[...] The film, entitled To Joy, was to be about a couple of young musicians in the symphony orchestra in Helsingborg, the disguise almost a formality. It was about Ellen and me, about the conditions imposed by art, about fidelity and infidelity. Music would stream right through the film.

I was left completely alone, speaking to no one and meeting no one. I got ‘drunk every night and was helped to bed by la patronne, a motherly woman who worried about my alcoholic habits. Every morning, however, at nine o’clock, I was sitting at my worktable, allowing my hangover to help intensify my creativity.

Ellen and I started writing careful but tender-hearted letters. Under the influence of a dawning hope of a possible future for our tormented marriage, the portrayal of the film’s leading female character turned into a miracle of beauty, faithfulness, wisdom and human dignity. The male part, on the other hand, became a conceited mediocrity; faithless, bombastic and a liar.

I was being courted, shyly but intensively, by a Russian-American painter. She was athletic but well-proportioned, dark as night with bright eyes and a generous mouth, a statuesque Amazon radiating uninhibited sensuality. My fidelity to my marriage stimulated us both. She painted and I wrote, two loners in unexpected creative fellowship.

The end of the film became terribly tragic. The female character was blown up by a paraffin stove (possibly secret wishful thinking), the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was shamelessly exploited and the main character realized that there was ‘a joy greater than joy’. (A truth I did not understand until thirty years later.)