Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  And so he listened to a great deal of jazz, but he also found his way into the music-hall tradition. It was a blissful combination of old songs from the days of the Great War and completely modern revue tunes with lyrics that were brazen, silly and absurd. Henry became totally nuts about a tall, gaunt man who looked like a transvestite and sang falsetto. His name was Tiny Tim, and he played the ukulele at one of Henry’s favourite clubs. Henry started writing songs too. He borrowed whatever piano he could find and wrote down his tunes, which he would then sell for a pint of Guinness.

  Henry also claimed – and no one was ever able either to refute or confirm his claim – that the original version of ‘Mrs Brown You Got a Lovely Daughter’ with Herman’s Hermits had been penned by Henry Morgan. One day he was sitting in his office at Smiths & Hamilton Ltd, gazing at an incredibly sweet girl who was a secretary; he was always teasing her because she had a photo of the Beatles on her desk. She teased him back, and she thought that Henry was a funny old man. Her last name was O’Keen, and she was from the north. She was the one Henry had in mind when he wrote ‘Miss O’Keen You Are a Naughty Daughter’, using exactly the same refrain that Herman’s Hermits later nicked. He played the tune with great success at the company party. Later he submitted the song to a record company that paid him fifty pounds and said the time might not yet be ripe for it.

  Several years later it showed up, nicely reworked, but by then Henry was gone. Nor did he want to cause a fuss, for that matter. He had a generous nature. In his opinion, the English had treated him well.

  ________

  The nicest of them all was Lana Highbottom. Henry couldn’t make much headway with the young girls at Smiths & Hamilton Ltd because they were all so gone on the Beatles. Any lad who didn’t look like the Beatles would find himself scrapped.

  But Lana Highbottom was different. She was already a mature woman, almost too mature. Recently she even sent Henry the clerk in Stockholm some photographs of herself and her two pale, typically English children. The photos didn’t really explain Henry’s enthusiasm for Lana. He didn’t think the pictures showed her at her best. And besides, her qualities weren’t visible on the surface, and in the long run that was the only thing that mattered.

  At the office Lana Highbottom was regarded as quite trying. She talked almost as much as Henry did. She was a forty-year-old widow whose husband had been a motorcyclist who drove too fast. She lived in Paddington with her old mother, who had also moved south from Liverpool, and that was no doubt her only redeeming feature, according to the younger girls in the office. ‘Liddypool …’ they would say, their eyes sparkling with delight.

  When it came to working late for a number of evenings at the office, Lana was always the one to volunteer, and she did so without complaint. And since Henry was considered new at the game, he also had to stay late to do some sort of inventory in the file room, and that was how it happened.

  He hadn’t managed to leaf through the folders in the file room for more than a couple of minutes after hours before Lana came in and kissed him right on the mouth. She pulled the folders out of his hands and put his arms around her buxom body as she stuck her thigh between his legs.

  In that sort of situation Henry wasn’t much of a stickler for etiquette, but it could be that he still didn’t think that was the most romantic place in the world. It smelled of file-room dust, erasers, ink, blotting paper and carbons. So when Lana started running her fingers through his hair and nibbling on his ear, he tried to stop her.

  ‘No, Lana,’ he managed to say amid the hot kisses. ‘Not here. We … can’t … do it here …’

  ‘Oh yes we … can,’ panted Lana. ‘There’s no one else here in the whole … building,’ she went on, pressing the young Swede up against the metal cabinets, which rumbled like thunder.

  Lana Highbottom had her arms wrapped passionately around Henry’s neck, and yet she was as practised as an actress and able to undo his tie so that she could press hot kisses on his throat. That was it for Henry. He couldn’t stop; he didn’t want to stop. He hadn’t had a woman in who knows how long, and Lana knew all the tricks. She was lecherous, to say the least, and Henry was depraved, and that was why things went the way they did.

  ‘Ohhhh … Henry …,’ breathed Lana. ‘You’re my bull, my miner …’ she snorted right into an annual report from 1957.

  The fact was that Lana thought Henry looked exactly like Tom Jones, the Bull, the mine-worker from Wales. Henry felt flattered.

