I’ve been thinking – maybe everyone has their secret Project X, something that drives them, moves them to push themselves beyond their limits. Viktor Harlem, for one, wrestled with just such a mind-boggling idea. And whatever one might think about this vision, or utopian concept, so robust was it that one long weekend in May it brought us – Viktor and me – to Venice.
Axel, who had fainted at the airport and had to stay behind in Oslo, was a dark Adonis with whom I lost touch after high school. Viktor, on the other hand, is as present in my mind to this day as he was back then. It is hard to describe the young Viktor Harlem, the brains behind The Three Heretics, but when I close my eyes what I see is a shining face, a face glowing with an almost uncanny intensity, rather as if a hundred-watt bulb had been screwed into a head that was only designed to take sixty watts.
Although I was quite clear on the purpose of our visit, when the time came to complete the final stage of our mission I began to falter. As Viktor stepped aboard the traghetto which was all ready to push off from the stop outside the Hotel Gritti Palace, I tried to explain to him that I was not coming, that I did not want to leave, could not face leaving, the Grand Canal, that waterway lined on either side by such mesmerising buildings, the sound of the water grinding away at the age-old stone. Why didn’t we find ourselves a table on the hotel terrace, overlooking the canal; order some cake – some tiramisù – and coffee, I asked. Please, I said. What I did not say was that I no longer had any faith in my friend’s audacious plan. I was trying, as gently as I could, to save Viktor from making a terrible fool of himself.
And what did Viktor have in mind. Viktor meant to pay a call on the poet Ezra Pound, a very old man now, and supposedly still living in Venice. Back in the flat in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka, when Viktor first mooted the idea of looking up Pound, for a moment I thought he was talking about the British currency, that we were off to find a whole pile of money. Which was not too far off the mark: to Viktor, Pound was as good as a treasure chest.
We were staying in an out-of-the-way hotel, in a dim room dominated by a lagoon-like mirror, with enigmatic stucco decorations on the ceiling. The hotel’s one notable feature was a portrait of Armauer Hansen, hanging on the wall of the lobby. ‘My great-grandfather was a doctor too,’ the hotel manager told us. ‘He met the later so famous Norwegian when the latter visited Venice in 1870 on a travel scholarship, then too in May as it happens.’ Viktor promptly took this as a good omen. ‘We’re on the trail of something much more important than the discovery of the leprosy bacillus,’ he confidently announced to the manager. For my own part, I interpreted the sight of Armauer Hansen’s countenance more as a warning of the city’s contagiousness.
After two days I was actually feeling rather weak. I had spent most of my time on board a vaporetto; I had travelled up and down the Grand Canal at least twenty times, for much the same reason as one sees a film again and again: to savour scenes that have gradually become familiar and to keep on discovering new details. I could not get enough of it, almost had to rub my eyes as I tried to take in the sight of the rows of Byzantine and Gothic buildings to either side of me; façades redolent of the Renaissance and neo-classicism, walls which altered colour with the light and whose reflections created a rippling fairy tale down in the canal. The fronts of these palazzos were Vivaldi’s music. I leaned over the rail of the boat, staring, staring with lovestruck, avidly curious eyes. I had planned to see other sights in Venice, but I never got beyond the Grand Canal. I never visited the Doge’s Palace, nor the Accademia and – no one will believe it, I know – I did not so much as set foot on the pigeon beset square of St Mark. The Grand Canal was all I needed and more; this lazy, inverted ‘S’ of water winding between rows of palazzos, with each façade that hove into view more evocative than the one before: Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. I felt as though I was sailing along a spine in my own imagination, a backbone made up of identical and yet widely differing vertebrae. I was struck by an intriguing and unnerving suspicion: if I were to enter any one of these buildings along the canal – Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo – inside it I would find another Grand Canal, equally spellbinding, which would hold me there for the rest of my life.
Just before the traghetto left the little jetty, I joined Viktor on board anyway. Something in his face made me do it. All of a sudden he looked worried. As if he realised that everything was at stake here, his whole life project.
