The philosophy of the murderer provides the prologue and prelude to Sanctimonious Cows. In my opinion that piece is among the most ferocious, the most raw, and the most nakedly brutal writing ever composed in this country.
After inserting the philosophy of the killer, the victims begin to appear in the telescopic sight: ‘Hammarskjöld sleeps in his hotel room / Genesis 38 bears the dog’s ears / shame has eyes …’ thinks the murderer, aiming at Onan, who is spilling his seed on the ground. ‘Churchill, who is the girl in Funchal / clinging tight to the raft of the cigar …’ thinks the murderer, aiming at the minister’s painting on Madeira. That is how the poem continues until the executioner has finally completed his assignment and cleansed the world of these saints, our sanctimonious cows. The people are indignant and feel forsaken; the messengers of the gods have left the earth and anything at all might now appear: the Messiah, Zarathustra, or a new Hitler. Not a single verse betrays who has commissioned the killer. It could just as well be a despised God, indignant at the idol-worshipping carried out by humans, or it could be Satan himself, furious for the very same reason.
In contrast to this fallen cult of sanctimonious cows, and as solace for the utter confusion, the poet presents his heavy artillery of ecstasy, rock and roll’s all-embracing intoxication in which the new will be born, in which the new has already been born – the all-encompassing hope can only be manifested in this blazing ecstasy, Unio mystica with the Universe.
So it is the total collapse of order that appears as the world’s only hope, a cataclysm, a catharsis for the besmirched. In an ironic verse targeting himself, Leo bids a final farewell to this order, the system for which he showed such eager fervour in Herbarium. ‘My plants were the dry / burning bushes of the desert / shrieking, like every fire in the sun …’ The lines have a threefold meaning. It’s an ironic joke aimed at himself, a biblical allusion, and a paraphrase of Dylan. The dried plants in Herbarium stand in bright flames; the system, the order, will soon be only ashes. Yet it was in this guise – in the burning bush – that the Almighty once revealed Himself to Moses and exhorted him to lead his people out of oppression to a land that flowed with milk and honey. The image itself, the insight itself, is painful and jarring.
In general, Sanctimonious Cows is brimming over with metaphors, allusions, travesties, and quotations; it requires the ciphers of a special consciousness to penetrate it fully. It’s a book for outsiders who were part of the in in- crowd.
Sanctimonious Cows might have been a critical success, but it did not sell particularly well. The book also became desirable quarry for intellectual Mods and Provies, who went around stealing books from shops. Leo Morgan may not have become an outright cult figure, but in certain circles he did enjoy a good reputation as a tortured conscience.
He had introduced disloyalty into the system, which was to his credit according to some people. Loyalty was a class weapon, something that the powers-that-be, the Social Democrats, and the SAF talked about during their negotiations. Workers were supposed to be loyal to their companies, loyal to Sweden. Loyalty was a poison, a divisive, treacherously poisoned cup. The ecstasy of rock music preached solidarity, and that was something quite different.
This included solidarity with the people in Indochina who were being increasingly subjected to American terror, whose resistance testified to an admirable strength. A consciousness of global phenomena such as imperialism began to penetrate into Swedish poetry in general, and into Leo Morgan’s poems specifically. Bonniers Literary Magazine caused a minor scandal and lost a good many subscribers after publishing Sonnevi’s Vietnam poem, and Leo clearly took a stand, even though he could never be mistaken for any sort of banner-waving or protest poet.
Leo Morgan was genuinely and sincerely indignant – I’d be willing to swear to that. The child inside the aged labyrinths of his brain knew precisely how panic sets in, how terror wriggles its way out of the body in dizziness, cold sweats and howls when the ground shakes with bombs. Leo had walked through that Inferno, and perhaps that was why he wrote a very savage and cutting poem entitled ‘Blanket Angel’. This might actually sound just like any of a dozen modernist titles – signed ‘Breton ’22’ or by one of his epigones in Sweden fifty-five years later – but it has nothing to do with striving for an effect. The ballad is actually what is usually called ‘a blistering attack’ on real-live blanket angels – meaning those Red Cross nurses who are constantly and persistently sending blankets to regions in the Third World struck by some catastrophe
The pilot casts his aeroplane shadow
drops the snub-nosed angel of death from the sky
soon every hut will be burning.
The pilot casts his aeroplane shadow
delivers the blanket-wrapped angel of mercy to the village
from the good lady of the Red Cross.
Biggles haunts every verse and serves – exactly like the hired killer in the title poem – both Good and Evil. He is merely a professional who is doing his job. He is, in fact, the most dangerous of us all, according to Leo Morgan, because whoever allows blind duty to barter with his conscience will be lost in the jungle where he will no longer be seen – by God!? – nor is he able to see.
