Salinger's Letters

by Nils Schou

  I wouldn’t dream of telling them, but I was sure I was the others’ favorite model. I was the character with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the one who catalogues whatever he experiences, the one without the slightest sense of humor, or the phantom seeking a pair of eyes and a voice - the character that’s just a little out of sync.

  All of Nora’s comedies were based on living models. She would often disguise me as a woman or a rabbit or a teddy bear. They were all slightly inept and were always on the lookout for friendship and love. She wrote romantic comedies. When the main characters are united in the end, the ugly duckling has long since become a swan.

  Nora never mentioned the word depression. She never gave me explicit advice. She leaves little gifts lying around that I can open or not as I choose. When I watch her working with actors she tells them things I know are directed at me.

  She’s developed her own technique for analysing the relationship between two people. This is a tool actors use. It’s called: ‘How do I stay centre stage?’

  The other side of that question is: ‘How do I keep everyone else offstage?’

  Nora has collected so much material over the years that she could write an instruction manual on how to be the centre of attention.

  The whole thing boils down to this: when to listen, when not to listen.

  Another theory she had was the drinking straw theory. Some people are like drinking straws, she told the actors. They dip their straw into other people and suck them dry. She said, ‘You meet a friend, a so-called friend. When you’re finished talking to this friend you’re so exhausted you can hardly crawl. What happened? Your good friend drained you of your last drop of energy. How was it done and what does it teach us?’

  Nora is an expert on social interaction. When she meets people who want to be more intimate with her than she does with them, she smiles a special smile: very cordial, very warm. Behind the smile she’s readying the scalpel to surgically sever the relationship at precisely the right moment.

  Nora’s acting directions always have a profoundly anti-depressant effect on me.

  Nora is a lightweight, she says so herself. Her only agenda is to entertain. She says she wants to be the Marilyn Monroe of literature. Who wants to see Marilyn Monroe in a tragedy? We want to see her in comedies. Nora wouldn’t dream of being profound. She loves superficial entertainment herself. She writes for success and money.

  Our personalities are diametrically opposed. I couldn’t be funny if someone was pointing a gun to my head. When I talk, people never laugh, they frown. No one has ever called me charming. When people are trying to be nice they say, ‘Nice talking to you, it’s been, uh, very informative.’

  Nora has no trouble finding material for her comedies. She begins with what’s right under her nose. She started out as a journalist. She got married and had two sons. Her husband cheated on her and they were divorced. That divorce proved a gold mine for Nora. She’s written two novels about it, three collections of short stories and two plays. She’s even written a musical about the divorce. All highly successful. She would often say: ‘The marriage was a disaster, but the aftermath was a success.’

  Her sons, Max and Jacob, are the most important things in her life, but so are the good reviews and all the money she’s made since the break-up of her first marriage.

  Later she married a businessman, Nicklas, who’s in the carpet business. The marriage is apparently a success; Nora hasn’t written a word about it.

  Nora has directed her plays and films herself for many years. As soon as she gets an idea she acts on it. When she thought it might be fun to be a director she went straight to Sam Besekow and knocked on his door. She did the same thing later with the director Palle Kjærulff-Schmidt.

  Nora loves social gatherings. She loves to cook. Even though she’s thin as a rake she loves to prepare food, eat food and discuss food.

  She takes great care drawing up her guest lists.

  This is only hearsay of course since I’ve never been invited to any of her dinner parties, nor have the two others. Rules are made to be observed. Particularly Puk Bonnesen’s rules.

  What Puk doesn’t know and what Boris only suspects is that Nora and I are secretly friends. We’re personal friends even though it’s strictly forbidden.

  When we really get going we tell each other we’re each other’s best friend.

  In Nora’s case I know it isn’t true. It’s just something she says to make me happy.

  It’s a clandestine friendship. There’s no love interest, no sex. There’s only the pleasure of being together. We have secret places where we meet.

