I first read Pan when I was fifteen years old, in the house that lay three kilometers from those rapids, and the forceful feelings it described found resonance in my own. Maybe that was why my love life proceeded so miserably in the years that followed, my understanding of girls, falling in love, and having relationships being too rooted in the late nineteenth century. But the novel that made the deepest impression on me in those years was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Reading it was a feverish experience. I had no idea why, and still don’t. I never identified myself with the Count, he who drained the blood of others, but with his victims, who after having been bitten by him lost not only their blood but also their independence. Knowing me, I most likely read Dracula as a novel about submission and liberation from submission. Not that I ever thought that explicitly, I never thought at all when I was reading, but it was what I felt. The sheer sense of triumph and joy that gathered in my chest when finally they drove the stake through the vampire’s heart would seem to indicate that was the case. And rather than seeing the writer as a vampire sucking the blood of those around him, which is a tantalizing trope for the business of writing about other people, at least as this is perceived by the public, I saw the writer as someone in danger of losing his independence, a person held captive and paralyzed by the power of another, who fawningly acts like him, pale, bloodless, and ghostlike. Perhaps because I have always had such a weak ego, always felt myself inferior to all others, in every situation. Not only the brilliant individuals I have met, who with their charisma, intelligence, and talent have outshone all others, but also taxi drivers, waiters, train conductors, in fact every kind of person one can possibly meet out there. I am inferior to the man who washes down the stairs and the corridors in the building in which we live, he possesses an authority greater than mine in that situation, so if he says something about the stroller, for instance, and the bikes left outside our door, in a voice that carries even the slightest hint of annoyance, I tremble. I am inferior to the female assistant in the shoe store when I go in to buy shoes, she has me in her hands, so to speak, full of an authority to which I yield. But the worst for me are waiters, since their role is so obviously to serve and be there to please, it is their job to submit to the wishes of their customers, and the fact that I feel inferior to them, at their mercy even, the fact that they can see that I’m not a good diner, for instance, and don’t quite know how to taste a wine, or what it’s supposed to taste like, matters in which they are expert, is a humiliation every time. And it goes on. All the journalists I meet, even those twenty years younger than me, are my betters, and I always do what I can not to bore them, I often say things I don’t even mean simply in order to present them with something. When I moved to Stockholm at the age of thirty-three, outwardly a man, inwardly still a sixteen-year-old, and met Geir Angell there, who I hadn’t seen since the spring we went out drinking together a few times in Bergen twelve years before, it was one of the first things he said to me. You’ve got the most warped self-image of anyone I’ve ever met, he told me. You’ve got absolutely no insight into yourself. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that it’s the others who are boring? That it’s the others who are unoriginal and haven’t a thought, that they’re the ones who are imitative and full of platitudes? No, I said, because it’s not like that at all. Listen, he went on. I saw you when you were twenty. You were totally different from anyone else I knew at that time. You were out on your own. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest when I saw you were getting a novel published. Who else back then did anything like that? No one. There was an intentness about you that … well, no one else had. Those sad eyes of yours. If only you could have seen yourself! Ha ha ha! And now you’ve written an amazing novel. You’ll write another, and another one after that. You’ve got to stop measuring yourself against people who are only bureaucrats in their own lives and in those of others. And you’ve definitely got to stop thinking they’re the ones who are interesting while you’re the nonentity. They’re the nonentities, and it’s glaringly obvious to anyone.
I continued to deny it but felt flattered nonetheless, who wouldn’t?
I resisted. What he said felt like a poison spreading through my veins.
