Perhaps he felt divided too. When Dad died in Grandma’s house and I went down to Kristiansand and cleaned up and took care of the funeral arrangements, he invited me out to the cabin one day for a break, and we went for a walk together across the meadows and among the trees, he told me what Dad had meant to him, and it felt like he wanted to get closer and share it with me. Later that summer he had gone to see Mom again, they spent a holiday every year at a place only a couple of hours from where she lived, and on that occasion he had been full of praise for Yngve and me, how well we had handled the situation when our father died. Only a few weeks later my first novel came out, and when it did everything went back to as it had been before. My father appeared in the book, and my father’s brothers too, not ostensibly, but clearly enough for those close to the family to realize who the characters were modeled on. When I sent a copy to Gunnar I included a letter in which I put down a few words about my relationship to Dad and my respect for Gunnar as a father, sensing I suppose how he was going to take it and hoping it would soften his reaction. He was furious about the book, but instead of calling me on the phone or writing me a letter, he phoned my mother and let her have it. She refused to take responsibility for what I did or wrote, telling him I was a grown man and that she wasn’t going to interfere. Six months later, however, he called me, the book had won the Critics Prize, I was staying at a hotel in Oslo and had just accepted the award when a man called, introducing himself by a name I didn’t recognize. The voice, though, was familiar, and after a few seconds I realized it was Gunnar, he had introduced himself using the name I had given to one of the father’s brothers in the novel. He wanted to congratulate me, and apart from him asking if we were having a drink to celebrate, it was a pleasant enough conversation. After that we met at Grandma’s funeral and at the division of her estate, and then one summer when I was at Mom’s together with Linda, Vanja, and Heidi he was suddenly standing there at the door, he just thought he would say hello, he said, would you like some coffee, I said, no, thanks all the same, he said, we’re on our way south, just passing through, but come in at least, I said, but no, really, it was quite all right, so we stood there in the garden, exchanging pleasantries for perhaps three or four minutes before he got back in the car and drove off. Linda and the children were upstairs asleep, I said I could wake them so he at least could see my children, but he didn’t want that either, it was too much trouble, then after they’d gone Linda and I laughed about the whole thing, since he had obviously only stopped by out of a sense of obligation and nothing else.
So that was the situation when I had to send him the new novel. I knew he wasn’t going to like it, and the thought of him reading it scared me. But there was no way round it. So on the last day of July 2009, a month and a half before the novel was due to be published, I sat down in front of the computer and wrote him a note.
Dear Gunnar,
It’s been a long time. Hope everything’s good with you and the family. I was in Kristiansand this spring at a playwriting seminar and was intending to stop in and see you, only then there was a funeral in Ålesund I had to fly up to – Sissel’s sister Ingunn had died – and my schedule was just too tight. Sissel’s brother-in-law Magne, who was married to Kjellaug, died too in the spring, so it’s been a rough year for Mom. Here in Malmö, though, things are well, all three children are in nursery school now, and Vanja will be starting school in the autumn, so the worst of our toddler years will soon be over.
