Things were much worse with her former child prodigy. She had never imagined that she would have any trouble with that boy, although over the past several years he had changed beyond recognition. She could no longer get a sensible word out of Leo. She tried everything she could think of to coax a few words from him, to try to understand him, but nothing worked. And she didn’t want to fuss over him too much, seeing as the fate of the Jazz Baron was still fresh in her mind.
A mother who disowns a son has to atone for her crime. That’s what had happened to old Mrs Morgonstjärna. After the Jazz Baron departed this life without reconciling with his mother, the woman had slowly but surely fretted herself to death. The family physician Dr Helmers had made weekly house calls and prescribed everything from mysterious diets at distant health spas to port wine. Nothing did the old lady any good. On the night the Beatles performed in Sweden for the first time, she drew her last breath, barely audible even to her own husband. A month after her death and funeral, the billiard table was restored to its former position, in her room. The old dandy, libertine and permanent secretary of the WWW Club could not look back without a certain bitterness at the period of his life spent as a married paterfamilias, which nevertheless seemed like a forty-year hiatus between two games of billiards. The WWW Club offered condolences and soon resumed its games, as if nothing had happened.
Greta didn’t want to leave such a bitter image of herself behind. She had to keep on good terms with Leo. And besides, things could have been worse.
There were also others besides Greta who wanted to make claims on Leo Morgan. Eva Eld seemed to be consumed with love for her poet, her bohemian, her George Harrison, and everything else that she imagined him to be. She knew full well that Leo was hanging out with the Mod crowd surrounding Nina Negg, but she didn’t care.
Wearing a skirt, checked kneesocks and a freshly ironed blouse, she bore a damned close resemblance to the filmstar Rosemary Clooney, and it was in her very neatness that Leo found his incentive. He now carried the photo of Rosemary Clooney around in his wallet, because it reminded him of Eva. She was full of blood and passion, and she possessed everything that Nina Negg did not.
Without a murmur of protest, Eva Eld allowed all the Mods that Leo knew to come to her parties. Someone would pick the lock on her father’s bar cabinet to get at the high-class alcohol. The more snobbish bounders in the dark blue suits and ties were in some way charmed by the rowdy Mods, who had no respect for anything. Their girlfriends were especially interested; there was always so much in the newspapers about riots and disturbances and it was all very exciting.
After one party at Eva Eld’s house, Leo fell asleep in her bed, and he was still there when her parents returned home, without warning. Of course they couldn’t be allowed to find a Mod in their daughter’s room, so Eva had shoved her poet under the bed and later joined him there on the floor. She made love to him with such passion that once again he found reason to doubt the evidence of his own senses.
________
Early in the autumn of 1967 a dignified procession passed through Stockholm. A number of subversive elements carried a coffin out to Kungsträdgården, the King’s Garden. There they picked up a rag with a special emblem on it, drenched it in petrol, burnt it and then let the ashes slowly drift down into the coffin while a couple of quiet hymns were sung. That was how the Provie movement, barely a year old, buried itself. It’s highly likely that Leo Morgan participated in the procession. Perhaps in a way he was also burying his own youth there in the King’s Garden.
Just before the traditional graduation exams were officially abolished, he managed to earn quite decent final grades, presumably as a result of his teachers’ favourable disposition, which by now had become a force of habit. He was definitely no longer the class genius, and it’s possible that there were certain differences of opinion that arose when Leo Morgan, the pupil, was discussed by the teachers and principal at their last meeting. Leo had been listless, apathetic and indifferent over the past few years. The teachers thought that the life seemed to have gone out of the child prodigy. As usual, they didn’t have a clue about what was really going on.
