So Long, Marianne

by Kari Hesthamar

  Axel believed that one of the reasons he was drawn to Marianne was that she was more grounded than he. Moreover, he had never allowed himself to be attracted to insignificant people for any length of time and was therefore certain that a powerful force lived within her. He thought that he could unshackle her from the surface, while Marianne would root him in the earth. In this way they complemented and empowered each other.

  Marianne was boundlessly in love with Axel and for her his letters weren’t didactic or moralizing. What he wrote appealed to her, and Axel’s view of life and humanity represented something new and free in which she desired to be included. But they had their conflicts. Axel was so overbearing that Marianne often disagreed with him just so he would notice that she was there. Axel thought that she was all at sea; she was wrong whether she expressed an opinion or kept quiet.

  Marianne was about to awaken as a young person, and Axel, who was both exciting and incomprehensible, aroused her sexuality. At the same time he offered her a new way of looking at herself and made her understand that there were other ways of living. Axel could take her away from her parents and their bourgeois expectations. The thought of a free life beyond the behavioural strictures of Oslo’s West Side both enticed and frightened her.

  Even though Axel represented freedom from home and her quotidian existence, the freedom didn’t offer her a secure framework. Something painful and bitter frequently arose between them, supplanting their love for each other. Axel often lost control of his temper. Very few people understood what preoccupied him and he often felt lonely. Marianne felt a frisson of fear about what she had gotten herself into — there was so much that was different about Axel — and occasionally she thought that he was utterly without limits. But the young lover steadily insisted on guiding her along the path toward inner and outer freedom.

  Think for yourself now, my own little woman, when you’ve purchased a dress or a pair of shoes. Then you’re bursting to tell me. It means something to you, and you want so much for it to mean something to me too. That’s the way it is for me too. Because something extraordinarily important is happening through my person. Understand me right. It’s not me as a person that’s important, but something that’s happening inside of the person, I am beginning to get down to something of the gem.

  … Do you remember all the tiny turtles? How they hatched and how they began to run down toward the shore. On the way many were eaten up by birds. Only a few survived and made it to the ocean, to the water. There even more were eaten by fish, and perhaps some few grew up and became large. Just a few managed to carry out the program of their lives. The others were consumed by life. Their forms disappeared. They disintegrated in the stomachs of birds or fish. Became the flapping of wings or the gentle movements of tail fins. But the original idea, to become a turtle, was not realized. That could only happen in the great depths. That is essentially man’s place in the universe. Just a few of us reach the edge of the water, the place where the spirit can be nourished. Just a few of us accomplish our goal and become Human, far too many become something else, something used up by life, something that is equated with life. But when we come down to the great depths. Then the world is still and clarified …

  I want so much to be your sustenance, to be your light and your water. That’s why I’m often seized by bitterness when I see that instead I’m the person who makes you desperate, chaotic, confused and unhappy … My own wonderful turtle, I feel and I hope that you have this something extra in you that can open your eyes so that you can see the ugly vampire that sits on your back, that creature in yourself that empties you of nourishment. And when you begin to suspect something of this … this unknown power that is fed by your negative emotional life will withdraw, the devil will lose his interest in you and God will redouble his.

  Forgive me this letter. I love you.7

  JOHN STARR COOKE

  Marianne kept Axel’s letters in a drawer in her writing desk and read them over and over in the dim light. She curled up on the bed in her light-blue pyjamas, closed her eyes and tried to envision Axel.

  In 1955 Axel was in Copenhagen for some weeks with the mystic John Starr Cooke. When Axel was deep in the Sahara the bizarre man had appeared, riding a white camel. Cooke was dressed in a black burnoose and didn’t have a hair on his head. He told Axel that he was an incarnation of Pharaoh Amenhotep the Fourth and that he had met both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Everything that Axel had been so absorbed by had materialized before his eyes when he encountered Cooke in the desert.

  Cooke came from one of the wealthiest families in Hawaii but had chosen to devote his life to occultism instead of the family businesses. One evening John had the idea that he and Axel should swing a pendant over a map and travel together to wherever the pendant stopped. The pendant came to a standstill over the town of Øksfjord in Finnmark, Norway’s nothernmost county. It was simply a matter of leaving the Sahara and turning their noses northward.8

  But now John had wound up in the hospital in Copenhagen, paralyzed from the waist down. John believed that his condition was linked to an insect bite he’d received in Algiers. Travelling to Denmark to be there for his old friend, Axel wrote letters full of desire to Marianne back in Oslo.

  Marianne smiled a little at her mental picture of her boyfriend at the hospital with John, Axel pounding away on his Remington typewriter. She didn’t wait long before she took out pen and paper and answered:

  It’s horrible to be alone, darling. Everything is so strange, why am I never content with anything? Peculiar thoughts rush through my head, making me uneasy and sad. When Father says something I can scarcely keep myself from flying into a rage. Darling, you are used to me and my whims, but it’s true that I have pains in my head, in all of me. Darling, you are the only one who can help me. You say that it is only me who can help myself. Yes, yes, that must be true. But God knows where I’ll begin. Fear of not being able to reach (follow) you drives me crazy. I am so wonderfully in love with you, proud of you. You mean so damn much to me.

