Salinger's Letters (13 page)

Boris is a true artist. Whatever he experiences, whatever he sees or hears is translated into art. His system is never overloaded by too many impressions. He can't experience enough.

My area of specialisation within Salinger Syndrome Theory is the how-to-please mechanism. It had worked perfectly for Boris until now. His soul was never in any doubt how to go about getting the attention and admiration he craved. He wrote, he charmed, he kissed, he hugged. His how-to-please mechanism got him more friendship, attention and love than anyone else in his generation perhaps.

Now it had all broken down. He held himself in the greatest contempt. When he read what he had written all he could see was an air of self-congratulation. When people greeted him on the street he felt he was being assaulted.

When he thought of Majken he saw himself as an overgrown baby, strutting about, his hand firmly grasping Fido.

Amanda and I quickly tired of watching Boris flagellating himself.

His self-flagellation took the form of claiming that self-flagellation was just as infantile as any other kind of sexual perversion.

That was when Boris touched bottom in his despair and slowly began to surface.

He did it with the help of the only thing I had to offer: a means of regulating the Salinger Syndrome's how-to-please mechanism.

Boris sighed when he heard it. ‘That's the most unsexy thing I ever heard in my life. You won't mind if I start crying, will you?'

But it was the lever he needed to keep from drowning in self-pity and despair.

No more admiration. No more acclaim. No more literary prizes. No charming TV appearances. No in-depth interviews for the papers.

Then came the worst part, the part that hurt most, the part Amanda delighted in telling him. ‘No beautiful young women to seduce and conquer. No falling in love, no infatuations.'

Boris looked as though he was about to cry when he said: ‘No more sex?'

Amanda said. ‘Boris you're not seven years old anymore. You have a wife you love. She needs your help. Try to think about her a little more and a little less about Fido and the Twins.'

Boris was crying in earnest now. He whispered: ‘You could have spared me that last remark, you bitch.
Fuck you, Amanda. Fuck you to hell
!'

 

 

One day Puk received a request. This was nothing new, Puk is always receiving requests. She never told us how the requests reached her, perhaps at a dinner party, or a friend of a friend may have called her.

Puk received a request from a woman writer who was encountering major difficulties in the novel she was writing. She needed help. It was a well known fact throughout the literary world that Puk was the one to see if you were having trouble with a novel. Puk would find the best man for the job.

Puk handed me a manuscript and asked me to read it. She'd only tell me who had written it if I accepted.

The novel was about the breakdown of a marriage. I had only read two sentences and I knew who the author was. The novel's stumbling blocks were purely structural and easily fixed. I drafted my alterations and met with Tove Ditlevsen in the Botanical Gardens. She was 54 when I met her in 1971. She was a well known and much loved writer and editor. Before we met I had to promise two things: never to tell anyone what she and I discussed, neither in writing nor verbally, and never to mention it in a private diary.

She explained why she felt so strongly about it. The letters she had written to friends and lovers over the years had been bought up by a collector. When she called the collector and reproached him she was told he had done it for financial reasons. He believed her current popularity would hold and one day she would be just as famous as Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen. He asked her if she realized what Andersen's and Kierkegaard's letters were going for these days.

I promised everything she told me would be in strictest confidence. That was easy enough because she told me nothing about her private life. I enjoyed that day in the Botanical Gardens. We discussed her manuscript; she approved my revisions.

Not until we were bidding each other goodbye did she mention Nora From, my dear colleague at the Factory, as she called her. She knew Nora very, very well, she said. But she always found it a little irritating when Nora was called the new Tove Ditlevsen.

‘For Christ's sake! I'm not dead yet, am I?'

I replied that not only was she very much alive, she was also a very beautiful woman.

Then she told me something that made my blood run cold, and walked off.

Nora writes drama, film and theatre. She's an expert at cliffhangers. The heroine is holding onto the edge of the cliff with her fingernails. While she's hanging there the scene cuts to somewhere else. The spectators remain glued to their seats. They have to find out what happens to the heroine. Will she be saved or will she plunge to her death on the rocks below?

Tove Ditlevsen's parting remark was just such a cliffhanger.

Cut to Nora.

The Factory rules stipulated we must never comment on each other's work. Another absolute taboo was any mention of reviews, either our own or the others'.

For the fun of it we always concealed a wink at the others in all our work. For my part I always worked in the three others as secondary characters, disguised of course and under different names.

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 comedian. ‘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.