Like two demons, Verner and Nina Negg had come down to the school and whisked away their fuzz-faced bard, rescuing him from the steamroller of the conformist lessons that smoothed out every little divergent element to produce a general mediocrity. Verner had started hanging around the university – he was the department’s laziest mathematician – and Nina worked if she felt like it. They devoured all sorts of things during the day, sitting in her place and smoking hash as they listened to Jimi Hendrix before they went over to the school to pick up Leo, who right up until the very end persisted in attending classes. Verner smoked up one stamp after another. He would go down to Hornsgatan to see the Philatelist – one of the men who was involved in the digging crew – and sell one rare stamp after another. His mother had no idea, because he would replace the valuable stamps with worthless ones, which she could never identify. Verner thought the very idea was exhilarating: old, extremely old, tiny pieces of paper could get him as high as he wanted – it was all a matter of which one he sold.
Sometimes Nina would worry about Leo as they sat there, puffing on their peace pipes. There was something rigid about his expression, something dark and utterly inscrutable. He would never get muddled the way most people did when they smoked. In fact, it seemed as if nothing really affected Leo, nothing took hold. He just became more and more introverted and reserved, even less approachable, and that worried Nina. She thought that he hated her because she knew that he spent time with that damn hag, that slutty bourgeois broad, Eva Bitch-Eld. One time Nina tore open Leo’s wallet and found those pictures that were supposed to depict her rival. She ripped them to shreds right before his eyes, then set the pieces on fire and stamped on them, just to make him react. But he didn’t. She could pretend to be furious and start punching him with her fists and scratching his face with her fingernails, which were bitten to the quick. But he didn’t react. She could have set him on fire, like a monk from the Far East, and he wouldn’t have tried to get away. Leo always wanted an explanation, he was always trying to twist and turn every idea until there was nothing left of it. Everything became empty, meaningless rhetoric. His whole life was like a game of chess in which the pieces disappeared, one by one, until only Leo’s remained – he would win, no matter how much hash he smoked.
But Nina Negg’s sole preoccupation was not officially declaring everything and everyone dead; she actually was able to participate in the fight for life. She was friends with one of the prominent figures in the Provies, if it was even possible to talk about those who were in the forefront or in the background in terms of this phenomenon. If so, Leo definitely ended up in what was the background.
This person Nina knew had hitchhiked all over Europe. His name was Stene Forman, and he was the son of a newspaper baron, though it was a minor enterprise compared with the big daily papers. Stene had a laugh that could drown out almost any other. When he laughed, people in the vicinity would be ready to call for an ambulance or the fire department or the like, because his laugh sounded so dangerous. There was something possessed about his laugh; perhaps it was filled with a natural power, a wild and untamed desire. Stene Forman was basically a very positive person, and that could be why the movement in Sweden was given the name ‘Pro Vie’.
In Holland it was called ‘Provo’ – for provocation – and there the participants had set off a minor civil war in Amsterdam when they allied themselves with striking workers. The Swedish version was somewhat nicer, more modest, more positive and not nearly as desperate or disillusioned as on the Continent.
Stene Forman was presumably the one who managed to persuade Nina Negg that it was fucking crucial to stage ‘happenings’, and Leo soon suspected that she had fallen in love with the guy – that was the only explanation. He wasn’t exactly jealous; he refused to acknowledge jealousy, because in his world it had been eradicated
, like some sort of Black Death of ownership.
The Provies staged a series of happenings and demonstrations. They emptied an entire bus full of non-returnable bottles right in front of the parliament building; they sang in the Brunkeberg tunnel; and they performed street theatre. It was all very innocent, and yet it was brutally received by the police. The Provies were stretching the boundaries of what was allowed, and that was one of the things that attracted Leo.
A lot of people were needed for a planned anti-atom-bomb action at Hötorget, and it was in this connection that Leo was summoned as a temporary Provie. It was a Saturday afternoon, in the middle of the weekend shopping rush downtown, and two processions that had started in opposite directions met down at the square, each showing up with an atom bomb made of tin foil. People from all around started getting curious, and the crowds grew. The two armies were urged towards each other by aggressive commanders. Innocent people who were out doing their shopping got dragged into the battle, and finally the bombs exploded, causing both armies to die.
