Professor Andersen's Night (4 page)

While Bernt Halvorsen was deeply preoccupied with the armaments race and the Cold War and was keen to take action, as an undergraduate Pål Andersen sat at home in his bedsit reading strange poems, which he had great difficulty interpreting. Was this his form of political radicalism, which linked him to the same
life
nerve that surged through Bernt Halvorsen with such unbending seriousness? Indeed, his preoccupation with avant-garde French and Polish films, modern literature and abstract paintings was an attempt, a desperate one at times, to enter the same period to which Bernt Halvorsen already belonged, and which he could defend from the inside with such accuracy. He was zealous in his efforts to understand avant-garde art, that form of art which has really taken hold of our own day and age. He often felt that he had failed to understand it, indeed, more often than he would admit, it left him in a state of incomprehension, confusion, indifference, even after he had used all his astuteness to understand only a snippet of it. It could make him feel desperate. He felt a failure because he didn’t understand the art of his own period, and it can’t be denied that in such situations he often pretended to understand more than he actually understood, and even feigned an admiration for works of art which, in actual fact, left him unmoved. But on the
other
hand, what pleasure he could experience if, after a long struggle with, for instance, a modernist poem, he suddenly understood it! He had, for that matter, felt the greatest joy when he understood intuitively, directly. Why? Because then his own searching and restless and frequently maladjusted soul melded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, with the greatest minds of his time. He had felt enlightened, and at the very highest level. It gave him a deep, tranquil satisfaction, as he had been moved by reality, and he hoped intensely that someone would pay a visit to his bedsit right then, so he could have read this poem aloud to them. That this reality had dissolved all conventional and normal reality, and depicted a quite different and often uncompromising reality, where ordinary things had ended up in unaccustomed and frightening positions, often accompanied by black humour, on this passage through a landscape of deformity and impossibility, of anxiety and pent-up screams, cynical and relentless, disparaging and dissolved, unnerved and alcoholised, fatally
wounded
by the belief in total happiness, none of that diminished Pål Andersen’s pleasure at being able to understand the most outstanding achievements of his own day and age, but that the young man who took all this to his breast could, simultaneously, identify with serious and morally incensed political radicalism may well strike one as rather mysterious. But that is how it was. Pål Andersen’s rare moments of happiness when he thought he understood the chaotic and iconoclastic form of an avant-garde work of art strengthened, rather than weakened, his confidence in his own impossible life, as a young man with the future ahead of him. He didn’t seek comfort, but relentlessness. He didn’t seek the structure he was brought up to see and understand, but the disintegration of that structure. He didn’t turn to art in order to receive, but to see. He couldn’t imagine using the word ‘rewarding’ about a work of art – for instance, that such and such a book has given me so much, taught me so much, etc. etc. – but thought solely that it enlightened him, made him see, cynically and without false expectations, so that he felt he was alive, something that young men often struggle to feel clearly, and
which
very easily makes them become maladjusted. Actually, it is not all that difficult to see that as a young man Andersen must have been a snob. If he were to become a part of his own day and age, with all his maladjustments, then it would have to be through reaching the highest level of enlightenment, through an understanding of this day and age’s most outstanding achievements within the arts. But Professor Andersen would probably in any case have asked us to bear with him, especially when we now see his desperate attempts to relate to the avant-garde movement of his period, which for him was identical to modernity; being a young man of his own day and age, as he painstakingly tried to understand a poem by, for instance, Pound or Elouard, by Celan or Prévert, and then managed it, he succeeded, perhaps even intuitively; can’t we visualise the leap in his own self-esteem when it takes place, and let us grant him that, and thereby the pride which rushes through this callow young man, who, in his deeply tranquil satisfaction, now has only one wish
beyond
the one which has already come his way, that someone would come and visit him, so that he might have someone to share this satisfaction with, therefore he wishes that someone would come, so that he can read this poem aloud for them here in his simple bedsit. Two youths, one of whom reads poetry to the other, two young students, one of whom reads aloud to the other from the works of their common youthful contemporaries with the most outstanding awareness of life as it is, and thereby also of life in the future. Pål Andersen wasn’t young in the sense that he felt life-giving sap threatening to burst his veins. He didn’t feel particularly strong, with unparalleled vigour, which was straining to get out, the way young people are often portrayed by older people, as a measure of youth, and which consequently has to be demonstrated through youthful conduct. He was a sallow youth, who smoked forty cigarettes a day, and drank five or six pints of beer in smoky, muggy bars three to four evenings a week, and who woke up with a hangover at least twice a week, so that it was a painful effort to
drag
himself up to the university at Blindern and his daily toil in reading rooms and in lecture theatres. He spent his life in stuffy surroundings, with flagging, aching limbs and endless brooding; nonetheless, it was beyond doubt that his young mind could respond, and that due to this responsiveness a promising future lay ahead of him. Now and then he was visited by his total opposite, the medical student Bernt Halvorsen, and then he read him poems, by Georg Johannesen for instance. Or by Stein Mehren, two Norwegian poets who were only a few years older than himself, and whom he admired enormously. Sitting on his unmade bed, with bedclothes that were never aired (but now and then actually washed), he read poems for Bernt.

