Return To Sender

J.D. Salinger may not talk much to reporters, but the author of The Catcher in the Rye does talk to his lawyers. Last year he directed them to halt publication by Random House of an unauthorized biography by Ian Hamilton. The reclusive Salinger objected to the book's use of excerpts and summaries from scores of private letters he had written. Last week (a busy one for literary law watchers after the Bell Jar settlement) a Manhattan federal appeals court ordered a preliminary injunction blocking the book "in its present form."

Salinger, 68, had refused from the first to cooperate with Hamilton, literary critic for the Sunday Times of London and biographer of Poet Robert Lowell. When he was sent galleys of J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life, Salinger objected to the extensive use of letters to, among others, Ernest Hemingway and Judge Learned Hand. The correspondence, gathered primarily from university libraries, sometimes shows him at his most scabrous. In one passage cited in the court opinion, a young Salinger vented his anger after Oona O'Neill, whom he had dated, married Charlie Chaplin. "I can see them at home evenings," he wrote. "Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead rat."

Salinger was no happier with revised galleys sent to him in October, in which Hamilton paraphrased many letters he had earlier quoted. By that time Salinger had copyrighted the correspondence. Although the actual letters belonged to the recipients, by law the words remained his. In court, Salinger's lawyers argued that Hamilton went well beyond the "fair use" right of writers to describe or give examples of another's work. The two-judge appeals panel agreed, reversing a lower court that threw out Salinger's suit last November. The judges pointed out that the letters are used "on at least 40% of the book's 192 pages." Observing that the excerpts included "virtually all of the most interesting passages of the letters," they held that Salinger was entitled to protect his own opportunity to sell them.

Random House can now appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court or try to issue the book in a more watered-down form. Salinger naturally had no comment on the court's decision. Holden Caulfield had already spoken for him, after all. In the opening lines of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger's captious hero warns the reader, "I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography." And not going to let anyone else tell it either.