Leo had been assigned the role of a soldier who wore a gas mask. As he lay on the ground and the police were trying in vain to figure out what was going on, he peered into the throng of people that was staring down in astonishment at the sea of bodies left by the huge explosion, and he caught sight of Eva Eld. She was standing there holding a shopping bag and staring at all the Provies. She didn’t recognise Leo, of course, since he was wearing a gas mask, but he imagined that her affections for him would not be diminished even if she did recognise him. For once he was a participant in something. He was seen. Somewhere in the swarm of bodies was Nina Negg, who was swearing energetically because it was too damn cold to be lying dead on the ground that day.
________
So if it’s possible to claim that Herbarium was the poet’s farewell to his childhood, it could be said with equal justice that Sanctimonious Cows – which was introduced to the public during that autumn when Sweden switched to driving on the right side of the road and the Provies staged their own funeral in the King’s Gardens – represents the final balance sheet of his youth. That volcanic eruption, that explosion may have acquired its monumental force in the same way the atom bomb does – a force field, a shock wave is created through fission, a Big Bang that establishes a new Universe in accordance with entirely new laws, a whole different moral codex.
Without a doubt, it had to do with the urge to create some form of unity, balance and – paradoxically enough – order in this chaos. Perhaps poetry was Leo’s only refuge where inconsistency was the rule. His brother Henry the adventurer, went abroad, while Leo began his own internal exile. The world was on the verge of tearing him apart, yet he could not leave. This was where Eva Eld was, with her suffocating, maternal adoration, and this was where Nina Negg was, with her seductively lovely catastrophe. Here was pacifism’s uncompromising hatred of evil, and here was the liberation movement’s righteous love of armed struggle. Here was his own cultivation of the printed word and his desperate longing for sensual grace.
It was a world thirsting for the truth. Leo would stay in it for a while longer, at least in order to make an attempt to hunt down the evil. But he would lose his way.
LE BOULEVARDIER
(Henry Morgan, 1966–68)
When the truly big elephants danced, only the best of venues would do. Paris would do, even for a citoyen du monde such as Henry Morgan. It was the merry sixties, and there were still big elephants who wanted to dance. Henri le boulevardier turned up wherever anything was happening. At a large demonstration, for instance, on Boulevard Michel he stood very close to Jean-Paul Sartre, and he asked the philosopher a question that was never answered. Even today no one knows what that question might have been. Henry was not trained in rhetoric. He was a man of action and physicality.
Sartre, for his part, was a very short man. Anyone who has ever seen him will attest to that. Minou was also short, appallingly short, though without being either a dwarf or a cretin. He was just very little, that was all. Minou worked as a waiter at the Café Au Coin, down by Rue Garreau where Henry spent his days. Henry could often be found at Au Coin, sitting there with a pastis as he stared at the throngs of people on the street. This was in Montmartre, and there was always something to stare at, especially for a name- dropper like Henry.
One day in the autumn of ’67 a black Lincoln Continental came gliding down the street. It was raining and slippery. The huge Yank vehicle was moving much too fast, and it rammed right into a rusty little Citroën 2CV which, with a small bang, was transformed from one miserable shape into another, more compressed one.
The Frenchman in the Citroën leapt unscathed out of the wreckage and started shouting and screaming, as was to be expected. He attacked the gleaming, sneering Lincoln Continental, apparently prepared to rip the 50,000-dollar vehicle to shreds with his bare hands. But he stopped when he caught sight of the two figures climbing out of the car – a fat, knock-kneed man wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat in the company of the world-famous painter, Salvador Dalí.
A moment of massive silence and monumental stillness followed. A big elephant was about to dance, and the world seemed to pause for an instant. The Frenchman, so enraged only a moment ago, began scratching his head. The world-famous painter had, of course, been recognised. He twirled his celebrated moustache and absentmindedly poked at the Citroën with his cane.
