Salinger's Letters

by Nils Schou

  ‘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!’

  TEN

  Two Stars in a Car

  When people like me it’s because I’m an intimate of Puk, Boris and Nora and work with them. People never come right out and say so, but it’s always there. They find it strange that I’m the Factory’s fourth member.

  What do the three others see in me? they wonder. I must have hidden qualities invisible to the uninitiated.

  Most people are cautious about approaching the three others through me. People usually only approach me when a friendship is at stake. It’s not unusual for Boris to break off a friendship, form a new one and then pick up the old one again and start all over. Boris quickly becomes enthusiastic but his enthusiasm cools just as quickly. His friends and ex-friends are well aware that it’s no use coming to me to mend a broken friendship.

  It’s different with Puk and Nora. They don’t break off friendships. They do something even crueler, they downgrade them. This occurs gradually and almost imperceptibly at first. A promised phone call isn’t made. The tone is slightly cooler when you meet on the street or at a party. There’s nothing to put your finger on, it’s merely a touch, a vague disquiet. The light of the friendship slowly goes out. Finally there’s that dinner party you would normally have been invited to but the invitation never arrives.

  Of course, you don’t just call and say, ‘Hey, what’s wrong? I’m always invited to your Sunday morning get-togethers in August. What am I missing here?’

  No, they come to me, Dan Moller, instead. I’m less dangerous to approach. They think up some kind of pretext. Slowly they work the conversation around to what they really called about. How is Puk these days, or Nora? What’s going on in their lives that made them change their routines? Do I know something they don’t?

  As Puk would put it: My power to appeal lies not in myself but in the reflected glory of others. I never tried to intervene on anyone’s behalf. I knew that could get me in trouble, especially when it came to Puk’s circle of friends. Nora’s circle got together to have fun. They weren’t interested in power or cultural status. But it was different with Puk, which was why I normally wouldn’t dream of getting mixed up in what was going on.

  There was the classic Puk situation: People thought they were her friends, that she liked them, they were in her confidence. Suddenly they found themselves off the best friends list with not a word of explanation.

  At one point I was working at a TV studio out in Gladsaxe. I took the bus back and forth. One afternoon when I was on my way to the bus stop, a car pulled up. A woman rolled down the window and asked if I wanted a lift back to town.

  I knew her face and the face of the man sitting next to her. I had never spoken to them before. In my opinion they were Denmark’s greatest movie stars, the ultimate when it came to talent, charm and star quality. They were the couple Lise Ringheim and Henning Moritzen.

  I got into the backseat of their car. I was a devoted fan meeting my adored idols, and here they were talking to me as though we were old friends. We were soon calling each other Dan, Lise and Henning. I was in seventh heaven.

  I felt like opening the window and calling out to the world at large: ‘Hey, do you realise who this is! I’m in Moritzen’s and Ringheim’s back seat! They’re talking to me! Call my mother and father and sisters and brothers and tell them I just met Lise and Henning. I’m in their car!’

  It took me back to when I was a kid and the walls of my room were plastered with posters of movie stars. Two of those posters had just opened up and let me in. Lise and Henning. I repeated their names to myself. It was almost too unbelievable to be true.

  I felt I knew everything about them. I would never be able to choose between them; they were a couple. But if I did have to choose I would choose Lise Ringheim. As an actress as well as a private individual she was in a class by herself, in my opinion.

  I was struck dumb with awe at the situation. I wasn’t too dazzled though, not to be fully aware there was a reason for all this and the reason lay with the three others at the Factory. I didn’t care. Here I was and they were talking to me as though we were old friends.

  Puk had already pointed out my tendency to prostrate myself before people I proclaimed unique and therefore worshipped like a teenager. She discussed this in an article on idol worship but I felt it was addressed directly to me. Puk’s point was that idol worship is a kind of suicide in disguise. Instead of physically killing yourself you get rid of yourself by moving entirely into someone else’s universe.

  You can never be entirely sure whether Puk is joking or not. That’s part of her attraction and it keeps people on their toes. You’d rather laugh once too often than once too little with Puk.

  I had been in the back seat for just a few minutes when something happened that suddenly changed the entire situation.

  Lise Ringheim was driving so I could see her eyes in the rear view mirror. She was wearing sun glasses but she took them off. Our eyes met, and I immediately understood she was suffering from the same thing I was. She was depressed. She hid it very well, but one depressed person can spot another a long way off.

  She nodded to me. She’d seen the expression in my eyes, too. She said, ‘Henning and I were good friends of Ib Schroder’s. We often met him at Mogens Fog’s.’

