Status Updates From Mykle: Et diktet liv

Agnar Mykle er en av de som har frivillig fått psykiatrisk behandling med LSD av Gordon Johansen ved Modum Bad.

Fem barn med fire forskjellige kvinner

Agnar Mykle har altså fem barn med tre ulike mødre. Tre døtre og to sønner.

Jeg er nå midt i rettsprosessen rundt Sangen om den Røde Rubin. Det er mye jeg ikke hadde hørt fra før, blant annet at Agnar sine meninger om at det ikke burde bygges kirker før man bygget boliger til folket, kanskje og har vært med på å få boken anmeldt.

Om Ole Hallesby skriver Agnar Mykle i 1953 at «han må være en av nasjonens morsomste menn» 😂

Urolig velskrevet.

I den sobre samtalebok En annen Mykle berettet Jane fra sitt eget liv. Her, mot slutten, ga hun også svaret på et spørsmål man måtte kjenne historien for å kunne stille:

- Hender det at du tenker at den som gir noe, også skal få noe tilbake?

- Nei, hvorfor det? Hvis man gir noe, er det fordi man har lyst.

It was often said later that Mykle became quiet after Largo. This is not really true; it would be accurate to say that people stopped listening to him.

1968. Mykle has just written and produced the puppet play Ali Baba og de førti røverne, the last thing he'll do which anyone is going to see before his death 27 years later. It ends thus:

(Til publikum): Dere kan få lov å klappe! Klapp masse! Åh, det er intet som et publikum som klapper masse! Hva var jeg uten dere! Og hva var dere...? Ha ha!

(Teppe)

Word has got round that Mykle is trying to do deals with several different publishers simultaneously. He approaches another one and asks if they would be interested in his next novel, but they send the following reply: "We are flattered to be asked if we would like to join your publishing harem, but must decline. We fear there would be too many lonely nights." [free translation]

"Well-off European writer (novelist and film-writer) who intends to live in Japan, wants young Japanese girl (15-22 years). She must be small, very slim (waistline 42-52 cm), graceful, good-looking, with warmth and kindness. Must have some high-school or college education, and be intelligent, economical and energetic."

- Ad placed by Mykle in Japanese newspaper, 1963, shortly after his third divorce.

"Her prøver å hvile Agnar Mykle
Skapt til å hane. Det blev mest å kjykle
Han prøvde å vidne. De fant ham å hykle
Han kom til en vei. Men han kunne ei sykle.
...
Enn virrer han i urnen, Agnar Mykle.
Legg inn till ham helhetens nykle."

- from the obituary he wrote for himself before an unsuccessful/hypothetical suicide attempt.

In Mirakelstigen, Mykle goes all the way. It's no longer a mostly-autobiographical novel about "Ask" or "a young Norwegian", it's explicitly about Agnar Mykle, the world's most interesting person. He paints a picture of himself as the greatest living thinker, explaining that while Jesus Christ was a psychopathic madman, he, Mykle, is "the genius our time requires".

[free translation]

In 1957, the Norwegian criminal courts have a list of four key criteria used when determining whether a book is pornographic. One of them is "det kvinnelige begjær" - i.e. that women are portrayed as wanting or enjoying sex.

15 years earlier, Mykle was working for the Nazis. Now he's on trial for obscenity, and they've just called Arnulf Øverland, one of his literary heroes, as an expert witness. Øverland gives an impassioned speech where he compares Mykle with Giordano Bruno, Socrates and Jesus Christ. Mykle breaks down and starts crying - why, I'm not entirely sure.

You really and truly couldn't make this up.

Sangen om den røde rubin is not a novel. It is a memoir with a few amusing descriptions in the middle of a mass of paper, to be honest well hidden at the bottom. But taken as a whole it is a very dull book, since one can only write a good autobiography if one has experienced something worth telling people about. And Agnar Mykle has not done that.

- From Jens Bjørneboe's review of the book [my translation]

Mykle is now 38, and according to his carefully updated journal has managed to seduce over a hundred different women. He's just fallen in love with a beautiful 19-year-old Danish girl. He writes a letter to his wife explaining that he can no longer live with her, because the thought of all the men she's slept with before they met is driving him insane. There are a dozen of them.

Oh, and he's discovered religion.

Mykle writes Lasso runt fru Luna, completing 600 pages in three months flat. Jane reads everything as soon it's produced and adds comments. Usually she says "Terrific!" When it's only "Very good, but I think..." he rewrites the offending page from scratch.

He finishes around 6 am one summer morning, stumbles out of the front door and vomits on the grass.

Mykle's wife Jane is eight months pregnant with their second child. He is having an affair with a 17 year old girl that ends up with them both being thrown out of the hotel where they've been meeting. He is incandescent with rage, and after sending several letters to the management writes a novel based on the incident. Jane helps him with it.

Why is there no biopic? It's crying out to be made.

Hva er en dikters tema? Det er og vil til alle tider være det som gjorde livet vanskelig for ham selv. Det er å redde livet. Og det er i siste instans å holde dommedag over seg selv, fordi det gikk så galt som det gjorde. Diktningen er den perlen som bygges upp runt en smertende kjerne.

- Aksel Sandemose

Mykle has just had a short story accepted for publication. He is so happy that he takes his one hat down from its peg, jumps up and down on it, dusts it off, and puts it back on the peg. He tells this story to the editor in his next letter.

The editor make a note of it in his journal and adds "If you don't understand this, you don't understand anything."

Mykle is now 29. He's got three girls pregnant, abandoning two of them and marrying the third. (He was briefly married to one of the others, but only pro forma). He's worked as an interpreter for a Nazi war tribunal during the occupation. Now he's just published his first short story. What will this charming person do next?

He's now 24, i.e. up to the end of the period covered by Sangen om den røde rubin, but I have not learned the name of any lover he didn't either marry or have a child with and the word "vagina" has occurred only once. I am not so much disappointed as dumbfounded. How can this book even call itself an Agnar Mykle biography?

"The person who in my youth showed me - what an experience - that one can create literature out of one's own life, however miserable and lacking in incident it may appear - is and remains Thomas Wolfe. What a wonderfully chaotic writer! No form! Just content!"

Quote from Agnar Mykle's journal [my translation]

So far, it's extremely close to the story in Lasso rundt fru Luna, except that the first woman he gets pregnant up in Northern Norway is a lot nicer than she is in the novel and the second one is somewhat younger. Bizarre detail: in reality, both women were called "Ruth".