Emir, the Swedish Ardennes

A shorter version of this essay was first published by Women Writers, Women Books at http://www.booksbywomen.org.

They named him Emir, after those powerful Arab rulers. He was an Ardennes draft horse, a roan gelding in a village in southwest Sweden. Why that name? His world was one of fog and snow, and summers so brief you hardly knew them, not one of palaces and sand dunes shimmering with heat.

Barely a teenager, I watched my great uncle lead him back from the pasture. Lightning flared across the sky, the forest rose dense, and dark was coming on, even though it was still early. Emir stepped high at my great uncle’s side, eyes flashing white, hooves tossing up clods of grass and earth, as if something in the thunder called him.

In the fifth century B.C. Herodotus praised the Belgian horses for their stamina and strength. Julius Caesar encountered them during the Gallic wars and called them “rustic, hard and tireless.” Stout and thick-coated, they stood barely 14 hands. In medieval times, they became war and jousting horses, taller and more massive, strong enough to carry knights in armor, yet agile and fast, able to spin around and charge. Arabian and Berber stallions mated with Belgian mares for endurance and style. In the mountainous region of the Ardennes, away from the battles and the crowds, Belgian monks carried on a breeding program of their own. The result was the Ardennes horse, tough and compact, still not very large but with a giant’s strength. During Napoleon’s Russian campaign, when thousands and thousands of horses died, the Ardennes resisted the cold and survived on thatch from farmhouse roofs.

In Sweden, my great grandfather kept shelves of stud books in his office. “The improvement of the Ardennes lies in the very few,” he noted in the margin. As the First World War raged on the continent, Sweden exported 73 stallions to Germany, all deemed unfit to advance the breed, either because of poor lineage or a flawed conformation. In return, the Swedes were allowed to import 40 brood mares, suitable for the Swedish taste, which tended toward greater power and size. As for the stallions that were sent to Germany, one of them died on the ship. I can only imagine the fate of the rest. The war used up horses as fast as it used up men. I see them pulling transport wagons, shells detonating all around. I see them sunk to their chests and necks in mud, the soldiers unable to save them. If lucky, they were killed with a bullet through the forehead (the most humane way, or so the field manual said). If unlucky, they were simply left behind.

The Ardennes stallions in my great grandfather’s stud books measured close to 17 hands and weighed nearly a ton. He used one of them, Ballancourt, for his mares. He liked the slope of his shoulders, just right to keep the collar in place, and the shape of his buttocks, strong enough to pull the new agricultural machines, but what he really coveted, although loath to admit it, was the curve of his neck, the breadth of his forehead, and those dark, luminous eyes. Even when pairing him with a coarser mare, he hoped to possess at least a small part of his beauty. Perhaps he saw redemption in that, although all in all my great grandfather appeared to be a practical man.

Emir would stand motionless as I climbed on to his back. I used the milk tables as ladders. Every farm had them, wooden structures along the road, where the farmers left heavy milk cans for the dairy to collect. He stood motionless down by the inn, as the blacksmith fitted his shoes, the iron glowing red, the old men on the bench swapping stories as they rested their chins on their canes. But out in the stubble field we practiced dressage — figure eights, an extended trot on the diagonal, perfect walks and halts. Those who saw us from the road must have shaken their heads. Dressage, of course, has its roots in war. Horses were trained to protect their riders, even to bite and kick. I suspect Emir viewed our exercises as just another task to perform, like tilling or ploughing, straight lines up and down the field, his patience as endless as the day. Yet, there were moments when his ambition stirred, and the push of his haunches made me grab his mane. When we failed at the half-passes, those tricky bends where we tried to travel sideways and forward both, he swished his tail.

I don’t know how long he lived. When I stopped coming to the farm, he was still young. In the end the Ferguson, the new tractor, won out. Even so, they would have kept him to haul logs out of the forest, where horses were more efficient, and machines tore down too much. With good treatment and care he could have kept working until he was well into his twenties. I can see him as he lowers his head, leans into the harness and pulls, his fetlocks clumped with ice, his winter coat curly with sweat.

