My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (75 page)

How much of the twenty-year-old was left in me now?

Not much, I thought, sitting and looking up at the glimmering stars above the town. The feeling of being me was the same. The person I woke up to every morning and fell asleep to every night. But the quivering panic was gone. As was the immense focus on others. And its opposite, the megalomaniac importance I ascribed to myself had become smaller. Perhaps not much smaller, but smaller nevertheless.

When I was twenty it was only ten years since I had been ten. Everything in my childhood was still close. It was still my reference point, from it I made sense of things. Not now, not any more.

I got up and went in. Linda and John were asleep, lying close together in the darkness of the bedroom. John like a little ball. I lay down beside them, watched for a while, until I too fell asleep.

Ten days later, early in the morning, I landed at Kjevik Airport, outside Kristiansand. Even though between the ages of thirteen and eighteen I had lived ten kilometres away and the countryside was full of memories, it aroused little or nothing in me this time, perhaps because it was no more than two years since I had last been there, perhaps because I was further away than ever. I descended the steps from the plane with Topdalsfjord to the left sparkling in the light from the February sun, and Ryensletta to the right, where one New Year’s Eve Jan Vidar and I had dragged ourselves downhill through a snowstorm.

I walked into the terminal building, past the baggage carousel, to a kiosk, where I bought a cup of coffee and took it with me outside. Lit a cigarette, watched people coming out in dribs and drabs, heading for the airport bus or the line of taxis, everywhere I heard the southern Norwegian dialect, which filled me with such ambivalence. It belonged here, it was the very marker of belonging, both cultural and geographical, and I could still hear the smugness I had always heard in it so clearly, probably my own interpretation, because I didn’t belong here myself and never had done.

A life is simple to understand, the elements that determine it are few. In mine there were two. My father and the fact that I had never belonged anywhere.

It was no more difficult than that.

I switched on my mobile phone and looked at the clock. A few minutes past ten. I was supposed to give the day’s first talk at one at the new university in Agder, so I had plenty of time. The second was in Søgne, approximately twenty kilometres outside the town, at half past seven. I had decided to speak without a script. I had never done this before, and fear and nerves were washing through me about every ten minutes. I was weak at the knees too, and it felt as if the hand holding the cup was shaking. But it wasn’t, I confirmed. I stubbed the cigarette out on the ash-coloured grid above the rubbish bin and went through the automatic doors, back to the kiosk, where I bought three newspapers and sat down on one of the high barstools to read them. Ten years ago I had written about this room, it was where the main protagonist in
Out of the World
, Henrik Vankel, went to meet Miriam in the final scene of the novel. I had been up in Volda, on the west coast, writing, where the view of the fjord, ferries shuttling hither and thither, the lights in the harbour and beneath the mountains on the other side was a mere shadow in the rooms and the countryside I was describing, this Kristiansand I had once wandered around and was now revisiting in my mind. I might not have remembered what people said to me, I might not have remembered what had happened where; however I did remember exactly what it looked like and the atmosphere which surrounded it. I remembered all the rooms I had been in and all the landscapes. If I closed my eyes I could invoke all the details of the house in which I had grown up, and the neighbour’s house, and the countryside around, at least within a radius of a couple of kilometres. The schools, the swimming baths, the sports halls, the youth clubs, the petrol stations, the shops, my relatives’ houses. The same applied to the books I had read. What they were about was gone in weeks, but the places where the plot had taken place had stayed with me for years, perhaps they would for ever, what did I know?

I flicked through
Dagbladet
, followed by
Aftenposten
and
Fædrelandsvennen
, then sat watching people pass by. I ought to have spent the time preparing. All I had done thus far was read through some old papers the night before and print the texts I was going to read. On the plane I had written down ten points I would cover. I couldn’t bring myself to do any more because the thought that I was only going to talk, that there was nothing simpler, was so strong and so appealing. I was supposed to talk about the two books I had written. I couldn’t do that, so it would have to be about how the books came into being, those years of nothing until something definite began to take shape, how it slowly but surely took over, in such a way that in the end everything came by itself. Writing a novel is setting yourself a goal and then walking there in your sleep, Lawrence Durrell had once said that was what it was like, and it was true. We have access not only to our own lives but to almost all the other lives in our cultural circle, access not only to our own memories but to the memories of the whole of our damn culture, for I am you and you are everyone, we come from the same and are going to the same, and on the way we hear the same on the radio, see the same on TV, read the same in the press, and within us there is the same fauna of famous people’s faces and smiles. Even if you sit in a tiny room in a tiny town hundreds of kilometres from the centre of the world and don’t meet a single soul, their hell is your hell, their heaven is your heaven, you have to burst the balloon that is the world and let everything in it spill over the sides.

That, more or less, was what I was going to say.

Language is shared, we grow into it, and the forms we use it in are also shared, so irrespective of how idiosyncratic you and your notions are, in literature you can never free yourself from others. It is the other way round, it is literature which draws us closer together. Through its language, which none of us owns and which indeed we can hardly have any influence on, and through its form, which no one can break free of alone, and if anyone should do so, it is only meaningful if it is immediately followed by others. Form draws you out of yourself, distances you from yourself, and it is this distance which is the prerequisite for closeness to others.

