Open Your Mouth and Sing: Frode Grytten on Becoming a Writer and Growing Up in Norway

I wake one winter’s night. A car alarm is sounding out in the street. After a few moments I realise that it’s my car that’s blaring, so I get dressed and go out into the snow. I start the car, and the illuminated dashboard tells me that the boot isn’t properly closed. I sort it out, then stand there for a while before going back inside, afraid the alarm might go off again. It continues to snow, the roofs and trees and street are covered, the entire city vanishing in white.

The bed is still warm when I get back into it. My hair is wet, and I can feel that it’s in need of a trim. When I was a boy, my mother, a hairdresser, was always the one to cut our hair. My older brother would kick up an almighty stink every time my mother brought out her little case full of combs and scissors, an electric razor. My brother wanted long hair. I wanted to be a punk, and for a punk long hair was utterly ridiculous.

My father, Leiv, was supposed to take over the boat and nets back home in Stavang in Sunnfjord; he was supposed to become a fisherman, as his father had been, and his father before him, but things didn’t work out that way. He happened to move to the city, to Bergen, to attend business school, and met my mother there—she came from a tiny village called Ølve, and she had moved to the city to work as a hairdresser. She cut my father’s hair, and before long they were taking lingering walks through the city streets together. Soon they did everything a couple in love is supposed to do, and along came my brother and me.

My father was offered an office job at the furniture factory in Odda. My parents’ friends tried to dissuade them—why on earth would they want to move there? Odda had a bad reputation in the sixties, it was a place to avoid, a small town full of trouble and noise, of smoke and communists and social democracy.

Just as my parents had wanted something else, something greater, perhaps, I too wanted something else, something greater, perhaps.

But we moved, and we stayed. I heard my father’s footsteps in the morning as he set out to work, the crackle of snow in winter, the crunch of gravel in autumn and spring. His father had fished for herring; he hauled silver up from the sea. My father was the new generation, he would enable people to sit snugly, lie restfully, sleep well, live comfortably. My maternal grandfather was a ferryman, he ferried people across the fjord from morning to night. My mother became a hairdresser, she helped people to look neat and tidy, to look their best.

Just as my parents had wanted something else, something greater, perhaps, I too wanted something else, something greater, perhaps. I would lie there in bed, listening to my father’s footsteps, thinking that one day—I don’t know quite how conscious this was, I no longer remember all the details—but I knew that one day, I would not follow my father’s footsteps down the hill and into the furniture factory.

My mother, Rannveig, had this portable typewriter—I believe it was a grey Remington —with its own carrying case. My mother would sit me down in front of this typewriter and get me to write lists for her. She worked for the local municipality, cutting the hair of people in nursing homes, of those who were ill and in need of care. I typed up lists of the people whose hair my mother had cut over the past month, so she could be paid for the work she had done.

After I had typed up these lists, I would stay sitting at the Remington. A young man with a portable typewriter and blank sheets of paper. I began to write poetry, and I began to write stories. Who was I to think I could write? There was nobody in my hometown who wrote poetry; no one in my family who wrote or did anything of the sort. I grew up in Odda, at the end of the Hardangerfjord, in a landscape that for many is Norway’s most beautiful, the quintessence of national romanticism.

But it was here, in 1908, that the nation took the dramatic step from being a farming society to an industrial one. This was when the huge smelting plant complex in Odda opened its doors, and with the help of hydropower from Tyssedal, around four miles further out in the fjord, it could produce calcium carbide and dicyandiamide.

But as people said in Odda: the smoke is our livelihood, as long as there’s smoke from the chimneys, we’ll have our wages.

I grew up during a great industrial boom, in a place where men disappeared through the factory gates: some clocked in, others clocked out, the morning shift at 6 AM, the afternoon shift at 2 PM, the night shift at 10 PM—a veritable army of men ready to work, to pound, to sweat, or ready to sleep, to rest, to drink beer. The smoke from the factories settled thickly over the valley; it hid the beautiful landscape, dirtied with soot the laundry that mothers hung out to dry. But as people said in Odda: the smoke is our livelihood, as long as there’s smoke from the chimneys, we’ll have our wages.

