Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  They all lived in a huge flat in Stockholm that Stene Forman had arranged on Karlbergsvägen, right near Corso, Noras and Kårhuset, where the notorious occupations would soon take place. This was actually the golden age of the neighbourhood. Stene Forman had just started as a hack writer for Blixt, and he was making good money. Nina Negg took odd jobs here and there, and Verner and Leo were in charge of everything that was ‘deep’. For the most part, this depth of thought was expressed in lengthy bacchanals that could go on for several days.

  Nina was actually the only one of them who did anything pragmatic, who undertook any practical work in the struggle that the students and workers supposedly shared. When the agitated reports from Tokyo, Berlin, San Francisco and Paris started filling the newspapers, she tore out big pictures and taped them to all the walls in that huge flat. She went to all the demonstrations, toiled over duplicating machines, helped distribute leaflets and attended conferences when new manifestos were drawn up. In spite of the fact that she wasn’t especially affected by whether the UKAS reform was implemented or not, she sympathised with those who were rebelling, because Power was Power, after all. She had almost stopped swearing; her vocabulary now included numerous revolutionary slogans that she enjoyed pounding into Leo’s head with great proficiency.

  But he was faithful to his disloyalty. That was what had brought them together on a mangy sofa in a draughty attic room long ago. Leo never felt at home in the organised struggle. He did his thing, as he said, preferring to sit and drink or read Hegel rather than take the German dialectic’s successors at their word. Disloyalty as a beautiful art – that was Leo Morgan’s motto.

  When the actual occupation took place, neither Leo nor Verner was present. They had been out roaming among the crypto-fascists in Spök Park a couple of times, and as luck would have it, Stene Forman, Verner and Leo all ended up in a photo on the front page of an evening paper as background for one of the chief ideologues of the occupation. But during the occupation itself they were going through a period of utterly pointless drinking. Leo was doing his best to run through the small inheritance from his grandfather quickly. Verner’s stamp collection had long since lost all value. He had drunk and smoked away every little philatelic rarity, one after the other, secretively and with exactly the sort of precision that an old chess player ought to display. No one ever dared get to the bottom of what the two men were actually doing during those periods. They would retreat from everyone, either together or separately, with a substantial battery of bottles and drink them in profound silence, as if in some sort of desperate devotion, a demonic requiem mass for the innermost circle.

  They were not ashamed of themselves, they did their thing and observed the world von oben, from above, or at least that was how Nina viewed it. She thought they were fucking quitters, both of them. They got out of serving in the military and were granted exemptions; they got out of everything. They inherited money and ate their meals at home with their mothers whenever they were short of cash. They were spoilt little brats, especially Leo. All his fucking poems, as well as his lovely talk about underdeveloped countries, imperialism and the global conscience were just empty words. All his talk about alternative Christmas Eve celebrations and cosmic love was nothing but putrid piss. He cared about only one thing in life, and that was himself. The little child prodigy loved only himself, yet he didn’t realise that the child prodigy had died years ago and that the myth was no longer valid. It was time to wake up, now that the whole world was awake and on its feet. But that wasn’t quite right; even Nina Negg could see that. It was too late to wake up. The party was already over.

  The big blow-up occurred at the end of May in ’68 when the occupation was called off, the revolt in France ended with de Gaulle’s unbelievable victory, and everyone was immensely tired. Nina Negg had fallen in love with Stene Forman, and when he kept on bringing home a steady stream of women, it got to be too much for her. Nina struck back and literally tossed Leo out onto the street. He would have to move in with Henry on Hornsgatan. Verner sided with Nina, and Leo turned his back on both of them. He was planning to do his thing.

  The result of this dramatic confrontation, recounted here in an extremely fragmented version, was that Nina went abroad that summer, to Amsterdam, the Mecca of the drug culture. She had been heading in that direction for years, and finally she set off. It was the beginning of her wandering towards Hades. Verner underwent various cataclysms, and rumour had it that during one confusing period he tried to get accepted by a commune of rebels – this was back when the Rebel Movement was running rampant – but the group quickly threw out this individualist. And that was no doubt the definitive end to Verner’s very obscure political career. Soon he too – some time after the big mining strike in ’69 – would come to a realisation that his studies were going nowhere. He needed to venture out onto the paths of life. A hard rain was going to fall.

