Professor Andersen's Night

by Dag Solstad

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

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

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

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

  If any of those present had taken photographs of the dinner group, what would you have seen? Immediately after they were developed, those who were there, the seven people around the table, the hosts and the five guests, would have recognised themselves and smiled a little at their own traits; and then have been even more amused, perhaps, by the other guests’ traits; all seven of them would, in other words, have been concerned with both their own and the others’ mannerisms, and in doing so given acknowledging smiles. But in thirty or thirty-five years’ time the same picture, now in a photo album belonging to, let’s say, Nina and Bernt’s son Thomas, might perhaps, while he was showing it to his own children, who are in their twenties, call forth smiles of acknowledgement from Thomas, too, and his young sons (or daughters if you like), but now because this photo is so typical of the period. Typical of the Nineties, the time when Nina and Bernt Halvorsen were in their prime, and typical of this period in that set, that social grouping, which was theirs. They, that is Nina and Bernt’s heirs, would look at the photo of these seven people around a dinner table, in old-fashioned clothes, in strange positions, and they would exclaim, even though the original photograph was supposed to have been taken spontaneously, so the people being photographed didn’t know they were being photographed just then: So stiff they look, so arranged, and in spite of the fact that the very generation who were photographed here, and precisely this social grouping, with their shared development and background, were such that they individually and as a group were particularly preoccupied with this very thing – trying to appear natural, relaxed, indeed spontaneous in every way, for such is the relentless nature of an image frozen in time; the rigid, the arranged is always apparent, and probably this rigid, unnatural, arranged look was actually the prevailing state of affairs at the time when the photo was taken, and of which they were such utter prisoners without noticing it themselves, but which now, an imagined thirty or thirty-five years on in time, streams out of the picture and brings about the feeling which calls forth the good-natured smiles we all adopt when we see photos from a time which isn’t our own, and which you can call smiles of acknowledgement because one acknowledges what was typical of the Nineties in this chance photograph from a party on Boxing Day at their grandparents
’ house at Sagene, and taken before they, in other words Nina and Bernt’s second-generation offspring, were even born. But while, let’s say, Bernt Halvorsen, on taking a look at this photograph of himself, would have shaken his head, because he would at once have recognised some habits from his medical profession which he never managed to exclude from his private life, which therefore had to be called bad habits in such a setting and which he regarded as slightly comic, though obviously it was much too late to do anything about them now, at this stage in his life, such things as laying one hand over the other, originally to calm patients, but now one of his characteristic traits, even when he was hosting a party in his home on Boxing Day, he could only shake his head in partial resignation, before he went on to study the rest of the people in the photograph, his wife’s little idiosyncrasies which came to light in the photo, and Per Ekeberg’s intense way of leaning forward, or Professor Andersen’s way of slightly tilting his head, which undeniably gave him an arrogant look, so typical of Pål, Bernt would have thought then, and smiled, because he knew that this arrogant, tilted head was a posture, created and built up to conceal the deep social insecurity that the 55-year-old had felt all his life, in the same way that his grandchildren, looking at the photograph in, for instance, the year 2029, would think how typical when they regarded their grandfather and Professor Andersen respectively, but they wouldn’t think how typical of Grandfather, and how typical of Professor Andersen, but would exclaim, at the sight of them both: So typical of the Nineties to hold his hands like that, and his head like that! The spirit of the times operates like this, concealed from the person who is its prisoner, but apparent to someone who observes us in photographs from another period, liberated, from the outside.

  There must undoubtedly have been something about this party in the home of a married couple who were both successful doctors in Oslo in the Nineties which would lead you to point to it and exclaim: Typical Nineties, even though both the hosts and the guests spontaneously expressed their individuality. What that might be would have been difficult (not to say impossible) for them to determine themselves, and, of course, so painful (herein lies the impossibility of it) that one would rather not be preoccupied with it, but Professor Andersen was thrown suddenly into a strange inner (and outer) existence which led, for one thing, to a strong feeling of unease about his own position within this group, in which he felt partially at home, not least because he knew its social codes, in other words what was regarded as good taste, the sense of humour, if you like, but in which he also felt partially trapped, so that he really would have liked to break out, in a tremendous act of will, in a tremendous leap, if that had been possible.

