Henry on the other hand required restraints and a straitjacket to keep him in bed; he screamed and howled for exactly twenty-four hours until the fever subsided, and then he was well again, no matter what illness had felled him. He wanted to go back to school, even though he never managed to make up the lessons that he had missed.
But little Leo lacked the will to get well. Nevertheless, he would usually be two weeks ahead of his classmates in his homework because he was an extremely gifted child prodigy. His glassy eyes greeted Dr Helmers with neither entreaties, impatience nor satisfaction. His gaze was quite simply desolate and empty, indifferent. Leo had escaped to another world, and by the time he was eight he already knew what death meant. Ten years later, in a famous poem, he would define every human endeavour and breath as ‘a war against death’, in which death was both the goal and the means. He was then caricatured by a critic as the ‘anarchist with bombs in his own pockets’. And that presumably signalled the absolute apex of that critic’s career.
Leo Morgan was marked by death, fixated on death, and he studied death with the inexhaustible frenzy that only someone who is deathly afraid can display. In reality, the little boy was scared out of the very wits which he turned to his benefit. His entire life was a prolonged attempt to find his way back from the valley of the shadow of death, but it was a long road, and he lacked any sort of reliable map.
________
A melancholy, almost tragic downpour was drenching the city. It sounded like an absent-minded and cautious plinking, as if a pianist with gigantic hands were pawing at the galvanised roof.
Henry was sitting in the dormer window of the laundry room up in the attic. Greta had a day off from her job at the Community Sewing Room down on Mariatorget, where people could come to get help with their sewing. It was her laundry day, and Henry had promised to help her wring out the sheets and hang them up.
A nice warm steam was coming from the very modern Husqvarna washing machine. In the winter the windowpanes would be covered with mist, and you could conjure up the street below by wiping them clean, or you could print letters, numbers and dates in the condensation. If Henry had done that, he would presumably have written 7 April, 1959, since that’s the date we’re describing in our chronicle.
It wasn’t especially cold outside, and he opened the window to look out across the green, red and yellow rooftops rippling like crumpled paper in the Brännkyrkagatan district. He liked the view. If he leaned out of the window he could peer over the eaves and catch a glimpse of the street below. When he was a kid that had made him feel dizzy. But Henry was no longer a child; he was sixteen, went to the Södra Latin school, played Dixieland jazz, and was a decent boxer.
Right now he sat there looking out of the window, whistling a tune that they were practising in the band. Greta sighed and groaned and wondered what had happened to the sheets. She had put the sheets in the spin-dryer, but when they were nearly dry and she took them out, the sheets were completely covered with tiny black hairs.
She wondered out loud what could have happened to the sheets. Henry went over to the spin-dryer and looked down, with due respect for the machine. He had never liked spin-dryers because when he was a kid and looked inside them, he would always feel dizzy, just like when he peered down at the street six storeys below.
He could see that there were tiny hairs inside. Greta sighed, thinking it was very strange. She started cleaning out the spin-dryer.
Henry, in an almost embarrassing manner, had become aware of his manhood up there in the laundry room. He wasn’t really sure what had prompted this feeling, whether it was the warm, damp, caressing air, or whether it was the fragrance of clean laundry. Whatever it was, he was filled with lust. He told Greta that he was thinking of taking a tour around the attics for a bit. He promised to come right back.
Henry was planning to find some secluded spot where he could rid himself of his importunate lust. There was a place where he and a couple of other boys from the neighbourhood, in the greatest secrecy, had stored a number of issues of Pin-Up, Top-Hat and Cavalcade. It was a dim corner of an empty attic storeroom where they could individually or together wreck their spines, impair their minds and ruin any chance of leading a respectable life.
This attic was undoubtedly one of the biggest in all of Stockholm. The corridors seemed to cover an entire neighbourhood, leading first to the right, then to the left, branching out in several directions at once, leading to dead- ends and completely new, endless networks. You almost needed a map to find your way if you failed to take proper notice of the numbered arrows. But even as a child Henry had despised maps; he put his trust in his instincts, his intuitive feeling for the points of the compass. Since this had won him first place in orienteering, surely it should be good enough for him to find his way in a simple attic.
It might be surmised that on this occasion the boy, taking a circuitous route to that particular attic storeroom, raced along with a pounding pulse. On his way he happened to pass a couple of other storerooms that were also empty and abandoned. But he caught sight of a strip of light seeping into the dark from a thin slit in a boarded partition. He was curious, of course, and stopped at once to sneak cautiously over to the wall. He heard voices that were not at all difficult to identify: Leo and Verner, the chess genius. Henry couldn’t fathom what they were doing there.
He opened the door slightly to the abandoned attic storeroom, causing the boys to jump in fright – they had been caught red-handed.
