I enjoy reading stories concerning portraits of people, places and objects. I suspect it is a challenge for a writer to tell a character’s, place or object’s life story in a few pages. This entry, written by a Swedish master of the form – and who deserves to be better known – is such a story.
We follow a senior business man on a typical working day, as he attends meetings, a funeral, worker’s dispute, a late afternoon function and so on. At each event our businessman adopts a different face, jovial, solemn, confident and so on, for the relevant occasion. It’s only once at home in the quiet of a bedroom, that the business man’s face relaxes and he can be himself.
“The solemn ceremony was over, the president covered his head, cast a rapid glance at the clock, and hurried toward the gate. A man kept pace with him, took him by the arm, grasped his hand and pressed it. It was his dead enemy’s best friend. He said: ‘Thank you. It was beautiful. It was both true and beautiful, and still I don’t understand how you could.’
The president got into a waiting automobile. He answered only with a smile, which could be interpreted however one might choose. For he used his precious gift of speech with discrimination.
Ten minutes later the president made his entrée upon another stage, grim and bare, coarse and grey, smelling of the smoke of toil, soot, sweat. It was filled with fierce, refractory blue-overall men. The president buttoned up his overcoat at the door, for the frock coat would not have harmonised with the stage decorations.”
Published in The American-Scandinavian Review April 1932
A Personal Anthology 