IN THE SUMMER OF 2013, A JOURNALIST FROM A DAILY newspaper in London telephoned me at my apartment in Oslo. The Legatum Institute in London had just published its Prosperity Index, a survey that claimed to offer ‘the world’s only assessment of factors that lead to higher levels of material wealth and subjective well-being’, and the reporter wanted to talk to me about it. From the Institute’s analysis of a total of eighty-nine variables, it had placed Norway at the top of a league-table of happy people living in happy countries. Great Britain was in thirteenth place of the 110 countries included in the survey. Zimbabwe, where the life expectancy of the average adult is forty-four, was bottom of the list. North Korea wasn’t even on it. Factors included in the survey and identified as ‘pillars of prosperity’ ranged from purely economic indicators to abstract quantities such as social capital, personal freedom, and safety and security. Figures on rates of marriage and divorce, religious attendance, statistics about the numbers of citizens taking part in voluntary work, and surveys showing how much citizens trust each other were also included.
The journalist wanted to know whether I, as a long-time British resident of Norway, had any comments to make on the result. A thousand responses flashed through my head, all of them positive. This is a very open society, I might have told her. It’s not punitive. There’s a strong sense among the people that the government will always respond to public concern. It’s one of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of equality of opportunity and equality in rights between men and women. Up to 75 per cent of women are in employment, and the men often work in child-care roles. This is a society built on trust and faith in human nature. When a Norwegian does well in the outside world the whole country celebrates. It’s as if a favourite son or daughter has brought honour on the family. Everyone shares in the achievement and feels a collective pride. There’s very little backbiting. The country’s two most popular tabloids – Dagbladet and VG – regularly carry book reviews. You’d never get that in the Daily Mirror or The Sun. Here, reputations are preserved for generations. The Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library) in Oslo is currently running a twenty-five-year retrospective on the band a-ha, the Norwegian trio who had a string of hits in the 1980s and ’90s. At one point in the 1990s, after Norway did quite well in the World Cup, there were some thirty or forty Norwegians playing for English Premier League clubs. One reason the managers liked them so much was because they were almost uniformly clean-living and decent people who trained hard and showed respect. You’d never get a Gazza or a George Best in Norway.
All of this I would gladly have said to her, but as luck would have it I was on my way out to pick up my father-in-law and drive him to a dental appointment and I was late already. When she asked if I could suggest another source I thought of my old friend Birger Rønning, a translator working from English into Norwegian who had spent many years of his childhood and schooldays in England, where his mother worked as a lecturer at the University of East Anglia. She thanked me and hung up, and I thought no more about it until an evening some months later when I met Birger at a Translators’ Union social in Rådhus gata and in the course of our conversation remembered that phone call. I asked if the journalist had telephoned him.
‘Yes, she called alright, but I don’t think she used what I told her.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘That I didn’t believe a word of it. As if you could measure something like that. They’re as bad as Jehovah’s Witnesses, these rationalists. Religious faith, human love, human happiness – they think if they shine the light of reason on it all will be illuminated. I told her my truth, Robert. That people here aren’t any happier than they are anywhere else. It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I expect she went to some know-all professor of sociology instead. Opinions on everything. He’d tell her what she wanted to hear.’
‘So what did you tell her? You gave her the melancholy narrative instead?’
He groaned. ‘That’s the other end of the same cliché.’ He already knew I intended to write a study of Scandinavian culture and made some disparaging remark about how he hoped I wouldn’t be putting that in my book, that Scandinavians are gloomy and mentally unstable melancholics.
I protested. ‘Come on, Birger. The Brits are funny but not very good at sex. The Italians are good at sex but not very funny. The French are intellectual. The Germans always wait for the green man before crossing. And when they’re not knocking out high-quality furniture and committing suicide the Scandinavians sit in the darkness and think about doing it. They might not be the whole truth but these national characteristics are a useful shorthand guide.’
I was hoping to wind him up. Ever since the idea of writing a book about the history of Scandinavian culture first came to me I had assumed it would have a title with an allusion to melancholy in it. ‘The Narrow Road to the Dark North’ was one I thought of. Or ‘Thirteen Types of Melancholy’, something like that. But the further I got into the book the less faith I had in the truth of the idea.
Birger was suitably provoked. ‘Scandinavian melancholy is a literary illusion,’ he said as he put his glass of white wine down on a low table next to an untouched bowl of Twiglets. ‘It’s an artistic myth. Listen: Saga literature. August Strindberg. Edvard Munch’s obsession with death. Ingmar Bergman’s obsession with the failure to communicate.’ He held a bunched hand up in front of him and with each name unfolded another finger. ‘For a hundred years that’s all the outside world ever knew about the Scandinavians. We were appointed official purveyors of melancholy to the rest of Europe. Anything that didn’t fit the cliché, they didn’t want to know about it. You remember Edward Said’s Orientalism? The imposition of a cultural definition from outside? Well, this is Nordicism. We should sue somebody.’
I said it was an interesting theory but I wasn’t convinced. What about Inferno, Strindberg’s harrowing account of his descent into madness? And how did his theory square with Henrik Ibsen’s famous remarks about the secluded and remote valleys and long dark nights of the winters turning every Norwegian inhabitant into a brooding philosopher?
The last known photograph of August Strindberg, taken on 9 April 1912. He died of cancer the following month. Adoc-photos/Corbis/Getty Images.
