* * *
So it wasn’t my writing the truth about my father and what had happened to him in the later years of his life that was Gunnar’s main issue with the novel, it was my lying about him and that period, and the fact that it made Gunnar seem guilty in the eyes of others, which was grossly inaccurate and, not least, unwarranted.
There was no doubt he meant what he was saying, that his perception of the events in question was quite different. That made me scared. If there was one thing I feared in myself, it was not being reliable. I had written that Dad had lived with Grandma during the last two years of his life, spiraling them both into decline. I had written that he had sent the nurse and the home help away. Gunnar denied both these things, and said he had witnesses to the contrary.
Where did my version come from?
How did I know it had been two years?
I had no idea. It was something I had written, and it had to have come from somewhere, but where?
I had been in Kristiansand at the time I started writing Out of the World, in January 1996, when Dad’s drinking had been severe and he was living with Grandma. True, he still had his apartment in Moss, but as I understood it he spent most of his time at her house, and for some reason my perception was that he had moved in with her for good that summer, two years before he died. But how I had arrived at that understanding, I didn’t know.
Could I simply have assumed as much, and then allowed that unconfirmed assumption to morph into certainty, subsequently elevating it to absolute truth when I started writing about it ten years later? It was not only possible, it was likely. If Gunnar said he’d only been living with Grandma for three months, and he had witnesses to confirm it, then surely it was true. I had also written that he had sent the home help and the health visitor away. Where did that come from? I didn’t know that either. Somewhere in my mind I had a very vague idea it had come from Gunnar himself, perhaps he had told Yngve over the phone that Dad had sent the home help away and was out of reach, wasn’t that what that phone call had been about? That Dad had barricaded himself in at Grandma’s and that Gunnar felt there was nothing left he could do, having already tried to step in and appeal to Dad’s reason, but to no avail? It was from that phone call too that I knew Dad had broken his leg and had been lying there helpless on the floor for some considerable time at Grandma’s before Gunnar found him and got him to the hospital. That event had etched itself into my mind, since it told me things must have been bad, but the exact circumstances of what had happened were unclear, I couldn’t put a date on either the event itself or my being told about it. But it was also possible the information about the home help being sent away had come when we were there, after Dad had died, when Gunnar was describing to us what had happened. I didn’t know. He might have been exaggerating, it might have been his way of saying Dad had made it impossible for him to intervene, or maybe the home help didn’t come that often. Maybe it was only the home help, the person who came to do the cleaning up, he’d been talking about, and not the nurse? But as far as I remembered I hadn’t written anything about the nurse. A third possibility was that no one had said anything of the kind and it was just something I’d assumed on the basis of the dreadful state of the house; it was hard to imagine anyone had done any cleaning for a very long time, therefore the home help must have been sent away, and the person who had sent them away must have been Dad. Maybe that was what I’d got into my head in 1998, and what to begin with had been little more than a vague theory had now become a solid truth ten years later.
I didn’t know.
But I felt certain Gunnar knew, and if he was so absolutely positive that was what had happened, then surely it had to be right.
In which case I was unreliable. In itself this was a crushing admission. But had I been unreliable in everything I had written? Did it in any way alter the fundamental truth of the novel if Dad hadn’t lived with Grandma for two years but for three months, and the home help hadn’t been sent away but had kept up the normal routine?
Yes, it did. It would mean I’d be talking about a few days of misfortune and consternation in a world of peace and tranquillity, not about a catastrophe that had been going on for a couple of years. The only thing I knew was that the sight that met Yngve and me when we entered the house back then had been dreadful. Gunnar was saying it was untrue that the place had been littered with bottles from the front door and all the way up the staircase, that in the two days before we arrived he’d cleaned and neatened the place up, and that only Dad’s room and some of the heavier items had been left.
Hadn’t there been bottles? The way I remembered it, there had been empties all the way up the staircase from the living room to the top floor, there were shopping bags of them dumped underneath and on top of the piano, and the kitchen had been crammed too. But what about the staircase leading up to the living room? I had no recollection at all. I must have exaggerated. Unreliable, again. The way Gunnar was looking at it, this was about maintaining that it was he who had cleaned up the mess, not us. I vividly remembered Yngve and I spending that day and the next clearing up and scrubbing the place down, whereas what he described was a distracted author swanning about with a bucket without even the most elementary idea about what to do. I had no recollection either of our having had dinner at their place, in fact I felt sure it had never happened. But still I couldn’t rule it out entirely, there were a lot of things in my life I couldn’t remember. What he wrote about our going out to the cabin with Grandma, and me diving off the jetty, was true, but that had taken place outside the novel’s time frame, after its conclusion. Giving Grandma a bath, washing the curtains, Gunnar and Tove’s efforts when it came to cleaning the place, all that had happened after the two and a half days I’d described. The way I saw the business of cleaning the house up was the exact opposite of Gunnar’s: the way I recalled it, I had found it decent of him to step back for a couple of days as he did and let Yngve and me assume responsibility, it was a way of saying to us that Dad had been our father, a way of returning him to us. Gunnar had been back and forth, helping us out with good advice, taking the furniture we lugged out of the house together away to the dump on a trailer he hired. He had not neglected anything, in fact he had behaved impeccably, but hadn’t I written about all of that?
