I told him that, under certain conditions, he could have the twenty aphorisms to use as his own. He gawped: "Are you mad, Petter?"
I gave him a quick lecture. I made him understand once and for all that I was serious about not becoming a writer.
He grasped that I was the victim of some rare kind of bashfulness. I told him I couldn"t bear the thought of living in the public gaze, that I felt happier in the wings, that I would never exchange my anonymity for money. I went on to predicate this on a more contemporary political ideal as well. "I"ve come to the conclusion that it isn"t right to stand out," I said. "Why should an articulate elite raise their heads above the ma.s.ses? Isn"t it better for everyone to have a collective working spirit?" I spoke of the rank and file and of the gra.s.s roots, and maybe I used the term "on the shop floor", which was then a very resonant expression, a really forceful idiom. I also mentioned medieval artistic anonym- ity. "n.o.body knows who wrote some of the old Norse myths," I said. "And in the end, Johannes, does it really matter?"
He shook his head. Johannes was a Marxist-Leninist.
Then I quickly added that the path I"d chosen for myself was strictly a personal position. I said I"d read both his novels and that obviously I could see the value of someone be- coming the mouthpiece of the people, only that it wasn"t me.
It had begun to dawn on Johannes that he might soon be standing out in the street in possession of those twenty aphorisms. But there was still a lot to arrange, and I tackled the pecuniary side first. I told him I was hard up and that I was willing to sell the aphorisms for fifty kroner apiece, but that he could buy all twenty for eight hundred. At first I thought I"d pitched it too high. Eight hundred kroner was a lot of money in those days, both for students and authors.
But Johannes didn"t look as if he was going to back out.
After all, they were twenty uncommonly pithy aphorisms - I"d spent a whole morning working them up. I said that naturally he was free to choose the ones he liked best and pay for them individually, but on the other hand it really did seem a shame to split them up. I"d had Johannes specially in mind and didn"t like the thought of relinquish- ing my copyright in things I"d written to more than one person.
"Super," said Johannes. "I"ll buy the lot."
Then I said something about feeling a little sullied by our financial arrangement, but reminded him that we were still living in a capitalist society and that a piece of intellectual property was indeed regarded as a commodity. "This is not very different from an artist taking payment for his paint- ings," I said. "They change ownership too, and the artist can"t have any claim to the paintings he"s already sold." I believe Johannes was glad to be reminded of the normality of our arrangements.
He said: "I can"t preclude the possibility that I"ll use some of these in a novel I"m writing at the moment ..."
"Perfectly all right," I replied. "You"ll make money out of them, a lot maybe, and good luck to you. It"s not unusual to sell a painting for much more than one originally paid for it.
It"s what"s known as a good investment."
Fortunately he was the one who brought up the most sensitive matter. He pointed at the sheaf of papers in front of him and said: "But how can I be sure you won"t let the cat out of the bag by saying that these aphorisms are really your work?"
I said I was only too pleased that the aphorisms would get published and reminded him that I wanted to stay out of the limelight. I also mentioned that I had several other things at home, jottings of various kinds, and that it wasn"t incon- ceivable that we"d return to these on a subsequent occasion.
If I didn"t keep quiet about the aphorisms he took with him today, I"d ruin the opportunity to sell him something in the future.
This last point was an important one. I had to emphasise that I had no intention of selling anything I"d written to anyone other than Johannes. This was vital for building up a sales network of many clients. Each one had to feel that he or she was unique, my sole and only favourite.
I had reason to believe that this strategy would work for many years to come. Authors don"t go round announcing that they employ a ghost-writer. They want to seem like original and thoroughly authentic individuals.
Correctly handled, there was no reason to fear that my customers would begin to shoot their mouths off to one another. I needn"t be afraid of the web unravelling, the threads would only be spun between me and each of my clients. There would be none to connect my customers with one another.
Johannes looked about furtively, then he leant across the table and whispered: "Two hundred cash, and I"ll give you a cheque for six hundred. OK?"
I nodded. I was particularly grateful for some cash and not solely because of the beer I had to pay for. Though the evening was still young, I recalled that the bank was closed.
With discreet movements, almost as if he was performing a ballet, he took out the two hundred kroner in notes and his cheque book. He wrote out the cheque as slowly and thoughtfully as if he was signing a tax return, then pushed the cheque and notes across the table towards me, and I folded the sheets and pushed them over the table to Johannes. Again he squinted round the room, but he didn"t see the little man with the bamboo cane who was about to run under a waiter"s feet.
Johannes quickly stowed the folded pages in the inner pocket of his jacket. "Shall we go?" he asked. But I said I was going to have another beer. "Thank you very much, Petter,"
were his parting words. With that he got up and began walking towards the exit. As he turned the corner towards the cloakroom I saw him pat his breast, presumably to make sure he really did have the gilt-edged sheaf of papers in his pocket. I thought I might photocopy his cheque before I cashed it. I didn"t quite know why, but I had the feeling it might be useful to keep some souvenirs.
