During the final months of the Second World War, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf commissioned a reader’s report, consisting of a form on blue paper with a few queries, regarding a translated novel it was considering by an Icelander named Halldór Laxness. Section B of the form instructed the reader, “If you recommend us to publish the book give your chief reason in a single sentence.” The reader replied, “Those who read this book will never forget it.”
The novel, “Independent People,” tells the story of an Icelandic farmer who renames himself Bjartur of Summerhouses, after the wretched farm that he has managed to buy for himself following eighteen years of servitude. No obstacle of God or man will separate him from his independence, even if he pulverizes himself and his family in the process. Against this grim backdrop, the reader observed, “Certain passages are of such beauty, so filled with an understanding of human dignity and pathos, so richly imaginative, that I want them permanently available for myself, my family, and my friends.” Yet the report projected meagre sales. The style, the characters, and the atmosphere were surely too unfamiliar to the American reader. Knopf published the novel anyway.
In its first year, “Independent People” sold more than four hundred thousand copies in the United States. Nine years later, Laxness won the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland.” Yet, even after the Nobel, the novel no one would forget was not reissued in the U.S. Of Laxness’s sixty other books, many of them fiercely admired around the world, nearly all remained unavailable in the United States for the rest of the twentieth century.
How to explain this long eclipse? Some scholars argue that Laxness was, however informally, blacklisted. An outspoken socialist and a defender of Iceland’s independence (achieved in 1944, when, after centuries under the Danish monarchy, it declared itself a republic), Laxness condemned the country’s joining NATO, in 1949. A documentary film that examined his U.S. reputation, “Anti-American Wins Nobel Prize,” was produced in 2011, taking its title from a contemporaneous American newspaper headline. The scholar Chay Lemoine has demonstrated that J. Edgar Hoover authorized an investigation into Laxness’s royalties from Knopf, on the suspicion that he was using them to underwrite Icelandic Communists.
Others suggest more prosaic explanations. The overwhelming majority of the sales of “Independent People” resulted from its selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, not a prairie fire of spontaneous enthusiasm in bookstores.
All this turned around in 1995, when the writer Brad Leithauser published an essay on “Independent People” in The New York Review of Books that began a renaissance of Laxness’s work in English that is still ongoing. “There are good books and there are great books,” Leithauser began, “and there may be a book that is something still more: it is the book of your life.”
Two years later, Vintage International published a new edition of “Independent People” that’s now in its thirty-sixth printing. A new hardcover edition came out in 2020. In the years since 1998, when Laxness died, in an Icelandic nursing home, at the age of ninety-five, Vintage has published his novels “World Light,” “Paradise Reclaimed,” “Iceland’s Bell,” “Under the Glacier,” and “The Fish Can Sing” in matching volumes, each with its own bright color, like the painted iron roofs of Icelandic coastal villages. More recently, Archipelago has published Philip Roughton’s translations of the novels “The Great Weaver from Kashmir” and “Wayward Heroes.” When Leithauser wrote his essay, nearly all of Laxness’s work was either unpublished in America or had been out of print for decades. But as of last month, when Archipelago published Roughton’s new translation of “Salka Valka”—a gripping wonder, and Laxness’s most sustained piece of narrative drama—all the major novels became available to English readers for the first time.
His father was raised on the parish: if you were the child of destitute parents, the local authorities placed you with a better-off family, who put you to work on their farm. Like a lot of things in nineteenth-century Iceland, where glass was just beginning to displace the afterbirth of cows as the material for windowpanes, such arrangements had remained mostly unchanged since the Middle Ages.
By his twenties, the pauper boy had become a “vacant man,” a day laborer free to work for a wage. His industriousness on a road-building crew got him promoted to foreman. He met a young woman employed as a farmhand whose father had died when she was ten. Of her mother’s six children, only this girl had survived to adulthood.
The vacant man and the woman married and settled in Reykjavík. In 1902, she gave birth to a boy on whom a cat leaped in his crib to scratch at his face. For its offense, the cat was hanged. When the boy, called Dóri, was three, the family moved on horseback about ten miles east, to a farm called Laxnes. The boy contracted polio but recovered, though it left him with a permanent stammer. When his father came in from work, he sat in the twilight by the window and played the violin.