Verner was the chess genius who was no longer such a genius. Henry had outgrown him, so Verner now had to settle for Leo’s company. They still played childish games, although they did so solemnly and doggedly, not as heedlessly as other children. They collected stamps, played chess, came up with inventions and performed experiments. Verner had the sternest mother in town; she protected her son as if he were a haemophiliac. He was seldom allowed out after dinner, he was never permitted to fight and he always had to have his lessons down cold. He was forced to study on Sundays as well, and even now, as a young boy, he was a bit odd because of this state of things. He had started a club at school for Young Inventors, but so far there were no members because he mostly kept to himself, picking his nose. He couldn’t seem to spend time with other boys unless a club were instantly formed to identify what they would be doing. Everything had to be organised, with a chairman, a board, membership cards and rules to make sure that nothing unexpected would occur. If it wasn’t organised, Verner couldn’t stand it. He was about as spontaneous as the leader of a political party.
On that April day in 1959 when Henry entered Leo and Verner’s secret attic storeroom, he was mildly shocked – the boys had created a small scientific laboratory up there. They had nailed blankets and cloths over the walls to mute the sound and to prevent the light from their torches from seeping out and disclosing what they were up to. From some orange crates they had taken a few boards that at the moment were clearly functioning as autopsy tables. In the centre of one of the planks lay a dead kitten that Verner had cut open with a scalpel. Leo was studying little pieces of flesh under a microscope.
Verner and Leo sat there as if paralysed until Verner found his tongue to protest their innocence. They had found the dead cat; they weren’t the ones who had killed it. It didn’t take Henry long to put two and two together. The cat hair in the spin-dryer was of course the remains of the hooligans’ latest party. There was a gang that stole cats in the springtime and broke into laundry rooms to spin the animals to their death amid wild shouting.
Henry believed the boys, even though he still thought they were nuts. He started screaming that they were both crazy, sitting there and staring at the body of a dead cat. Why were they doing that? It was disgusting!
Henry was absolutely furious. Verner and Leo were dumbfounded. They couldn’t say a word. They couldn’t explain why it was so amazing to look at dead tissue under a microscope. It just was.
Well, Henry finally calmed down, and then he suddenly rem
embered why he’d come to this part of the attic in the first place. He asked Verner for a laboratory flask, struggling to keep from laughing. Embarrassed, Verner handed over a flask, and then Henry left and headed for his own secret storeroom. Filled with fury combined with lust, he leafed through an old issue of Pin-Up until the sweetest moment of the divine sexual act sent shivers racing through his whole body and, in a highly tangible temporal confirmation of success, it also sent a measured white, sticky fluid, a secretion, an essence, the very mystery of life out across the cold floor of the attic. Fortunately, a small portion of this magnetic mass landed in the laboratory flask. Quite pleased, Henry rushed back with the results in a considerably more amicable state of mind.
He shoved Leo away from the microscope, slipped out the piece of cat flesh, and slid his own quivering sample into place. He adjusted the instrument and immediately saw tiny, cocky sperm cells merrily swimming around in our world, wriggling and jostling their way across the Baltic Sea, down through the North Sea, across the English Channel, through the Strait of Gibraltar into the hot salt of the Mediterranean, east to the Suez Canal, out to the Arabian Sea, straight down the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, right across the Atlantic Ocean, around Cape Horn and up through the Pacific towards the Bering Sea, where the cold made them a bit stiff in the tail.
Henry cheered at this dizzying odyssey through the oceans of the world. A number of mates looked tired and feeble right from the start, some were misshapen with crooked tails, but most of them were big, fat, strong chaps that merrily wriggled towards a non-existent goal. As so often before, they had been tricked.
He shouted to Verner and Leo that here was something worth looking at. It was much more exciting than dead cats. But when he tore his eyes away from the lens of the microscope, he found himself all alone in the secret laboratory. Verner and Leo had run off. They never took part in this remarkable discovery of Henry’s, Henry the inventor.
________
And Greta, of course, never learned the reason for the mysterious little hairs on her sheets. Henry was certainly not one to keep silent, but no doubt he thought she’d had enough of death and misery; he didn’t want to worry her unnecessarily.
I, on the other hand, heard the story approximately twenty years later. It was very much like a lot of other things that I know about Leo. The story stems from Henry, from his perspective, because Leo was a professional silent type. He had an unusual, extremely strange way of speaking. Leo spoke slowly, sucking on the words like boiled sweets until he spat them out. He used words rather like a small child who finds a smashed piece of chewing- gum on the pavement, pries it loose with an ice-cream stick and stuffs it into his mouth. With a ruminative expression he chews the gum until it’s soft, only to spit it out again when the taste is revived from its fossilised slumber. It took time to listen to Leo, once he started talking at all. I concluded as much on that very first evening when he joined us at the goose banquet in the cellar. I surmised that his manner of speaking was caused by some sort of shattered relationship with language, and words in general.
________
It’s unlikely that anyone today would remember the poet Leo Morgan, other than those who are most in the know. He was never an Evert Taube, even though at one time in his fair youth he found himself quite close to Gösta Nordgren, known as Snoddas.
There are three books that admit him to the eternity of libraries, now that human memory is starting to fail. He made his debut with Herbarium (1962), followed by Sanctimonious Cows (1967), and finally Façade Climbing and Other Hobbies (1970).