The reason I’m writing to you now though is a different one. The fact is I’ve written six autobiographical novels – three coming out this autumn, three in the spring – all dealing with different parts of my life, and basically all names and events included in them are authentic, meaning they describe actual occurrences, though not in any great detail. The first of the books will be published at the end of September – the first part takes place in Tveit in the winter and spring of 1985, which is to say the time Mom and Dad split up and Dad began his new life with Unni, and the second deals with the days in Kristiansand following his death. You appear briefly in the first part, giving me a lift down to a friend’s house on New Year’s Eve, and briefly in the second, when you and Tove come to the house and lend a hand cleaning the place up. As such, it’s a positive portrayal, obviously, because that’s the way I think of you, so that’s not the difficult or painful part of it – this lies in the fact that I am laying bare the private life of our family, something neither you nor anyone else in the book has asked for. On the other hand, this is a book about me and my dad, that’s what it deals with, my endeavor to understand him and what happened to him. To do that I have to go to the core, the inferno he made right at the end, in which he destroyed not only himself and the house but also Grandma’s final years, besides harming everyone else close to him. Why did he do that? What made him do it? Was it something he had inside him all the time when we were growing up? I don’t know if you realize this, but my father has had me gripped in a vise all my life, even after he died, and if I am to tell my story, that’s where I have to delve. The fact that this story also involves other people, among them – and perhaps especially – you, torments me severely, but at the same time I’ve been unable to see any way around it. The rot and repugnance the book describes all comes down to Dad, no one else was to blame, but I can’t describe any of it without reference to the context in which it took place. That’s the way it is. Right now I’m sending the manuscript to everyone who plays a part in it. Yngve has read it, and Mom as well. Now I’m sending it to you, attached to this e-mail. If you would like your name to be changed, and your background made anonymous, I am of course willing to do that. It wouldn’t be difficult, but the real problem lies elsewhere: that something you would prefer left alone, out of sight, is now going to be held up on display. Again, I’m sorry about that, but he was my father, the story I tell is my own, and unfortunately it looks like this.
All the best,
Karl Ove
During the next couple of days I checked my e-mail several times an hour. Whenever the phone rang I felt stabs of anxiety. But nothing was forthcoming. I took this to be a good sign, he was reading the novel and thinking about what to say and how to react. Either that or he was away at the cabin.
It wasn’t until the fifth day that I heard from him. As soon as I saw his name in my in-box I stood up and and went out onto the balcony, sat there for a while, smoking and gathering courage. The children were at the nursery, the sounds of the city rose toward me. The worst that could happen, I thought to myself, was that he would be angry with me for writing about the things I’d written about. But that would pass. All I had to do was take it, and it would pass.
I couldn’t undo what I’d already done. Not only had I made the decision that it was what I wanted, but I’d also worked under the banner of that decision for more than a year. The will of one person couldn’t change that.
That was what I thought. But it wasn’t what I felt. I felt like I did when I was a little boy and had done something wrong. I was afraid Dad was going to come and be angry with me. There was nothing worse in all the world. After I left home and became an adult, the fear remained, it was with me all the time, and I did everything I could to keep it from breaking out. Dad was no longer around, and my fear of his rage had been transferred onto others: I was twenty years old and scared stiff of other people being angry with me. It never went away. When I left everything behind and moved to Stockholm at thirty-three, the fear was still inside me. Linda, whom I met soon after, was temperamental and often unreasonable in her outbursts, and yet I allowed myself to be intimidated completely, even the slightest raising of her voice was enough to fill me with anxiety, and the only thing I could think about would be to make it go away. Even as a forty-year-old, sitting on the balcony on a morning in August 2009, I was scared of someone being angry with me. Whenever I gave anyone reason to be, I became so terrified and despairing and so full of anguish, I never knew how I would ever get over it.
I stood up and went into the bedroom where the computer with the Internet connection was. I opened the e-mail. It was short, and nothing to be concerned about.
Hi Karl Ove.
Would you please send me an e-mail address for your contact(s) at your publishing house.
Gunnar
I read it through a few times, trying to make out what lay behind the words. He hadn’t started with “Dear,” as I had done, but if he was fuming about something then surely he wouldn’t have written, “Hi Karl Ove.” The fact there was a period after my name indicated a lack of enthusiasm, otherwise there would have been either an exclamation mark – which I didn’t think was in his nature – or a comma, or else nothing. A comma or nothing would have been neutral and objective, a period was making a point, stern and unpermissive. His use of “please” pointed in the same direction. “Please” was formal, more formal than the uncle–nephew relationship warranted, so my understanding was that he didn’t care for the manuscript. At the same time, it was a marker of politeness, which might indicate that he wasn’t fuming at all, I thought, otherwise wouldn’t he just have dispensed with courtesy altogether? The fact that he hadn’t put anything before his name, either “Best regards” or “Yours” or something equally friendly, indicated the same thing as the opening, that this was a formal, matter-of-fact kind of inquiry on the computer screen in front of me. I knew he’d never cared for me, that he saw me as an attention-seeker, someone who wanted to be different for the sake of being different, who believed himself to be more than he was, and moreover without any sense of responsibility or order, and I took the content of his brief e-mail to be more indicative of that than of what he thought about the novel. Wanting the addresses of my contacts at the publisher was a good thing too, it seemed to say he would be putting any objections to them rather than to me personally. More than anything else, I was afraid of any direct contact with him. If he was going to be writing to the publisher, it would hardly be to rip into them.
