Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (41 page)

Håkan did indeed feel himself to be prey, in a clamp and a trap. He bent humbly over the keyboard and began what was already his fourth report that week: ‘This extensive collection demonstrates its writer’s industry and ambition. However, the writer uses very unwieldy imagery. Such expressions as “amorous geldings” or “adverse furniture” etc. will leave the reader a little cold.’

Håkan’s job was to read the manuscripts of amateur writers for a large publisher: prose poems, essays, collections of poetry, short stories and aphorisms, historical novels, fantasy novels, autobiographies, in recent times also experimental, interactive fiction. He had been reading for more than a decade, three, four or even five manuscripts a week. That was almost twenty manuscripts a month, a couple of hundred a year.

And Håkan did not merely read: he wrote a page or page and a half reporting on each manuscript and left it with the publisher’s literature department.

Håkan did his work without any particular lust for power, his only aim to earn his living, which remained modest despite a considerable number of weekly hours worked. The fee for each report had remained the same for more than a decade. Without any wish to do so, Håkan wielded cultural and political power. Relying on his reports, the publisher decided to publish or reject the manuscripts. Almost always, it rejected them, for only one or two percent of the manuscripts it received were put on the publisher’s list.

Once Håkan himself had thought he would be a writer. But when, as a young student of literature, as a result of a request from a publisher friend, he had begun to read other people’s attempts, he had quickly, almost as if beaten, abandoned his dream.

In those manuscripts he had seen, as if reproduced in the fragments of a mirror, his own incapacity. Their narcissism, artificiality, lack of concreteness, scattered thoughts and lame emotions were also among his weaknesses. He was man enough to admit it to himself. When he wrote poems and little stories, he always, as he began, seemed to see before him, in the space of thought, a text which he only had to write down. It was bright, light, logical and universal. But it was an entirely different piece of writing from the one which appeared painfully on the screen of his computer. The original text escaped irretrievably from his grasp. The prey remained uncaught.

Over the years, his work as a reader had become increasingly burdensome and unpleasant to Håkan. Only once or twice a year did he bring back to his bedsit a manuscript that brought him a little hope and confidence. Writing reports took Håkan longer and longer. He had begun to feel that reading a manuscript exacted much more from him than the time he could have used for real literature. And that did exist, although at his most miserable he was in danger of forgetting it. Reading manuscripts also robbed him of his enthusiasm for life, his self-respect and his belief in humankind.

Sometimes Håkan still believed that if he had never started working as a reader, he might after all have developed into a writer. Now it was, in any case, too late. The destructive flood of manuscript had drowned beneath it his flexibility, his open world-view and, who knows, any talents of his that might have been worth developing.

There were months in which he only managed to read ten or fifteen manuscripts, and then he lived on tuna fish and porridge and was forced to ask his bank to give him a month’s mortgage holiday.

As he read, Håkan often gesticulated and grimaced. He would grind his teeth, snort contemptuously, even swear aloud. Sometimes he said: ‘For heaven’s sake!’ or ‘Oh, really?’ At others he would hiss, ‘That’s it!’ And, with increasing regularity, ‘Completely pointless!’

An expression of contempt had begun to establish itself on his increasingly bony features.

At first, Håkan had signed his reports with his own name. But a few years ago he had abandoned this incontestably decent habit. He now submitted his reports anonymously and sent them straight to the editors in the literary department. The publisher did not reveal the name of the report-writer, even on request.

It had become necessary to adopt this slightly impolite procedure because of increasing numbers of telephone calls and letters. Only those whose manuscripts had been rejected and who felt they had been treated unfairly contacted Håkan. But, of course, they were in the majority, by a long way.

A certain case, which was in itself insignificant but which had enraged Håkan, had given him the final grounds for anonymity. One Tuesday, when Håkan had got off the local train carrying a heavy briefcase full of manuscripts which he intended to return to the publisher, an unknown male stopped him.

‘So you are Håkan B.,’ he had said.

Unsuspecting, Håkan had conceded that he was indeed the person in question.

