The Fly Trap
Fredrik Sjoberg
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (2015)
* * *
A Nature Book of the Year *(The Times (UK))***
“The hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else.”
A mesmerizing memoir of extraordinary brilliance by an entomologist, The Fly Trap chronicles Fredrik Sjöberg’s life collecting hoverflies on a remote island in Sweden. Warm and humorous, self-deprecating and contemplative, and a major best seller in its native country, The Fly Trap is a meditation on the unexpected beauty of small things and an exploration of the history of entomology itself.
What drives the obsessive curiosity of collectors to catalog their finds? What is the importance of the hoverfly? As confounded by his unusual vocation as anyone, Sjöberg reflects on a range of ideas—the passage of time, art, lost loves—drawing on sources as disparate as D. H. Lawrence and the fascinating and nearly forgotten naturalist René Edmond Malaise. From the wilderness of Kamchatka to the loneliness of the Swedish isle he calls home, Sjöberg revels in the wonder of the natural world and leaves behind a trail of memorable images and stories.
Translation copyright © 2014 by Thomas Teal
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Sweden as Flugfällan by Nya Doxa, Nora, in 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Fredrik Sjöberg. This translation originally published in Great Britain by Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., London, in 2014.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sjöberg, Fredrik, author.
[Flugfällan. English]
The fly trap / Fredrik Sjöberg ; translated by Thomas Teal.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-101-87015-0 (hardcover : alk. paper).
ISBN 978-1-101-87016-7 (eBook).
1. Sjöberg, Fredrik. 2. Malaise, René Edmond, 1892–1978. 3. Entomologists—Sweden. 4. Entomology. 5. Scientific expedition—History. I. Teal, Thomas, translator. II. Title.
QL467. S54513 2015 595.7—dc23 2014037123
eBook ISBN 9781101870167
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design by Kelly Blair
v4.0
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1: The Curse of the Starving Class
Chapter 2: My Entry Into Hoverfly High Society
Chapter 3: A Trap in Rangoon
Chapter 4: The Man Who Loved Islands
Chapter 5: The Archipelago of Buttonology
Chapter 6: René Malaise (1892–1978)
Chapter 7: Narcissiana
Chapter 8: The Riddle of Doros
Chapter 9: In the Shadow of a Volcano
Chapter 10: The Net and Loneliness
Chapter 11: The Fly Tree
Chapter 12: The Entomologist’s Career
Chapter 13: Slowness
Chapter 14: The Island That Sank in the Sea
Chapter 15: The Legible Landscape
Chapter 16: Doctor Orlík and I
Chapter 17: The Allotted Time
Chapter 18: Portrait of Old Man
There are only three subjects: love, death and flies. Ever since man was invented, this emotion, this fear and the presence of these insects have been his constant companions. Other people can take care of the first two subjects. Me, I just concern myself with flies—a much greater theme than men, though maybe not greater than women.
Augusto Monterroso, Hispianola (Addendum)
Chapter 1
The Curse of the Starving Class
It was during the time I wandered the streets near Nybroplan with a lamb in my arms. I remember it so well. Spring had come. The air was dry, almost dusty. The evening was chilly but still carried the smell of earth and last year’s leaves, warmed by the sun. The lamb bleated forlornly as I crossed Sibyllegatan.
During the day, the animal lived with the king’s pampered horses in the Royal Stables, down towards Strandvägen, and we understood that it must feel out of place, not only there but also, in the evenings, at the theatre. I know nothing about lambs, but old it was not. A few weeks, maybe. Playing the part of a living metaphor onstage must have been an ordeal, especially since the play—Sam Shepard’s American drama Curse of the Starving Class—was violent in places, and noisy, and hard to digest, even for full-grown human beings. We could only hope that the poor creature was able to just grit its teeth and think about something else. In any case, it grew, faster than anyone had reckoned on.
And now, once and for all, that was my problem. A foggy mixture of ambition and coincidence had led me to a job at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, and for the past couple of years I had been in the properties department, responsible for taking care of often rather peculiar props for various productions, so it fell to me to fetch the unhappy animal from the Royal Stables before every performance. I carried it in my arms. We undoubtedly made a sweet picture in the spring evening. And then when the curtain rose, the lamb (later the sheep) was to make its periodic entrances and exits, keep quiet, and preferably not soil the stage, all with the scrupulous precision of any other scenery change. In pitch darkness.
Before the opening, while we were still in rehearsal, we planned a mechanical lamb, a woolly stuffed animal with a movable head and a built-in speaker that would deliver adorable bleats at exactly the right moment by simply having the stage manager press a button. But when the director saw our expensive robot, he thought it over for about four seconds before condemning the attempt as futile. If the stage directions specified a real lamb, then we would have a real lamb, not a toy. So that was that. The lamb became my responsibility. And that is how it came about that spring that I began to ask myself what I thought I was doing, and why.
