I was widely read by the time I was only eleven or twelve.
At home we had both Aschehoug"s and Salmonsen"s encyclopaedias which came to forty-three volumes in all.
According to motivation and mood, I had three different modes of approaching an encyclopaedia: I might look up articles on a particular subject, often related to something I"d been pondering for some time; I might sit for hours and dip into the encyclopaedia at random; or I might begin to study one entire volume from start to finish, like Aschehoug"s volume 12 from Kvam to Madeira or Salmonsen"s volume XVIII from Nordland Boat to Pacific. My mother had dozens of other interesting books in the living-room bookcases. I was especially keen on comprehensive works that covered all the knowledge on a particular subject, for example The World of Art, The World of Music, The Human Body, Francis Bull"s World Literary History, Bull, Paasche, Winsnes and Hoem"s The History of Norwegian Literature and Falk and Torp"s Etymological Dictionary of the Norwegian and Danish Tongues. When I was twelve, my mother bought Charlie Chaplin"s My Autobiography, and despite its lack of objectiv- ity, it too became a kind of encyclopaedia. My mother was always nagging me to remember to put the books back on the shelves, and one day she banned me from taking more than four books into my room at once. "You can"t read more than one book at a time, anyway," she declared. She didn"t seem to realise that often the whole point was to compare what was written about a particular thing in several different books. I don"t think my mother had a very sharp eye for source criticism.
After we"d learnt about the prophets in religious instruc- tion, I asked the teacher to look up the prophet Isaiah, chapter 7, verse 14. I wanted him to explain to the cla.s.s the difference between a "virgin" and a "young woman". Surely the teacher knew that the Hebrew word translated as "virgin"
in that verse actually only signified a "young woman"? This was something I"d chanced on in Salmonsen"s encyclopae- dia. But, I went on, Matthew and Luke appeared not to have studied the underlying Hebrew text carefully enough.
Perhaps they had contented themselves with the Greek translation, called the Septuagint, which I thought was such a funny name. Septuaginta was the Latin for "seventy", and the first Greek translation of the Old Testament was so named because it was made by seventy learned Jews in seventy days. I elaborated on all of this.
The teacher didn"t always welcome my contributions to his lessons, even though I took great care not to correct him when he said things that were factually wrong. When I ventured to attack the very dogma of the virgin birth by referring to what I considered was a translation error in the Septuagint, he was further constrained by church doctrine and the school"s charter. He tried to hush me up, too, when I pointed out something as innocent as the way Jesus" public ministry lasted three years in John"s gospel, but only one year according to the other Evangelists.
When we were doing human biology I told the teacher that I thought his use of the word "winkle" for a certain bodily member was utterly risible, at least in the context of propagation. I told him that the term "winkle" had fallen completely out of fashionable use, especially in matters of s.e.xuality. "Which term do you think I should use instead?"
he asked. The teacher was a sympathetic chap, a powerfully built man and almost six foot six into the bargain, but now he was completely at sea. "I haven"t a clue," I replied. "You"ll just have to try to find something else. But do try to avoid Latin," I said by way of a parting shot.
I never gave pieces of advice to the teacher during the cla.s.s. My aim wasn"t to demonstrate that I was cleverer than my cla.s.smates or even, from time to time, cleverer than the teacher. It was always in the schoolyard or on the way in and out of the cla.s.sroom that I gave the teacher friendly tips. I didn"t do it to make an impression on him, or to feign a greater preoccupation with school work than was really the case. The opposite was nearer the mark. I would sometimes pretend to be less interested than I was, which was much more fun. So did I do it out of pure, unalloyed benevolence?
No, that wasn"t true, either.
I"d regularly feed the teacher good bits of advice because I found it fascinating to watch his reaction. I enjoyed watch- ing people perform. I enjoyed watching them disport themselves.
Each Sat.u.r.day I"d listen to Children"s Hour, and I wasn"t alone. Every child in Norway listened to Children"s Hour. In later life, I saw an official statistic that said that in the period 1950 to 1960, 98 per cent of all Norwegian children listened to Children"s Hour. That must have been a very conservative estimate.
We lived in what social scientists call a h.o.m.ogenous culture. Everyone with any self-respect listened to The Road to Agra, Karhon on the Roof and Little Lord Fauntleroy. Every- one read the Bobsey Twins, Nancy Drew and the Famous Five books. We were brought up with Torbjrn Egner and Alf Proysen. We also had a shared experience in the long weather forecasts from the Met. Office, the arid Stock Exchange prices, Sat.u.r.day night from the Big Studio at Marienlyst, Family Favourites, that now dated mix called Music and Good Motoring and d.i.c.kie d.i.c.k d.i.c.kens. Every Norwegian of my age shares the same cultural background.
