Hamlet of the weights room

Ingmar Bergman meets Arnie: Mark Simpson grapples with a Swedish intellectual down at the gym

Bench Press, Sven Lindquvist (Granta)

What do bodybuilders and writers have in common? Not much, thinks our Sven, as he heads for ‘flabby middle-age’, disdainful of what he sees as the ‘aggressive virility at the heart of the whole thing’. Until one day he is accosted in a Swedish sauna by a ‘heavily muscled’ young skinhead.

‘Dangerous?,’ replies the beefy bully to Sven’s vegetarian objections to his buffed appearance, ‘isn’t that what every artist wants to be? It’s not the threat of violence that makes my body dangerous. It’s the challenge. Just as a thought can be dangerous, by calling into question the way you live, your scale of values, your will, and thus your self, your innermost core, your essence. Can you survive being called into question? Or do you react by condemning?’

Wise words, and little wonder that Sven is entranced by this vision. However, while I’m sure that Sweden’s heavily muscled skinheads are superior to anyone else’s, I find it a little difficult to believe that such a person – or in fact, any human being – would speak in such a way. As a somewhat heavily muscled skinhead myself, I should know. In fact, if I‘d met Sven in the sauna, and had spoken to him at all, rather than simply looking through him with my practised body-fascist glare, my response to his objections to bodybuilding would have been simply – ‘Oh, yeah? Then how come you can’t take your eyes off me?’

Actually, this would vain and vulgar sneer would have been more flattering to him than insulting. Sven, like most writers and bodybuilders, appears to only really have eyes (and ears) for himself. This exchange in the sauna is clearly just interior dialogue. To be sure, Sven does a lot of talking to himself in this book; he’s the Hamlet of the weights room, wrestling not just with barbells on his bench but also visions of his dead father, ethical dilemmas and mixed metaphors, taking up big arms against a sea of troubles. Ironically, Sven abandons his prejudice – or resistance – to bodybuilding on the grounds that it is ‘individualistic and vain’ and enthusiastically takes it up himself when he discovers that it is a way of exploring and ‘re-birthing’ himself. As Sven’s body strengthens, he finds that he is ‘dreaming intensely’ and remembers his ‘long-repressed’ scenes from childhood – the ‘heavily muscled skinhead’ becomes a new-born baby’s head, which is nice for Sven but not terribly useful for us.

‘Bench Press’, originally published in Swedish in 1988, muses philosophically and poetically on bodybuilding, childhood, dreams and politics and seems in fact to want to be ‘Pumping Iron’ directed by Ingmar Bergman. An admirably strange ambition, but one that doesn’t quite achieve ‘definition’. Often thought-provoking in a whimsical way, and rich with a poetic charm, it never manages to fascinate in quite the way it seems to want to. Of course, this is where true bodybuilders have the upper meaty hand over writers – they just have to take their shirts off and everyone is convinced, albeit somewhat resentfully. In the same vascular vein, some ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs charting Sven’s journey into the world of bodybuilding might have been more interesting than the line-illustrations of ancient bodybuilding techniques and machinery we have to make do with. It’s difficult to suppress the uncharitable thought that all this thinking wasn’t, in the end, very conducive to the bodybuilding.

Whatever the results of his researches on his body, on the page Sven does evidence some ‘gains’, such as the observation that bodybuilding is not about having as much body as possible but as much will as possible – this is why fat is anathema: it refuses to obey anything except gravity. It’s the timeless dream of spirit triumphing over flesh. A kind of visual immortality. This is the overlap with writing – and, as Sven’s skinhead argues, in the same way that a good writer will never be happy with a first draft, a bodybuilder is never happy with the body he or she has been given. Writers and bodybuilders are perfectionists, aspirationalists. Idealists, even (though it is perhaps too kind to writers to suggest that their tendency to think too much is a function of spirit or will). My own fanciful impression is that bodybuilding, like writing, can be a way for men to attempt to usurp the feminine role, to act out their vagina envy and conceive, gestate and deliver... themselves – to become their own special creation.

However, there are other things that bodybuilding and writing have in common which Sven doesn’t dwell on: for example, both over-develop pointless muscles (brains and buttocks); both are lonely, dubious ‘sports’; both employ repetition of the same routines, over and over again (at least though bodybuilding is honest and calls them 'reps'; writing calls them 'new work'); and both seem to be motivated by a form of I’ll-show-‘em sulking, a desire to win an argument (with life?) long after it has been lost. Writing and bodybuilding are both attempts to become larger than life - to kick sand in its face.

In his adult researches, Sven happens across an evangelical 1930s bodybuilding book he recalls from his childhood, and which he slowly realises had an enormous influence on him. ‘Look at your fellow human beings!’ it exhorts. ‘At that one on the street corner…Is that how you want to live? Is that where you want to end up? No! Beware the hopeless nonentity! Break free from your life of routine. Build yourself up!’ Who could resist such an address?

As Sven confesses: ‘“The hopeless nonentity”. That was me.’

© Mark Simpson 2003