This is so because writing and publishing a book is to lay some part of oneself bare, in such a way as to be utterly defenseless, and allow oneself to be judged by someone with nothing at risk. An editor who also works as a critic, which is to say interpreting and passing judgments on quality – and yes, they exist – serves literature poorly, since interpretation and judgment wrap up a work as if for good, whereas what they should be doing is keeping it open as long as possible. For literature is always something that is becoming, in the making, whereas the forms in which it appears are something that is, they exist already. And since the art is to force oneself beyond what is and into what is becoming – which is alive and essentially unknown to us until we get there – then only those who don’t know how to write can write, only those who can’t write a novel can write a novel. From this it follows that the role of the editor can’t be about knowing either, for in these processes knowledge is sabotage.
Now we are far from the classic editor, the fifty-six-year-old man in tweed, bent over the manuscript, pencil in hand, and are approaching my own editor, whose pencil never appears before a date has been set for publication and the services of a proofreader engaged to go through the final manuscript. What his work until then involves I can’t say with any certainty, other than that we talk quite a lot. These discusssions take place during all stages of the writing, from before a single word has been put to paper and only a vague idea exists as to what area of reality the novel is to explore, until the book has been published and the various ways in which it has been received call for endless and occasionally crisis-bound conferences with a person who knows how much has been invested in it and has invested so much in it himself.
Although this has been going on for seventeen years, during which time we have published a total of eight novels and sat for countless hours talking on the phone or in conference rooms and offices, and have gone through thousands of manuscript pages, I am still unable to say “this is what he does,” “this is how he works,” “this is how he thinks.” Of course, this has to do with me never being able to really see others, the fact that I’m so involved in myself that I never quite manage to get beyond that, but that’s not the only reason. It has to do with his way of working too, which is not about remoteness, the famous view from without, but about nearness, the view from within, which is more difficult to see and define. What we stand above is easy to see, what we stand below is easy to see, and what we stand beside is easy to see, but what we stand in the middle of is not.
When I was writing my autobiographical novel My Struggle there were three people in particular to whom I found it difficult to give shape, difficult to give voice. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I could neither hear nor see them. I knew who they were to me, but it was almost impossible to give that awareness form. One of these people was my mother, one was my wife, one was my editor. What could these three very different people have in common that meant they were stuck in the shadows of my writer’s mind? In a way, the people they were went without saying, they didn’t need me to speak for them, they spoke for themselves. For an author, this is interesting: writing is about giving form to something, constructing something, familiar or unfamiliar, by means of language. Usually, this is easier the more unfamiliar the object: a cow wandering through a poor street in India is easy to depict, whereas a man watching TV in his apartment is not. Nearly all literature is about conflicts, which have their root in differences, the unlike breaking out of the like and only then allowing itself to be captured. Sameness residing in sameness, which is to say harmony, is almost impossible to make into anything. And this is where my mother, my wife, and my editor come in, for what roles do they play in my life? They give, demanding nothing, or very little, in return. To see such a person, who gives without making demands, is hard indeed. Demands have outline, but the absence of demands? Such absence is nothing, it is without shape, yet at the same time significant, and quite fundamental in everything that is human.
We see and talk about everything that works loose and tears itself away, never about what comes to us. This is true in the greater perspective and true in the smaller perspective. My father took something from me, I competed with my brother, this is easy for me to see and write about, but my mother gave me something, and this is difficult for me to see and write about. What did she give me? I’m not sure exactly. My editor, what does he give me? Suggestions as to books I should read? Yes, but many other people do that as well. An understanding of what I’m doing? Yes, but I have that myself, and if it isn’t complete, there are many other people I know who could fill in the gaps. Inspiration? Certainly, but I get that opening almost any book about art.
All of this is important, but it isn’t what is significant. What is significant is a feeling, something vague and elusive, perhaps best captured in the word trust. I have absolute trust in him. With absolutely everything I write, even the smallest newspaper article, he has to read it before I can publish it anywhere. This is something on which I’m totally reliant and at the same time take for granted. It’s not a function, it’s not something anyone else can do, because it’s not about the role of editor, it’s about him, the person he is. And that’s what the role of editor is for me.