  Poor John, he must be in a bad way. I should be ashamed for complaining. He surely needs you.9

  Marianne had met John some months earlier, soon after he was admitted to the hospital in Copenhagen. She had gone with Axel to visit him, and had looked at him with a pitying gaze and said she felt sorry for him. “Cut that out,” he had responded brusquely, “It’s no help!” He had asked her to go to the woman in the next room. There lay a twenty-six-year-old woman who had been injured in an automobile accident just after she had been married. Now she was bedbound, trying to write down her thoughts with a pencil clamped between her teeth.

  When Marianne left Copenhagen John had given her a gold bar that had filled her clutch bag. Earthly goods were of no interest to the mystic from Hawaii, who had asked her to sell the gold bar and put the money in her bank account. She boarded the Danish boat with half a kilo of gold under her arm and deposited it in a safety deposit box when she got to Oslo. The bar wasn’t numbered but she and Axel checked that it was the real thing.

  “WE MUST GET MARRIED”

  In 1957 Axel was called up for military service. Meeting at the Theatre Café the evening before his departure, they kissed and said goodbye for a year. Axel joked, “I’ll meet you after work tomorrow,” but Marianne was prepared for a long separation from her lover.

  The next day, when she came out of the office Axel was waiting, in his duffel coat. He had talked his way out of military service and come right back to Oslo the same afternoon. To celebrate his homecoming they went straight to the Theatre Café, where they found the usual gang. Duffel-coated Arne Nordheim sat, as always, at his own table. Judge Einar Moen was there, and Axel’s good friend Per Schioldborg.

  Per had been with Axel in the Sahara in 1953. Axel, Per and his girlfriend Else Berit had travelled by train to Nice, where she stayed behind while the other two hitchhiked and travelled in smugglers’ vehicles through the l
and of the Tuaregs, to Tamanrasset and the Hoggar Mountains, which was the goal of the journey. Per returned to Nice after a few months; he missed Else Berit and wanted to go back. Axel gave himself over to solitude and his own reflections. Surrounded by thousands of miles of sand, he had fixed himself up with a stone shelter and begun on a novel about his great passage through the desert. He wrote about craving insights other than those supplied by the established elite. He wrote about the fabulous and the supernatural.

  Axel had always been drawn into the most remarkable adventures. Now he had begun again to think about travelling to a place he had never been before, and he wanted Marianne with him. The time for lazy daydreams was past. Marianne, whose travels beyond Norway had been few and safe, fantasized about the romantic departure they would make. They both began to put aside money for the trip. Axel was grappling with his first novel for Cappelen, one of Norway’s oldest publishing houses, hoping it would add a little money to the pot.

  On a writing excursion to the village of Øyenkilen, outside Frederikstad, he sat before the typewriter and related that the writing proceeded slowly. The individual sentence itself posed no difficulty, the challenge was getting the whole thing to hang together, to create an undertone and a sense of coherence throughout the book.

  But now he wanted them to marry! He wanted to take Marianne away from the environment that he believed destroyed something in her, day by day, and that he claimed would break her down.

  I don’t mean in any way to set you up against your own parents, but the climate in your home is perilous for a soul that wants to come up. I can’t comprehend how you hold out, that you don’t explode and fly off the handle, I can’t comprehend how you can be so sweet and good to me, so difficult and jealous and devilish as I can often be. But I’m sure that everything will be fine if we marry and get away from the whole mess.

  We’ll get engaged on the twentieth of May. It will be a shock for them … It isn’t out of fear that I don’t ask your father, but because to a certain extent it’s repulsive to give him a say in this matter. Why should I ask him? It’s you I want! It is you I ask. So forget about the old formalities. They are so easy to see through anyway. If they don’t think I’m good enough, how much that reveals of their innermost souls! Just because I’m not loaded. Just because I’m a person who has something to live for, who has something that lifts him a bit above the grey masses and blows a little sunshine into life, just because I refuse to take things exactly the way they are, refuse to follow the same old tracks and sniff along like a dog, just because I want to create my own future and my own home as I would like it, not as others say I should have it nor what they say is proper and fitting.10

  Axel wanted to share his life with Marianne, to become something together with her. But it mustn’t happen at the expense of either his soul or hers. The more he thought about it, the more evident it became to him that even though one shouldn’t ride roughshod over others, at the same time one had a duty to one’s self and one’s own soul. He made it clear that marriage with him would rip Marianne out of her old rut. They wouldn’t have much “dough” but it would be exciting:

  I shall whirl you into a world that is new and alien to you and that is necessary for you to dissolve all the old corpses that are sloshing around in your brain. Come out into the fresh air and become human! It’s a fucking planet we live on, not a neighbourhood or a miserable little town in the far north. Whether you plant the seed in Norway or Spain it becomes a plant, right? Yes, I dare say that the strong sun and the cloudless sky offers a greater margin of happiness than the leaden Oslo Fjord on a chilly winter’s day. One gives up something and receives the sun in return. And the sunshine is always accompanied by clear-cut shadows. I like clear-cut shadows. I like them endlessly more than this dull grey ingrown milieu that has lost all meaning for me. We must get out, Marianne. We weren’t born for this. No, no, careful now. I’m not turning my back on Norway. But I’m not a Northman, I’m an Earthman. I live on a planet. And the planet is sailing through space. What is Oslo? A speck. A moaning dust mote. And the forests here in the north are so cold, so cold.11

  Marianne thought that Axel could make her complete and fill the longing in her. There was something about his voice, the intensity of the words that issued forth from him. He spoke with enormous authority and always took things further than anyone else, enthusiastically breaking boundaries and bearing his companions out of the commonplace. Marianne couldn’t count the times she had heard him exhort, “You mustn’t stop there!” when someone raised his voice or threw himself into the discussion around the table.