The boy had a different passion: he wrote incessantly. For ten hours a day. He showed no interest in farm labor and, for reasons no one can explain, his parents let him stay inside at his desk.
One day at Laxnes, a man knocked on the door, looking for directions to a nearby waterfall. No one answered. He continued knocking until a twelve-year-old boy came to the door. “Unfortunately, no one is at home,” the boy said, to the man’s surprise. After all, the boy himself was home. Everyone was out making hay. The man asked why the boy himself was not working with the others. “Me?” the boy asked, perplexed. “I’m writing!”
The boy’s name was Halldór Guðjónsson. At thirteen, he finished writing a six-hundred-page novel. He put it aside. At seventeen, he finished another novel and found someone to print it. The day before reviewing the proofs, he returned home from Reykjavík, where he was studying, for a Communion service at the local church and met up there with his father. When they parted, his father extended his hand. “Bless you now, dear Dóri,” he said. Within two weeks, his father had died of pneumonia.
A month later, the boy boarded a steamship heading to Copenhagen. When he arrived, he had business cards printed. He taped one to his door. It read “HALLDÓR FROM LAXNES, POET.”
Only one major biography of the writer who would call himself Halldór Laxness exists in English: “The Islander,” by Halldór Guðmundsson, which was published in 2008 in the United Kingdom but never in the U.S. Abridged from the Icelandic original though it is, the biography still provides a lively soup-to-nuts account, including the dizzying sequence of travels Laxness began after he left home.
In Denmark, he covered his expenses with stories he wrote for newspapers and with remittances from his mother, who earned the money by knitting. He went to Sweden to read Strindberg, passed himself off as a baron in Germany and Austria, and sailed to New York, where he was refused entry for lack of papers. He fathered an illegitimate child in Denmark, although he didn’t know it until he had already gone to Luxembourg, where he converted to Catholicism, entered a Benedictine monastery, and stopped just short of taking Holy Orders. He lived briefly in France, England, Norway, Rome, Sicily, Canada. By the time he was twenty-five, he had already published four books. He knew Danish, English, and German, and was teaching himself Russian, French, and Latin. His private writing from that time reveals two modes: narcissistic grandeur and annihilating self-doubt. In a letter, he declared, “I shall become a great writer in the eyes of the world or die!” In his diary, he wrote, “With the exception of being prideful and having empty dreams of being a superman, I am nothing.”
Determined to break into the movies, he went to Hollywood, where he wrote a screenplay called “Salka Valka,” or “A Woman in Pants,” with Greta Garbo in mind for the title role. The movie had good prospects of being produced by M-G-M, until Laxness fell out with the studio over its idea to set the film not in Iceland but in Kentucky.
The crash of the American economy in 1929 convinced Laxness of the truth of socialism. He gave up on Hollywood and returned to Iceland. Something seemed to have matured in him. Having travelled and studied the languages of the great powers, he began writing with expansiveness and confidence, in the language of his tiny nation, the epic, multivolume, tragicomic novels of struggling Icelanders that would make his name.
Chief among the works of this period was “Independent People,” set amid shocking poverty that engenders in the characters a steeliness verging on cruelty. When by some miracle the lonely old cow at Summerhouses gives birth to a calf, Bjartur’s family falls in love with it and seems to know hope for the first time, until the morning Bjartur matter-of-factly slaughters it and wakes up the children with an order to clean its tripe off the paving as he heads to town to sell its carcass.
Laxness’s severe depictions of rural life did not flatter Iceland’s modernizing self-image. When the novel first came out, one of the most prominent politicians in the country accused Laxness of “raising old and lost banners of oppression” and “working against his own people.” For his unorthodox spelling and use of neologisms, others accused Laxness of being a “language abuser.” This was no trifling matter in a country whose case for independence from Denmark rested in part on its mostly unaltered use of the ancient language of the Vikings.
By 1954, he had married twice, fathered four children, built his family a house on his father’s old land at Laxnes, and become famous abroad. The next year, when he won the Nobel, he was still just fifty-three. A remarkably various body of work was still to come. Both his ideological commitments and the genres in which he worked continued to evolve. By the nineteen-sixties, he had renounced Stalinism and identified more closely with Taoism. He turned to playwriting, then to memoirs. To any writer prone to blocks, he makes a daunting example. Throughout his life, he wrote with the tirelessness of a swimming shark.