There are many conceptions about writing. One of the most common is that it’s a lonely business, something writers do on their own. I can’t see myself in that. On the contrary, in all the fifteen years I’ve been making my living as a writer I’ve been dependent on the help of others in order to write. When I was writing My Struggle, I read every word of it out loud to a friend, Geir Angell Øygarden, I called him on the phone every single day and read him what I had written, some five thousand pages in total. Why? Because someone had to tell me it was good enough, that was one thing, but also what it actually was that I was doing, and, importantly, what it might become, in what directions I could proceed. I needed his thoughts, they came together with mine but from a completely different place, and this was essential; because I was writing about myself I desperately needed that view from outside, which in this case was not simply a view but a whole outlook, which I made my own in the novel. Those conversations formed a space, and I think all books exist within such a space, either very obviously (as in my case) or less so, for instance when what surrounds them is the literature an author reads during the writing process, or has read before it starts. Even though I knew nothing about this when I began to write at the age of eighteen, I still set up those kinds of spaces; it was as if the need itself made it happen. The actual act of writing still took place in solitude, but everything that surrounded it, which after all was what was important, had to do with other people. When I was nineteen, for instance, studying literature at the university in Bergen, I met Espen Stueland. He was writing, I was writing, we became friends, and he shared with me everything he could think and read, everything he had thought and read. He introduced me to books by Ole Robert Sunde, Tor Ulven, Claude Simon, Gunnar Ekelöf, Osip Mandelstam, Samuel Beckett, to pick out just a few of the many names that swirled in the air at that time. We read each other’s texts, and his critiques, as sincere as they were severe, encouraged me to rewrite or toss. But even when I tossed what I had written, I was stirred, because through Espen I had suddenly come to a place where literature mattered, and was perhaps what mattered most of all, a place where it was impossible to bluff, impossible to cheat, impossible to be halfhearted in anything we read or wrote: it was all or nothing. Espen soon debuted with the poetry collection Sakte dans ut av brennende hus (Serene Dance Out of a Burning House) and uprooted to Oslo, got involved with Vagant, and shared that with me too, introducing me to the writers and critics he met in that connection. I stayed behind in Bergen, and there I met another student who wrote, his name was Tore Renberg, we too became friends, and he shared with me everything he could think and read, everything he had thought and read. Tore’s literary preferences were different from Espen’s, but included many of the same authors: Tor
Ulven was impossible to ignore for any student of literature in the early nineties, Ole Robert Sunde likewise, and Samuel Beckett was everywhere. But the writers Tore was most immersed in at that time were Eldrid Lunden – whose work I had never read, Tarjei Vesaas, and Sigbjørn Obstfelder. We too read each other’s texts, and in a very short space of time he wrote a collection of short prose pieces that got accepted for publication, the title was Sovende floke (Sleeping Tangle), and, like Espen, he too uprooted to Oslo, debuted, and soon after became involved with Vagant.
When all of this was going on, when I was sitting around in cafés with Tore or Espen, talking about literature or music or football, the three of us having in common the fact that we wrote and wanted to be writers, it was nothing. None of us knew how things were going to pan out, we barely knew what we were doing. Were we doing anything at all? Weren’t we just idling away our time, doing nothing other than following our own inclinations? It was all without shape, as yet undefined, and if reading Tor Ulven, for instance, pointed forward in time to a future Tor Ulven influence in our generation’s literature, which is now incontestable, we were oblivious to it then, for we were no generation, we represented nothing, and what we were doing stayed between us and had no audience, the very thought was absurd. It was as local as you can get, the coffee was lukewarm, the rain came down outside, and if I needed a piss I could wait out of politeness. But writing this now I sense it transforming from nothing into something, an era is committed to writing, a milieu emerges, a history unfolds. And yes, seen from where we are now, Espen forty-two years old and a father of two, Tore forty-one and a father of two, I myself forty-four and a father of three, middle-aged men the three of us, authors of a sizable number of books, essays, and articles, a straight line seems to go from all our get-togethers and discussions back then to where we are now, authors of our generation.
As such, history always lies, it turns what was inconsistent, all over the place, perhaps even meaningless, into something consistent, systematic, and meaningful. The situations and events that occurred, the people who were there, and the discussions between them were of course real, it is not the case that writing about something is the same as lying or distorting, but the moment that reality is written down it is given a form that is basically abiding and unalterable, which pins it down in a certain way, whereas what was significant about it was that it was all over the place and could not be pinned down at all. To write about a situation is to take out part of its potential, at the same time as its remaining potential disappears into the shadows of the unsaid, the unthought, and the unwritten, in the valley of opportunities lost.
But anyway, there I was in Bergen, twenty-six years old. My two best (and only) friends had achieved the only thing I really wanted to do in life, they had made their literary debuts and moved to Oslo, to the very center of Norwegian literary life. It felt like they had abandoned me, and if they were unaware of exactly how jealous I was, they must surely have had an inkling, or at least should have had, the three of us had shared the same lives, young aspiring writers, shared the same ambition, to become authors, we had shared all our reading experiences, everything we learned, and they had succeeded – Tore spectacularly so, receiving that year’s Best New Writer Award – whereas I had failed and was left behind in Bergen, with what amounted to nothing, because unlike Espen and Tore I couldn’t write, in the sense that nothing came out when I sat down at the computer, not a sentence, not a word, I was completely empty. I told myself the ambition of writing, or the belief that I actually could do it, was self-delusion, a deception. Tore had it in him, Espen had it in him, I didn’t. What I did then was go back to studying. Within a year, I did a subsidiary course in art history and began majoring in literature. I was going to write about literature instead. But then something totally unexpected happened. An editor called me up asking if I could come in for a chat, he had read a short story of mine and wanted to discuss it with me.
