My Struggle: Book One (48 page)

“Can we do some by the apple trees as well?” Asbjørn said.

Hauge nodded, got up, and followed Asbjørn to the trees. I bent down and stubbed out my cigarette on the ground, cast around for a place to put it as I straightened up, I couldn't just flick it onto his drive, but couldn't see anywhere suitable so put it in my pocket.

Surrounded by mountains on all sides, it felt as if we were standing in an enormous vault. There was still a warm, gentle waft to the air, as there often is in autumnal Vestland.

“Do you think we can ask him if he would read some poems for us?” Espen said.

“If you dare,” I said, and noticed that Asbjørn was smiling. If Hauge was a poet for Espen, he was a legend for Asbjørn, and now he was standing there photographing him with permission to take all the time he needed. Once we had finished we went into the living room to fetch our things. I took out the book I had bought in a shop on the way, Hauge's collected poems, and asked him if he would write a line for my mother in it.

“What's her name?” he said.

“Sissel,” I said.

“Anything else?”

“Hatløy. Sissel Hatløy.”

“
To Sissel Hatløy with best wishes from Olav H. Hauge
,” he wrote, and passed it back.

“Thank you,” I said.

He escorted us to the door as we left. Espen had his back to him, getting the book ready, then suddenly turned with a face shining with embarrassment and hope.

“Would you mind reading us a poem?”

“Not at all,” Hauge said. “Which one would you like to hear?”

“Perhaps the one about the cat?” Esben said. “On the drive? That would be fitting, ha ha ha.”

“Let me see,” Hauge said. “There it is.”

And he read.

The cat is sitting
out front
when you come.
Talk a bit with the cat.
He is the most sensitive one here.

Everyone was smiling, even Hauge.

“That was a short poem,” he said. “Would you like to hear another one?”

“We'd love to!” Espen said.

He thumbed through, then began to read.

T
IME TO
G
ATHER IN

These mild days of sun in September.
Time to gather in. There are still tufts
of cranberries in the wood, the rose hips redden
along the stone dykes, nuts fall at a touch,
and clumps of blackberries gleam in thickets,
thrushes poke about for the last red currants
and the wasp sucks away at the sweet plums.
In the evenings I set my ladder aside and hang
up my basket in the shed. Meager glaciers
already have a thin covering of new snow.
Lying in bed, I hear the throb of the brisling fishers
on their way out. All night, I know, they'll glide
with staring searchlights up and down the fjord.

Standing there on the drive and looking down at the ground while he read, I was thinking that this is a great and privileged moment, but not even this thought had time to settle, for the moment occupied by the poem, which its originator read in its place of origin, was so much greater than us, it belonged to infinity, and how could we, so young and no brighter than three sparrows, receive it? We could not, and at any rate, I squirmed as he read. It was almost more than I could endure. A joke would have been apposite, at least to lend the everyday life in which we were trapped some kind of form. Oh, the beauty of it, how to deal with it? How to meet it?

Hauge raised his hand in salute as we departed, and he had already gone into the house by the time Asbjørn started the car and was on the road. I felt the way you do after a whole day in the summer sun, worn out and sluggish, despite the fact that all you have done is lie on a rock somewhere with your eyes closed. Asbjørn stopped by a café to pick up his girlfriend, Kari, who had been waiting there while we interviewed Hauge. After we had discussed what had happened for a few minutes, the car went quiet, we sat in silence peering out of the windows, at the shadows lengthening, the colors deepening, the wind coming off the fjord and tousling the hair of those outdoors, the newspaper pennants outside the kiosks flapping, children on their bicycles, those eternal village children on their bicycles. I began to write up the interview from the recording as soon as I came home because I knew from experience
that the resistance to the voices and questions and all that had happened would increase quickly over time, so if I did it there and then while I was still relatively close to it, my doubts and the shame would be manageable. The problem I realized at once was that all the good exchanges had taken place beyond the range of the tape recorder. The solution was to write it as it had been, to present everything, our first impressions, the mumbling introvert he had been, the sudden change, the apple pie, the library. Espen wrote an introduction to Hauge's authorship, and several small analytical passages in between, which contrasted well with what else had gone on. From the editor of TAL, the philosophy student, disciple of Professor Georg Johannesen, and Nynorsk speaker, Hans Marius Hansteen, we heard that Hauge had enjoyed it, he had told Johannesen that it was one of the best interviews he had experienced, although it probably wasn't, we were only twenty years old, and as far as Hauge's evaluations of others were concerned, courtesy always triumphed over veracity, but what he liked, and what prompted his wife to ask us for more copies for their friends and acquaintances, was, I reflected after reading his diaries, that it may have given him a picture of himself that was not mere flattery. Of course Hauge was well aware of his hostile, old-man aspects, but people held him in such high esteem that this was always overlooked, a matter which, hidden deep behind layers of politeness and decency, and with him being the truth-loving person he was, he cannot always have appreciated.