We were like one big family.
Children"s Hour was accompanied by a 50-ore bar of chocolate, a small bottle of fizzy orange and either a packet of alphabet biscuits, a small box of raisins or a bag of peanuts.
On the rare occasions we got both raisins and peanuts, we mixed them. The Sat.u.r.day treat was almost as standardised as school breakfast. For school breakfast the education authorities supplied milk, crispbread with cheese, and bread with liver pate, fish paste and jam. It was during school breakfast that I would sometimes take soundings to find out what the others were given for Children"s Hour. It appeared that everyone got exactly the same as me. I found it eerie to discover that there was some unseen parental conspiracy in operation. This was before I realised just how deep a h.o.m.ogenous culture could sit.
Sometimes we were given a krone so that we could go to the sweet shop and choose our own Sat.u.r.day treat. Of course, this was far better than the usual mix of peanuts, raisins and alphabet biscuits. A krone would buy us ten mini chocolate bars, but with ten ore you could also get one jelly baby or two salt pastilles or one piece of chewing-gum or two five-ore chocolates or four fruit pastilles. So, for a full krone you could buy three mini chocolate bars, two jelly babies, two salt pastilles, one piece of chewing-gum, four five-ore chocolates and four fruit pastilles. Or you could buy a 25-ore bar of chocolate, a 25-ore sherbet lemon and, for example, two mini chocolate bars, two jelly babies and a piece of chewing gum. I was good at making my money go a long way. Sometimes I would also filch small change from my mother"s coat pocket, when she was getting ready in the bathroom, or having an after-dinner nap, or late in the evening when she was sitting listening to La Boheme. Taking a small coin or two didn"t give me a bad conscience, because I only did it when I hadn"t used the phone for days. Four phone calls cost one krone - I was already a very businesslike little person. But for my mother"s sake I was careful to avoid any jingling of keys or coins when I stuck my hand into her coat pocket. Metre Man often stood watching me, but he wouldn"t tell. An extra krone or 50 ore made selecting the Sat.u.r.day sweets much easier.
Not everyone had a state-of-the-art radio, but my mother and I did. We had just traded in an old Radionette for a brand new Tandberg Temptress. The set stood on a teak shelf in the living-room and banana plugs attached it to two loudspeak- ers. These gave far better sound quality than the cabinet radios. The shelf below the radio set and record player contained all of mother"s records: an impressive number of old 78s, but also a lovely collection of modern LPs and singles. Once I"d bought my supply of sweets for Children"s Hour, I"d perch on the Persian pouffe right up close to one of the loudspeakers and lay out all my sweets in one long row on top of the radio. If I had more sweets than my official means dictated, I"d make a secret little row of chocolates and jelly babies down on the record shelf as well. In such circ.u.mstances, I"d always consume the lower row first.
The grown-ups also bought themselves treats to go with their Sat.u.r.day coffee. I"d made thorough investigations about this too during school breakfasts, and the impression I got concurred almost uncannily with what I"d observed in my own home. The grown-ups ate large 25-ore crystallised fruits, little liqueur chocolates, chocolate orange segments or slabs of dark chocolate. If visitors came in the morning, they"d have tea and fresh rolls with vegetable mayonnaise, and if it was an extra special occasion, they"d buy French sticks and make great open sandwiches with roast beef, prawn salad, ham and liver pate.
My mother a.s.sumed I listened to Children"s Hour because I thought it was fun. She didn"t realise I was sitting there wrapped in my own thoughts. She didn"t realise that I was sitting on the pouffe working out how Children"s Hour might be vastly improved. If radio was claiming the attention of every Norwegian child for a whole hour each week, I thought the quality of the programme should be impeccable. I put together an entire raft of good programme ideas - with everything from listener compet.i.tions, jokes and ghost stories to sketches, animal tales, real-life stories, fairy tales and radio plays, all of which I"d written myself. I timed each piece and always kept within the sixty minutes.
It was instructive. An impressive amount could be slotted into sixty minutes - it merely required an iota of critical faculty. That"s something I"ve always possessed, but un- fortunately the same couldn"t be said of Lauritz Johnson.
