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| Salinger |
My correspondence and cornflakes
with JD Salinger
We only met once,’ recalls novelist Nils Schou, the author of Salinger’s Letters. ‘It was like meeting Elvis Presley.’
Saturday 21 November 2015 14.00 GMT
I wrote to Mr Salinger (never Jerry) from a military base in Greenland in 1962 after reading Franny and Zooey in an aeroplane, a normal fan letter. I wasn’t surprised that he answered; maybe I should have been. We wrote to each other right up to his death, always about Søren Kierkegaard and Isak Dinesen, but latterly also about zen. I met him only once, in a New York hotel restaurant one morning in 1966. He was with a fireman, a friend from the war, eating cornflakes, and even today I eat cornflakes the same way. I gave him some papers from the Kierkegaard Library, but we didn’t talk much. He was very charming and very beautiful. For me it was like meeting Elvis Presley.
From my window now I see the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, on my way to work I pass Kierkegaard. Without my knowledge of them, I would not have had the contact with Salinger. Kierkegaard wrote much about melancholia, sadness and the way out. Andersen wrote fairytales, as do I, for small children, but also for adults. Both of them wrote about the art of telling stories, their healing effects. They followed the advice of Salinger’s favourite, Dinesen, said: “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” Salinger’s Lettersis a novel I told him I’d write one day. He didn’t comment. It’s a fairytale and it’s about sadness.
Apart from me, only my wife has read the letters, and I won’t let anyone else. Nor will I sell them, or publish anything from them. I was not a friend of Salinger’s, who never wrote about his private life but made a fairytale about himself. He’s the magician, and if I don’t treat him with the greatest respect, I’m afraid he will appear with a sword and cut my head off. Sounds childish? Storytelling is childish.
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