The ‘anti-vivisectionist ladies’ in the Red Cross turn out to be the wives of generals, the feminine superego of the military, penitent madonnas whose good deeds have only the effect of an echo, in the service of a returned favour instead of in the service of God. They were merely meant to assuage the Western conscience. As anyone might realise, it’s no easy matter to describe Leo Morgan’s path from the starry-eyed, doomed visionary who wrote Herbarium to the hardened shaman who produced Sanctimonious Cows. That era, the golden sixties, has become so cloaked in bewildering and misleading legends and mystique that reaching its core seems hopeless. What is required, as mentioned, is an infinite number of stock-exchange quotations to confirm all the hunches. The monument of May ’68 stands there like some over- advertised carnival that makes tourists on the horizon feel disappointed, or it’s like some over-insured painting that gives an undeserved fortune to the victim of a burglary – he becomes whiny and pathetic.
But he would never howl with the wolves or go prowling around during the seventies, saying that he was disappointed that the revolt of ’68 never hit home. Leo was neither a commonplace poet nor a commonplace rebel – he was much too headstrong for that. His road was not shared by anyone else. It could hardly be called a road at all – it was nothing more than a deadly dangerous path through a rancorous landscape, full of pitfalls and landmines.
This Janus-headed skald never felt himself to be a fully committed participant. There was always some sort of veil or an unreal aura about his life. Words never managed to penetrate that veil. Words were keys, magic passwords, that would be forever misappropriated. When the Garden of Eden came crashing down, human beings were not only estranged from God, but words – especially the word ‘love’ – began their long and bloody journey towards meaninglessness. Words were fragile keys that were conveyed through cultural history without ever finding the right lock in the right door. The quantity of meanings compressed in words – just like the various notches on a key – promised something which human beings, ever since the mis-appropriation, have never managed to live up to. There are words for love, but there is no love. There is evil, but no words that can capture that evil. ‘The keys promise a door / somewhere on this earth / Baptism promises a peace / although no one can find words …’
So language has to be broken apart, the metal of the keys has to be melted down, poured into new forms, into free forms. The only thing Leo could do was to remain free, completely free of all obligations, of all bonds and commitments. No one could demand anything of him. The responsibility he took upon his shoulders was the responsibility of freedom, which weighs more than any other yoke ever placed on the shoulders of slaves. The moment when a person realises that he is free – that is a ghastly moment when the abyss yawns like a black pit of ma
tter compressed to nothingness. There is no longer anything to hold on to, no rituals, ceremonies, or processions. There are no concepts that mean anything but precisely what we decide they should mean at the moment. It does no good to read old books, because books can burn, and burn well.
If the sixties can be said to have been imbued with a certain steadiness of belief, then Leo was the exception that proved the rule. He had his sympathies – as far away from his high-born heritage as possible – but his poetry celebrated its greatest triumphs when free from any creed.
________
‘It was so dark that there was no proof / she was stateless and the sofa was clad in goosebumps / No one believes in a murderer if no bodies are found …’ as it says in Sanctimonious Cows. You would have to look for a long time to find a darker picture of a love tryst. This is as far from classic love poetry as you can get.
Her name was Nina, and she had been to all the concerts that were worth going to. She had seen the Beatles in Sweden at Kungliga in ’64, she had heard Bob Dylan tune his guitar at Konserthuset, and she had seen the Rolling Stones. Some people called her Nina Negg because she was so negative. She talked like no one else, and she swore so fiercely that she made everything smoulder.
Nina Negg was in some sense the hub for a gang that used to hang out down by Hötorget. She was a Mod and helped to start several riots because she hated everything that had to do with law and order. To hell with everything. No one could say this more convincingly than Nina Negg. She always carried a spray-can of red paint with her so that if she felt like it she could instantly write something on a wall or the pavement, wherever she happened to be standing. That was how Leo and Nina met – and it’s well known that two negative charges that come together will result in a positive.
They were probably sitting in Nina’s flat – her parents were always away – listening to the year’s big smash hit, ‘Satisfaction’ by the Stones, a single that had knocked out everything else in the business. The gang was most likely in high spirits and decided to go downtown to see what was going on. Out on the street Nina Negg claimed to have forgotten her spray-can of red paint back home. She told Leo to wait but the others should go on ahead. When Nina came back they walked a couple of streets and then stopped to write something on the wall of a building. Nina shook the spray-can but couldn’t think of what to write. She asked the fucking poet to come up with something. He couldn’t think of anything good, other than ‘Satisfaction’. ‘OK,’ said Nina and started writing in big letters on the wall: SATISFACT. She was just about to add an ‘I’ when a cop car on patrol turned up the street. Two longhaired Mods in US army jackets, jeans and basketball shoes made rewarding booty – two hoodlums caught in the act of vandalism. Leo smelled the cops and grabbed Nina; they started running. They ran like crazed dogs. An officer tried to catch them, but he didn’t have a chance. Their trainers were too fast. Leo knew the area and without thinking he pulled Nina inside an entryway and slammed the door behind them. There they tried to catch their breath.
It was all a bloody hell and a fucking pisser because Nina Negg had dropped her red paint. Leo could not console her. He stood there staring at her as she tried to pull herself together after their flight. He couldn’t figure out what he really felt about her. Nina Negg looked much older than she was. She had deep circles etched under her eyes, little folds that she’d had since birth, or so she claimed. And her intense way of life had not made them any less distinct. They gave her eyes a special, appealing look, which disappeared completely as soon as she opened her mouth. It’s impossible to appeal to someone if you’re cursing and swearing. But in the midst of this flood of epithets she could sometimes, for just a moment, look so desperately serious, as if she really were very old.