But as for that day, when his life finally came to an end, my vision blurs. I hope they gave him a long, gentle brush. Perhaps it was in the autumn, the air high and thin. By then his coat would have been gray rather than roan, and his back would have sunk, his withers more prominent now. I hope they combed his tail and ran a damp sponge across his forehead, the hollows above his eyes deep with age. When they picked his hoofs, they had to work fast, for he would have lacked the strength to hold them up for long. As they led him out to the truck, his shoes would have clipped the cobblestones and the stable cats would have crouched and fled. And as the sun struck his eyes, still blinding but lacking in warmth, I see him raising his head and pointing his ears, his nostrils quivering with the scent of the desert wind.

Photo JensEnemark

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Rilke in Sweden, Summer of 1904

Rainer Maria Rilke was in his late twenties when he wrote Ellen Key from Rome, complaining about the “galloping spring.” Two years earlier, in 1901, he had married Clara Westhoff, a sculptress, with whom he now had a daughter. He longed for the north, for distances and wind – for solitude.

Born in Sweden, Key had long fought on the barricades for women’s rights. Stirring up all of Europe, men and women both, she believed that marriage should be based on love, not be a means of support. Because of her veneration of motherhood, she also drew the wrath of many for not going far enough. For years she herself had been in love with Urban Von Feilitzen, a reformer and essayist, whose ideas on women as mothers and nurturers echoed hers (perhaps it was the other way around?). Their relationship, sustained through letters alone, had ended in 1889, her hopes that he would divorce his wife long since dashed.

By the time Rilke wrote to Key, he was in a bad way. “You cannot imagine what I am suffering and what I have suffered all these last months; I know I am not exhausted; but the little and continual thoughts of every day and its most unimportant things confuse me so that I can no longer recollect my own.” With her usual vigor, Key set about to introduce him in Denmark and Sweden. When she sent him a questionnaire, in preparation for a lecture and an essay, he balked. “If any man stood in need of secrecy, that man is I,” he wrote to Lou Salomé, a former lover, now friend. Still, he needed Key and her connections, so he complied.

Rilke was born in Prague in 1875. Although he claimed to be the descendant of an old aristocratic family, the details may or may not have been true. His childhood had been hard. His father wished him to pursue a military career for which his sensitive nature was all wrong. Trying to console herself for the death of an infant daughter, his mother had dressed him in skirts until he was almost seven. His schooling had been a disaster, five years at a military boarding school, where he spent most of his time “in the sickroom, more spiritually exhausted than physically ill.” Key’s question about what books he had written so far may well have been the one that plagued him the most, even though he had published quite a few. Again he wrote to Salomé: “I am watching her undertaking (confidentially speaking) with terror, for in reality and to less charitable eyes, nothing has actually been done. 

In July 1904, thanks to Key, Rilke boarded a steamer to Sweden. Rain whipped his face as he stood alone on the deck, the cries of seagulls like voices from Hades. Ernst Norlind, a young artist, met him in Malmö as the waves crashed against the rocks. Where Rilke really wanted to be was in Denmark – he revered Jens Peter Jacobsen and carried a copy of Niels Lyhne wherever he went — but Sweden was close enough.

He spent that summer at Borgeby, an ancient castle in southern Sweden. Slight and stooped, alone in his thoughts, he walked barefoot in the park, the red brick walls of the castle rising behind him. Black and white cows grazed on the other side of the river. Above him rooks shot in and out among the trees (in a letter to Clara, he called them ravens). On his “white” days, he fasted and took himself to the sea, where he lay in the sand reading Thomas a Kempis, only to return in the evening, sated with wind and sun. Years later he would recall how people from other estates used to send their carriages, “as one sends for a doctor,” to hear him recite a poem by Richard Beer-Hoffman, the rage of Vienna. Perhaps he read some of his own verses too, like the ones about Prague — blonde maidens moving amid grey ruins or lost in reverie in dusky gardens – lovely images but none very original.

In the midst of this arrived Ellen Key, now in her fifties, her hair white, her body stout. Norlind, also a guest at the castle, found himself clasped to Key’s bosom, which, I can only assume, Rilke did too. In his diary, Norlind notes how she disappeared into the castle to study the paintings, only to emerge again, dressed in a robe, “skipping through the park with the lightness of a girl.” She dove into the river and “swam about like one of Böcklin’s sea monsters,” while the castle inhabitants watched. Later, her energy far from spent, she informed them “about the spiritual crisis of the times, about Nietzsche, about Heine, about Goethe and about God, but more than anything about Berlin, where so many splendid and wonderful people lived” and where “the erotic problems were being resolved.”