  ________

  Those who were still there, late on the night of the first Gärdet Festival in 1970, got to see a true underground band called the Harry Lime Group, named after Graham Greene’s sewer hero no. 1 from the forties.

  Late that night Stene Forman – that tireless producer of unforgettable happenings – lined up a few guys as back-up musicians, with Verner on guitar, Leo as the solo poet, and the feverish Nina as vocalist. A miracle had occurred. In the best Baden-Powell style, Stene, with Leo right on his heels, had combed the ungodly dense jungle known as The Old Swamp and fished out both Nina Negg and Verner Hansson from a disgusting shithole on Tunnelgatan – the place was stinking of sewage from a broken toilet, mouldy food and rotting mattresses. He transported the two wrecks home, fattened them up and got them off drugs with the help of some private experts. As a newspaperman he knew all sorts of markets inside and out. It became a sort of reconciliation at Stene’s place over on Karlbergsvägen. Nina’s weary eyes became a little less weary, and after a couple of days her marvellous epithets slowly began to come to life. Verner’s delirium was transformed into a period of intense creativity – he had never in his life held a guitar, but he could play three gnarly chords like no one else had ever done. It started to seem like old times again, and Leo churned out one hit song after another. Stene took care of the administrative tasks.

  I was present that night at Gärdet, and I remember the Harry Lime Group very well, especially the singer with the weary eyes. She moved in a special way, jerky and disjointed like a marionette with tangled strings. The back-up musicians sounded heavy and harsh, false and awful, but that didn’t matter. Several of the songs actually enjoyed a certain success. ‘Military Service Mind’ was a protest song à la Country Joe & The Fish. The refrain went like this: ‘The generals can always buy / Some big and strong and bloody guy / But we will make it hard to find / A Military Service Mind …’ And here and there the audience could actually be heard singing along with the words.

  The song ‘Vinyl Figureheads’ had a hallucinogenic tune and a special background that was indicative of Leo’s life during the period between Sanctimonious Cows and Façade Climbing and Other Hobbies. It was probably late in the autumn of ’67, and Leo had just started studying philosophy at the university. That was a completely understandable choice, since philosophy was Leo’s proper element. The positivism of the natural sciences seemed more and more like an offshoot of a Power, and Leo wanted to be subversive. Poetry and philosophy are in many ways the same thing. Great, true poetry is a subcontractor for philosophy: the poets deliver the raw material, a sort of theoretical cement for the builders of philosophical systems, who then lock in and fix the concepts’ bricks in their cathedrals and their ladders to heaven. Leo Morgan felt like an architect without a blueprint – he had to become a philosopher.

  But on a cold and nasty day during that autumn he felt tired of everything that had to do with books. He put on his flea-bitten Afghan waistcoat and went down to sit on Stockholmsterrassen above Sergels Torg, where it was amusing to watch the cars. Cautiously, seeming a bit clu
msy and fumbling, they would keep to the right in the roundabout and then occasionally lose their heads and crash into each other. That was, of course, excellent entertainment. Leo was not feeling at all well that day because he was weighed down by hash, and he felt burned out from booze; nothing gave him any peace. He and Nina had meditated together and read the Bhagavad Gita and Hesse and other serene things that you could read about the East, but none of it had stuck with Leo. Nina was smoking a lot, and she thought that Leo was too cold. He wasn’t even any different when he got drunk. She couldn’t stand to see his eyes grow dark and rigid, disappearing into some inaccessible realm. It was driving her crazy. They were locked in a horrible, vicious circle.