If many readers come to Laxness for the scenery of an exotic land, they often stay for the characters, more specifically for the quality of his attention to them—close enough to sympathize with their inmost longings yet somehow far away enough to chuckle. Everybody does foolish things, and everybody has a soul. One of his most often quoted lines comes after a despairing girl in “Independent People” gives way to sobs, and her little brother, in comforting her, sees for the first time into the labyrinth of another soul: “The source of the greatest song is sympathy.”
But when a reader who knows Laxness only from “Independent People” encounters his contemporaneous political writing, in which mere human beings seem to count for nothing compared with the success of the socialist project, the cognitive dissonance is enough to crash the operating system of the brain.
Countless Western intellectuals shared his ardor for the Soviet Union, but few of them had witnessed the purges firsthand, as he did. Laxness attended the infamous Moscow show trials of 1938, where all but three of the twenty-one defendants, including Nikolai Bukharin, were found guilty and sentenced to death.
Within a day of the verdicts, Laxness was invited to dinner at the apartment of his friend Vera Hertzsch, a devout Communist. Around midnight, a knock came at her door. While Laxness watched, Hertzsch’s baby daughter was taken from her with a promise that she would be sent to an orphanage. Hertzsch herself was taken to the Gulag. The daughter vanished from public records and is presumed to have died shortly afterward. Hertzsch died in a Kazakh labor camp in 1943.
Yet, in the face of what he’d seen, Laxness still went home to Iceland and finished writing “The Russian Adventure,” a travelogue of Stalinist propaganda that included his wonder-struck account of the trials. So in awe is he of the political struggle the trials represent that, he wrote, “issues such as the legal or moral ‘guilt’ of the conspirators or the punishment that awaited each of them personally becomes a minor issue, of no interest for further debate.” Is this a man ironically sneering at a murderous spectacle or applauding one? Or did he stand by the sentiments he had written in a letter some years before: “What are the masses but clay in the hands of superior minds? They are nothing but raw material, at the most the tools to initiate events of world importance.”
His politics impeded his career and led to errors in his reputation that persist today. Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize the year before Laxness did. The Times wrote of the two favorites, “The fact that Mr. Laxness had received the Stalin Prize for Literature might have swung the vote for Mr. Hemingway.” The claim that Laxness had won the Stalin Prize gained currency. The Times repeated it in his obituary, in 1998. Susan Sontag included it in her introduction to the Vintage edition of his late novel “Under the Glacier.”
Laxness won no such prize. He didn’t win the Stalin Peace Prize, either, as others have erroneously claimed. No available Russian source, including Pravda, which seemed to report his every move at that time, links him with any of these laurels. Guðmundsson insists that the awards are a fiction and points to a medal that Laxness accepted in Vienna from a Communist-affiliated peace council as a possible source of the rumor.
Nowhere in Laxness’s novels is the conflict between the shining ideal of socialism and the dignity of individual people on plainer display than in “Salka Valka,” written after the movie of the same name fell through. Roiling with “unruly vitality,” young Salka arrives with her mother one night in a coastal village. Salka has a “deep, almost masculine voice.” Tall and strong, she’s determined to buy herself a pair of trousers soon “and stop being a girl.” When the schoolmaster asks her who the minister is who rules over them all in Iceland, she replies, “No one’s going to rule over me!”
To readers whose attachment to Offred, in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has led you to get “NOLITE TE BASTARDES CARBORUNDORUM” tattooed on your arms, “Salka Valka” is for you. It never even occurs to Salka that the bastards might grind her down.
Everyone fails this girl, especially her mother, Sigurlína, who neglects to protect her from the predations of a vainglorious drunk, Steinþór Steinsson, whom Sigurlína is desperate to marry. After Sigurlína has become pregnant by him, Steinþór tries to assault Salka and is discovered. He escapes the village, only to return a few years later. Sigurlína wants him back and plans a big wedding, but Steinþór is there only to get at Salka, now fourteen. After Salka fights him off another time, he leaves her mother for good. In despair, Sigurlína drowns herself, and Salka is alone.
The only other English version of “Salka Valka,” which came out in 1936, had to be prepared in a ricochet off the Danish translation. Laxness didn’t like it. “Fifty per cent of my style has disappeared,” he complained. Nevertheless, “Salka Valka” was a hit in the U.K., where the Evening Standard wrote that it was “replete from cover to cover with the beauty of perfection”; however, no edition of it has been available in the U.S. since the Great Depression.
