Salinger's Letters (4 page)

We rented an office on Rentemestervej in Norrebro. The furniture was ramshackle and the toilet didn't work most of the time. We used the toilet at the car repair workshop down the street.

From morning to night we were cooped up in a stuffy, little room sitting around a shaky round table, and together we wrote a TV series. I was still living at Nordisk Kollegium. I don't remember what my exact feelings for the others were. I do remember though that we were always bickering and belittling each other. What I remember most clearly is that from the moment we started work early in the morning I was almost depression-free. I found the three others arrogant, self-righteous, full of themselves, and not nearly as smart as they thought, but they kept depression at bay. That was what interested me. They were a powerful antidepressant.

 

 

I've known a number of depressed people. What they have in common is that it's hard for them to believe anyone could willingly hang out with them. How could anyone in his right mind be willing to spend time with somebody I can't stand myself?

Why Puk and her two friends would choose to sit with me in the same smoke-filled office day after day was something I only gradually came to understand over the years, but I had already glimpsed the answer the day we started work in the factory building on Rentemestervej in Norrebro.

In hindsight it should have been obvious from the start of our first collaboration, the children's television series in 12 episodes.

I knew nothing about TV, children didn't interest me, I had never written a word and especially not a drama.

The others had known for years that they were going to be writers. Puk was born into a family where writers were always coming and going. When she mentioned Knud, it was Knud Sonderby, Martin was Martin A. Hansen, Uncle Keld was Keld Abel.

Boris thought quite simply he was a born genius. He thought God had reached down a hand into the two room apartment in Hvidovre where he lived with his parents who were post office employees. God had pointed his finger at Boris in his cradle and spoke. ‘Unto this boy I bestow a special talent, a genius, to go forth and tell of his times and thereby go down in the history of Denmark.'

Nora didn't take things so seriously. She just wanted to have fun and have a good life. At school she was the gorgeous blonde that all the boys fell in love with. She had posters of Marilyn Monroe hanging on the walls of her room. She stood in front of the mirror for hours imitating Marilyn. ‘Blondes just have more fun,' she would pout. But nobody ever took her for a dumb blonde. She had discovered she could make her classmates laugh while she was at Ingrid Jespersen School and was consequently assigned to writing the school play. If she could make other people laugh why not do it for a living? She had what the reviewers called a light touch and used it to amuse. She had no wish to change the world or analyse her own or anybody else's inner life very deeply. What she wanted was to entertain and that was the end of it.

As for me I wanted to be a dentist. The writers I had met during the course of my life had no appeal for me. They were insecure, self-promoting and, worst of all, poor. There wasn't an ounce of artistic ambition in me.

Yet here I was with three writers, with ambition coming out of their ears.

How could that be?

There was only one explanation. For unknown reasons this writing business had a tonic effect on me.

Puk was the one who had brought us together. Well mannered, upper class Puk was not in the least insecure, she was not self-promoting and she had absolutely no intention of being poor. Very early on she had made some decisions. She wanted to be a writer but she had no desire to scribble away alone in a garret. She needed a group, she was going to put together a team of colleagues. The group members would cover different areas but not be so different that they couldn't work together. She herself was an intellectual and politically engaged so she was looking for another woman who was just the opposite. She read one of Nora's satires in
Politiken
and saw one of her comedies performed at a small underground theatre and knew she was onto something. She biked out to where Nora lived with her parents on Peter Bangsvej and rang the bell.

‘I'm Puk Bonnesen,' she said, when the door was opened. No one in the From family had ever heard of her.

Puk sat at the table where Mum and Dad and four children were having dinner. She sketched out her plan. Nora accepted immediately, particularly after Puk had said that the primary goal was to make money, lots of money.

Nora's father was a bank employee at Handelsbanken. He said later: ‘Puk looked like a schoolgirl but she was so persuasive that I felt like quitting my job myself and going into partnership with her.'

It was Nora's idea that Boris Schauman should be the group's third man.