Birger eased down into an armchair beside his wine glass and drained it. ‘Ibsen was a professional Norwegian,’ he said derisively. ‘What did Ibsen know? He lived in bloody Italy most of his life. As for Strindberg, he’s misunderstood. Strindberg was a joker. He’s even funnier than Samuel Beckett. Listen. I’ll tell you a Strindberg joke. After he asked Frida Uhl to marry him she told him she needed time to think about it. They arranged to meet on a certain date in the Red Room and she would give him her answer. When she gets there Strindberg is already sitting at his usual table. Near the back, in the shadow of the staircase, away from the light. He couldn’t stand the light. It was one of the first things he told her. Something she had to know about him if the marriage was going to have any future at all. One of the first things he impressed upon her. Frida comes in. He doesn’t look up but she can tell that he’s registered her arrival. She shakes the wet snow from her frilly black umbrella, furls it and hangs it by its bone handle over the back of the chair next to his. She takes off her coat and sits down beside him. She’s had all night to think about things and now here she is, ready to give him her reply. Strindberg looks as though he hasn’t slept at all. His high, delicate cheekbones are flushed pink, the whites of his blue eyes are flecked with red as they flick restlessly around the red walls of the bar. Now and then they pass across her and she can almost feel her skin burning. Then, suddenly sitting upright in his chair, he reaches into the inside top pocket of the heavy black overcoat he’s still wearing. He seems to feel about for something. But when he brings his hand out again it’s empty. Now he erupts in a fit of dry coughing that almost doubles him over. Once he’s recovered he straightens up again, eyes glinting feverishly. He shakes his head violently, as though to clear it. He rubs his lips hard with his fingertips, presses the waxed wings of his moustache upwards with the tips of his forefinger and thumb four or five times. Then, finally, his gaze fixes on her. She knows this is it, he’s not going to look away until he has had her answer.
She takes a deep breath. Then a second, even deeper. And then: ‘Yes, August,’ she says. ‘My answer is yes.’
She sees the tension drain from Strindberg’s body. His shoulders sink down inside the black overcoat, the lapels and fur collar stand up from his chest. Again he reaches down into the inside pocket of the coat. This time, when his hand emerges, he’s holding a slender-barrelled black pistol. Delicately, almost soundlessly, he places it on the table in front of him.
‘Oh my God, August!’ Frida whispers in horror. ‘Would you have shot yourself if I’d said no?’
He looks at her in astonishment, his blue eyes wide. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I would have shot you.’
Birger rose to his feet to bellow out the punch line, and heads turned, wondering what we were talking about. He ended by giving me a friendly pat on the shoulder, as though he hadn’t enjoyed shattering my illusions, and admitted he had once read an interview with Strindberg, on the occasion of the Swede’s sixtieth birthday, in which he revealed that he had first thought of killing himself at the age of seven.
‘Although perhaps even that was a joke,’ he added, half to himself.
I persisted. I said it was beyond the bounds of coincidence that every great Scandinavian writer, painter and film-maker should have concerned himself with an art that concentrated on the darkest and most painful aspects of human existence. Sickness. Death. The failure of love. I invoked the crop of Dogme films from Denmark, about incest, insanity, child abuse, the imminent end of the world. Surely, I said, you can’t ignore thematic content as consistent as that?
Birger would have none of it. ‘Those are all art films you’re talking about. All those von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg films. And Ingmar Bergman. Art films are the only Scandinavian films foreigners ever see. Show them a film about the Olsen gang or one of those silly selskapreise films, those Lasse Åberg and Jon Skolmen films about idiots on package tours, and they’d walk out complaining that it wasn’t the real Scandinavia. Or let them read Triztán Vindtorn’s poetry instead of all this “Nordic noir” crap. Now there’s a case of coals to Newmarket if I ever heard one.’
Birger’s command of English was excellent, but some of the gaps in his grasp of idiom could still surprise me. He once told me he had commissioned a friend of ours, Erling Jonsrud, to paint a self-portrait of his dog Gunstein, the long-legged, sad-eyed poodle with whom he shared the house in Ljabru he had inherited on the death of his mother. On another occasion he gave me a harrowing description of the time Gunstein had been menaced in Frogner Park by an enormous black ascension dog. The films about the Olsen gang he was referring to were a series of films from the 1960s and ’70s, about a gang of badly dressed and incompetent Norwegian criminals, farcical in tone and not unlike the Carry On films in spirit. Vindtorn was a surrealist Norwegian poet who, at the age of sixty-two, changed his name from Kjell Erik to Triztán.
I accused Birger of wilfully not seeing my point. He glared huffily at his empty glass and then disappeared through the crowd to replenish it. As so often happens at these dos I got into conversation with someone else almost immediately, a young woman with fragrant hair who wanted to pick my English brain for the meaning of a phrase in an English novel she was translating for Gyldendal, to ‘push the envelope’: what does it mean when you say someone is ‘pushing the envelope’? I hadn’t the faintest idea. Perhaps it had something to do with a bribe being offered? Money being pushed across a table in a fat envelope? But I failed to convince myself and in the end could only suggest she ask an American.