Now you may well wonder what a young entomologist was doing in the theatre in the first place. It is indeed a troubling question, one I’d rather not dig into too deeply. Anyway, it was a long time ago. Let’s just say that he wanted to impress the girls, an area where entomologists need all the help they can get. Or it might be better to say that all of us need to flee blindly from time to time so as not to become copies of the world’s expectations, and maybe, too, to give us the courage to remember some of those great, bold thoughts that made a child get up in the night, heart pounding, and write down a secret promise for his life.
In any case, it was an exciting job. Fascinating and attractive to an outsider. Nothing can swallow fear headfirst like a large theatre in a strange city; nothing is more intoxicating than the dreams that dwell in its walls. Of course there was much that I never understood about the tricks of the playwright’s trade or the unwritten subtext in a manuscript, the subtleties and tiny footnotes. But it didn’t bother me, not to begin with.
Ingmar Bergman had returned from Munich, and it was all a great celebration. Shakespeare was mounted on the main stage in a great hubbub of activity, and those of us who padded quietly along the fly galleries and in the wings were able to transform the smallest glimpse of the master into anecdotes about his whims and legendary magic touch—small, plain stories that got better and bolder in the city’s bars and could easily be turned into envy of and interest in the storyteller himself. Gogol rolled in like an armoured cruiser, and Norén ground down all resistance even from the most obdurate audiences. Strindberg, Molière, Chekhov. My relation to all of this was perhaps looser than that of the younger stagehands, property mistresses, dressers, extras and assistants with unclear assignments with whom the
theatre teems—looser because almost all of them wanted to become famous actors and actresses themselves and stand in the spotlight, so they suffered mightily from their longing and from other people’s success and from the capricious rule of theatre-school auditions.
The work was rarely demanding. You followed a production from the first rehearsals until the play closed. In the beginning, it was about understanding the director and even more so the set designer, which is an art in itself. Then later you rehearsed scene changes with the cast and crew and checked the props as they arrived from the warehouse and workshops. By the time of the opening, we usually had everything down pat.
But this particular play was different. It was not just that the increasingly unmanageable lamb was a constant source of concern. It was also a food play, by which I mean that food was prepared onstage. There are several fairly simple ways of dealing with this problem, but certain directors and designers always want to make things difficult. That is to say, if the actors are supposed to cook a meal, then they have to cook a meal. No substitutes. Of course you can use apple juice for cognac and beer. But the food has to be real. In this case, they were supposed to sauté some kidneys. The smell of frying kidneys fills a theatre in no time at all, which it was felt added a certain authenticity.
When the lights went out for scene changes, we prop people rushed in like silverfish across a bathroom floor to rearrange the furniture, clear the table, set the table, carry a lot of stuff in and out—in this case, among other things, a wheelbarrow, a broken door and innumerable artichokes. During one of these pitch-black scene changes it was thus our job—with the aid of nothing but memory and tiny luminous strips of tape on the stage floor—to place raw kidneys into a frying pan on a stove of the type supposed to have stood in American rural kitchens in the 1950s. The number of seconds allotted for this task was precise and verged on the impossible. And as if that weren’t enough, Curse of the Starving Class had another curious feature—we can call it technical—which I would guess is unique in the history of Swedish theatre.
The thing was that in one particular scene, Wesley, the son in the family, played by Peter Stormare, was to show his contempt for his younger sister’s vapid life by pissing on some charts she had made at a scout meeting.
So the workshop was instructed to construct a gadget with which to simulate this act, and shortly before opening night it appeared—a device, ingenious in its simplicity, consisting of a tube and a rubber bladder. The trouble was merely that the director, at this delicate juncture in the play, placed Stormare far downstage, facing the audience. This created a serious credibility problem. And when it then became clear that the gadget leaked so badly that Wesley appeared to suffer from incontinence, there occurred what I had already begun to fear.
“Oh, what the hell,” Stormare said. “I’ll just pee.” And so he did.
My artistic sense was still rather undeveloped, but I was nevertheless deeply impressed by this unusual ability, night after night, month after month, to realize the playwright’s vision and the director’s weakness for unusual effects by very calmly urinating onstage just a few feet from the noses of the very cultivated ladies in the first row. What a gift! Naturally it was only a matter of time before he wound up in Hollywood, where he won undying fame as the silent, psychopathic kidnapper in Fargo.
Where I would wind up was less certain, but because it was I and I alone who was entrusted with the task of cleaning up this example of great acting—on my knees, in the dark, with a rag, hastily—it became clearer and clearer to me that my place was not, perhaps, in the theatre.
I may be exaggerating everything that happened in those days, romanticizing my longing and my fear, remembering only occasional lines of dialogue. It’s possible, I know, but it was definitely spring and I was absolutely both confused and in love. On top of which, certain lines stuck to me like birthmarks. Not because they meant so very much, not then, but maybe just because they matched the colour of something in my life.
When Wesley stands downstage and disgraces himself, and his mother Ella has just complained about the way he’s only making everything worse for his poor sister, he says, “I’m not. I’m opening up new possibilities for her. Now she’ll have to do something else. It could change her whole direction in life. She’ll look back and remember the day her brother pissed all over her charts and see that day as a turning point in her life.”