  Mortizen and Ringheim had treated me all along as though we were old friends. Suddenly I felt it was true. They had known my father-in-law. They knew a lot about me.

  Henning glanced at Lise who nodded. Then he told me about their little problem, as he called it. They had been friends of Puk Bonnesen f
or some time. Now she had become reserved towards them. Not only that, Puk was the gateway to a lot of other people they really wanted to keep in touch with.

  This was a serious problem for them, I felt. Nevertheless it was the funniest thing I’d heard for ages. It put me in a good mood.

  I had no idea why it should cheer me up so much. The situation simply served as a powerful anti-depressant.

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ I said without having the slightest idea how I’d go about it.

  Lise said bleakly, ‘Dan, you call the shots.’

  Henning turned around and looked at me as if to make sure I’d understood what Lise had said.

  He patted my knee and smiled. ‘Maybe you think you know a lot about us, but I can assure you we know ten times more about you.’

  He turned around and looked out the windshield again.

  Just before Lyngby, Lise passed a truck at high speed. She looked at me at regular intervals in the rear view mirror and explained:

  ‘For many years we’ve been part of a circle of intellectuals. They’re the only people we can be ourselves with. They like us for what we are and not for what we do. Do you understand? It would be a minor disaster if they drop us. It would almost be like dying.’

  Henning said. ‘What do you mean, minor disaster? It would be a major disaster.’

  ‘Do you understand what we’re saying?’ asked Lise.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘But I just have to get used to the fact I’m in Mortizen’s and Ringheim’s back seat, talking to them as if we’ve known each other forever.’

  Henning turned around and smiled. ‘We’ve known you a long time because we realise our lives are in your hands, if you’ll pardon the somewhat melodramatic turn of phrase. You’re the star here, Dan. You’re the one in control.’

  Lise said, ‘It may sound like an exaggeration, Dan, but Henning’s right. We’ve been planning how to run into you by chance for a long time.’

  Henning smiled broadly and said. ‘We’ve studied you so carefully we feel sure you understand what we mean.’

  Henning was a master of imitation, I knew. The person he was imitating now was me. He had my dry, slightly didactic way of talking down pat.

  He smiled delightedly when I cracked up. Tears came out of my eyes and snot out of my nose. Henning knew I thought he was the funniest man in the world, and he enjoyed it.

  He also knew that I knew that his charm offensive was well prepared. Now that I was reduced to a cackling hen he proceeded to his next number.

  ‘Of course I enjoy your finding me funny. But at the same time I hate you. You think I call the shots, but you do. All you have to do is stop laughing and in a second I’m reduced to looking like a manipulative asshole.’

  Henning had kept up his imitation of my pedantic way of talking. He had me in the palm of his hand and proceeded with what he had rehearsed.

  ‘Every evening when we’re scheduled to perform at the theatre we go onto the stage in plenty of time before the audience arrives. We go all the way out to the edge of the stage and look down at the empty seats. And we say, ‘Fuck you, you predators! Go home to wherever you come from, your stupid little row houses. Put a bullet through your brains. Put your heads in a gas oven. Find something better to do than coming here and turning thumbs up or thumbs down.’ Then we go up to our dressing rooms, our peace of mind restored, ready to go down to the stage again and satisfy the many-headed monster in the house.’

  Henning waited until I had dried my eyes and then he delivered the coup de grace. ‘Fuck you, Dan Thorvald Moller. You and your left wing, radical chic, wine-guzzling pals. Our lives are in your hands. We’re in free fall out here and the only one that can bring us down to earth alive is you. You’re a monster! You call the shots!’

  I doubled over in the back seat, and felt the wind had been knocked right out of me.

  ELEVEN

  At a Nursing Home in Frederiksberg

  Kierkegaard wrote: ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ Else Marie Vandborg and I agreed this was only moderately true. I understood my life better after I had met her; I incorporated her into the life I was living forwards. Meeting her was the turning point of my life. She was with me every day in everything I did. Else Marie Vandborg was one of the most powerfully antidepressant human beings I’d ever met.

  She fell one morning in her room at the nursing home and broke her hip. I visited her once at the hospital and another time when she was back in the nursing home in Frederiksberg.

  I felt about her the way I felt about Nora. The mere fact that here was someone I could tell anything meant I didn’t have to seek her out.

  She was my direct link to Kierkegaard. She knew Kierkegaard had been my salvation and she herself was the mainstay of my life.

  She always laughed when I told her that.

  ‘I can barely keep alive myself and there you go making me out to be some kind of lifeline in a troubled sea.’

  ‘That’s what you are to me,’ I said.

  ‘Dear little poet, it would be more accurate to say you’re my lifeline. My children and grandchildren are kind, they visit me, but they find it harder and harder to know what to talk to me about. With you I can talk for hours because we have Kierkegaard in common.’

  In our minds’ eyes we strolled through the Latin quarter of Copenhagen near the University. We attended lectures with Kierkegaard, we listened to Sibbern lecture and especially Poul Martin Moller lecturing on the Greek philosophers. We imagined the two men, Kierkegaard and Moller, meeting after the lecture. Kierkegaard was a great admirer of Moller. Moller was almost a father to him. Kierkegaard felt safe in the older man’s company. They would talk for hours in a coffee house on Nytorv square.

  Our common interest in a single sentence by Kierkegaard furnished us with material for endless discussions. When we met we first caught up on her health and whatever minor matters I could help her with. I showed her photos of Beate and our two daughters. Then we turned to what really interested us. We plunged into the sentence. Down in the sentence there was always plenty of space and elbow room for both of us, for hours on end.

  Else Marie said: ‘You could spend your entire life in just one of those words, isn’t that true, Dan? Is it sympathy or antipathy you’d rather be in?

  ‘How do you know everything about me?’ I asked.

  She put her hand on my arm and laughed. ‘Dear, sweet little poet. All it takes is just a few minutes with you to be able to see deep into your soul.’

  ‘Even if you’re blind?’

  ‘Especially if you’re blind. Almost blind.’

  ‘Else Marie, no one has ever said such things to me before.’

  That made her laugh even louder. ‘Now don’t go getting any ideas into your head, little writer. What you want is what we all want. We’re all lost without it. It’s what our friend wrote about all the time.’

  ‘And there I was thinking I was special.’

  ‘It’s all right there in our sentence! Clear as day. Study the word sympathy and what do you find? Everything your heart is full of.’

  Together Else Marie and I descended into our chosen sentence. We found ourselves inside the word sympathy. We explored it that first day and all the following days I visited her at the nursing home.

  That afternoon in the nursing home when Else Marie and I descended together into the word sympathy for the first time, I felt I had come home. I had reached the haven I had been seeking. All my life I’d hoped to find a place I could call home. For the most part it was an aimless journey in the dark, driven by hunches, intuition. The journey for all its mistakes had been necessary; it couldn’t have been any shorter. I was young and depressed, and there was no way anyone was going to hand me a user’s guide to a Kierkegaard sentence that said: Go down into the word sympathy, that’s where you belong, that’s your home, that’s where you’ll find the answer to all your questions. In the word ‘sympathy’.

  Else Marie was p
robably the only person who had delved into the concept so deeply. She understood it backwards and forwards. She felt secure down there and had no trouble showing me around. It was her contention, and Kierkegaard’s, that all human beings could feel at home in that sentence and in that word.

  As a child the word sympathy repelled me; being depressed I was well aware there was no getting around it. When I started studying the Salinger Syndrome I had to find words for everything the term sympathy encompassed. I found it humiliating to articulate my deepest needs, but I knew I needed to find the right words. Without words everything would simply remain an amorphous mass of emotions and desires. Ib Schroder, my father-in-law, made me put my desires into words. The words were then and are now: friendship, attention, and love.

  These are three basic necessities. To get them you need to have a well running how-to-please mechanism. My how-to-please mechanism, or enzyme as I called it, didn’t work. It was off balance. I had spent half my depressed life studying that imbalance. When I met Else Marie Vandborg certain things started to fall into place. I could say the words friendship, attention and love aloud without feeling embarrassed or ashamed.

  Else Marie said, ‘I wish I could live for another couple of years, Dan. We could explore your three words in depth together. Kierkegaard would be pleased with us. I’ll soon be twice his age when he died but there’s still not enough time.’

  Else Marie got seven more months. She died one winter night. She left me a small collection of books and a long handwritten letter that I still read on the evening of the last Friday of every month. Always in the evening so there’s a chance Else Marie will show up in my dreams.

  TWELVE

  A Fairy Tale in the Botanical Gardens

  We all knew Puk knew Frederik Dessau. When Puk said, ‘Frederik told me’, we knew it wasn’t just any old Frederik, it was Frederik Dessau.

  There was no need to brief us on him (b 1927; Sweden, during the war: alone at school in Lund. Currently a ubiquitous member of the Danish literary scene: author, journalist, director, own radio program, etc.)