Herbarium is consequently a poetry collection filled with Latin names, acute observations and items that bear witness to a profound intimacy with nature. The strange thing is the way in which this cogency, this taut and restrained form does not become a rhyming prison for such a young and inexperienced skald. Leo Morgan strides boldly through the syntax like an accomplished poet – the reader can’t help but surrender to his adolescent charm.
By the way, perhaps it should be added that the magical repetition of ‘cruel times’, ‘banal times’ and ‘coquettish times’, etc., is a stylistic element that permeates all of Leo Morgan’s work. He seems possessed by the magic of words, repetitions and ambiguities, just like certain manic individuals.
But to return to the set of Hyland’s Corner … Leo Morgan made his way through ‘So Many Flowers’, reading verse after verse and making use of what seemed convincingly like trained phrasing, pausing and beautiful diction. The studio audience was beside itself with delight. Hyland’s eyes sparkled; he flashed his choppers and bellowed like never before. ‘That was fantastic, Leo Morgan, you wonder boy!’ Hyland shouted, gleaming and gurgling with pleasure. In the wings the jaunty studio man in the white jacket slapped Leo on the back and said that the kid had made a breakthrough. The fact is that the studio man was right – Leo was a hit in viewers’ living rooms. Sweden had a new darling that the weekly press could tout for a couple of weeks until people got tired of him, found someone new and tossed the old on the rubbish heap.
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As a result of Leo’s performance on Hyland’s Corner, a new print-run of the poetry book Herbarium was ordered, and a lot of foolish journalists came over to Brännkyrkagatan to interview the young poet. Some of the poems were also set to music by a well-known modern composer and recorded by a great opera diva.
In other words, success was his, although Leo Morgan was not the sort to let it go to his head. He remained perfectly serene. For that matter, as a young child he had already distinguished himself as an exceptional bookworm, as opposed to his sanguine brother, who could barely even spell his own name.
But Leo was still the little boy who collected plants, even now that these plants had become symbols and words in a celebrated poetry book. In spite of this loyalty to his own childhood, the very act of writing signalled an equally precocious and bitter farewell to ‘the most banal of times’. Leo had realised that he would never recapture that time. This was the bitter insight that forced him constantly, through the magic of words, to relive what had been lost, because there was sorcery in the words. It had to do with the creation of a human being, that moment when the child becomes a person. When it comes right down to it, children are not considered people in our culture. Children are dwarfs, creatures, gnomes, mysterious and inexplicable. For that very reason every adult must strain to speak in the artificial, hopeless sort of prenatal polyglot which is supposed to have an ingratiating effect on children. The only things children want to know when they talk to people are names and facts, and it’s important to give children these names and facts in order to stimulate their curiosity – adulthood, at least as seen from the outside, is a way of putting a muzzle on curiosity and any desire for discovery.
Leo had learned – perhaps unconsciously – to control his curiosity, and yet he still had a long way to go before the final leap into the complete opposite of curiosity: indifference. But one day that’s where Leo would end up, and maybe it was to emphasise even further how different he was from Henry, one of the world’s most inquisitive individuals.
Herbarium was just a small step towards the petrifaction of the adult world, but it was a step nevertheless. Leo had entered the world of language, the sphere of listeners, and it’s significant that he had acquired his own shortwave radio a few years before Herbarium came out.
It was a marvellous radio, a Philips with magnificent oak panels and lots of buttons and knobs made of ivory-coloured Bakelite. Leo loved to sit in bed at night when all the lights were turned off and look at the illuminated dial with all the place names in the world: Lahti, Kalundborg, Oslo, Motala, Luleå, Moscow, Tromsö, Vasa, Åbo, Rome, Hilversum, Vigra, Brussels, Belfast, London, Prague, Athlone, Copenhagen, Stuttgart, Munich, Riga, Stavanger, Paris, Warsaw, Bodö and Vienna.
Leo’s paternal grandfather had given him the radio. His grandfather claimed to have been to almost all those places because he was a member of the Well-travelled, Well-read, Well-heeled Club. To become a member you had to have travelled to all parts of the world that would fit on a radio dial. Leo would sit there in the dark room at night, turning the knobs with the feverish fingers of an eleven-year-old, making the needle slide onto Hilversum – a pleasurable glide between Rome and Vigra – where some lady was singing opera. There was always some plump, clear-voiced lady singing opera in Hilversum. Leo imagined that his grandfather had met this stout opera diva in Hilversum and presented her with flowers because she sang so beautifully. All grown-ups thought that opera was beautiful. Or at least so they said.
