My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (19 page)

The rain caused some of the gel the hairdresser had rubbed into my hair to run down my forehead. I wiped it away with my hand, wiped it on the thighs of my trousers, spotted a small gateway on the right-hand side of the street and went there to light up. Inside, there was a long garden with at least two different restaurant terraces. With a small pool in the middle. On the wall beside the entrance was the name of the Swedish Writers’ Association. That boded well. The association was one of the places I had intended to ring to enquire about somewhere to live.

I lit the cigarette, took out the book I had bought, leaned back against the wall and somewhat half-heartedly started to flick through it.

Hölderlin had long been a familiar name to me. Not that I had read him systematically, not at all, a couple of sporadic poems in Olav Hauge’s collection of translations was the sum total, apart from knowing, in the most superficial of ways, about the fate that befell him, the years of madness in the tower in Tübingen; nevertheless his name had been with me for a long time, roughly since the age of sixteen, when my uncle Kjartan, my mother’s ten-year-younger brother, first started talking about him. He was the only sibling to live in his childhood home, a modest smallholding in Sørbøvåg in Ytre Sogn, with his parents: grandad, my mother’s father, who at that time was approaching eighty but was still active and full of vitality, and grandma, who was in the latter stages of Parkinson’s disease and therefore needed help to do virtually everything. As well as running the smallholding, which, though it was no bigger than five acres, demanded considerable time and energy, and caring for his mother, which, in effect, was a twenty-four-hour job, he also worked as a ship’s plumber at a yard over twenty kilometres away. He was an unusually sensitive man, as delicate as the most delicate of plants, with absolutely no interest in or talent for the practical sides of life, so everything he did, what constituted the basis of his everyday life, he must have had to force himself to do. Day in, day out, month in, month out, year in, year out. Sheer unmitigated willpower. That he had come to this was not necessarily due to the fact that he had never succeeded in breaking out of the conditions he was born into, as one might perhaps imagine, just staying in his familiar environment because it was familiar, it was more likely a consequence of his sensitive nature. For where could a young man with a proclivity for ideals and perfection turn in the mid-1970s? Had he been young in the 1920s, like his father, maybe he would have sought out and felt at home in the vital nature-loving late romantic current that swept through our culture, at least in the
nynorsk
-writing section of it, the one within which Olav Nygard, Olav Duun, Kristoffer Uppdal and Olav Aukrust wrote and which Olav Hauge was later to carry over into our own age; had he been young in the 1950s it might perhaps have been the notions and theories of cultural radicalism he would have absorbed, unless, that is, its opposite, the slowly dying forces of cultural conservativism had caught hold of him first. His youth, however, had been spent neither in the 1920s nor the 1950s, but in the early 1970s, so he became a member of the (Marxist–Leninist) Communist Workers’ Party and proletarianised himself, as the expression went in those days. Started working as a pipe fitter on ships because he believed in a better world than this. Not only for a few months or years, as was the case for most of his party colleagues, but for nigh on two decades. He was one of the very few who didn’t give up his ideals when times changed, but clung to them even though the cost, both social and private, increased as time passed. Being a communist in a rural community was a different matter from being a communist in an urban setting. In a town you were not alone, there were other, like-minded people, there was a community spirit, in addition to which your convictions were not visible in all contexts. In the country you were ‘the communist’. That was his identity, his life. Being communist at the beginning of the 70s, being borne on the wave, was also quite a different matter from being a communist in the 1980s, when all the rats had long since left the ship. A lonely communist sounds like a paradox, but that was how it was for Kjartan. I remember my father having discussions with him those summers when we