Later, as I was leaving, I passed Birger on the steps. He was talking to a chubby youth in a check shirt with red cheeks and a bushy beard, both of them smoking, the youth listening intently as Birger told his Alan Bates story, a story I had heard many times, but always late on in the evening, so that I never quite felt I had got the full gist of it, other than that he had once met the actor Alan Bates, or once for some reason spoken to him on the telephone around the time Bates was filming Gosford Park, and that Bates, imperfectly remembering his name, had addressed him throughout their conversation as ‘Mr Trotting’. It was an inconsequential story, but the pleasure Birger derived from re-telling it was infectious. It had led him to develop a sort of obsession with Alan Bates, which, it has only recently occurred to me, may have had something to do with their sharing a faint facial resemblance, a phenomenon I have noticed before among certain of my friends as providing a credible explanation for an otherwise inexplicable passion. Without really breaking the thread of his tale he turned as I walked past on my way down the steps into the courtyard, tapped me on the shoulder and announced that he could not stand idly by and allow me to perpetuate the illusion of a congenital Scandinavian melancholy and ordered me to ring him and arrange a meeting at which he would demonstrate his theory of the artificial origin of the illusion irrevocably, as he put it, dropping into English, as though no Norwegian word could possibly convey the absolute finality of what he was proposing to offer me, and jabbing my shoulder with his finger for emphasis. I said I would.
*
‘I’m going to talk to you about what I call the Golden Age of Scandinavian melancholy,’ he began in the familiar didactic manner that was one of the reasons I found his company so relaxing. It was the same whenever we met. Birger would do the talking, I would respond with a series of nods and hums and grunts, which every few minutes would turn into a whole sentence intended usually to encourage or provoke him into continuing. ‘I’m going to prove to you that it is not a national characteristic unchanging down through the centuries. That it had its definite beginnings in a definite artistic environment and that it is the legacy of this quite specific artistic environment that leads directly to the films of Ingmar Bergman, the plays of Jon Fosse, and most strikingly to the school of “Scandinavian noir” novels that have become so popular recently in your country. That thanks to the lifestyles and creations of a handful of Scandinavian artists around the turn of the nineteenth century the rest of us have been cast in the role of experts on melancholy and madness and there is little we can do about it.’
It was mid-December. We had arranged to meet at Majorstua station and take the metro out to Skøyenåsen in the eastern suburbs of Oslo and then embark on a point-to-point stroll around Østensjø lake and on up past Rustadsaga to Skullerud, where we would pick up the metro or 74 bus back into Oslo. Leaving the station at Skøyenåsen we skirted the lower part of the lake and then took the forest path that leads up past an indoor ice-hockey stadium before descending along the open eastern side of the water. A faint humming sound came from a yellow Portakabin involved in some small lakeside clearing project. Periodically we glimpsed it as we climbed through the trees.
*
‘Once upon a time there was a woman named Dagny Juel,’ he began. ‘She was born in Kongsvinger in 1867, into one of the leading families in Norway – in the days of the Sweden-Norway union her uncle Otto Blehr was the Norwegian prime minister in Stockholm. Her parents were enlightened people, modern people. The family was musical. Her sister was a fine singer. Edvard Munch painted the two of them at the piano once, Dagny with her back to us at the piano, Ragnhild facing us, singing. Very unmelancholic painting. Dagny wanted to be a writer. I know all this because I’m translating a new book about her. By an American academic. Dagny spent two years at some kind of finishing school in Erfurt, in Germany, where she became fluent in German. After that, she returned to Norway and a few years later moved to Kristiania to study music. In Kristiania she got to know a lot of artists and novelists and poets, people like Vilhelm Krag, Sigbjørn Obstfelder. She also got to know Edvard Munch. In February 1893 she went to Berlin to continue her music studies. She hooked up with Munch again and he introduced her to the crowd that hung out at a bar called Zum Schwarzen Ferkel, where all the exiled Scandinavian artists congregated. Strindberg, for example. Plus a smattering of men from other countries. Poles. Like Stanislaw Pryszbyszewski. Actually it wasn’t called The Black Pig at all. Its real name was Das Kloster, but Strindberg thought the leather wineskins that hung above the door looked like three black pigs.’
We had reached the footbridge at the top of Østensjøvatnet, where the ducks congregate. Birger, already pale and panting from the exertions of the walk, though it had all been flat once we cres-ted the forested knoll at the foot of the lake, took the opportunity to rest, leaning both arms on the wooden railing and affecting a keen interest in the mallards circling in the water below us and quacking for bread.
‘I saw Woody Allen on a French television show once,’ he said after a few moments. ‘The interviewer asked him what he would like to come back as if he could choose. A sponge, he said. The interviewer laughed and asked why. He thought he was joking. Because a sponge is alive, said Woody Allen. It’s alive but it’s incapable of suffering.’
‘And how would Woody Allen know that?’
Birger shrugged. ‘Guessed, I suppose. Anyway. Dagny fell for Pryszbyszewski, known as ‘Stachu’. He was one year younger than her but living with a woman who already had three children by him. Pryszbyszewski was a hell-raiser. You know the type: he comes round to your house, drinks all your booze and is sick all over your carpet. He was a writer and a self-taught pianist, a wild man at the piano, jumping up and down on the stool while he played Schumann and Chopin. They were a musical crowd at The Black Pig. Strindberg used to take his guitar along sometimes and accompany himself in a special tuning of his own devising while he sang folk songs and ballads. Sigbjørn Obstfelder carried his violin about with him and played Grieg, Svendsen and Bach. Women are funny, aren’t they? What they’ll fall for. Dagny being a pianist herself I’m guessing it was Stachu’s playing she fell for. He carried on seeing his old love but in August of that same year, 1893, he and Dagny got married.