The names on the radio dial sounded magical, faraway and exotic. And later in life Leo could never see any of those names without thinking about his grandfather, the WWW Club or long and exciting journeys. Strangely enough, Leo would never leave Sweden, not even to set foot on the island of Åland. A number of the names on the dial, such as Vigra and Moscow, sounded Russian, grey and dreary like Nikita Khrushchev. Others sounded more festive, such as Copenhagen and Paris. That’s where Leo’s father, the Jazz Baron, had played. He had told them a lot about those cities, about Tivoli, the Eiffel Tower and amazing castles. But that was a long time ago now, and Leo tried not to think about his father. Everyone told him that he shouldn’t brood so much about his father, and maybe that was why he had been given the radio.
Sometimes he would listen until late at night, and he often fell asleep in the warm yellow light coming from the radio dial. Henry had to come up and switch it off. Henry may not have been outright jealous of Leo because he’d been given the marvellous Philips radio. It was more likely that Henry was damned curious about what it was like inside. One afternoon he came up with the idea that he would be Henry the engineer, specialising in radio technology, just to impress his little brother and to satisfy his own damned curiosity.
Without warning Henry began taking apart the whole marvellous Philips apparatus, using a screwdriver. He claimed that he was just going to have a little look inside. He would remove the oak panel and take a look. Leo was concerned, of course, but he knew that he didn’t have a ghost of a chance of stopping Henry.
The engineer sat there, whistling, as he took out a lot of screws, washers and nuts. It was amazing how much a radio could hold: valves, cords, resistors, soldered circuit-boards, speakers, more resistors and washers and valves, until he ended up with a whole pile of loose parts. Henry sat there for a good three hours, unscrewing and adjusting and tinkering and examining and taking things apart, discovering that a radio, like a Chinese box, had more and more hidden parts.
Leo sat sobbing in the room he shared with his brother. He wept silently, not wanting Henry to notice. Leo had his pride. He kept his tears to himself, burying them deep inside and leaving a big patch of spittle in the middle of Henry’s pillowcase.
When Greta came home for dinner from her job at the Community Sewing Room down on Mariatorget, she found Henry sitting at the kitchen table, which was completely covered with hundreds of parts from what had once been a radio from Philips in Holland. She was furious, of course. She didn’t hesitate to give Henry a proper scolding, and when she found Leo dissolved in tears on his bed, she almost lost all composure. Henry promised to put the radio back together at once. In reality he was just trying to adjust it a bit so that it would sound better. First-rate radios always required service. But it was clear that the engineer had lost his head long ago. When Henry the failed radio technician had finally – long after bedtime, and he hadn’t even stopped to eat dinner – put all the parts back in the box and stuck the plug in th
e outlet, not even the slightest hum came out of Leo’s marvellous Philips radio. It cost over a hundred kronor to have the set repaired.
