For a trained philosopher, these are naturally truisms, not to mention nonsense, but it all becomes quite ludicrous by virtue of the fact that Leo Morgan continually confronts these assertions and theories with our daily human life here on earth and shows how gossip and the reading of magazines hardly makes us wiser or our minds more inquisitive – we would rather hear perpetual confirmations and no surprises. The way out of this lowly condition – and here the author suddenly turns pragmatic and didactic – is via a stoic and exalted sense of calm. The gossip of curiosity is a vice, the calm of indifference is a virtue. Perhaps this is not exactly what he meant, but that’s how I interpret it. I never managed to ask him, but one thing at least is clear – the author of Curiosity, Inquisitiveness and Knowledge must have scorned, not to mention detested, one of Stockholm’s most celebrated and talented gossipmongers: Henry Morgan, his own flesh-and-blood brother.
Curiosity, Inquisitiveness and Knowledge was printed as a small booklet by a publisher with philosophy as its speciality, and it’s probably impossible to find, even in an antiquarian bookshop. I would venture to state that it was to be Leo Morgan’s last published work.
It may be useful to keep in mind this parenthesis about Leo’s efforts within the philosophical profession. One of the doctors at Långbro Hospital referred to the patient’s philosophical studies and works in order to reveal a connection between stoicism as a virtue and catatonia as a diagnosis. New findings within psychiatry assert that the symptoms of an illness can often be seen as pure extensions of the behaviour of a completely ‘healthy’ individual. It’s totally natural for small children to be afraid to walk through a deserted square, to get into a crowded lift, to be locked inside a wardrobe, or to discover a snake in the grass. But in adults, these fears and fantasies become manifest as phobias: in a state of illness they are called agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and herpetophobia.
One of the doctors asserted that such was the case with the patient Leo Morgan. His complete passivity and resignation corresponded fully to his philosophical conclusions, developed from a purely intellectual point of view. His theories had become anchored in practice.
Involuntarily I happen to think of the copperplate engravings above the desk here in the library. They depict a number of authors of the past such as Dante, Cervantes, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and others, including the Spanish Renaissance writer Lopez y Ortega. His play Fernando Curioso has been called Spain’s Hamlet, and the magnificent final monologue, just before the cloister doors close behind the hero, ends with this self-ironic insight:
The fool in the poem
is no invention
he is for the most part
merely an extension.
Keeping in mind that this was written by a blind, syphilitic, former conquistador over four hundred years ago, the arrogant and overrated doctors of today may end up in a more equitable light.
________
More than anything else Leo Morgan wanted to continue working on Autopsy. Bonniers Literary Magazine had sent out a letter to a number of poets with the question: ‘Halfway through the seventies, what has happened so far?’ A written response was requested, and Leo was undoubtedly pleased to be included in the group – only the heavyweights were asked. But no response would ever come from Leo Morgan.
Stene Forman had moved into high gear, always off the record, as they said in the White House. ‘What the hell’, he would moan and groan on the phone. Leo needed to get his arse moving some time. Leo had to write letters, wise and considerate letters, pepper the old man with letters. And if that did no good, he would have to go out to see the old fellow, kick down his door and ask him what the hell he was really working on. For Hogarth to carry on like that, terrorising conscientious citizens in the middle of the night and then go underground … No, dammit, in Forman’s opinion it was just a matter of piling on the pressure. Verner Hansson would win justice, Stene would boost circulation, and Leo would get a nice chunk of change.
But Hogarth had gone underground, and no one answered the phone when Leo rang. By then he was prepared to give up on the whole thing – he had no reason to be loyal to either Stene or Verner – yet he couldn’t get the affair out of his mind. There was something special about this Hogarth. He had shaken Leo’s hand in a special way, as if Leo might be infected with something or chosen for something.
So he did as Stene said. He wrote a couple of wise, subservient letters, waited for a reply that never came, and then decided to pay another visit to the old man. He might as well get to the bottom of the matter, once and for all.