If he was right about what he was implying, that the sight that confronted us in the house had been quite normal, and that my depiction was grotesquely exaggerated, then everything fell apart. It bore down on something fundamental, first and foremost of course the very premise of the novel, that it was describing reality, but also its motive, the reason I had written about my father’s death and the dreadful days that followed. When Yngve, in a car full of empty bottles, had turned to look at me and said that if I ever wrote about this no one would believe me, it was for that very reason, that everything we had seen had been like something out of a novel or a film, and not reality.
In the years that followed, I willingly told anyone who cared to listen about Dad and his demise, it made me special and perhaps interesting too, it made me into someone who had seen a few things, gave me a certain air of casual disregard and depth, something I’m sure I was trying to attain, I’d always carried that inside me, the desire to be someone, and that notion of elevation had always been a part of my motivation for writing. Holding forth in that way about my father and what became of him always left me with a bad taste in my mouth, because I was exploiting him and the tragedy of his life for my own ends. But that was small scale. The novel blew it all up and made a big thing out of it. I was exploiting him, yes, I was climbing on his corpse. And I was doing that simply by writing about it. At the same time it was the most important story in my life. If it wasn’t true, it meant I’d exaggerated things in order for Dad’s fate to make the greatest possible impact, thereby lending me some of the recklessness and destructive force I thought I needed for me to become a real writer instead of someone pretending. In that case I wouldn’t just be letting him down, but
myself as well. It was this that Gunnar’s letter addressed, as forcefully as if he’d punched me: I had lied. There had been no bottles on the staircase up to the living room. Dad had not been living there for two years. The home help had not been sent away.
If I accepted that perspective, on the other hand, I would be obliterating myself. Not once had I considered myself to be exaggerating when writing about what had gone on in the house, not once had I considered myself to be exploiting Dad and Grandma, the events I was describing were too overwhelming for that, and what I was delving into was too important.
I’d written about Dad. I’d written about my fear of him, my dependence on him, and the enormous grief his death had filled me with. It was a novel about him and me. It was a novel about a father and a son. It didn’t matter that the very sight of the words “legal action” terrified me, and that my insides turned cold when he wrote that he had witnesses to the effect that I was lying, I couldn’t give up the story of my father.
Not even if it was a lie?
Without realizing, I had touched on something dangerous, more dangerous than almost anything else.
But why was it dangerous?
He had to attack Mom because he felt that was what I’d done in writing the novel, attacked Grandma and Dad. It was retaliation. An eye for en eye. He was only doing what I myself had done, the difference being his retaliation lacked symmetry: my novel would be published for anyone to read, it would be available in all bookshops and all libraries. His e-mails would be read only by those he sent them to, which was to say the publisher, Mom, Yngve, and me. Because our strengths were so unevenly distributed, he was rectifying matters by hitting us even harder.
I sat down and switched the computer on, opened the document containing the novel, and started to read. In the light of what had happened in the past few days, nearly every page had me feeling uncomfortable, all the old friends and classmates I’d written about could react in exactly the same way as Gunnar.
I called Geir Gulliksen so we could discuss the purely practical implications of Gunnar’s e-mail, the fact that I was going to have to alter some specifics as to time, the two years Dad had lived with Grandma in the novel, maybe by just not being specific at all, as well as correcting the errors that had occurred. I asked him what we should do about all the other names. Geir considered that anyone from my childhood or youth who was described in a relatively neutral way could stay as they were without any problem, this was quite without risk, whereas I would have to anonymize the ones I’d written about in a way that could be perceived as compromising, for instance if I’d gone into their family relations, a father who drank or was violent or who in any other way had done something that might be considered questionable. Geir’s views calmed me down, he was talking of the basis of the novel, it was the novel we had to focus on, the editing of the manuscript.
After I’d spoken to Geir I called Yngve. We talked back and forth about what we remembered from the days surrounding Dad’s death, he couldn’t recall that many details, but hadn’t balked at anything he’d read in my description. In the event of our being taken to court, he would be my only witness, though I didn’t mention this at all. A court case was the worst thing that could happen, and the publishers were doing everything in their power to prevent it, I knew that. The second-worst thing that could happen was something leaking to the papers.