  I tell Nora everything. I used to think she told me everything.

  Nora teaches me all kinds of antidepressant things. She’s taught me more antidepressant techniques than anyone else. Before Nora took me in hand I was incapable of making small talk, chattering with people I didn’t know. I was so unresponsive that people would willingly have killed me. She taught me how to have a casual conversation. She directed me the way a director directs an actor. I didn’t have a spark of talent but with Nora’s help I could just about manage to talk about the weather and ask how things are going.

  Nora taught me the most antidepressant technique I’ve ever learnt. She uses it when writing and directing comedies and also in her personal life. Just like everything else, she says, she stole it from somebody else, in this case from the French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Bergson claims that all comedy derives from the breakdown of rigid, mechanical behaviour. All human beings, all events proceed according to a built-in mechanical system. Instinctively we know what to expect from a normal procedure, and then when the expected mechanism breaks down, we’re surprised, we’re liberated, and we laugh.

  I stole it from Nora as soon as I heard it, who had stolen it from Bergson, who had probably stolen it from someone else. Ideas are made to be stolen and I quickly made it mine. I apply it a hundred times a day and it works every time. Unfortunately my wife and daughters find it extremely irritating since it has certain consequences: I’m incapable of following an instruction manual, I never follow recipes, and worst of all I always cross on red.

  Blaming it on Woody Allen is just a bad excuse. Nora had heard about Bergson from Woody Allen.

  Woody was in Copenhagen one spring, staying with Mia Farrow and four of her adopted children at the Hotel d’Angleterre. He had checked in under an alias and wanted to be left in peace. The family was on their way home from Stockholm where he had met Ingmar Bergman, his idol.

  Nora was a great admirer of Woody Allen and had been ever since she’d seen his first movie, Bananas. Woody Allen was her role model as a writer and a director.

  Woody Allen is a genius, Nora maintained, even though some of his work was not the work of a genius, of course, just like all geniuses.

  Nora’s favorite Woody Allen quotation was, ‘Whenever I start on a new project I look around and ask myself what does it remind me of that was highly successful?’

  Woody’s sole reason for coming to Denmark was Soren Kierkegaard. Woody had read Kierkegaard ever since he was very young. He identified with Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard had been his gateway to two other existentialists, Sartre and Heidegger. Woody was the world’s most famous professional neurotic. He claimed he dealt in neuroses; neuroses had made him a rich man. He claimed to suffer from anhedonia himself, a lack of the ability to enjoy. He found the same anhedonia in Kierkegaard, which is why he was in Denmark for a few days to see everything he could relating to Kierkegaard. Puk saw to it that Woody’s guide to Kierkegaard was Nora.

  Nora took him to the Copenhagen City Museum on Vesterbrogade where the few things Kierkegaard left behind are on exhibit. This doesn’t amount to more than a few pieces of furniture. Woody had looked at the furniture and whispered to Nora, ‘I’m so moved I could cry, but I never cry on principle.’

  Nora later wrote a newspaper article about her meeting with Woody Allen in which he maintained he was ashamed of being a come
dian. ‘It’s like when you’re invited to a party and they put you at the children’s table.’ He hoped he would grow up one day and write bleak dramas but he knew it would never happen. The title of the article was ‘Study in Silence.’ Woody never laughed, he was very quiet. ‘Laughter is work,’ he explained, ‘Funny is money.’

  Woody explained Bergson’s theories while they were looking at Kierkegaard’s furniture at the Copenhagen City Museum.

  I’ve never told anyone about my eyes and voice issues except Nora. She had a theory that working with the automatic and the mechanical might help.

  I don’t experience anything until I’ve told my wife. I see the world through my wife’s eyes. I’ve borrowed her eyes. When you don’t have eyes of your own you don’t have a voice either. I borrow other people’s voices. There are four voices I borrow from in turn, my three Factory colleagues and my wife.