It was early April, a very sunny day. The no. 12 tram took its usual route, and Leo got off at Höglandstorget. The street seemed even deader than before, if that were possible. Smoke was rising from a few chimneys, a pitiful poodle could be heard barking from some distant corner inside a house – otherwise the street was utterly deserted. This time the snow had melted away completely from Hogarth’s garden, which was not an encouraging sight for a man who had once been a botanist. The garden was in a deplorable state, and the gate creaked stubbornly.
Leo cast a glance up at the house. The desk lamp on the upper floor was shining just as it should. The doorbell produced a low rasping sound inside the house, but nothing happened. It seemed absolutely dead inside. He rang the bell again, and then walked around the corner to the kitchen door. Not a sound. The little glass porch looked cold and draughty when he peered through a window. He was looking right into the large room with the leather furniture and all the valuable paintings – an attractive bounty for the cultured thief.
Then Leo gave up. There was no sense in standing there pressing the bell. The neighbours would just get curious and wonder who he was. On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be any inquisitive neighbours, since the street was completely dead. At any rate, he decided to give up. He was fully prepared to go home and ring up Stene Forman to tell him in no uncertain terms to take his Hogarth Affair and go to hell.
Leo started walking back towards Höglandstorget to catch the no. 12 to town, but he was only halfway there when he happened to think of something. He could at least check the letterbox. He walked briskly back to look at the letterbox attached to the old, creaky gate with the peeling paint. There, just as he thought, were soaked morning newspapers from the past four days, advertisements addressed to the homeowner and Leo’s equally wet and disintegrating letters.
He looked around but didn’t see a single soul, so he stuffed the letters in his pocket and went back to the tram. He wasn’t going to give another thought to the matter – or so he imagined.
________
Henry was actually the one who intervened and started feeling uneasy, which he would later regret. He had been down south in Skåne for a film shoot. His biggest part yet. He had a real role, with several lines of dialogue. It was now April and he had returned home, tremendously pleased with his efforts.
Henry came home to a Leo who seemed very torn, worried and abnormally restless. All of this was due to the unusual circumstances, and Leo couldn’t resist telling his brother the whole story from the very beginning, including Verner’s talk about his missing father, Stene Forman’s imminent bankruptcy and old Edvard Hogarth out in Bromma. Henry claimed to remember Hogarth from the WWW Club. His description of the old fellow was little more than ‘a man with two legs, two arms and a head between his shoulders’, but just to be nice, Leo agreed and said that he must be right.
But dammit all, Henry thought it was clear that Leo had to step in and offer the old man support. They had their heritage to live up to, after all. Old Morgonstjärna would never have backed down. Leo had to see to it that nothing happened to the old fellow. In Henry’s opinion, if it later turned out that Verner Hansson became a little wiser as a result and Leo earned a nice chunk of change, well, what did that matter? And he whistled through his teeth. Leo shouldn’t go shuffling about and brooding; he should play the detective and ferret things out. Henry knew exactly how to do it. He’d been a s
ecret agent in Berlin, after all. It was simply a matter of not giving the game away and not letting on, in all instances. Hell, there was no denying that Henry looked both envious and proud. He had never expected this of Leo. One way or another the little child prodigy might actually become a hero.
Without giving a thought to being any sort of hero, Leo caught the no. 12 tram once again. He had no desire to be a hero, but on the other hand he wanted to have enough peace of mind to be able to continue writing his new poetry suite Autopsy. And that would never happen as long as all this rubbish kept swirling around in his head forever and ever. He had developed – he was forced to admit – some sort of infection; he’d been chosen for something, but he didn’t know what.