‘I’m trying to paint you a picture of a certain kind of environment, in which the two most famous names were Edvard Munch and August Strindberg. Strindberg was the oldest man in the group, over forty at this time. He was secretly engaged to an Austrian woman half his age, an actress named Frida Uhl. According to Strindberg, while Frida was away from Berlin he was Dagny’s lover for three weeks and then, in his own gallant phrase, he handed her over to a young Swedish scholar named Bengt Lidforss. After that he embarked on a campaign of hatred of her. He writes a letter about her to a friend: she’s rented a room in a red-light district, he says. The woman is a moral imbecile. Any day now the police are going to arrest her. It’s like a bloody novel, he says. She breaks up happy homes and ruins talented men, drives them to leave their wives, their homes, their jobs, their responsibilities. Mind you, it’s none of my business, he adds, she’s someone else’s mistress now. But for her own sake, and the sake of her family, he says in this letter, get someone to fetch her home.’
We had walked on now, under the flyover, and crossed to the other side of the lake and were ambling in the direction of Rustadsaga, where we planned to stop for a waffle and a cup of coffee. I remarked that his story showed yet again the great difference in personality between Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen.
‘The author of the book I’m translating thinks these expressions of hatred for Dagny and horror at her destructive force can be explained by the fact that he was about to enter a binding relationship with Frida Uhl that would inevitably, to his way of looking at things, emasculate and enfeeble him. He needed a woman as a scapegoat. Dagny was handy.’
‘Is that what you believe?’
He shrugged and scuffed the cindered path with the toe of his dirty white trainers.
‘Possibly. Or perhaps she competed with him. He hated competition. I remember in your Hamsun biography, when Hamsun and Strindberg were in Paris, how he didn’t like being around Hamsun because he said his personality was too strong. Dagny was strong. She had an easy, confident strength that maddened him. She wrote a play in 1895 called Den sterkere [“The Stronger”]. Strindberg had written a play six years before that was called Den starkare [“The Stronger”]. Well, there’s only one thing stronger than the stronger, and that’s the one that comes after it. I think she did it deliberately. She just didn’t buy into his bullshit. Inventing a new tuning for the guitar. Discovering a new planet all by himself. And why not? It’s hilarious. Of course it is – if you look with Strindberg. It doesn’t work if you look at him. I think Dagny looked at him, and he couldn’t take it.’
Birger stopped again, panting heavily, as the path rose slightly, heading away from the football fields at the northern end of the lake. Struggling to get his breath back he glared at the grass on either side of the footpath and made some obviously diversionary remark about how worrying it was that there was no snow yet. Nearly Christmas and still no snow. As I knew he hadn’t the slightest interest in climate change I let this pass, and once he’d recovered we carried on at the same easy shuffle as he resumed his attempts to prove to me irrevocably that Scandinavian melancholy was either a myth, a piece of pernicious Nordicism, or even a commercial construction.
‘Of course, Strindberg’s hatred of Dagny may have been merely an artistic convenience. For the purposes of his writing he needed someone to hate. It could have been anyone, but it happened to be her. He wrote about her. Dagny was his dark muse. His Aspasia in Inferno and Svarta fanor, his Henriette in Brott och Brott, his Laïs in Klostret and Karantänmästarns andra berättelse. Edvard Munch used her in his paintings and lithographs too. Dagny was his orgasmic Madonna. His Vampyr. He used her in Sjalusi, Aske, Kyss. She wasn’t beautiful. She must have been what people call attractive. You had to be there to get it. Look at any photograph of her, then look at Munch’s Madonna. Look at the eyes. She was everyone’s model. Stachu used her in his first novel, Totenmesse.* He used her again in Overbord. He used her over and over again. What a life. Everybody’s muse. It must have worn her out. Stachu used Munch in Overbord too, the first part of his Homo Sapiens trilogy. About a writer who steals a woman from his painter friend. So Munch used him. Again and again. The haunted, white-faced goat-boy staring out at us from paintings like Jealousy or Red Virginia Creeper, that is Stachu.’
‘Was this before or after Munch painted Scream?’†
‘Munch painted Scream for the first time in 1893, so this was right in the middle. Late in 1895 Dagny gave birth to a boy, Zenon. Stachu was still seeing the woman he’d left for Dagny, a woman named Martha Foerder.’ Birger sighed. ‘You read about these people and you wonder how they had the stamina. Some didn’t. In June 1896 Martha killed herself. Stachu was arrested on suspicion of being involved with her death and held in jail for two weeks before being released without charge. In the winter of 1897 Dagny gave birth to their second child, a daughter christened Iwa. Stachu was starting to make his name in native Poland and he was offered the job as editor of Zycie, a literary magazine published in Cracow, so in 1898 the family moved to Poland. A few months later Dagny’s father died. She wasn’t able to get home for the funeral. Her husband was an alcoholic and a serial adulterer. She had two young kids. She couldn’t speak a word of the language. So there she was, trapped in Poland with this mediocre, flashy shit.’ He said this last with such venom that I glanced at him and wondered fleetingly if, in the course of translating her biography, he might have fallen in love with Dagny himself. But his round, owlish face betrayed nothing.
Red Virginia Creeper by Edvard Munch, 1898–1900. Wikimedia Commons.
‘So she left him. Left Poland and the children and spent most of 1900 travelling around. She was in Berlin, Prague, Paris, back home in Kongsvinger, Stockholm. And then she decided to give Stachu another chance. Because of the children I suppose. So it turns out she wasn’t Nora Helmer after all. Stachu said he was willing.’