That summer, for all his apparent joie de vivre, Norlind was recovering from troubles with his nerves. He professed fondness for Key, but after one of her hours-long monologues, he found himself “seized by angst.” Rilke also found Key overwhelming, not least because of her tendency to explain his poems rather than letting them speak for themselves. Even now, in hindsight, it’s not difficult to find faults with this woman whom Norlind chose to mock. Her emphasis on women’s roles as mothers and wives still grates. Her advocacy of free love at a time when contraceptives were illegal seems naïve. And she came dangerously close to eugenics, when she lost herself in musings on race. Could she not see where such ideas would lead? Still, is there not something to be said about her fierce engagement in the world, even after Urban von Feilitzen let her down? When everyone else appeared to look inward, she looked out.

Rilke himself wrote long letters to Clara, his wife, but didn’t seem to want her near (she did come to Borgeby but did not stay long). In spite of his assurances to Key, he took little interest in his daughter, who grew up with her maternal grandparents, so that both Rilke and Clara could devote themselves to their art. In a letter to Salomé, Rilke openly regretted having tied himself to family and home. “What was my house, then, except a foreign thing for which I had to work, what more my family than visitors who refused to leave?” His whole life would be one of seeking refuge from the clamor of everyday life. “Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain,” he wrote to Franz Kappus, a young poet who sought his advice. “And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind.”

The price of genius? Perhaps. Are we not prepared to forgive almost anything in exchange for art? By the time he died from leukemia in 1926, Rilke had written poems whose vision and beauty would astonish the world. Estranged from Clara, he had found other castles where he could put up for free, his need for solitude respected and met. He was good at that. Even without Ellen Key 

Photograph shows Rilke with Clara Westhoff, his wife (1901).

Ernst Norlind’s diary published in Rilke på Borgeby (Ellerströms förlag, 2004).

I’m also quoting from Borgebyminnen, Norlind’s memoir (Gleerups förlag, 1947).

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Horse Meat in Sweden: Its Troubled Past

Dead horses hang from a giant tree. Blood drips from their lacerated flesh. Below, hooded figures tend to cauldrons, the air putrid from boiling meat. Did I dream it? Or did I hear about it as a child in Sweden? Perhaps I read about it in the family encyclopedia, those ponderous volumes that were my gateway to the world. Or was I too young to read and only saw an illustration? For all my searching, I cannot find it now. Still, I do remember, men and women cloaked in gray, blood splattered on autumn leaves, the huge tree groaning.

Adam of Bremen, a monk who traveled to Sweden in the 11^th century, heard about it too. He wrote about a sacred grove outside Uppsala, not far from what is now Stockholm. Every nine years people from all the provinces would arrive to attend a great sacrificial feast. One of his informants, a heathen turned Christian, claimed to have seen no less than seventy-two corpses hanging in a grove, horses and other animals too, “among them corpses of men.” The celebrants had been eating and drinking, the songs “so many and disgusting that it is best to pass them over in silence.” Of course, Adam was a monk. Unlike the Vikings, he saw the profane and the sacred as opposites, not aspects of the same.

As Sweden converted to Christianity, the Vatican banned the consumption of horse meat, linking it more closely to pagan worship than that of other animals. Through the centuries the taboo gained in strength, even though its alleged origin became increasingly obscure. The very act of killing a horse was shameful in itself, carried out by rackare, a shunned breed of men, who also assisted in human executions, quartering and disemboweling the condemned.

As for how the rackare treated horses, I can only hope that the killing itself was swift. Little went to waste. Shoes were ripped off and sold to farriers, hooves boiled for glue. Hacked close to the root, tails and manes reappeared in upholstery, paint brushes, and the bows of musical instruments. But the meat itself remained tainted, fit only for prisoners and dogs. That is, if the horse was lucky enough to be killed at all. Several methods existed to make an old horse look young, such as stuffing its anus with tobacco, or filling the hollows of its teeth with tar, likely to dupe the most experienced trader. Was the old gelding lame? Make him limp on the other leg too, and no one would know.

Then, in 1784, at a manor house not far from Uppsala, Baron Adam Germund Cederhielm slaughtered his own horse. Assisting him were 18 of his farmers, dour men in coarse, dark wool. At least some of them had been promised tax relief for their services that day. Crops had failed, beggars wandered the road. Nödbröd was common fare, bread baked on chaff and bark, even mosses. For some time Cederhielm had written letters to people of influence, in both the countryside and Stockholm, advocating horse meat as a healthy and flavorful food. The response had been cautious, privately positive but rarely public. Aside from the 18 farmers, close to 400 people, all of them living and working on the estate, attended the slaughter. Cederhielm was known to take care of his own. A philanthropist of note, he preferred to stay at his manor house, unlike his brother, who was drawn to Stockholm, where his vitriolic wit, as exercised in his polemic journalism, led to his exclusion from the House of Nobility, a disgraceful conclusion to his political career.

