Boozehound - Jason Wilson [59]
After Hendrik, Sven, and I finished tasting all three aquavits, I dumped the spit cup into the bathroom sink—water was still soaking the floor—and they packed up their bottles. Later that afternoon, alone and feeling some of the usual post-tasting tipsiness, I started thinking about Edvard Munch and summertime and decided to pay a visit to Oslo’s Munch Museum.
The Munch Museum was the scene of a brazen art heist in 2004, when masked, armed bandits stormed in and stole both The Scream and another of Munch’s paintings, Madonna. Both were eventually recovered, and now you must pass through a metal detector to see the paintings. The Scream, of course, is the highlight that most tourists come to see. And in the gift shop, you can buy Scream T-shirts, Scream mouse pads, and, perhaps soon, Scream Vodka. I bought a Scream tote bag because I needed something to cart all my aquavit samples home in.
But the painting I came to look at was The Voice (Summer Night), which depicts a woman, with her hair let down, standing in a secret lovers’ spot near the shoreline on one of those endless Scandinavian midsummer nights. Most agree that the painting depicts Munch’s great love, Millie Thaulow (the wife of his benefactor’s cousin), with whom, as a young man, he had an affair one fateful summer in the coastal village of Aasgaardstrand. “When love grew!” wrote Munch in diaries. “Nature gave of her beauty and you became more beautiful the summernight cast over your face and your hair—only your eyes were dark—and sparkled with a mysterious glow.”
After their first tryst, Munch wrote, “something very strange happened—I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us—I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding around me—and thus as she disappeared completely beyond the sea—I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding—because the threads could not be severed.” Eventually, inevitably, Millie ended the affair, and that summer rendezvous haunted poor Edvard for the rest of his life.
The thing about Munch is that, no matter how dreamlike or metaphorical or obvious or depressing he becomes, his landscapes are somehow always right. He caught the seductive yet ominous mood of those midsummer nights. He knew better than anyone that the flip side of the glorious midnight sun is the long, dark, melancholy winter to come. That even within the moment, great happiness is already swiftly moving into the past tense.
I have stood, literally, in such a landscape. It was near the end of an Icelandic summer long ago, as a bunch of friends passed around a bottle of brennivín—the rougher Icelandic cousin of aquavit—while we quickly stripped down to our underwear and jumped into a hot spring. We relaxed as bubbles of hot water floated up from between the moss-covered rocks on the bottom, all of us settled in, chin deep, steam rising around our heads, the wind whipping across an impossibly blue fjord. Everyone was impossibly happy, but the midnight sun was finally beginning to set and soon it would be autumn and we’d all have to go home.
I have also been there figuratively. Let’s say it was a late August, many years ago, in a lifeguard stand on a midnight beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. Perhaps I was there with a girl with whom I was hopelessly in love, who would go back to college in September and never call again. There may have been a bottle of sloe gin (or was it Jägermeister, or even peach schnapps?) and “Livin’ on a Prayer” was surely playing on a cassette tape in the boom box.
In his essay on Munch, Schjeldahl writes, “My heart pledges allegiance to old revelations of truth—truth-to-me, truth-of-me, truths involved in the project of being a person—that seem still true. I may be humbled to reflect that I have advanced little on those lessons since receiving them years ago.” I stood before the painting that afternoon in Oslo, the taste of premium aquavit in my mouth, similarly humbled, and feeling the distinct tug of those unsevered summer threads.
A Round of Drinks:
From the North
I acquired my