We had passed under the railway bridge that carries the metro’s Line 3 and were clambering up the steep rise that the brown footpath takes before it enters the dense forests of the Østmarka. It had started drizzling and the track was lightly coated with mud and slippery. Birger must have stopped five times in the course of the short climb, right hand flat against his heaving chest, face pale and glinting with a combination of rain and sweat, the wispy brown hair sticking to his forehead. I found myself wondering what to do if he collapsed, but he made it to the top after a couple more stops and a few minutes later we were sitting inside the café at Rustadsaga.
It’s a typically Norwegian ramblers’ café of the type that are dotted throughout the forests of the marka, cocooned in a 1950s atmosphere with wooden walls adorned with fly-specked black-and-white photographs of the innocent people of that time, in their heavyweight anoraks and ancient wooden skis. Rustadsaga was a place to sit and stare out of the window at the trees and through them catch blue glimpses of the waters of Lake Nøklevann while munching on a warm golden waffle folded over a few thin slices of sweet-tasting Norwegian brown cheese. If they really wanted to find out why Norwegians seemed so content, I thought to myself, all the people at the Legatum Institute needed to do was take a walk up here and spend half an hour over a coffee and waffle at Rustadsaga.
Although we had spoken of quite other things for the past fifteen minutes, Birger resumed his narrative, after returning to the table with a second cup of coffee, as though he had only just left off.
‘They had a friend who hung out at The Black Pig, a young Pole in his early twenties named Wladislav Emeryk. Known as the Dog on account of his slavish devotion to Stachu. His father was a millionaire industrialist and Emeryk had invited them to stay at the family home near Tbilisi. I imagine poor Dagny thought Stachu might have grown up and turned over a new leaf now that he’d made his name in Poland. And he could write a love letter. Listen to this.’
Birger picked up his rucksack, unfastened the straps and pulled out an iPad. He tapped the screen a couple of times, pulled up his translation and began to read from it:
Min Ducha, [...] Now, only now do I realise that I love you [...] I remember […] how you put up with me when I was drunk, how you have suffered and rejoiced with me, I see your lovely, refined, aristocratic cheek and feel your delicate, silky panther skin in my hands […] I want you to know that it is you who have made me, and I want to possess you as I have never before possessed you: your naked, quivering soul, your naked and quivering thoughts […] A nature such as mine can only exist in you, because you alone are my absolute, highest, most intimate ideal […] I will write the most wonderful things, I will tower through the skies, I will do everything, everything, everything. But I must know that you love me.
He looked up from the screen: ‘Ducha, that means “soul” in Polish. It’s what he called her. So of course, she goes to the station with Zenon and their suitcases and everything. And Emeryk is there, and they wait for Stachu. And he never turns up. At the last moment, he sent a telegram saying he was delayed and they should go ahead, he would join them with Iwa as soon as he could. So in April 1901 these three left Warsaw and began the long rail journey to the Caucasus.
In mid-May they reached Tbilisi. Emeryk booked them in at the Grand Hotel, pretending to be Dagny’s brother. Nothing from Stachu. Not a word, not a letter, not a note. He has her passport. As the days pass her despair and bewilderment increase.’
Birger cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses and read from the screen again:
My mind is frozen. A month, and not one single word from you. I have telegraphed Cracow, Lvov and Warsaw – no answer. Okay then! Tomorrow we leave Tbilisi for Emeryk’s place in the countryside by the Black Sea. I cannot, of course, make any further arrangements until I have heard from you. My address remains Grand Hotel, Tbilisi. Very important: you must immediately send a passport for me and Zenon. It could cause me great difficulties if you don’t. You promised to send the passport after two days! I’m begging you: do it now.
‘The same day she wrote this,’ Birger went on, ‘Emeryk came into the hotel room where she was dozing in a chair. She had her back to the door. Zenon was sitting on the floor with a colouring book. He looked up as Emeryk entered. Emeryk put a finger to his lips, admonishing silence, and held out his hand to the boy. Zenon took it and Emeryk walked him in silence down the corridor and into a room where a friend of his was staying. He kissed him, then returned to Dagny’s room and shot her through the back of the head at close range. He lifted her body out of the chair and arranged it on the bed. Then he shot himself. Five days earlier at the hotel he had written and sealed a number of letters that showed the murder was long premeditated. One was to Stachu. Stachu, he wrote, I’m killing her for her own sake. Another was to Zenon. On the front of the sealed envelope he wrote that it was to be given to the boy on his twentieth birthday:
My dearest Zenon! I am taking your mother from you. You will hear the strangest things about her, but literature – both what has been written and what will surely be written – will not give you […] the truth. For she was not of this world […] That she was the only one of the absolute Almighty’s incarnations, that she was God, you will hear from others. I wish only to say, to express myself in an earthly way, that she was holy. She was Goodness itself, she had a royal goodness which came from contempt. You alone were everything for her […] She believed that her goal, that her reason for being sent here – was to give birth to you. I am taking her from you. I am doing you a terrible, boundless wrong. Maybe your life will be ruined by it. I cannot do anything else, I cannot do anything else out of concern for her. In eternity, when we meet ...
‘I think a lot about this murder,’ Birger said, closing the screen, slipping the iPad back into his rucksack. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t do. But it keeps me awake at night. The papers were full of it. Apparently it was all her fault. She was this femme fatale, this home-wrecker, heartbreaker, etcetera, etcetera. A French paper even managed to get the two Strindbergs mixed up, writing that August had been in love with Dagny, and when she rejected him in despair he signed up for Andrée’s balloon expedition to go to the North Pole and was never heard from again. And the whole extraordinary rumour mill started grinding. To this day there are people who believe Stachu was behind it, that Stachu had asked the Dog to clear up a messy situation for him.’