Suddenly the bewildered Frenchman had an idea, something that Frenchmen often have. Quick as lightning he dashed inside the Café Au Coin where Henry Morgan was sitting with his pastis and where Minou worked. The victim asked for a bucket, some paint and a paintbrush, all of which fortunately could be found in the café. He then went back out to his demolished Citroën. The whole business was resolved amicably, without any gendarmes. The immensely marketable surrealist willingly signed the wreck with his distinctive signature, and the victim instantly became the proud owner of a Citroën détruit par monsieur Salvador Dalí, an original. Later the car was undoubtedly sold for a high price to some crazy American collector.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. At that point all was well and morale was high. The fat American in the wide-brimmed cowboy hat was clearly elated by the whole affair. With his friend Dalí and the Victim, he went into the café where Henry Morgan was sitting and Minou was working. The American insolently clapped his hands and shouted for champagne. The occasion had to be celebrated as if they were dedicating a new sculpture in a public place.
Minou bowed very politely, showed the party to a table, and ran off to get a bottle of chilled, dry champagne. As the cork flew off, the Yank finally noticed the extremely short Minou. He shoved back his cowboy hat and announced to the attentively listening crowd in the bar that he had just bought a fantastic castle ‘down in Lorraine’, which happened to be totally inaccurate, since Lorraine lies to the east. He was thinking of having it transported home all the way across the Atlantic to his property in Texas where it would be reconstructed. He was one of those crazy American collectors.
‘Merveilleusementable …’ said Dalí with a sigh, twirling his moustache.
And it was here that Minou entered the picture.
‘You’d suit the place perfectly!’ bellowed the cowboy, giving Minou an appraising look. ‘How much are you, monsieur?’
Minou didn’t reply and tried to slip away. He was shy and didn’t welcome attention.
‘I mean …’ the cowboy persisted, his voice just as loud. ‘Combien êtesvous?’
Minou had evidently heard this question before and perhaps he thought that he could afford to be a bit amiable – that usually resulted in a nice tip and restored tranquillity, if nothing else.
‘One twenty-five,’ said Minou, because that was his height in centimetres.
‘No, monsieur,’ grunted the American. ‘I mean in dollars!’
That was clearly the last straw for Henry, that blue-eyed, loyal Sven Dufva. He jumped into the situation, striding over to the cowboy and landing
a well- aimed right hook right between the eyes of that swine.
A tumult ensued. Dalí was on his guard and gave Henry a thrashing with his cane that was worthy of an old-fashioned schoolmaster. Minou tried his best to separate the combatants, but without success. He was, in fact, too small for the task. Gendarmes were required to restore peace to Au Coin, and Henry was taken in for questioning.
The boxer and bohemian Morgan was never again welcome at Au Coin after his heroic intervention. Life, Jean-Paul Sartre and Minou were all very short; art, on the other hand, was very long. That was what he learned.
________
There are people who go to museums, and there are those who go to cafés. Some people go to museums, while others never do. That might be a good subject for a historian, to investigate when and under what circumstances humans started collecting and preserving things from history and what importance this had for humanity’s self-awareness. Perhaps this is even something that is particularly Western; I’m not sure. Museums are our bloodless past, exposing traces of our lives; they’re a type of conscience, captured in display cases and equipped with seals and burglar alarms. All art is actually museum- like, with the exception of music. Henry Morgan was a musician, and as far as I can tell, he lacked any notion of time or space.
The Paris in which Henry spent his last springtime in exile was at the heart of the world revolution, a city on the brink of ferment, exactly like in the days of the Commune ninety-seven years earlier, and exactly like in Blum’s days, approximately thirty years earlier. This was no time to be going to museums, at any rate not for a man like Henry. He belonged to those who went to cafés.
Henri le boulevardier read all the newspapers he could find, laboriously making his way through Le Monde’s weighty columns, spelling his way through all the leaflets and communiqués from the revolutionary forces. He saw all the soon-to-be legendary heroes in full action on the street: the short physicist Geismar, the red-faced Cohn-Bendit and even Sartre. He listened to all the talk on the street and was, of course, drawn into all the skirmishes wherever he showed up. People willingly allowed themselves to be duped – they thought that he was some sort of hero.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 30
