Salinger's Letters by Nils Schou

wheel. Art followed her as she drove out of town. She drove very fast for a while and then after about 10 minutes made a sharp left. We entered a wooded area. At the end of a long forest road, in a clearing, an old black Land Rover was parked. The woman drew up alongside. A man got out of the Land Rover. He was tall, his thick hair dark and greying. He wore glasses.
    It was him. I recognized him at once. He was wearing a pair of blue canvas trousers and a blue sweater. A light coloured silk kerchief was tied loosely around his neck. He was elegantly and neatly dressed. It was him, the man I had dreamed of meeting, J.D. Salinger himself.
    The woman indicated I should get out of the car. I went over to Salinger who greeted me pleasantly. His handshake was firm. He had an old man’s hands.
    He was 67 years old but well preserved. He looked at me kindly and searchingly. His eyes were jet black and his eyelashes, which so many women had fallen for I had read somewhere, were still thick and attractive.
    The woman got into the driver’s seat of the black Land Rover. Salinger invited me to get into the back seat with him. As he was getting in I heard his voice for the first time. Mellow and pleasant, the way he must have sounded ever since he was a young man, I thought.
    The first thing he said was that he was hard of hearing, but he had recently acquired a hearing aid made in Denmark, that he was very satisfied with. He asked the woman, whom he called Colleen, to start driving. Out of the rear window I could see my wife standing in the clearing, growing smaller and smaller. I felt like a schoolboy leaving his parents for the first time, watching them disappear from the back seat of the bus.
    For as long as the interview lasted we drove around the country roads near Cornish. All I was aware of was the old man sitting next to me. In his own way he was just as handsome as the only existing official pictures. I gaped, hypnotised.
    There was something attractive and frightening about him at the same time. He had a way of pushing his jaw out and staring fixedly at me that made him look like Marlon Brando playing Don Vito Corleone, the Godfather himself. Mafia associations, literary mafia, were not unwarranted; Salinger was the boss of his own universe. He demanded obedience and omertà, total silence. He had made me an offer through a strawman. Now I had broken mafia rules by outbidding him with an offer he could have refused, but which he had chosen to accept.
    â€˜Let’s get started,’ said Salinger.
    â€˜Are you the one that wants to buy the letters?’
    â€˜Does that surprise you?’
    â€˜Why didn’t you just write me in Denmark and ask for them back?’
    â€˜Would you have given them to me?’
    â€˜Of course’
    â€˜Even when you know how much money is involved.’
    â€˜Hmm. I hope so.’
    â€˜Collectors would give their eye teeth to get a hold of those letters. Everything I think about Kierkegaard is in there.’
    â€˜How do you feel about my blackmailing you into giving me your first real interview?’
    â€˜I have mixed feelings about it, very mixed, but I’ve made a promise. A deal is a deal. I’m doing it because of Kierkegaard. I’ve been obsessed with Kierkegaard ever since I read him for the first time at military school. Everything I’ve ever written was inspired by Kierkegaard.’
    â€˜Was that why you answered my first letter, back then?’
    â€˜Yes. And also because you knew things about Kierkegaard only a Dane could tell me. Holden Caulfield is partly based on Kierkegaard, partly on my own life. The way Holden divides other people into categories, those he doesn’t like, the phonies, and those he likes, is straight out of Kierkegaard when he speaks of the single individual and the ethical and aesthetic idiosyncracy which so painfully cuts him off from the world and from living a normal life. That’s Holden’s