Even a man of Alf Proysen"s stature ought to have asked himself how many times we"d want to hear that he"d put a two-ore bit in his piggy-bank. Walt Disney had a critical faculty, he was divine, he had created his own universe. In fact, Walt Disney and I had several things in common. In the days before he"d created his own Disneyland, he had also been inspired by the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. I worked out several great Donald Duck stories, intending to send them to Walt Disney, but I never got round to it.
I didn"t send in my suggestions to the Norwegian Broad- casting Corporation, either. If I had, they would certainly have acted on them, but I didn"t want to listen to an entire Children"s Hour that I"d already worked out in my head. And so I kept all my sprightly ideas to myself. Not everyone is so restrained as that, as splendidly exemplified by the develop- ment of television.
When Norwegian television made its first official broadcast in 1960, I was visiting a neighbour and heard the Prime Minister"s inaugural speech. Prime Minister Einar Gerhard- sen pointed out that many people understandably feared that television would become a distracting intrusion into childhood and family life. They were worried, he said, that watching television would adversely affect children"s home- work and recreational activities in the fresh air and sunshine.
"The development of television will probably be similar to that of radio," the Prime Minister declared. "When some- thing is new it"s natural that people want to get as much of it as they can." But Einar Gerhardsen thought this would right itself. Gradually we would learn to be choosy. "We must get better at selecting things with special value," he said, "we must learn to switch off the programmes that don"t interest us. Only then will television become really useful and en- joyable." Gerhardsen hoped that television would become another tool for teaching and general education, and a further channel for disseminating knowledge throughout the country. He expected television to be a key to new values of heart and mind, and he emphasised that there ought to be strict quality controls on programmes for children and young people.
Einar Gerhardsen was an inveterate optimist. He was also a good man who fortunately never lived long enough to see how television as a medium degenerated. If Einar Gerhard- sen had been alive today, he would have been able to flick his way through a rich flora of soap operas and fly-on-the- wall doc.u.mentaries on a host of different channels. He would have witnessed just how keenly television companies compete for quality, especially as regards programmes watched by children and young people. He would have seen how clever we"ve become at selecting what is of special value.
I"d actually invited myself over to a neighbour who"d bought a television set. I wasn"t shy about inviting myself - I was eight, after all. The summer holidays had just ended, and I was now in the Second Form. This new medium was something I had to be in on from the start.
This neighbour hadn"t any children, that was what was so good about it, and I don"t think he had a wife, either - at least I"d never seen him with a woman - but he did have a big Labrador called Waldemar. I made sure I got there early enough to play with Waldemar a bit before the first, official television broadcast began. My neighbour appreciated this. I asked if he thought dogs could think, and he was quite sure they could. He explained that he could tell by Waldemar"s eyes if he was dreaming or if he was just asleep. He could read this from his tail as well. "In that case, he only dreams about bones or dog biscuits," I interjected, "and maybe b.i.t.c.hes as well, but I don"t think a dog can dream a whole play. Dogs can"t talk," I pointed out, "so I don"t think they can have very strange dreams." My neighbour believed Waldemar could clearly signal when he was hungry or when he wanted to relieve himself, nor was it hard to see when he was happy or sad or frightened. "But he can"t tell fairy tales," I insisted. "There isn"t enough imagination in his head for it to overflow, and that"s why he can"t cry either."
My neighbour agreed with me there. He said he had to make sure he took Waldemar out for a walk so that he didn"t pee on the living-room floor, but luckily he didn"t have to worry that Waldemar might suddenly build a puppet theatre out of sofa cushions or start drawing Donald Duck cartoons on the walls. "Dogs aren"t as communicative as us," he said, "perhaps that"s what you mean." And that was exactly what I meant. I said: "Even so, they may be just as happy."
We weren"t able to say more because now it was Einar Gerhardsen"s turn. My neighbour and I shared a moment of national celebration. Waldemar padded out into the kitchen and occupied himself with something quite different.
The new medium had soon become a huge challenge.
Within a year I"d managed to persuade my mother to buy a television set, and soon I was bubbling over with ideas for programmes. I didn"t send any of them in, but I was constantly phoning up the television service telling them what I thought.
One of the programme ideas I"d come up with was to put ten people into an empty house. They were to be isolated from the outside world and not allowed to leave before they had created something totally new. It had to be something of lasting significance for people the world over. It might, for example, be a new and better declaration of human rights, or the world"s most beautiful fairy tale, or a pro- duction of the world"s funniest play. The partic.i.p.ants were to have plenty of time - I think I reckoned on one hundred days. That"s a long time. That"s more than enough time.