  Nora is working on it. She believes that my own eyes will have a breakthrough one day. On that day my depression will disappear, says Nora. She knows perfectly well that’s not what happens in real life, only in one of Nora From’s charming comedies.

  Being in a comedy by Nora From is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Written by Nora, directed by Nora. A shallow, hopelessly romantic comedy in which the lovers are united in the end, and the bad guys have to leave town.

  I don’t have to actually be with Nora for her to have a tonic effect on me. Simply knowing she’s there is an upper. If I need to, I can see her and tell her what’s bothering me. That’s a pick-me-up in itself.

  Who loves Nora? Everybody loves Nora. When I hear people talk about her they always go on about how wonderful she is, how great it must to be friends with her. I feel that way myself.

  Cut back to Tove Ditlevsen walking away from me down the street that day. What Tove had told me knocked me on the head like a boomerang. The boomerang was the phrase ‘Everybody loves Nora.’

  Three apparently innocent words, but they hit me full force. After talking to Tove the phrase ‘Everybody loves Nora’ sounded like a terminal illness, a death sentence.

  It was cruel. She had made me see Nora with fresh eyes, Tove’s eyes.

  Why did Tove tell me and no one else? I’d known the answer to that one for years. People with depression are so hard-hit to begin with that one more depressing fact won’t make any difference.

  I kept what Tove had told me bottled up inside for a while before I could find a way of bringing it up with Nora. There was no way I could call her up and say, ‘Hey Nora, there’s something we need to discuss.’

  Eleven days passed before the right opportunity arose. During the course of those eleven days I thought about Nora constantly, so often that actually confronting her almost began to feel unnecessary. I knew so much about her now that all I had to do was reshuffle the pieces with Nora’s name and put them together again to form a new picture.

  Poor Nora. She had no suspicion I was springing a trap from which she couldn’t escape. I was going to make her do something she would hate more than anything else in the world: take a long, hard look at herself.

  For many years we had met in Tivoli on August 4th. We took turns choosing the restaurant where we’d have lunch and the rides we’d go on before lunch. This time I chose a ride on the boats in the lake near the Chinese Pagoda.

  In mid-lake I had Nora where I wanted her. If she tried to get away, she’d have to jump into the lake.

  ‘Tove Ditlevsen tells me you’re a junkie.’

  Nora was rowing. The smile on her lips didn’t falter an inch. She didn’t even glance in my direction.

  The important thing was that now Nora knew I knew she was an addict. She also knew I knew why she was an addict.

  She knew I had spent a large portion of my life studying one small mechanism: the how-to-please mechanism. She knew I had studied it so intensely because my own mechanism is out of balance, causing my depression. She also knows that I know just about everything worth knowing about her own how-to-please strategies.

  ‘So?’ she asked.

  ‘How long have you been a junkie?’

  ‘Let’s call it a consumer of cocaine, shall we?’

  ‘My guess is seven years’, I said.

  ‘Four years, maybe five.’

  ‘Does your husband know?’

  ‘No. ‘

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Tove Ditlevsen, my pusher, and now you.’

  ‘What should I do with this information?’ I asked.

  ‘I want you to be my accomplice, my witness. Dan, you must realize how relieved I am that now you know, too.’

  ‘Did you send Tove Ditlevsen to tell me?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘All that about my helping her with her manuscript, did that come from you?’

  ‘Danny, sweetheart, that’s how we make a living. Fiction, right?’

  ‘Nora, if it wasn’t Hans Christian Andersen’s birthday I would strangle you and throw you in the lake.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s not because of Andersen! The real reason is you’ve just been given the greatest proof of trust and affection a friend can give.’

  ‘It weighs on me so heavily I’m afraid I’ll sink straight to the bottom.’

  ‘Great, you’ll meet the little mermaid down there, Dan, and you can fall in love with her.’

