Classical Dan Turèll

Can one call an author who died seven years ago at the age of 47 a Danish classic? This question is answered by Politiken reviewer Bo Tao Michaëlis in his affectionate portrait of one of Danish literature’s most colourful personalities.

By : Bo Tao Michaëlis

‘A classic’… Dan Turèll would have taken such a label with a grain of salt. Partly because, as a cheerful modernist, he loved the ‘real’ classics. A Danish hymnist, B.S. Ingemann, and the American rock poet Lou Reed were both cool and classic for him, because they each swung with the rhythms of the age in their own way, and said something eternal and lasting to people in every time. Partly because Turèll, who really began as a very linguistically aware and experimental avant-garde poet, with sufficient linguistic savvy to know that the word ‘classic’ derives from Latin and originally meant model, exemplary and worthy of imitation. And his style as columnist in the newspaper Politiken, with himself as Uncle Danny, created a school for young journalists who like to take the pulse of the capital’s hectic life for their readers, both in broad daylight and after dark. In a more literary sense his quirky and tragicomic novel-memoir Vangede Billeder (Images of Vangede), which in 1975 brought a breakthrough to popular acclaim for Dan Turèll, is already a classic in the Danish educational system, where it is often used in the teaching of Danish. Turèll’s “On the trail of the lost petty bourgeois suburb of his childhood and youth, Vangede, on the wrong side of the tracks in the wealthy municipality of Gentofte north of Copenhagen” has for 25 years been a kind of Bildungsroman for millions of Danish youngsters. Young people who in Images of Vangede are not only able to re-experience their own modern housing estates in the environs of Danish towns and cities, but are also able to identify with the note of blues and melancholy that runs through Turèll’s retrospective view. Images of Vangede is a description of a working-class district that sadly changes physically as well as psychologically with the new times. The neighbourhood environment with housing blocks, small shops and work-places disappears to make way for bungalows and supermarkets. While the social democratic solidarity of the past is replaced by political populism and egoism. And it is especially children from the non-academic middle class who nod with recognition at Turèll’s speech in defence of and tribute to the modern youth culture of rock music, American films, cartoon series and thrillers. A culture that was far more the ‘classics’ one took with one in one’s luggage when one sought access to the institutions of higher learning, dominated as they were by a purer and more traditional cultural taste. Thrillers, especially the hardboiled American ones à la Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, had Dan Turèll’s unreserved love. Rumour has it that it was a large tax debt that prompted him to write his series of twelve crime novels, which began with Mord i mørket (Murder in the Dark) in 1981. His model was the American crime novel of the inter-war period. In particular, the crime novels of Dashiell Hammett, with an anonymous private detective from the San Francisco of the 1920s, became the all-prevailing inspiration. For Turèll’s main character, too, a tough and self-willed journalist from a morning paper, is a man without a name, one who lives in, lives for and partly operates out of Vesterbro in the proletarian inner city of Copenhagen with prostitutes and pickpockets, gangsters and drug dealers. (Today this part of town has been renovated, restored and is now almost fashionable, so Dan would turn in his grave if he knew what had happened to his old ‘city’.) All but three books in the murder series remain set in the Danish capital. As an inveterate city-dweller, Dan Turèll did not have much time for the Danish provinces, which in his eyes were sleepy, bigoted and backward. Mord i Rodby (Murder in Rodby), which was also published in 1981, is a bitter portrait of a provincial town and its pecking order and double moral standards. In Mord på Malta (Murder in Malta), which appeared the following year, on the other hand, we are with the author on his beloved Mediterranean island, where he had several enjoyable stays. And then the series ends with the anonymous detective and journalist going to Hammett’s San Francisco in Mord i San Francisco (Murder in San Francisco) (1990), probably the city outside Denmark Turèll liked best of all. Also because the Northern Californian city was the centre of the American beat generation in the 1950s, led by the poet Allen Ginsberg, and because the city with its legendary hippy life in the 1960s was a kind of Mecca for ‘senior hippy’ Turèll. Although Turèll wrote prose, his life and soul were those of a poet, and right up to his all-too early death he wrote his poems in a modernistic vein and tradition. But of course to the music of the time, from advanced rock music to hits from the Danish top 10 and the radio music request programme Giro 413. So Images of Vangede is a classic in itself and the Murder series is an affectionate greeting to the classic hardboiled American crime novel. But common to everything Dan Turèll wrote was a highly gifted ear for the music of language in all its facets and styles. Both for what was written in high style, the pure standard Danish of earlier times, but also for street jargon, workers’ slang and today’s linguistic borrowings from American folklore. In that respect, too, Turèll was classic in a way. By stealing bits and pieces from yesterday and today and making those stolen goods completely his own tomorrow. As it has been done since Homer, Dante, Shakespeare & Co.

Translated by David McDuff