Brunta, the horse, was accustomed to crowds. Cederhielm used to ride her in parades, amidst drums and flags, the colonel saluting as they passed. Now, standing in the courtyard, she likely remained calm. After a clergyman offered a prayer, Cederhielm rammed the knife into her throat, the most common method to kill a horse, supposedly also the one that caused the least pain. Still, she would have taken her time to die. The knife still stuck in her throat, she might have circled the courtyard, nosing the ground, spread with meal and salt to soak up her blood. Once she went down, Cederhielm pulled out the knife and waited while her eyes clouded over and stilled. As he slit her coat from head to tail, the farmers stepped up to help, one after the next, a pool of roiling intestines at their feet. The meat, dark red with murmurs of blue, sizzled on the glowing coal. Cederhielm, the first to eat, pronounced it good. A shudder ran through the crowd, mixed with disbelief. Still, Cederhielm’s matter-of-fact-ness won out, and what was not consumed was cured in vinegar and stored away.

Serving Horse à la Cederhielm became the fashion of the day. After all, it was the Age of Reason, and all manners of prejudice were under attack. Concerns for animal welfare were also on the rise and employed in the cause. Their meat valued, as that of a cow or an ox, horses would be well treated for as long as they lived, not die in harness, half-starved and flogged, which was not an uncommon sight. I envision elegant coaches drawing up in front of marble steps, roses scattered on a table cloth, footmen along the walls, menu cards beside each plate. Cederhielm sent steaks to King Gustav III himself. An enlightened despot and admirer of Voltaire, the king was embroiled in a battle of his own, caught as he was between the warring factions of his noblemen. In view of “certain considerations,” he did not officially endorse horse meat as human food, not even to ease the privations of the poor. Nor did he oppose it. Certain is that the name Cederhielm was again on everyone’s lips, although the king at times found it difficult to tell the two brothers apart, as in “the one who eats people, or the one who eats horse?”

Reason did not prevail. When the old idols collapse, new ones are born, or so Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. Horses have been a large part of my life, and even now, I never miss an opportunity to press my face to their necks and draw in their musty, grassy scent. Eating their meat, for that reason alone, strikes me as repulsive, akin to eating a friend. But what if there’s more? Carl Jung suggested that ancestral memories are embedded in our collective unconscious, a theory that scientists today continue to pursue. That prayer before Brunta’s death, what was it really about? A plea for forgiveness? A plea for better crops? Could it have been a throwback to those pagan times, when carcasses hung from a tree, and the cries of animals carried in the wind? What if deep within us, that savage place still lives? What if Nietzsche was wrong? What if the gods are the same?

I wonder.

Portrait of King Gustav III (1746-1792), by Lorens Pasch the Younger

My main source was Hästslakt och rackarskam, by Brita Egardt (Nordiska museets handlingar 57, 1962)

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Queen Christina of Sweden:

Man, Woman, or Both?

This essay was first published by Women Writers, Women’s Books.

Garbo portrayed you in Queen Christina, beautiful, when you, in fact, were not. These days you’re celebrated as an early feminist, although you, of course, would have sneered. And to be fair, some still call you a traitor, even to yourself. 

In the late 1960s, at a dinner party in Sweden, my host took me aside to show me a fragment of your burial robe. A professor of anatomy, he had attended the opening of your grave beneath St. Peter’s Church in Rome. Many books had been written about you, and I was bold enough to think that I would write one too.  

In 1632, when you were crowned Queen of Sweden, your subjects called you “King.” You despised women, in particular your mother, and yet you loved at least one, the young Ebba Sparre, your lady-in-waiting, with whom you shared your bed, perhaps not just for warmth, and whom you named Belle.  