It was a good piece of business for Johannes. His return on those aphorisms was many many times his outlay. But that"s the way it is with any sort of paper investment, you never know what it may be worth in the future. But I needed the money right there and then. Maria was on the train to Stockholm.
Johannes died a short time ago. He will be remembered for his precise, almost lapidary axioms.
I had already decided not to feed any single author with more than one genre. It would have seemed highly implausible if the city had suddenly turned into a literary cornucopia. There was only one stud, but his rut was enough to inseminate an entire flock of writers.
And so, with one exception, I fed Johannes solely with a variety of adages, thoughts and aphorisms, or with "spice" as he once called it. Since he was one of the moving spirits behind the Marxist-Leninists" May Day procession, I also gave him several clever slogan and catchword ideas over the years, though I never took any payment for them.
The exception was a plot for a story set in Vietnam. The sheet of notes he got for a hundred kroner ran something like this:
Two identical twins are born a few minutes apart in a small village in the Mekong Delta at the beginning of the 1950s. After their mother"s rape and murder at the hands of a French soldier before the boys are six months old, they are adopted by separate families and grow up without seeing each other. One twin joins the FNL, and the other the American-backed government force. After the Tet offensive the twins come face to face in the jungle. Both are on reconnaissance prior to a major action but as yet it"s only the two brothers who"ve clashed. They are identical in appearance, and each recognises his twin brother. Now, one of them has to die. But the two soldiers are equally good with their knives, they have precisely the same genetic characteristics, and manage to wound each other fatally.
Some useful ideas: dwell on the choice facing the two of them, the logic of war. The man who doesn"t kill his brother risks getting killed himself. Do the brothers manage to say anything to each other before their last gasp? Do they gain any new insight? (A short dialogue here?) Don"t forget the battle scene: the two dying twins who once were at peace with one another in their mother"s womb and later, when they each suckled at one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but who have now killed each other. The circle is complete. They were born in the same hour and now their blood mingles in a single pool. Who finds the twins? What reaction does the discovery provoke?
Johannes used the story, but turned it into a novella. When I read it in a literary periodical a year later, I thought it was well written, and I was particularly impressed with his detailed knowledge of military hardware and all the telling background descriptions of Vietnam. But it made me rather depressed all the same.
Johannes" version of the story ended, of course, with the twin who represented the army of liberation being unable to kill his twin brother, even though this brother had enlisted as a lackey of US imperialism. And so he"d been brutally liquidated himself.
Throughout the novella the words "sly" and "heroic" were used repeatedly, but never of the same twin. Johannes had known how to deploy the fact that the twins were identical.
He had used the story to demonstrate how little effect inherited characteristics have on a person"s development.
I can"t say I was shocked by this turn of events, for it was hardly surprising. That was the way a lot of literature was written in the seventies. Literature"s job wasn"t princ.i.p.ally to debate problems. It was supposed to be uplifting.
During the next few years I established myself on a national basis and I also made a few contacts in the other Scandi- navian countries as well. It took longer to go international, that was the next step.
One important principle was that I couldn"t sell the same notes more than once. That would have been spotted. What a spectacle it would have been if two detective novels by two separate authors based on exactly the same plot had appeared in the same year! The thought struck me occasionally and it was a seductive one, because it would indubitably have been interesting to see, just once, what two authors made of the same idea.
I also had to be careful which stories I told in company. I couldn"t run the risk of a critic pointing out that a recently published novel was based on a story which had been doing the rounds for ages and which the reviewer had most recently heard related across a table at the Tostrupkjelleren.
This forced me to segregate the stories I could tell myself from the plots that were earmarked for sale. I had to curb my oral development. Living with this limitation was an excellent challenge. It pushed me ever harder to invent something new the whole time.
Right from the start I had to live with one big exception to this rule. I"d told so many good stories to Maria that I didn"t feel I could keep them all back. If Maria read Norwegian novels during the eighties and nineties, she"d have chuckled quite regularly. In more recent years she"d also have been able to reminisce about the days when she nestled in my arms, by reading various foreign novels. I have several film synopses on my conscience too, or on my list of credits, depending on how you look at it. I like the thought of Maria going to the cinema and watching an epic cinematic version of one of the many stories I made up for her after we"d made love. I need no other copyright acknowledgement.
