Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

In all fairness it has to be said that a few critical voices did say that it all went too far, as when an ex-girlfriend appeared in court and told — she, with her natural bloom and expressive features — of their six-month affair, a testimony in which their sexual escapades were more than hinted at. She had been called as a witness — this was a point which a tireless prosecutor emphasized at great length — because of a brutal tale, a quite shocking business, if it were true, which would possibly provide absolute proof of Jonas Wergeland’s terrible temper and violent tendencies. These revelations were all the more sensational since the woman concerned was now one of Norway’s best known film actresses, one of the very few to achieve international stardom — and as if that weren’t enough she had recently married and had a child by an Oscar-winning American director.

I would like, if I may, to slip in here a little information about this person drawn from my own material: Jonas Wergeland met Ingunn U. while she was at drama school, when her temperament was at its most volatile — if that is any excuse. She was the type who was liable to bathe in fountains and simulate scenes on the tram. If my source is correct, she went so far on several occasions as to have sex with Jonas with her face heavily made-up, wearing theatrical masks from a variety of roles; according to Jonas himself, the first time he was about to enter her she apparently murmured one of Juliet’s final lines: ‘O happy dagger — this is thy sheath!’ As far as I can judge Ingunn U. was a person who was more or less continually out of context. When Jonas broke up with her, she would stand all night outside his bedsit in Hegdehaugsveien, bawling and shouting and waking up half of Homansbyen until the police finally took her in hand. Whether it was acting or genuine hysteria no one ever knew; that was her secret, as it was on the stage or on film sets later in her career.

All in all, a lot of things seemed to be taken to the extreme, blown totally out of all proportion. The whole sensation industry that fed on this case lent it the character of a farce, of something unreal. More and more people had the feeling that something was fundamentally wrong. For a start, the motive seemed unclear. Why would Jonas Wergeland kill his wife? This seemed even more inconceivable to all those Norwegians for whom the thought of Jonas Wergeland and Margrete Boeck conjured up a picture of the ideal couple, snapped at premieres and parties, a regular feature in weekly mags and newspapers year after year; the television personality and his wife, a dark beauty who also happened to occupy the highly respected post of consultant physician.

‘Do you know what the most surprising thing of all is?’my guest asked on the fourth evening on which she visited me, clad in her usual elegant black and as earnest as always. ‘The most surprising part of all this washing of dirty laundry in public was one question that was never asked. Obviously because it had nothing to do with the case. And yet it gets to the very nub of the matter. Because, if it were true that Jonas Wergeland possessed all those failings and evil inclinations, how could a whole nation fall under his spell? And that being the case, does this not say everything about Norway, the cultural level of this country in the last decade before the millennium? That such an individual could wangle his way to such enormous power and popularity, I mean?’

This evening she was in less of a hurry to launch into her unstoppable monologue; for the first time she wandered round the turret room, taking everything in. I have to be honest and admit that I was warming to her, that she was actually starting to intrigue me, those bright red lips in the pale face and the blazing eyes framed by such a remarkable mass of black; the way she moved, with the dignity of one of royal birth. As she passed me I tried again to place the indefinable odour that hung around her — it seemed to hail from some other land — but with no success. She stopped in front of one of the bookcases, pulled out a couple of the biographies I have written, leafed through them, smiled. ‘Well, you’ve certainly not been idle, Professor.’

No I haven’t. I have always worked hard. I do not know whether it is necessary to mention this, but I am regarded as a pioneer within my field, my original field that is: historical research. I think I can safely say that I was the first, or certainly the first clear representative in Norway of what is now referred to as the Annales school: a form of historical research with the emphasis on research which, simply put, concentrates more on the long lines of history, the currents below the surface, than on individual lives, and endeavours, above all else, to eschew any kind of storytelling, especially of stories depicting political or military events as the illustrious deeds of great men. ‘Structures rather than events’ was my motto. Where the nineteenth century, my own specific field of study, was concerned, I took up the fight to tone down the focus on nation-builders and looked instead at the more economic and social aspects. My best known work, which is still cited in international history circles, is the treatise Broad Sail — the title meant to give an idea of the book’s subject matter and its scope — in which I shed light on the Norway of the nineteenth century by writing about the shipping trade and the south coast of Norway, though with wider reference to the whole period from 1536 to 1870. It is as much a study of the region as it is a work of history, an investigation of the relationship between the people and the country along the south coast. The first — and most highly praised — third of the book deals with the district solely from a geographic point of view: the climate, the coastline and the interior, islands, harbours and towns, land and seaways. The aim was to view the whole of the North Sea as one vast region in such a way that the relevance of Britain to what happened in Norway became apparent. By dint of interdisciplinary methods I describe everything from food, clothing, housing, tools, wages and prices, to the family circle, customs, religion and superstition — and even idioms peculiar to the south coast, not least seamen’s expressions. Some said that the treatise’s central character was not man, but the ship, or the sea.

My apologies for this brief discourse, but I feel a need to underline that it was not a betrayal of, but doubts about, this method which led me to make a fresh start, whereby I would once more attempt to centre my account around people, those people whom I had, until now, working from my Olympian perspective, treated almost like insects, or as a ‘sum’. Perhaps — I say perhaps — this could be attributed to a new realization that you cannot discount the story from a description of historical events. In any case, this resulted in a string of books that could be said to be well known and that I suppose could be called biographies since they deal with figures of consequence in the history of nineteenth-century Norway. And while the general public had never heard of my four major scholarly works, not even The Structure of the Bureaucrat State , sales of the first biography, of P.A. Munch, simply skyrocketed. Two years later The Norwegian No , a book about Søren Jaabæk, appeared and repeated the success.

Although I did try later to explain the success of these books by saying that I just happened to hit the biography boom which began around this time, satisfying the public’s apparently insatiable need for coherence, for a mirror they could hold up to their own lives, the real reason was obvious: the Norwegian people, the Norwegian general public at least, wanted histories not History. And maybe they are right: maybe our existence is best understood as a story. To some extent this depressed me, to some extent it heartened me. I confess, however, that this voracious interest took me by surprise, and what is more: it was this longed-for wider recognition that tempted me to resign my professorship in order to devote myself to writing biographies fulltime. And if I were a Judas, selling out my beliefs, then I didn’t sell them cheap; I made a fortune out of it. Forgive me, I’m only human — vain too: I willingly let myself be flattered by people who praised my gift for popularization, for taking a fresh slant on things, by reviewers who maintained that I had done for a number of prominent Norwegians what Lytton Strachey did for a bunch of his countrymen.