My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (69 page)

‘Fine by me.’

‘Let’s do a few shots outside first. Then I’ll let you two get on with it,’ the photographer said.

At that moment the journalist’s mobile rang. He scrutinised the number.

‘I’ll have to take this,’ he said. The conversation, which lasted no more than one, maximum two, minutes, was about snowfall, a car, train times, a skiing hut. He rang off and met my glance.

‘I’m going skiing with some friends for the weekend. That was our lift from the train to the hut. An old boy who’s always helped us out.’

‘Sounds nice,’ I said.

A hut, skiing with friends, that was something I had never done. While I was at
gymnas
and for a couple of years into the course at university, this had been a sore point. I barely had any friends. And the few I had didn’t know each other. Now I was too old to bother about that sort of thing, but nevertheless I did feel a stab of pain, on behalf of the old me, as it were.

He put the mobile into his pocket and set the cup down on the table. The photographer was packing away his gear.

‘Shall we go then?’ I said.

It was a bit awkward standing together and getting dressed to go out, the hall was too narrow, they were too close, no one said anything. I called goodbye to Linda and we went down the stairs and out. On the front doorstep I lit a cigarette. The temperature was biting cold. The photographer drew me over to the step across the street, where I posed for a few minutes with the cigarette cupped behind my hand until the photographer said he would like it in the picture, if I didn’t mind. I understood what he meant, it gave a bit of life, so I stood on the step smoking while he clicked away and I moved according to his instructions, all of which was registered by the many passers-by, then we walked to the tunnel entrance, where he continued for a further five minutes until he was happy. He left, and I walked in silence with the journalist over the hill and down to the Metro station on the other side. A train pulled into the platform at once, we stepped on and sat by the window facing each other.

‘Taking the Metro still reminds me of the Norway Cup,’ I said. ‘When I catch a whiff of that special smell in the concourses that’s what I think of. I come from a small town, you see, and then the Metro was the most exotic invention in existence. And Pepsi-Cola. We didn’t have that either.’

‘Did you play football for a long time?’

‘Until I was eighteen. But I was never any good. It was a very low level, all of it.’

‘Is everything you do at a low level? You said you hadn’t read any of your books. And in interviews with you that I’ve seen you often talk about how poor what you do is. Aren’t you being a bit too self-critical?’

‘No, I don’t think so. It depends how high you set the bar, of course.’

He peered out of the window as the train emerged from the tunnel at T-Central.

‘Do you think you’re going to win the prize?’ he asked.

‘The Nordic Council one?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Who will then?’

‘Monica Fagerholm.’

‘You seem sure?’

‘It’s a very good novel, the author’s a woman and it’s ages since Finland has won it. Of course she’s going to get it.’

The conversation went quiet again. The time before and after an interview was always uneasy; he, and I didn’t know him, was there to elicit my innermost thoughts, but not yet, the situation hadn’t arisen, the roles hadn’t been allocated, we were on an equal footing, but there were no points of contact, nonetheless we had to talk.

I thought about Ingrid. I couldn’t say anything to anyone, not even Linda, until I was absolutely sure that I was right. I would simply have to mark the bottles. Would have to do it this evening. Then have a look tomorrow. If the levels were down I would have to take it from there.

We arrived in Skanstull, and with the town glittering in the darkness around us we walked in silence to Pelikanen, where we found ourselves a table at the back of the pub. We sat chatting for an hour and a half about me and my work, then I got up and left while he, not having to fly back to Norway until the next day, remained where he was. As always after long interviews I felt empty, drained like a ditch. As always, it felt as though I had betrayed myself. Merely by sitting there I had gone along with the premise, which was that the two books I had written were good and important, and that I, the writer, was an unusual and interesting person. That was the starting point for the conversation: everything I said was important. If I didn’t say anything important, well, then I was just hiding it. Because it obviously had to be somewhere! So when I told stories about my childhood, for example, some perfectly normal, ordinary story everyone had experienced, it was important because it was me who said it. It said something about me, the writer of two good and important books. And I not only went along with this view, which formed the basis for the conversation, but did it with great enthusiasm. I sat there jabbering away like a parrot in the zoo. All while knowing the reality of the situation. How often did a good meaningful novel come out in Norway? Somewhere between every ten to twenty years. The last good Norwegian novel was
All Ablaze
by Kjartan Fløgstad, and that was published in 1980, twenty-five years ago. The last good one before that was
The Birds
by Vesaas, which appeared in 1957, so a further twenty-three years previously. How many Norwegian novels had there been in the meantime? Thousands! Yes, thousands! Some of them good, a few more passable, most weak. That’s how it is, nothing to shout about, everyone knows this. The problem is what surrounds all these authorships, the flattery that mediocre writers thrive on and, as a consequence of their false self-image, everything they are emboldened to say to the press and TV.

I know what I’m talking about. I’m one of them myself.

Oh, I could cut off my head with bitterness and shame that I have allowed myself to be lured, not just once but time after time. If I have learned one thing over these years which seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following:

Don’t believe you are anybody.

Do not bloody believe you are somebody.

Because you are not. You’re just a smug mediocre little shit.

Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t. You’re just a little shit.

So keep your head down and work, you little shit. Then at least you’ll get something out of it. Shut your mouth, keep your head down, work and know that you’re not worth a shit.

This, more or less, was what I had learned.

This was the sum of all my experience.

This was the only true bloody thought I’d ever had.