  ________

  There followed a brief period of happiness for Henry the clerk. Lana would come over a couple of evenings each week. He savoured the treatment, and the part about Tom Jones was just something that he had to put up with. Lana would throw herself at him like some sort of starving Amazon, and afterwards, when she left him to go home to her two pale kids and her elderly mother from Liverpool, Henry would lie in bed for a long time, smoking. Then he would dash out to a pub to have a drink and enjoy his solitude.

  It was just about now, towards the end of 1964, in the midst of pop’s budding youth, that Henry started working on his magnum opus ‘Europa, Disintegrating Fragments’. He didn’t yet know that this would be the title of the piece; he wouldn’t know that until he returned home to Sweden in the late sixties. But he had been struck by a vision of a lengthy, cohesive composition that would follow his route through Europe. The idea appealed to him; it would keep him company like a truly reliable travelling companion.

  As mentioned, there followed a brief period of happiness for Henry the clerk. Over time the saga with Lana Highbottom became extremely vexing because she had a hard time handling her passion. She had a hard time separating one thing from another; she couldn’t understand that everything had its place. Henry Morgan simply became too much for her. She saw him at the office every day, and the young Swede would walk around whistling hit songs and take no notice of her while she would cast long, languishing, teary- eyed glances at her virile lover, her Tom Jones. She literally swallowed her miner, hook, line and sinker.

  As soon as Henry approached the office, his stomach would start to hurt. When he serviced his Lana Highbottom at home, everything went splendidly. But at the office things began to get awkward. Henry cared what people said about him, and he was always anxious to follow convention. If word suddenly went out all over Smiths & Hamilton Ltd that he was screwing Lana Highbottom, he would become a laughing-stock.

  The brief period of happiness came to a disastrous end. Lana Highbottom had come over to visit Henry in his room at Mrs Dolan’s to partake of her cure. As usual, when she left she descended the stairs twittering and giggling with delight. Henry stayed behind, lying on his bed naked and dazed, smoking. It wasn’t especially late. Lana normally left early because of her kids and elderly mother in Paddington.

  The evening was still young, and Henry threw on his clothes and went down to the pub. He was a regular at the place, and he was in the habit of banging out several hit tunes on the piano if it was available. In return he would get a couple of free beers. On that particular night, he sat down at the battered piano and started playing a jazz version of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. That was what folks wanted to hear.

  Everyone was clearly enjoying Henry’s rendition of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ except for a big pockmarked thug who looked as if he’d been lying too long under a double-decker bus. His forehead was dented, his eyebrows shredded and it was anyone’s guess what had become of his nose. The thug had hairy fists that dragged on the ground, and his whole physiognomy was straight out of textbook pictures about the dawn of humankind.

  The pub pianist Henry Morgan probably hadn’t studied this prehistoric Cro-Magnon type very carefully, and he’d started giving his fingers a real warm-up when he was suddenly interrupted. The thug set his privy-lid mitts right down on the keyboard, which meant that he nearly covered four octaves. He reeked of cheap whisky, and Henry only had to cast a quick glance at the monster’s blotchy, injured face to realise that it was ripe fo
r a slugging. If the thug didn’t land one first, that is. But a proper gentleman doesn’t go for a punch without very good reasons.

  It didn’t take long for those reasons to appear. Without any sort of palavering or superficial pronouncements, the thug abruptly raised one of his sledgehammer fists and aimed a blow as deliberately as if he were going to drive a wedge into a chunk of wood. Henry had plenty of time to reflect on his life and fend off the projectile, which swished past his jaw. Then the thug’s left fist came down at an angle and clipped his shoulder. That did not leave Henry wishing for more.

  The bartender was standing behind the bar, and he shouted to Henry to take off. Several drunk fellows slowly stepped to the side, murmuring quietly. No one made a move to intervene.

  Henry ducked out from under the heavy artillery of serious, albeit totally misdirected projectiles the thug was firing off, using the worst possible street style. Henry the pianist and boxer by turns slipped out and ducked and backed away; no doubt it looked as if he were playing with the huge guy, as if he thought it was all in fun.