Nowadays, this is a fairly normal way of going about things. Back then, in the early nineties, it wasn’t. For anyone harboring ambitions of becoming an author in the late eighties and early nineties the way to do it was this: you wrote a book and submitted it to a publishing house, after which you waited a month or two before receiving a reply in the post, very likely a rejection, which could fall into one of several categories; it could be a standard rejection, which was a bad sign, it meant the manuscript came across so weak it hadn’t been worth the effort to give it an individual assessment. If, on the other hand, it was accompanied by a reader’s assessment, then it was a notch up, even if that assessment happened to be negative, since it meant someone at least had seen enough merit in the work to commission an external reader to read it and make an appraisal. That appraisal might conclude with something to the effect that the author showed promise, but that the present manuscript could not be recommended for publication, or – oh, joy! – that they would like to read it again in revised form. But because that revision had to be done by the author alone, with at best a couple of vague suggestions to go by, it too normally ended up in a rejection. Only very, very seldom did it happen that a manuscript was accepted as it stood – I remember hearing at the time that it was one in a hundred.
Because of the distance between author and publisher, so great it amounted to an abyss, a lot depended on capturing the attention of this mysterious and unapproachable reader from the outset. A strong title, in an eye-catching font (if memory serves me right, you could buy sheets of lettering back then, before we got word processors, in Gothic style, for instance, and stick them on), without typos or scribblings-out, a meticulously worded accompanying letter. I remember a piece of advice to us from Øystein Lønn when I was at the Writing Academy: Put your best parts first, no matter how little it says about the text overall, put the best parts first. It was all about getting read, about making sure whoever was charged with sifting through new manuscripts at the publishing house didn’t just toss yours aside, but was intrigued enough to read on.
The first novel I submitted as a manuscript, it must have been in 1989, drew a standard rejection of no more than a few lines, the publishers had read the manuscript with interest, which was good, but they wouldn’t be publishing it. Still, this was nothing compared to Tore, who not without pride had told me he’d been turned down eighteen times. He was nineteen years old. But when he debuted, it happened in a different way altogether. He had not submitted a manuscript to a publishing house, the way generations of budding Norwegian authors all the way back to Hamsun had done before him, no, in his case the publishing house had called him. He had written some reviews in Morgenbladet and Vinduet, and one morning the phone rang and it was a man presenting himself as an editor at the Tiden publishing house, wondering if Tore would like to be a reader for him. Tore accepted gladly, though not without mentioning that he was a writer himself. The editor, who had suspected as much, duly offered to have a look at his work.
That was how Tore was taken on by Tiden and became an author. The year after, he was asked by them to edit an anthology of so-called “new voices” in Norwegian literature and asked me if I happened to have anything he could use. I did. Tucked away in an attempt at a novel about a slave ship that was basically lifted in its entirety from an existing nonfiction book I’d found, was a story I sent to Tore and which, perhaps because my envy, which he must surely have sensed, made him feel sorry for me, he published. It wasn’t a very good story, but it did mean that I too received a phone call from the same editor, and a few weeks later was seated in his office in Oslo’s Operapassasjen, casting stolen glances at the piles of manuscripts there in case they might reveal something significant to me while he was out getting us coffee. When he came back, we talked a bit, or he did mostly, and then I was back in the street again. It was hardly anything to speak of, but it was enough, for when I left there it was with the feeling of having been seen.
Oh, how fragile these things are. It’s hard to describe that this vagu
e feeling of having been seen, of someone showing faith, was enough for me to start work on a new novel, one in which I went much further than I had before. Was it because of him, that editor? Let me put it like this: had he not asked me to come and see him, I would never have started writing again, at least not in the same way. When I sent him the first beginnings of this new novel, I was ashamed and felt like a dog. Now surely I had let him down, abused his trust, ruined everything. One part in particular felt shaming: at one point, my main character goes into a phone booth on the Torgallmenningen in Bergen, from where he makes a phone call to his ten-year-old self. It was so stupid!
A few weeks passed and then the editor called me. He liked what he had read, especially the part where the main character phones back to his own childhood, that was really good! And he said something else too: Henrik keeps repeating a thought, something about in the world, out of the world, in the world, out of the world. That sounds like a title, don’t you think? Out of the world?
These two comments were decisive, and they steered the rest of the writing until the novel was finished. Movement from one time to another, or from one place to another, by means of a metaphor or simile, often something concrete like that phone booth, runs through the entire novel and is its way of thinking, all times and all places held within a single consciousness. And the title he gave me, Out of the World, steered its complex of themes in much the same way.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 28