In a flat near tidy, wooded Skansen, with its Volkish cottages and farms, old-time dances, the quietude irritated, so that I invented risks, was grateful when the telephone rang and nobody spoke, entered taverns in search of a quarrel. Soon, however, I adapted to a small, gracious city without ghoulish, sodium-lit ring roads and flyovers, brash concrete housing blocks, endless development. Instead, quays, masts, trees, statues, parks, galleries, cinemas. Water induced strict architectural lines and proportion. The countryside seeped into the capital, in parks, small woods, belvederes, fresh vivid air.
I had expected the sexual extravagances of Swedish movies, bizarre as the Devils of Gothland, with leathered skinnuttar roaring through streets clean as Holland, girls prancing nude over midsummer fires, an occasional Strindberg mistaking people for trolls, frantic crayfish festivities, sociological natter humourless and prolonged, sex a cool mode of exchange. All was indeed efficient as a carburettor, the ethos tight but benevolent, oiled by unending skål, delicious smörgåsbord. Perfect schools, perfect health, so that I looked for street signs, ‘Blow Your Nose Now.’ A voucher entitled me to live Interchat with Males and Females in Their Own Homes. Had I been blind, the municipality would have provided a talking parrot. An elderly flower-seller confided her belief that she could be prosecuted for not answering the telephone, thus likely to endanger the Health Service by Anti-Social Behaviour. Instead of Bergman movies, I found Lawrence of Arabia, and How the West Was Won. An agency entrusted me to a cultural guide, who escorted me to Thorwaldsen sculpture, Strindberg paintings stormy as his drama, to Josephsons and Nordstroms, then imitation Cézannes and Picassos. I read Dagerman and Lindegreen novels, in English, and, common tourist at large, sauntered through sunlight into the stillness yet expectancy of Rilke’s roses, drank schnapps, wandered intricate rococo-style pavilions, watched Sunday toy-soldier parades – remembering, without admiring, the Swedish war effort, flunkeydom to the Reich, indifference or worse to Norway and Finland, while dredging heroic memories of Gustav Adolf and Charles XII.
I quickly received a role. As author, traveller, colleague of the renowned Stephen Spender, surely primed with the latest American artistic and liberal fashions, I was welcome in many homes, comfortable, well-stocked vital citadels against winter. A Frau Professor, having been assured that Secret Protocol was the most searching novel of the decade, held a reception for me in an apartment where fittings, audio-machines, plants shone like coffin-plates. Her husband, Herr Senior Engineer, told me that Estonia was very pretty. She herself occupied the Chair of Horticulture as Welfare. Their daughter was foremost in Temperament Sculpture, designed to collapse after five months, to avoid the staleness of Thorwaldsen and Michelangelo.
To escape well-documented information of cybernetics, neutrons, Vietnam, Paul Newman’s eyes and ‘the End of History’, I regularly sought watersides, watching ships leave for islands. The poetry of masts. Contrasting Strindberg’s torments, clouds were fleecy, skies soft blue; flowers striped and frilled, stationed in public places regular as hussars; bronzed swimmers bonding with glassy waves, divers reporting subaqueous realms dazzling as ducal Burgundy.
Swedish silence was graded to new niceties. Silence of water, of a fisherman alone on Mälaren Lake under a red moon, silence of woods lit by midnight sun with rich, damp, green elfin hues, silence of great bells in repose, of a consulting-room after a dreadful verdict. In testing myself against silence, I hoped to retrieve perceptions almost lost since Meinnenberg. Alone, I relived Forest noons, pungencies of bark and mushroom, the gleam of Old Men of the Earth, the dense musk of hay. High Folk obsolete as peruke and quizzing-glass, gulping kvass in the saddle, dancing with servants in Stille Nacht, when a medieval banner depicted the Christ Child clutching a reindeer – an icon that had once fostered belief that Jesus had been suckled by animals.
Fatigue, anxiety, lassitude dropped like towels from such play of light, pagan hedonism, elated bodies. Only my sexuality was out of condition, on hold. In Canada, there had passed a slim Norwegian girl, without tinsel beauty but of Grail magnetism, glowing, so extraordinarily alive that I was content only to observe, like a veteran from campaigns strenuous though futile, like Charles XII.
Swedes, like handsome children slightly overtired, generously eased me into cliques, sailed me to islands of runic stones, antlers nailed above porches, herrings smelted on shores. In seas strewn with sunrise, we all swam naked, laughing, thoughtless, ready for a long day of happy triviality.
By autumn, I was almost nightly guest at dinners with formal toasts, tiresome traps for the novice; at nightclubs, yacht clubs, literary clubs, I was deferred to by Cold War specialists, gossip journalists, even biotechnologists, myself listening more than contributing to quack about Federal Europe, high-tech planning, world health, from those who at elections were too busy or idle to vote. I parried with local movie stars, all identical blondes, usually recovering from plastic surgery and to be met only by candlelight. Discussions wove around such urgencies as the Practicality of Improbability, which sent me back to the sharp scurry of waves, salt breezes, the aftermath of a storm, wash-up of coiled weed, an orange shirt, Coca-Cola bottle, a slab of glass, such debris once, so long ago, messages from Never-Never. I strained towards the frisky blue water around ‘Ogygia’ and to names jagged as pirate teeth – Skagerrak, Cattegat, Hakuyt – a sound from a cliff, like the hum of church-owls in the Manor park.
Inescapable in Stockholm was the Cold War journalist, Herr Doktor Kauffler, proudly declaring his flat was bugged. By whom? By everyone. His smile was rubbery. ‘Sweden’s frail as a meringue. Seas… ringed with atomic mines. The archipelago, covered with the unidentified. To a soldier like yourself’ – his respect rang like a false coin – ‘this is very familiar. You keep watch, you have your weapon primed. But even you may not have informed yourself that they’re scheming to divert the Gulf Stream. Super-hydraulics.’ Pleased, he could have been taking a salute. ‘While our students shirk their Finals, you and I could count the body-bags.’
Another, more popular habitué was the New York novelist originally from Texas, who, flaxen-headed, athletic fellow guests assured me, was hurrying to transform literature. He agreed. ‘These good folk see captions as proper writing. At Yale…’ before producing a notebook in which to scribble my recollections of the white-haired British Poet Laureate murmuring that had he known how to lie his verse would have been better.
The three serious crimes here were to be virgin, black and over thirty. Though greying, I was reprieved by rumours that my German war record was to be subject of a new movie and that a mountainous advance had been offered for my memoirs. Goggle-eyed young and respectful veterans plastered me with questions. How well had I known Goering’s Swedish wife? Was I really involved in a plot against Saigon? I was swiftly recognized as friend of Gene Kelly, quarreller with Gore Vidal, associate of Susan Sontag, for meeting Churchill and Malraux. Did Herr Capote really…? Was it true that Herr Bellow…? Demands often smothered by an infantile gurgle or singsong joke.