‘That was the only reason Emeryk gave for killing her? That insane babble about how ethereal she was?’
He nodded. ‘And yet, this pointless and unspeakably cruel murder came about only because this quite normal woman was sufficiently grown up to be able to think of men as friends, a feat of the imagination that appears to have been beyond the reach of these sex-obsessed geniuses, these men-children she found herself among. In my view the story encapsulates the whole myth of Scandinavian melancholy, though that’s hardly the right word, Scandinavian melancholy, mental disturbance, sexual darkness, insanity, whatever. It can stand as an unmasking of the whole sorry myth. It spread through Scandinavian art. It penetrated everywhere. Like water. Edvard Munch was convinced that Irene in Ibsen’s last play When We Dead Awaken was based on Dagny – you remember how in that play Irene was the sculptor Professor Rubeck’s model, his muse?’
Dagny Juel Przybyszewska painted by Edvard Munch in 1893. Wikimedia Commons.
‘Do we know if Zenon ever read that letter?’
‘I don’t know. But a friend of mine told me a curious story concerning him. My friend was a conscientious objector and he opted to do samfunnstjeneste‡ instead of military service and found himself working as an attendant at the Munch Museum in Tøyen. He told me that one day a rather sad and defeated-looking elderly Swedish man arrived at the museum accompanied by his wife. My friend said he asked to be directed to ‘Munch’s portrait of my mother’. He said he had seen reproductions of it but never the original painting. As luck would have it the painting wasn’t on display at that time – they don’t have room for everything on the walls. The head of the museum was called – I think it might have been Arne Eggen – and when the Swedish gentleman explained who he was, he was allowed down into the basement. Eggen went down with him, to show him where to find the painting and to set it up for him, and then he found a chair for him to sit on, placed it in front of the portrait and left him alone. His wife waited upstairs for him in the cafeteria. He spent a long time down there, just looking at Munch’s portrait of his mother. Half an hour at least. And when he came back up again, my friend said, he seemed like another man. He said you would hardly have recognised him. The experience had transfigured him.’
Birger drank the last of his coffee, stood up and shouldered his rucksack. ‘Come on, or we’ll never get to Skullerud.’
What did Birger think he had proved? That it was these painters and writers, living this particular kind of life and creating this particular kind of art, who had created the national trope of the Scandinavian that so much of the rest of the world responds to even today? That The Bridge, Mankell, all of this is gloomy merely because it comes from Scandinavia, where everybody makes gloomy art because gloom was what they inherited from their nineteenth-century forefathers? Absurd. And what about Henrik Ibsen? Apart from the illegitimate child he fathered from his days at the chemist’s shop in Grimstad, Ibsen led a life that makes Trollope look like Henry Miller. But surely it was Ibsen more than any of those alcoholic bohemians, with his enormous fame, with his Brands and his Gregers Werle, his fru Alvings and his Osvalds, his Hedvigs and his Rebecca Wests, the incest, the syphilis, the blindness, the suicide, surely he was the one who had schooled the rest of Europe in this perception of Scandinavians? No. Birger’s ‘Nordicism’ argument was unduly cynical. Kierkegaard thought the way he did, Ibsen wrote the way he did, Strindberg wrote and painted the way he did, Munch painted and wrote the way he did, Bergman made the films he made because they could not do otherwise. And if this were not the case, where was the Swedish Oscar Wilde? The Danish Noel Coward? The Norwegian Tom Stoppard? No, Ibsen was naturally attracted to darkness. Scandinavians are naturally attracted to the shadows.
I argued this to Birger all the way as we followed the twisting path through the trees towards Skullerud. I half-expected him to mount a renewed defence of his theory about how a handful of drink-sodden bohemians, entirely untypical of the average Scandinavian, were responsible for the whole image outsiders have of them. But he seemed to have wearied of the discussion and instead started talking about how important Ibsen had been to the writers of Nordic noir. With a wave of the hand he reeled off a few names: Jo Nesbø, Liza Marklund, Peter Høeg, Stieg Larsson….
Concerned not to let him duck what seemed to me a clear flaw in his train of thought, I protested that their inspirations were rather American, such as Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wambaugh, Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, and that while Ibsen was certainly responsible for the creation of the modern theatre, with his revolutionary idea of dramatizing the lives and problems of his own contemporaries, the crime novel as a genre was actually the invention of another American, Edgar Allan Poe.
‘A sad case of cultural imperialism,’ he replied obdurately. ‘Nothing has been invented until it has been invented by an American or an Englishman. Or in the case of James Joyce and the stream of consciousness, an Irishman, since that was discovered and first used by our own Knut Hamsun in Mysteries, published back in 1894. No, the modern crime novel was actually the invention of an obscure nineteenth-century Norwegian writer named Mauritz Christoffer Hansen, born on July 5th 1794 in Modum. His novella Mordet på Maskinbygger Roolfsen [“The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen”] was published in 1839, a full eighteen months before Poe’s Murders on the Rue Morgue appeared. It has all the hallmarks of the classically structured crime novel as we know it today. It is focused throughout on the investigation of a crime committed by a person or persons unknown. There is a detective, a lawyer and a police chief who interview suspects and witnesses in a slow and methodical attempt to create a complete picture of the actual train of events. Among the clues that emerge, one provides an early example of the use of forensics.