  When Henry had backed along the full length of the bar and everyone had stepped aside, he ended up pressed against a table. Several startled customers fled out to the street, only to peer through the window. Henry made short work of things. He clenched his teeth and charged. He threw a powerful left jab and hit the thug in the forehead and the cheek. The dunce merely looked surprised but he lost his focus. He shook his head and in confusion tried to aim another punch, but he never got that far. Henry charged with a new powerful left to the chin, followed nicely by an explosive series of right hooks just above the thug’s ear. And that was the end of it.

  The thug fell to the floor with a deafening crash, taking a table down with him as he moaned. He tried to fumble his way to his feet again, but without success. Several old guys came over to shake hands with Henry and to thank him for the show. Then they dragged the thug out to some convenient and suitable back alley.

  Henry climbed onto a bar stool, finding himself in that unreal haze that all heroes experience after a battle. The bartender poured him an enormous whisky for his nerves and brought out some ice cubes and gauze for his knuckles, which were tender and bleeding.

  ‘A piano player should be careful about his hands,’ said the bartender. ‘But you’re a great fighter, Henry.’

  ‘Who the hell was that?!’ Henry understandably wanted to know.

  ‘Not sure,’ said the bartender. ‘Doesn’t come here often. I just know that he used to ride a motorcycle. Ended up underneath a semi. His name is Highbottom, or something like that.’

  ‘Highbottom?!’ cried Henry. ‘That can’t be true! He’s supposed to be dead!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Henry,’ said the bartender. ‘He’s been beaten before.’

  ________

  ‘Lana’s Left in London’ was the title of a song that Henry put together as an homage to his middle-aged lover. I’ve heard that tune too, a nice little ballad about a lying woman who only stopped talking when she was kissed. I don’t think the song had anything to do with contempt for women; it was more likely just the opposite. Henry really did like Lana, but she deceived him, and he was on his way to Paris.

  He’d been in Swinging London for more than a year; he now knew the city and he’d learned a lesson. Lana would quickly forgive him, because he never told her about the fight with her deceased husband. She would forever after and very punctually each year send him a glittery greetings card, wishing him a Merry Christmas and asking him whether he planned to return. But he never did go back.

  One day Henry stood there in Victoria Station with his suitcase while the newspaper boys shouted at the top of their lungs that Sir Winston Churchill was dead. The breathless waiting of the entire nation had suddenly ended with the great man’s last gasp. A whole era swept like a gust of wind through the station, taking along a whole generation of dutiful and patriotic disabled soldiers permeated with tonic water across the filthy floor of Victoria Station, where the handbills were whirling around in the draught. HE IS DEAD.

  It was early on a Sunday morning in January 1965, and Henry lit up a Player’s, blowing the smoke up towards the grimy glass roof of the station where the rain was making dismal streaks in the soot. An old woman sitting on a bench burst into tears, several distinguished gentlemen in city suits removed their hats in respect for the most English of all Englishmen, and even the trains seemed to heave a deep sigh of despair. The mourners began to line up in tight queues along the Thames. Even Henry felt deeply gripped by sadness; he had always liked Churchill. He didn’t know why, since his knowledge of history regarding Churchill’s role was quite limited. It was more likely a question of style, and of sentimentality.

  Henry felt a sadness, a sense of indecision, and hope. He didn’t know where to go, but he no longer needed to have any qualms about leaving Lana in the lurch because she would be sad about his treachery. Right now all of Great Britain was in mourning, and Lana didn’t have to feel alone. Sorrow was sorrow.

  SANCTIMONIOUS COWS

  (Leo Morgan, 1965–67)

  Leo Morgan’s second volume of poetry was given the title Sanctimonious Cows and appeared on the booksellers’ shelves at about the same time that we switched to driving on the right-hand side of the road in Sweden, which was in September 1967.

  Sanctimonious Cows displayed an entirely different face. The reviewers could conclude that something fundamental had happened to the poet. His five- year silence – there is always talk of a ‘silence’ when it comes to poets who don’t put out a steady stream of poetry books; those poets who have never been the object of this special ‘silence’ probably ought to give it a try; it usually does the poet good – this silence had been like the quiet before a storm. The corps of critics was almost unanimous in viewing Leo Morgan as the spokesman for the new generation, like the Bob Dylan of the Swedish Parnassus, an eccentric who united a modern idiom with classic modernism, whatever that might mean.