She had heard him read his poems aloud at the Students' Union. He was so absorbed in playing the divine poet with the tormented inner life that Nora was the only member of the audience that had found him pricelessly funny. ‘Either that act is for real or it's the con of the century, in which case it's sublime.'

Boris was studying literary theory and lived at Regensen Hall of Residence. Puk and Nora headed for Rundetårn nearby and knocked on Boris' door. They were granted an audience. The great poet, wearing a striped bathrobe, looked thoughtfully out the window. He did his best to look world-weary although he was only twenty-one. He gave them to understand he had tried everything and was now weary of life.

He was willing to give them an autograph but then they would have to go. He was too busy to talk to all the female admirers beating down his door.

Puk and Nora looked at each other and had an idea. They quickly took off their clothes, stood in the middle of the room and told him he could do with them whatever he wanted. Their fondest wish was to bear his child, the child of a genius.

Boris gaped at them. His two admirers sat in his lap, one on each knee. Then they told him why they had come.

Boris accepted at once. ‘But only if you swear you'll never pull a number like that on me again. Do you promise? Swear? Your breasts are the same size, did you know that? You really think we'll make money?'

It took them a long time to find the fourth member of the group. Nora said later: ‘We agreed that the fourth member should be everything we weren't. He should be non-intellectual, without any particular talent, and utterly devoid of charm.'

I quickly grasped that it wasn't me they had chosen to be the fourth member of the group, it was Amanda. Amanda entered the picture the day we all met for the first time.

The meeting took place at the bus stop on Frederikssundsvej early one morning. The landlady of the office on Rentemestervej wanted to meet us there. She worked the night shift as a waitress. We could meet her at the bus stop when she came home from work at 5.30 am. The woman, whose name was Ruth Larsen, was late because she had just had a fight with her boyfriend. She had given him two black eyes and broken his nose. While this was going on we waited at the bus stop for an hour in the drizzling rain and had plenty of time to get to know each other.

‘Did you bring Amanda?' was the first thing Boris said when we met.

‘Of course I brought Amanda.'

‘Is she wearing a raincoat?' Boris inquired.

‘No, Amanda doesn't like raingear. She always carries an umbrella.'

‘Has Amanda heard of me, Boris Schauman?'

‘Of course Amanda has heard of you. Everybody in Denmark has heard of you, the brilliant young poet, the new Oehlenschläger, Drachmann, Frank Jæger, whoever.'

‘Is Amanda as hostile as you are?'

‘I'm not hostile. I'm just the messenger telling you what Amanda tells me.'

‘Can I get to meet Amanda?' he asked.

‘You're looking into her eyes as we speak.'

Boris stretched out a hand. ‘Dan, the only thing I know about you is that you're a depressed dentist. Although being sentimental and banal isn't my style I'd like to take the opportunity to say straight out that I'm delighted to make your acquaintance.'

We shook hands.

Nora approached us. ‘Oh, by the way my name is Nora From and I hate dentists. Therefore I hate you. Dentists are probably the most boring people I know, dentists talking about pension plans and retirement savings. You look so intense you really scare me. Can we be friends anyway?'

We shook hands.

Were the other three feeling what I was feeling? Were we all thinking the same thing as we stood there at the bus stop in the rain? That something unprecedented was happening in our lives. That from now on our lives would be divided into the time before the bus stop on Frederikssundsvej and the time after.

It was still unclear why they had chosen me but I was vaguely aware of the stages leading up to the bus stop: Schroder himself; myself stretched out on the floor of the apartment on Strandboulevarden, tripping on acid; and especially Amanda, the woman who had emerged out of the acid shadows.

Amanda was the fifth member of the group. Nora and Boris wanted to know everything about her from the start. Without any doubt this was because Amanda could answer all their questions. No matter what they asked, the answer came promptly. Boris was sure I was having them on. Nora thought I must be seriously mentally ill if my depression was a woman who had an answer for everything. Puk said that for some strange reason my company and Amanda's gave her a sense of security.

‘Secure?' snorted Boris. ‘What's so secure about a depressed dentist and his sick imagination?'

‘I can't imagine anything less threatening,' said Puk. ‘That's why I suggested Dan as the fourth man. He suffers so much that the rest of us can breathe easy.'

