Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

That Jonas found Anne B.’s party to be very different from parties in Grorud, rather like a peek into a strange aquarium, had nothing to do with the material aspect, with which Norwegians tend to be so obsessed, but more with the actual tone of the evening. In other words, what impressed Jonas was not so much the fact that Anne B. lived in a house with a fireplace in the kitchen, five bedrooms and furniture bought from shops he had never heard of, not to mention original works of art on the walls, pictures that actually seemed to give pleasure; Jonas was more impressed by the way Anne B.’s guests — Jonas being the only one from their class — were welcomed, with some formality, by her parents, both of whom were doctors; and not only that, but that her parents joined the party for the first half-hour and conversed — it is the only word for it — with their daughter’s guests quite as a matter of course as if these young people were their equals, their very close friends.

To top it all, early on in the evening Jonas had been complimented — again it is the only word for it — by Anne B. who told him he was looking great, and this she did while he was scanning a bookshelf lined with the standard ‘classics’ and chewing on the first olive he had ever tasted, fished from the bottom of a dry martini. Thereafter, Anne B. gave him a hug which left him in no doubt, nor did she intend to leave him in any doubt, that she was inviting him to more thoroughgoing embraces when he felt ready for it. In other words, she displayed a directness, an ease of manner and, not least, a self-assurance never before encountered by Jonas among girls of his own age.

And finally there was the dinner, or not so much the dinner as the atmosphere around the dinner table. And again I must emphasize that I am not talking here of anything as banal as the fact that they were waited on by a maid or that it was a three-course dinner with a bewildering array of cutlery — phenomena it would be all too easy to joke about and which would really only serve to obscure the main point. It was the actual manner in which the dinner party was conducted that amazed Jonas. The fact that people carried on a conversation . There was no yelling, no loud music; they talked, animatedly, but quite quietly, while records of pieces by Bellman and Taube played softly in the background, as if even the Tafelmusik were designed to add a mildly philosophical note to the proceedings.

And what did they talk about? As far as Jonas was concerned this was the most staggering part of all. For although they touched on most topics, from the theatre to glacier trekking, at all times politics ran like a red thread through the conversation and, even more staggering, it dealt not so much with specific issues of the day but with values and principles. So in between comments on the moon-landing or Woodstock, these teenagers discussed politics as a concept, neither more nor less. Jonas was all ears. Not that he felt inferior — Jonas Wergeland never felt inferior — but this was something different, almost unheard of: teenagers sitting at a table, discussing how social democracy could avoid becoming just another form of totalitarian regime, while the courses were served and cleared away and their glasses were kept topped up with wine and mineral water, a product new to Jonas. Even after a break, during which one of the boys rose to his feet and made a speech to Anne B., and a very original and witty one, at that; a speech which he rounded off by reciting a poem, and not just any old rubbish, but a poem by a relatively obscure writer called Charles Bukowski, a most unusual poem about what it was like to make love to a panther — even after that, the red thread of socialism as a concept was picked up yet again. Just before the dessert, a couple of these young people, neither of whom had seemed anything out of the ordinary to Jonas, presented a somewhat tentative but perfectly lucid discussion of the pros and cons of democratic socialism: ‘a system based on compromises between different sets of mutually restrictive values’ as one of them put it. Both were taken up with the idea that freedom and equality could not exist side by side. Eventually, the discussion, or conversation, crystallized into a candid question as to whether a social democracy along Scandinavian lines, with its almost fanatical obsession with equality, would render a society epitomized by its diversity impossible and hence, in the end, stifle the growth of new ideas.

Jonas loved it. He loved the crossfire of long, searching arguments mingled with poetry about lovemaking and panthers, all to the hushed accompaniment of Carl Michael Bellman; Jonas loved it not least because these animated expositions were leavened with just the right degree of uncertainty and, most importantly: irony, elements which saved them from seeming pretentious. Nor did Jonas have any problem holding his own. On a couple of occasions he even came up with paraphrased quotations from his little red book, including one from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty , from the very last page as it happens, as to how a state that dwarfs its citizens so that they will become more docile instruments, even in order to do good, will find that no great thing can be accomplished with small men. This sparked off a pretty fierce debate on the question of unduly far-reaching state control, concern for the underprivileged as opposed to new industry and the need to take responsibility for one’s own life, a discussion in which the girls were the most vehemently vocal and took the greatest exception to Jonas’s indirect criticism — unintentional though it was — of the welfare state.

Who were these people? Anne B., whom Jonas was seated next to at dinner, told him in her slightly husky voice that many of them were, like herself, members of Labour Youth while the rest were just friends. Although this may not have come as a shock to Jonas, it did serve as a sharp reminder that the Labour Party not only represented the workers but also this affluent, academic stratum of Norwegian society and their children, sophisticated teenagers who ate three-course dinners while discussing everything under the sun, who were active members of Amnesty International, who had hiked the length and breadth of Jotunheimen and knew the first three pages of A Farewell to Arms by heart, in English, not because it was part of their schoolwork but because they thought ‘Hemingway wrote so divinely’ — and beneath all this, or besides, they had it in them to stand at a gathering and sing ‘when I see a red flag flapping on a bright and clear spring day’ with feeling, mark you, real feeling. Once again Jonas was reminded of, and had to concur with, Gabriel’s theory of the multifaceted individual. Jonas could not bring himself to condemn this little circle, not least because they were at least endeavouring to find a third way, and being a young Labourite was not exactly the most opportunist option at a time when the majority of so-called politically-aware teenagers either joined the Young Socialists or the Young Conservatives. In the years that followed, Jonas was to find Labour Youth more amazing by far than the Young Socialists, later the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist Party. To Jonas’s mind, it was Labour Youth and not the Marxist-Leninist Party that was the real miracle.

After dinner, when they had once again fallen into conversation, this time in smaller groups, liberally supplied with expensive whisky and brandy, Jonas asked one of the girls, Guro, about this whole Labour Party business, whether it wasn’t ‘a complete dead loss in our day and age’. And it was during the course of her long explanation of why she was a member of Labour Youth, peppered with many an ‘at this moment in time’ and ‘we, for our part’, that realization dawned on Jonas: up to that point he had regarded these conversations as a casual flirt with political standpoints, little more than a mode of cultivated, not to say civil, conversation, but now he saw that many of the young people round about him actually were genuinely committed and had aspirations to a political career. The Young Socialist phenomenon was a mere flash in the pan but the Norwegian Labour Party was a party with a future, this girl Guro told Jonas, thereby revealing that such a sense of commitment was rooted not only in youthful idealism but also and to as great an extent in a rational plan of attack and a certain cynicism — and, indeed, no small lust for power. Or did Jonas really believe, Guro asked, handing him a glass of brandy, that future generations would be likely to compare a radical trade unionist like Tron Øgrim and a prime minister of Einar Gerhardsen’s standing — a pigeon dropping and a monument?