- (Read the Danish version here)
“It was during the days when I walked around starving in Copenhagen, this wondrous city that no one leaves without being marked by it.” – “But that was how Copenhagen was in those early days, when we were very young and very poor and very, very happy.” [1]
[1] Shamelessly borrowed from the opening line of Hunger and the closing line of A Moveable Feast.]
In fact, I was so poor that hunger drove me to the lakes every evening. There, I stood by the shore under cover of darkness, and when no one was looking, I’d knock out a duck or two with a bike pump and toss them into a plastic bag.
Or was it …
Or so I remember, quite distinctly, those days when I decided to become a writer … or … now that I think about it … actually, I wasn’t poor, and I didn’t knock out any ducks, and, in fact, I still lived at home with my parents, who even did my laundry. And very, very happy? Well, maybe not. But it’s true that I was young. Very young. And very ordinary. And that was the big problem.
A Very Ordinary Teenager
I went to high school, and I was a teenager—a perfectly ordinary teenager. And if there’s one thing you don’t want to be when you’re an ordinary teenager, it’s ordinary. I wanted to stand out, to be something other than everyone else. Exactly like everyone else also wanted to be different from everyone else. The result was a high school full of perfectly ordinary teenagers trying to be different.
In his memoir På myrens fodsti (On the Ant’s Trail), Johannes Møllehave describes this teenage phenomenon as “acting out.” You act out, and you act yourself into existence.
Creating a Writer
And my way of acting out was to decide that I wanted to be a writer. After all, I had read so many books, and that almost makes you a writer, I thought. Yes, I had even dabbled a bit in writing, even had a couple of overly precocious op-eds printed in Berlingske. So, becoming a writer, I figured, was the logical next step. And I could be fairly certain I was the only one at my school with such dreams.
Or so I thought—because time would prove otherwise. In my class were future authors Mette Thomsen (Plastic, Shark-Infested Waters) and, in the parallel class, Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen (Hildegard I & II) and the playwright Jokum Rohde.
The Perks of Thinking You’re a Writer
I imagined that a writer’s identity had many perks. It was as if being a writer was the whole package: you were a free spirit, you were allowed to be strange and brooding and bohemian. Plus, I hoped it would sound cool to the girls (it didn’t). But most importantly: a writer was different—I could see that myself.
Dan Turell gave a lecture at our school with black-lacquered nails and a Borsalino hat. Poul Borum hung out at Krasnapolsky with his combover gelled into a punkish style. And the star of the moment, Synnøve Søe, had just emerged with her book Fars (Dad), and she walked around Copenhagen dramatically white-painted, beautiful, mysterious, and different. I wanted to be like that too. Not white-painted and mysterious, but to act out. To be different.
Dressing the Part of a Writer
Not knowing quite how to do it, I experimented. At the time, the prevailing fashion was a clean-cut 80s look with Ballsweaters and Lacoste T-shirts. I had to go against that. I wrote a toe-curlingly scornful piece in Politiken about the brand-conscious animals of my generation. Then, I found my dad’s heavily checkered tweed jacket from 1972. Around my neck, I draped a very long scarf that could sit carelessly like in Toulouse-Lautrec’s painting of Aristide Bruant.
Where everyone else arrived on racing bikes with drop handlebars, I found a 1935 police bike in the classifieds and pedaled so hard that my scarf fluttered the right way in the slipstream.
Don’t… Ask
Back then, it was trendy to stand around smoking during breaks. But to be different, I pulled out a long-stemmed pipe. Later, I switched to rolling my own cigarettes with Turkish Latakia tobacco. Each cigarette was stamped with my name. I made sure people noticed, right before I stubbed it out, that when only the last three letters of my name were left, it spelled “…ask.”
Papa Don’t Preach
Then there was the language. It was important to speak like a writer. I turned to my great hero, Ernest Hemingway. I read his early novels over and over and studied his dialogues until I could speak exactly like his male protagonists Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, and Robert Jordan.
I remember going on a date with a girl, and for the first half of the evening, I spoke Hemingway-esque: iceberg-clipped, each word laden with significant fate. However, I was thrown off when the girl suddenly gave me an annoyed look and asked, in distinctly down-to-earth Fynsk, why I was talking so strangely.
Hemingway Never Ate Here
In the summer, I traveled to Paris, intoxicated by pastis at all the places Hemingway had been. One day, at Harry’s Bar on Rue Daunou with my brother, he teased me, asking (much too loudly) where Hemingway used to sit—because we had to sit there too.
The waiter, thankfully quick on his feet, replied that Hemingway had sat on every chair in the bar. So, we just picked a free table.
Later, I went to Spain. I had to attend a bullfight, just like Papa. Though I actually found it a barbaric spectacle, I naturally cheered “Oléeee” enthusiastically and acted the part of an aficionado as I’d read in Death in the Afternoon. Later, I was brought down a peg when I passed a restaurant with the slogan: “No, Hemingway never ate here. But the food is cheap!”
A Five-Page Brick of a Novel
But it wasn’t enough to look the part. I had to act the part of a writer. So, I told my friends, on Friday nights when we’d failed to find any girls, that I had to go home—I had writing to do.
When I did write, it was on a resolutely non-electric Remtor typewriter that had once belonged to my grandfather at the National Bank.
I worked on a novel, of course. I even had a title: Statue. I had only a vague idea of the plot. It was about a writer in a checkered tweed jacket who falls for a beautiful girl who plays the cello. She often gets up at night, sits naked with the cello between her gorgeous naked legs, and plays Bach suites. Then she goes insane.
I wasn’t quite sure why she went insane, but she had to. In the end, she would withdraw completely, sitting in a catatonic state like, well, a statue.
I wrote on that novel for an entire year. Or, at least, I said I did—because it never exceeded 4-5 pages. The only one who became a “statue” was me, paralyzed in front of the typewriter, clueless about how to write a novel.
And Then I Got Sensible
And what then? Well, I was never young, poor, and very, very happy in Paris with a Hadley. I didn’t catch any pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens. The checkered tweed jacket was lost at a party. The police bike was stolen. I quit smoking and got a sensible computer.
I stopped wanting to be different, grew a little older, a little greyer. And then I lived a bit, wrote and wrote and wrote. Threw most of it away, sent pieces to newspapers and journals, got some short stories and op-eds published, but got even more rejections, and kept writing and writing.
Well, I guess I simply, in the boring way, realized—like every other writer—that there’s only one way to become an author. By keeping at it.
One day, you’ve written enough to take the big leap into authorship.