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From the herbarium’s careful arrangement of families, genera and species – so neatly and decoratively arranged by the young Leo Morgan, who because of his handy examination method never flinched at even the most peculiar of plants for fear of not being able to determine its classification – arose a magnificent solitary plant whose power seemed to shine even brighter after days and weeks of drying in the press. It was the Storm bluebell, the pride of Storm Island, a particular variety of the large bluebell, Campanula persicifolia. It was the absolute majesty of the meadows, a towering sovereign over the cretins that were always creeping around down in the dirt and thickets. In both colour and stature Campanula persicifolia was vastly superior to its subjects. The plant could shoot up nearly one and a half yards above sea level, and its colour was as clear as the deep blue sky. From time immemorial people on Storm Island had recognised that this particular species of the large bluebell was something very special; it was in their damp meadows that it flourished best, after all. It had come to them as solace – the sky-blue Storm bluebell was said to start chiming miraculously all over Storm Island to warn of malevolent winds, bad weather and danger. Very old islanders also claimed to have heard the bells chime just before ominous storms. Strangely enough, they were often right. But praise for the large bluebell’s magnificence was not merely provincial boasting and bluster. It had all been confirmed when the famed nineteenth-century botanist Häggdahl made his grand tour of Sweden’s outlying archipelago in order to write his magnum opus, the maritime-orientated Flora Along the Coasts of the Kingdom of Sweden. He couldn’t help focusing his attention on that very plant from Storm Island, ‘… a windswept but nonetheless sparsely populated island on the far eastern edge of the Stockholm archipelago where the climate seems most beneficial for Campanula persicifolia, which occurs there in a particularly beautiful and majestic form in the somewhat marshy meadows in the middle of the island, located in an enormous long valley that resembles a bowl, providing the vegetation with shelter from the wind, which otherwise freely ravages the skerries …’
Leo Morgan had naturally heard the legends about the Storm bluebell and was aware of Häggdahl’s enthusiastic description. The first time that he, with a feeling of disconsolate shame in his body, cut down one of these sacred plants, it was nearly as tall as he was. He considerately apologised for his act, but on the other hand he could promise this particular flower a form of eternal beauty in his herbarium. Of course there were other beautiful plants in Storm Island’s flower-filled meadows. Among the favourites were the deep-rose- coloured German catchflies and Swedish oregano, the blue forget-me-nots and dog violets, the yellow rock-roses and babies’-slippers, and, of course, the reddest of all flowers, the treacherously beautiful and deadly dangerous long-headed poppy. Magnificent examples of all of them were gathered, carefully picked at the height of their bloom. Then they were lovingly pressed and, with the greatest piety, inserted into the Linnaean–Darwinian system. People came from all over to catch a glimpse of the herbarium, this impressive work documenting all of Storm Island’s flora, from the simplest grass plant on the shoreline to the monumental Storm bluebell from the divinely graced meadows – which in Leo’s dried state would shimmer with what appeared to be undiminished power and, in popular parlance, assumed a touch of magic and sorcery. There was something special about that Leo Morgan.
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The poetry book Herbarium is also a homage to life on Storm Island in the Stockholm archipelago, to childhood summers spent in a type of paradise far out in the archipelago. We won’t say much here about Storm Island, that speck of rock in the middle of the Baltic Sea, located almost in the right-angle of a triangle formed by Rödlögam, the Björkskär archipelago and Svenska Högarna. Perhaps the purely anthropological remark should be made that the island – up until the mildly explosive nineteenth century – served only as an overnight spot for those fishermen who lived in the inner archipelago and were headed east to hunt seal. Later the island was populated by a number of families who, in the early twentieth century, reached their highest census before returning today roughly to the population figure of the Middle Ages, which was all of seventeen individuals.
Families come and families go. In 1920 a girl was born on Storm Island, and she was given the name Greta. Her parents, who were perhaps not wild with enthusiasm – this daughter was their seventh child – bore the surname of Jansson and were part of what might be called the original population. A certain inbreeding had provided Storm Island’s populace with a disproportionately large number of idiots and fools, although there was nothing wrong with this girl. She developed well, with a strong back, lovely teeth and clear blue eyes. No one could say anything but that she was sweet. It was not just her name that made people think of that other Greta who had become a star in Hollywood – a place so lustrously bright, even Storm Island was caught by its glow.
With an openness of mind, Greta Jansson assimilated the meagre measure of knowledge about the world that was available in such a backwoods locale under the auspices of a perennially drunk schoolteacher. By the age of eighteen she already felt that she had outgrown Storm Island; there was nothing on those rocks that would be inscribed in the history of the twentieth century. On a warm day in May in the late thirties, she allowed herself, like most of her older siblings, to be rowed across the bay and over to Kolholma, where the steamboat was docked. There she boarded the ship and went off to Stockholm. After taking several different types of jobs, she ended up as an assistant at the Community Sewing Room on Mariatorget. That was the place where she felt most at home. Later on she would be promoted to head seamstress, and she has continued to work there up to the present day.
So it was this seamstress whom the Jazz Baron met at Bal Tabarin on a merry evening in 1940. It was as merry an evening as could be expected in that year, although the Jazz Baron didn’t allow himself to worry. He was a lively, carefree soul. And the son that Greta gave birth to three years later seemed to have inherited all the sunshine that the Jazz Baron had inside him. Henry, of course, was the child in question.
