Salinger's Letters (8 page)

‘Here comes the million dollar question that all your fans are dying to ask you. Why did you decide never to give a single interview?'

‘I'll try to answer that as exhaustively as possible. First of all there was Kierkegaard, our mutual friend. He hid behind any number of pseudonyms. Kierkegaard was my hero, so the obvious thing to do was follow his example. It made me feel close to him. But there were a number of other things in my personal life that were decisive. Towards the end of the war in Europe I had a massive nervous breakdown. It was due partly to total exhaustion and partly to what I had witnessed. I was one of the first American soldiers to enter a liberated concentration camp and I saw what the Germans had done to my fellow Jews. My nervous system has never been the same since. Hence my radical decision to live in peace. The consequences that decision has had on my life were completely unpredictable. I feel like a criminal. My only crime is that I want to be left alone. They talk about me as if I was a madman, a saint or a fairly well functioning psychopath. It's been particularly hard on my family. For them it's almost like living with a wanted criminal. At the same time my decision not to give interviews has cemented my celebrity status. Very few people actually have any idea what I've written. To most people I'm known as the guy who doesn't give interviews or appear on TV. My celebrity is due solely to a polite but definite ‘No thanks.' I'm a freak in a world where communications have gone haywire.'

‘
Are
you a freak?'

‘No, there's nothing mysterious about me. I'm a normal person, usually a very happy person. I love my work, my friends, my family. I enjoy excellent health. I've been a health freak all my life. I'm a self-taught herbalist, I can heal with herbs. I'm a completely average, banal old man.'

‘Why do you say banal?'

‘Because I'm completely uninteresting as a private individual. Marlon Brando has been a good friend of mine for years. As a private individual he's almost boring. Marlon came up here once with John Lennon and Bob Dylan, who wanted to meet me. We were four unusually boring men. What we really sounded like was a group of travelling salesmen talking shop.'

‘Can I get you to talk about women?'

‘Oh, please don't hold back! Just stick your nose right into my private life! I've always lived surrounded by women. I've been married twice, first time to a German woman right after the war and then to Claire, who's the mother of my two children. She lives in California now, my daughter lives there too. She's a psychotherapist, my son is an actor and film producer. Now I'm living with that wonderful woman you saw driving the car.'

‘One of your girlfriends, Joyce Maynard, wrote a book about her affair with you when she was 18 and you were 55.'

‘Yes.'

‘Have you read it?'

‘Of course.'

‘What do you think of it?'

‘Apart from the fact that I come across as a dirty old man forcing an innocent young girl to have oral sex with him, the book is quite well written.'

‘They say you're attracted to very young women?'

‘I'm attracted to young women and old women both. Woody Allen and I, we're old friends, are considering founding The Dirty Old Man's Club. Men with wives 40 years younger than themselves get to join free.'

‘How did you meet Woody Allen?'

‘The usual way. He wrote me many years ago. We're both in therapy so we exchange experiences. Woody gave me the name of a therapist who helped him for many years. He finally stopped going to him because the guy kept insisting he was an infantile narcissist. I was an extra in four of Woody's films. See if you can find me. Woody even made a movie about me.
Zelig
is about a man who only is what everybody else wants him to be. That's me. Or it
was
me. Maybe that's why I'm so dependent on women. I dry up and disappear if I'm not with a woman. I really am dependent on women on every level. Graham Greene used to say it came as a surprise to him that the dependency gets worse the older you get. He had always thought that desire would dull with age, but that's not how it is. You're in for a surprise if you're expecting a peaceful old age.'

‘How did you meet Graham Greene?'

‘He was a good friend of Georges Simenon whom I met when he was living in America. All three of us used to meet at least once a year either in Antibes where Greene had an apartment in a building near the harbour or in Switzerland at Simenon's place. Sometimes Noel Coward joined us and one memorable evening we went over to visit Chaplin and Oona. Oona still made my heart beat faster. Noel Coward sang for us and Chaplin accompanied him on the piano, and Oona and I danced just like we used to at the Stork Club in New York before the war. So don't tell me I live an isolated life!'

‘Did you discuss women with Greene and Simenon?'

‘Greene's theory about himself and women was that he could only get a relationship to work if the woman was married to another man, preferably a friend of his. He himself was sure it was a kind of homosexuality in disguise, a way of being intimate with other men by sleeping with their wives. Simenon, on the other hand, made a big deal of having slept with ten thousand women. He told Federico Fellini while they were sitting under a big tree getting interviewed by some French magazine. Simenon thought all good writers hated their mothers, that's why they had become writers. He told me he had been sending money to his mother in Belgium for all those years. When she died they found all that money in a shoebox under her bed. It was her final rejection of him. She preferred his brother. That's what all his novels were about, he said.'

‘What are your books about?'

‘Read Kierkegaard, pal, and you'll find out.'

‘Your daughter recently wrote a book about her life with you?'

‘She did.'

‘Have you read it?'

‘Of course. I wasn't the easiest father to live with to put it mildly. But I'm an old man now. When I die the vultures will pounce the way they swooped on Greta Garbo when she died. So it's better my daughter writes something approaching the truth and actually makes some money on it. I love my daughter. It's only natural that her feelings towards me are more complex than mine are for her. When Marilyn Monroe came and stayed with us she always slept on a camp bed in my daughter's room. They'd lay there all night talking. I may have been impossible but I did have friends worth talking to.'

The interview terminated there. We had turned back towards Cornish for the last part. Salinger's wife pulled into the parking lot behind the supermarket where she had picked us up a little less than an hour ago. I could see my wife waiting with Art and Rose by the store entrance. I gave Salinger the folder containing his letters.

He shook my hand, I got out of the car, and as soon as the car door shut behind me, the woman accelerated and Salinger and his wife drove out of the parking lot. The last I saw of him he was taking off his glasses and cleaning them with a white handkerchief.

All the way back to New York and the following day I was in a daze. I had met my hero, the mythical Salinger, and it had been even better than I'd hoped.

The fairy tale ended abruptly when two women I'd never met knocked on our door at the Hotel Pioneer. They were young, both in their 30s, both dressed in black, both frighteningly efficient. They told us they represented one of the biggest law firms in New York.

They informed me in no uncertain terms that if I had any plans of publishing the Salinger interview they would sue the shit out of me, or words to that effect. The parties that were interested in acquiring the letters Salinger had written to me had been obliged to do a little number on me: When they had realised I wasn't going to sell the letters they had resorted to Plan B: The person I had interviewed was a fake. He wasn't Salinger but a Salinger lookalike, an out of work actor who had presented himself as Salinger. The most sensible thing for me to do was to return to Denmark and keep
very quiet
.

They left the hotel room without saying goodbye.

The next day we tried to get hold of Art and Rose but to no avail. None of the telephone numbers they had given us was answered. When we went to the lawyers' office on 57
th
Street where we'd had the meeting with them nobody had ever heard of Art or Rose.

The credit card we'd been given was closed of course. We tried to find out who had issued it but no one could say.

The story could have ended there. But it didn't.

Beate and I were walking down 6
th
Avenue after we had given up trying to reach Art and Rose. I was dazed, reeling from pure depression.

Beate was in excellent spirits. She said, ‘We'll be hearing from them again.'

‘From whom?'

‘Art and Rose.'

‘Why ?'

‘We have something they want.'

‘And what might that be?'

‘A bunch of letters worth a fortune.'

‘But I gave them to Salinger, the fake Salinger.'

‘No you didn't.'

‘What are you talking about? I gave them to him myself.'

‘What you gave him were copies.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘I had copies made of all the letters before we left.'

‘That's a lie!'

‘Dan, I'm a dentist. Some of the biggest crooks in Denmark are my patients. These are people who have embezzled billions. It was no problem getting them to advise me.'

‘I can't believe what I'm hearing! Why didn't you tell me before?'

‘I was nervous enough. I didn't want to spoil things for you.'

‘Have you suspected them all along? Without telling me? You're treating me like a child!'

‘Dan, the issue here is not whether or not you're a child. The point is I love you and it doesn't hurt to be careful, does it?'

‘I'll never stop being a little kid lost in the woods, is that it?'

‘Oh stop being so sorry for yourself. I can't stand listening to you.'

‘Well, what happens now?'

‘We'll be hearing from Salinger and his gang, I warrant.'

‘Where are the letters?'

‘That's something I'm not going to tell even you', she laughed.

We continued down 6
th
Avenue and I felt as if I was being sucked straight into a black hole.

Whenever depression strikes and I'm groping around in the dark for help, one person stands out: Ib Schroder, my deceased father-in-law, the orthognathic surgeon, the children's grandfather, Salinger's Danish friend.

Everything important about depression I learned from him.

‘Give it a face, make it concrete,' he would say. ‘Depression is a nebulous, amorphous mental process. It tends to lift when you grab hold of it.'

Make it concrete, give it names, faces. Depression isn't just depression. Visualize it. A depression is always people, faces.

I gave it faces. First, Ib Schroder's face. Behind his face was Kierkegaard's. Behind his was Salinger's.

Salinger's face. The fake Salinger. Salinger hiding behind someone paid to play the role of Salinger. Maybe the real Salinger doesn't exist. Maybe he never existed. Maybe he's an artificial product, an author right out of Andy Warhol's philosophy of art. A machine. A sphinx. A mirror. You think you're looking Salinger in the face but all you see is yourself in a mirror. You only see what you want to see. You see only yourself.

I had travelled all this way to meet Salinger only to encounter myself. Concrete enough for you, Ib? Now what?

Ib's counsel came promptly. ‘Keep moving. Stay on the path. You're on an endless journey into the darkness within you. Seek out those friends who can help you.'

Help me do what? I had barely formulated the question when the answer came to me.

The answer is eyes. The answer has
always
been eyes.

I looked into Beate's eyes. It's ok to look into your wife's eyes. In Beate's eyes I saw what I had to do here in New York.

Beate is the only woman I ever loved and who ever loved me. If I hadn't had the extraordinary good luck to meet her I would never have experienced love. I would probably be dead in fact. It's as simple as that, as complicated as that, it's the truth. She knows it and I know it. There's no need to say it aloud.

I am not a marketable commodity. No one with depression is. Beate is a marketable commodity, without her I'm nothing. When something happens to me it doesn't seem real until I've told her. I can't experience anything myself, I can't enjoy anything myself. I don't have eyes.

All my life I've wanted eyes of my own.

I've used other people's eyes. I know how Kierkegaard sees the world, I perceive the world through his eyes. I know Salinger's eyes, I enter his universe and look through
his
eyes.

Who can help me find my own eyes? I decided
now
was the time, here in New York.

I had resolved any number of times before this that
now
was the time, but nothing had happened.

Why should anything be any different now?

There was no answer to that.

Seek out the friends who can help you.

It's in your head. Anything can happen.

I took the train out to the Bronx Botanical Gardens and stayed there for hours until it got dark, journeying back to the friends Ib spoke of, dead and alive.

 

 

Naturally it was Puk who helped me get the best anti-depressant advice I ever had. She always knows somebody. If there's someone she doesn't know, she always knows someone who can put her in touch with the right person.

For Puk it was a challenge to ferret out the top Kierkegaard experts and establish connections. If all else failed she'd call the head of the Kierkegaard research centre and say the magic words, ‘Hello, Puk Bonnesen speaking.'

Her name is the
open sesame
that opens all doors. Puk unearthed the name of the person who knew most about Kierkegaard's little sentence on the sympathetic and the antipathetic that I had spent so much time studying, an 87-year-old former pastor and associate professor at Århus University, Else Marie Vandborg. Almost blind and living in a nursing home in Frederiksberg, she was a Doctor of Theology and her doctor's thesis dealt with the concept of love in Kierkegaard.

Two of her grandchildren met me in front of the nursing home one Tuesday morning. Else Marie Vandborg was standing by the window in her room when we knocked on the door. She was a tall woman with white hair, and her dark eyes peered out at me with the look of the visually impaired. The two grandchildren had arranged it so that she and I should sit next to each other on a sofa against the wall next to the window. It was very quiet. Tea and cookies were produced.

We sat down and the grandchildren left.

‘Let's call each other by our first names, shall we?' was the first thing she said.

‘With pleasure. My name is Dan.'

Her voice was high-pitched and clear and she talked very loud. She said, ‘Puk Bonnesen told me you're a descendant of Poul Martin Moller. Is that true?'

‘No, it isn't true.'