I typed the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of the director of publishing Geir Berdahl and commissioning editor Geir Gulliksen, and sent them off to him. I went back into the study. The volume of work I had to get through was enormous and I had no idea how I was going to manage it all. In April I had sent twelve hundred pages off to the publisher, the idea all along having been for a single novel, to be published in the autumn, but then it had grown, it was too long, and the way I was thinking now was it was going to be another three hundred pages or longer still, which begged the question of how actually to publish the book. I’d discussed the matter with Geir Gulliksen over the phone. Was publishing a novel that ran to fifteen hundred pages at all feasible? Everything was feasible, he said. It could also be put out in two volumes, either at the same time or with a few months in between. Although this was more rational and would moreover have the advantage of giving me a double payout of two basic fees, a matter that was far from insignificant in view of our, to put it mildly, frail finances of the past few years, I nevertheless still preferred the book to come out as a single volume. It would be a statement, something there would be no getting away from, Norway’s longest novel. Geir said he would run it past some other people at the publishing house and call me back. He did so a few hours later. He said that the proposal he wanted me to listen to, as suggested by Geir Berdahl, was probably unrealistic, and that I might not like it at all, but it was definitely worth considering.
“Let’s hear it, then!” I said.
“We put it out as a series of twelve. A book a month for a year. We could set up some kind of deal so people can subscribe and get the whole lot. What do you reckon?”
“It’s a fantastic idea!” I said. “Absolutely brilliant!”
“Yeah, I liked it too. It’d be a bit of a challenge, though. We’d need to find the funding somewhere. I’ll go ahead and look into it, then we’ll see.”
“It’ll be like Dickens or Dostoevsky,” I said. “A serial novel! I really like the serial aspect of it. Like when The Wedding Present released a single once a month for a year, then put them all together to make an album when the year was up. It’s a gimmick, but why not?”
“It’s not an ordinary novel. It’s fitting we do something special with it. Think of how it’ll affect the way it’s received. How would they review it? Each book as it comes out? Or the whole work as one at the end of the year?”
“It’s fucking genius, Geir! Say hello to Berdahl and thank him for me.”
“I think it’s good too, and I’ll do what I can to make it work. It’ll take time. But let’s say for now I go ahead and look into it, then I’ll give you a call in a couple of weeks, OK?”
As soon as we hung up I went straight into the study and set about dividing the novel into twelve. If it was going to come to fifteen hundred pages in all, then each book would have to be roughly a hundred and twenty-five pages. I searched for places where one book could end and another begin. It was the first time during the year I’d been working on the novel that I’d felt anything remotely like joy and enthusiasm. I imagined the paperback with just the title printed on it, as they used to do in the nineteenth century. Subscription coupons in the newspapers and magazines that could be cut out and sent in to the publishers, the way people did in my childhood.
Nearly three weeks went by before Geir phoned back. When he did it was to tell me they couldn’t make it work with twelve separate publications, there were too many practical problems and the figures wouldn’t add up. He suggested six instead. Three in the autumn, three the following spring. I hesitated, not wanting to let go of the idea of twelve and once a month, almost pleading with him to think again, he could see what I was saying, he said, but it had turned out to be impractical, we ran the risk of ruining the publishing house, as far as I could understand him. Six had been difficult too, but eventually he had managed to get them all covered by the State Purchasing Program, thereby minimizing the financial risk.
“That’s unbelievable,” I said. “How did you manage that? Isn’t there a strict rule they only purchase one work of fiction a year per author?”
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 7