Later, Georg Johannesen and Stein Mehren came to represent two opposite poles of Norwegian poetry, the former cultivated by high-brow left-wingers, the latter considered the greatest Norwegian poet since Wergeland by the conservatively minded; but in the early Sixties, when Andersen was reading them as an undergraduate and they were new, their poems belonged to the same frame
of
reference, at least for a young man who desperately leaned towards the avant-garde in order to feel he truly existed. When Pål Andersen read the following lines by Georg Johannesen aloud to Bernt Halvorsen: ‘I am glad / I cannot see / my death in a mirror – When my picture falls down from the wall / I’ll resemble the wallpaper / and when an heir counts my sheets / they will be white and clean / like the day I bought them – Everything has to be written anew / like before I wrote my signature,’ and later the following lines by Stein Mehren: ‘But the stranger who stands up on the hillside, listening / to the drone of a city by night. He can do nothing / He, too, is an observer. Through the night air / it looks as though the towns on the coast have been accidentally / washed ashore. And now lie there twisting con- / voluted like jellyfish of light – Far away … Far above hover the new gods / in the invisible spokes of the celestial wheel / From afar the towns can be seen as large / gently vibrating circles which interminably / spread their SOS,’ then he was perfectly aware that these
two
poets differed greatly in their language and outlook, something he, in fact, also expressed by reading them in highly different ways to his friend Bernt Halvorsen: Georg Johannesen in a staccato, hoarse voice; Stein Mehren in a meandering, almost ecstatic voice (the way he had heard Stein Mehren himself read his own poems on the radio). But they had one thing in common, they were both
his
poets, and could invigorate his own life force, and he now read them eagerly for Bernt, purely as a matter of course, in order to hear his opinion.

And Bernt lent an ear. He listened, but if Pål Andersen waited eagerly to hear his friend’s thoughts, hoping that his own enthusiasm might have instilled itself in Bernt Halvorsen’s frame, he must have been disappointed. Because it never happened, and this was something young Andersen must have anticipated, and for that reason his intention couldn’t have been to hear Bernt’s enthusiastic interpretation when he read so eagerly; instead it must have been to get the feeling that Bernt listened, properly and politely, open to what so
preoccupied
his friend Pål, so that he might receive fresh acknowledgement of something he took so superbly for granted, since he, purely as a matter of course, invited his friend to a poetry reading from his ever-increasing repertoire of avant-garde writers, among whom were his Norwegian heroes Georg Johannesen and Stein Mehren, those young contemporaries, also to feel that he and Bernt were on the same side, and that being on the same side meant that Bernt listened with a genuinely open mind to Pål Andersen reading poetry, regardless of whether the poems were performed in a staccato, hoarse voice or in a meandering, ecstatic one. They were, as it happened, on the same side, and belonging to that side gave him the right to read avant-garde poetry to someone who was only mildly interested in it.