So from the first, Maria was the only one able to pinpoint me as The Spider. I never told my authors about Maria, and I never told Maria about them, even though my business was well established by the time we last met. But I felt I was safe with her - she had used my sendees too. Maria"s darling child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. That was her little secret that she didn"t want revealed. Perhaps she was as scared of it becoming common knowledge as Johannes was of the whole city finding out I"d written the twenty aphor- isms that had added zest to the novel that proved to be his literary breakthrough. In this regard but only in this, Maria was in exactly the same boat as Johannes.
When a thing was sold, it was gone. This didn"t pose a problem. The idea that I"d ever run out of ideas never occurred to me, it was the only thing I simply couldn"t conceive. I"d been much alone in childhood, I"d had my own flat since I was eighteen, I"d been in training ever since I went to nursery school.
However, I made a point of keeping a photocopy of all the notes I sold. They were kept in separate ring-binders marked "SOLD". On the top of each page I wrote who I"d sold them to and how much for. In the early days this was the only system of receipts I used, but that was before I realised that it was possible one day for a counter-force to build up, to equalise the pressure that arose from within me. It was before I began to carry a dictaphone in my inside pocket when I talked to authors, and before I began to tape telephone conversations. However, I did keep photocopies of every cheque I"d received right back to my earliest transactions. And I might as well make it clear that those, too, are kept in my bank box, together with the tapes.
The enterprise got going just at the time when photo- copiers were coming on to the market. For a short while I was dependent on the coin-operated machines at the university or in the library, but it wasn"t long before I had my own Rank Xerox. When personal computers made their appearance in the 1980s, the office work became much simpler, and when I went international in earnest, I never travelled anywhere without a powerful laptop.
I had to accept being the centre of a large circle of acquaint- ance. This was a bit of a trial sometimes, but it wasn"t onerous. I was a sociable person, I was well liked, and I rarely found I had to pay my share of restaurant bills. I couldn"t always explain why myself but, whenever a bill was presented, someone had almost always settled up for me.
That was just the way it was.
I had a reputation as a fount of ideas. If they"d only known! None of them could see more than the tip of the iceberg. How could I have kept the business going if all my clients had discovered that, in reality, I"d spun a finely meshed web which would one day be so extensive and fragile and have so many loose ends that it was doomed to unravel?
At any cafe gathering, several of those seated round the table might be my clients, but each thought that he or she was the only one, at least in the early years. They thought I was monogamous, and I"ve always considered that a peculiarly amusing aspect of my unusual trade. To begin with none of my customers had the slightest inkling that I was really highly promiscuous. I sometimes felt like a polygamist who enjoys the favours of several wives simul- taneously. I knew about them and they knew about me, but they knew nothing of each other.
If six or eight of us were in company, possibly three of those present might have bought a plot or two from me. But each thought he enjoyed a special relationship, and so they maintained their respect for each other. This was what they lived for. Many of them had already lost their self-respect. In those days, lack of self-respect was so rare that I noticed it; maybe today it wouldn"t stand out so much. Self-respect is the name of a mental state that is less and less in evidence.
And certainly as a virtue self-respect has gone completely out of fashion.
Naturally no one announced that next month they were publishing a novel based on an idea they"d bought from me.
But, on the other hand, I several times sensed a certain nervousness that I might suddenly forget myself and blurt out, for example, that Berit"s critically acclaimed detective story was built on a six-page synopsis I"d sold her for four thousand kroner. I could detect such nervousness in an overstrained laugh or a tendency towards abrupt or over- frequent digressions.
While we sat in the Theatercafe celebrating Karin"s suc- cess in winning a prestigious award for her latest novel, she spent the entire evening following me with her eyes.
She was ill at ease. I, on the other hand, was feeling marvellous. In the citation they had specifically remarked on the elegant construction of the narrative. Quite right, I thought. I was satisfied with Karin. She"d taken good care of what I"d entrusted to her, she hadn"t buried her talent.
I wielded considerable power in such company, and that was fine by me. I could see nothing wrong in feeling powerful. Power doesn"t have to be abused, and I was a good example of that. I had shared my own power with others. I"d always been excessively well endowed with ima- gination, so much so that I"d even begun to organise a major power distribution. Bold it may have been, brazen too, but princ.i.p.ally it was generous. As far as the media were con- cerned it was Berit who had power and I who was weak. If I"d been longing for a spot in the media limelight I would have been a self-sacrificing person. But I"ve never wanted a place in the public eye.
It amused me to see what my authors made of all the ideas I fed them, that was all. I had a function, and so I had to function. I had to have something to live on as well, I had to ensure my cut of the profits of an industry that was becoming ever more dependent on my efforts.
When the results were tolerable, I had the pleasant feeling of being surrounded by my own pack of writers. I could feel like a king in an enlightened autocracy. I was a pa.s.sable chess player, but I was even better at playing with living pieces. I liked pulling the strings, and I found it entertaining to watch how the proud authors put on airs. It was fun to watch them disporting themselves.