  On this cold and nasty day he was now sitting on Stockholmsterrassen, shivering and feeling completely done in. When Nina turned up she saw at once that he was thoroughly depressed. She tried to entice him with tea and coffee and aspirin and all sorts of other things. But nothing did any good. Finally she took out a tiny green pill, which she ordered him to take. She didn’t tell him what it was, but she insisted that it would help. He would be cool if he took this pill, which was reliable goods.

  For once Leo gave in and swallowed the pill. He slouched in his chair, closed his eyes, and began waiting for the drug to take effect. It took a long time. He watched the traffic driving on the right, and gradually the cars started moving slower and slower, as if they were circling inside a sunny aquarium. The headlights looked the way they did on the postcards that Henry had sent of London and Paris ‘by night’ – photographs taken at night using a time-exposure that made the lights turn into long streaks, neon-like strands winding through dark and slippery streets. Stockholm fell silent, and the traffic was soon flowing so slowly that all movement became imperceptible. The whole city seemed to pulsate in time with his own heart, the asphalt and cement were warm and mute and utterly still. Leo blinked his eyes but couldn’t keep them open. He disappeared into a warm and beautiful trance.

  He may have shuffled out to the street on his own, or else someone called the police and hauled him out to the street. People may have been annoyed with him because he looked so typical with his long, greasy hair, his thin droopy moustache, and his ratty Afghan waistcoat. The only thing he clearly remembered was that a couple of police officers put him on a bench inside a van, and he apparently resisted because a cop twisted one of his arms behind his back to make him lie still and stay calm. And he did stay calm; he didn’t feel a thing. He didn’t hurt, but he was feeling extremely hot. He began to regain his sense of smell, and the van smelled of vinyl, a disgusting, sticky, sweaty, and filthy vinyl. Disgusting vinyl can have a singularly revolting smell, and Leo drank in that smell and then returned to his delightful trance.

  The next time he awoke he smelled the vinyl again, but this time even stronger. He was lying motionless, taking in that vinyl odour, and with infinite caution he opened his eyelids. He was staring at a wall, lying practically naked under a blanket. Gradually he realised that he had been placed in the drunk tank over in Klara.

  Using his impressions from this experience when the police took him into temporary custody – they had treated him much better than he thought they would treat people of his ilk – he composed the song ‘Vinyl Figureheads’ a couple of years later.

  You are the vinyl figureheads of the ss Sweden

  You try to force me into your social incubator

  Your raised batons are an inverted command

  A white inclamation point

  But I will never come back in

  But we will never come back in

  That was the incorrigibly individualistic credo that was presumably received with both praise and criticism at Gärdet. At any rate, the words made a certain impression on me, and I recall that Nina joined in to sing the phrase ‘But we will never come back in’ with a fierce, agitated voice that left very little room for doubt. There was also a deep sense of tragedy behind that voice, so proudly decadent, because she never did come back in. For the brief future that remained to her, Nina was a total outcast, at the mercy of the demonic interests that would profit from her cravings.

  Anyway, the Harry Lime Group completed its performance with its honour intact. The group would never perform again. Not even an enthusiast like Stene Forman could keep Nina and Verner on their feet.

  ________

  In 1974 another music festival was held, a little Woodstock, at Gärdet in Stockholm. The event was accused of being ‘too establishment’. The pioneering appetite for experimentation was supposedly gone; this time it was standardised lyrics and dry professionalism that counted. What was initially an enthusiastic counter-culture had been bought out by the establishment and become stereotyped, conformist and dull. The movement had dispersed in various directions; some had gone institutional, while others had dared to ‘come back in’ to use the words of Harry Lime. The group was not revived for that festival, and no one knew whether there would even have been a slot for it. Four awful years had passed, and time had quite simply made a revival of the Harry Lime Group impossible.

  A couple of years earlier, in ’71, Leo had run into Nina downtown. They were both demonstrating to save the elm trees in the King’s Garden, and they saw each other on Fregatten on a few nights, but then she disappeared once again. Leo immersed himself in his studies and didn’t know what happened to her. In the spring of ’73 he learned that she had been found dead of an overdose over in Söder. On that very day Leo was supposed to take part in a big poetry festival in Gamla Riksdagshuset – dozens of more or less well-known poets were going to read from their work, and he had been looking forward to being remembered – but he ended up not going. No one knew where he went. He was gone for several days and came back in a deplorable state. That was his way of saying goodbye to Nina Negg.

