Foreword

- to Just a Gigolo

By : Peter Laugesen

Dan Turréll sold newspapers by the ton. At least to me he did. Lots and lots of copies of Politiken for starters. But – as this book shows - he could just as easily have sold me any number of issues of Bergens Tidende – which was a new one on me.
    Dan was what Anglo-Saxons, and the American branch of that race in particular, call, in typical no-nonsense fashion, a "writer". Someone who writes. That you cannot be in Danish. You can be an author. You can be a poet. You can be a journalist, a reporter, a belletrist, and essayist, a chronicler. You can be a prosaist or a lyricist or even, at a pinch, both at once. You can be a wordsmith, a pen-pusher, a scrivener, a scribbler and a hack. You can be a bard, a poet and a rhymer. You can be a balladeer, a troubadour, a psalmist and a whole lot else, no doubt. Dan Turéll was all of these things. As well as a philosopher and an entertainer.
    Even when you’re heart is breaking, you’ve got to get out there in that circus ring and do your turn. You’re only a strolling player, after all.
    Yes, that too.
    To write as he did, with such wild, wide swings of the one profoundly melancholy mood: so unique and yet so universal; so high-flown and off-beat and banal, calls for a tremendous amount of knowledge of the sort that you have to pick up for yourself over the years. There’s no other way. You pick it up by reading and writing. You pick it up on the streets, in pubs and hotel rooms. You pick it up with the matter-of-factness of a child and stuff it into the empty pockets of the teenager. You could start with T.S.Eliot, although that is not to be recommended, nor does Dan ever recommend it, not in this book or anywhere else. Nonetheless that is what he did. And wrote from there. Sadly – though that word is far from adequate to describe how I feel – he’s not writing any more. But while he lived, that’s what he did.
    And it may be that there really is no reason to give any thought to the knowledge that lies behind the writing, always on call. The knowledge that makes it look so easy. The knowledge that did in fact make it easy, but which in itself was not easily come by. The knowledge that would simply have been way, way, way, way, WAY TOO MUCH if it had not been for the fact that the man who possessed it was Dan Turéll.
    And how open-handedly he dispensed his gems, making no attempt to hide them. One could – and indeed he did – split his work into different genres, but why bother? It all comes from the same hand. It’s all part of the whole. And it is a whole. There’s always the chance that one day it will be forgotten, but I certainly won’t forget.
    It’s too good. Too solid. It is grounded in craft. Whereby after a while you find you can do things you couldn’t do to begin with. And that, luckily enough, you aren’t T.S. Eliot after all.
    And when newspaper articles, forewords for books, texts for programmes, catalogues and brochures, poems produced off-the-cuff for obscure little magazines can be collected into a book, and stand the test – that is when the quality shines through.
    Here you can read what Uncle Danny has to say about our Norwegian cousins, about Christiania and the bridge across the Great Belt: a side of his activities which, until now, most of us had missed out on – apart, that is, from those fortunate readers of Bergens Tidende.
    There are pieces on Ingemann and Kierkegaard, on Mark Twain, O. Henry, Gustav Wied and Damon Runyon.
    I’m proud to be included, and of course I had expected to be able to repay the compliment when Dan himself turned 50, for example – or perhaps tease him a little by waiting until he got to 80.
    You have to watch out for that sort of thing. Sooner or later, your turn in the ring comes to an end and the leaves fall: the delicate and the coarse, the sad and the funny; then along comes history to rake them up into piles. Suddenly you’re sitting there with just such a pile on the desk in front of you. Already a year has gone by since Dan Turéll left for that place where no news ever grows old. And here the newspapers still appear every day, but it’s not the same now. I can’t be bothered buying them. They can lie there and cry in the rain, for all I care. Each one more plaintively pathetic than the one before, with all the crap they contain that only starts to have any meaning when someone picks it up and brings it to life. That’s what Dan did. He wrote because he wanted to be read, and read he was. He wanted to be heard, and heard he was.
    "I’ve never heard the Dead better live," he writes at one point in the American section, as always the biggest, of the book which you, dear reader, hold in your hand. And of course he was talking about the Grateful Dead, but I’m talking about him.

"When the last night-light has guttered,
the emptied glass rinsed and put away.
When the last weary sigh has been uttered,
And the last night has turned to day."

How typical, and how it makes you want to cry out loud, that the man not only empties the glass, he also rinses it and puts it away. That he scrupulously breathes the last weary sigh before the angel of light carries the day across the threshold of the night, allowing him, finally, to take his walk along Åboulevarden, singing a little song.
    So what if they will soon be available on CD and hard disk, for as long as I can, I’ll hang onto the memory of the days when newspapers were black and smudged with printing ink and Dan Turéll wrote for them.

Translated by Barbara Haveland