________
On that night in late May of ’68, Maud and the entire French nation were gripped with breathless suspense. De Gaulle had gone underground – people suspected that for tactical reasons he was hiding in Colombey in order to devise his last, brilliant plan and stage a counter-offensive, to wrest the weapons from the hands of his enemies – and Henry Morgan had likewise gone underground.
Maud was in a room at the Hotel Ivry on Rue de Richelieu, alone and filled with anticipation. She was waiting for a man who never arrived. When Bill rang from the Bop Sec, he had indeed said that Henry was down there at the pub, and the lad looked just like himself, he hadn’t changed a bit. He would soon be on his way over to see her, and Maud told Bill to go to hell. No doubt it was fate.
The audience at the Bop Sec was in high spirits as Henry left the place. A poet was reading de Gaulle’s obituary to loud cheering, and Bill was having a great night. Maybe he was on his way to making a real breakthrough. A producer had already contacted him. There was talk of cutting a record. Henry wasn’t envious, though he felt a bit cheated. He wondered where he might have ended up if he’d stayed home and continued playing with the Bear Quartet. Perhaps he too might have made his international breakthrough that night at the Bop Sec. Perhaps he too might have been offered a record contract, a tour, interviews in Jazz Hot and Jazz Journal, maybe even in Down Beat. What good were these five years on the Continent, this long exile? He had a few pitiful drafts of ‘Europa, Disintegrating Fragments’. Maybe it was something new, unique and original, but he had spent so many days and nights merely drifting around with the crowds in London, in Munich, in Rome and in Paris!
He felt dejected and pensive. Meeting Bill again, at the height of his career, talking about Maud and hearing that he hadn’t changed a bit in five years – it felt as if he had simply squandered his time, as if he could just as well have been asleep, although the dream was reality. Life was totally meaningless, and down there the Seine flowed past, with its black, cold water. There were no empty bottles, sandwich wrappers, no cardboard boxes or cigarette ends to be seen. The Spree, the Thames, the Isar, the Tiber, the Seine – the rivers were all alike, and they had taken many people with them. So many anonymous lives had sought out these waters, and perhaps death was the only thing at which they had really succeeded.
The May night was warm and vibrant. Henry roamed aimlessly along the Seine staring at the black water – he couldn’t just set out for Rue de Richelieu. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the stone wall. He stood still for a long time, trying to reflect on his life, which had never seemed so meaningless as it did at that moment. He felt like some tragic character in an opera, like the musician Sc haunard just as he discovers that Mimi isn’t in fact merely asleep; she’s dead. Curtain. When Henry was feeling out of sorts, he did a proper job of it.
He tried to console himself with the improbable thought that he could be received by Maud at the Hotel Ivry on Rue de Richelieu. She would be standing in the doorway wearing her black kimono with the peacock on the back. Perhaps she had already poured a couple of drinks in order to wipe out the past five years. She would say that he hadn’t changed a bit, although perhaps he looked a little thinner. Then they would make love, calm and collected, like two grown-ups, without illusions. Everything would be exactly, precisely like before. His exile like a dream, a totally impossible flight, because there was nowhere to hide on this earth.
The police riot-squad van gently slid to a stop at the pavement, and Henry didn’t even have time to react before four cops jumped out and pressed him against the stone wall. He had to stand there with his hands against the wall while they searched him, as if they thought he were carrying cannons in his trousers. They asked for ID, and fortunately Henry had his papers in order, because he knew the methods of the police.
‘Where do you live?’ one of them asked.
‘Live?’
‘Don’t play dumb!’
This lonely, tragic opera character was completely preoccupied with his brooding and didn’t manage to wriggle his way out of the situation, was incapable of wriggling out. The cops cuffed Henry’s hands behind his back and led their victim to the van, which was already occupied by five other men about the same age. They all wore baggy white coats, which also looked as if they’d been bought in second-hand shops in Kensington, London. Henry realised that he matched the latest description of the evening.