As a rule, three such impenetrable, heavy poetry collections would give a poet more than a certain reputation among the initiated, but Leo was not the type to publicise his own work, or to promote himself at all the right parties, or to stay on good terms with the right critics. There are plenty of examples of such lone wolves and outsiders but, regrettably, there are even more examples of just the opposite.
Citizens possessed of a good memory may recall Leo Morgan as the child prodigy who read poems on the TV show Hyland’s Corner. That must have been in the autumn of 1962, because Henry claimed to have seen the programme when he was doing his military service, and he was damn proud. No one knows who ‘discovered’ Leo, but he had just made his book debut, only fourteen years old, with the poetry collection Herbarium, and he’d won notice as a minor celebrity. Many critics said they were astonished that a teenager could come up with such exquisite and luscious rhymes, because the boy, like so many ‘amateurs’, insisted on writing rhymed verse. No subverted modernism here. One critic had even mentioned the equally youthful Rimbaud, although without making any further comparisons, but still … Perhaps it was a bit of an exaggeration, even though there was something evasive and indefinable about Herbarium which, for lack of a better term, might be called brilliant. Perhaps it was the fact that there was often something flawed about the poems, a slipping away, an ambiguity, that made the reader uncertain and hesitant – it was questionable whether the young boy actually knew all the meanings and connotations of the words.
The critics, at any rate, were quite favourable, and maybe it was this critical success of the poems, as well as the poet’s uncommonly young age that prompted Hyland’s Corner to invite the child prodigy to read on TV. Child stars have always been highly favoured by the entertainment industry.
At the rehearsals before the evening broadcast of the Corner, Leo conducted himself perfectly. He was well-groomed, conscientious and well-mannered, maybe a little too well-behaved. But the studio crew were a forbearing lot, and they took good care of the discovery, making sure that he got to shake hands with the TV stars Lill-Babs, Lasse Lönndahl and Gunnar Wiklund. He stuffed their autographs into his wallet, in the compartment behind his little Bakelite comb.
But later, after dinner, when it was time for his entrance and Leo was standing in the wings and listening to Lennart Hyland bellow out his name as he introduced the precocious discovery as the son of the Jazz Baron, the popular jazz pianist and welcome guest on many a Corner show, the boy began to shake. A jaunty studio man with enormous teeth and wearing a white jacket slapped Leo on the back and wished him luck. And all of a sudden Leo was standing there, dazzled by the spotlights, his lips dry and knees shaking. Greta was sitting somewhere in the audience, and in their homes sat several million people staring at him. Verner, his classmates, his teachers and others who knew Leo were sitting there right now, this very second, staring at him. It was impossible to comprehend a single word of what Uncle Hyland was babbling about over there in his armchair. He said something, nodded and drew a round of applause – no doubt for Leo – and just as the boy was thinking of starting to read, that damn Jack-in-the-box popped up and drew another round of applause. But after that there was silence at last, and the cameras moved on their trolleys, and Leo realised that it was now time. With shaking hands he picked up his book and leafed through it a couple of times, exactly as if this were the very first time he had seen the book, or as if he were searching for a word on a list. The audience didn’t notice at all that the young boy was nervous – the next day the newspapers reported on ‘Leo Morgan’s sophisticated pauses, his indefinable stage presence’ – and at last he started reading the poem ‘So Many Flowers’.
I’ve extracted from the poem several of what I consider the best verses. It’s a very long ballad that suffers from a certain unevenness.
So many flowers have I gathered
that no one can count them all.
They were the medallions of June
from the most coquettish of times.
The fairest of flowers
blooms for all eternity.
The strongest of beauties
grows in solitude.
So many flowers have I given
to all those who save them.
They were all my childhood friends
from the most cruel of times.
The fairest …
So many songs have
I written
to all those who sing.
There is no one left I know
from the most banal of times.
In the rest of the poem he further develops this theme, which is also the theme of the entire collection. It is only seemingly an homage to flowers, to nature. Beneath this floral splendour lie the thoughts of the Artist, the one who protects nature, the one who shows people how beautiful the world really is. According to the young Leo Morgan, these experiences have to be transformed, reshaped by the artist in order for anyone to be capable of seeing the underlying reality. A quote ascribed to Nietzsche will no doubt spill from the lips of an educated person: ‘Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside it for its conquest.’ It’s most unlikely that this quote would have been known to the young Morgan, but he probably would have understood from a purely intuitive standpoint that it dealt with conquest – he had to conquer himself.
So the pervasive theme is dried plants, the herbarium that the young boy collects during long walks, carrying his vasculum across resplendent meadowlands in the early morning hours of the month of June, ‘the most coquettish of times’, when the flowers are at their most beautiful, the dew still covers the fields, and the plants are lovely and fresh. But the skald never enjoys nature’s splendour as much as when he presses and dries his plants, determines their species and name and puts them in the herbarium, arranged according to the systems of Linnaeus.
Life is at its most beautiful when compressed and dried out into pale, crisp symbols on rough paper. Not until life ends up in a herbarium does it acquire meaning and significance; it becomes catalogued and registered as language – the plants have become symbols, calligraphy, and printed words.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 12