In 1965, when they opened your grave, their sole purpose was to take a cast of your silver mask. Finding that your coffin had all but fallen in, they decided to replace it. In the process, my host took the opportunity to examine your remains, trying to answer the one question that had trailed you already in life. Were you woman, man, or both? Born in 1626, on a cold winter’s night, you startled the Stockholm castle with a cry so lusty that they mistook you for a boy. Your father, Gustavus Adolphus, realizing that you were a girl, lifted you high, proud that you had almost succeeded in fooling them all. Your mother, Marie Eleonora, knew she had failed. When a nurse dropped you, your mother smiled, or so you yourself would claim. Ever since, your one shoulder would sag. 

In 1632, Gustavus Adolphus died in the battle of Lützen, in what would be known as the Thirty Years’ War. Deranged with grief, Marie Eleonora kept his heart in a golden shrine. They pried you away from her – at the age of six you became the property of the state. As your father had wished, you learned to ride, fence, and hunt. You read Latin and Greek, studied astronomy and mathematics, spoke Italian and French. You invited Descartes, the French philosopher, to Stockholm, where he told you that your mind could be free. The two of you would meet at dawn, his cough growing worse, until he died from pneumonia, brought on by those icy castle floors.  

At eighteen, on the day of your coronation, you rode in a bejeweled carriage, followed by your favorite horse, gold chains clanking around its silver-shod hooves. The absolute monarch of one of the great powers of Europe, you scattered titles and land, so much so that you were accused of bestowing the same land twice. You suffered headaches, insomnia, and horrendous menstrual pains. Expected to marry and give birth to an heir, you refused to be used by a man like “a peasant plowing his field.” 

Shrewdly, you maneuvered for your male cousin to succeed you on the throne. No one understood why, until you abdicated and rode south. Close to the Danish border, you changed into men’s clothes, called yourself Count von Dohna, and buckled on a sword. In 1655, amidst cannon salutes, you entered Rome. You wore skirts that day, but you made sure your riding breeches showed underneath.  

Was your conversion to Catholicism sincere? Did it not faze you that your father, the Lion of the North, had died for the Protestant cause? Still, with more than two hundred retainers, and funds from Sweden being late or not arriving at all, you needed the generosity of the Pope. You lived in the Palazzo Farnese, one of the finest palaces in Rome. From there you wrote a letter to Belle: “I kiss you a million times.”  

But then you fell in love with Azzolino, did you not?  A clever young cardinal, he was appointed by the Pope to manage your house. Some say he was a Vatican spy. Either way, I suspect you enjoyed the game. What an odd couple you must have been, he a man of wit, insinuating and subtle, you with one leg flung over the arm of your chair, cussing like a soldier, stroking your chin the way a man might stroke his beard, the next day wearing a dress cut so low that people gasped.  

Arrogant and capricious, you continued to live beyond your means. In 1658, while in France, you conspired to become the ruler of Naples. Income from taxes alone would have made you set for life. When you failed, you ordered the slow and gruesome murder of the man you felt was to blame, turning your back on his anguished howls. When you returned to Rome, the Pope banned you from Palazzo Farnese, his patience exhausted at last. Azzolino remained at your side. In 1689, fatally ill himself, he kept watch as you slipped into death. He also arranged your funeral. You wanted it simple, he thought otherwise. 

That day in 1965, when they opened your grave, you lay with your arms across your chest, a silver scepter in your hand. Your silk gloves had disintegrated, and the bones of your fingers had fallen off. Your long silk mantle, with traces of ermine, the fur of kings, was strewn with hundreds of embroidered crowns. The fragment my host showed me is now on display at the Royal Armory. He had used a soft toothbrush to bring out the gold.   

For a woman, he said, your thigh bones had been robust, but the rest of your skeleton was slight. And yes, your shoulder had sagged, why artists chose to paint you from the side, not head-on. Back in the 1930s, a renowned gynecologist had seen this “crookedness” as further proof that you were, in the language of the day, a pseudo-hermaphrodite, both Hermes and Aphrodite, with a pelvis too narrow to birth a child. Now, as we spoke in his library, the clatter of cutlery coming from the dining room, my host refuted that claim. Your pelvis had most assuredly been female: shallow and with flaring crests.  

If I dare write that book, will I get you right? Have you not been prodded enough? You scoff. You never gave a damn.

Portrait by Bourdon

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Queen Victoria of Sweden: She Sat the Whole Time Cold

The castle in Stockholm was cold. Descartes had died there in 1650, supposedly freezing to death. Queen Kristina, whom he had come to tutor, would abdicate and flee to Rome. In 1891, when Victoria arrived from her native Germany, the old castle had burned. A new palace had been built in its place, floor after floor of apartments and reception rooms, all of them cold. She too should never have come. She coughed all the time. 