When we stepped ashore on the other side of the canal, he seemed even more uncertain. He led the way up the labyrinthine street, in the opposite direction from the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and turned left at the first bridge, onto the Fondamenta di ca’Bala. ‘What if he’s not at home?’ Viktor muttered, stopping short. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’
I had to take charge. ‘Of course he’ll be at home, where’s he going to go? He’s as old as the hills, for God’s sake.’
Viktor was an avid fan, to put it mildly, of that motley literary bazaar which went by the title of The Cantos: a fragmented poetic work touching upon just about everything between heaven and earth. At the flat in Seilduksgata in Oslo, Viktor kept having to build more shelves to hold the books which were supposed to help him pursue more of the strands in Ezra Pound’s vast tapestry of words. The Cantos were for Viktor what Provence was for Karen Mohr: an experience which craved a lifetime. Viktor wanted to achieve a thorough understanding of Pound’s work, but he understood very little of it. Then he had the idea of going to Venice. He was devoutly convinced that all would be revealed if only he could meet the poet himself. ‘Devoutly’ being the right word here. Viktor had the same motive for seeking out Pound as some people have for wishing to meet God. It was much like having the chance to ask about the meaning of life.
In spite of all this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Viktor walked more and more slowly along the side of the narrow canal. The street scene was what any holiday brochure would describe as ‘picturesque’, with just the right number of cats, flower boxes on the walls, little bridges and elegant motor-boats with hulls of gleaming varnished mahogany. Suddenly Viktor turned left again, looking both quite certain and utterly lost, as if he were wavering between a sense of having been here before and of finding himself on some distant, watery planet. We were standing in the calle Querini, a narrow, paved cul-de-sac, outside a deep-pink or terracotta-coloured house. Viktor goggled at the lion’s head knocker on the dark-green door. His courage failed him. I basically had to half-carry him back to the canal. Viktor pulled a bottle of aquavit out of his satchel: ‘Maybe we should just drink it ourselves.’
I said nothing. We simply stood there, leaning against the railing along the canalside, staring down the cul-de-sac at the pink house front, as if we both knew that all would be revealed if only we waited long enough, stared hard enough. Then the bells of Santa Maria della Salute began to chime. It might have been the cue for a revelation: the green door opened and around it came a head, a lion’s head larger than that on the door knocker; an old man walking with a stick and accompanied by a white-haired woman. They came hirpling towards us. Something happened to Viktor. He woke up, or woke up and all but fainted away. Pound appeared to have the same effect on him as Venice had on Axel – the reality was just too much for him. I nudged him in the ribs and as he pulled himself together I heard a panic-stricken: ‘What do we do?’ And I, to whom this man meant nothing, said: ‘Ask him. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ As far as I was concerned this was an interesting dilemma. You meet God. You are allowed one, possibly two, questions. What should you ask?
The woman and the old man were now level with us. Viktor took the plunge, he held up his hand, stopped the couple. They did not seem surprised, nor particularly well-disposed. Pound was wearing a broad-brimmed brown hat. His hair stuck out from underneath it. The maze of wrinkles on his face was like script, the marks of many lives. I remarked on his eyes, blue but with a sort of mist over them. Viktor approached Ezra
Pound. Produced a book, ‘every heretic’s bible’ as he put it, the latest, expanded edition of The Cantos. The writer squinted at Viktor for some time before accepting the proffered pen and signing his name, along with a couple of words, on the title page. As he took the book back Viktor handed the bottle of aquavit to the poet, as a thank-you – or, why not: an offering – pointing as he did so to the ship on the label and reciting the first line from ‘every heretic’s bible’: ‘And then went down to the ship …’
Pound peered curiously at Viktor as he handed the bottle to his companion. Viktor’s worshipful expression did not appear to make much of an impression on him.