Six months later it was Kjartan Fløgstad's turn. He had read the interview with Hauge, and would be happy to be interviewed by TAL, he said when I called him. If I had been on my own I would, out of sheer nervousness and respect, have read all his books, neatly jotted down enough questions for a conversation lasting several hours and recorded everything, for even though my questions might have been foolish his answers would not have been, and if I had them taped, his tone would carry the interview, however deficient my contribution. But, with Yngve along, I was not nervous in the same way, I leaned on him, I didn't read all the books, jotted down less carefully worded questions, I also took account of the relationship between Yngve and myself,
I didn't want to be seen as a corrective presence, I didn't want him to think I could do this better than he, and when we went to Oslo to meet Fløgstad – it was a gray spring day, the end of March or beginning of April, outside a café in Bjølsen – I was less prepared than I had ever been, before or since, and on top of everything Yngve and I had decided that we wouldn't use either a Dictaphone or a tape recorder or take notes at the interview, that would make it stiff and formal, we had figured, we wanted it to be more like a conversation, impressionistic, something that developed on the spot. My memory was nothing to brag about, but Yngve was like an elephant, he never forgot a thing, and if we wrote down what had been said straight after the interview, we could fill in each other's gaps and together complete the whole picture, or so we thought. Fløgstad led us politely into the café, which was of the dark, beer-dispensing variety, we sat down at a round table, hung our jackets over the backs of the chairs, took out our question sheets, and when we said that we were going to run the interview without notes or a tape recorder, Fløgstad said that commanded respect. Once, he added, he had been interviewed by the Swedish newspaper
Dagens Nyheter
by a journalist who hadn't taken any notes, and the report had been impeccable, something he found very impressive. As the interview progressed I was as focused on what Yngve said as on Fløgstad's reactions, not only how he answered, the tone of his voice and body language but also the content of the conversation. My own questions addressed what was going on around the table as much as what went on in Fløgstad's books, in the sense that they tended to complement or compensate for something in the situation. The interview took an hour, and after we had shaken hands and thanked him for his willingness to talk to us, and he had set off for what we assumed was where he lived, we were excited and happy, because it had gone well, hadn't it? We had been talking to Fløgstad! We were so excited that neither of us was in the mood to sit down and write a report about what had been said, we could do that the following day, now it was Saturday, the weekly soccer pools match would soon be on TV, we could watch it in a bar, and then go out, we weren't in Oslo that often after all . . . the train went the next day, so there wasn't any time to write
anything down then, and when we arrived in Bergen we went to our own places. And if we had already waited three days, we could wait three more, couldn't we? And three more, and three more? When, at last, we did sit down to write, we could not remember much. We had the questions of course, they were a great help, and we had a vague idea of what he had answered, partly based on what we actually remembered, partly on what we thought he would have answered. It was my responsibility to write the report, I was the one who had been given the commission and did this sort of work, and after I had cooked up a few pages I realized this would not do, it was too vague, too imprecise, so I suggested to Yngve that we should phone Fløgstad and ask him whether we could ask a few supplementary questions over the phone. We sat down at a table in Yngve's flat in Blekebakken and scrawled down some new questions. My heart was thumping as I dialed Fløgstad's number, and the situation was not improved when his reserved voice answered at the other end. But I managed to explain what I wanted and he agreed to give us another half an hour, although I could detect from his voice that he was beginning to put two and two together. While I asked the questions