And so the number twelve drove its route, Höglandstorget sighed heavily beneath its overcoat of silence, and Leo headed straight for his goal. He walked quickly, feeling a bit excited, towards Hogarth’s house. The small street was not just quiet and deserted, it was also dark and gloomy at this hour of the evening. But Leo didn’t allow himself time to be scared, even though there was good reason to feel that way. He went through the stubborn, creaking gate, marched up the crunching gravel path and feverishly pressed the doorbell. The bell rasped and snarled inside the entryway, but nothing happened.
The lamp was shining in the upper floor, but otherwise the house was just as lifeless as it was before. Without questioning what was right or wrong, the visitor walked around the corner to the kitchen entrance and reached for the door handle. The door was locked. He checked the handle, the lock and the hinges. It was an old panelled door made of pale pine; a simple Yale lock shouldn’t be much of an obstacle for an old locksmith who in his day had forced open hundreds of attic storage rooms.
And sure enough, the lock yielded to a suitably thin piece of metal from the rubbish bin. He was still acting without taking even a brief second to consider what he was doing. He was feeling agitated now, breathing heavily, almost panting. His hands were shaking from nerves. Maybe he knew that if he allowed even a moment’s hesitation or doubt, he would be boarding the no. 12 tram to go back home. This sort of behaviour required courage, and courage often had the character of stupidity, boldness or at least recklessness. The possibility that the old man was sitting upstairs as if nothing had happened or that he was lying in bed and would take Leo for a simple burglar was embarrassing. Maybe he would even fire a gun in self-defence. But Leo couldn’t think about that in this situation; he couldn’t think about anything at all.
It was completely dark inside the house, and he didn’t dare turn on a light. Cautiously he entered the large room with the leather furniture and all the valuable works of art. He heard only his own breathing and the pounding of his heart. To cut through the silence and the terror, he shouted, ‘Hello! Hello!’
No answer, no response. He headed for the stairs to the upper floor and cautiously crept up one step at a time, holding onto the banister. One thing he had already learned: he would never make a successful burglar; this was all too much for him.
Then he saw the light from the lamp on the desk upstairs. The light was casting long shadows over the stairs, and Leo began shouting again. No answer. There was no one home to answer him. The parquet floor creaked under his feet as he walked through all the rooms up there. The three bedrooms empty, nice and tidy; and the study with the files, the books and the desk. Everything looked very orderly, and Leo almost felt a bit disappointed. He didn’t really know what he had expected or what he had been hoping to find – either a body or a Hogarth very much alive.
The dirty grey light of dusk fell across the desk, and the Strindberg lamp glowed with its yellow light. Leo went over to the desk where all seven pipes were lined up, one for each day of the week, in their place next to the manuscript basket. The old Remington typewriter, the tobacco tin and the pencil box stood exactly where he remembered them from his first visit.
But there was something that was different: the manuscript basket. Leo leaned over the desk and picked up a couple of pages from the thin stack, which didn’t look the way it should. He read sentences like: ‘Charlie was beside himself with excitement and pulled off her dress to find what he was looking for – a moist vale in which to quench his desires …’ or ‘… after they made love for the first time, he lit a cigarette and asked her what her name was …’
The whole manuscript basket was filled with the pages of a terrible pornographic novel, a serialised story for the worst of the lurid tabloids. Only now was Leo truly shocked. In a rage he began digging and rummaging through all the papers on the desk, on the shelves, in the files and anywhere else he found papers in the room. The folders in the file cabinets, labelled with numbers, were either empty or filled with uninteresting duplicated copies from various Swedish civil service departments. The stacks of papers on the shelves – what had once been Hogarth’s intellectual archives – turned out to contain national propositions regarding day-care investigations.
Leo was now completely soaked with sweat, and he was breathing hard when he suddenly thought he heard a sound from downstairs. He held his breath and stood motionless for several endless moments as his blood seemed to scream and roar in his skull and the whole world stood still. For one brief and dizzy moment everything turned totally white and all strength vanished from his body as if he’d been struck by lightning. His legs buckled, but he was already on his way down and in slow motion he stretched out his arms to break his fall. Lying on the floor he continued listening but heard nothing.
