The art of skimming the cream off a depression

On Hundehoved (Dogshead)

By : Michael Jannerup Andersen

You have to look back at your family history to understand yourself better. That is the view of author Morten Ramsland – who has two versions of his own family’s history. The colorful, fictive version can be read in his new, critically-acclaimed novel Hundehoved [Dogshead].

”I went through a depression, which was one of the greatest gifts I ever received,” Morten Ramsland suddenly exclaims, as we sit, chatting about his new novel, Hundehoved.

Depression is a long way away at the moment, now that the author is swimming in a flood of good reviews. He is home alone in his apartment in Braband, west of Århus. He and his family are living in his little garden house for the time being; while the apartment functions as a study and source of inspiration for a few hours a day. The study is full of books, sketches and colors. Paintings hang all over the living room: “I’m painting at the moment. In the last stage of editing Hundehoved and since we had our son Hjalte six months ago, it has been easier to paint than to write. Paintings are a little like poetry, easier to pick up and put down again.”

Morten Ramsland made his debut back in 1993 with a collection of poetry, Når fuglene driver bort [When Birds Drift Away]. Later came the novel Akaciedrømme [Acacia Dreams] in 1998.

Painting, along with five 24-hour shifts a month helping the handicapped, helps secure his economic freedom to keep writing. The reviewers are in no doubt that they would like to see more novels from Ramsland’s creative hand. In one newspaper, the author was proclaimed to be the heir of Axel Sandemose, and here in this paper, he was compared to the great American storyteller John Irving.

Family history as background
Hundehoved is an accomplished family chronicle, straddling the grotesque and absurd experiences of four generations, from the grandfather’s Cubist art and smuggling activities in occupied Norway, to the father with the nickname Flapears, who was born in an outhouse. At the same time, it is a novel that takes its narrative drive from the sort of collective stories that accumulate in every family. Stories that form the “putty” holding the family together: “There is a core of biographical accuracy in Hundehoved, especially in the oldest stories. The tale that starts the novel off – about the grandfather Askild, who was caught by the Germans and put in a concentration camp – is inspired by my own grandfather’s story. He was also sent to a German concentration camp and he smuggled liquor, just like Askild in the novel... it is one of those sorts of stories we don’t go around bragging about in my family. It has always been a little murky what it was he was really doing.”

But you should not read the novel as a true account of his family history:
”I only use biography to enrich my imagination, and I make it up from there. An ordinary life is not a good story particularly often. When you compose your own life story to make sense of your life, you often have to cut and revise reality somewhat … and I’ve done that in my novel. In fact, the boundaries between fiction and what is biographical in the novel have become so muddied that I’m in doubt myself about what is true and what I’ve made up.”

Muddied memories
The muddied pool of memory, according to the author, has descended like an effective veiling mechanism over the family album of his own family:
”During the writing process, I interviewed my grandmother and learned that many of the stories that were told again and again in our family do not quite tally with the truth. For example, the story of my great-grandfather who was the owner of a shipping company that went bankrupt. I think I was told in my childhood that he was great Norwegian shipping magnate from Bergen with a fine family who lost his entire fortune, when the Germans sank all his ships during World War II. But when I had a proper talk with my grandmother, it turned out that he had gone bankrupt in the ‘30s.”

In Hundehoved, of course, Ramsland sticks with the colorful official version:

The key to understanding
”I think that the stories that have the potential to develop are those that have a tendency to live on.”
Why is it necessary to look backward?
”I am very interested in how psychological influence works between generations – how the flotsam and jetsam that floats around between generations doesn’t just get passed on with encounters, defiance and resistance, and how individuals are linked together in the story of the family. If you want to learn about where you came from, it is necessary to look back – and not only at your parents but even further back to understand them properly. If you don’t, you often lack the key to understand your parents, and you can easily come to condemn them.”

Isn’t a family novel an old-fashioned way to tell stories?
”No, I don’t think it is especially old-fashioned. What I’m doing is not some sort of Pontoppidanian attempt to dissect a life, where I’m trying to explain why the narrator has become this way or that way. I really think that every single one of my characters in the novel does something unpredictable; there is an anarchist hidden in them all; they defy the fate to which they are subjected … and this makes the novel almost modern.”

Depression
He has made use of the family stories that started him off on Hundehoved before. After the publication of Akaciedrømme, he suffered from a depression that lasted with varying intensity for over two years. Part of his therapy was to write the history of his family: “It was pure self-therapy. I described my own childhood, as I remembered it, and had absolutely no artistic ambitions whatsoever. The depression was the greatest gift I ever received, because it gave me a new understanding of myself. Afterwards, I wanted to use the stories in a completely different way. But writing Hundehoved was certainly not part of the therapy. It was more like an overflow of abundance – almost like skimming the cream off afterwards.”

Ramsland now has two different versions of his family history. The colorful version can be read in Hundehoved, while the other is in a drawer in his study, where no one is allowed to see it: “But that version isn’t interesting to anyone but myself,” he says.

Translated by Russell Dees