That happened in the first act. In the third, when the sister finally leaves and makes his words prophetic, she bursts out, “I’m gone. I’m gone! Never to return.”
I used to repeat those very words to myself, quietly but with the same rebellious tone used onstage, when, late at night, I returned to the stables with my shaggy friend from the country. Later that spring, I could no longer carry the lamb, so I led it on a leash, like a dog of some breed unknown even in snooty Östermalm. Elderly ladies stared after us, but we paid no attention and went on forging our plans in silence.
Only one year later, I lived here on the island—along with the girl who sat in the audience one evening and said later that the play was both funny and moving, yet wrapped in a singular fragrance of wool, piss and sautéed kidney. That was 1985. I was twenty-six years old. All this business with flies—that too was only a matter of time.
Chapter 2
My Entry into Hoverfly High Society
The theatre was my second attempt to flee from entomology. Aimless travel was the first. And I am, of course, painfully aware of how sorry a subject can seem when the only approach to it is flight. But that’s the truth, and there’s no way around it.
No sensible person is interested in flies, or anyway no woman. At least not yet, I like to think, although in the end I’m always quite happy that no one else cares. The competition isn’t exactly murderous. And when all is said and done, what I wanted to be best at was not urinating before an audience—my nerves were too delicate for that—but something else, anything at all actually, and finally it became obvious that my talents lay with flies.
That’s a fate that takes some getting used to.
Anyway, the hoverflies are only props. No, not only, but to some extent. Here and there, my story is about something else. Exactly what, I don’t know. Some days I tell myself that my mission is to say something about the art and sometimes the bliss of limitation. And the legibility of landscape. Other days are more dismal. As if I were queueing in the rain outside confessional literature’s nudist colony, mirrors everywhere, blue with cold.
But as I now live on an island in the sea and am not an expert on anything but hoverflies, we will simply have to start there. Should someone have the desire, or simply the kindhearted impulse, they could bind it all together in the genre—mostly unknown in Sweden—so lovingly practised by the Smiths, Ken and Vera, in their quite fabulous book A Bibliography of the Entomology of the Smaller British Offshore Islands. It wouldn’t be easy to do, I’m afraid, but after all it’s the thought that counts.
In my library, which is large enough to withstand a Russian siege, this book occupies a unique position. It is quite thin, just over one hundred pages, light blue in colour, and it has perhaps taught me little more than that Englishmen are crazy, but I am always equally exhilarated when I see it, heft it in my hand and read its title, as if it somehow justifies my existence. The text on the back of the dust jacket tells how the authors met and fell in love at Keele University in 1954 and how, later, they began studying flies together and started to collect literature about the insects on smaller islands. The couple are pictured as well, separately, and I can assure you that they look very nice. Ken—thin-haired, dressed in a suit, waistcoat and tie—seems to be hiding an ironic smile in his neatly trimmed beard, while Vera looks a little as if she had just woken up, with rosy cheeks. She appears to be thinking about something else. You can see that he loves her.
The book consists of a long list, nothing else. A catalogue of every known book and article about insect fauna on the islands along the c
oasts of Great Britain, from Jersey in the south to the Shetland Islands in the north. More than a thousand titles.
What is it these people have tried to capture? Hardly just insects.
…
In short, my artistic sense remained relatively undeveloped, and my past, as always, caught up with me. When anyone asked, therefore, I said succinctly that hoverflies are meek and mild creatures, easy to collect, and that they appear in many guises. Sometimes they don’t even look like flies. Some of them look like hornets, others like honeybees, parasitic ichneumon wasps, gadflies or fragile, thin-as-thread mosquitoes so tiny that normal people never even notice them. Several species resemble large, bristly bumblebees, complete with in-flight drone and coats flecked with pollen. Only the expert is not deceived. We are not many, but we grow very old.
Nevertheless, the differences are great, in fact greater than the similarities. For example, wasps and bumblebees, like all the other hymenoptera, have four wings, whereas flies have only two. That’s elementary. But it’s a thing people seldom see, principally because flies can easily achieve several hundred wing beats per second.
The entomological literature that soon began to fill my island house tells of a Finnish scientist named Olavi Sotavalta, whose interests included an investigation of insect wing frequencies. In particular, he occupied himself with the biting midges, which manage to reach an astonishing frequency of 1,046 wing beats per second. Sophisticated instruments in his laboratory allowed him to measure exactly and unambiguously, but just as important for Sotavalta’s research was his wonderful musicality and the fact that he had perfect pitch. He could determine the frequency simply by listening to the hum, and the foundation of his renown was laid when, in a famous experiment, he managed to trim the wings of a midge in order to increase the frequency beyond the limits of what seemed possible. He warmed up the midge’s tiny body several degrees above normal and cut its wings with a scalpel to minimize air resistance, whereupon the little beast achieved no less than 2,218 wing beats per second. It was during the war.
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