Salinger's Letters

by Nils Schou

  I was terrified someone would break into the Hotel Pioneer and steal the letters. The rumor they were worth a fortune would have preceded us to New York. I lay awake at night listening to the traffic noises down in the street. The door would be smashed in. Masked robbers armed with revolvers would burst into the room and order me to hand over the letters without a struggle, or else. ‘Hand over the Salinger letters. Now, motherfucker!’ My inveterate writer’s brain was hard at work.

  A trip to NY was an offer that I couldn’t bring myself to refuse. However, that was as far as I could go. I was determined not to sell the letters.

  This decision didn’t make me feel I was conning Art. There was a poetic justice in the idea that my former correspondence with Salinger was paying for our stay in the city Salinger had lived in as a young man and where the action of his classic novel, The Catcher in the Rye, unfolds.

  The rules of the game demanded that I meet with Arthur Goldman and his wife at a lawyer’s office on 57th Street. My wife came too. I placed the letters on the table in front of the Goldman couple They pored over them, studying them carefully for a long time. A respectful silence reigned in the room.

  When they had finished reading they asked if they could take a photocopy.

  No, I said.

  They then increased the amount of their original offer. This time they didn’t say the amount aloud, they wrote it on a piece of paper which they pushed over the table to us. My wife read it and said, ‘My God, Dan, that’s your pension.’

  ‘What are you talking about, pension? I’m young!’

  ‘You’re not young, you’re just childish.’

  ‘I’ll be childish till I die.’

  ‘Hey, listen, there are writers out there who aren’t childish.’

  ‘Who? Name me one. Just one!’

  ‘Dan, calm down. Take it easy.’

  ‘I’m not selling those letters.’

  ‘For Chrissake. You’re acting like the hero of one of your own sentimental stories.’

  ‘I’m not selling’

  ‘So don’t sell, Asshole!’

  We were speaking Danish so we could talk freely. We tried to make our voices sound as neutral as possible. I kept my hands under the table so Rose and Art couldn’t see how much they were shaking.

  ‘Who’s the buyer?’ I asked Art.

  Unfortunately, he said, he was bound by client confidentiality not to reveal his client’s identity.

  ‘Is it Salinger?’ I asked.

  Art’s face was expressionless. ‘Let’s just say it’s someone who feels close to Salinger.’

  ‘Have you met Salinger?’ I asked.

  Art hesitated. ‘I’m in correspondence with him.’

  ‘Can you call him now?’

  Art smiled broadly as though he was enjoying this game of ping-pong.

  ‘Possibly,’ he said.

  Now my hands and feet both were shaking under the table. I girded my loins and came out with the phrases I had rehearsed so carefully.

  I said, ‘If the party who wishes to purchase the letters is either Salinger himself or a member of his immediate family, he can have them for free. On one condition.’

  Art didn’t look at all surprised. ‘What’s the condition?’

  ‘That I get to meet Salinger and get to have the first ever interview with him.’

  Art was an experienced negotiator. He didn’t bat an eye. His hands on the table in front of him were absolutely still. He fixed me with an unwavering gaze for a long time.

  The seconds crawled by and became minutes without his saying a word. His eyes still fixed on me, he made a sign with the index finger of his left hand to Rose, who was sitting next to him. Rose took a diminutive cell phone out of her jacket pocket. She entered a number and handed the phone to Art.

  Art waited 20 seconds before the phone was answered.

  ‘Mr. Salinger?’ said Art in his low-key, nasal New York voice. ‘Art Goldman in New York. I’m sitting here with your Danish friend and his lovely wife. Here’s the deal they propose. You get the letters free and he gets to meet you and get an interview.’

  Art listened to what was said on the other end. It was a short message. Then he stood up, held out his hand and said, ‘You’ll hear from us by evening. Mr. Salinger wants to think over the offer.’

  When we were down on 57th Street again my wife exploded. ‘Why the hell don’t you just sell him the damned letters so we can have some money for once?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said. ‘But all my life I’ve dreamed of meeting the man, just once.’

  ‘Can’t you just meet him, give him the letters and dash over to the bank with the money. We need a new kitchen and a new bathroom and a new floor in the living room.’

  ‘I know. Let me think. I’m kind of confused right now.’

  ‘You’re always confused and you never think!’

  ‘You know that isn’t true. I’m always thinking, just not the way you think.’

  ‘Listen Dan, don’t give me that bit about how I’m that boring little dentist who somehow or other just happens to pay all the bills.’

  ‘You knew perfectly well what you were getting yourself into.’

  ‘That excuse wore pretty thin a long time ago.’

  The telephone in our room rang the same evening.

  ‘It’s Art’, said the low, self-contained voice. ‘You’ll be picked up outside your hotel tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Mr. Salinger will be waiting in Cornish, New Hampshire. He will give you the first and last interview of his life. In return you will give him the letters.’

  I couldn’t sleep all night, naturally. The idea appealed to me. When my wife had fallen asleep I left the hotel and wandered the streets of New York until the sun came up. I walked and walked. I was troubled. Being troubled is good for me. I was upset. That’s good too, and so is being uneasy, nervous and confused. I didn’t want to miss one second of what was going on in the city around me or what was happening inside me.

