Stockholm had been betrayed and misappropriated; it was trying to live up to something that Henri le citoyen du monde didn’t fully understand. He had seen the real metropolises, after all, the real cities in Germany, England and France. Stockholm could never be their equal; even trying seemed ridiculous. But he would never be part of life there again. He was passé, an anachronism. Whenever he ran into old friends, he couldn’t accept them as they were; he always wanted to view them as they had once been. This made everyone furious, and they pushed him away. Only Willis down at the Europa Athletic Club was the same as ever.
Henry simply could not accept change or renewal, and he grew more and more isolated in that old flat on Hornsgatan where the cigar smoke of his paternal grandfather still clung to the heavy curtains. He tried to tell stories about the big world to his brother, but Leo just got bored. He thought that Henry was living in a fantasy world, a pseudo-existence. Henry could never convince him otherwise.
They got on each other’s nerves, those Morgan brothers. Leo did his thing, and Henry fulfilled his obligations. He was trying to finish ‘Europa, Disintegrating Fragments’ – music that left his brother cold – while he continued the digging down in the cellar. Leo thought the whole endeavour so naïve that it made him feel like crying. Yet Henry was forced to keep on, since it was a requirement for receiving his allowance. Leo probably felt bitter because he had squandered every öre of his own inheritance in a matter of months. He couldn’t comprehend why Henry had to pretend, at any cost, that there actually was something to dig up. Leo tried to open Henry’s dreamy blue eyes and get him to realise that the whole thing was nothing but play-acting, that he was really as much a fool as the Philatelist, Wolf-Larsson, the Flask and the other lads down at the Fence Queen’s shop. But Henry would fly into a rage; he refused to tolerate such low blows, nor would he discuss the subject. There were rules and certain things that a person simply had to accept. End of discussion.
Quarrels ensued. Henry nagged at Leo like a crotchety old landlady, pointing out every mistake and every failure on his part to keep things neat and clean. He would like nothing better than for Leo to pack up and clear out. They yelled at each other … shouted and screamed, and then Henry would inevitably start to bawl. He felt so lonely. He didn’t want to live alone. He was an artist, after all.
Yet when Henry saw his little child-prodigy brother lying there, seemingly paralysed by his talents, he would do an about-face and suddenly behave as nicely and considerately as he could. He brought tea to Leo in bed and asked him what he wanted for lunch and dinner; he took care of his brother as if he were an ailing and beloved spouse. He would go into Leo’s room and sit down on the edge of the bed and tell him stories, wearing out the Brahman with endless tales and adventures from the Big World. He was thinking of venturing out into the world again because it was so hard for an artist to breathe in Sweden. But Leo knew that Henry was home to stay. Henry would never leave Sweden again.
These periods of utter passivity were always followed by the exact opposite – long frenetic spells of working, reading, drinking and copulating. During Leo’s extroverted periods, Henry’s attitude would change completely. He tried to be moralistic, stern and admonishing. And he was deeply bitter whenever he saw that none of his ploys had any effect on Leo. Not even dastardly tricks or threats of eviction did any good.
During that summer of ’74, Leo Morgan was apparently in a bright period of productivity and somewhat extroverted socialising. He had completed a work that was printed as a booklet by a small press specialising in philosophy. It was called Curiosity, Inquisitiveness and Knowledge, which was clearly a moderately inflammatory title. We will have occasion to return to this modest work a little later, since it would presumably end up being his last achievement in book form. On a couple of occasions he had seen Eva Eld again – his devoted admirer from his school days – and it’s quite likely that they also had sexual intercourse. Leo Morgan sowed his wild oats as often as opportunities presented themselves, which was quite frequently since he managed to arouse in women a peculiar protective instinct – that is, until they realised that he really had no need of their protection. Rather, they were the ones who needed to be protected from him.
But to get back to the festival at Gärdet. Leo was presumably feeling a bit lonely. The old gang from the past had split up – they had either died or vanished. Time had taken a harsh toll, and people had been dropping out right and left. But no one could defeat Stene Forman. He circulated among the crowds of people, lofty as an eagle, weary and haggard, feeling the pressure of bad business deals, high overheads and constant arguments at the weekly magazine Blixt, which was being forced into more and more salacious territory just to keep its readers.
So Leo happened to run into Stene Forman among all the festival booths and guitars, the bongo drums and peace pipes, and Stene practically fell upon Leo with joy. The famous laugh was gone – it now sounded more like a heavy wheeze – but he was glad to see Leo still alive, as he said. Leo couldn’t hide his own delight, and they tried not to talk about the past. They had grown so much older, more mature and wiser.
