AND ANOTHER THING
Tivolijournalist reports heavy trouble in Sweden
PAUL JOHNSON
But, being engaged in launching the Swedish edition of my latest book, I had other things on my mind. So had the man who met me at Arlanda airport and drove me to Stockholm: meter-maids. They are blonde, too, but somewhat beefier and very strict. I love Stockholm, which has the pret- tiest city-centre in Europe, with masses of sea, ships and stone and the excellent Grand Hotel plonked right in the midst of It, but it isn't a place to break the law and there are a lot of laws in Sweden. Even the cars tick you off, with flat electronic voices, if you do something wrong. We drove straight to my publishers, and I was closet- ed with photographers, first on the editorial floor, then in the attics. I was made to stick my chin out 'to catch our sensitive northern light' and the result made me look like Musso holding forth from the Palazzo Venezia. Then I was interviewed at length by a nice, bearded, serious man called Ake Lundqvist from Dagens Nyheter; and so on to the Institute of International Affairs, to give a lecture and answer questions. I had been there before: a delicious, tile-and-ter- racotta interior of what had been a 19th- century bank. They said I had a bigger turn- out than Yeltsin, but that was no doubt Swedish politeness. There were some wor- ried questions: was Sweden right to seek to Join the EEC? Were the Germans march- ing again?
Then another interview and off by car to Uppsala. On the radio we heard the early evening news: bank-rate to go up to 75 per cent! The Finns are in even worse trouble,' said my driver with gloomy satisfaction. The dinner, served in the wan evening sun- light, was superb: the Swedes do more var- ied things in the way of poaching, pickling, smoking and salting fish than any other people. The professors wagged their heads: 'Thank God we got rid of the Social Democrats in time!' At the university I gave the history dons and students a lec- ture, interrupted by the chiming of many hells. More worried questions. It was dark when we emerged: a quiet, underlit, old- style university town, with no high jinks and the red lights of students' bicycles winking in the street. I gave a lift in my taxi, which took me hack to Stockholm, to Bo Lundqvist, the brilliant artist who does my Swedish dust-jackets, and a delightful blonde undergraduate who can't find a flat in Uppsala and so commutes from the capi- tal: the taxi saved her a 90-minute train- trip. The Swedes work hard, whatever peo- ple say.
Then onto the night-sleeper to Gothen- burg. Everything spotless, stainless steel, ingeniously contrived shower-room, soft, comfy bed, warm towels. What I thought was a box of Kleenex turned out to contain a large, scrumptious ham-and-cheese sand- wich, so I ate that and then settled down for the night with William Shawcross's life of Murdoch. We humped and glided through the dark forests. At eight in the morning I was met on the platform by Per Dahl, also from my publishers, a young man who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Baltic politics and gave me the lowdown on recent events. How, for instance, Kkinigsberg had restored all the pre-war street-names so they once more had a Goeringalle and a Rosenbergstrasse. Much talk of the collapse of Finland's Russia-ori- ented economy as Moscow can't pay for anything. Dahl is also an accomplished craftsman and typographer and he present- ed me with a copy of my book sumptuously bound in reindeer skin. We had breakfast at the Europa Hotel, and he suddenly realised his credit-card was from a Swedish bank which had just gone bust and been 'lifeboated'. Another sign of the times.
At the Gothenburg Book Fair, however, they assured me books were still selling merrily. I signed copies, shook hands, chat- ted to other publishers, booksellers. A bearded Englishman, who runs one of the biggest bookshops in Stockholm, said he loved it: 'Best place in the world to live and work.' We walked around the stands, and I saw familiar faces. Margaret Drabble was there, Julian Barnes, the exotic and deli- cious Shusha Guppy. Talk of options, royal- ties, deals, Rushdie. A smiling Boris Pankin, former Soviet foreign minister, gave me a signed copy of his book. My pub- lishers were exultant that my interview and Musso chin were splashed all over the front page of the arts section of the biggest Swedish daily. We lunched luxuriously on the panorama floor of a new skyscraper with a group of literary and arts editors. Gothenburg spread out before us, once known as 'Little London', Sweden's win- dow to the West. 'Most provincial, as you can see,' said a Stockholm editor loftily. We had some good laughs, unusual in lunchtime Sweden. They liked my joke about Mendelssohn and Hegel.
Finally to the new auditorium, a state-of- the-art building open for the first time that day. At the touch of a button, massed rows of seats appeared from nowhere, and the main hall divided into four segments, each seating 500 people. But the sound-proofing of the electronically worked partitions left something to be desired. My lecture on 'The Writing of History' was hilariously punctuated by sounds from the next seg- ment where the author of A Guide to Swedish Folk Music was giving a talk with illustrations from the piano-accordion, cho- rus and foot-stamping. There was also a kerfuffle at the entrance to my segment, where a group uniting extremist leftists and rightists, who have recently put out a Swedish edition of Mein Kampf, were dis- tributing leaflets attacking me as a tool of the Confederation of Swedish Industry. No wonder the bank-rate was 75 per cent!
What this had to do with the early-19th century, the subject of my book, was not explained, but they referred to me as a tivolijournalist, a new Swedish term of abuse. Pondering this, I was swept by taxi to the airport and so home. I think I rather like being a tivolijoumalist.
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