This was one side of the coin. The other was that I was preoccupied, to an unusually high degree, by being liked, and always had been, ever since I was small. I had attached huge importance to what other people thought about me ever since I was seven. When newspapers showed some interest in what I was doing and who I was, it was, on the one hand, confirmation that I was liked and therefore something part of me accepted with great pleasure while, on the other, it became an almost unmanageable problem because it was no longer possible to control other people’s opinions of me, for the simple reason that I no longer knew them, no longer saw them. So whenever I had done an interview and there was something in the interview I hadn’t said or what I had said was cast in a different light, I moved heaven and earth to change it. If it wasn’t possible, my self-image burned with shame. The fact that despite all this I went on giving interviews, and once again sat facing a journalist somewhere, was the result of my desire for flattery being stronger than both my fear of looking an idiot and any ideals of quality I had, as well as acknowledging that it was important for the books to reach a readership. When I had written
A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven
I said to Geir Gulliksen that I didn’t want to do any interviews, but after talking to him I decided to do them after all, such was the effect he had on me, and I justified the about-turn with the excuse that I owed the publishing house nothing less. But it was no good: I was a writer, not a salesman or a whore.

All this turned into one unholy mess. I often complained I was presented as an idiot in the newspapers, but it was no one’s fault but my own because I saw how other writers were presented – for example Kjartan Fløgstad – they definitely never came across as idiots. Fløgstad was a man of integrity, he stood as tall as a tree whatever was going on around him, and had to belong, I guessed, to that rare breed of whole person.

And then he didn’t talk about himself.

What had I just done, if not that and only that?

I gave my ticket to the black man in the ticket office window, he stamped it hard and pushed it back with expressionless eyes, and I went back down the escalator to the underground, through the tunnel and onto the narrow platform, where, after confirming that the next train was due in seven minutes, I sat down on a bench.

In late autumn, when
Out of the World
was published,
TV2 News
wanted to do an interview. They came to my home to collect me, we drove down to the Hurtigruten terminal, where the interview was going to take place, and on the way there, by the Technology Centre at the end of Nygårdsparken, the journalist turned and asked who I was.

‘Who are you actually?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ I answered.

‘Well, Erik Fosnes Hansen is the sage, the cultural conservative, the child prodigy. Roy Jacobsen is the Socialist Party writer. Vigdis Hjort is the wanton and drunken female writer. Who are you? I know nothing about you.’

I shrugged. The sun was glittering on the snow.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just an ordinary fellow.’

‘Come on! You’ve got to give me something. Something you’ve done?’

‘Had a few odd jobs. Studied a bit. You know . . .’

He turned round in his seat. Later that day he solved the problem by showing rather than telling: towards the end of the interview he pieced together a series of pauses and hesitations to represent my personality, and brought it to a conclusion with my statement: ‘Ibsen said that he who stood alone was strongest. I think that’s wrong.’

Sitting on the bench, I threw up my hands and took a deep breath as the memory of what I had said overcame me.

How could I have said anything like that?

Had I believed it?

Yes, I had. But it was my mother’s ideas I was expressing, she was the one who was preoccupied by human relationships, who thought that was where value lay, not me. That is, at the time I was, at the time I believed it. But not from any personal experience, it was just one of the things that were as they were.

Ibsen had been right. Everything I saw around me confirmed it. Relationships were there to eradicate individuality, to fetter freedom and suppress that which was pushing through. My mother was never so angry as when we discussed the concept of freedom. When I expressed my opinion, she snorted and said that was just an American notion without any content, vacuous and fallacious. We were here for others. But this was the idea that had led to the systematised existence we had now, where unpredictability had vanished and you could go from nursery to school to university and into working life as if it were a tunnel, convinced that your choices had been made of your own free will, while in reality you had been sieved through like grains of sand right from your very first school day: some were sent into practical jobs, some into theoretical, some to the top, some to the bottom, all while being taught that everyone was equal. This was the idea that had made us, at least my generation, have
expectations
of life, to live in the belief that we could make demands, make real demands and blame every possible circumstance other than ourselves if it didn’t turn out the way we had imagined, that made us rage against the state if a tsunami came and you didn’t receive immediate help. How pathetic was that? Become embittered if you didn’t get the job you had merited. And this was the thinking that meant the fall was no longer a possibility, except for the very weakest, because you could always get money, and pure existence, one where you stand face to face with a life-threatening emergency or peril, had been completely eliminated. This was the thinking that had spawned a culture in which the greatest mediocrities, warm and with a well-fed stomach, trumpeted their cheap platitudes, thus allowing writers such as Lars Saabye Christensen or whoever to be worshipped as if Virgil himself were sitting on the sofa and telling us whether he had used a pen or a typewriter or a computer and what times of the day he wrote. I hated it, I didn’t want to know about it. But who was talking to journalists about how he wrote his mediocre books as though he were some literary giant, a champion of the written word, if not myself?

How can you sit there receiving applause when you know that what you have done is not good enough?

I had
one
opportunity. I had to cut all my ties with the flattering, thoroughly corrupt world of culture in which everyone, every single little upstart, was for sale, cut all my ties with the vacuous TV and newspaper world, sit down in a room and read in earnest, not contemporary literature but literature of the highest quality, and then write as if my life depended on it. For twenty years if need be.

But I couldn’t grasp the opportunity. I had a family and I owed it to them to be there. I had friends. And I had a weakness in my character which meant that I would say yes, yes, when I wanted to say no, no, which was so afraid of hurting others, which was so afraid of conflict and which was so afraid of not being liked that it could forgo all principles, all dreams, all opportunities, everything that smacked of truth, to prevent this happening.

I was a whore. This was the only suitable term.

Half an hour later, after I closed the door behind me at home, there was a sound of voices in the living room. I poked my head in and saw that Mikaela was there. They were curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea in their hands. On the table in front of them was a candlestick with three lighted candles, a dish with three pieces of cheese in it and a basket full of various biscuits.