very poet who had, after his death, built his reputation in large part on assertions that he was actually someone else.
“One must be modern,” Jón says, and once again the shape of his mouth makes him look like Robert Duvall. “So says your father, and so said the foremost poet of the poetic renaissance of the nineteenth century.”
Sturla places his cigarette down amidst the unsmoked pipe tobacco that is in the ashtray, and looks at his father who comments, seeming very pleased with himself, that he can make out the aroma of Prince Albert tobacco.
Jón Magnússon is only sixteen years older than his son Sturla Jón Jónsson. Jón was in his second year at the Grammar School in Reykjavík when Sturla Jón came into the world, but he definitely wasn’t going to let that interrupt his studies, as Sturla remembered his father advising him when he himself started Grammar School. Jón and Fanný Alexson, Sturla’s mother, still lived at that time with their parents, but shortly after the birth of their son they moved into a little apartment on the east side of town which Fanný’s father, Benedikt Alexson, at that time a politician and later an ambassador in Oslo and Stockholm, rented for them. When Sturla was born Fanný had completed one year at the Business School of Iceland. She’d intended to continue her studies, but she wasn’t able to fulfill her ambition: Fanný and Jón acquired another boy, Darri Örn, two years after Sturla was born; Darri was born the day Jón graduated from Grammar School. When he was one month old Benedikt bought a little apartment on Mánagata for Jón and his daughter, an apartment they lived in throughout their cohabitation, twenty years in all, and which they sublet during the three years they spent in Prague while Jón was studying film.
As Fanný had told Sturla, something in Jón Magnússon’s character had touched a sensitive nerve in her shortly after they had met; she had begun to sense a kind of mental imbalance, a malaise, which among other things made her almost pathologically dependent on Jón. It led her to develop a great impatience about all kinds of minor details in her relationships with other people, especially Jón. She had never before displayed such neuroses, and they began to swell inside her like a malignant tumor, having a growing influence on her behavior towards others, no matter whether they were close relatives or complete strangers at the supermarket checkout. That “devilish condition” of hers, as Jón described it long afterwards to Sturla, increased dramatically following the birth of Darri Örn, and in their last months in Czechoslovakia Fanný and Jón’s relationship unraveled because of these notions hidden inside her, feelings someone who shared a roof with two young kids shouldn’t entertain. Jón had for his part already withdrawn from Fanný and the boys, moving deeper and deeper into a private world he was creating with his graduate project—a rather strange story, to say the least, about an individual who is faced with eleven doors—but fortunately Jón and Fanný were wise enough to make an agreement to separate for a time; that was their way of saving the relationship, a relationship which became marriage a year after Jón came back from Prague, and lasted, at least on paper, until 1977, the year Sturla Jón graduated from Grammar School, two years later than his peers.
During Fanný and Jón’s separation, it was her habit to make up theories, theories that Jón believed later came to poison every single moment of their relationship. That habit culminated in her idea that one day during their time together, in June 1957, she had had a son who came to nothing—that is, he died—while Jón was on an all-night bender with his friends, celebrating the completion of the very exams she’d never allowed herself to take because of her children, “the most idiotic stupidity a person can get mixed up in,” as Sturla later heard his mother say when Hulda, his ex-wife and the mother of his five children, was pregnant with their last child, Hallgerður.
Fanný had been placed in a psychiatric ward three times, due to what Jón called “chronic daily confusion”—once while she lived with Jón, and twice during the three years she lived with another man—but since she had decided to live alone, and had moved into a little basement apartment on Nýlendugata where she still lived, she had managed to maintain a mental balance “with the help of the liquor which I never touched during the twenty years I lived with Jón Magnússon,” as she described it to her son. It was, however, a balance that anyone who didn’t know Fanný’s past would be more likely to call a chronic imbalance.
Wasn’t it somewhat unusual, Sturla thinks, as he and his father sit facing each other in Jón’s living room and Sturla runs his eyes over the bookshelves, that at nearly seventy years old his father is occupied by the relatively new art form of the cinema—with all the enthusiasm of a childlike quest for learning—while it could easily be said that Sturla is overburdened by old-fashioned literary interests, which his father maintains need reinventing in the spirit of that young man who famously gave up poetry one-and-a-half centuries ago. Among the books on Jón’s shelves is the newest edition of the Time Out Film Guide, a thick-spined book about the 1001 movies the reader ought to see before he dies; a biography of Billy Wilder; and a long row of black paperback screenplays from Faber and Faber. However, most of the space on the shelf is taken up by videocassettes and DVDs. On the coffee table lie a few oversized books about the movies of Pasolini and Milos Forman, and two smaller books by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Sturla has no doubt that his father consciously chose to put these particular books on display as a demonstration of his antipathy to what one always sees in architecture magazines: the handsome coffee-table books in people’s living rooms—books which are meant to suggest highly-refined taste.
One of the photographs in the second Nobuyoshi Araki book was a black and white image of a hooker in Tokyo; she sat, wearing a depressed expression, her thighs wide open, her hands bound at her feet, her eyes staring despondently at an electric dildo which someone else—perhaps Nobuyoshi, imagined Sturla—had placed in her vagina. Another picture was of a huge, steaming pool of piss on the floor of a train station; others variously depicted distressed female sex-workers (usually naked) and their fully clothed customers; or tired-looking office-workers on board the express train. A few pictures were images of the photographer’s wife; in one she was alive; in another she was lying in her coffin, her final resting place. Sturla had flicked through the book the last time he visited the house at Skólavörðustígur 46. This time, he satisfies himself with placing it on the table and contemplating the color photograph on the back cover, an image of a younger Japanese woman in a kimono sticking a blood-red slice of watermelon between her lips, a slice shaped—or so Sturla Jón thinks—like an erect penis.
His thoughts turn to the Mother. With a capital M. And for a moment the word myrkur, darkness, occupies his mind. Although thirty years have passed since the publication of Sturla’s first book, The Flip Side of Words, he is still troubled by his decision to use capital letters at the beginnings of poems and after periods; in some of the poems he’d gone so far as to imitate that peculiar custom by which English poets put capital letters at the start of lines. Except for the title of the book, Sturla still considered his first collection a worthy part of his oeuvre—although some of the poems were juvenilia, on the whole there was nothing to be ashamed of—and for that reason he was disturbed that the orthography of the book—his use of capitalization, etc.—hadn’t been in keeping with the rest of his publications. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to change that, even if this first book of his was one day reprinted. Long ago he had set himself the rule that he wouldn’t change anything in his work once it left his hands. Only a few weeks after the publication of The Flip Side of Words Sturla had found out that, to put it baldly, using capital letters in poetic verse was wrong, as every word—two letter conjunctions as much as nouns or verbs—had equal weight and one shouldn’t visually isolate words from their neighbors with these larger characters.
But now, when he thinks about the mother—his own mother and the one who stood by the window and stood for darkness and stood in the shadows—he discovers that the shape of the words calls for capitals, contrary to his assertions, and when he goes over in his mind the conversation he’s just had with his father about poetry, the following imaginary exchange takes place, which he finds just as important and just as worthless as his life’s work at this very moment:
Sturla:
