The Discoverer (65 page)

There is a well-known adage which says that love bears everything, believes everything, hopes in everything, endures everything. To this should be added: Love changes everything.

The most important story has not yet been told. That of the emergence of a genius. How could one man enthral so many thousands, almost inspire an entire nation to change direction. How could anyone come up with an idea as exceptional as that conceived by Jonas Wergeland.

That seminal work of art
Thinking Big
, a feat unparalleled in the history of modern Norwegian thought, has faded from the minds of the
Norwegian
people. It is a puzzle, and more than a little depressing, but it is
nonetheless
a fact. Not that the programmes have been forgotten – clips from them are still doing the rounds. There is always a chance, in any gathering, of someone mentioning a scene in which Henrik Ibsen wanders around inside his own brain; or, while out skiing with friends, referring to a programme in which Fridtjof Nansen stood and wept. Jonas Wergeland had a gift for creating scenes as unforgettable as a riff, a phrase you simply cannot get out of your head – but people no longer remember the import of that series, that voyage of discovery, if you like. The great majority have forgotten how much his programmes affected them,
inspired
them, you might say; how, when they switched off the television, they had a powerful urge to talk to someone about what they had seen. A great many of them said the same thing: they felt like doing something. It is no exaggeration to say that, for a whole year, a couple of million Norwegians were on the verge of changing their outlook on life. Changing themselves.

Why did he do it? Or how?

A lot happened to Norwegian television during Jonas Wergeland’s time in prison. On the plus side possibly just one thing: the appearance of the first Negro television host. ‘Negro’ has to be the correct term here, since, even though they believed themselves to be living in a multicultural society, people said to themselves: Gosh, a Negro on NRK – much as the sight of an African in Oslo in the fifties made people turn their heads with a: Gosh, a Negro on Karl Johans gate. Other than that, it was the decline in standards which struck one, the increasingly desperate attempts to win viewers. And the monotony of it, a so-called diversity which, in actual fact, meant almost identical programmes on hundreds of channels, a diversity the essence of which was repetition. In the battle for viewers – read: money – all the
television
companies were offering the same product.

Jonas Wergeland foresaw this development even before the advent of his
own glory days. On his return from Montevideo in the mid-eighties he gave a lecture at the NRK studios. Hardly anyone attended it. The organisers of the evening seminar – all honour to their names – wrote it off as a total flop. But since then that meeting has acquired a legendary status equal to that of the inaugural meetings of political parties which altered the course of history. And if everyone who boasts of having been in attendance truly had been there, the NRK headquarters would not have been big enough to hold them all.

What did he talk about? After a complete, and somewhat sardonic, rundown of the previous week’s broadcasts on NRK TV, he concluded by saying: ‘Television is a marvellous invention. Is this really the best we can do with it?’ The remainder of the lecture was devoted to a ruthless critique of his own work, as good as a confession, some said. Wergeland confined himself strictly to his own productions when it came to citing examples of
unoriginality
. From the platform he made a vow that from now on he was going to make programmes unlike anything ever made before. It might not be going too far to say that Jonas Wergeland wished to be a Negro on the Norwegian television scene; he wanted to come from the outside and show Norwegians strange things about their own country which they had never noticed. He wanted to turn the viewers into
see-ers
.

What happened in Montevideo?

In Montevideo Jonas Wergeland was down for the count. An observer would have doubted whether he was capable of conceiving any ideas at all. Because in Montevideo, in the far-off country of Uruguay, Jonas Wergeland spent most of his time slumped in a deckchair, all alone on a vast, deserted beach, staring out to sea, or rather the Rio de la Plata. On the other hand, it should come as no surprise to anyone that a Norwegian should have had the great revelation of his life while lounging in a deckchair, considering that Norwegians have grown up, so to speak, in chairs designed to allow one to recline at one’s ease. That deckchair was, for Jonas, what the bathtub had been for Archimedes.

This was in October. Behind him Jonas had several years as a
programme-maker
. Fired by his unorthodox studies in London he had produced shows which, while they may have had a certain zest and were technically superb – his colleagues were full of praise for him – lacked the magic ingredient which could pin a large proportion of the population to their seats as well as making them think, feel, that they had seen something unique and hence important, something which concerned them personally. Jonas himself knew exactly what was missing: an original idea. Not little ideas for single programmes, but a vision, a unifying concept. He needed a rest. And so it was that in that
most burnt-out phase of his life he went out into the world, going pretty much wherever the wind took him, and eventually ended up in Uruguay, in Montevideo. It may have been something about the name – a combination of letters containing the verb ‘to see’ – which drew him. He needed a lookout point. And yet he could never have imagined that this point would turn out to be a person. That it would be a woman, and that her name would be Ana.