visited my grandparents, their loud voices coming from the living room below when we were trying to sleep, and even though I couldn’t articulate it, nor think it, I could sense there was a difference between them, and that the difference was fundamental. For my father the discussions had limited scope, their sole function was to point out to Kjartan how he was deluding himself, for Kjartan they were a question of life and death, all or nothing. Hence the irritation in my father’s voice, the fervour in Kjartan’s. It was also apparent, or so it seemed to me at any rate, that my father’s words were grounded in the real world, that what he said and thought belonged here, was related to us, to our schooldays and football matches, our comics and fishing trips, our snow-shovelling and Saturday porridge, while Kjartan spoke of something else, something related to another place. Of course he could not accept that what he believed in, and in a way had dedicated his life to, had nothing to do with reality, as my father, along with everyone else, asserted on every occasion. That reality was not as Kjartan described it and never would be. That would have implied he was a dreamer. And a dreamer was precisely what he was not! Concrete, material, physical, down-to-earth reality was precisely what he was talking about! The situation was highly ironic. There he was defending theories about sticking together and solidarity, yet he was the one who had been ostracised and stood alone. He was the one who observed the world through idealistic abstract eyes, who had a more refined soul than any of the others, he was the one who lifted and carried, hammered and pounded, welded and screwed, scrabbled and crawled round ship after ship, who milked the cows and fed them, who shovelled muck into the muck cellar and in the spring spread it over the fields, who mowed the grass and dried the hay, maintained buildings and looked after his mother, who needed more and more help as the years passed. That became his life. The fact that communism began to wane at the beginning of the 1980s, and that the intense discussions he’d had on all sides imperceptibly abated until one day they were completely gone might have changed the meaning of it, but not the content. It continued as before, along the same course: up at the crack of dawn to milk and feed the cows, catch the bus to the shipyard, work all day, come home and see to his parents, walk his mother around the living room, if she was capable of it, or sit bending and massaging her legs, help her to the toilet, maybe get her clothes ready for the following day, do whatever had to be done outdoors, whether it be bringing in the cows and milking them or something else, then back to his place, have supper and sleep until the next morning – unless grandma was taken so ill that grandad had to fetch him in the course of the night. This was Kjartan’s life, as it appeared from the outside. When his communist phase started I was only a couple of years old, and when it ended, at least the active, rhetorical part, I had just finished first school, so all of it was no more than a vague backdrop to the image I had of him when I turned sixteen and started taking an interest in who people ‘were’. More significant by far for my image of him was the fact that he wrote poetry. Not because I was fond of poetry, but because it ‘said’ more about him. You didn’t write poems if you didn’t have to, that is, unless you were a poet. He didn’t talk to us about it, but made no secret of it either. At any rate, we knew about it. One year some poems were published by
Dag og Tid
, another year in
Klassekampen
, small simple pictures of an industrial worker’s reality which despite their modest proportions had gained a certain prestige in the Hatløy family, where books enjoyed great popularity. When he had a poem published on the back page of the literary journal
Vinduet
beside a small photograph of himself, and then a few years later his poems covered two whole pages of the same publication he was, in our eyes, a fully blown poet. It was at this time he started reading philosophy. Of an evening he sat in the house high above the fjord fighting his way through Heidegger’s incredibly intricate German in
Sein und Zeit