The interrogation took all night, and Monsieur Morgan managed to control himself quite well. He was allowed to smoke in the waiting room, under the malice-filled eyes of the Law. He bit his fingernails and ran through all the swear-words that he knew in German, English, Italian and Swedish. In spite of everything, there was a certain sweetness about his defeat, a special sort of pleasure in his failure. He had been freed from the Hotel Ivry on Rue de Richelieu. He had been freed from the decision and the anxiety. He claimed that never had Sartre made so much sense to him as on that night.
But the French forces of law and order had now taken charge of Henry, freeing him from all decisions and displaying just the right amount of hostility on the street. He couldn’t answer the question: who are you, monsieur? Because on that very evening, after the meeting with Bill at the Bop Sec, Henry was for once beset by doubt. He had wrestled with the big issues, questioning himself. And just at that moment he was unlucky enough to end up in a police interrogation which, on some other day when he was in the proper frame of mind, he would have managed splendidly, prompting even the most experienced interrogator to question his own existence, as well as that of the French police, the EEC, the United Nations, de Gaulle and the entire Cosmos.
But Monsieur Morgan was not at all in top form on that night. He gave answers that were vague, evasive and fumbling to all the intricate questions that were levelled at him about his life and habits. The French police didn’t like bohemians or tragic opera characters. But Henry had a bit of luck in the midst of all this misfortune. A zealous rat of an archivist managed to find a folder containing a document stating that this Swede had played a role in connection with a riot at a certain Café Au Coin in Montmartre, during which the world-famous painter Salvador Dalí had been subjected to an attempted assault six months earlier. Monsieur Morgan had been taken in for questioning back then too, but he was later released when the world-famous surrealist explained that the whole commotion was actually a happening that had been planned far in advance. Naturally Henri le boulevardier hadn’t the faintest idea about all this. Although he wasn’t about to tell the police that.
Upon hearing this report, the chief interrogator raised both his eyebrows and his moustache and deferentially offered his apologies, since he now realised that Monsieur Morgan was actually a prominent musician, bohemian and close friend of Salvador Dalí, an artist whom he had always respected. Salvador Dalí praised the Spanish system and Franco, and that was splendid.
Without understanding a thing, Henry was released, departing the arduous interrogation under a shower of apologies, like an honoured guest. It almost came to the point where he was asked for his autograph, although the chief interrogator didn’t dare go quite that far. Henry was offered a lift in a patrol car right to his door, but he politely declined. He was no longer especially tired or surprised. In the big world where the elephants dance, anything could happen, although he had exhausted all his possibilities. He felt empty and done with this odyssey. A power struggle had taken place in the umost ethereal strata of society, while a real soul-searching had taken place inside both de Gaulle and Henry Morgan. The latter was now strolling calmly towards Rue Garreau in Montmartre, where he would make himself a Continental breakfast and cast furtive glances at his suitcase. There was no room for any more labels. Kilroy had been everywhere.
________
His homesickness had left its mark. On the day when a country’s postal service is put out of commission, the crisis can be called serious. The post office is supported by duty and devotion; it represents an end in itself, a
cat egorical imperative, nourished by symbolic postage and stamps.
On the day when de Gaulle made his awful comeback and gave his speech about War, Order and Revenge without actually being seen, on that chaotic day a letter dropped through the letterbox addressed to Henry Morgan, 31 Rue Garreau, Paris IXème, France.
It was from Sweden, from Greta Morgan of Brännkyrkagatan in Stockholm. She was worried but didn’t really know how to express herself. She enclosed a clipping with a photo from an evening paper, from the student occupation of Kårhus on Holländargatan which had been called off. It actually depicted the foremost revolutionaries, and there with the crowd of leaders was none other than Leo Morgan, standing slightly off to one side.
