Later, Georg Johannesen and Stein Mehren came to represent two opposite poles of Norwegian poetry, the former cultivated by high-brow left-wingers, the latter considered the greatest Norwegian poet since Wergeland by the conservatively minded; but in the early Sixties, when Andersen was reading them as an undergraduate and they were new, their poems belonged to the same frame of reference, at least for a young man who desperately leaned towards the avant-garde in order to feel he truly existed. When Pål Andersen read the following lines by Georg Johannesen aloud to Bernt Halvorsen: ‘I am glad / I cannot see / my death in a mirror — When my picture falls down from the wall / I’ll resemble the wallpaper / and when an heir counts my sheets / they will be white and clean / like the day I bought them — Everything has to be written anew / like before I wrote my signature,’ and later the following lines by Stein Mehren: ‘But the stranger who stands up on the hillside, listening / to the drone of a city by night. He can do nothing / He, too, is an observer. Through the night air / it looks as though the towns on the coast have been accidentally / washed ashore. And now lie there twisting con- / voluted like jellyfish of light — Far away … Far above hover the new gods / in the invisible spokes of the celestial wheel / From afar the towns can be seen as large / gently vibrating circles which interminably / spread their SOS,’ then he was perfectly aware that these two poets differed greatly in their language and outlook, something he, in fact, also expressed by reading them in highly different ways to his friend Bernt Halvorsen: Georg Johannesen in a staccato, hoarse voice; Stein Mehren in a meandering, almost ecstatic voice (the way he had heard Stein Mehren himself read his own poems on the radio). But they had one thing in common, they were both his poets, and could invigorate his own life force, and he now read them eagerly for Bernt, purely as a matter of course, in order to hear his opinion.
And Bernt lent an ear. He listened, but if Pål Andersen waited eagerly to hear his friend’s thoughts, hoping that his own enthusiasm might have instilled itself in Bernt Halvorsen’s frame, he must have been disappointed. Because it never happened, and this was something young Andersen must have anticipated, and for that reason his intention couldn’t have been to hear Bernt’s enthusiastic interpretation when he read so eagerly; instead it must have been to get the feeling that Bernt listened, properly and politely, open to what so preoccupied his friend Pål, so that he might receive fresh acknowledgement of something he took so superbly for granted, since he, purely as a matter of course, invited his friend to a poetry reading from his ever-increasing repertoire of avant-garde writers, among whom were his Norwegian heroes Georg Johannesen and Stein Mehren, those young contemporaries, also to feel that he and Bernt were on the same side, and that being on the same side meant that Bernt listened with a genuinely open mind to Pål Andersen reading poetry, regardless of whether the poems were performed in a staccato, hoarse voice or in a meandering, ecstatic one. They were, as it happened, on the same side, and belonging to that side gave him the right to read avant-garde poetry to someone who was only mildly interested in it.
It was natural for him, Pål Andersen, to share Bernt Halvorsen’s opposition to NATO and nuclear armament, even though he wasn’t really so hugely preoccupied with it; it concerned him more as a topic of conversation than it did as a political action to which he himself had to ascribe, but he liked to listen while Bernt made his acute observations, occasioned by some topical political event, such as the Cuban crisis in 1962, and then make a couple of remarks, which showed that he agreed, or ask a few questions, which showed that he was attentive; that was perfectly natural for him, just as it was natural for Bernt to say, after he had listened to Pål Andersen reading ‘Expectation’ by Stein Mehren: That was really not bad at all; or when he read from ‘Generation’ by Georg Johannesen: Yes, that was rather good, as a token of approval. Although he never got round to buying any of these poetry collections himself, in order to read them himself, or aloud to Nina, and it was equally improbable that young Andersen would wear in his lapel the Ban the Bomb badge which Bernt had donated to him, and instead laid it on top of the chest of drawers in his bedsit, putting it openly and naturally on view, visible to everyone who came to visit. This naturalness was both a token of the fondness one had for things with which one was preoccupied and passionately interested in, and of the slightly polite distance, or regard, one showed towards the matters with which the other was preoccupied and passionately interested in, and was an expression of the fact that through them both flowed the same life force, which was theirs, and only theirs, the life force of their own day and age, the communal spirit of their generation. But only some of this generation; as a matter of fact most young people belonged among the stolid conservative types, with their rituals, which Bernt and Pål disliked, and even despised; they themselves were only a small minority but were distinctive enough to constitute a whole generation, about that they agreed whole-heartedly, both Pål Andersen and Bernt Halvorsen. What they shared was directed at them, at the others, who were pro-NATO, who were for nuclear armament, and against avant-garde art. Perhaps not all of those who demonstrated, for instance, against apartheid and the tennis tournament between Norway and South Africa at Madserud were so fervently preoccupied with abstract art or incomprehensible free verse, perhaps many of them didn’t appreciate it all that much, but they weren’t shocked by it, they didn’t get upset, they didn’t shun avant-garde art, not even when it resulted in a Korean pianist smashing the piano as the finale of his concert in the University Assembly Hall; it didn’t upset them, the way it upset them, the others, they would merely have commented on it by asking: Did he really do that?
In their own way all of the participants in this dinner party (all bar Judith Berg, who at this point in time still flew like a princess, not waited on, but waiting on, high up in the air above them somewhere, wonderfully beautiful) were within this alliance who shared radical political attitudes and a preoccupation with (or polite regard for) avant-garde art, in other words, members of the special minority who represented the New, modernity, the distinctive modernity of their time, and who cultivated being in opposition, against them, and the fine arts in a new, diluted form (in provincial Norway).
This was in the Sixties, more than thirty years ago. Now they were in a completely new phase of life. Life no longer lay ahead of them, they were no longer in the phase where you couldn’t think ‘I’ without at the same time having the word ‘future’ in mind, but could allow themselves to look back and register that they had succeeded fairly well, as doctors, psychologists, leading actors, professors and cultural administrators. They were all in their fifties and all of them had grown-up children, apart from Professor Andersen, who was childless. But it was only their hosts Nina and Bernt Halvorsen who had children with each other. Senior pyschologist Per Ekeberg had children with his first wife, and they were now studying at the University of Oslo, psychology like their father, both the boy and the girl, while Trine Napstad’s daughter was reading media studies in Volda. Judith Berg’s daughter with the Italian business magnate had established a career as a TV presenter, and now had her own entertainment show on one of the TV channels. Nina and Bernt had three children: their son Morten, twenty-seven, who had left medical school to be a rock musician (as Bernt said, in reality he had become a pop musician); their son Thomas, twenty-five, who was nearing the end of his medical studies; and their daughter Clara Eugenie, fifteen, who was still at home, but who, of course, was out this particular evening. Whether Jan Brynhildsen had children, from his first marriage or in another way, was a little unclear.