Copenhagen; he came back frequently to Denmark.
Standinavia
was the title of one of his albums. Kerrigan heard him play at Montmartre once in 1977, the new Montmartre which had moved to Nørregade , North Street. He thinks now what it must have been like to be able to go hear Getz play four nights a week.
Kerrigan contemplates the fact that a man who could play such profoundly beautiful music, lines that search into the bottom of your soul and lift it up through an agony of pleading to an angelic plain, could be so helpless against the demons that had him terrorize his own family.
He thinks again of Kristensenâs Ole Jastrau, nicknamed âJazzâ in the novel
Havoc
, written thirty years before Getzâs stay in Copenhagen. Jastrau lashes out to destroy a life that is destroying him as an artist, as a poet. He drives away his wife and child, smashes up their bourgeois apartment, exposes himself to syphilis, performs a wild awkward dance to the jazz of a wind-up gramophone, all the while accompanied by a younger man, Stefan Steffensen, a poet who shamelessly, scornfully uses him, abuses his hospitality, a young man fleeing from wealthy parents who are both infected with syphilis, as he is, as is the girl he has with himâa servant from his house whom he himself has infected.
Abruptly Kerrigan feels that he understands the difference betweenKristensen the creator and Jastrau his creation. For just as Stefan Steffensen is Jastrauâs alter ego, so is Jastrau Kristensenâs. What kept Kristensen from the dogs perhaps was his pen. He wrote it. Jastrau only lived it and even then not in the world but in the word, while Kristensen was his god, his creator; through Jastrau he both lived
and
uttered it. Getz had only the music, and beautiful as it was, as it is, it did not give him the power he needed over his demons. He only played it, interpreted it; he did not create it. But no, no, of course Getz created it, his breath shaped the notes, his being improvised the turns, the leaps.
So Kerrigan takes up his Montblanc pen, pleasingly weighted in his hand, and casts into words the spirit of the water suddenly subjected to the wind, flinging sand in the faces of the people at the café tables around him. One by one, they gather up their cakes and coffees and liqueurs and hurry indoors, hair dancing in the wind, blinking against the dust, smiling self-consciously, self-deprecatingly at their soon-solved predicament, but Kerrigan stays where he is, eyes squinted into the wind that cannot blow the ink from his page.
Grinning, he lifts his glass and drinks beer, swallowing the dust the wind has flung into it, letting the grit of it against his teeth be pleasure, and practices one of his favorite hobbies, the memorization and juxtaposition of dates:
In 1987 when Stan Getz was doing his penultimate appearance in Copenhagenâs Montmartre club, dying, playing âBlood Count,â which Billy Strayhorn wrote in 1967 when he was dying, the great horn man Dexter Gordon, who lived in Copenhagen from 1962 to 1976, was, incredibly, competing against Paul Newman for an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the film â
Round Midnight
, a composite portrayal of American jazzmen in Europe. Newman won. And Long Tall Dexter Gordon, the soft-spoken six-and-a-half-footer who was described by the critic Alexander Walker as moving with a childâs gentleness but having an unsettling tensionâthat the big barrel of his body might contain gunpowder while his deep quiet voice seemed to emanate from a silence in which he lived, listening to sounds no one else could hear. Dex returned to America in 1976, twelve years before Kerriganwould meet Licia, twenty years before she would disappear with their baby, another maybe in her womb. Maybe of Kerriganâs, maybe not.
In 1943, Kerrigan was born to an Irish father and Danish mother, exactly a hundred years after the birth of Henry James and the
Standinavia
was the title of one of his albums. Kerrigan heard him play at Montmartre once in 1977, the new Montmartre which had moved to Nørregade , North Street. He thinks now what it must have been like to be able to go hear Getz play four nights a week.
Kerrigan contemplates the fact that a man who could play such profoundly beautiful music, lines that search into the bottom of your soul and lift it up through an agony of pleading to an angelic plain, could be so helpless against the demons that had him terrorize his own family.
He thinks again of Kristensenâs Ole Jastrau, nicknamed âJazzâ in the novel
Havoc
, written thirty years before Getzâs stay in Copenhagen. Jastrau lashes out to destroy a life that is destroying him as an artist, as a poet. He drives away his wife and child, smashes up their bourgeois apartment, exposes himself to syphilis, performs a wild awkward dance to the jazz of a wind-up gramophone, all the while accompanied by a younger man, Stefan Steffensen, a poet who shamelessly, scornfully uses him, abuses his hospitality, a young man fleeing from wealthy parents who are both infected with syphilis, as he is, as is the girl he has with himâa servant from his house whom he himself has infected.
Abruptly Kerrigan feels that he understands the difference betweenKristensen the creator and Jastrau his creation. For just as Stefan Steffensen is Jastrauâs alter ego, so is Jastrau Kristensenâs. What kept Kristensen from the dogs perhaps was his pen. He wrote it. Jastrau only lived it and even then not in the world but in the word, while Kristensen was his god, his creator; through Jastrau he both lived
and
uttered it. Getz had only the music, and beautiful as it was, as it is, it did not give him the power he needed over his demons. He only played it, interpreted it; he did not create it. But no, no, of course Getz created it, his breath shaped the notes, his being improvised the turns, the leaps.
So Kerrigan takes up his Montblanc pen, pleasingly weighted in his hand, and casts into words the spirit of the water suddenly subjected to the wind, flinging sand in the faces of the people at the café tables around him. One by one, they gather up their cakes and coffees and liqueurs and hurry indoors, hair dancing in the wind, blinking against the dust, smiling self-consciously, self-deprecatingly at their soon-solved predicament, but Kerrigan stays where he is, eyes squinted into the wind that cannot blow the ink from his page.
Grinning, he lifts his glass and drinks beer, swallowing the dust the wind has flung into it, letting the grit of it against his teeth be pleasure, and practices one of his favorite hobbies, the memorization and juxtaposition of dates:
In 1987 when Stan Getz was doing his penultimate appearance in Copenhagenâs Montmartre club, dying, playing âBlood Count,â which Billy Strayhorn wrote in 1967 when he was dying, the great horn man Dexter Gordon, who lived in Copenhagen from 1962 to 1976, was, incredibly, competing against Paul Newman for an Academy Award for best actor for his performance in the film â
Round Midnight
, a composite portrayal of American jazzmen in Europe. Newman won. And Long Tall Dexter Gordon, the soft-spoken six-and-a-half-footer who was described by the critic Alexander Walker as moving with a childâs gentleness but having an unsettling tensionâthat the big barrel of his body might contain gunpowder while his deep quiet voice seemed to emanate from a silence in which he lived, listening to sounds no one else could hear. Dex returned to America in 1976, twelve years before Kerriganwould meet Licia, twenty years before she would disappear with their baby, another maybe in her womb. Maybe of Kerriganâs, maybe not.
In 1943, Kerrigan was born to an Irish father and Danish mother, exactly a hundred years after the birth of Henry James and the
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