Born in 1862, Victoria was the daughter of Fredrik I, Grand Duke of Baden. Royals and aristocrats visited her parents’ castle in Karlsruhe, as well as writers, artists, and musicians (she once turned the sheet music for Liszt). Her romance with a young Russian nobleman ended when the tsar made it known that he opposed marriages between cousins. Her mother’s hopes that she would marry the future Kaiser, another cousin, also came to naught. Now it was Bismarck who said no. Like the tsar, he did not believe in cousin marriages, but he also questioned Victoria’s constitution, notably that racking cough, which had plagued her long before she came to Sweden. That, they said, was the end of that. Well, not quite.

When Gustaf, the crown prince of Sweden, came courting, she was only 19 years old. Studying her through his pince-nez, he was 24, tall and gangly, his manners stiff. This time no one said no. Victoria was the great granddaughter of Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, so in a sense she would only be coming home. This same great grandfather had been dethroned and exiled after losing Finland to Russia in 1809, but the old Vasa blood still coursed through her veins, and was it not time to forget and move on? She was not considered beautiful (her face was much too strong for that), but the Swedish newspapers made the most of her large blue-gray eyes, her superb shoulders, and her tightly knit frame. Her iron will, inherited from her mother, soon made itself known, not least among her servants, some of whom trembled at the mere sound of her voice and grew to hate her.

In rapid succession Victoria gave birth to three sons. The youngest, Erik, suffered from epilepsy, brought on, or so it was thought, by medications she took for her lungs. In search of a warmer climate, she left with Gustaf for Egypt. Joining them was Gustaf’s aide-de-camp, Baron Blixen von Finecke, witty and virile, as much at ease in a drawing room as he was in the desert (and yes, related to Bror, Karen Blixen’s husband). When not hunting hyenas, Gustaf focused on archaeology, while Blixen focused on Victoria, carrying her camera equipment, the two of them processing films in one of the tents. Exactly what passed between them is unclear, but Blixen was not allowed to join her when she returned to Egypt the following year. Gustaf confronted her and wrote about it to his father. “She sat the whole time silent and cold, hardly shed a single tear, but asked my forgiveness and confessed to everything.” Why do I shudder when I read his words? Not just for her but also for him.

In 1892 she met Axel Munthe, a Swedish doctor of lowly birth, his father a small-town pharmacist. Hardly dashing, he dressed more like an artist than a doctor, his probing glance concealed behind eyeglasses tinged blue. He had studied medicine in Paris, where he worked under Charcot, the famous neurologist, whose research on hysteria inspired August Strindberg. He now ran a clinic in Rome, overlooking the Piazza di Spagna, where he treated wealthy women with illnesses that had no name (he actually invented one – “colitis” – harmless enough not to mean very much). “He’s an evil man,” one woman wrote. “I think him capable of anything, surely he’s a hypnotist too.” Still, most women yielded to his powers – he himself called them “almost demonic” and acknowledged the temptation to misuse them. Not wearing gloves (careless indeed), he drove around the city in a pony cart, always with his dogs beside him. When Victoria invited him to a dinner she gave in Rome, he arrived half an hour late, well after the soup and the fish had been served. Was it by design, making it clear that her status as crown princess did not impress him? Or was he late because of his work at his other clinic, this one in Travestere, where he treated the Roman poor for free? Either way, when she asked him to examine her, he consented.

In the years to come, the two of them would meet on Capri, where he built his San Michele, a villa high above the Bay of Naples. One photograph shows Victoria stepping out of a boat in the Marina Grande, a woman in black, small and demure, looking up at the people on the quay, a softness about her that I haven’t noticed before. The people in the boat and on the quay watch her every step – word was she was better loved on Capri than she ever was in Sweden. Instead of rest and medications, Munthe prescribed fresh air and steep climbs up narrow, stony ravines. In the evenings, the sun sinking into the sea below, she played the piano, while he sang Schubert, his baritone floating through the loggias, past the Medusa head and the sphinx, which he claimed had belonged to Tiberius, past the vineyards and the cypresses with roses and honeysuckle circling their trunks. Were they Jean and Miss Julie, the valet and the daughter of the count, had Strindberg allowed them to escape together? If so, where was Gustaf in all this? I think of him as the absent father, too powerful to be ignored, a constant reminder that all this will not end well. “I’m trying to help her be Swedish,” Munthe wrote. “We both know she’s not.”