  At about the same time, in the spring of ’73, Verner was committed to a detox centre for alcoholics. There he was cleaned up and dried out, fattened up and processed, only to end up under house arrest a few months later. His stern mother met him at the door and told him that she’d damn well had enough of all this nonsense. Then she dragged home her twenty-eight-year-old wreck of a son and locked him in his childhood room, which was filled with worthless stamps. Rumour has it that he’s still sitting there today.

  ________

  People were dropping like flies, right and left; many were gone by the summer of Gärdet ’74. The only reason even to mention the festival was that it fundamentally changed Leo Morgan’s life. No one can say with certainty what he was actually doing during this period. He was still enrolled at the university to study philosophy, but the curriculum and pace were all his own. Leo Morgan did his thing, no matter what he was involved in. He had polemicised about both Marxists and Wittgenstein adherents, and no one knew where he stood. At one point – when he was taken under the wings of an eccentric professor – he became preoccupied with trying to establish a kind of nomenclature for the one hundred most important concepts in Western philosophy, from Thale’s ‘arché’ to Sartre’s ‘être’. This Jacob-style wrestling match was said to have ended in total confusion, prompting Leo to retreat and disappear again, moving out to or into a periphery known only to himself, not to anyone else. At least half of the six years that Leo spent at the university could be categorised as squandered time. He spent days, weeks and months in a state of utter passivity, merely lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, whistling monotonous melodies, and living on next to nothing. Maybe he had adopted some type of Eastern meditation and entered another world in which time and space no longer had any meaning.

  He had set up for his own use part of his grandfather’s enormous flat on Hornsgatan – which in practical terms meant getting rid of most of the furnishings. He shared the hallway and kitchen with his brother. Leo’s section consisted of two small but pleasant rooms with windows facing the street. Even so, Henry felt that his privacy was being disturbed. At that time he was just completing his ‘Europa, Disintegrating Fragments’
and needed all the quiet in the world to finish the piece. It was the fruit of five long years in exile – Henry Morgan’s magnum opus.

  Yet Henry was at his most friendly and considerate when Leo lay on his bed, whistling. Presumably this show of consideration was not entirely altruistic. Henry was a man of action, an enterprising man in his prime, and he couldn’t stand people who simply drifted. Perhaps he was frightened by Leo’s inaccessible state, the same way he would be scared of a child with mysteriously piercing eyes. Henry went around babbling to himself all day long, and every morning he pinned up his list, describing everything he had to do, point by point, on that particular day. He could just as well have made carbon copies, because the lists were exactly the same, down to the very last detail. Henry’s life was filled with singularly uniform kinds of work – which in Leo’s eyes were meaningless – and it would have sufficed to use one list starting on the first of January and continuing for the remaining 364 days of the year.

  Henry had come back to Sweden and to Stockholm as a man who was totally unrecognisable and yet more grown up. His desertion from the Swedish army had unofficially fallen outside the statute of limitations. He had returned to Stockholm, where everything seemed to slip out of his hands. He wanted to believe that everything had stood still, impatiently waiting for Henry Morgan’s comeback, but that was not at all what had happened. The city he remembered as his home town had changed drastically. Whole neighbourhoods, whole sections of the city had been torn down and levelled; the Klara district resembled a ruin, motorways cut through downtown and a year earlier the last tram had been taken out of service. All his friends had settled down. Some of them had already completed their education and were now married with children; they had a good salary and a regulated life with brilliant prospects for the future. Jazz was practically dead, and no one even talked about Dixieland anymore, except with a slightly ironic, nostalgic smile on their lips. Even the Bear Quartet was no more than a faded memory. One member had died, another had become a studio musician for top Swedish bands, and Bill himself was still on the Continent, in the midst of what was called an international breakthrough.