Not only did he listen to what I told him about my life, he also found it interesting and wanted to talk about it on our endless wanderings around Stockholm. How everything had centered around my father when I was growing up, my attempts to please him, the terror that was always there, the circumstances of his death. My relationship with my brother, which had been complicated when he got together with a girl I was in love with, and which was close and distant at the same time. The confidence I shared with my mother, her analytic approach to reality. My various romantic realtionships, though these were not numerous. The way I was in awe of women, to such an extent that I was unable to approach them. How twice I had slashed my face in fits of despair. My vanity. My fear of coming across as feminine. My joy at being drunk, my infidelities, my constant feelings of inferiority in every respect. My triumphs, which could not outweigh my failures, neither in number nor in their sheer intensity. He took all of this and composed a picture of my psychological and social character he then analyzed and discussed. He construed me as a kind of baroque entity, abnormal and warped, whose inner being was utterly out of sync with its outward expression – completely the opposite of how I saw myself, which was ordinary to the point of self-erasure, this very ordinariness being my problem as a writer. I enjoyed football, both playing and watching; I enjoyed lightweight American films and could still read comics now and again; I watched the weather forecast on TV, or the news, because of the gorgeous women who sometimes appeared on the screen, and could develop small crushes on them; I enjoyed much the same music as when I was twelve, and if I liked a book or a painting I would never know why and would have to resort to words and thoughts I had picked up from others and which thereby were wholly lacking in authenticity. I had nothing special to say about anything, because I was a nobody, with nothing distinctive about me. Yet by simply talking about myself to someone who was not only genuinely interested but also analyzed everything, identifying or establishing connections between all the various parts, that ordinariness was turned into something extraordinary and unique, even to my own mind. It was as if my self had been kept frozen and had now begun to thaw. It creaked as it stirred, so long had it lain stiff and immovable. I soon got the feeling my inner being was inexhaustible. It was a good feeling. The idea that things I said could be interesting was a new experience. I’d always found myself dull. What was interesting was connected with the feeling of inexhaustibility, because there were no limits to the inexhaustible, and limits were what had kept everything out of reach and frozen. I almost never confided in anyone, thinking nothing I had to say could be of interest to anyone, and from that perspective, which was the social perspective, the expectations of the you as constructed by the I, confidence was a nonstarter for me, and this was basically how I was with everything. I was mute in the social world, and since the social world exists nowhere else but in each individual, I was also mute toward myself, in my inner being. Only once before had I felt such inexhaustibility, and the situation had been almost the same: another person had seemed to be genuinely interested in what I saw and in what I had to say about myself. That person was Arve, he was ten years older than me and had acquired such insight into the world it meant he could laugh at everything. He was on a completely different level to anyone I had met until that point. Arve was supreme, in a way, independent in the true sense of the word. He was also demonic, or at least played the demon with me, forever tantalizing. What did he tantalize me with? Freedom. What was freedom? To be free was to transgress. To identify everything as being subject to constraints, stuck, ossified, and to remove oneself from that. Not necessarily the social world as a set of rules for behavior, which then Bohemian-like could be ignored, but the mind-set those rules entailed. What Roland Barthes referred to as doxa. But Arve hitched up with wife Linda, who I ha
d very quickly fallen in love with, and I closed the door on everything that had happened, including what I had learned from him in his capacity as freedom’s demon. None of it mattered anymore. I returned to my own life, that’s how it felt, as if for some days I had been living another life entirely, only then to find it wasn’t for me, it simply wasn’t mine. I had no business encroaching on the wild. I was pleasant, thoughtful, and responsible, apart from the times I was drunk, when a strong urge always rose in me to let people down. Eventually I did, and when that came to light, a year later, I ran away to an island and lived there completely on my own for several months, during which I felt I needed to make a decision and stick to it for the rest of my life. I needed to become a good person. It was in the winter and spring of 2001. In the spring of 2002 I left everything behind and uprooted to Stockholm. There I met Geir and eventually Linda. While meeting Geir gave me a viewpoint on myself and a space in which it could be articulated, in other words remoteness, which was invaluable, meeting Linda gave me the opposite, in that encounter all remoteness was dissolved, I became closer to her than I had ever been to any other person in my life, and in that closeness there was no use for words, no use for analysis, no use for thoughts, because when all is said and done, which is another way of saying in life, when it presents itself in all its intensity, when you’re there, at the center of it all, with your entire being, the only thing that matters is feeling. Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love. That the two things came into my life simultaneously meant for a while everything was turned upside down, all of a sudden, almost from one day to the next, I found myself plunged into something completely new. Everything was wide open, nothing was impossible anymore. And in the sky, in that fantastic summer of 2002, the sun shone, sinking red into the Mälardalen every night, as if shrouded by a veil of blood, its last rays glittering gold on all the city’s towers and spires, and I was immortal. Seven years later, toward the end of the not-quite-sofantastic summer of 2009, here I was with Geir again, in the bathroom of our apartment in Malmö, watching the four kids splashing about in the bath as the sky outside, which I couldn’t see but whose light I could sense through the rectangular windows, gradually darkened.
