Salinger's Letters (6 page)

 

 

Sex has always been one of my main interests. I'm no different from anyone else that way. But if you're depressed, your sex life is depressed too, and that's a subject only a person with depression could find interesting.

Depressive sex usually involves masturbation and bad sex, neither of which anyone with depression would ever dream of knocking.

As a masturbator I've always been a large scale consumer of pornography. As a depressed masturbator I've always been on the lookout for antidepressant porn.

Until I was 22 my sex life consisted of masturbation and bad sex. People with depression are experts at bad sex. Sadly, most depressed people are usually nowhere near getting even bad sex. If they do, they think: Better bad sex than no sex.

Fortunately the depressed and the non-depressed have equal access to the pornography needed for masturbation.

The sex shops divide their wares by category. There's ordinary sex, and there are all kinds of sub- categories: sex with leather and whips, SM, sex with blacks, sex with Asians, and so on. There are no shelves for sex for the depressed. We have to put together our own category. This tallies well with the fact that no two types of depression are alike. That's why certain kinds of sex have an antidepressant effect on one kind of depression but can aggravate others.

Most people with depression feel tense about life and almost always have a complicated sex life. Their attitude towards sex is non-spontaneous. They envy anyone who can have sex spontaneously; sex is something other people want and do without thinking about it much. People with depression brood and speculate over their sex lives before they even get
near
sex.

I was convinced I would never have anything that even slightly resembled a normal sex life. I would end my days as a depressed masturbator. I was pretty sure I knew why too: my eyes. You want to look at the person you're having sex with. If you don't look at that person then it's not sex, it is masturbation. But when your eyes are open you allow the other person to look inside you. Inside me was something neither girls nor women wanted to see, depression. It scared them. Nothing is so unsexy.

The first time I let a woman look inside me was when I spent the night with Beate Schroder in the apartment on Vester Voldgade. The first time I had non-disastrous sex with a woman was that same night with Beate Schroder on Vester Voldgade. I kept my eyes open. This had never happened before. I let her look inside me. She saw nothing frightening. Her reaction was, ‘That's what people with depression look like inside. No big deal.'

Depressed people spend a lot of time brooding and turning things over in their minds. They have daydreams, they have wishes for the future. What they long for most of all is for the depression to go away. They want what everyone wants: love.

I dreamt of finding love too, but I had given up hope long ago. Whenever I fell in love it always ended badly. Girls and women liked me until they found out how knotted up and tense I was inside.

I had finally met someone who thought I was perfectly normal. What went on inside me was perfectly recognisable so there was no reason to get upset about it. It was normal, everyday behavior to her; she had lived with her father her whole life.

I wasn't cured, I was still depressed; I agonised over every tiny detail in my life. But whenever Beate Schroder and I lay there in her bed on Vester Voldgade kissing each other I knew that I had taken a giant step towards finding what I always called the
enzyme.

The enzyme is what I call the small mechanism in my brain that's out of balance and causes my depression.

The scientific breakthrough was not the fact that for the first time in my life I was engaging in something that resembled ordinary sex. It was not the fact that it had been arousing to watch Beate undress in the light of the street lamp. It was not the fact that our nipples touched. It was not the intense pleasure I experienced placing my hands on top of her buttocks.

No, the real step forward on the road to the enzyme lay spread out on the table in the dining room, in the piles of handwritten papers Schroder had left behind. I had finally read the letters Salinger had written Schroder, and there discovered the germ of what I had spent my entire life trying to find out.

When I met Schroder we quickly discovered that we suffered from similar types of depression. He had spent the major part of his life mapping out the form he suffered from. He applied the same scientific approach as when he was working with corrective jaw surgery and pharmacology. Now he had left his notes to me. He had met Salinger in Germany during the war at a hospital where they had both been admitted for nervous breakdowns; Salinger suffered from depression, too. They had discovered they suffered from similar types of depression and remained in contact after the war. Now Salinger's letters were on the desk and Beate and I were on her bed.

I had gone through the letters and Schroder's notes several times in the course of the many hours I spent in the apartment on Vester Voldgade. The picture of a certain type of depression was beginning to take shape. Schroder and Salinger had tried together to define the type of depression they both suffered from. They wrote about other things too. They told each other what was going on in their lives, but depression was the leitmotif of their correspondence. In one of his earliest letters to Salinger, Schroder suggested half in jest that they call their type of depression the Salinger Syndrome. Salinger responded by proposing they call the treatment they were seeking together the Kierkegaard Cure.

Kierkegaard was depressed. He called it melancholy. Depression is a leitmotif in all his writing. Schroder and Salinger agreed that the best description of their depression could be found in Kierkegaard's sentence:
‘
Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy
.'

The sentence described a certain type of depression and the rudiments of a treatment, they felt.

Salinger had a special relationship to Denmark because he had read Kierkegaard as a young man. During a certain period of his life he had planned to read Kierkegaard in the original. He had started studying Danish but had given it up. In one of his early letters to Schroder he wrote that Kierkegaard was the person that had most accurately described his own state of mind. Schroder had an older brother who was a clergyman and a Kierkegaard expert, and Kierkegaard became a recurring element in the correspondence between Salinger and Schroder. The two men set out to identify the components that constitute the Salinger Syndrome and the Kierkegaard Cure based on what Kierkegaard said about sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy.

I had read Salinger but now I reread him with fresh eyes. This time I could hear a voice, a narrative voice, addressing me directly. He was writing about something I knew all too well, a certain form of hidden depression.