– presumably word by word, because to my knowledge he had not read or spoken German since his schooldays – and the poets Heidegger wrote about, especially Hölderlin and the pre-Socratic writers he referred to, and Nietzsche. Nietzsche. He later described reading Heidegger as like a homecoming. It is no exaggeration to say that it filled him to the brim. And that it was a kind of religious experience. An awakening, a conversion, an old world was filled with new meaning. At that time my father had left the family, so Yngve, my mother and I had begun to celebrate Christmas at our grandparents’ where Kjartan, now in his mid-thirties, still lived and worked. The four or five Christmas Eves we were there are without doubt the most memorable I have experienced. Grandma was ill and sat huddled at the table, shivering. Her hands shook, her arms shook, her head, her feet. Now and then she had bouts of cramp and had to be taken to a chair where her legs had to be practically forced into a bent position and then massaged. But her mind was clear, her eyes were clear; she saw us and she was happy to see us. Grandad, small and rotund and lively, told us stories whenever he could, and when he laughed, as he always did at his own stories, the tears rolled down his cheeks. But this didn’t happen as often as it could have done because Kjartan was there, and Kjartan had sat for a whole year reading Heidegger, had been filled with Heidegger amid the grinding pointless working life of his without a soul to share it with, because no one within a radius of several kilometres had even heard of Heidegger, and no one wanted to either, although I had an inkling he had tried various people, he must have done, so taken with him was he, but it led nowhere, no one understood, no one wanted to understand, he was on his own with this, and then in we walked, his sister Sissel, who was a nursing teacher, interested in politics, literature and philosophy, her son Yngve, who went to university, something Kjartan had always dreamed of doing, more and more so in recent years, and her son Karl Ove. I was seventeen years old, at
gymnas
, and even though I didn’t understand a word of his poems he knew I read books. That was enough for him. We came in the door and his sluice gates opened. All the thoughts that had accumulated over the last year came flooding out. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand, it didn’t matter that it was Christmas Eve, that the mutton ribs, potatoes, mashed swede, Christmas ale and aquavit were on the table; he talked about Heidegger from within, without a single communicative link to the outside world, it was
Dasein
and
Das Man
, it was Trakl and Hölderlin, the great poet Hölderlin, it was Heraclitus and Socrates, Nietzsche and Plato, it was the birds in the trees and the waves in the fjord, it was man’s
Dasein
and the advent of existence, it was the sun in the sky and the rain in the air, the cat’s eyes and the plummeting waterfall. With his hair sticking out in all directions, his suit askew and his tie full of stains he sat there talking, his eyes aglow, they were really glowing, and I will always remember it, for it was pitch dark outside, the rain was beating against the windows, it was Christmas Eve in Norway 1986, our Christmas Eve, the presents were under the tree, everyone was dressed up, and the sole topic of conversation was Heidegger. Grandma was shivering, grandad gnawing at a bone, mum listening attentively, Yngve had stopped listening. As for me, I was indifferent to everything, and above all happy it was Christmas. But even though I didn’t understand a word of what Kjartan said, and nothing of what he wrote, nor anything of the poems he praised with such passion, I did understand intuitively that he was right, that there was such a thing as a supreme philosophy and a supreme poetry, and that even if you didn’t understand it, were unable to partake in it, you only had yourself to blame. Since then, whenever I have thought about the supreme, I have thought about Hölderlin, and when I’ve thought about Hölderlin it has always been associated with mountains and fjords, night and rain, the sky and the earth and my uncle’s glowing eyes.

Although much had changed in my life since then my attitude to poetry was basically the same. I could read it, but poems never opened themselves to me, and that was because I had no ‘right’ to them: they were not for me. When I approached them I felt like a fraud, and I was indeed always unmasked, because what they always said as well, these poems, was, Who do you think you are, coming in here? That was what Osip Mandelstam’s poems said, that was what Ezra Pound’s poems said, that was what Gottfried Benn’s poems said, that was what Johannes Bobrowski’s poems said. You had to earn the right to read them.

How?

