One of the most widely read and discussed parts of Jan Myrdal’s production and writing that is still, three years after his death, debated on cultural pages and in books is his I-novels and autofiction.
A literary form he borrowed from, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jule Vallès and August Strindberg and which Myrdal in later years saw Karl Ove Knausgård as the foremost contemporary representative of with the publication of the mammoth work My Struggle (2009-2011).
I have never made any secret of the fact that as a twenty-two-year-old, when I moved in with Jan Myrdal to help him with his work and the library, I had difficulty understanding and following his many and long monologues.
I can honestly say that it was actually pretty impossible to even get a word in for a follow-up question. No wonder it took a year before I was promoted from being called “hey you” to being “Anton”.
Perhaps it is not so strange that I did what I could to find ways to interest the old man in a conversation.
In the summer of 2012, Karl Ove Knausgård was such a way. An author I myself had read and admired and who that same spring appeared on the TV program Babel on SVT and pointed out that Myrdal’s classic Contemporary Confessions of a European Intellectual (1964) had been an important model for him in his work on My Struggle.
But at that time, Jan was busy writing a longer text about the Paris Commune and what he considered to be a very important piece of writing about the sexual issue in the former GDR. Everything else simply had to wait.
The next person who recommended that Jan read Knausgård was Sigrid Kahle, who during a visit to the library together with her husband Carl-Göran Ekerwald did her best to get Jan to read more by younger authors.
Two names she mentioned in particular were Kajsa Ekis Ekman and Karl Ove Knausgård, adding, “Yes, it can’t be that easy to be young these days,” to which Myrdal replied, “No, but it never has been. But the Paris Commune.”
It took until August 2013 before Jan read My Struggle. But when he did, it was in a way that was typical of him. He ordered all the books in paperback, with express delivery, asked me to run to Systembolaget to buy a round of Gin & Tonic, and then sat down in the reading chair, a little defiant, with a drink, and said:
“Yes, you say he has read me.”
I remember the week that followed very clearly. Simply because we never drank a drop of the Gin & Tonic; on the contrary, total sobriety prevailed the entire time Myrdal read My Struggle.
If you have ever visited Jan for more than a day, and many have, you know that an afternoon drink with a novel was really important to him. It was simply his way of relaxing and having fun.
But when the first drink didn’t come and the next day, he immediately started reading part two in the book series sitting in the reading chair as if he had fallen asleep in it the night before.
Yes, that’s when I understood that it was serious.
I walked around the library on tenterhooks, waiting for a comment.
But during the five days that Myrdal read My Struggle, there was rarely more than humming and the occasional laugh from the reading chair until he had finished the fifth part.
Then he stood up and looked at the colourful covers of the books that he had thrown around him on the floor in recent days. Then came the comment:
“Yes. It’s obvious that he has read me. When do you say the sixth part will be coming?”
It is impossible to describe everything Myrdal was drawn to during his reading. But he returned to a few things during the many discussions we had about Knausgård until Jan’s death on October 30, 2020.
First and foremost, Karl Ove Knausgård, with the help of the self, reflects the small world in the big one and weighs the personal betrayal against the great societal one. This way of writing a whole was an ambition that Myrdal shared.
That Knausgård also manages to do this almost simultaneously and with a light hand was something Myrdal held in very high esteem. “Not praising himself. Not adding from the side. Editing and doing it right. Peeling the onion again and again. That’s what the man is doing.”
In Contemporary Confessions as well as My Struggle, both authors also formulate their task at the desk early in the text. In Myrdal’s case, it is a dark winter night in 1964 in the villa in Fagervik.
It is a late winter evening in 2008 in Knausgård’s apartment in Malmö. They are more than forty years apart, yet both ask themselves the question: Why duty over happiness?
Myrdal lets psychoanalyst Nic Waal (1905-1960) formulate the question: “Happiness? What do you want with happiness? You have to work.”
Central to both is the search for meaning through work. “You know,” as Jan said. “It’s serious for Knausgård. He understands what the form is used for.”