‘So it’s you,’ the man continued, piercing him with a glance whose significance was by no means clear.

Håkan waited for the man to introduce himself, but this he did not do. The unknown man was well-dressed and had recently paid a visit to the barber’s. To judge by his appearance, he could have worked at a bank or in a life-insurance office. He was certainly not a manual worker or in receipt of unemployment benefit.

As Håkan walked on along the station bridge, the man glued himself to his left side.

‘What an ass!’ the man said, and Håkan started strongly. He did not believe he had heard correctly.

But the man said again: ‘Ass!’

Håkan continued walking steadily without glancing at the man again. His voice deep with hatred, the man hissed new, quite extraordinary insults and curses into his left ear.

Håkan tried desperately to remember where he might have met this character and how he had hurt him. As their shoes clattered in rhythm on the tarmac he thought he understood. It seemed that they had never met. Perhaps the man’s abuse was not really personal, although he seemed somehow to have discovered Håkan’s name.

‘You,’ the man said, ‘are lacking in both intelligence and heart. I doubt you even have a cortex.’

A cortex? Swallows twittered and pecked at something between the rails. The station clock shone in the cold morning twilight like a second moon. They pushed forward toward the station’s swinging doors, side by side like comrades, in the thick torrent of people hurrying to work.

How, when and where had this completely unfamiliar man gained such an extraordinarily unflattering image of him? Håkan pressed on as usual, his shoulders a little hunched forward, still not responding to the man’s aggressive outbursts.

‘Has no one ever told you that those articles in the Literary Critics’ Society yearbook are pathetic scribbles? They should never have been published.’

Once again, Håkan did not respond, and the man did not appear to expect him to. The two articles to which his persecutor referred had appeared in the yearbook five and eight years earlier. It was quite extraordinary that anyone should still remember them. Both of them dealt with a subject that one would not have thought passion-provoking: they pondered the problems of the philosophy of art, with particular reference to the relationship between the authentic and the copy.

Håkan felt the man’s nervous panting in his ear. For a moment he felt him shake with an anger that had no doubt been seeking an opening for some time. Håkan feared that the worst could happen at any moment: the man would hardly be able to control his rage for much longer, but would soon attack him physically, push him into the cold mud of the bridge and strangle him with the soft green scarf that Håkan had recently bought against the cold November winds.

But Håkan pushed open the heavy glass door and nothing fateful happened. Now the man shifted from literary scholarship to something completely different.

‘Only an idiot like you,’ the man said, ‘could wear a scarf of such a ghastly colour.’

It was as if he had grasped Håkan’s thought about the scarf he would be strangled with. Only when they had reached the newspaper kiosk did Håkan turn suddenly toward the man and say simply: ‘Goodbye,’ and for some reason made to grasp the man by the hand.

At the last moment he realised how completely at variance with the situation his impulse was, and pulled his hand away.

The man had stopped in front of him, very close to him; his flood of words had now ceased. He stared at Håkan with wide eyes made sharp by hatred. Håkan felt that the inimical stranger could see him, his faults and mistakes as if enlarged, without subterfuge or defence. The man could see his bad posture, the ugliness of his aging body, the boil on his chin and the folds in the flabby skin on his neck – as if they had been what was essential about Håkan. It occurred to Håkan that perhaps the green scarf, which had delighted him, did not suit him at all. Perhaps it made his pallid cheeks unpleasantly green.

‘You think you are looking at me,’ Håkan said soundlessly, ‘but you are wrong. I am quite different.’

Hatred is not blind – but nevertheless, it is, for unlike love, it sees only what is visible. And for a moment Håkan felt himself to be one and the same as his intellectual, emotional and physical weaknesses, to be their sum and nothing but.

Håkan descended the elevator with his head bowed, unnaturally stiff. He still felt the man’s burning gaze on his neck. Only as he reached the station tunnel did he understand that he had probably read the man’s manuscript and written a report on it. It could not have been a flattering one.