There was no one who wrote poetry here. It simply wasn’t done. Boxing? Yes. Wrestling? Yes. Drinking? Yes. Shit-talking? Yes. Writing poetry? No. But I had started reading. We had a fantastic library in Odda, the head librarian was a feminist and a communist, she virtually forced the local council into establishing a good library in the new town hall that opened in 1957.

There, I borrowed books by Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor. Everyone should be able to experience the joy of reading; everyone should have the opportunity to acquire knowledge. I practically moved into that library—I was there all the time. I hauled home bags full of poetry, novels, short stories, drama, life.

Many years later I heard from an acquaintance, and he told me that whenever his family would drive past me as I walked through Odda, on the pavement as I made my way up the hill from the town centre to my home—I must have been around seventeen or eighteen, and in all likelihood I’d been down to the library again—whenever this family saw me, someone in the car would say: There’s the guy who writes poetry!

It was hardly possible to be more of an outcast in Odda than I was back then. The guy who writes poetry. What an idiot. But this was the mid-seventies, the late seventies, and punk rock had arrived with full force. Or, it had, but not in Odda. At the first punk rock concert to be held in my hometown, in the local cinema auditorium with the English band Crisis, there were only four or five of us in the audience. We sat there, as if slightly embarrassed to be punk fans, almost like dirty old men at a porno screening.

To live off numbers, live off letters—what a joke.

I remember that I didn’t give a damn—that was what punk rock told me. Just do it, you too have a voice, art doesn’t belong to those other people, don’t sit on the fence, don’t just sit there in your comfy armchair gawking at the TV. You can play in a band, you can make fanzines, you can write texts, you can take part, you can play a part. I had access to a Remington typewriter, I had a pile of blank pages, and I’d read a whole load of books.

So I began to write. I started wearing my father’s old suits, and I got myself a Borsellino hat, under which I styled my hair in a high quiff—I looked like I might become a member of The Clash any day. London could come calling and I would jump on the next plane to run away and join the band. I could neither play an instrument nor sing, but who the hell cared?

I was lucky—it was a moment in history when there was a scrap of freedom. There were no external pressures on me, no expectations that I should build a career for myself or become anything in particular in life. On the contrary: in the late seventies and early eighties there was a sense that you could do whatever you wanted. Do It Yourself.

Yes—because who’s to say you can’t sing? Who’s to say you can’t play your part? My brother became a computer engineer. I became a writer. Our grandparents would have shaken their heads had they lived long enough to know. To live off numbers, live off letters—what a joke.

I moved to Bergen when I was eighteen. I found myself a room with a view of the Puddefjord and the bridge to the city centre; in the evenings I could stand there and gaze at the bridge’s row of lights and all the lit windows over in the city. One of the first things I carried into that room was an electric typewriter—I bought myself a brand new Facit with a dual-colored ribbon, I could hammer out texts in both black and red. It was perfect. Black and red were the colours of punk. All I had to do was sit down and write.

My parents are dead now. My brother and I sold the house in Odda two years ago. Like so many others before us, we had to return to our hometown to clear out what had once been our childhood home. I took the express boat from Bergen down the fjord to Rosendal, and then the bus on to Odda. I was home again, in this town where I was a Small Town Girl who walked headlong in the wind with bags full of books; where I took Bowie records to the music classes at school when all anyone else wanted to listen to was heavy rock.

Down in the basement I studied the titles on the bookcase. I found books about fathers and philosophers; a Spanish dictionary; some volumes of National Geographic. I found Aschehoug’s autumn 1983 publisher catalogue, in which one of the featured debut writers was Frode Grytten, aged twenty-two, still with his hair in a high quiff. I had become a writer, almost before adult life had truly begun. A writer!

My books stood on my parents’ shelves, with handwritten greetings scribbled inside them. There was no way of explaining all this to my mother and father. I wrote the books, and I sent them to my parents. I used to call them from a phone box in the city, and towards the end of the conversation they might say: Oh, by the way, we got your book. And a few weeks later, when I called them again from the same phone box, most often on a Sunday: Oh, by the way, we read your book.