Myrdal himself never made a secret of the fact that what he wrote in his autofiction was fiction.
To be able to write this type of novel, Jan believed that a certain approach was required. You must turn around and open the doors to the actual rooms, that is, the places, in the past.
Then it was a matter of trusting in the writing itself. Enter the role of, say, an eleven-year-old and write from its perspective.
In the afterword to The Collected Childhood Story (1992), Myrdal points out that letters and archives that could disprove him in a biographical sense are not of interest.
What is interesting instead are the questions; how and why does the self remember certain events and not others? And why does the self act as it does?
Imagine his joy when he read in My Struggle that this Norwegian, apart from a few isolated incidents, does not remember almost anything from when he was a child.
But he remembers the rooms. “All the places and rooms. Just not what happened in them.” (Knausgård p.195:1)
Myrdal particularly recognized himself in these types of questions. Like the passage where Knausgård’s self asks himself why he cries when he sees a beautiful painting but not when he sees his children?
Something Jan pointed out is “Damn interesting. I mean have you ever asked yourself why you cry when your dog dies but not when you leave your children to travel to Asia for a couple of years?”
That I could tell Jan that I had never had a dog, children or travelled to Asia didn’t matter then, because now Knausgård had set questions in motion inside Myrdal.
Jan was also extra happy that death was given such a large space in My Struggle.
Because without it, there could be no whole or project, and without the project I, that Myrdal formulates for himself both in letters in his youth and at his desk in Contemporary Confessions, well then there would never have been a Jan Myrdal.
Perhaps that is why he was particularly affected by the end of My Struggle when the author-self declares that it puts an end to it and no longer exists. Because the whole is thus created.
Because only then can the small life truly be seen in the big.
This is noticeable in Myrdal’s last I-novel A Second Respite (2019) where he winks at his ally Knausgård and tries the same trick.
The author’s self feverishly dreams of taking his own life on the last pages of the book on the morning of St. Lucia in 2018 and, just like Knausgård, being able to put a stop to it and declare it over.
What a terrible misfortune it is then that his friend Lasse Diding, with poor timing and initiative, comes to visit the library just in time to save Jan’s life.
You just can’t have friends like that.
Yes, when Myrdal read Knausgård, something happened. Maybe it was a newfound passion for the form, maybe a desire for revenge? One can only speculate.
But slowly fragments and different approaches began to be sent back and forth to the closest circle of readers about what would later become A Second Respite.
There is no doubt that Karl Ove Knausgård was absolutely crucial for Jan to find the words. Without My Struggle, Myrdal would simply never have received the final restitution that he so longed for.
For readers, the series of I-novels had ended with, honestly, the not entirely successful Gubbsjuka (2002). That alone could be considered worthy of a Lenin Award.
So how did reading the last and sixth part of My Struggle go? Well, the same day it came out, I bought it and took it home to the library.
There I met a Myrdal who was astonished both by the scope but above all by the mere thought of technically tying the sack together and placing the talked-about essay about Hitler in the middle of the text. Then everything happened very quickly.
Jan asked me to go down to the basement and find material for a text he just had to formulate in order to sort out the Dacke feud and Nils Dacke’s real intentions.
But when I came back from the basement, Jan was gone, the door between our living rooms was closed and my book had disappeared without a trace. The text, it was apparently not that important.
When I found the book much later, after some effort, it was hidden among stacks of books, paintings and Afghan blankets on the sofa in the living room.
With Jan Myrdal’s largest ex-libris pasted into it, right next to my signature.
So, it was no longer my book, it was Jan’s.
Karl Ove Knausgård, who by then had packed his bags and moved from the land of the Cyclops, Sweden, was, according to Myrdal, no longer a Scandinavian writer, he was and is a contemporary European intellectual.
Jan laughed when he caught me stealing the book back:
“Yes, bring him here. We have to reason. Suggest him for the award. You know, families, they can be devilish. But the man can write. Nah. Gin & tonic.”