Roughton has made his version from the Icelandic. Even in moments of high drama, he moves along with calm assurance, tossing off Laxness’s inventive and always spot-on descriptions as though they were commonplace, as when, on a cliff, the puffins “squatted with the dignity of church officials in front of their burrows.” He captures Laxness’s singular dour-droll tone with uncanny grace. After her mother has died, Salka walks alone under the mountains and sticks a peppermint in her mouth to comfort herself in “this gray, unfantastic, meaningless Easter weather.”
“Salka Valka” was published in Iceland in two volumes, in 1931 and 1932. When the second part came out, it bore the subtitle “A Political Romance.” A young local intellectual, Arnaldur, has gone away to school in the south and come home to incite a Communist revolution in the tiny village. Salka, her self-sufficiency notwithstanding, goes weak for this man who promises to lead a dictatorship of the proletariat. Here the reader braces for agitprop.
Evidently, so did the Nazis, who, after Laxness signed a contract to publish “Salka Valka” in German, found it “sinister” and banned it. The Soviets, too, at first refused to publish it, on the ground that Arnaldur was a coward to the cause. After the war, the novel’s would-be publishers in Communist East Germany asked Laxness to change the ending for the sake of ideological conformity. He refused, saying that the editors in Moscow had told him, “ ‘Our people have never seen Communists such as Arnald.’ I replied: ‘Of course they have, but you hang them.’ ” (The novel eventually came out in German, Russian, and at least twenty other languages.)
A heavy ideological hand does hover over the second part of the book. But, if the problem with ideology in a novel is its tendency to drag the characters down the routes it prescribes, Laxness allows his heroine better than a fighting chance to choose her own way. The revolutionary arguments that galvanize her village are as violent as the snow that inundates the ramshackle houses; Salka takes these ideas seriously, but, despite what may feel like Laxness’s own wish that she get with the program, she never quite acts as any ideology demands. She rises to own a share in a fishing boat, and her interests compete with those of the workers on shore. The stakes now are more than her own gain. She has to support a bunch of malnourished children she’s taken in. The Communist standard-bearer Arnaldur would have let the children die, and says so. “It’s nothing but bourgeois sentimentality and hypocrisy to help individuals,” he pronounces. Salka accuses him of being nothing but a doctrine, “and a false doctrine at that. When did you ever harbor human feelings for a single soul?”
It’s impossible to separate any Laxness novel from the legacy of the Icelandic sagas, the great savage stories written in prose on calfskin during the early twelve-hundreds, before many modern languages had any literature at all. We know the authors of almost none of the sagas. Among the devices that distinguish them is a point of view that seems to come from the shared knowledge of humanity as applied to particular farmers on particular fjords. Laxness is an heir to the form and its tropes, which he can deploy for laughs or for pity. Of Salka and Sigurlína’s first arrival in the village, he writes, “The snow blew straight into their faces, as it always does with such people.” Of the moment Salka discovers that her mother has spent all of Salka’s money, he writes, “Few sights are as peculiar as that of a little girl in a ragged man’s jacket, with a string around her waist, crying on a set of steps in a little village by the sea as dusk is beginning to fall.” Who’s saying this? None of the characters. But it isn’t Laxness himself, either. Reading him reminds you that the narrator of any novel is as much an invention as the characters are. But a funny kind of invention. Far from being a part of the writer’s mind, it partakes of a genius, when things are going right, that the writer himself doesn’t possess.
Once that invented narrator starts to speak on the page, whatever point a writer may have hoped to dramatize can feel hopelessly sophomoric. Laxness seems to have made this same discovery multiple times. His opinions were less interesting, and paradoxically less true, than the fictitious products of his imagination.
Laxness once wrote in a letter that he felt “like a man who is rowing for his life on a little boat out on the open sea.” If that image conveys the novelist’s fundamental loneliness as well as her strange belief that, seated in a quiet room while the hot radiator ticks and the snow falls outside, she is engaged in a matter of life and death, it also conveys the feeling you get from reading Laxness: that, despite his mischievous show of ease, he is giving his book everything he has in the hope that it will exceed him. ♦