We got to work at once on the TV series for Danmarks Radio Youth Entertainment Section. We hung a bulletin board on the wall on which we tacked our ideas for a scene.

The first time we got really stuck, our minds a blank and no ideas in sight, something occurred that would recur repeatedly in the future.

Nora suggested, ‘Ask Amanda.'

Nora took out a sheet of paper on which she drew the outline of a woman's face. Within the outline she put a large question mark. She marched over to the bulletin board with the drawing and tacked it on.

We got up and took a break. We went outside. We walked around the neighborhood for an hour talking of other things. When we got back to the office Amanda had come up with three ideas. We couldn't use any of them but idea number three gave Nora another idea and the TV series took off from there.

Biking into town a few days later the three others started speculating about Amanda. Was Amanda an angel, a guardian angel, a secret friend or a worshipped idol? Boris claimed to be jealous of me because I had Amanda. Nora said she wanted a guardian angel, too. She knew who she would choose: Marilyn Monroe. Boris said that if he could have a guardian angel that was somebody dead he would choose someone who had died the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Ernest Hemingway. Puk opted for someone still alive and whom she had even met several times, Andy Warhol.

The next day they had all brought photos of their guardian angels. Next to Nora's drawing of Amanda hung photographs of Warhol, Monroe and Hemingway.

From that day on we were never at a loss. At the slightest hitch we would ask in unison, ‘What does . . . say?' And then the name of one of the guardian angels would pop up.

Of course it didn't work every time, but it was fun. Or as Puk said, it gave us a sense of security.

We stayed together as a group after our time on Rentemestervej. We rented rooms at different locations all over town, on Viborggade in Osterbro, on Gammel Koge Landevej, and in a disused bakery in Hvidovre.

Twice we rented a large open-plan office. Although our individual ways of writing were completely different the presence of the others posed no problem when we were working. Part of the time we worked as a group. We wrote films and TV series together, but mostly we worked alone on our own projects. After the Hvidovre bakery we bought an office condo on Gothersgade in central Copenhagen overlooking the Botanical Gardens.

For quite some time now we had been a company, a firm. The official name of the firm was The Factory of 21/9/1977, but we always referred to it as the Factory. The condo consisted of four offices, a kitchen and a communal room.

As usual Puk's vision formed the basis of the Factory's code of conduct.

The stated mission was to work hard, make money and especially to maintain a level of social intercourse that would keep us from getting on each other's nerves.

No guests were allowed at the Factory, especially no lovers or mistresses spending the night. No family, no husbands or wives, no kids. No dogs, no pets of any kind. No phones.

The general regulations and the rules governing the cleaning of the kitchen and bathroom including the sanctions imposed if the rules were broken were put in writing down to the last detail. The ultimate sanction consisted of having to invite the others to lunch at a venue in the immediate neighbourhood of Gothersgade.

Nora had formulated most of the rules that would keep us from getting on each other's nerves. She is almost obsessive when it comes to the rules of social intercourse and can discuss social codes for hours. In fact, this is the topic of all her plays, films, newspaper articles and books.

How to devise the rules and regulations that would regulate our interaction and keep us from getting fed up with each other or flying at each other's throats? That was the question. Some of us already knew writers. We had got to know others during the years we had been in business.

Nora drew up a long list of questions upon which her code of conduct would be based. Are writers more self-centred than other people? Yes, one would hope so. Vanity is the fuel that drives all writers. Are writers more combative than other people? Yes, one would hope so. Conflict lies at the core of all literature. Are writers more unlikable than other people? No, they don't have to be in order to survive. Are writers' egos bigger than other people's? One would hope so for their sake. Are writers better company than other people? No, they're just like anybody else. Some are fun, some are dull.

Nora answered all the questions herself and came up with the following rules:

We must not see each other socially.

We must not be friends with each other's families.

We must not under any circumstances have sex with each other.

We must never advise each other.

We must never divulge information about each other to anyone.

Of course we broke these rules frequently over the years but in principle we were in agreement.