And when there are ten of you to fill the hundred days, it"s really a thousand days, in fact almost three years. If the will is there, ten people can do quite a lot in a hundred days. One prerequisite was that the partic.i.p.ants had to learn to work together. Each time they had anything important to announce to humanity, they could ring up TV head- quarters, and one of the well-known presenters would go to the house with a camera crew to hear what they were suggesting that was so important for mankind. At the time it wasn"t normal to use twenty or thirty different cameras to make an entertainment programme. There weren"t that many cameras in the whole of the television service - it was before we Norwegians had discovered North Sea oil.
You were also supposed to have something to say before you appeared in front of a television camera. Not everyone did, but it was at least regarded as desirable. Even in those days there were programmes featuring meaningless gather- ings of people, and we were served up things like the annual school graduation trips to Copenhagen, but it would have been unthinkable to film a gathering or graduation trip that lasted a hundred days. It was a different age, a different culture, and perhaps even something as remote as a different civilisation. I don"t say this in my own defence, but today"s television culture was beyond the bounds of my conception.
Soon I had a whole notebook full of good programme suggestions, but the idea that it would become possible to set new viewing records by making a television series hundreds of hours long about a gang of giggling girls and itchy- fingered youths, surpa.s.sed my wildest fantasy. It"s unlikely that Caesar or Napoleon had sufficient imagination to envisage atomic weapons or cl.u.s.ter bombs, either. It can be wiser to leave certain notions for the future. There"s no intrinsic merit in using up all the bright ideas at once.
I was much alone during my teenage years too. The older I got, the more alone I became, but I loved it. I enjoyed sitting on my own, thinking. Gradually, as I grew up, I concentrated more and more on working out various plots for books, films and the theatre.
As a legacy from my childhood and youth, I had notes for hundreds of stories. They were rough drafts of everything from fairy tales, novels and short stories to theatre and film scripts. I never made any attempt to flesh the material out, I don"t think the thought ever occurred to me. How could I possibly choose which novel I should begin to write when I had a whole pile of narratives to select from?
I was incapable of writing a novel in any event, I"ve always been too restless for that. While thinking and making notes my inspiration was of such intensity that my own chain of thought was constantly being interrupted as new ideas presented themselves, often much better ones than those I"d been working on in the first place. Novelists have a special talent for slogging away at the same story for long periods, often for several years. For me this is too inactive, too distracted and preoccupied.
Even if I"d mastered the mental inertia for writing a novel, I wouldn"t have bothered to do it. I should have lacked the motivation to write the book once the idea had been born and had taken its place in notebook or ring- binder. The most important thing for me was to gather and earmark the greatest number of ideas, or what I later called subjects and synopses. Perhaps I may be compared to a hunter who loves hunting rare game, but who doesn"t necessarily want to take part in cutting up and cooking the carcase, and subsequently, eating the meat. He could be a vegetarian. There"s no contradiction in being a crack shot and a vegetarian at the same time - for dietary reasons, for instance. Similarly, there are many sports fishermen who don"t like fish. But they still spend hours casting their lines and if they get a big fish, immediately give it away to friends or some chance pa.s.ser-by. The most elite sports fishermen go one step further: they cast off and reel the fish in, only to return it to the water moments later. Good G.o.d, you don"t stand there fishing all day just to save a little money on the housekeeping! The whole point of this august catch-and- release fishing is that the consumer, or utility, element is completely absent. One fishes because it"s a balm. Fishing is a game of finesse, a n.o.ble art. This a.n.a.logy puts me in mind of Ernst Junger who wrote in one of his wartime diaries that one shouldn"t grieve over a thought that gets away. It"s like a fish that gets off the hook and swims down into the depths again, only to return one day even bigger ... If, on the other hand, one lands the fish, guts it and chucks it into a plastic bucket, any further development of the fish has clearly been curtailed. Precisely the same can be said of the idea behind a novel once it is written out and set in more or less successful aspic, or even published. Perhaps the world of culture is characterised by too much catch and too little release.
There"s another reason why I never wanted to write a novel, or start "writing", as people often say. I considered it far too affected. Ever since I was a boy, I"ve been as scared of being affected as I was that my father might begin expressing gooey sentiments in that tunnel of love. If there was one thing I really hated as a child, it was being patted on the head or chucked under the chin. I found it unnatural, I didn"t know how to respond to such advances.
This doesn"t mean that I consider affectation a bad characteristic - not a bit of it - I love affected people, they have always amused me immensely. The vain are only eclipsed in my estimation by pure poseurs or those who are in love with themselves. Such people are even more fun to observe than the ones who are only moderately self-centred.
