I met Annabel Chapman and discovered her poetry and her art by coincidence—a
series of coincidences. In a west-side Copenhagen bar named Café Snork with
a couple of friends, we got to talking with the couple at the next table. He was,
as it turned out, a well-known Danish rock musician, Johan Olsen, with the group
“The Corridors of Power” (Magtens Korridorer), as well as an
associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen. She was Daisy
Lykkeberg, a teacher in the Copenhagen public schools. They were a handsome couple,
blond, in their prime, probably a quarter century younger than I.
It turned out she was half British, and they both often read English-language books;
by chance I happened to have a paperback copy of one of my novels with me and asked
if they would like it. Johan, in turn, gave me his latest double CD and signed the
case for me with a special, silver-inked marker.
Daisy began to leaf through my novel, read one page intensely for several moments,
then put the book aside and began to tell me about her mother and father and older
brother. The reason she told me about them was because she had discovered that in
my novel one of the characters has a child who commits suicide at the age of seventeen.
Daisy’s older brother took his life at that age. Her mother’s name is
Annabel Chapman, and she would turn seventy in a week. She lived in an assisted
living apartment on Absolon Street—one of the west-side streets I crossed
on my walk from the Central Station to this Café. Daisy told me that her mother
longed to have more English around her.
Annabel is British. When she was nineteen, she married Johs. Lykkeberg—Daisy’s
father, a Danish physician, who was twenty-two years older than she. Annabel moved
from England to Denmark at the age of twenty-three. Johs. died last year at ninety-one.
Daisy’s older brother, John Robin, was born in 1967. She removed from her
handbag a piece of paper, on which was printed Annabel’s words about John
Robin—it looked like a page from a book—who:
“...died voluntarily at 12 noon, Saturday, March 31st, 1984. He
was 17. He took his life unselfishly. He was neither drugged, insane, nor neurotic.
His courage matched his beauty. News of his death did not reach us until Sunday
morning. After supper on the day of his death I was sitting in my kitchen when suddenly
there he was opposite me at the table, radiant and happy. I was not surprised by
his presence. I merely accepted it in all its reality. We talked together for ½
hour. This happened.”
Beneath that was printed:
For John Robin
Your gaze still fills me
Like the first sight of the sea
After a long journey...
I still was not aware that Annabel was a writer and an artist. And I didn’t
tell Daisy that I lost my “little brother” in an untimely fashion as
well when he was young, just four years after John Robin died, and that he had been
an accomplished rock guitarist and composer. He was actually my nephew, only eight
years younger than I, but we were as close as any brothers can be. We had written
about a hundred songs together. I know that one never gets over something like that,
and I felt an affinity for Annabel. My little brother’s name was also John—John
Anthony, but we called him Jack, and like Annabel, I had also experienced a remarkable
occurrence, though in my case it had been two months after Jack’s death. I
was visiting Lesbos, standing on the balcony of my hotel room one evening, and there
was a furious wind that night, clattering trash cans down on the sidewalk. I looked
up at the dark-blue sky. There was a bright moon silvering the clouds, and somehow
I could see the wind ascending to the apex of the skies, and a voice inside my mind
told me that it was Jack, that he was ascending to a higher place now, where he
would have peace. It was not experienced as a metaphor. As Annabel had written:
“This happened.”
Daisy asked then, “Would you visit my mother and speak English to her?”
Annabel Chapman lives in a two-room apartment on Absalon Street in a county building.
Johan meets me on the street to escort me up to her floor. Daisy is staying home
with her son, who is sick that day. The first room of the apartment is large, comprising
a kitchen and dining space, a sitting area, a broad, tall bookcase against one wall.
The big room is bright with afternoon sunlight through several windows at the outer
wall that looks down to the street.
Annabel is sitting on the edge of her mattress in the much smaller bedroom. I cannot
see her at first because Johan is tall and precedes me into the room. Then I see
her—pale blue eyes, slightly tense posture as she sits there, her palms flat
on the mattress on either side of her, shoulders slumped, feet barely touching the
floor in oversized gray socks. Her hair is white and short, her skin pale. Johan
suggests that we go out to the sitting room by the windows.
“I might need a little help,” Annabel says, and he offers his arm to
support her from the bed. As we move in to the wicker chairs, Johan scolds himself
for forgetting to bring the book of poems that Annabel had given Daisy for me, but
Annabel says that she has several copies here and picks one out of the bookcase—a
slender rainbow-covered volume. (In fact, as I walk back later along Istedsgade,
the book under my arm, a woman standing beside a wall—a street-walker—remarks
to me, “That’s the color of the rainbow, baby!”) The book is entitled
Just on the Other Side, Poems 1979-1986, Annabel Chapman. There is no publisher
or city or copyright date so I assume it has been self-published.