Only then did Leo recognise where they were. They were huffing and puffing inside a building that he and Verner had used as a favourite hiding place when they were kids. They knew every door up in the attic. They had opened every lock to every little nook and cranny, and they had been allowed to operate in peace and quiet up there. He suggested to Nina that they go up to the attic to have a look at the view. He didn’t say a word about suffering from vertigo; that would have just made her curse him even more vehemently.
Nina Negg thought the idea sounded fucking great, and she was clearly impressed that Leo, with a few elementary tricks, was able to open the door to that magnificent attic. A ladder led up through the dark to the hatch in the roof. Leo went first, not saying a word. No doubt he swallowed a big lump in his throat as he helped Nina over to the edge, where they could look out over the whole city. Stockholm by Night. Nina swore slightly cautiously at the overwhelming view of that shithole called Stockholm. Her billowing curses carried her across the seas, far away to Amsterdam, to London, to cities that were much more pleasant than Stockholm. As soon as she’d saved up some dough she was going to take off, and that fucking big poet could go ahead and write that down.
Nina Negg was freezing up there on that roof, so she climbed back down the ladder and disappeared somewhere in the dark. It was utterly silent and pitch dark when Leo followed. He tried in vain to listen for any sound, but he couldn’t hear a thing that might give Nina away. He groped his way along the crumbling wall, pausing next to the chimney to hold his breath. He tried to recall the layout of the attic and then took up position at a sort of intersection that every visitor would have to pass, sooner or later. He stood there, breathing, hearing only his own heart beating; Nina didn’t give herself away. For a moment he suspected that she might have slipped downstairs and left him all alone up there. Nina Negg was not to be trusted, and that was undoubtedly what he liked about her.
Suddenly a match was struck only a couple of yards away from Leo. It was Nina. She had grown tired of her game; it was so damned dull. She would never have admitted to being afraid. She lit a cigarette and handed it to Leo. She asked him if they were going to stay in that damned attic all night. Stay and stay, thought Leo. They could sit down on a sofa if they liked because there was an old attic storeroom nearby that had a sofa, a table and two armchairs. Nina didn’t believe him until she saw the room for herself. She sat down on the sofa and Leo lit a candle that had been stuck onto the old table.
It was this sofa that was ‘clad in goosebumps’, as it said in the world of his poem. It was a dark image for a love tryst, but there’s nothing particularly romantic about making your debut as a lover on a moth-eaten old sofa in a cold and draughty attic on Timmermansgatan. Especially if the most tender words you hear are that you’re an unusually nice bastard – for a poet.
________
Presumably there is a partially denied but nevertheless deep disappointment in those words about the sofa that was clad in goosebumps. Nina and Leo had a monopoly on personal freedom, and after their premiere in the attic, neither one of them wanted to acknowledge the other, so to speak. Neither of them believed in lasting relationships. In spite of the fact that Leo, at least, had never had any experience with this sort of thing, he repudiated with high-minded arrogance anything that bore the least resemblance to marriage. And they had agreed to put up with the consequences.
At any rate, there seemed to be a certain bitterness and despair in those verses about the sofa. ‘It was so dark that there was no proof’ – as if love itself needed something more tangible than the memory. ‘She is stateless’ – she was no ordinary citizen. Nina Negg was a counter-citizen upon whom no one could make any claims, and perhaps Leo actually did want to make claims on her. He loved that sudden solemnity in her weary eyes; he wanted to share it with her.
But there were also those who wanted to make claims on Leo Morgan. His mother Greta, of course, had not sat by in silence, watching the changes over the past few years – or, as she viewed it, the going astray. Henry might be accused of many things – he was a good-for-nothing and a deserter – but at least he was neat and dapper. Leo, on the other hand, formerly a model young boy, had suddenly begun to cultivate a very deliberate slovenl
iness, which consisted of neglecting both his room and his appearance. Greta didn’t understand him anymore.
From time to time photographs would arrive from the Continent, where Henry the adventurer had his picture taken at famous monuments. He was constantly running into the kind of photographer who roamed through the streets of Copenhagen, Berlin, London and other big cities taking terrible pictures that were both blurry and poorly composed. But a mother is willing to make do with very little, and there was never any doubt that it truly was Henry, always elegant, standing there and preening himself at Rådhuspladsen, Kurfürstendamm, Picadilly Circus, by the Danube and in the Tuileries.
Greta pinned one picture after another to the pinboard in the kitchen as she sighed and wondered how long Henry was really planning to stay away. The authorities seemed to have dropped his case long ago, and he would undoubtedly not have to go to prison if he returned from his lengthy exile. But he didn’t come back; he kept moving on to new places. She never had to worry, though. Those photos bore witness to the fact that he was doing well and taking good care of himself.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 29