Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

It was, however, in athletics that Daniel was expected to do great things. He meant to walk — or rather, run — in the footsteps of the Kvalheim brothers who hailed from the flats down by Grorud station. Jonas had always admired Daniel’s alarming gift for self-abuse; it could be snowing buckets and still his brother would be out running; he practised interval and tempo training until he collapsed or threw up. And through it all he remained a rebel. Where Jonas, more by accident than design, had a scar in the shape of a little x above his eyebrow, there came a day when Daniel put a large X after his name. This came in the wake of the summer Olympics in Mexico City. Daniel insisted on being known only as Daniel X and that autumn, at an athletics meet at which he had won every event, he mounted the podium wearing dark sunglasses and a black glove on his right fist which he held demonstratively in the air. It all went so well and was so outrageously provocative until some aggrieved soul asked him what he was protesting against. At first Daniel was lost for an answer. It was one thing to protest against curfews and high garden fences, quite another to stick one’s fist in the air, and a black-gloved fist at that. He saved the situation with a watertight reply: ‘Everything!’

But in protesting against everything you protested against nothing. And when it came to the crunch Daniel’s anger, too, lacked direction. So maybe that was why he put an X after his name, to indicate that he was searching for a particular, but hidden, field which lay there waiting for him and his rebellious urges. To Jonas, the letter X seemed more indicative of a mysterious, unknown side to Daniel’s character. This suspicion was soon confirmed. His big brother finally met with opposition: a nerve-wracking experience which brought him down to earth with a bump. Daniel ran, as it were, smack into the gravity of life. And, of course, it involved a girl

Prior to this event and parallel with Daniel’s more harmless excesses, Jonas and Leonard conducted their passive protest in the Red Room. They were rebels without a cause. For months at a time, against all good advice, they let the sun go down on their anger. After a while, though, there was not much to be got out of whiling away their time down in the basement, nursing their seething contempt for everything and everyone. It was like sitting next to a pot of boiling water with nothing to put in it. For a time, therefore, their anger looked set to take a socially conscious turn. They decided to follow in the footsteps of Leonard’s father. And Leonard’s father was not just anybody.

One forenoon on board the Voyager , as we were about to bear due south into Aurlandsfjord, I came upon Jonas Wergeland sitting on a bollard. He was writing in a book which he must have bought in Lærdal, a big thick notebook with blank pages and stiff covers. We were just sailing past the Frønningen estate with its fine, white manor-house and the pine forest behind — we already knew that this was the family home of a famous painter, that the place even had its own art gallery. Martin was on the foredeck, on the lookout for killer whales — a school had recently been spotted in the area. The smell of the loaves he was baking in the old wood oven was already drifting up from the galley. Jonas Wergeland made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was writing, he merely looked up, smiled. I noticed that he wrote in a big, neat script. Like a beginner, someone who has not had much experience of writing by hand. It occurred to me that he might have been inspired by the surrounding scenery, by Sognefjord. If, that is, it was not the suspicion, or the knowledge, rather, that I was writing about him.

I had not meant to write anything. I do not know when the idea came to me. Maybe it was when he spoke about his auto-da-fé . He had spent several years working on a manuscript. As far as I know I was the only one to have seen it. I thought of Nehru, who wrote a history of the world for his daughter while he was in prison. For some years I regularly received envelopes containing twenty or thirty pages which I, in turn, handed back when I went to visit him — or rather, they had to pass through security control before getting to him. I read it like a serial. He did not ask for my comments. Sometimes I would say something, other times not. Had I known that he would destroy it, I might have made a copy. Although I don’t know. It was so — how can I put it — clumsy. Or, at least: there was so much of it, it was such a muddle. As if he was forever trying to get everything down. Even so, now and again he would write a passage which completely bowled me over, something so dazzlingly astute and original. And poignant. I read it with a mixture of confusion and gratitude. He also wrote about people and events that no one else had ever mentioned. About Mr Dehli the schoolmaster, about Bo Wang Lee, about a breathtaking kiss on Karl Johans gate. Nonetheless, I always had the feeling that he was circling around something, a central point which he could not capture in words.

So when he destroyed the whole lot, every last sheet of it, I was struck by a sense of responsibility. I had read it. I remembered a lot of it. Certain details word-perfect even. And I knew that many of these stories deserved to be made public. Ought to be made public. I also had something of an advantage. I knew a lot from before. In my more presumptuous moments I actually felt as though I knew everything. I had once drawn pictures with him. I had sat up in a tree with him and asked him why the sky was blue. I had been a child in his arms. And a child sees a great deal. I did not know him from the television, I knew him face to face; I knew him with my fingers and my cheek and my nose. Not only that but, particularly during the years when my brain was at its most malleable, he had been the person to whom I talked the most. I loved him more than anyone in the world. If the young Jonas was right, if the whole point of life was to save lives, then I had a job to do: to save him, metaphorically speaking, from drowning in lies.

What held me back was not my inevitable sympathy for him — I considered this a strength, not a weakness — but the thought of having to write a book, of actually putting words on paper. Because I realised that no other medium would do. If I was to get my message across. If I was to succeed in driving a wedge of doubt into the fossilised myths surrounding him. If I was ever to be able to say something about his genius, the origins of his creativity, the motives behind that peerless work of art Thinking Big — arguably Norway’s greatest cultural contribution to the world in the twentieth century. I would of course have preferred to use my own form, my own medium, but that was still in its infancy, it was nowhere near being fully developed. And few people understood it. Few people were willing to understand it. I had to make a compromise, take up again a tool I had abandoned in favour of something better. I was also forced to resort to a genre, the biography, which was akin to an antiquated, all but obsolete — though still popular — fictional form. It scared me. To have so much to say, to know so much — and to have to employ such an imperfect, passé mode of expression. To risk being dismissed for being too conventional, for sticking to the set rules for how to render characters vivid and believable; notions based on simple, recognisable elements, a set of ‘valid’ devices born of centuries of literature. I felt as though I was setting to work with a hammer and chisel.

I knew, of course, that in undertaking this task, I was stepping out into a whole industry — or perhaps I should say: onto a battlefield. And the merchandise to be fought over was Jonas Wergeland, his life and reputation. Not least the latter. At the point when I started writing, eleven books about him — not to mention countless news reports and articles — had already been published. Of the eight which appeared after his conviction and imprisonment, six would have to be described as extremely negative, almost derisive, with their hindsightful, moralistic tone. The two exceptions were Kamala Varma’s book and the curious biography, penned by another it is true, but at Rakel W. Hansen’s behest. I soon realised that my own writing style had been coloured by these two last-named works — possibly because in them I discerned something I could use, an approach which I recognised from my proper work.