Gustaf would order all letters between Victoria and himself to be burned. Munthe promised to write her biography but never did. Even if he had, would he have told the truth? In a preface to his book on San Michele, in which he never mentions her, he states that “some of the scenes are laid on the ill-defined borderland between the real and the unreal.” His colleagues in Sweden called him a charlatan, questioning his use of hypnotism and his remarkable sway over the crown princess, who seemed all too eager to leave Sweden for Capri. No doubt Munthe was a social climber, who craved recognition while professing to despise the very people that might grant it. When weighing whether to become Victoria’s physician, he was well aware of the cachet and the “advertisement” it would bring. But unlike Jean, he did not care to chop off the necks of small birds. In his book he writes about his feud with the island butcher, who blinded quail with red-hot needles, which made them sing until they died, thus luring thousands of birds to the butcher’s nets. And Victoria? Did she, as Munthe claimed, suffer from “old bad blood”? Did she abase herself when she pleaded for his time? “I love you, darling, I want to be near you, see you – if only for the shortest while.” Accustomed to giving orders, did she find relief in following his? “A difficult patient,” he wrote. “But now she obeys.”

In 1907, a few months before Victoria became queen, Munthe married a much younger Englishwoman, calling it a marriage of convenience (certainly to him, as his eyesight was deteriorating). Still, it was not his marriage but the First World War that caused a rift between Victoria and him, albeit temporary. He became a British citizen and served with the Red Cross in France, while her allegiance was to Germany and the Kaiser. When King Gustaf gave his famous speech to the Swedish farmers who marched for a stronger defense, Victoria could be glimpsed behind one of the palace windows. She wanted Sweden to fight with Germany, but Gustaf’s diplomacy prevailed and Sweden remained neutral. Throughout the war, she kept visiting her family in the castle in Karlsruhe, raising eyebrows in Sweden, perhaps in Germany too. Appointed Honorary Colonel of the German army, she was photographed riding sidesaddle on a long-legged Prussian horse. She wears a uniform and a picket helmet, her back as straight as ever, whale bones gripping her flesh. In the fall of 1918, after the war ended, she was caught in the socialist revolution, fleeing from castle to castle, machine guns blocking her retreat. Even as Erik, her youngest son, fell ill and died from the Spanish influenza, she did not come to his side, blaming the risk of contagion. She did not return to Sweden until the spring of 1919. By then Munthe had spent his last winter with his wife, who banned him from her life after she found him kissing the kitchen maid. Gustaf, for his part, had sought company elsewhere, his homosexuality no longer a secret. Victoria still stood when he entered the room.

Victoria died in Rome in 1930, coughing herself to death. Both Gustaf and Munthe were present. Munthe, or so he would imply, gave her morphin to shorten her pain. He would spend much of his remaining life in one of the apartments in the palace in Stockholm. Suffering the indignities of blindness and old age, scraps of food stuck in his unkempt beard, he dressed so poorly that the royal guard was reluctant to let him pass. Gustaf, when not following the work of his government, hunted, embroidered, and played tennis, his game as impeccable as his pleated white pants. Summers Munthe would join him at Solliden, the villa Victoria had built on an island in the Baltic Sea, meant to resemble San Michele and the only place where she felt she could breathe. In one photograph, Gustaf sits so as not to tower over Munthe — the two men, who had so disliked each other, now trapped in a friendship they both called dull. If they talked at all, did they talk about her?

What would Strindberg have made of that? 

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Reading Tomas Tranströmer

Tomas Tranströmer’s poems won’t leave you alone. They’re dark, infused with dread, but also shot through with light, as when, nearby, a string quartet plays Schubert.

So much we have to trust to be able to live our daily day without sinking through the earth! 

Trust the masses of snow that cling to the mountainsides above the village. 

Trust promises to keep silent and the understanding smile, trust that the telegram about the accident doesn’t refer to us and the sudden axe blow from within doesn’t come.

I interviewed Tomas in 1988. It was a sunny morning in San Francisco, a city known for its fog. He was in the US to read from his work. We met at a downtown hotel. Car horns honked from Union Square. The tape recorder balanced precariously on a small table. Were there coffee cups too? It seems there ought to have been.At the time, he was 57 years old, tall and wiry, like a distance runner. What struck me the most was his modesty. Had he preferred to be somewhere else, he didn’t show it.