  As a writer my sole material is what’s happening inside me. I keep track of every single thought. Actually I would rather have been a dentist. That’s what I was trained for and that’s what I did until a woman I had never seen before came into my life. Without that woman I would still be a dentist. But instead I found myself committed to a childish, self-absorbed and somewhat ridiculous line of work. I was a writer, a writer without the least bit of imagination. I don’t invent anything. The material comes to me. I am merely the attentive observer. What’s going on? What’s passing through my mind? That’s what I was eager to discover as I walked the streets of New York that night in April, 1987.

  Of course what came to me was what was bound to come. As Tove Ditlevsen said, ‘You open the closet and your childhood comes tumbling out.’

  My youth, my childhood and my entire life basically consist of just one thing: depression. Out of the closet tumbled depression.

  If I didn’t suffer from depression we wouldn’t be in New York now.

  Depression was the reason why Salinger and I had been in correspondence for all those years. His depression and mine.

  The streets of New York that night in April were the perfect setting for letting my thoughts drift back in time, back to all the people that had led to Salinger and our trip to New York.

  THREE

  Back Into the Shadows

  I have depressive personality disorder. I’ve had it all my life.

  I was quite young when I learned I had to hide my depression; no one wants to hang out with someone with depression. Depression is contagious. One of the first things I mastered when I was at school was how you’re supposed to look when you’re happy.

  Another thing I understood at an early age was that there’s not just one kind of depression; no two depressions are alike. Depressions keep changing, they develop. You have to find out for yourself what your depression consists of, what it looks like. You scrutinize yourself, well aware you could be wrong. You examine your own reactions, yo
u’re your own doctor. It’s unremitting, hard work and in all probability doomed to failure; most people give up in advance.

  Some people compare having depression to having cancer. They wish there was some kind of chemotherapy for depression, and there is. Antidepressants are pretty much the only treatment for depression. In many cases the medication works and the patient and their families are duly grateful. But if they don’t work you have to be your own doctor. You have to figure out for yourself what people, what places, what situations have an antidepressant effect on you.

  When I was a child I thought everybody was like me. Later I realised that most children are happy, full of a zest for life.

  I wasn’t just an unhappy child. I was depressed. I was suffering from an illness.

  My parents tried to find someone who could cure me. They took me to specialists. A number of people tried to help. All kinds of approaches were tried: medication, electroshock therapy, talk therapy. It seemed I was resistant to all of them. Many of the people I met while we were undergoing treatment committed suicide. When I was fifteen I contemplated different methods of committing suicide. I carefully studied all the different ways you could take your own life. My choice fell on hanging. Two of my friends had hanged themselves, one from a chandelier hook in his room, the other out in the woods one night.

  I discovered that for me the best antidepressant was to carefully observe my inner processes and write them down.

  From the age of fifteen I’ve treated myself 24 hours a day. I kept it to myself, but the girls I fell for fled as soon as they realised. I wanted to tell them everything, but of course none of them wanted to listen.

  I was a compulsive talker. When I was a child I talked so much that my parents and family would say, ‘Would you please just shut up for a minute, Dan. You’re driving me crazy talking all the time.’

  I talked incessantly until I was six. I would say the first thing that came into my mind. Then from my first day at school it became an inner monologue in my head, not a word would escape my lips. From that day on I’ve talked continuously, unceasingly, but only as an interior monologue. I discovered other people don’t do that. I yearned for the day when I would stop talking all the time.

  I was filled with excessive longing for other people to like me. At the boy scout summer camp I went to, one of the boys was selected as Scout of the Year. I spent every second I was in that camp running back and forth in front of the scoutmaster busily performing chores. My deepest wish was to be recognised as the most popular boy scout of the summer. It never happened.

  My friends could experience things without having to talk about it with other people. I couldn’t enjoy it if I hadn’t told someone. In High School I often heard a classmate say, ‘He’s just like a three-year-old who hurts his knee and doesn’t cry until he’s run home and told his mother.’

  I dreamed of the day when I would be able to experience something without having to tell anyone.

  I didn’t know whether this was a symptom of depression, but I did know that it was what made me different from other people.

  They had eyes to see with; I had no eyes. I always saw everything through other people’s eyes. I dreamed of having my own eyes one day.

  Certain situations can have an antidepressant effect, certain people, objects, colours, sounds. Most of the time you don’t know why.

  I am, and have always been, a large-scale consumer of medication and pills. I’ll try just about anything. I would visit people and go to the bathroom looking for the medicine chest. I would steal medication for arthritis, sleeping pills, painkillers, anti-epileptic drugs, stimulants, whatever. In my experience just about any pill has a mild antidepressant effect.

  I’ve tried all the hard drugs; they all have an antidepressant effect.

  Liquor is good for depression. So is rain, a good fight, coffee, cigarettes, and bad sex.

  Just about anything can have an antidepressant effect, but only on a superficial level. The depression always returns when the drug wears off.