  He was like a preacher; he was without a doubt one of those people who seemed to know what made the world go around. When Axel came into her life, she wanted to let go of everything — her family, her own identity. But at the same time she was petrified. She was like a bird flapping with one wing while the other wing hung down uselessly. The freedom that waited for her out there was simultaneously tempting and oppressive. She feared losing control over her life and wished that Axel were more grounded. She was afraid of not being up to tackling the new life that they contemplated. She bridled when anyone — her family or Axel — tried to lead her. Equally she felt lost when he wasn’t there and wrote back to him as soon as she received his letters.

  In a strange way it’s beautiful, but it also scares me that I would be so lost without you, Axel. I miss you, I must see you, hear your voice. You are mine. I read all your letters yesterday. The one from Øyenkilen and the one about the turtles, and every time I read them, I feel more and more what you mean, see it so damn clearly, if I could just really hold on to it and follow through. I have seen the vampire that sucks sustenance from me, so now it’s just a matter of getting rid of it.12

  Full of youthful insecurity, she wrote back to Axel in his own language and pretended she was tougher than she really was. But she was unable to put his advice into practice in her daily life or ask herself the question “What do I want to do with my life?” It was Axel who steered the relationship and she understood that if she wanted to be with him their life together would be mostly on his terms. Marianne knew that if she joined him an adventure was in store for her that few others could offer her. He was her Genghis Khan.

  It was Axel who had invited her to dance and she tried her utmost to follow the jazz rhythm. His keynotes would not change, but perhaps hers could.

  * * *

  Axel suggested in one of his letters that they should write travelogues together. He promised to help her with the genre until she got the hang of it and then they would submit the manuscripts under Marianne’s name. They would use the money for something they both needed — a new typewriter for each of them. Marianne wrote in her diary almost daily, filling the small notebooks from cover to cover. Nothing ever came of the travelogues.

  IKAROS

  In the middle of planning their big trip abroad came Axel’s explosive breakthrough as an author. In 1957, when Axel was twenty-five, Cappelen published his novel Ikaros and he was declared a genius by Norwegian book reviewers. The story described a young man’s journey through the Sahara. At a deeper level, the novel concerned a thirsting for the fabulous and the supernatural and a quest for experience and one’s bearings in the world. In the magazine Vinduet, the literary critic Kjøv Egeland wrote that not since Knut Hamsun had a Norwegian youth stood out in Norwegian literature with greater determination and a greater claim to be different. “Here is one of the year’s most sensational works of fiction. Sumptuously rich, brightly talented, fascinating,” opined Egeland. In short order, Ikaros was reviewed in more than thirty Norwegian newspapers and Axel and the book were lavishly praised by the critics.

  Axel was interviewed everywhere. Cappelen’s head, Henrik Groth, staged a press conference so journalists could meet the young man, who talked about the book and his travels in Europe and Africa. There was a reception at Cappelen and dinner at the grand home of Groth an
d his wife on Bygdøy Peninsula. With a view over the fjord, the house boasted columns and one drawing room after the other. Marianne felt as if she were at a palace ball. She stood aside and watched while Axel was borne aloft on the wings of his success.

  * * *

  Marianne and Axel wanted to go south — to Greece. Planning to root his next novel in the Oedipus legend, Axel sought the mythological atmosphere of the Mediterranean coast. He intended to rent a house, where he would have peace and quiet to write the book. Marianne had been in Denmark and had worked as an au pair in England, but more extensive travels she had only taken in her imagination and through the stories told by her grandmother and Axel. Now Axel wanted to take her to a country he hadn’t visited before. Marianne thought that everything would be simpler there. It would just be him and her. Axel would find contentment with her and with his writing.

  She didn’t tell her parents of their plans. She knew they would oppose them, and she dreaded raising the subject.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1957, Marianne is staying at the home of her mother’s cousin, looking after the children while their mother tours the country with a theatre production. One evening, Marianne asks her friends Lasse and Unni to babysit for her while she goes to meet Axel at the Theatre Café. Marianne rides the streetcar downtown and at the café Axel is waiting for her at a small round table near the bar. Seated at his right is a young woman with long black hair. Axel introduces the two women to each other, and Marianne takes the empty chair beside the woman. Marianne tries to read Axel’s face; she knows how feelings can flit like clouds across his face, the way a small child shifts from laughter to anxiety in seconds. She thinks his smile looks like a grimace when he turns toward her and opens his mouth: