by Dag Solstad
They had rakfisk as a starter and the main course was grouse. Beer and a chaser of aquavit were served with the rakfisk; a Spanish red wine, a good Rioja, with the grouse. Before the starter was served, Nina their hostess complained of an irresolvable problem which they had encountered while drawing up the menu. Rakfisk as a starter, and grouse afterwards, they go together, not least if one considers that both the rakfisk and the grouse come from the same geographical area, Valdres. But as for the beverages, beer and a chaser of aquavit first, followed by red wine – Nina didn’t think that was an ideal combination, but what else could they have done? Thought of a different starter before the grouse? No, she didn’t want to do that, she said, when one has rakfisk in one’s larder from Valdres, and grouse from the same area, both of them obtained in a personal way, considering that Bernt had shot the grouse, right there in Valdres, and the rakfisk was procured by one of their close acquaintances in Valdres, so it had to be done like this, ‘And so you will just have to put up with drinking beer and a chaser with the rakfisk now, and going over to red wine later,’ said Nina decidedly.
They ate rakfisk. They skolled with beer and aquavit. Professor Andersen was at a Christmas dinner party at his good friends’ Nina and Bernt Halvorsen. Bernt he had known ever since his youth, and they had grown up together in a town somewhere near the Oslo Fjord. They had come to Oslo to study at the same time, Bernt medicine and he the arts and humanities, and they had remained close throughout their student days, despite belonging to different faculties. After a while Bernt found his Nina, who also studied medicine, and Professor Andersen had got to know her too. He had found a wife who also studied the arts and humanities, and from the end of their student days the two newly married couples had spent much time together. They had continued to see each other often, with intervals when one or other of the couples had been living outside Oslo – Nina and Bernt because they worked at a hospital out of town, he because he was abroad, either on a research grant or as a Norwegian visiting professor in Strasbourg, right up until he got divorced ten years ago, and then he had continued to see Nina and Bernt on his own. Both he and Bernt had been successful in life, he had secured a post at the university early on, had done a PhD and become a professor while still relatively young, at the same time as Bernt had made a career for himself in the hospital sector, where as a young man he had become a consultant, a position he held today at Ullevål Hospital.
The other guests were Nina and Bernt’s friends, but for that reason they had also become close acquaintances of Professor Andersen. Per Ekeberg he remembered well, as a psychology student from the early Sixties, and also Trine Napstad he remembered from the dozy reading rooms at Blindern, where she, like him, had studied the arts and humanities. Small and animated, she had talked non-stop in a far-too-loud, piercing voice the moment she escaped the silence of the reading room. That had grated on his nerves somewhat, he remembered, even though he had thought she was attractive enough. When he had met her again, at Nina and Bernt’s, as Per Ekeberg’s new partner, and thus, in reality, his second wife, he on occasion found himself wondering about Per Ekeberg’s first wife, since Per had settled down, found solace, with this woman on his journey through life, which also for him, Per Ekeberg, has an unavoidable conclusion, as we all know, and which, at least for brief periods of time, cannot fail to cause us concern. Per Ekeberg was a senior psychologist. It was a title he took with him when he moved from the public sector into private enterprise to be a director in the Norwegian branch of an international advertising agency. He appeared to be just as content in the private sector as he had been in the public one, and in addition he earned a lot more money, and it’s possible he also set greater store by the creative side of his new profession, which, among other things, was such that he didn’t need to call himself Director, but could continue to present himself as senior psychologist, which undoubtedly seemed more intriguing when the title was used in an advertising context.
If he were to choose, then he had greater respect for Jan Brynhildsen and Judith Berg than Per Ekeberg and Trine Napstad. Jan Brynhildsen had, as a newly divorced 45-year-old (after being married to a female colleague who at that time was far more successful than he was), fallen head over heels in love with an air hostess. A rather weary-looking beauty in her forties, who was a single mother with a teenage daughter from a short-lived affair with an Italian business magnate. Jan Brynhildsen was at the time a typical second-rate actor and his falling in love with a faded air hostess undeniably had a strong element of comedy to it, of the more malicious kind that Professor Andersen, for his part, couldn’t claim to be entirely innocent of being partial to. But in this amorous project Professor Andersen had been Jan Brynhildsen’s secret admirer. He had looked up to him, and inwardly urged him on, Jan Brynhildsen, the walk-on actor at the National Theatre, to follow the convictions of his heart. ‘The person who is unable to be fascinated by his youthful dream of the Air Hostess has lost the ability to love,’ he inwardly urged, ‘even if she, Judith Berg, doesn’t resemble the dream of the Air Hostess, but is a tired, middle-aged woman with a bad back and swollen feet and bitter wrinkles round her painted mouth, she nevertheless represents the Air Hostess, for whom we just have to fall, Jan Brynhildsen and I,’ thought Professor Andersen, then as now. ‘Jan Brynhildsen is ingenuous in his love, and for that I admire him, and he will surely be rewarded,’ Professor Andersen had thought. And he had been rewarded. On stage. On the main stage at the National Theatre. That was where he now had his success. First in small roles, which all of a sudden were played with a comic talent that aroused interest among theatregoers. Very minor roles from the pens of great playwrights often have great comic potential which is seldom exploited, either because minor roles are played by minor actors or, if they are given to good actors, they can easily overshadow major roles and more important scenic events, and thus damage the dramatic unity of the piece. But Jan Brynhildsen succeeded, and that was because he didn’t play the comic parts like a great actor, but like a minor one. He stood there in his minor role, completely devoid of dreams and ambitions. He didn’t try to show the comic nature inherent in the character by stealing the scene. He stood there on the fringe, playing the minor role as a minor actor, but with luminous, raw, indeed hoarse, comedy, which many in the audience experienced as a magic moment of silence and laughter. Soon he was getting larger comic roles, and now he was one of the theatre’s leading comic talents, who came to mind for a main part every time the theatre was to stage Molière, Holberg or a light comedy by Shakespeare. But although he gave a good performance in these classic comic roles – not least by continuing to preserve the minor actor in the garb of the leading role – it was the sweet (in the original meaning of the word) element of the character that was really touching, and one ought to be touched when seeing a comedy performed, but it was nevertheless Professor Andersen’s opinion that it was in the minor parts that Jan Brynhildsen had carried out remarkable feats, and there were many people who were of the same opinion, even if this wasn’t expressed publicly or privately by Professor Andersen, because he didn’t want to hurt Jan Brynhildsen, even though Jan Brynhildsen himself wouldn’t have heard what he said.
They ate rakfisk. Drank beer with a chaser. Skolled and laughed, and chatted cheerfully. They all belonged to the same generation, and they were linked to each other by strong ties, even Professor Andersen, who, tonight in particular, struggled with a disturbing feeling that he had now parted from them for good. He still felt bowled over at being unable to confide in his friend Bernt, their host, when he had come to this dinner party an hour and a quarter early for the sole purpose of doing so. He now sensed that he was not just about to be, but already was tangled up in something which had consequences he couldn’t imagine, and which were such that they threatened for one thing to leave him friendless, since it was now impossible for him to deny that the strong urge he had felt to confide in a friend, frankly, baring his soul, in reality couldn’t be fulfilled when standing
face to face with Bernt. This distracted Professor Andersen somewhat, and in this distracted frame of mind it would have been easy for him not to take part in this dinner group and to regard it from the position of an outsider, as if it were a remote event which didn’t concern him, with gestures and rituals performed by strangers who didn’t concern him, but that wasn’t the outcome. Whether he wanted to or not, he belonged in the company of these successful intellectuals in their fifties in the capital of Norway towards the end of the twentieth century. They were linked to each other by such strong ties that, for instance, Professor Andersen, who wasn’t a close friend of either Per Ekeberg or Trine Napstad, knew both of them from the university at Blindern in the Sixties, and that at a time when Per Ekeberg and Trine Napstad hadn’t the foggiest notion of each other’s existence, though she, Trine Napstad, easily remembered Per Ekeberg’s first wife, who had been a childhood friend of Nina Halvorsen, at the time when her name was Nina Hellberg, which was still her name when Trine Napstad came to know her. Thus one could look back to the early Sixties, and the random, but strong and active, ties created at the university, where all of them had studied (apart from Judith Berg, who was at the time unattainable, an Air Hostess), and each in some way had become a radical student. None of them, apart from Jan Brynhildsen, had ever ended up on the far left, the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists, the Maoists, in the legendary – or notorious, if you prefer – Marxist-Leninist Workers Front known as AKP (M-L); they were, in fact, slightly too old for the likes of that, and too set in their ways when it came to the fore, but they had been anti-NATO and voted against the Common Market, relatively early in the Sixties, and early in the Seventies, and Per Ekeberg had demonstrated against apartheid at Madserud during a tennis tournament between Norway and South Africa, and had been carted off by the police, and Nina and Bernt had been anti-nuclear demonstrators and worn Ban the Bomb buttons on their duffle coats. The nuclear badge, as Andersen, still an undergraduate, had called it, alluding to the swimming badge so popular in their schooldays. ‘I see you’ve earned your nuclear badge,’ he would say, but neither Nina nor Bernt had laughed, for some things were too serious to make jokes about, and thus he had been left standing there with his silly joke, feeling silly himself as well when the others didn’t laugh, for he was radical, too, in his way. However, as an undergraduate, Andersen’s radicalism was mainly expressed through his interest in and his support of people who attacked either in speech or in writing the empirical school of thought, which was then the prevailing approach within philosophy and the social sciences, not to mention his preoccupation with all kinds of avant-garde trends in art and literature.
While Bernt Halvorsen was deeply preoccupied with the armaments race and the Cold War and was keen to take action, as an undergraduate Pål Andersen sat at home in his bedsit reading strange poems, which he had great difficulty interpreting. Was this his form of political radicalism, which linked him to the same life nerve that surged through Bernt Halvorsen with such unbending seriousness? Indeed, his preoccupation with avant-garde French and Polish films, modern literature and abstract paintings was an attempt, a desperate one at times, to enter the same period to which Bernt Halvorsen already belonged, and which he could defend from the inside with such accuracy. He was zealous in his efforts to understand avant-garde art, that form of art which has really taken hold of our own day and age. He often felt that he had failed to understand it, indeed, more often than he would admit, it left him in a state of incomprehension, confusion, indifference, even after he had used all his astuteness to understand only a snippet of it. It could make him feel desperate. He felt a failure because he didn’t understand the art of his own period, and it can’t be denied that in such situations he often pretended to understand more than he actually understood, and even feigned an admiration for works of art which, in actual fact, left him unmoved. But on the other hand, what pleasure he could experience if, after a long struggle with, for instance, a modernist poem, he suddenly understood it! He had, for that matter, felt the greatest joy when he understood intuitively, directly. Why? Because then his own searching and restless and frequently maladjusted soul melded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, with the greatest minds of his time. He had felt enlightened, and at the very highest level. It gave him a deep, tranquil satisfaction, as he had been moved by reality, and he hoped intensely that someone would pay a visit to his bedsit right then, so he could have read this poem aloud to them. That this reality had dissolved all conventional and normal reality, and depicted a quite different and often uncompromising reality, where ordinary things had ended up in unaccustomed and frightening positions, often accompanied by black humour, on this passage through a landscape of deformity and impossibility, of anxiety and pent-up screams, cynical and relentless, disparaging and dissolved, unnerved and alcoholised, fatally wounded by the belief in total happiness, none of that diminished Pål Andersen’s pleasure at being able to understand the most outstanding achievements of his own day and age, but that the young man who took all this to his breast could, simultaneously, identify with serious and morally incensed political radicalism may well strike one as rather mysterious. But that is how it was. Pål Andersen’s rare moments of happiness when he thought he understood the chaotic and iconoclastic form of an avant-garde work of art strengthened, rather than weakened, his confidence in his own impossible life, as a young man with the future ahead of him. He didn’t seek comfort, but relentlessness. He didn’t seek the structure he was brought up to see and understand, but the disintegration