  I’ve filled piles of yellowing notebooks with good advice over the years. I’ve collected advice from any number of sources. Useful advice can be found anywhere; user’s guides are particularly helpful. In a paint store I found a booklet on anti-rat pest control, figuring that rats were comparable to depression. That booklet was one of the most effective introductions to depression I’ve ever encountered.

  Nobody really knows what depression is or where it comes from. This is a fact that many people find difficult to accept. You have to write your own user’s guide. It’s hard, time-consuming work and will most likely end in failure and defeat.

  During one period of my life when I was particularly depressed I tried rat poison as an antidepressant. Afterwards I thought it might have been an unconscious wish to commit suicide. But the fact was that rat poison proved to be one of the most effective antidepressants I had ever tried. For days I walked around in a mild daze, close to feeling something approaching happiness or joy. I daily increased my dose of rat poison until I ended up collapsing in the street and was rushed to the hospital to have my stomach pumped. That was my last experiment with rat poison.

  Over the years I’ve been examined regularly to determine whether I’m autistic, schizophrenic, psychotic or paranoid. Every time the answer is the same: I just have ordinary, run-of-the-mill depression.

  When I was a child one of my therapists was an old lady who lived in an apartment on Valby Langgade, Mrs. Magnussen. She suffered from depression herself and experimented with alternative treatments. We played music together. Music had proved to have an excellent effect on certain forms of depression. On me it had the opposite effect; music, especially beautiful classical music, made me even sadder.

  Mrs. Magnussen tried to devise a therapy tailored to my case. She knew I was a compulsive talker without ever opening my mouth. She told me I should try letting the words come out. She didn’t have to say it twice. I opened my mouth and let everything I was saying to myself pour out. She listened patiently to all the murders, mutilations, blood and destruction that gushed from my lips. I could have kept it up for hours, days, weeks. Mrs. Magnussen was the only therapist who had seemed to like me.

  When I was in High School I was an in-patient at a psychiatric hospital on several occasions. They gave me antidepressants and talk therapy.

  Since nothing seemed to help, my parents tried a number of alternative therapies. There was primal scream therapy. I was supposed to yell as loud as I could while beating a pillow that I was supposed to imagine was my mother and father. But I’ve always been very fond of my parents and even though I tried hard to mobilise the hidden anger I was supposed to feel against them, I never could.

  There lived a woman in Birkerod who did fairytale therapy. Her name was Ulla Ladegaard, and I liked her from the start.

  She looked as though she had just stepped out of a fairy tale herself. She didn’t look like a witch, she looked like a princess. Even though she was old she dressed like a girl. She dyed her hair red and wore rings on all her fingers. Ulla Ladegaard taught me how to step into a fairy tale and seek out someone wicked to slay later on. This could also be an evil beast or an impersonal force. Anyone could do this exercise or therapy. We went through Grimm’s fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and obscure Croatian, Italian and German fairy tales that Ulla had collected. I chopped the heads off trolls, off death, off the devil, off black dogs. They all symbolised my depression.

  I really liked Ulla but no matter how many dragons I slew it didn’t make my depression go away or even grow any less.

  The last time I saw Ulla she had called in her sister, who was a fortune teller, a clairvoyant. She pored over my palm and then burst into tears.

  Ulla apologised, but there was no need. You didn’t need a fortune teller to know that things would not go well for me.

  Ulla from Birkerod taught me how to give my depression faces. Faces, adventures, quests. Depression was not just
an impersonal grey rot engulfing me; it had evil-looking avatars beckoning me into their universe.

  I invented long tales in which I was lured into dark forests. Deep in the forest, in the dark, a huge hound would be lying in wait, or a troll or a lion. This creature was the depression. If I vanquished the monster either by force or by cunning the depression would disappear.

  The tales filled my life when I was in High School. On the outside I was a normal student. No one suspected the orgies of violence and bloodshed raging within me. Not until I graduated from High School and started dental school did my depression stop having different faces; the faces merged into one face and only one face.

  As soon as the face emerged I immediately called Ulla to thank her. Without her help, the face would never have come to light.

  She laughed when I told her. ‘Dan, you have no idea how happy that makes me. It was bound to happen.’

  ‘Why was it bound to happen?’

  ‘Because you try so hard. You expend more strength than you have. But remember, my dear, life is and will always be a quest. We’re all of us a little lost out there in the dark woods, you’re not the only one. We’re all seeking the love that moves the sun and the stars.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll find out some day. When you do, think of me, Dan.’

  The road that led to all the different monstrous faces merging into just one face went past a professor at the School of Dentistry.

  Professor Ib Schroder, Dr. Odont, was my teacher of pharmacology and corrective jaw surgery during my fourth year. He was an ugly little man with a pockmarked face that made him look like a frog. He had been tortured during the war and for many years had been an alcoholic and a manic depressive. When I met him he hadn’t touched a drop for several years and was no longer manic depressive; he was only depressive. He knew I was depressive too because we had often been patients together in the psychiatric ward at Rigshospitalet. We had spent hours and days together in the corridor comparing notes on our depression.