Of course I should have told him that the kind of singing voice you have isn’t all that important—you have to sing anyway. You just have to open your mouth and sing.

That was it—there was no more to say. Then we’d talk about the weather, about work and everyday goings-on. I called them from that phone box, and later, when I had a home and family of my own, I called them from my landline, and in the last years of their lives I called them from my mobile. I called them, listened to them, the way sons and daughters all over the world call their parents, the way family members in every country listen to each other’s silences, seeking the world that lies behind this one, the world that conceals itself in all the pauses and throat clearing and changes of subject.

The last thing my father said to me, or the last thing he said that I was fully able to understand, was said two days before he died. He lay in his bed, clearly weak, but I asked if we should listen to the radio, listen to a little music. Well, there hasn’t really been much music, he replied. Not much singing, you mean? I asked. Yes, there hasn’t really been much singing, he said. No, you don’t have a very good singing voice, I said. He cast a glance at me: Neither do you.

We laughed then. I turned on the radio, he dozed off again, and then he drifted away from me. Of course I should have told him that the kind of singing voice you have isn’t all that important—you have to sing anyway. You just have to open your mouth and sing.

He passed away in his sleep on a Sunday in July 2023, at almost ninety-eight years old. Over those last weeks I sat with him, he lay in his bed, and I sat in a chair with the manuscript of a book I was in the final stages of writing. He never asked what I was working on—he was too proud for that, I always had to tell him before the chance to ask arose. I wondered whether I ought to read for him from the manuscript, but he was so weak in those last weeks of his life, I thought me reading aloud would only bother him. I regret it now. I should have read to him.

I sat there with an almost completed manuscript of what a few weeks later would become The Ferryman and His Wife. I sat there with a manuscript about the last day of a man’s life as I accompanied my own father to his death. It was strange and wistful, bittersweet, but it also felt natural, as it should be. Because it was these trips to visit my father over those final few years that had caused me to write the novel.

To write is to transport yourself to another world, to step into the lives of others, but also to connect yourself to those lives, to be there in everything you write.

When my father turned eighty—and certainly when he turned ninety—I started to think about how he didn’t have all the time in the world left to him, and so I began to travel from Bergen to Odda more frequently. I often took the express boat, and from the window I looked out across the fjord landscape, the mountains and the sea, the waves and the islands. I was already well aware of it as I sat there, but in a curious way it crept into me and overwhelmed me nonetheless: This is my grandfather’s landscape, it was here that Fredrik Moss chugged around in his boat, my grandfather who was a ferryman from the age of fourteen. This was where he ferried people back and forth, tall and short, young and old, men and women, birthing and ready to be married, suicidal and euphoric.

The past began to seep into me—who my grandfather was, who my mother and father were, who my forefathers were—yes, on those journeys by express boat they came alive in me in a way I had never experienced before.

I have no idea how many books I’ve written—around thirty, maybe? Five plays, at any rate—I know that. But what I’ve written doesn’t really interest me; more important is what I’m going to write. Just do it, just open your mouth and sing. To write is to transport yourself to another world, to step into the lives of others, but also to connect yourself to those lives, to be there in everything you write.

I remember how desperate I was to leave Odda; how hungry I was to live, how hungry I was to write. To get away, get out of Odda. But all the same, time after time, I write myself back there—into the fjord, into the rooms of my childhood home, where now, for the first time, people other than our family live; where the smelting plant long since shut down after the American owners sold off all the parts they could and then simply up and left. All I wanted back when I lived there was to get away myself, to start writing. Get away, get out of shantytown.

How could I know that so many years later, I would be lying here in this fine house one winter’s night, in this house that has now become home, in a bed with this beautiful wife, in a dark city besieged by snow. If I could call myself up as a young man, the guy who walked headlong in the wind with vinyl records in his bag, how could I ever explain that incredible things were going to happen to him? Such as that a car alarm might start blaring one winter’s night and cause me to think of my mother’s slim hands, and her little case with all the scissors and combs, and the electric razor that would make me Odda’s first punk.

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The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten and translated by Alison McCullough is available from Algonquin Books.