Several minutes later he was standing at the station on Höglandstorget, waiting impatiently for the no. 12 tram.
________
The Good Samaritan who once rang the journalist Edvard Hogarth had now gone astray deep in the wilderness. It was no longer a matter of Verner Hansson’s ill health or Stene Forman’s circulation figures or Henry Morgan’s putative sympathy for old members of the WWW Club. Quite simply it had to do with Leo Morgan’s own well-being. He wanted to have proof of the testimony of his own mind, he wanted to come back to the reality that existed before this ‘affair’ dragged him into some sort of hazy dreamscape in which he did not feel at all at home. Leo had always sought tangible proof of his experiences, as if he’d often had reason to doubt. Everything he wrote was presumably based on this lack of contact with life. He had been an outsider for as long as he could remember, and only when he was writing did he feel completely real, a participant instead of an observer.
Against his will he had now been dragged into a story that was not lacking in elements of unreality. A red thread ran from Verner Hansson’s vanished father to Leo’s paternal grandfather and Edvard Hogarth to Stene Forman and himself. Whether it was called – a caprice of fate or something else – it was at any rate enough to preoccupy Leo completely. He pushed on as if in a state of shock.
Leo presumably looked like a bewildered somnambulist or a drugged zombie as he entered Salzers to have lunch with Stene Forman yet again and to report the latest news, off the record, as they said in the White House.
Forman didn’t seem a bit surprised at the new turn of events in the story. He puffed on his cigarettes, wheezing now and then and jotting down some brief notes on a pad as Leo tried to recall all the details, smells and sounds. Forman had brooded over this matter for a long time, and he claimed to have found out a good deal. But whatever had happened to Hogarth, it would have to wait until later. He was a cunning old guy; he would surely turn up. He had presumably gone underground, plain and simple and tidied up after himself so as not to give anything away. He was probably forced to observe a certain caution – that was Forman’s theory. Leo had no suspicions of his own. He merely sat there in a state of confusion, leafing through his documents about the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB – they were all he had that in some way proved he had even met the old member of the WWW Club – and he looked utterly distracted. He had not been sleeping well lately.
But Forman wasn’t born yesterday. He had come up with yet another i
dea, and he cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner. He didn’t hesitate to call it a stroke of genius.
There was one avenue that they hadn’t yet tried: the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB.
________
That meeting at Salzers took place about a week before the discovery of the death which would definitively turn this story into an ‘affair’ in the classic sense of the word.
But my own enquiries – it was like searching for the pieces of a bomb disarmed long ago – require a number of comments regarding the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB.
It must have been around 20 April, 1975, on a cold and hazy afternoon when Leo Morgan took the bus from Slussen via Skanstull down to Hammarby Harbour, a filthy industrial area of asphalt, brick and soot, which on that day presumably must have looked damned dreary. Leo was tired and feeling feverish. He hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep for the past two weeks. He was taking sleeping pills that allowed him a couple of hours’ slumber towards morning, when the nightmares were worst. He was now completely immersed in this story, which had increasingly taken on the character of an ancient fateful drama that inevitably had to end in tragedy. He took each step of his own free will, yet these were steps that he was absolutely forced to take if he didn’t want to head into a life of utter uncertainty. He could have left the stage long ago and retreated, but he would have done so as a wimp, a coward and an ignorant shit. Henry would never have forgiven him. Henry kept harping on about his damned honour and pride, which made demands of anyone who was a real man; it was actually what turned a stripling into a man. Very odd words to be coming from Henry – the perpetual quitter, wretched wimp and loser. Leo himself claimed not to possess even five öres’ worth of pride, but he was driven towards the truth like a moth to the flame. He thirsted for the truth like a nomad for his watering hole, even if it was an all-engulfing, consuming fire or a putrid, poisonous oasis.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 37