For me all his books were written by a person with depression; I knew that kind of depression. At one point in
The Catcher in the Rye
the main character says that a writer should be someone you feel like knocking on his door and talking to. Salinger lived in the States so he was in no danger of that from me. I knew from the newspapers that he had shut himself off from the rest of the world. He gave no interviews, lived far away from New York, surrounded by secrecy, and no reader ever knocked on his door.

I didn't knock on his door; I wrote him a letter. I related the facts surrounding Ib Schroder's death, and spoke of Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard appears in Salinger's work in various contexts, and not without reason. Kierkegaard's melancholy is closely related to Salinger's.

My kind of depression was closely related to Salinger's and Kierkegaard's.

In my second letter I was guilty of a lie, a white lie. My excuse was that Salinger's letters had had an antidepressant effect on me and I wanted to make sure the medicine kept coming. So I waved a carrot in front of him, the carrot being Kierkegaard. I wrote that I had been weaned on Kierkegaard since my uncle was one of the greatest Kierkegaard experts in Denmark.

Salinger reported on his own melancholy temperament. He never mentioned the word depression. I saw a connection between what he said about himself and Kierkegaard's melancholy, and my own.

I always looked forward to Salinger's antidepressant letters and did my best to keep the correspondence headed in the right direction. I included tidbits of Kierkegaard lore in every letter. Salinger was interested in Kierkegaard and I was interested in Salinger.

I had another reason for being interested in him apart from the antidepressant effect of his letters: We exchanged ideas for keeping depression at bay. In addition to the remedies we devised together, my letters contained my own personal contributions towards what we called the Kierkegaard Cure. This was practical advice on treating a certain form of depression, all of which I maintained was to be found in Kierkegaard's writings.

The Kierkegaard Cure consisted partly of material for which there actually was supporting evidence in Kierkegaard's works and partly of material I had thought up myself. You could call it fraud, pure fantasy or an attempt at Kierkegaard exegesis. At any rate one thing was certain: Salinger kept up the correspondence because of the Kierkegaard Cure.

In order to make sure I was on solid ground I started studying Kierkegaard, particularly the passages that deal with anxiety, or angst. I soon came to believe that this applied to most of his work. I contacted Kierkegaard scholars who were experts on Kierkegaard and anxiety. They received me warmly. A few of them suffered from depression themselves. I never tried to conceal the fact that I was depressed, too. I never mentioned Salinger's name. I told them I was looking to Kierkegaard for help in trying to understand the philosophical aspects of depression.

The more depressed the Kierkegaard scholars were, the more powerful was their antidepressant effect on me. Putting into words what I had discovered and sending it to Salinger in the States had the same effect.

My correspondence with Salinger filled a large part of my life. First, there was the physical pleasure of writing the letters. Then there was the joy of imagining him walking down to his mailbox at the side of the road in Cornish, New Hampshire. I had seen photos of that mailbox in Time Magazine. It was an iconic mailbox. No photographer had ever succeeded in catching Salinger picking up his mail. How and when he did it remained a mystery.

When I got a letter from Salinger I left it on my desk unopened for at least 24 hours. It was a pleasure I wished to savour to the full.

I tried to imagine what Salinger would do when he got my letters. Did he open them immediately? Did he open them with his finger or a letter opener? Did he read them standing up or sitting down? Did he tell anyone about them? Did he tell his wife or kids, ‘I've got a letter from that dentist in Copenhagen I told you about, that Kierkegaard expert. He sends me all kind of information, research, gossip, about my absolutely favorite philosopher. Remember that guy from Denmark I was in the hospital with in Germany during the war? He's the boyfriend of his daughter now.'

I never mentioned the letters to anyone myself.

He wrote very little about his private life. He said he worked every day but strongly doubted he would ever publish any of it. Publishing a book was too great a violation of his privacy, he said.

I described to him the anatomy of my depression.

What I was suffering from was an imbalance of the sensory processing system. All impressions hit me directly with an immediate, devastating effect. Nothing was filtered off. I was bombarded with impressions just like everybody else, but in my case the external pressure was too high, it blasted me. To protect myself from the shock wave I created a negative pressure inside, a depression.

Depression is a defence. You have to protect yourself from the mass of impressions weighing you down, otherwise you'll be crushed.

Most people whose filter is out of balance protect themselves by erecting an internal wall. They shield themselves from an overload of impressions, but behind the wall they're in pain, they're lonely. Cowering behind the wall, they cut themselves off from what they need most: friendship, attention, love.

If you don't learn how to get out from behind the wall once in a while you're in danger of dying of malnutrition.

Salinger wrote back that there were parts of what I said that he recognised.

I've spent my whole life studying the form of depression that Schroder and Salinger called the Salinger Syndrome, trying to find a remedy. Salinger gives the best description of depression in his stories. Kierkegaard gives the best philosophical interpretation. My job was to figure out a practical treatment, and I needed Salinger's help.

The various types of depression fascinate me, first of all my own, of course; I want to understand it and fight it. But other people's depression interests me too, particularly the hidden kind, the undetected kind. Depression comes in many varieties. My own form is so obvious that I've always known it was there. There are other types that are either disguised or invisible or transparent.

I've met many people with depression and I've compared many different types of depression. No two depressions are alike for the very simple reason that depression strikes an individual and no two individuals are alike.

Curing your own depression is a virtually impossible task. It takes time and energy. You enter a boundless universe and most of the time you're working in the dark. Doubt is your constant companion. You have to figure everything out for yourself.

When I look at myself – and I look at myself constantly 24 hours a day – I see myself as a research scientist who has spent his entire life studying one little enzyme. In my case I've spent my whole life studying one little mechanism. My life consists of a multitude of unconnected details, fragments. What connects them is Amanda, Depression.