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The weekly magazine Blixt – which was shut down in the autumn of ’75 – was a typical men’s publication that existed in the shadow of the publications put out by the major newspapers. Nicely enough, it lacked any hint of sex or pornography. That was why things went wrong. The paper was the life work of Stene Forman’s father, and it would have celebrated its thirtieth anniversary if only it had survived one more year. But Stene’s father – who, against all odds, had founded three publications – was a lone wolf who went against the current and refused to surrender to the demands of a new era as long as he was in charge. Yet by the early seventies he was old and worn out, so in ’73 his son took full control. Stene had grown up in the industry, chasing down news stories while he was still in short trousers, and he had shown a natural talent for the business. He continued in his father’s footsteps during what was a very propitious time. The year 1973 was a remarkably good one for the weekly magazines. They didn’t even have to go looking for news; it just came pouring in. Stene enjoyed major coups with the death of the old king, the Norrmalmstorg drama, and a series of articles following in the wake of the IB Affair. He himself wrote a huge ‘I was there’ report from Norrmalmstorg, which evoked a certain acclaim even far beyond the less respected journalist cadres of the weeklies. An excerpt was translated for readers of the American magazine Esquire, which was not something that happened to many Swedish reporters, fashionable as it was to encourage investigative journalism, new journalism and whatever else people liked to call the age-old muck-raking from the nineteenth century. At any rate, the size of Blixt’s circulation rose appreciably during that year, reaching an all-time record of 147,000 in November ’73. The magazine’s success was, of course, celebrated with appropriate tributes at well-known restaurants, and Stene Forman – like every father’s son – did not skimp on the food. He had become part of the system.
He had been a Provie and a hippie; he had tried just about everything. But the long and the short of it was that he’d had a large number of children with a somewhat smaller number of women, and he’d put a damper on his laughter. That tremendous, wild, almost absurd laugh from his youth in the sixties had now become a heavy rasping that bore witness to complications. His difficult position was widely known and shamelessly exploited by the forces of the free market which, for a certain compensation, were allowed to plant ‘news’ in Blixt. This news had to do with reporting that competitors’ products – such as exercise equipment, charter trips and new car models – were deadly dangerous or of inferior quality. It was an old gimmick – maligning other products by manipulating the facts. In other words, Stene Forman had become corrupted, albeit no more corrupted than other editors-in-chief, as he was always eager to point out. If you wanted to play the game, you had to accept the consequences. Eat or be eaten. Among all the accountants, corporate trouble-
shooters and publication experts who were called in to rescue the small magazine company, the editor-in-chief was considered a hothead and crazy man. The magazine’s success – exactly as the experts had predicted in their highly scientific prognoses and calculations – was only temporary. A duckpond like Sweden couldn’t provide dead kings, bank dramas and espionage affairs more than once a decade. As soon as the champagne bubbles evaporated the circulation figures were back down to disastrous levels. The threat of closure cast a shadow over the editorial offices on Norr Mälarstrand, and the magazine’s printing bills began rising towards amounts that augured bankruptcy. Stene Forman was thinking of scuttling the ship. The two other trade publications – also the work of his father – were devoted to electronics and antiques and could be saved through various efforts. But Blixt was a defenceless little animal without claws, vulnerable in a jungle of dragons and behemoths. Forman persistently refused to capitulate – which would have meant focusing on pornography – because he didn’t want to betray his father’s ideals. At least not as long as the old man was alive. It was a question of honour and conscience, he claimed.
This made Stene Forman into a sort of ethical model for a number of radical groups who supported all private enterprise that didn’t try to be a monopoly. Stene became the subject of a major interview in FiB/Kulturfront, in which he complained long and loud about the shallowness and moral decline of the magazine world. He himself had clean, absolutely lily-white hands, which he held up as if he were being robbed in the photo accompanying the interview, apparently without any sense of irony. His heart was with the left, as it always had been. But in business the law of the jungle ruled, along with trial and error. It was a matter of fighting your way through by constantly using new equipment, as well as coming up with fresh new ideas. During the continual, chaotic brainstorming sessions in the Blixt editorial offices on Norr Mälarstrand – with creative and improvisational forces specially summoned from various other professions – Stene Forman tried to be dynamic and formulate a new image, a new drive that would save the publication from death by suffocation. But everyone was tired. The life had gone out of the magazine. Forman was not lacking in a dash of charisma, but that was not enough. At any rate, it was during just such a brainstorming session that Stene – all on his own – came up with an idea that might have ended up in the wastebasket among all the other hackneyed ideas if it hadn’t included two old obsessions of his from the past, namely Leo Morgan and Verner Hansson.
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Restaurant Salzers was located on John Ericssonsgatan, between Hantverkargatan and Norr Mälarstrand, not far from the editorial offices of Blixt. Leo Morgan turned up there one day in the new year of ’75, and the maître d’ very politely showed him to a table that had been reserved under editor Forman’s name. It was a secluded table intended for confidential conversations, and Stene was sitting there waiting, the ashtray in front of him already half full. He stood up at once and greeted Leo with enthusiasm.
This was meant to be a proper lunch, and Leo was urged to select whatever he wanted from the menu. When their orders were taken, Leo leafed absent-mindedly through the latest issue of Blixt, in which a new model car was reported to have a countless number of defects. The headline said: SAFETY KILLS THE POOR. Stene had presumably made a real pile on that story.