As soon as he reached the publisher’s office, after leaving the manuscripts and his opinions with the editorial assistant, he announced that from now on he did not intend to sign his reports with his own name. The leading editor of the literary department was fetched. He approved Håkan’s demand so calmly and as such a matter of course that Håkan was amazed. It was only now that it occurred to him that the publisher’s other readers (whose identity he did not himself know) perhaps never appeared under their own names. He alone had been so naïve that he had for years signed his reports and thus submitted himself to the intrusions and anger of rejected writers.

After this Håkan became more cautious as a writer of reports. He did not wish for any more lifelong enemies in addition to the numerous ones he imagined he already had. Sometimes, as he lay awake, Håkan felt an unknown anger seeking, in the darkness, his slowed heart.

But at the same time he could feel his self-respect crumbling. Håkan had once believed in honesty, unconditional and unflinching directness. But now he knew that the consequences of frankness could be terrible and completely unpredictable. He was not only afraid for his own peace of mind. After all, there was some primitive sympathy in him even for the writers. Who stood to benefit from his sincerity? How much would it weigh against the damage he had caused? Could he pride himself in a directness that resulted in deep and lengthy discomfort, perhaps even in acts of desperation?

That was why Håkan attempted to seek a balance between his true opinions and necessary expressions of politeness. He watered down even justified annoyance and made frequent use of such phrases as ‘perhaps’, ‘a little’ and ‘not necessarily’.

He would have liked to have written, ‘You are wasting both your own time and other people’s. Have pity on yourself, your family and the overworked editors at the publisher’s. For God’s sake, go and do something of benefit to both yourself and your fatherland.’

Instead, he wrote dryly and falsely, ‘The manuscript contains promising starts and interesting trains of thought, but it remains fragmented and uneven.’

Or he would very much have liked to say: ‘You are not well. Stop this chatter and get yourself a therapist before you are forced into rehab and a straightjacket.’

But he wrote: ‘The reader will not easily grasp perhaps personally significant lines such as “As the century departed he hanged the iris on its line,” or “Anne inside the plum / a museum car her skirt / in the ice-cream bar”.’

When Håkan read a collection of aphorisms whose author aspired to be a humorist as well as a satirist, he wanted to write: ‘You miserable wretch, so you think you amuse the writer. Your pseudo-jokey rhymes make me sick.’

But instead, he wrote, ‘The manuscript also attempts satire, but these experiments remain a little feeble.’

Håkan had a particular horror of aesthetes who imagined that being a poet – even in cases where this was merely a title the writer had awarded himself – would isolate them from the activities and senseless business of ordinary people.

Another wearisome category included those writers who constantly lined up learned quotations and mottos or musical terms. But the writer’s own thoughts, what he himself had to say, would have fitted on one line, and even if it was a new and previously unwritten line, one forgot it as soon as one had read it.

Håkan yawned and wrote and yawned again: ‘It is worth weighing up very carefully when a quotation really does open up one’s own text, when it is just an extra additive or a proof of learning. A richly nuanced collection, but one that still needs adjustment.’

Håkan found himself reading mottoes that, in recent years, were increasingly taken from Foucault or Baudrillard, or even Lacan. There were texts that swarmed with references to Baudelaire, Lorca, Dostoevsky, the pre-Raphaelites and pre-Cretan mythology.

Some cultivated Dante with all their might, others Montesquieu. But they never remembered the latter’s words: ‘It seems to be a wise provision of nature that the follies of men should be short-lived; but books interfere and immortalise them. A fool, not content with having bored all those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come . . . he wishes posterity to be informed of his existence, and he would have it remember for ever that he was fool.’

Many wrote 500 or 750 pages about their miserable lives, which even they loathed. But they wanted above all to write a novel, not an autobiography, and so they catalogued the events of their days in the third person. One began with spring 1995, another from December 1921. The main character was without exception noble, upright, faithful, intelligent and humorous, but he was always and everywhere surrounded by cheats, slanderers and plotters. His decency was shamelessly exploited, greedy and base characters schemed for their own benefit, violent, fraudulent and twisted people swarmed around him.