Salinger's Letters by Nils Schou Page A

dilemma, it was Kierkegaard’s, and it’s mine.’
    â€˜Why do you care where your letters end up? What’s so terrible about a collector or a university?’
    â€˜Are you naive or do you just pretend to be?’
    â€˜I just pretend.’
    â€˜When I was young I dated Oona O’Neill. I was crazy about her and her best friend, Carol, who later married the writer, William Saroyan, and after that the actor, Walther Matthau. When Oona started going with Charlie Chaplin I wrote her a bunch of letters. I was devastated and I ridiculed Charlie Chaplin. Those letters are now in the possession of a university library. Anyone can just go in and read them! Somebody even tried to publish them as a book, but my lawyers managed to put a stop to that.’
    â€˜Do you think I should feel like a traitor, a whore or just a common blackmailer for taking advantage of the situation to get an interview with you?’
    â€˜You’ll get no absolution from me! But I know what I’m expected to deliver. I’ve been a devoted fan of lots of people myself.’
    â€˜You? The guy that’s famous for refusing to let his fans anywhere near him?’
    â€˜There are people I would have travelled halfway around the world just to see walk down the street.’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜The person I’m the biggest fan of is Kierkegaard but he died in 1855 so that pretty much leaves him out, I guess. The other person I worshipped just as much as groupies dote on film stars and rock singers was Freud. I besieged him with letters and I met him once too.’
    â€˜How did that come about?’
    â€˜I wrote to Freud in Vienna when I was young. He always answered me, kindly and impersonally. He got lots of fan mail. I thought he was a brilliant novelist, in Kierkegaard’s class. His works on the mysteries of the soul were pure poetry to me. I dreamed of meeting him. Just before the war broke out I went to London to meet him. I was relentless. I had to meet him. I went to where he was living in exile and knocked on the door. And there he was, the old man, almost a dotard, his mouth in excruciating pain because of the cancer. He listened patiently to what I said, how much I admired him, how much it meant to me to meet him. My secret wish was to get to touch him, physically touch him. I was sure some kind of spiritual energy would be transferred from him to me by the least physical contact. Freud invited me to walk with him in the garden. We strolled there together, arm and arm, for 10 minutes at most without saying a word, Freud leaning on me for support. I was ecstatic. When his daughter Anna called Freud into the house again I did something perhaps I should be ashamed of. I stole a small plant shoot and put it into a little plastic bag I had brought. I took such good care of that shoot that its descendants now live in my garden. The day that plant dies I’ll die too, I’m sure of it.’
    â€˜So you understand us, all us fans.’
    â€˜Otherwise I wouldn’t know what I was turning down, would I? And who was a greater fan than Kierkegaard? He wallowed in names, he hid behind any number of pseudonyms the way only people do who long to be famous. He sat at Hegel’s feet in Berlin, he dreamt of knowing everyone who was anyone in Copenhagen and was beside himself with rage when he wasn’t invited to the right parties. Kierkegaard was the ultimate fan long before the word was invented. A fan wants names, a steady flow of names to root around in so as to fill up the emptiness inside. I’m offering you a trade in names to get my letters back. You want names, facts. Don’t get me wrong though. I don’t mean to imply you’re a pig!’
    â€˜I’m surprised you don’t sound angry.’
    â€˜Listen, you Kierkegaard landsman. I’ve been friends with some of the most notorious gossips in the world. Take Truman Capote and Andy Warhol for