Putting all his information together, Barth, the investigator, arrives at a surprise double-solution. One is that the guilty party is the city’s most powerful man, the person who has pressed most strongly for a quick and successful resolution of the case. The other is that Roolfsen hasn’t been murdered at all, but disappears in such a fashion that everybody thought he had been. In contrast to his literary descendents like Arsène Lupin, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Johannes Barth is a realistic, everyday character, even to the point of having a strong weakness: the main suspect’s mother was the love of his young life. She wouldn’t have him, because he came from a lower social class, but his feelings for her have never died.
Hansen never made much money from his writing and sustained himself mainly by teaching and writing textbooks of grammar. He died at the age of forty-eight, three years after the publication of The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen. He left no school behind him and his books were soon forgotten. He did have one famous pupil, though. Henrik Ibsen was notoriously cagey about his influences, but in an autobiography he began writing but never finished Mauritz Hansen is one of the few names he mentions as being among his early reading. The retrospective technique Ibsen used in his plays from contemporary life, where the secrets of the past are slowly stripped away, layer by layer, until the truth of a present situation is laid bare, is the very essence of all crime writing, and owes much to what he learned from books like The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen.
After I had listened to Birger’s deconstruction of the myth of Scandinavian gloom, with which I thought he seemed overly satisfied, we walked on in silence, heading for the metro station at Skullerud to catch a train back to the centre of Oslo. I was feeling obscurely defeated, as if I hadn’t worked hard enough to defend a point of view I instinctively felt to be true.
Outside a Narvesen newspaper kiosk at the head of the station I stopped in my tracks: ‘What about Hamlet?’ I crowed. ‘Where does that come from?’
‘Hamlet wasn’t a real person,’ he countered implacably, walking on, turning down the station slope. He was right, of course, and there was no more to be said about it.
On the train into town Birger spent a lot of time looking out the window, frowning at his reflection in the glass, shaking his head now and then, as though conducting an inner debate. It occurred to me that he might consider his victory a mere technical knockout. Encouraged by the thought, I decided to take another crack at it.
‘Well alright then, leaving aside the fact that in Saxo Grammaticus’s history Hamlet is a real person, explain to me where Shakespeare got the characteristics from? The madness? The intensity? The endless and futile philosophizing? Hamlet had to be a Scandinavian because only Scandinavians are like Hamlet. Hamlet was an Elizabethan cliché. A high-class one, yes, but still a cliché.’
Birger snorted. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘He got it from John Dowland. Dowland was in Denmark at precisely the period when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet.§ He was member number 140 of Det Kongelige Kapel at King Christian IV’s court at Elsinore.’
‘Dowland had a number?’
‘They all had numbers. The Danish Royal Orchestra is the oldest functioning orchestra in the world. Founded in 1448 and still going strong. They had to keep track of them somehow. Or maybe Shakespeare got it from number fifty-six, William Kempe. Kempe was also a member of the Chamberlains’ Men at the same time as Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. Carl Nielsen, the great Danish symphonist, was number six hundred and fifty-seven.’
Brushing aside a sudden fear that he might be about to give me the names and numbers of everyone who had ever joined the orchestra I asked him whether there was any proof of Dowland and Shakespeare even knowing each other, never mind swapping influences?
Birger paused a moment before responding. He removed his spectacles in their heavy black frames and stared at them with a dazed frown, as if he’d never seen them before. He huffed on each lens in turn before polishing them on a corner of the faded black T-shirt that was hidden beneath his oatmeal-coloured pullover and that I knew from experience carried an image of Henrik Ibsen and lines from Brand which I had always thought particularly appropriate for my intransigent friend: Det som du er, vær/ fullt og helt/ og ikke stykkevis og delt – ‘Be what you are with all your heart, not now and then, and just in part’. Then, with a peculiar, twisting lunge, he wedged his face back inside the spectacles.
‘It’s unthinkable that they did not know each other,’ he asserted with a weary patience. ‘In all likelihood they were friends. Probably very good friends. I see them in the corner of some dark tavern. Let’s say The Boar’s Head in Eastcheap. Shakespeare is working on Hamlet. He’s picking Dowland’s brains over a pint of ale. What are the Danes like, John? How would you describe them? “A sad and troubled people, William,” says Dowland. “They think too much.” “Just give me a few key words,” says Shakespeare. “Melancholy,” says Dowland. “Sorrow. Trouble. Gloom.” But you know what Dowland was doing, don’t you?’ Birger went on. ‘He was projecting his own melancholy onto the Danes. Dowland was describing himself. If he’d been at Versailles, and talking about the French, he would have said exactly the same things. I do it. You do it. We all do it.
With this QED, Birger sat back in the seat, folded his arms and stared out the window again. As the train slowed to stop at Høyenhallen station he sat up, suddenly very alert, shading his eyes as he stared out the window.
‘See that house there?’ he said, without turning to look at me, pointing down across the roof of a school to a house standing on its own in a wintry garden. There was a strange, tight excitement in his voice, as though the sight of the house both frightened and exhilarated him. I leaned forward to look. A low white picket fence ran along either side of a muddied driveway leading up past the front of the house. The roof was tiled in black. A thin bare tree stood guard outside the entrance, and the single most striking thing about the house was the brilliant red Virginia creeper that covered almost its entire front. ‘I used to live there when I first got married,’ he said. ‘We had the ground floor.’
I was astounded. I had known him for twenty years and never heard him even mention a wife. ‘I didn’t know you were ever married, Birger,’ I said. ‘How long were you married for?’