“Looks like we’ve got the hang of it,” he said.
I turned my head to look at him. He was smiling.
“How do you mean?” I said.
“Kids.”
“What are you talking about, Daddy?” said Vanja.
“We’re talking about being fedre,” I said.
“What’s that?” she replied.
“It’s what Geir and I are,” I said, leaning forward and turning off the tap. “Fathers.”
I wondered if his pleasure came from seeing Njaal with other children, a relatively rare occurrence with Njaal being an only child, and the fact that he seemed to be handling it so well, or whether it was down to Geir himself having organized the trip, since normally it was Christina who took care of everything to do with Njaal, while Geir mostly sat in his study writing. He had never immersed himself in the daily routines I dealt with, the clothes and the laundry, food and cooking, children’s play and bedtimes, it was his choice and he had always been quite clear on the matter, that he didn’t want anything to do with any of that, and yet I often thought he must feel he was missing out on something occasionally, not the practical things but what came with them in terms of involvement. I didn’t think that was the case, but the sudden pleasure I saw in him as they sat there playing in the bath perhaps suggested it. I wasn’t going to ask him, it was one of those things I was reluctant to bring up, sensing it would be touching on something I didn’t want to touch on. It would be an infringement.
What was so dangerous about closeness?
Getting close to someone meant seeing things the other person didn’t, whether it was because they didn’t want to, or because they couldn’t. Geir had an explanation for everything, but that didn’t mean that everything about him was explained. He controlled every situation in which he was involved, with the exception of those that included children; the intimacy they afforded, so unaccountable in nature, was something he was unfamiliar with, and this unfamiliarity was plain to see. I had always thought he wanted it that way, but when I saw the smile on his face as he watched Njaal with the others, the sudden sense of pleasure that came over him, it struck me that perhaps he felt the lack of complete familiarity that Christina for instance enjoyed to be something lacking in his life.
What would he say if I told him this?
That it wasn’t true?
That it was true, but it was the price he paid for being able to do what he wanted?
That it was his problem, not Njaal’s, and therefore unimportant?
That it was no price at all?
* * *
After writing this yesterday morning, I took Heidi and John to the nursery, where I was putting in a shift. The staff told me I could get off early to go to Vanja’s last-day-of-school event if I wanted, so I took Heidi and John with me and went to the church a few blocks away where it was taking place. Compared to the last-day assemblies of my own school days, which had taken place in a chapel with hymns and a priest in full garb in an atmosphere that was starched and solemn, the last thing we had to endure before the summer, which seemed to us to be ready and waiting outside, Vanja’s last day was like something from a different world. A choir of nine- or ten-year-olds sang pop songs by the likes of Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey; two kids of the same age played piano; some others, slightly older, perhaps twelve or thirteen, performed a rap. After each performance the church erupted into exuberant applause. It was like an audition for American Idol. The priest spoke about how important it was to be joyful, he told them fame and fortune didn’t matter and that everyone was equal. There was no mention at all of God, Jesus, or the Bible. After the sermon, which lasted all of five minutes, the pupils who had stood out most during the year were called forward. They received diplomas. Some for their fantastic grades, some for their fantastic personal qualities, which, judging by what was said, consisted of taking responsibility for others and caring. The whole hour-long event concluded with the graduates from the ninth grade being called forward in turn to receive a flower. As I walked back with Heidi and John holding my hands, we came up behind a group of kids, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. All were crew-cut, dressed in jacket-and-trouser combinations, boisterously backslapping, laughing, and shouting exaggeratedly, as many had done in the church. They had clasped hands when greeting each other, applauded and whooped when one of their own, or someone they respected, took the stage to perform. This macho-like behavior, which seemed so out of place in their ungrown bodies, several sizes too big as it were, and which for that reason came across as rather comical, was nevertheless genuine in that this was their ideal, and nothing else. These boys wanted to be hard, strong, and tough, and they were in the majority. The others, pale and spindly youngsters with glasses and smidgeons of gel in their hair, hadn’t a chance against the swagger of the immigrant-community kids. After we got back to the nursery and I was busy filling the dishwasher and wiping the kitchen counter, the nursery head asked me how the event had gone. I said it was like being in the United States. That I’d never seen anything as Americanized before. The best students singing and performing for the others, diplomas awarded to those who had stood out. And the absurd sermon given by the priest, who said everyone was equal, while everything that was going on around him said the opposite, with some students singled out as being more valuable than others and put on display in all their glory. Yes, said the director. When I was a kid, the last day of school was a solemn occasion. We sang the national anthem. But that was banned. They said it was racist to sing the national anthem. Can you imagine?