‘A masterpiece,’ Viktor said, or sighed almost. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but which canto do you consider to be the most important.’ Viktor stood there, waiting for the magic word, the key that would lay the work wide open instead of, as now, being only slightly ajar. This was no formative trip, but something far more ambitious: a mission in search of the answer to all things, the ultimate truth. I was reminded of my own feelings on that day in my childhood when I was introduced to Uncle Melankton.
Pound stood as if in a dream, his mind somewhere else behind those misty blue eyes. ‘I was wrong,’ he said, motioning towards the book. He went on standing there, gazing into space, shook his head slowly while the fingers of one hand scratched the knuckles of the other. ‘Those poems don’t make sense,’ he said, ‘they were written by a moron.’ ‘But, but, but …’ I could see that Viktor was totally thrown. ‘But it’s … a masterpiece,’ he said again.
‘It’s a botch,’ Ezra Pound said. ‘Stupid and ignorant. I knew too little about so many things.’
And with that the ancient left us, walked off slowly along the canalside with the white-haired woman. Viktor just stood there with his mouth opening and shutting, as if he were choking on a sentence. I told him to relax, Pound was probably just feeling a bit down, I said. I followed the woman and the old man with my eyes until they disappeared into a restaurant. ‘Cici’ it said on the sign. And all at once I realised that I had come face to face with myself, a wonder who knew, nonetheless, that he was a fool.
Viktor was left with a faraway look in his eyes. Or maybe he was lost in one of those whirlpool visions Pound was always on about. Viktor stared into mid-air, at the point where the poet’s head had been. Aghast, I thought at first, but after he had been standing like this for some minutes it dawned on me that he was actually awestruck. ‘What heresy,’ he gasped. ‘To condemn your own life’s work.’ Viktor kissed the book. I had a nodding acquaintance with Hamlet, and to me Viktor looked exactly like Ophelia at the moment when she started to lose her marbles.
We wandered back to the hotel. Viktor was acting like an absolute lunatic. Hooting with laughter one minute, cursing and swearing the next. Shaking his head and slamming his fist into walls along our way. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed every few minutes. ‘Je-sus!’ In the hotel room he slumped down into a shabby armchair among all the other heavy, cherry-wood furniture, with a look in his eyes that could have won him a part as the occupant of a deckchair on the beach in the film of Death in Venice, which Visconti had just finished making. He opened the bottle of grappa we had bought. ‘Holy shit,’ he said after the first swig. ‘They wouldn’t win any prizes for this. I should have kept the aquavit.’
Barely a year later, in Lillehammer, Viktor Harlem received a blow on the head from a block of ice which left him staring into space in an institution for twenty-odd years. The look in his eyes the same as in Venice: faraway. Or rather, the light in his face was extinguished, as if a light bulb had gone out. I always had the feeling that his head would tinkle if I shook it. Despite Viktor’s affected wonder at Ezra Pound’s self-denigrating statement, it often occurred to me that it was actually in Venice that he was dealt the blow to the head that put him out of action for so many years. That he had been hit, not by a block of ice, but by a book. It was as if he needed twenty years to digest the shock of his guru describing his life project – a superhuman feat and the object of Viktor’s unstinting admiration – as a complete and utter failure. Each time I visited Viktor at the institution I was met by the eyes of someone who did not consider it worthwhile being fully conscious in such a meaningless world.
After all those years, he would one day get up and perform an achievement which would leave a lasting impression, but I knew nothing of this in Venice. To be honest I had worries enough of my own. In all probability I had been more thrown by the meeting with Ezra Pound than Viktor, at that point anyway. I needed room to breathe. I needed to be alone with my fear. It seemed clearer to me than ever: I could wind up a fool. Despite the knowledge of the powers pulsating within me.