But at that time the lives of Greta and the Jazz Baron were anything but carefree. When the jazz pianist introduced himself as Gustaf Morgonstjärna, the girl from the archipelago could hardly believe her ears – his name sounded so inexplicably noble. And when the Jazz Baron later introduced his fiancée as Greta Jansson from Storm Island in the Stockholm archipelago, she was naturally not at all what his snobbish mother had in mind. To her Aryan eyes, Beelzebub herself had sunk her claws into her beloved only son. The boy’s piano playing had gone too far; nothing had turned out as expected. In those days Mrs Morgonstjärna would have liked to see her son as a stylish cadet. Instead the good-for-nothing shambled about wearing a slovenly trench coat with sheet music spilling out of his pockets. A Negro musician – that was what her son had become. A messenger of the devil who played music that made people go wild. Mr Morgonstjärna, the former dandy, libertine, bon vivant and globetrotter, as well as the perennial secretary of the WWW Club, was sufficiently well-travelled, well-read and well-heeled not to give a damn what sort of girl his son took a liking to and married. Just as long as she was sweet and nice, and a healthy amount of love was part of the picture.
Now, this may sound like the prelude to some truly smarmy manor-house novel about a man of noble birth and a girl of the people – in spite of the fact that it has been stripped of any overly garish overtones from the account that Henry related to me. In his version – filled with sentimentality, laments and banalities – all of life became one long serial novel in a ladies’ magazine.
Sweet young Greta Jansson from Storm Island now became a familiar sort of watershed. The Jazz Baron was head over heels in love with her, and he received his father’s blessing but his mother’s curse. Mrs Morgonstjärna – in a pompous farewell sermo
n – repudiated her son Gustaf, along with the Devil and Louis Armstrong. Her son was no longer welcome in her home; only over her dead body would he be able to return to claim the inheritance which she unfortunately could not deny him. Nor did she have any legal right to withhold it, since the modest inheritance which would eventually fall to her son consisted of a stock portfolio from the paternal side of his family.
It was in the midst of all this that the Jazz Baron changed his name for good, to the even greater annoyance of his self-serving mother. Gustaf Morgonstjärna disappeared forever from the registry of nobility, and into the Swedish jazz world stepped Gus Morgan, alias the Jazz Baron.
That’s how it was. At Midsummer in 1940 – as the well-oiled German war machine occupied Denmark and Norway, having just marched into Paris – the couple went out to Storm Island. Gus and Greta Morgan were married by a pastor who had come over from Kolholma, and on Midsummer’s Eve a party was held that presumably would require a titan of Strindberg’s calibre to describe.
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It was out there on Storm Island that the boys spent all their summers when they were young. This paradise island became exactly the same ‘flower-basket in the sea’ for the poet Leo Morgan as Kymmend Island was for Strindberg. Greta spent all her holidays on her home island while the Jazz Baron mostly travelled around the country on various tours that never seemed to end. In the early fifties he was at the height of his career as a musician. There is a photo showing him as part of a group standing around Charlie Parker, who made a whirlwind tour of Sweden at that time. The picture was taken in a cellar in Gamla Stan, late at night in the middle of a jam session, a night that was said to be one of Parker’s best. Presumably it was also one of the Jazz Baron’s best. He could br found on the periphery of the circles surrounding Halberg, Domnérus, Gullin, Svensson, Törner, Nonin and other greats. He was among the first to welcome bebop to Sweden. He cheered when Gillespie visited in 1948, though he realised that it would take a while for the general public to come around. He would never be able to make a living playing bebop in Sweden. For the sake of money and food he had to stick with the dance-band tours and settle for sitting in with the house band at occasional sessions. Nevertheless, he was always a welcome guest when they played. He could be found on the periphery of the circles surrounding Halberg, Domnérus, Gullin, Svensson Törner, Norin and other greats. He was often on the radio because he was an easy sort of guy to deal with; he wasn’t that spontaneously combustible type that so many jazz musicians could be. The Jazz Baron was joy incarnate, and that was apparent in his tone; it lacked that aggressive edge. It was bebop on Midsummer’s Eve – more lyrically seductive than fiercely demonic, a quality that did not escape a certain amount of attention from Estrad, Orchesterjournalen, and other leading publications. A brilliant future was predicted for the Jazz Baron. He was still quite young, the father of two boys and full of vitality and energy.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 13