She laughed. ‘Nevertheless, it's a sympathetic thought. Moller was such a sympathetic man. I was so busy studying Kierkegaard all my life that I came to feel we were close relatives. My Uncle Soren, my devoted Soren Kierkegaard, with whom I've shared so many joys.'

‘To be honest I feel related to Poul Martin Moller, too. I often read him when I'm in need of comfort.'

‘My grandchild tells me you suffer from melancholy.'

‘Yes, that's correct.'

‘Tell me, Dan, why do you want to talk to me?'

I told her about Salinger and the correspondence.

She listened and then asked. ‘Have you come because of Salinger or for yourself?'

‘Both.'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘What does Kierkegaard mean by the sympathetic and the antipathetic?'

Else Marie bent forward groping for the tea thermos. She rattled the tea cup. I reached out to help her but she pushed away my hand saying, ‘Thank you, young Moller, but I can manage.'

She insisted on pouring the tea and spilled some on the table.

Then she offered me a cookie. ‘Coconut macaroons baked by my youngest grandchild, a boy. I would so much have liked for him to be named Soren, but they called him William. And it
is
the right name for him.'

We spoke of Puk Bonnesen and Nora From, both of whom she had read. Her son had read Boris Schauman aloud to her. She said, ‘Schauman is always flexing his verbal muscles, which I find extremely tiresome. What about yourself, Dan. Are you a great writer or a little writer?'

‘I'm a little writer.'

‘Some people prefer little writers. I know I do.'

‘That's very kind of you, Else Marie.'

‘I won't tell you whether I've read your work until you tell me if you've read my Kierkegaard dissertation.'

‘No, I haven't.'

‘Well, I haven't read your work either!' she said and gave a loud laugh.

We spoke of Kierkegaard's death in the hospital on Bredegade and the family dispute that prevented a headstone from being erected on his grave for so long.

‘Well, my little poet,' she said. ‘Maybe we should talk about what you came to hear. One little sentence by Kierkegaard.'

‘Puk tells me you're the expert.'

‘Puk Bonnesen is a born flatterer.'

‘But she's right, isn't she?'

Else Marie smiled and nodded. ‘Well, at any rate I'm the person who's devoted most time to that sentence. My father was melancholic and his father before him. I know what it's like growing up in a melancholy family.'

‘What is your own temperament like?'

‘I've woken up in excellent spirits almost every morning of my life.'

‘I could tell by reading your dissertation.'

‘So you
did
read it? I thought you said you hadn't.'

‘I lied.'

‘Why did you do that?'

‘I was afraid you'd start examining me on it. They say you were merciless, brutal in fact, at the oral exams.'

‘Little poet, you're flattering me and caning me at the same time.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Well, I'm going to give you an exam anyway. You say you can tell I have a cheerful temperament by reading my dissertation. Would you care to exemplify?'

‘Remember the part about Parnassus, the exalted cultural circle that everyone wanted to be part of, the Heiberg family's intellectual salon at Sokvæsthus in Christianshavn? You describe how Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen were allowed in a couple of times even though everyone made fun of the two insecure, gauche, young men behind their backs?'

‘Yes indeed, page 275,' said Else Marie. ‘What's so remarkable about that?'

‘What comes next? You write unexpectedly: “If anyone had whispered to the cultural elite snickering behind their hands in the salon in Christianshavn that the only reason they would be remembered today is precisely because of those two gauche young men, they would have thought it a bad joke.”'

‘Heavens! You remember the exact wording on the bottom of page 275!'

‘So do you, Else Marie.'

‘Certainly, but I wrote it!'

‘I don't remember a single word I ever wrote myself.'

‘Little poet, that's obvious in your work.'

‘So you
have
read my work.'

‘Dan, what do you take me for? Here's a young writer who leaves no stone unturned in trying to talk to me. Don't you think I was just a little curious to find out who he is, what sort of thing he writes and why he might be interested in talking to me?'

‘Did you find out?'

‘Very likely. Let's put it to the test.'

Else Marie picked up a bag made of some kind of fabric from the floor next to her chair. In the bag were some papers and a large magnifying glass. She brought the magnifying glass to her eye and looked at me through it.

‘Young Moller, I may be the only person in the world who's read your texts under a magnifying glass.'