Having deposited Viktor at the hotel with the bottle of grappa, I hopped onto the first vaporetto to come sailing along the Grand Canal. I had to take my mind off things, I had to find solace. I gazed at the buildings slowly slipping past, seeming to pile up in my memory. And suddenly I discerned a secret, mutual affinity between them, an all but invisible similarity, even between façades lying far apart; and at one spot, near the Rialto Bridge, it struck me that if I looked a little closer I would see that all of the house fronts were in fact the same façade. They were all part of an endeavour to say something about the perfect façade. Just as Cézanne painted the same mountain again and again. Palazzo Dario, Palazzo Barbarigo, Palazzo Loredan. Variations on the same possibility. I leaned over the rail of the vaporetto, trying to memorise each frontage – Palazzo Garzoni, Palazzo Grimani, Palazzo Bembo – so that in my mind I might be able to lay them one on top of the other, veil upon veil as it were, to create the underlying, ideal, façade, the palace in the depths, behind, beneath everything.
I am not sure, but sometimes I am inclined to see a connection between the television series Thinking Big and the ranks of façades along the Grand Canal. At the time I regarded the canal more as a long strand and the palazzos as almost identical pearls. Something I could collect, something which, by mere accumulation, could save me from ending up as a fool.
I had laughed at Viktor’s discourses on The Cantos, Ezra Pound’s megalomaniac attempt to construct a different sort of unity out of fragments. But some years later, by which time Viktor – I almost envied him – had found an impenetrable hiding place in an institution, there I was myself, striving to draw up a new map of human knowledge, a Project X which probably had more in common with the American bard’s euphoric songs than I liked to think.
My study of – I might almost say: worship of – the cross spider’s wheel web had inspired me also to try working breadthwise and from here it was only a short step to a more spatial perspective. I left my seat in the reading room and took instead to roaming around the campus. By studying the relationship of the university buildings to one another, which departments occupied which floors, I hoped I might discover something about the relative order of the various disciplines. Why were the buildings housing Sociology and Physics situated so far apart? And why did Philosophy occupy the floor above Theology in the Niels Treschow building?
It may well have been these strolls around the campus which prompted me to move base to the College of Architecture. Because my aim was not to become an architect; I was still looking for some means of organising all human knowledge – something better than the stunting 534: Sound and related vibrations, 535: Light and paraphotic phenomena, 536: Heat and thermodynamics; what I sought was a set-up which would make the most of the potential stored within the knowledge common to all of us, hence enabling us to take a cognitive leap forward. The first months there seemed especially promising. I had been spurred to apply the principles of floor-planning to my work. I grouped the sheets of paper I had spread out on the floor of the living room in Hegdehaugsveien as if the main classes and the subdivisions listed on them were rooms in a large house, or private and public premises in a metropolis.
This soon had to give way, however, to a more ambitious plan – this too architectonically inspired – i
n which I tried to find a dimension of depth in the connecting tissue of the arts and sciences. I tore up the sheets of paper on the floor. I started working with larger sheets, progressed from miniatures to massive canvases, so to speak. The living room was now full of transparent plastic tablecloths suspended from the ceiling, closely covered with subject headings. It looked rather like a lot of bookcases sitting one behind another, the only difference being that these you could see through, see all the way to the very back. Sometimes I had the impression that I was once more on a vaporetto on the Grand Canal; I felt as though I was gliding past a succession of transparent, almost identical palazzo façades. On the first sheets I had listed the more concrete main classes and subjects; the further back you went the more abstract they became. Each heading had, therefore, possible links running in countless directions. I suddenly perceived, for example – with the taste of gooseberries in my mouth, as it happens – that there might be a connection between palaeontology’s interest in fossilised dinosaur bones and modern neurology’s theories regarding the reptilian layer of the brain. Often, when I was standing looking at these transparent tablecloths, contemplating the groups of subjects hanging in layers, one behind the other, I felt something close to a new state of mind, as though my vision and my thoughts were now in tune with an awareness I had always possessed.
What Margrete liked better than anything else was to walk around the garden, barefoot and without an umbrella, when it rained in the summer. She was the sort of person who could set such store by a fine dinner service that she would stroke it with her fingers. Sometimes she would kiss me just to enjoy the sound of a kiss. That was the best sound in the world, she said: the sound of a kiss. I never made any allowance for such knowledge, such wisdom, when I was struggling with my Project X.
The Discoverer Page 48