It was natural for him, Pål Andersen, to share Bernt Halvorsen’s opposition to NATO and nuclear armament, even though he wasn’t really so hugely preoccupied with it; it concerned him more as a topic of conversation than it did as a political action to which he himself had to ascribe, but he liked to listen while Bernt made his acute observations,
occasioned
by some topical political event, such as the Cuban crisis in 1962, and then make a couple of remarks, which showed that he agreed, or ask a few questions, which showed that he was attentive; that was perfectly natural for him, just as it was natural for Bernt to say, after he had listened to Pål Andersen reading ‘Expectation’ by Stein Mehren: That was really not bad at all; or when he read from ‘Generation’ by Georg Johannesen: Yes, that was rather good, as a token of approval. Although he never got round to buying any of these poetry collections himself, in order to read them himself, or aloud to Nina, and it was equally improbable that young Andersen would wear in his lapel the Ban the Bomb badge which Bernt had donated to him, and instead laid it on top of the chest of drawers in his bedsit, putting it openly and naturally on view, visible to everyone who came to visit. This naturalness was both a token of the fondness one had for things with which one was preoccupied and passionately interested in, and of the slightly polite distance, or regard, one showed towards the matters with which
the
other was preoccupied and passionately interested in, and was an expression of the fact that through them both flowed the same life force, which was theirs, and only theirs, the life force of their own day and age, the communal spirit of their generation. But only some of this generation; as a matter of fact most young people belonged among the stolid conservative types, with their rituals, which Bernt and Pål disliked, and even despised; they themselves were only a small minority but were distinctive enough to constitute a whole generation, about that they agreed whole-heartedly, both Pål Andersen and Bernt Halvorsen. What they shared was directed at
them
, at the others, who were pro-NATO, who were for nuclear armament, and against avant-garde art. Perhaps not all of those who demonstrated, for instance, against apartheid and the tennis tournament between Norway and South Africa at Madserud were so fervently preoccupied with abstract art or incomprehensible free verse, perhaps many of them didn’t appreciate it all that much, but they
weren
’t shocked by it, they didn’t get upset, they didn’t shun avant-garde art, not even when it resulted in a Korean pianist smashing the piano as the finale of his concert in the University Assembly Hall; it didn’t upset them, the way it upset
them
, the others, they would merely have commented on it by asking: Did he really do that?

In their own way all of the participants in this dinner party (all bar Judith Berg, who at this point in time still flew like a princess, not waited on, but waiting on, high up in the air above them somewhere, wonderfully beautiful) were within this alliance who shared radical political attitudes and a preoccupation with (or polite regard for) avant-garde art, in other words, members of the special minority who represented the New, modernity, the distinctive modernity of their time, and who cultivated being in opposition, against
them
, and the fine arts in a new, diluted form (in provincial Norway).

This was in the Sixties, more than thirty years ago. Now they were in a completely new phase of life. Life no longer lay ahead of them, they were no longer in the phase where you couldn’t think ‘I’ without at the same time having the word ‘future’ in mind, but could allow themselves to look back and register that they had succeeded fairly well, as doctors, psychologists, leading actors, professors and cultural administrators. They were all in their fifties and all of them had grown-up children, apart from Professor Andersen, who was childless. But it was only their hosts Nina and Bernt Halvorsen who had children with each other. Senior pyschologist Per Ekeberg had children with his first wife, and they were now studying at the University of Oslo, psychology like their father, both the boy and the girl, while Trine Napstad’s daughter was reading media studies in Volda. Judith Berg’s daughter with the Italian business magnate had established a career as a TV presenter, and now had her own entertainment show on one of the TV channels. Nina and Bernt had three children: their son Morten, twenty-seven, who had left medical school to be a rock musician (as Bernt said, in reality he had become a pop musician); their son Thomas, twenty-five, who was nearing the end of his medical studies; and their
daughter
Clara Eugenie, fifteen, who was still at home, but who, of course, was out this particular evening. Whether Jan Brynhildsen had children, from his first marriage or in another way, was a little unclear.