  What was it that united them as a group that was easily recognisable as quite definitely belonging to that period? What, in other words, was their mark of distinction? Their individual development and individual lives had in many ways been similar to the development you would have found in any social grouping like the one to which they belonged. Success had made them adapt. Good food, good drink, spacious living accommodation, holiday houses and weekend homes, cars and boats set their mark on the privileged people who enjoy such benefits, radical or non-radical. But if this generation or, to be more precise, this small minority within their own age group, who were confident, and probably justly so, that they were right to claim their own hallmarks as hallmarks of their generation, for if they had any hallmarks to speak of, any small but important detail that made them stand out amongst other fifty-year-old professors, medical consultants, celebrated actors, heads of administration, senior psychologists who were radical youths in 1950 or 1970 or for that matter whatever one may predict will exist among fifty-year-olds in 2020, then it must have been their refusal to be pillars of society. They were strongly disinclined to regard themselves as pillars of society. Because they didn’t feel they conformed: not to the authority, or rather duties, which they enacted, nor to the social group to which they belonged. They denied being what they were. They didn’t feel that they conformed to their given status. They were consultants, heads of administration, senior psychologists, celebrated actors and professors of literature, but in their innermost thoughts they believed, every single one of them, that they had not adopted the attitude that was expected of them. They were still against them, the others, although they could scarcely be distinguished from them any longer, apart from in small ways; they liked to wear blue denim trousers, so-called jeans or Levi’s, when they carried out their duties as heads of administration, professors, etc.; indeed, Professor Andersen himself rather liked to dress in jeans, and did so with glee, when he turned up at meetings at the National Theatre, where he was a board member. They continued to be against authority, deep inside they were in opposition, even though they were now, in fact, pillars of society who carried out the State’s orders, and no one besides themselves (and old photographs from the year 2020) could perceive that they were anything other than State officials, part of the State fabric, and the fact that most of them voted in elections for the ruling party would hardly surprise anyone other than themselves, but they, on the other hand, would argue that they didn’t want to throw away their own vote and by so doing bring the right-wingers into power. Nor were they being hypocritical. They just fundamentally did not conform in their own eyes, when all was said and done, to what they actually were.

  Another of their distinctive traits was their relationship to the good things in life. They ate as became their position, resided likewise, had holiday homes and cars and boats and ever-increasing affluence, but it meant nothing, so they claimed, and rightly so. They had never dreamed of material wealth; in their dreams for the future, material wealth hadn’t even been part of the scenario. Therefore they behaved as though these material goods were encumbrances in their lives. They didn’t really concern them; they didn’t define themselves through these objects which they enjoyed and which were there for one and all to see. This was particularly evident when one of them owned something that was extremely expensive or conspicuously striking, and that happened every so often, as they didn’t deny themselves the good things in life. It would be explained as a personal deviation, and it was the person who owned the particularly expensive or striking object who themselves explained that it was a highly personal deviation. Per Ekeberg, for instance, owned a fast and extremely elegant car, and he explained this was due to him being possessed by a ‘speed demon’, which he never managed to banish, and Bernt Halvorsen had a large sailing boat lying at his fairly unpretentious holiday cottage in the county of Vestfold, and he apologised for this by saying that the wind and sailing held an almost abnormal attraction for him, which was connected to his childhood in a little town in Vestfold, the same one, by the way, that Professor Andersen had grown up in, without having to acquire a sailing boat when he was a grown man. Instead, Professor Andersen had another vice: a passion for Italian suits. In his wardrobe hung five light-weight woollen Italian suits, bought in Italy, it’s true, while there on literary conferences, so they didn’t cost more than an ordinary suit at home, he made a point of stressing – a whopping lie by the way. His Italian suits cost every bit as much as an Italian suit bought here at home; that is to say, if that suit could have been bought here at home at all, then it would have cost two or three thousand kroner more, so that, in a way, you could perhaps say that he had saved the price of one or two cheap Adelsten suits for every suit he bought in Italy. It wasn’t often Professor Andersen wore one of these Italian suits, but what a delight it was for him when he did so once in a while. He seldom wore them when he had to be smart at a party, or when he had to represent the university or go to receptions, or quite simply when he gave a lecture. Tonight, for instance, he was wearing an ordinary, grey suit, the same one, by the way, that he had worn on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and on most days for everyday purposes he wore jeans. But now and then he had a great urge to get dressed up in one of his Italian suits, and then he did it, no matter what the occasion. Consequently, he coul
d turn up at the university at Blindern dressed in one of his extremely elegant Italian suits made of pure wool. He delighted in turning up like that in front of his students, maybe just to lead a postgraduate seminar, or maybe even just a single tutorial with a postgraduate student in his office. He didn’t do it to make an impression on his students, but to make an impression on himself. Getting dressed up in one of these suits gave him a heady, liberated feeling. Then he liked to go to a restaurant afterwards, alone, not an expensive restaurant either, and he delighted in dining absolutely alone at a small table by the window.