But that was not what worried Greta most. In fact, she was rather proud that her son was in the newspaper. But Henry’s paternal grandfather had died. She couldn’t think of any less blunt way to say it. The old dandy Morgonstjärna had never been ill, nor had he exhibited any serious symptoms of weakness other than what was a natural result of old age. He was made of first-class stuff that should have lasted for ninety years, at least. But during this turbulent spring he had stubbornly insisted on walking up the stairs to his flat on the sixth floor, and one day he simply collapsed in the hallway, with blood trickling out of his mouth. Pulmonary oedema, said the family physician, Dr Helmers. Heart attack, wrote Greta. He would be buried in about a week.
Old Morgonstjärna left no living children. His only heirs were his daughter-in- law Greta and his grandsons Henry and Leo. Like the clear-sighted man that he was, he had thought the matter through, and in a desk in his library there was a folder with the blunt heading ‘After I am dead’. It contained envelopes addressed to a lawyer’s office, to Greta and to Henry and Leo. Henry’s envelope was still unopened.
But the most surprising envelope in old Morgonstjärna’s folder was the one labelled ‘The Crew’, written in ink, and ‘To Henry Morgan’ written in pencil underneath. Greta swore that, in spite of great curiosity, she could not bring herself to open anyone else’s letters. Nor did she have either the courage or the desire to send them by post to Henry in Paris. You couldn’t trust anyone anymore. The postal workers might go on strike during these turbulent times.
That was enough for Henry. He took care of all his affairs in Paris and made it back to Sweden in time for the funeral. A deserter made his comeback after five long years in exile. He was done with playing around; he had sowed his wild oats, become a grown man, and he would now start on something serious.
THE HOGARTH AFFAIR
(Leo Morgan, 1968–75)
In America hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Woodstock as a manifestation of what was still some sort of counter-culture, an antidote to everything in Western society that involved aggressive imperialism and intellectual colonialism. Sweden wasn’t much better, and in 1970 the first celebration was held at Gärdet. Those who lay there in the grass, on their blankets, in their makeshift tents and hammocks, having fun and listening to the music, may recall a very strange man who walked around selling a poetry book. He was dressed as a pirate, with a scarf tied over his long hair, a patch over one eye and a soiled striped shirt that reached to his knees. He was both drunk and high, but he could still recite all his poems by heart, flawlessly.
The poetry collection was called Façade Climbing and Other Hobbies, and it was written by John Silver. That old pirate name was, of course, a pseudonym for Leo Morgan. He never explained why he produced that collection on a duplicating machine and self-published it under a pseudonym. Perhaps it was because the poems weren’t sufficiently high-class, or because he wanted the book to seem more dangerous and insidious than a book published by the establishment.
Façade Climbing and Other Hobbies is not a very good book, nor is it what is rather naïvely called ‘straight protest poems’. Instead, it’s a collection of texts characterised more by the difficulty of writing political or so-called ‘placard verse’ than examples of successful attempts.
The title poem ‘Façade Climbing’ is a tribute to Harold Lloyd and to all the men who have dared take risks, who were forced by various circumstances to take those very risks while their heroism was constantly being tested. And it was not entirely unexpected that the tallest of all American skyscrapers ends up being in Bolivia, where a hero is forced to race higher and higher, at an ever-increasing pace, until only the sky remains. The allusion is to Che Guevara, and it could be that the idea of comparing him to a comic like Harold Lloyd isn’t quite successful, but there is a certain force, a special power of suggestion in the poem that holds the lines together. You read it all in one breath. It’s rather nicely done.
The most successful piece in Façade Climbing and Other Hobbies is named after the pirate and hence the poet as well: John Silver, pirate, poet, cigarette.
Smoke your cigarettes slowly, comrade
They may be our last
Sing your songs quietly, comrade
They can never silence us
For this march there is no map
The terrain lacks a commander
No one speaks so purely that we obey
The points of the compass are always militant
The points of the compass are never vertical
We can reach both God and Satan
Without knowing where we are
Here Leo Morgan, alias John Silver, is making use of the magic of secret codes. The stanzas are occasionally of the type that resistance movements and rebels have used as passwords at important checkpoints – the questions, replies, and statements are to be answered in a certain manner, known only to the initiated. The whole poem is really one long incantation, and this part of the rhythmic phrases quickly became a sort of recited popular song in a number of circles. It was also frequently quoted in pubs and cafés. For much of the early seventies ‘The points of the compass are never vertical’ could be read in countless men’s rooms.