He booked in to the Hotel Carrasco, an old and somewhat dilapidated establishment near the road running along the waterfront, the Rambla Naciones Unidas, a palm-lined avenue which wound its way along the coast, past seven white beaches, into the centre of the city. Surrounded by
well-tended
gardens and pine trees, the hotel still retained traces of the grandeur it had enjoyed in a not too distant past thanks to its casino. Jonas felt at home there right away, he liked the faint air of decadence: the flaking Baroque
exterior
, the sleepy ballrooms, the cracked marble tiles in the bathroom. It suited his mood. I’m not a tourist, he told himself, I’m a patient in a sanatorium.

In Montevideo the summer season ran from December to the middle of March. Out of season you had the beach to yourself, even though the weather was as warm as a Norwegian summer. It suited Jonas perfectly: a city where you could lounge in a red deckchair, under a blue-striped parasol, on a beach that went on for miles. Just him and the wind, just him and the sun, just him and the waves. He relished this solitude. He did not so much as read a
newspaper
, simply lay there, lay there with a vague ache in his chest. For Jonas, difficulty in thinking had always been associated with the feeling of having something wrong with his lungs, of not being able to breathe properly. Had he not known better, he would have thought he had TB. I ought to go for an X-ray, he thought listlessly. Just to be on the safe side.

He sat motionless in a deckchair, gazing out across the water, thinking about what he should take with him, or thinking without being conscious of thinking. He may not even have been thinking at all. He may have been almost in a state of coma, not unlike that inhabited by Viktor Harlem. When Jonas visited Viktor at the institution, he would catch himself staring in
fascination
at the face of his friend as he sat there in a Stressless chair angled towards the television whether it was on or not. Jonas had always, even after the accident, regarded Viktor as a kindred spirit.

Day after day, Jonas lay in a comfortable deckchair thinking, or dozing, on a long white beach. Maybe this was the Norwegian’s lot: to be a
holiday-maker
in the world. An observer by the sea. Nevertheless, it must have been this enervating passivity which at one point caused him to remember another time, a time of activism, a period when he had actually been a rebel. Truth to tell, when Jonas Wergeland was taken into police custody in the wake of
Margrete’s death, it was not his first run-in with the powers that be; he had also been carted off to the police station once before – the old headquarters at Møllergata 19 on that occasion – and even though this happened at the beginning of a decade characterised by manifold forms of rebellious unrest, I think it is safe to say that this was the first and last time on which a court ever fined a teenager clad in a Nehru jacket and brandishing a placard inscribed with a fiery slogan in Marathi, a language spoken a fairly long way away from Oslo, namely in the Bombay region.

Not all that many demonstrations from Norway’s idyllic post-war period will be remembered. The Mardøla protest is one. And the campaign against the hydro-electric power station at Alta, of course, not least for the Lapps who pitched their tents and staged a hunger strike outside the Norwegian Parliament, and still more for the occupation by outraged Lapp women of Prime Minister – and former Minister for the Environment – Gro Harlem Brundtland’s office. Another incident which is sure to stand the test of time is the demonstration staged by Jonas Wergeland and his two friends from high school. This also marked Jonas’s first appearance on television: a brief clip which has fortunately been preserved, and deservedly so; this was an event of great symbolic value, one which said a lot about modern Norway.

The brains behind it was, as always, Viktor Harlem. If he had had to choose between his two chums, Jonas would probably have come down in favour of the restless Pound devotee who had drawn inspiration from the lush, green Hedmark countryside around the Løiten distillery until his parents divorced. Viktor – with his eternal black polo necks, eager baby face and fine hair – was a born rebel and freethinker. Jonas always felt a little distanced from Axel Stranger, who came from a well-to-do home on the west side of Oslo and was more of a silk-tie, patent-leather shoe sort of rebel, a rather arrogant revolutionary with a Frogner drawl, a managing-director father, three dinner suits in his wardrobe and a maid who presented him every morning with the world’s most elaborate and delectable packed lunch, complete with parsley sprig. In a way, that in itself was an act of rebellion, to even dare to open it at school, in front of his gawping classmates.