He said, “It would have been more natural for me to be a musician or a painter.” As a teenager, he had inherited a piano and soon learned to play. But at his high school, an all-boys Latin gymnasium in Stockholm, emphasis had been on the written word. He and his classmates passed notes to each other behind the teacher’s back, attempts at poems, bidding for approval but more likely spurned. He was not the only one who became a writer. “If it hadn’t been for their influence, I might never have become a poet myself.” Now his reader was Monica, his wife. He said she knew him so well and would detect a false note if she heard it. “And you can’t tell yourself?” I asked. He smiled. “Perhaps not.”

In Schubertiana, the poem with the string quartet, he muses on Schubert himself. As is often the case, the sublime rubs shoulders with the comic.

And he who catches the signals from a whole life in some rather ordinary chords by a string quintet, 

he who gets a river to flow through the eye of a needle

 is a fat young gentleman from Vienna, called ‘the little mushroom’ by his friends, who slept with his glasses on

 and stood himself up punctually at his writing lectern in the morning. 

At which the music script’s wonderful centipedes set themselves in motion.

As we talked, a staccato of honks erupted from the square, accompanied by screeches from a cable car. Tomas nodded when I wanted to close the window. In the hush that followed I asked how his poems evolved.

“They often begin with a sudden idea, as when I read something that surprises me, something I feel has a special meaning for me. I don’t know what the meaning is, but I want to find out, and I must start a voyage to a place where the secret is disclosed. It starts with fragments in my notebooks. Sometimes the fragments develop into an idea, a wholeness, perhaps something playful, not very serious. As soon as I start writing, everything changes. Often the writing takes me to a place where I didn’t expect to go at all. Several different fragments may belong to the same poem. I just didn’t see it from the start. Completing a poem takes a long time for me. What’s most difficult is finding the links or the tissue between its different parts. I know this part and that part belong together. But how? What’s the bridge between them? The bridge will build itself if I let it. All I can do is wait.”

“And your subconscious?” I asked. “What role does your subconscious play in all this?”

 “The subconscious is always active. But sometimes it’s not active in the way I want it to be. The conscious will is sometimes very strong. I want to build the poem in a certain way. Perhaps the poem isn’t meant to be that way. There’s something else that wants to happen, that wants to be done with the poem. There must be a balance between reckless intuition and conscious will.” 

He said he did not consider himself a difficult poet. “I think I give my readers a certain resistance at the outset. I’m a modernist, no doubt, but at the same time I’m not very abstract. Perhaps for a person with a good visual imagination, I’m not difficult at all. For a person with a more abstract, intellectual approach, I’m probably more difficult. My poems must enter through the senses, rather than the intellect. The intellectual part of the poem develops after you have first read it in a more primitive way.” 

After Tomas went back to Sweden, we never met again. Seven years later, in 1996, he sent me a copy of The Sorrow Gondola. The blow of the axe had come. A stroke had paralyzed the right side of his body and robbed him of speech. But he kept on writing, pointing to the words in the dictionary as Monica wrote them down. In “April and Silence,” his images were as startling as ever, steeped in loss.

Spring lies deserted.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.

All that shines
are yellow flowers.

I’m carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
gleams out of reach
like the silver in a pawnshop.

But, in “The Cuckoo,” he appears to be at peace.

What happens is always more than we can carry.

There’s nothing to be surprised about.

These thoughts carry me as faithfully as Susi and Chuma carried Livingstone’s mummified corpse through Africa.

In 2011 Tomas won the Nobel Prize. Hours before the announcement, journalists and photographers crowded the staircase to the apartment where he and Monica lived. I heard he played the piano, albeit with only one hand.

Four years later the world learned that Tomas Tranströmer had died. By then I had moved to the coast north of San Francisco. I walked into the forest, all the way up to the ridge. Under a redwood I came across a freshly killed deer. Partly hidden under sticks and leaves, the carcass was gutted, bones shining white, coat stippled with blood now dry. Silence was all around. The cougar may well have watched me, perhaps from one of the branches above. Common wisdom told me to move on, but the closeness of death made me stay.

The thing was, I felt no fear.

Poems:

“Schubertiana” (translated by Samuel Charters)
“April and Silence” (translated by Michael McGriff & Mikaela Grassl)
“The Cuckoo” (translated by Michael McGriff & Mikaela Grassl)

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