It was simple. You opened a book, read, and if the poems opened themselves to you, you had the right, if not, you didn’t. In my early twenties and still full of notions of what I could be, it bothered me a lot that I was one of those for whom the poems did not open. For the consequences of this were serious, much more so than merely being excluded from a literary genre. It also passed judgment on me. The poems looked into another reality, or saw reality in a different way, one which was truer than the way I knew, and the fact that it was not possible to acquire the ability to see and that it was something you either had or you didn’t condemned me to a life on a lower plane, indeed, it made me one of the lowly. The pain of that insight was immense. And strictly speaking there were only three ways of reacting. The first was to admit it to yourself and accept it for what it was. I was an ordinary man who would live an ordinary life and find meaning where I was, nowhere else. In practice that was the way it looked too. I liked watching football and played too whenever I had the chance, I liked pop music and played drums in a band a couple of times a week, I attended lectures at university, went out a fair amount or lay on the sofa at home watching TV in the evenings with the woman I was with at the time. The second way was to deny everything, by telling yourself that it existed inside you but it had not yet come to fruition, and then live a life in the world of literature, perhaps as a critic, perhaps as a university lecturer, perhaps as an author, because it was entirely possible to stay afloat in that world without literature ever opening up to you. You could write a whole dissertation about Hölderlin, for example, by describing the poems, discussing what they dealt with and in what ways the themes found expression, through the syntax, the choice of words, the use of imagery; you could write about the relationship between Hellenic and Christian modes, about the role of the countryside in his poems, about the role of the weather, or how the poems relate to the actual politico-historical reality in which they had arisen, independent of whether the main emphasis was on the biographical, for example his German Protestant background, or on the enormous influence of the French Revolution. You could write about his relationship to other German idealists, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Novalis, or the relationship to Pindar in the late poems. You could write about his unorthodox translations of Sophocles, or read the poems in the light of what he says about writing in his letters. You could also read Hölderlin’s poetry with reference to Heidegger’s understanding of it, or go one step further and write about the clash between Heidegger and Adorno over Hölderlin. You could also write about the whole history of his work’s reception, or of his works in translation. It was possible to do all of this without Hölderlin’s poems ever opening themselves. The same could be done with all poets, and of course it has been. You could also, if you were willing to put in the hard work, write poems yourself if you were one of those for whom poems did not open themselves; after all, only a poet would see the difference between poetry and poetry that resembles poetry. Of these two methods the first, accepting the fact, was the better, but also the more difficult option. The second method, denying it, was easier but also more unpleasant because you were constantly on the verge of the insight that what you were doing actually had no value. And if you lived in the world of literature it was precisely value you were seeking. The third method, which was based on rejecting the whole issue, was therefore the best. There is nothing higher. There is no such thing as privileged insight. Nothing is better or truer than anything else. The poems did not open themselves for me, but that did not necessarily mean I was inferior to them, or that what I wrote necessarily had less value. Both of them, the poems that did not open themselves and what I wrote, were basically the same, namely text. If mine proved to be worse, which of course it was, this was not the result of an irremediable condition – I didn’t have it in me – but was something that could be changed through hard work and increasing experience. Up to a certain limit, of course, concepts such as talent and quality were still indispensable; not everyone was able to write well. The crux was that there was no barrier, nothing insuperable, between those who had it and those who did not; those who saw and those who did not. Rather, it was a question of degrees within the same scale. This was a gratifying thought, and not hard to justify, after all this way of thinking had been dominant in all spheres of art and criticism, as well as at universities from the middle of the 1960s until now. The ideas I had nurtured, and which had been such a natural part of me that I didn’t even realise they were ideas, and accordingly had never articulated, only felt, but which nonetheless had had a controlling influence over me, were Romanticism in its purest form, in other words antiquated. The few who engaged seriously with Romanticism were preoccupied with those aspects that fitted into the contemporary world of ideas, such as the fragmentary or the ironic. But for me Romanticism was not the point – if I felt an affinity to any era, it was the Baroque period. I was attracted to its sense of space, its dizzying heights and depths, its notions about life and theatre, mirrors and bodies, light and dark, art and science – it was more my sense of standing outside the essence, standing outside what was most meaningful, outside what constituted existence. Whether this sense was Romantic or not was beside the point. To dull the pain it caused I had over the years defended myself using all three of the above-mentioned methods, and for long periods believed in them, especially the last. My notion that art was the place where the flames of truth and beauty burned, the last remaining place where life could show its true face, was crazy. But now and then this notion broke through, not as a thought, for it could be argued out of existence, but as a feeling. I knew with my whole being that the notion was a lie, that I was deceiving myself. This was what was in my mind as I stood there in the gateway outside the Swedish Writers’ Association in Stockholm one afternoon in March 2002 flicking through Fioreto’s translation of Hölderlin’s last great hymns.