All of this was about Gunnar and the way he saw the novel. What we were talking about was basic human consideration. But there was another, more literary, critical issue about the novel that I’d been thinking a lot about in the interim between completing the manuscript and being made aware of Gunnar’s objections. It too concerned truth, though more from a formal perspective, and what set me off was that I’d read a short novel by Peter Handke called A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, it was about his mother’s suicide and thereby autobiographical. In contrast to my own prose, which constantly leaned toward the emotional and evocative, Handke’s prose was dry and unsentimental. When I started writing I’d been trying to achieve a similar style, if not dry, then raw, in the sense of unrefined, direct, without metaphors or other linguistic decoration. The latter would give beauty to the language, and in a description of reality, especially the reality I was trying to describe, that would be deceitful. Beauty is a problem in that it imparts a kind of hope. As a stylistic device in literature, a particular filter through which the world is viewed, beauty lends hope to the hopeless, worth to the worthless, meaning to the meaningless. This is inevitably so. Loneliness beautifully described raises the soul to great heights. But then the writing is no longer true because there is no beauty in loneliness, not even in yearning is there beauty. But while it may not be true, it is good. It is a comfort, a solace, and perhaps that is where some of literature’s justification lies? But if that’s the case, then we are talking about literature as something else, something unto itself and autonomous, valuable in its own right rather than as a depiction of reality. Peter Handke tried to get away from this in his novel. It was written a few weeks after the funeral, and in it he endeavored to approach his mother and her life in as truthful a way as possible. Not truthful in the sense of things actually having occurred, her having been a real person in the real world, but truthful in its insight and the way that insight is conveyed. He refrained from representing his mother in the text, to have done so, I felt in reading the book, would have been a violation of her as a human being. She was her own person, living her own life, and instead of representing that life, Handke referred to it as something existing outside the text, never inside the text. This meant that he wrote in very general terms about the connections of which she was a part, about the roles she assumed or did not assume, but this general aspect could also potentially be a problem, he stated at one point, in that there was a risk of it becoming independent of her and taking on its own life in the text by virtue of the author’s poetic formulations – a betrayal of her, this too. As he wrote, “Consequently, I first took the facts as my starting point and looked for ways of formulating them. But I soon noticed that in looking for formulations I was moving away from the facts. I then adopted a new approach – starting not with the facts but with the already available formulations, the linguistic deposit of man’s social experience.” In these formulations he searched, as it were, for his mother’s life. And he did so, as far as I could understand, in order to protect her dignity and integrity, but something else was going on in the text too; when a person is portrayed from a social viewpoint, through the contemporary eyes of society’s culture and self-understanding, with all its various roles and limits, that person’s inner being, her singular, individual existence, what used to be called the soul, vanishes, and, I considered, Handke’s book was perhaps a story about just that, the suppression of the individual by the social world, the strangulation of the soul. After all, in the end she took her life. Handke steered away from all affect, all feelings, anything anecdotal, anything that might inject life into the text, always insisting that he was writing a text, that the life he was describing exists, or existed, elsewhere, and when, after some seventy pages or so, he arrives at the moment of death and the funeral, which takes place on the fringe of a forest, he writes, “The people left the grave quickly. Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees: for the first time it seemed to me that nature really was merciless. So these were the facts! The forest spoke for itself. Apart from these countless treetops, nothing counted; in the foreground an episodic jumble of shapes, which gradually receded from the picture. I felt mocked and helpless. All at once, in my impotent rage, I felt the need to write something about my mother.” This sudden insight into the nature of death is the novel’s true starting point. I recognized that insight, it was mine too. However, the book I had written was the direct antithesis of Handke’s, its antipode.
I wrote that I had the same insight as Handke when he stood there at the graveside and looked toward the trees and realized that nature was merciless and that the forest
spoke for itself. But was that true? How could it be true when that insight had prompted Handke to write a book about his mother and his mother’s death in which she was not represented but merely referred to? Given shape only by way of the time in which she lived and the formulations and insights of that time, viewed as an individual who had a certain number of types to choose between, socially and historically determined, albeit of course not without her own personality, though this was not given shape, because then it would have become “typical” of her, and paradoxically a deceit, for the reason that she was always, and invariably, something else. Death in Handke’s universe was merciless, and the life he described was merciless too, and given that this is true, his book could not be about mercy. From a literary perspective, mercy lay in beauty, which is to say in the beautiful sentence, and in the creative manifestation, the fictionalization, the secret alliance of events that crisscrossed any novel, because this crisscrossing in itself was an affirmation of meaning and cohesion. So how could Handke’s insight be the same as mine when I had written a book about my father’s death in which I allowed the text to represent him as if it were in the text that he existed, which is to say making him an object of the reader’s own feelings, in prose that sought to form and shape, to creatively make manifest throughout, since it, or its author, was aware that shaping a character into life, making him manifest in that way, rouses or manipulates feelings in a world that was not merciless, because meanings and cohesion would continually be established by their different routes, regardless of what the text otherwise had to say about the matter?
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 19