  That was the extent of our exchange on the subject of her drug abuse. Nora is not one for psychology in her personal life. She spouts psychology in everything she writes or directs, but when it comes to herself she’s silent as the grave. Nobody better dare psychoanalyse her! If anyone tries, that’s the last they see of her. She leaves the introvert stuff to me, she says. Other people’s problems are like weeds, she maintains. People should keep their weeds in their own backyards.

  That’s why she sent Tove. Or Tove had sent herself. When I went over in my mind what I knew about Tove, it became clear to me she was the obvious choice.

  It was a well known fact around town that Tove Ditlevsen was a drug addict and suffered from depression. Much of what she wrote dealt with ways in which she blackmailed her husbands and lovers into giving her the love she craved. She threatened them. She pleaded with them for love and attention. When that failed she twisted their arms to give her what she needed even more than drugs.

  Nora gets more attention, friendship and love than anyone else I know. This applies to her work and to her private life. She knows how to gain people’s confidence and win their devotion. I tease her by saying she’s a small, highly efficient how-to-please machine. She finds this amusing, but refuses to listen to a single detail of my endless theories about her.

  Nora’s many friends miss her when they’re not with her. They count the days before they can see her again. They feel like calling her every day but they know she’s busy and that she has other friends. Everyone knows pretty much where they stand on Nora’s friends list.

  If they’re in any doubt they can check out her dinner party guest list. Everyone in her milieu knows exactly who’s invited. They keep count of who’s been invited many times, just a few times or almost never. I know, too. It’s easy for me to say because I’m never invited myself. Neither is Boris or Puk, of course, which is a comfort.

  I also know how habitués react when for some unaccountable reason the invitations stop coming. Several have become so desperate they’ve approached me to find out what’s going on. Did we say something wrong? Has Nora started to find us boring? Does Nora disapprove of our other friends? Whenever anyone approaches me I give the same answer: Nora never tells me her opinion of other people. That’s a downright lie, of course. We hardly ever talk of anything else at our clandestine meetings. We exchange gossip by the truckload, and solemnly swear never to say anything nice about anybody.

  We make a living off fiction, says Nora, fiction and vanity. We’re both great believers in vanity. That’s one of the many reasons we like Hans Christian Andersen so much. Unlike us he never tried to conceal his v
anity. Andersen would go for a walk and catch sight of an acquaintance on the other side of the street. He’d cross the street and say, ‘Hello. Now they’re reading me in Spain now, too. Goodbye.’ This was the Andersen Nora and I respected, and one of the reasons we commemorated the date of his death in Tivoli every year.

  What did Andersen want? The same thing the rest of us want: attention, friendship and love. He was just less devious about it than the rest of us.

  I can give Nora the same kind of attention I give Boris and Puk: Amanda. Without Amanda I would never have got near them.

  In Nora’s company Amanda became virtually invisible. Nora is number one on my list of anti-depressant friends.

  She’s at the top of my list and many other people’s for the same reason she became a junkie. Amanda and I both know why, but usually we don’t give it much thought.

  We’re facing it now though, surrounded by the rides, restaurants and entertainments of Tivoli Gardens the sole purpose of which is to please. The urge to please is a necessity of life, but once you’ve tried it you’re hooked.

  Nora, look the other way. I’m going to analyse you according to the Salinger Syndrome. I know you hate it. But you’ve chosen me for a friend because you know I can do it. That’s why you sent Tove Ditlevsen to me.

  And that’s why you know I can handle your dirty little secret, because I know things, I’ve been there. And that’s why you have to accept that you’ve become a case in my lifelong little research project, the Salinger Syndrome.

  I too know what it’s like, the urge to please. I just never manage to please anybody. Of the four of us at the Factory I’m the worst. I wish things were different, but they’re not.

  You were a junkie long before you started snorting cocaine, Nora. You were hooked on popularity, on other people’s admiration, on their love for you. You were a love abuser for so many years that you kept craving a higher dose. But then even that wasn’t enough and you turned to synthetic love, drugs.