‘Nine days,’ he said as the train pulled into the station. ‘She ran off with —.’ And here he named of one of Norway’s most famous novelists. ‘She was pregnant at the time.’
‘So you’re a father?’ I said, even more surprised.
‘No,’ he said, turning his head away with such finality that I asked no further questions.
*
We said goodbye to each other at the National Theatre, and I exited up the pedestrian ramp into the street behind the theatre, past the two Roma musicians who had claimed the ramp as their own for the past few weeks. With Christmas just a couple of weeks away they were singing a full-throated version of ‘Jingle Bells’ that mysteriously segued into ‘La Bamba’ before returning to ‘Jingle Bells’ again. I crossed Stortingsgata to buy an English paper at the Narvesen opposite the station, the most well-stocked kiosk in town because of its proximity to the Continental Hotel, forgetting yet again that they had recently and permanently ceased to stock any English dailies, apart from the Financial Times. Apparently the importer no longer found it profitable. The curse of the internet.
Thwarted in my plan to spend an hour in some quiet booth in Burns’ with an English newspaper, a beer and an aquavit I decided go to the National Museum and take another look at Munch’s Scream. I crossed back over the road and slanted across the cobbled open ground in front of the National Theatre, passing Sinding’s two huge statues of Ibsen and Bjørnson on their cylindered plinths, Ibsen with hands clasped behind his back and head bowed, to my eyes obviously brooding and inward, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson the very image of the self-assured chieftain he was in life, his chest puffed out, arms akimbo and head tilted back looking, Ibsen once remarked, as though he were taking part in a spitting contest.
Crossing by the Hard Rock Café on the corner of Karl Johan I made my way up Universitets gate to the National Gallery. I can never climb the steps to the gallery without thinking of the time Scream was stolen back in the 1990s, while the attention of the whole country and its police force was focused on the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, two hours away from Oslo by car. The thief was a small-time gangster from Tveita named Pål Enger. In his youth Enger had been a talented footballer, good enough to play a few games for Vålerenga, the biggest club in Oslo, until they had to let him go after he was caught going through his team-mates’ pockets in the dressing-room.
Birger had mentioned the Olsen gang films. Well, the way Enger stole the Scream could have come straight out of one of those old Olsen gang caper-films. At seven-thirty on the morning of 12 February 1994 he had propped a ladder up against the gallery wall just in front of the steps, climbed up it, fallen down it, climbed up it again, smashed a window, jumped inside, grabbed the painting off the wall and climbed back down the ladder with it, hopped into the stolen Mazda Estate that was waiting at the kerb and driven off. The whole thing was caught on CCTV cameras, though the definition wasn’t good enough to enable an identification. As soon as Enger jumped down onto the gallery floor a motion sensor set off an alarm in the guard room. The security guard on duty looked up from his book, turned it off, and went back to his reading. As for the ladder, Enger and an accomplice, both dressed in black, had carried it through the streets of Oslo late the night before without being challenged, and with a quick left-right-left-again glance up and down Universitetsgata hidden it behind the bushes against the gallery wall. People must have seen them but assumed their behaviour had a reasonable explanation. It made me think of the Legatum Report, and the top score Norwegians got for trusting each other.
The ladder used to gain entry to the National Gallery, Oslo when Edvard Munch’s Scream was stolen in 1994. Hansen, Stig B./Scanpix Norway/Press Association Images.
Enger was arrested, tried and sentenced in 1996 to six years in jail for the theft. When sentence was handed down, he leapt onto a courtroom table, smashed a water jug and had to be restrained by the police. ‘I am innocent!’ he shouted as he was dragged away. Enger continued to deny it until 2008, when he was serving a one-year sentence for the theft of some duvets from an abandoned caravan, and two pairs of socks from a Kiwi supermarket. As part of an art project that consisted of photographs of prisoners accompanied by personal statements, Enger offered, as his contribution, a written confession: he had kept Munch’s painting hidden in a specially concealed compartment in a relative’s kitchen table.
Standing in front of the gallery’s version of Munch’s extraordinary foetal image – one of the five different versions he painted – I recalled another thread in the strange history of this painting. How, in the media frenzy and chaos of theories that followed the theft, the anti-abortion priests Børre Knudsen and Ludvig Nessa had requisitioned the event for their own cause, hinting at their involvement in it as part of their long and lonely campaign against Norway’s liberal abortion laws. They published a sketch showing a hand closed firmly around the defenceless subject of Scream: ‘Which is more valuable?’ went the caption, ‘A painting or a child?’ Police with plexiglass riot shields had to protect Knudsen from the spitting and stone-throwing of the Anti-Nazi League supporters in the crowd when he took the stage at an anti-abortion rally held at Spikersuppa in central Oslo and enacted his impression of Scream as part of the same campaign.
Børre Knudsen faces pro-abortion protesters at a rally in Oslo.
* These works by Strindberg have appeared in English as Black Banners (Svarta fanor), Crimes and Crimes (Brott och Brott), The Cloister (Klostret) and The Quarantine Master’s Second Story (Karantänmästarns andra berättelse). Munch’s paintings, in English, are Jealousy (Sjalusi), Ashes (Aske) and Kiss (Kyss). Stachu’s Totenmesse translates as ‘Requiem’.
† Munch’s title is Skrik, ‘scream’. English usually adds a definite article, calling it The Scream.
‡ This is a community service, an alternative to military service in Norway.
§ Dowland was in Denmark between 1598 and 1606, and the writing of Hamlet is usually dated to a time between 1599 and 1602.