The chums – non-conformists to the core – called themselves The Three Heretics, and they met regularly in a flat in Grunerløkka which Viktor had more or less to himself. Here, in a room lined with shelves laden with books about and by Ezra Pound, they could sit undisturbed, finding fault with
everything
and everyone and boosting their energy levels every so often with swigs of a lethal, greenish variant of absinthe, obtained through Viktor’s boyhood friends from the more anarchic corners of Hedmark. The Three Heretics cherished the principles of marginalism – or, in Jonas’s parlance: the
outside left. According to Viktor, one should never look for a centre or a core, in people or in life. ‘Out on the edge, that’s where life is,’ he declared, raising his glass. ‘In the centre there’s nothing but red-hot chaos. Look at the Earth!’

In everyone’s life there is a time like this, a glorious phase – rather like a long recess – when God is dead and everything is allowed. During their
high-school
years The Three Heretics were almost always to be found in Viktor’s flat in Seilduksgata, dismantling – or, to use a word that would later come into vogue: deconstructing – all of the prevailing schools of thought and leaving the pieces scattered about in all their pathetic absurdity. And now and again they even got off their backsides and went out to put their heretical theories into practice. These acts were invariably memorable; all their woolly
ramblings
seemed to give the trio added incentive, a barricade-storming urgency – or maybe one should say a bad conscience. On one occasion, though, they bit off more than they could chew: when they tried to break down an
invention
which was definitely here to stay; or, to put it more plainly: when they set out to reconstruct the traffic system.

Viktor’s arch-enemy was the car. ‘The automobile is the number one false god of our day,’ he said, ‘the golden calf that everybody dances around.’ It really pained Viktor to observe the devotion with which people washed their vehicles, as if it were some sort of liturgy; or the way in which Norwegians meekly accepted the fact of the several hundred souls sacrificed each year on the altar of the car – on a world scale road accidents cost twice as many lives each year as war. If one wanted to point to something that was quite clearly all wrong, but which no one seemed able, or cared, to do anything about, then the car was the perfect example. Everyone was well aware of the enormous damage done by the motor car to the environment as well as to life and limb, everyone agreed that public transport was better, but no one drove less or took the tram more often. The war against the motor car was, it goes without saying, the most hopeless of all causes in the latter half of the twentieth century, but Viktor seemed to thrive on it; it was, in many ways, an exemplary act of iconoclasm. This was how Jonas remembered Viktor best: a shining baby face chanting the refrain ‘Car-free city centres!’, unfazed by the ill-concealed yawns this always drew from those listening.

From the moment they met, Jonas knew that Viktor was girding himself for a decisive strike against the automobile and above all against what he called road traffic’s ‑ of the cities. Their target was chosen with care. Was there one spot in Oslo which illustrated the whole society’s lack of resolve and want of co-ordinated planning and also told an outsider pretty much everything about the Norwegian cultural mentality? Yes, there was: Rådhusplassen – the Town Hall Square – not for nothing the natural last stop on
the Norwegian version of the Monopoly board, as well as the most expensive property.

Since a lot of people have already forgotten, I’m sure, that there was a time when all Norwegian shops closed at five p.m. and there were no newspapers on Sundays, it seems necessary to remind readers of how Oslo’s Town Hall Square looked at the time when Viktor Harlem planned to put a spoke in as many wheels as possible. Some have most likely forgotten the dominant presence of a huge and fully operational shipyard right next door to the Town Hall, and the minor, cartoon-style detail of the never-ending goods train escorted by a man with a red flag and a whistle, which caused traffic jams every single day as it chugged slowly across the square. A few may even have managed to suppress the worst memory of all: that for decades the fjord was separated from the town by a six-lane carriageway cutting right across this charming part of the city. To Viktor Harlem, the Town Hall Square
epitomised
the very worst of all civic stupidity. What, he demanded to know, was the absolute height of lunacy? They build the city’s finest building on the city’s finest site. And then what do they do? After filling the mid-section of the area between the harbour and the Town Hall with splendid fountains and lovely sculptures, they filled the remaining space with cars. They built a grand square, then dumped a whole load of rubbish in it.