Stene seemed to be in high spirits, and Leo was naturally curious since the editor had rung him up to say this was urgent. He had an idea that he wanted Leo to hear. Leo was the only one whose advice he trusted, the only one who had not already been compromised with a clutch of fiascos in the business.
This was actually true of Verner too, but they hadn’t seen Verner for several years now. He was still under strict house arrest at his old mother’s flat; he was not allowed to go out, nor did he wish to. She couldn’t stop him from boozing, but apparently she preferred him to do it under her supervision. It was the strangest relationship imaginable. Pure Ingmar Bergman, in Stene’s opinion.
But the most peculiar thing of all was that Verner had been ringing Stene nearly every day lately, dead drunk on the phone, to babble away about his dad ‘Hansson’, as he called him. He had never stopped fantasising about his father, even though he’d disappeared in 1944, before Verner was even born, and maybe that was why he had turned out the way he did. His mother refused to say a word; she was as silent as the grave. All she would say was that the man had left, and that was the end of it. When Verner was a kid, he had imagined that his father owned an island in the South Pacific and that he would go there someday when he grew up. By now Verner had been grown up for a good ten years, but he still hadn’t gone there. Instead he had perpetually cultivated an interest in similar disappearances, and in his present situation he had apparently taken up this research again. Or maybe his mother had disclosed something that she had been keeping secret, accidentally letting something slip that prompted Verner to return to those same old, worn-out paths.
So he had been ringing Stene Forman every day, because Stene had plenty of contacts, after all, and he had babbled on about some old journalist supposedly named Hogarth, who apparently had information about the case. Stene had tried to calm Verner – who was always very drunk – assuring him that he would check it out, thanking him for the tip, and promising to be in touch. Stene Forman hadn’t really paid much attention to these phone calls until he was suddenly struck by a brilliant idea.
He happened to know who this Hogarth was – the old journalist actually did exist in the real world – and he realised that there might be something to what Verner was saying. Old Edvard Hogarth was even something of a legend among serious journalists. He had been a bright star in the thirties and forties, but he had displayed such good foresight that he cut short his career long before the business became sullied by the depraved filth of the times.
Leo couldn’t really see how he came into the picture or what the idea was behind this meeting. He had known for a long time that Verner was under house arrest and that he spent his days drinking and leafing through albums of worthless stamps and trying to solve classic chess problems. Nor was it a surprise that Verner was also attempting to formulate theories about missing persons. If he thought he had found some trace of his father at this late date, that was not something Leo was going to get into.
Stene Forman wheezed and stubbed out his fifteenth cigarette as an exquisite salmon trout was served after a good-sized prawn cocktail. They tasted the fish, drank a toast with a light white wine and then Forman explained that his idea had to do with starting a series of articles about these missing persons. All the unsolved cases and mysteries that the most experienced detectives on the police force, the inspectors and investigators, had failed to solve. Of course this was not an original idea; this type of material could always be found in any weekly magazine. Readers loved mysteries, enigmas and unsolved crimes. People wanted a bit of speculation, that’s just how it was. But the difference was that Blixt would not simply speculate – Blixt would be so bold as to present the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Furthermore – and this was the humanitarian core of the whole matter – they would really find out whatever they could about Verner Hansson’s father, they would redress the wrongs of the innocent, restore contacts that had seemingly been lost for good, release those who were wrongfully committed and so on, ad infinitum.
And this was where Leo came into the picture – he was the one who would do the writing! Leo swallowed a piece of salmon trout the wrong way and had a classic coughing fit. He took a gulp of white wine and watched with tear-filled eyes as Forman lit a cigarette – he didn’t much feel like eating – his expression both proud and entreating at the same time. He waited nervously, full of anticipation, for Leo’s response.
________
The year 1975 had started off very well for Leo Morgan, especially for the poet. The philosopher had been forced to retreat indefinitely in favour of the poet, who had a premonition of a new lyrical ‘ejaculation’. He began a rough
draft in a black workbook – it’s still there among the rubbish in the flat – for a long suite called Autopsy, First Suite, Jan. ’75. The word ‘autopsy’ is derived from the Greek, meaning ‘a seeing for oneself’, or ‘post-mortem’, which prepares the way for certain associations. The draft is interspersed with quotes and literary gems from ancient philosophical documents and from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As far as I can judge – it’s well known that peeking at other people’s workbooks is a dubious pleasure, and you never allow yourself the proper tranquillity to do a thorough study of the mat erial – Autopsy could definitely have been Leo Morgan’s breakthrough and led to recognition even from the most stringent arbiters of taste. One recurring theme is the subject–object relationship, the insistence of human beings to regard, for instance, a dead body as a ‘person’, a creature with certain characteristics, which in fact involves a persistent inability to regard oneself as an object. A human being becomes a corpse: a semantic distinction that Leo elevated to an all-embracing perspective. ‘Life’s forms, an infinity of combinations, / predestined revolutions, / glide silently into the rock / with the water foaming all around as pain. / Death is one and the same crystal / deep inside the highest mountain …’ This is a passage that I couldn’t resist stealing.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 34