I could indeed. Equality was the supreme principle, and one of the conseq
uences was that expressions of the singularly Swedish were seen as exclusive and discriminatory, for which reason they were shunned. When it came to religion, one had to tread carefully, church had long since been separated from state, and now things had got to the stage where priests no longer mentioned God or Jesus or the Bible when addressing schoolchildren, since this could cause offense to the many who came from Muslim homes. It was this same ideology, hostile to all difference, that could not accept categories of male and female, he and she. Since han and hun are denotative of gender, it was suggested a new pronoun, hen, be used to cover both. The ideal human being was a gender-neutral hen whose foremost task in life was to avoid oppressing any religion or culture by preferring their own. Such total self-obliteration, aggressive in its insistence on leveling out, though in its own view tolerant, was a phenomenon of the cultural middle class, that segment of the population which controlled the media, the schools, and other major institutions of society, and it existed, as far as I could tell, only in northern Europe. But what did this ideology of equality actually entail? A recent study said that differences between pupils in Swedish schools had never been greater than they are now. The gap between the ablest children, for whom the future is bright, and the least able, whose futures lie outside the zones of influence and wealth, is widening year by year. The trend in the study is clear indeed: the strongest pupils are those from Swedish backgrounds, the weakest are from immigrant backgrounds. While we might be concerned not to offend people from other nations and other cultures, and go so far as to eliminate everything Swedish, this happens only in the symbolic world, the world of flags and anthems, whereas in the real world everyone who does not belong to the Swedish middle class, which is hostile to all difference, is kept down and excluded: most immigrants in Malmö, welcome as they are, live in ghetto-like public housing projects outside the center, in miserable apartments, areas where unemployment is massive and prospects are dim. It is also the case that the middle class, hostile to all difference, prefers not to send its children to schools attended by children from immigrant communities, thereby further reinforcing the segregation, with a knock-on effect on the next generation. Many immigrant children have parents with no education, and what the Swedish school system formerly considered to be a priority, lessening differences by providing equal opportunties to able and less able students alike, has now been completely invalidated as a guiding principle, the result being that the haves receive more, the have-nots less. Equality in Sweden is confined to the middle class, they alone are becoming more equal; elsewhere the only equality is in the language, managed by the same middle class. In Sweden something happening in language is much worse than something happening in reality. An instance of one moral code applying in language and another in reality used to be called a double standard. This was what was going on at Vanja’s last-day-of-school event; the ideal of everyone being equal, and fame and wealth being unimportant, applied in the language of the priest, whereas the reality surrounding that ideology said the opposite: the most important thing is to be rich and famous. Every child there harbored that dream, it was in the air. And the more I see of it, this self-blind and self-satisfied ideology of equality, believing as it does that the conclusion it has reached is universal and true and must therefore govern us all – although in fact it is valid only to a small class of the privileged few, as if they comprised some little island of decency in an ocean of commercialism and social inequality – the more the significance of my life’s struggle diminishes, for what difference does it then make if I spend more or less time with my children, if I change their diapers or don’t change their diapers, if I do the dishes or don’t do the dishes, if I spend time on my work or don’t spend time on my work? Oh, how then, for crying out loud, can we make the lives we live an expression of life, rather than the expression of an ideology? All the thou-shalt-nots by which our small middle-class lives were constrained, all the things we weren’t supposed to say or do, or else were obliged to say or do, how I longed not to give a damn and do as I pleased.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 28