John Silver actually managed to preserve his secret identity and was categorised in various ways as both a ‘muddled anarchist’ and a ‘militant pacifist’. People spoke in the same breath about both D’Annunzio and Ginsberg, and all these traits that were attributed to the poet are indicative of how difficult it is in general to define anything about Leo Morgan.
I myself believe that he – perhaps in a process of self-examination – took his bearings in that gap between his official actions and his private persona, which had always afflicted him, ever since he was a kid and saw that red accordion lying on a rock near the shore. It’s so obvious that he starts by trying to write a straight poem with comrades of indefatigable fighting spirit and using a confidently calm tone. But after only a couple of verses he reaches a staccato pitch and gets himself entangled in heavy symbolism that doesn’t belong at all in ‘placard verse’. It’s more Dylan–Cohen than Hill– Brecht. John Silver could applaud Che Guevara and the struggle’s character of self-effacing sacrifice, and yet be accused – and perhaps rightly so – of being a selfish and conceited individualist who absolutely refused to submit to anything.
________
Those who took part in that first Gärdet festival in the summer of 1970, and who don’t recall the disreputable pirate who was peddling poetry, might on the other hand be moved to remember the group Harry Lime, which performed very late in the evening and which some people called Sweden’s real underground band. That first celebration at Gärdet was a successful show insofar as the quality of the music was subordinate to the joy of playing. It was the politics of the will that counted. In other words, no one was going to prevent the Harry Lime Group from playing. Harry Lime existed only for that one evening. The group consisted of Verner Hansson and Stene Forman on guitar, Nina Negg doing the vocals and tambourine, Leo Morgan as solo poet and a rhythm section that I haven’t been able to identify. So many people have disappeared from the scene. The group was formed at Stene’s initiative when he heard about the planned festival. Harry Lime was created for a single performance
, like a truly exclusive supergroup made up of irreconcilable stars, rather as if the Beatles were resurrected for one night.
It was probably some time in the spring that Stene – the former Provie with the amazing laugh – contacted Leo to check out the situation, as he said. Stene sounded like Lazarus rising up from his grave. They hadn’t spoken to or seen each other in years. Leo was now living with Henry because their paternal grandfather had passed away two years earlier, and Henry had taken over the whole show at Hornsgatan. Leo was studying philosophy, and for a brief and intense period of time he’d been living a somewhat regular life.
In any case, Stene told him about the planned festival at Gärdet and said that he was thinking of putting together a band, a real underground band that is. Stene was working for one of the three weekly magazines owned by his father. It was called Blixt, but it’s no longer in operation. He also kept up with the American magazines, which discussed the new crop of underground bands. Stene wanted Leo to put together some good lyrics, because this called for something that was a bit intellectual. And Leo couldn’t deny that he had quite a few things lying around.
But there was only one hitch: they had to find Verner Hansson and Nina Negg. Leo thought they might still be living in Stene’s enormous building on Karlbergsvägen, but they had actually both disappeared. Things had gone to hell for both Verner and Nina.
Two years earlier, Nina had told Leo to get lost – he was free to choose how. It was the spring of ’68, that legendary spring when the whole world was in uproar and mighty statesmen, kings, presidents and ministers lay awake praying that God would punish those disobedient students. Leo had enrolled at the university to study philosophy. Verner was in a different department, and mysteriously, they had both passed their preliminary exams even though they never put much effort into studying. Yet this prompted all the more frequent theorising at the cafés. They questioned the university reforms of U-68 and the system and the means of production and everything else that could be called into question. This pleased Nina Negg. Out of pure instinct she had always questioned everything and everyone. She had never needed to be an intellectual, nor did she plan to become one.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 32