I"ve always been able to pick out the most inflated characters in a crowded room. They are easy to observe, it"s not hard to notice the peac.o.c.k once its fan is spread. I find it more amusing to talk to the slightly vainglorious than to con- verse with people whose inflated egos are partly or wholly concealed by a cultivated interest in others. The vain always do their utmost to be as funny and entertaining as possible. They aren"t lazy. They usually pull out all the stops.
Unfortunately, I"m congenitally bereft of vanity myself. It must be dull for the people about me, but it"s something I"ve had to learn to live with. I would never have permitted myself to pull out all the stops. This is doubtless a mean att.i.tude to life, I admit as much, but I"ve never allowed myself to dance to another"s tune. I"m not denying I"m clever, but I couldn"t have stood the thought of someone telling me so.
I would never have managed to do anything as pretentious as write, publish and present some novel or collection of short stories, thereafter to clamber up on to a pedestal and take my applause. And another thing: writing novels has become all too commonplace. Only the naive write novels.
One day it will be as common to write novels as it once was to read them.
Watching Limelight with my mother really brought home to me the brevity of life. I realised that in a little while I would die and leave everything behind. Unlike vain people, I had the ability to think this thought right through. I had no difficulty in picturing full theatres and cinemas long after I myself was gone. Not everyone can do that. Many are so intoxicated with sensual impressions that they"re not able to grasp that there"s a world out there. And therefore they"re not able to comprehend the opposite either - they don"t understand that one day the world will end. We, however, are only a few missing heartbeats away from being divorced from humanity for ever.
I"ve never tried to embellish what I am by showing off to others or posing in front of the mirror. I"m only on this planet for a brief visit. It"s largely because of this that I"ve found it refreshing to talk to vain people.
Speaking to little children or watching a comedy by Holberg or Moliere can have a particularly cleansing effect on the mind. In a similar way it"s been a benison to meet the conceited. They are just as innocent as small children, and it is precisely this trust that I"ve caught myself envying. They live as if something can be achieved, as if something is up for grabs. But we are dust. So there"s no point in making a fuss.
Or as Mephistopheles says as Faust dies: What matters our creative endless toil, when at a s.n.a.t.c.h oblivion ends the coil.
My mother died just before Christmas 1970, while I was in my Sixth-Form year. Her illness came on quite suddenly. She was sick for only a short while, a month at home attending an Out Patients" clinic and then a few weeks in hospital.
My father and mother were completely reconciled in the weeks before she died, even before she was admitted to hospital. My father told me he"d wrecked my mother"s life, and she said exactly the same about him, she said she"d ruined his life. And so they continued their lamentations and reproaches right up to the last. The difference was that they no longer blamed each other, now they only blamed themselves. The sum total of all this woe added up to much the same. It wasn"t a matter of any great concern to me if my mother and father tortured each other or if they merely tortured themselves.
It was a fine funeral. My father made a long speech about what a wonderful person mother had been. He also went into what he termed "the great fall from grace" in their lives.
During recent days they"d managed to find their way back to one another, they"d forgiven each other"s shortcomings, he said. And so they"d managed to fulfil the vow they"d once made before the priest. They had had their better days and their worse days. But they"d also managed to love one another until death parted them.
There wasn"t a shred of dissimulation in my father"s eulogy, he really did love mother in the weeks before she died. To me it had seemed rather late in the day and I felt he might have kept away for the few weeks she had left.
Perhaps he loved her even more in the days immediately after her death. He didn"t do it just to gain attention.
The idea was that I should say a few words by her coffin too, but I couldn"t do it. I was really broken-hearted. I think I mourned her more than father, and that was why I couldn"t say anything, it wasn"t the moment for witticisms.
If I hadn"t cared so much about my mother"s death, I should certainly have made a moving speech. I didn"t realise it would affect me so deeply. I simply rose from my pew and walked to the coffin with a wreath of forget-me-nots. I nodded to my father and the priest, and father and the priest nodded back. As I stepped down to return to my seat, I saw that the little man in his green felt hat was pacing up and down in the aisle thrashing the air with his thin cane. He was irate.
I was over eighteen, and my father thought I should go on living in the flat despite mother"s death. For some time afterwards we continued to see each other once a week.
Early the following spring we decided that once a month was enough. We had outgrown skating heats and ski- jumping and all that. There were to be no more rides through the tunnel of love. Father lived to be over eighty.
In the weeks following my mother"s death I remember thinking: mother can"t see me any more. Who will see me now?
Maria