Inside is a photograph of Annabel from 1980, seated on what appears to be the side
of a boat, both hands gripped round what seems to be a jibboom, smiling with her
round high-cheek-boned face, her eyes, her mouth, its full lower lip. Her eyes are
light, accentuated by dark brows, her hair short and dark, delicately wind-fanned
across her forehead, her skin pale. She wears a heavy dark sweater and light jeans
on her slender frame. She is looking off to her left and her smile is ineffable,
perhaps sensuous, perhaps dreamy, perhaps both. She was thirty-eight then—thirty-two
years before.
I ask if she will sign the collection for me and hand her the book and my Montblanc.
She takes the pen and admires it, but then sits holding pen and book and seems to
be lost in thought for a moment. She looks a little frightened, confused perhaps,
a little bit lost, and I want to make her feel safe. Johan has told me that the
day before, on her 70th birthday, she said that she no longer feels there
is a reason for her to be here.
“You mean...to live?” he asked. She nodded. He didn’t quite know
what to say, so he offered her a cigarette. “Here, then—smoke,”
he said and laughed, and she joined his laughter complicitly.
I brought two packs of cigarettes for her—the brand Daisy had suggested, Manitou
(no additives), and now she opens a pack and lights one with Johan’s plastic
lighter. “I only smoke for the balance of it,” she explains. “It
makes me feel balanced to have a cigarette.” I do not quite understand what
she means, but it is good to see her smoking, to smell the tobacco burning. I have
always liked the smell of cigarettes, though I quit over thirty years ago, when
my first child was born. I also brought her a copy of The Literary Review’s
“New Danish Writing” issue which I guest-edited three years before,
with English translations of a variety of contemporary writers. Daisy has been reading
chapters from my book aloud for Annabel which apparently she is enjoying.
“Where are your paintings, Annabel?” Johan asks suddenly.
“I took them down,” she says.
“Annabel is a very talented artist,” Johan tells me, looking around
the room for the pictures. “Why did you take them down? Where did you put
them?” Johan asks, but she is silent. “Ah, here they are!” he
says, discovering them in the bedroom, stacked face-in against the wall in two or
three piles. He takes one out to show me—an owl which seems to be painted
in the fashion of a mosaic of sharp color. It is strong and sharp and beautiful.
Then Johan suggests that he go down to buy something for us to drink, and Annabel
and I sit alone for a bit while she signs her book to me. “For Thomas, with
love, Annabel, 27th April 2012.” She prints a large “X”
before her name. We have no trouble talking. It almost seems as though I have known
her a long time ago, but have not seen her for years, and we have to catch up. I
feel as though I ought to be here. I could be her two-years-younger brother.
“Daisy told me that you like wine, but I couldn’t find out what kind
to bring—red, white or bubbly.”
“I like them all,” she says. “Do you like bubbly?”
“Of course—you know what Karen Blixen said. Remember always to take
a little bubbly with your predicament.”
Annabel smiles. “Did she say that?”
“Yes. I’ll bring some next time. If I may come back again?”
“Of course you can come back again,” she says.
Johan returns with a six-pack of beer and pours us each a glass. Annabel tells that
she has been writing since she was six, that she has written two novels. Johan affirms
that they are extraordinary—one is entitled Troutboy, about a witch
who catches a trout in the river one day and takes it home to fry it, but the fish
jumps from her grasp and turns into a boy, and the witch brings him up. The novel
is about Troutboy’s adventures. He promises to lend me his copy of the
manuscript—perhaps we can publish an excerpt from it. Henrik Stangerup, a
prominent Danish novelist who died in the ’90s, was very taken by it, but
for one reason or another, it was never published, as so many worthy novels are
never published, or published and ignored.
“And I wrote that long before the Potter woman appeared,” Annabel says.
She adds that nothing of hers was ever published—just the journalism she worked
with—and she has no motivation to begin to write again.
“Why not keep a journal?” I suggest. “Sometimes that helps.”
“I’ve done that for years,” she says mildly. “They’re
all stacked under my bed.”
That night, at home, having passed nearly three hours of the afternoon with Annabel,
I open her book of poems and read them through. Many of them have a particularly
haunting quality, polished and moving, complex but accessible, with startling but
exact word choices. I begin to select poems that I would like to send out for publication
in the U.S. if she will allow me to. Perhaps it will motivate her to begin writing
again.
It would be good to see Annabel writing again, to read what she might write now.