‘What was the result?'

‘There goes your author's ego sitting up, wagging its tail, and begging to be scratched behind the ears!'

‘Hey, that's a line straight out of Puk Bonnesen.'

‘Exactly, but who do you think she stole it from?'

‘You?'

‘Precisely. I said it once on a radio program.'

‘Puk steals anything she can get her hands on.'

‘You wouldn't be here without her, little poet.'

‘I'd be dead without her,' I said. ‘Sorry. It wasn't my intention to go on about myself. Please forgive me.'

‘Dan, I've made inquiries about you. You have a reason for reading that Kierkegaard sentence under a magnifying glass. Kierkegaard wrote it for people like you. You were depressed and suicidal as a child. I know that. That's why I agreed to see you today.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Furthermore, you're quite a good-looking young fellow who flatters me to just the right extent. I would probably have agreed to see you even if you weren't suicidal.'

‘Can you actually see me?'

‘Not very clearly, but I've studied photos of you under the magnifying glass. You're definitely on the good-looking side, but you look arrogant and withdrawn, almost hostile.'

‘Sounds like me alright.'

‘What do you think of the way I look?'

‘Else Marie if you want to hear the truth from an arrogant, hostile writer, I have looked at photos of you when you were young under a magnifying glass. You're beautiful now that you're old. But you must have been
sensational
when you were young. Rumour has it that Georg Brandes was madly in love with you.'

‘Brandes spoke to me of the times he'd met Hans Christian Andersen, his left hand resting absentmindedly on my knee all the while.'

‘That gives us a direct connection back to Kierkegaard through Brandes and Andersen.'

Else Marie said, ‘Ah, Kierkegaard was always my contemporary. My love for him is purely physical. I've spent more hours with him than with anyone else. It's as though everything he wrote was written directly to me. I can feel his body heat, his breathing.'

‘I feel the same way. I just don't completely understand what he writes. That's why I've taken the liberty of intruding on you, Else Marie.'

‘Well, you've come to the right person, Dan. I believe I'm the only one who really understands what Kierkegaard means when he speaks of sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy.'

‘What does he mean then?'

Else Marie picked up the magnifying glass again. But instead of holding it over the papers on the table in front of her, she held it to my eyes. I looked into her eyes, several times magnified.

She began to explain. ‘The key concept for Kierkegaard is guilt. This is the origin of all the misinterpretations. It's Kierkegaard's own fault. He writes about guilt; we all owe a debt, he says. Most people think he's talking about sin, that we're born sinners due to original sin. This is a mistake. Kierkegaard means something completely different when he speaks of guilt. Guilt is a good thing. Guilt is a positive thing. Do you follow me, Dan?'

‘No, to be honest, I don't think I do.'

‘Guilt is an optimistic, edifying term in Kierkegaard. That's my thesis. Guilt should not be understood the way we do today in the sense that you're guilty, you've committed a crime, you're a born criminal or anything like that. No. That's not what he meant. Guilt should be understood as the opposite of innocence. What Kierkegaard is saying is that you should
never
be innocent. You should
never
be the innocent victim things happen to. No matter whether you're knocked down on the street or run over or struck by lightning, you're
always
in some way responsible.
Never
be the innocent victim. Why not? Because if you're innocent, you have no options. Even if you really are completely innocent of something that happens, then against all logic you must insist that you are
not
innocent. On a certain level you're always responsible for what happens to you. You're guilty. Only when you're guilty, the opposite of innocent, that is, can you act. Do you understand, little poet?'

‘Yes.'

‘If you just stand there like a chump waiting for disaster to strike, you're innocent. Go forward, go sideways, just go, move. Where should you go? What compass should you follow? The compass is contained in Kirekegaard's sentence: Go where the sympathetic collides with the antipathetic. If you hold back, you'll always be on the outside looking in; you'll always be an innocent child. It's very pleasant being an innocent child. It's secure. Your surroundings like you when you're an innocent child and that makes you feel sheltered. You encounter no hostility, but being an innocent child causes anxiety and depression. If you want to overcome that anxiety you have to engage in the struggle between the sympathetic and the antipathetic. It hurts, but that's the arena where the battle against melancholy is fought. That's where you must go!'