and he answered, Yngve was sitting in the adjacent room with the headphones, like a secret agent, writing down everything that was said. With that, we had it in the bag. Between all the inaccuracies and vagueness, I inserted the new sentences, which were genuine in quite a different way and also gave a touch of authenticity to the rest. After I added a general introduction to Fløgstad's work, as well as more factual or analytical insertions, it didn't look too bad. In fact, it looked quite good. Fløgstad had asked to read the interview before it went to press, so I sent it to him with a few friendly words. I had no idea whether he insisted on reading all such reports in advance or just ours, as we had been foolhardy enough to do the interview without taking notes, but since I had managed to pull it off in the end I didn't much care. I admit, I did have a vague sense of unease about the imprecise parts, but I dismissed it, to my knowledge there was no requirement for interviews to be recorded verbatim. So when Fløgstad's letter fluttered into my mailbox some days later and I held it in my hands, I was blissfully unsuspecting, although my palms
were sweaty and my heart was pounding. Spring had come, the sun warmed, I was wearing sneakers, a T-shirt, and jeans and was on my way to the music conservatory where a pal of my cousin's, Jon Olav, was going to give me drum lessons. It might have been wiser to leave the letter unopened because time was tight, but curiosity got the better of me, and, ambling toward the bus, I opened it. Held the printout of the interview. It was covered with red marks and red comments in the margin. “I never said this,” I saw, “Imprecise,” I saw, “No, no, no,” I saw, “???,” I saw. “Where did you get that from?” I saw. Almost every sentence had been commented on in this way. I stood stock-still, reading. I could feel myself falling. I plummeted into the darkness. He had attached a short note, I read it as quickly as I could, in feverish haste, as if the humiliation would be over when the last word had been read. “I think it's best this never appears in print,” it concluded. “Best wishes, Kjartan Fløgstad.” When I set off, dragging my feet, looking at his red marks again and again as I walked, my insides were in turmoil. Hot with shame, on the verge of tears, I stuffed the letter in my back pocket and waited by the bus which had arrived at that moment, boarded, and sat in a window seat at the rear. The shame burned through me as the bus went at a snail's pace towards Haukeland, and the same thoughts churned around my brain. I wasn't good enough, I was not a writer and never would be. What had made us happy, talking to Fløgstad, was now just laughable and painful. On arriving home I called Yngve, who to my surprise took it all quite lightly. That's a pity, he said. Are you sure you can't shuffle it around a bit and send him a new version? Once the worst despair was past, I read the comments and the accompanying note again and saw that Fløgstsad had commented on my comments, for example, the epithet “Cortazar-like.” Surely he wasn't allowed to do that. To meddle with my opinions of his books? My evaulations? I wrote this in a letter to him, agreeing that the interview did have inaccuracies in a few places, as he had pointed out, but he had in fact said some of it, I knew this because I had taken notes during the telephone interview, and what was more he had raised objections to my – the journalist's – comments, and that was going beyond his remit. If he wanted, I could use his corrections and suggestions
as a basis, perhaps do another interview, and then send him a revised version? A polite but firm letter came some days later, in which he conceded that some of his comments had related to my interpretations, but that did not change the main thrust, which was that the interview should not appear in print. After I had shaken off the humiliation, it took about six months, a period in which I could not see Fløgstad's face, his books or articles without feeling profound shame, I turned the episode into an anecdote for general merriment. Yngve didn't like the fact that it was at our expense, he didn't see anything comical in being humiliated, or to be more accurate, he didn't see any humiliation. Our questions had been good, the conversation with Fløgstad meaningful, that was what he wanted to take from the experience.