of that structure. He didn’t turn to art in order to receive, but to see. He couldn’t imagine using the word ‘rewarding’ about a work of art – for instance, that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc. etc. – but thought solely that it enlightened him, made him see, cynically and without false expectations, so that he felt he was alive, something that young men often struggle to feel clearly, and which very easily makes them become maladjusted. Actually, it is not all that difficult to see that as a young man Andersen must have been a snob. If he were to become a part of his own day and age, with all his maladjustments, then it would have to be through reaching the highest level of enlightenment, through an understanding of this day and age’s most outstanding achievements within the arts. But Professor Andersen would probably in any case have asked us to bear with him, especially when we now see his desperate attempts to relate to the avant-garde movement of his period, which for him was identical to modernity; being a young man of his own day and age, as he painstakingly tried to understand a poem by, for instance, Pound or Elouard, by Celan or Prévert, and then managed it, he succeeded, perhaps even intuitively; can’t we visualise the leap in his own self-esteem when it takes place, and let us grant him that, and thereby the pride which rushes through this callow young man, who, in his deeply tranquil satisfaction, now has only one wish beyond the one which has already come his way, that someone would come and visit him, so that he might have someone to share this satisfaction with, therefore he wishes that someone would come, so that he can read this poem aloud for them here in his simple bedsit. Two youths, one of whom reads poetry to the other, two young students, one of whom reads aloud to the other from the works of their common youthful contemporaries with the most outstanding awareness of life as it is, and thereby also of life in the future. Pål Andersen wasn’t young in the sense that he felt life-giving sap threatening to burst his veins. He didn’t feel particularly strong, with unparalleled vigour, which was straining to get out, the way young people are often portrayed by older people, as a measure of youth, and which consequently has to be demonstrated through youthful conduct. He was a sallow youth, who smoked forty cigarettes a day, and drank five or six pints of beer in smoky, muggy bars three to four evenings a week, and who woke up with a hangover at least twice a week, so that it was a painful effort to drag himself up to the university at Blindern and his daily toil in reading rooms and in lecture theatres. He spent his life in stuf
fy surroundings, with flagging, aching limbs and endless brooding; nonetheless, it was beyond doubt that his young mind could respond, and that due to this responsiveness a promising future lay ahead of him. Now and then he was visited by his total opposite, the medical student Bernt Halvorsen, and then he read him poems, by Georg Johannesen for instance. Or by Stein Mehren, two Norwegian poets who were only a few years older than himself, and whom he admired enormously. Sitting on his unmade bed, with bedclothes that were never aired (but now and then actually washed), he read poems for Bernt.
Later, Georg Johannesen and Stein Mehren came to represent two opposite poles of Norwegian poetry, the former cultivated by high-brow left-wingers, the latter considered the greatest Norwegian poet since Wergeland by the conservatively minded; but in the early Sixties, when Andersen was reading them as an undergraduate and they were new, their poems belonged to the same frame of reference, at least for a young man who desperately leaned towards the avant-garde in order to feel he truly existed. When Pål Andersen read the following lines by Georg Johannesen aloud to Bernt Halvorsen: ‘I am glad / I cannot see / my death in a mirror – When my picture falls down from the wall / I’ll resemble the wallpaper / and when an heir counts my sheets / they will be white and clean / like the day I bought them – Everything has to be written anew / like before I wrote my signature,’ and later the following lines by Stein Mehren: ‘But the stranger who stands up on the hillside, listening / to the drone of a city by night. He can do nothing / He, too, is an observer. Through the night air / it looks as though the towns on the coast have been accidentally / washed ashore. And now lie there twisting con- / voluted like jellyfish of light – Far away … Far above hover the new gods / in the invisible spokes of the celestial wheel / From afar the towns can be seen as large / gently vibrating circles which interminably / spread their SOS,’ then he was perfectly aware that these two poets differed greatly in their language and outlook, something he, in fact, also expressed by reading them in highly different ways to his friend Bernt Halvorsen: Georg Johannesen in a staccato, hoarse voice; Stein Mehren in a meandering, almost ecstatic voice (the way he had heard Stein Mehren himself read his own poems on the radio). But they had one thing in common, they were both his poets, and could invigorate his own life force, and he now read them eagerly for Bernt, purely as a matter of course, in order to hear his opinion.