For the talk I was going to start with an anecdote about Hauge, the crabby old man who mumbled and was so locked inside himself, utterly isolated for all those years, yet so much closer to the centre of culture and civilisation than perhaps anyone else of his era. What conversations did he have? What places did he inhabit?

I slipped down off the stool and went to the counter for a refill. Changed a fifty-krone note into coins. I had to ring Linda before going any further, and I couldn’t use my mobile phone to call from abroad.

It’ll be fine, I thought as I scanned the two sheets of cues. It didn’t matter too much that these were old ideas and I no longer believed in them. The important thing was that I said something.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fibre of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair. I couldn’t write like this, it wouldn’t work, every single sentence was met with the thought: but you’re just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

That was as far as the thought got, it hit a wall. If fiction was worthless, the world was too, for nowadays it was through fiction we saw it.

Now of course I could relativise this as well. I could think it was more about my mental state, my personal psychology than the actual state of the world. If I spoke to Espen or Tore about it, who were now my oldest friends, whom I had known long before they made their debuts as writers, they would utterly reject my view. Each in their own way. Espen was the critical type, yet at the same time he had this burning curiosity, he had a voracious appetite for the world, and when he wrote all his energy was focused outwards: politics, sport, music, philosophy, the history of the Church, medical science, biology, painting, great events of the present, great events of the past, wars and battlefields, but also his daughters, his holiday trips, minor events he had witnessed: he wrote about everything, and with his characteristic lightness, which he had because he wasn’t interested in the in-turned gaze, introspection, where his criticism, which was so fruitful on the outside, could easily contrive to destroy everything he tried to understand. It was this participation in the world that Espen liked and craved. When I first got to know him he was introverted and shy, self-contained and not very happy. I had seen the long way he had come, to the life he lived now, which he had managed so that everything that depressed him was gone. He had landed on his feet, he was happy, and if he was critical of much in the world he didn’t despise it. Tore’s lightness was of a different kind: he loved the present and took a great interest in it, which perhaps stemmed from his deep fascination with pop music – the anatomy of the charts, one week’s top songs being replaced by others the next, the whole aesthetic of pop, big sales, high media visibility, touring with his own show. He had transferred this to literature, for which of course he was castigated, but nevertheless he carried on with typical resolve. If there was one thing he hated it was modernism because it was non-communicative, inaccessible, abstruse and endlessly self-important, though he never bothered to elaborate. But what do you say to have any impact on a man who at one time admired the Spice Girls? To influence a man who once wrote an enthusiastic essay about the sitcom
Friends
? I liked the direction he was taking, towards the pre-modern novel, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Dickens, but I didn’t share his belief that the form could be transferred to today. Hence the only thing I was doing that he really criticised was the form, which he thought was weak. I also liked the direction Espen was taking, towards the scholarly but digressive and overflowing, all-encompassing essay which had something Baroque about it, but I disliked the standpoint he took, in which for example rationalism was lauded and Romanticism ridiculed. Nonetheless, Espen and Tore didn’t do anything by halves, and I saw nothing wrong in that; on the contrary, that was what I also had to do, affirm life, in a Nietzschean sense, for there was nothing else. This was all we had, this was all that existed, and so should we say no to it?

I took out my mobile and flipped it open. The photo of Heidi and Vanja shone up at me. Heidi with her face pressed against the display, one big smile, Vanja a little more tentative behind.

It was a quarter to eleven.

I got up and went to the payphone, inserted forty kroner and dialled Linda’s mobile number.

‘How was it this morning?’ I asked.

‘Terrible,’ she said. ‘Absolute chaos. Uttterly out of control. Heidi clawed John again. Vanja and Heidi had a fight. And Vanja had a temper tantrum on the street as we were about to go.’

‘Oh no. Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘And then when we got to the nursery Vanja said. “You and dad are always so angry. You’re always so angry.” I was so upset! So unbelievably upset.’

‘I can understand that. It’s terrible. We’ll have to sort this out, Linda. We have to. We have to find a solution. It’s no good what we’re doing. I’ll have to pull myself together. A lot of this is my fault.’

‘Yes, we must,’ Linda said. ‘We’ll have to talk about it when you come home. What drives me to despair is that I only want us to be happy. That’s all I want. And I can’t do it! I’m such a terrible mother. I can’t even be alone with my own children.’

‘No, that’s not true. You’re a fantastic mother. That’s not what this is about. But we’ll get there. We will.’

‘Yes . . . How was the trip?’

‘Fine. I’m in Kristiansand now. Off to the university soon. I’m dreading it. I really hate this. I can’t think of anything worse. And then I go and do it again and again.’

‘It always goes well though.’

‘That’s a qualified truth. Sometimes it does. But I don’t want to keep grumbling. It’ll be fine, and I am fine. I’ll ring again tonight, OK? If there is anything, ring my mobile. It’s OK for incoming calls.’

‘All right.’

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Walking in Pildamms Park with John. He’s asleep. It’s nice here and I should be happy. But . . . this morning has shattered me.’

‘It’ll pass. You’ll have a nice afternoon together. Linda, I’ve got to go. Bye!’