  Presumably the poet countered this opinion with scornful silence. He had never acknowledged any gods. Those idols that he did acquire he set on a pedestal only in order to hear the exquisite crash when they fell. Blasphemy was Leo Morgan’s trademark.

  But it was a long road to that point, to the autumn of ’67, and you could list a well-nigh infinite cataloguing and count up all the formidable stock- exchange quotations, all the literary trends from Baudelaire to Ekelöf to Norén, and all the records from the Beatles to Zappa that had battered the poet and shoved him this way or that. In the mid-sixties Leo Morgan, just like everyone else of his generation, was the object of an inexhaustible stream of impressions, whose aim it was to devour ideas, clothing, drugs, and people like one-eyed cyclopses.

  Sanctimonious Cows was thus a poetic volcanic eruption, in its way heralding the political volcanic eruption that would culminate in the spring of ’68. From a literary standpoint, the seismographs also showed a real impact. Many critics confessed to being tremendously impressed by the furious power, the liberated poetic energy that blazed in every syllable. There must have been some sort of Rilke-angel murmuring in Morgan’s ears.

  In this case the poetic method has to do with feeding a whole volcano full of all the cult figures of the West – like a sort of minor Cantos – only to have the entire decoction later detonate in an annihilating eruption of invectives that make Dante look like the most cowardly of panegyrists.

  In contrast to a ‘traditional’ presentation of the Good – personified by Dag Hammarskjöld, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Albert Schweitzer from the twentieth century; all of them dead – the poet offers a fertile and growing Chaos. He scrutinises and castigates his victims, making them seem nothing more than naïve figures striving for the Good. Behind the façades are concealed the lowest of motives and the most vulgar of perversities – Hammarskjöld was a deviant in his own way, Churchill painted naked models, Kennedy exploited his secretaries and Schweitzer spread syphilis among the native tribes �
� which vacillated between general gossip and sheer figments of the imagination. But the worst thing about these ambassadors of the Good was their corrupt Loyalty.

  In opposition to this notion of seemingly good loyalty, Leo presents altruistic ecstasy, the spontaneously combustible fire, which is anything but loyal. For the first time in his life Leo allows disloyalty into the system. The order that he strove to achieve in Herbarium appears to be an illusion, a false sort of order. This is a realisation that is as bitter as it is vexing and painful.

  In fact, it’s astonishing that a respectable publisher, and a Swedish one at that, would dare publish such an unrestrainedly blasphemous book as Sanctimonious Cows. Perhaps it was out of sheer thoughtlessness or carelessness. Or else the publisher was counting on a minimal print run and a negligible readership. The poet was no longer some sort of Wunderkind; he was eighteen years old and rather past his prime. He was the former child star from Hyland’s Corner and hardly worth even a small mention in the tabloids, which reported ‘now the sweet poet has acquired fuzz on his chin and written some angry poems …’ and so on.

  As I sit up here at this much-abused desk in this ever-so-dismal flat, leafing through Sanctimonious Cows ten years later – it’s his paternal grand father’s copy, well thumbed and with exclamation marks here and there in the margins – I can only conclude that the power and the energy in Leo’s lava still endures. By all rights, the title poem should have been included in some school anthology, but as far as I know, that hasn’t yet happened. It’s a testimony to the gross negligence on the part of those responsible, or possibly to the much-too-powerful impact of the material.

  The perspective is brilliant. In the title poem Leo scrutinises his sanctimonious cows through the telescopic sight on a Mauser rifle. The poem is a sort of monologue, spoken by a hired killer whose assignment it is to shoot the sanctimonious cows. To be able to kill, he has stoked himself up with pills and the limited perspective that the telescopic sight allows, guaranteeing that the victims will never be people in a specific milieu, individuals in any sort of context. The people in the telescopic sight become screened off dolls, encircled figures, almost abstract. These are, of course, the conditions for killing – in order to kill, the victim must be something abstract that is called the enemy, perhaps clad in a uniform so that he can’t be distinguished from other victims. The murderer and executioner is not allowed to see a human being, he has to see an abstract organism which he – with all his professionalism, his skill, and his precision – will inject with a certain amount of lead, ensuring that death inevitably ensues.