From: Literature Online Sent: Mon 02/02/2009 22:21

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From: Literature Online [ Sent: Mon 02/02/2009 22:21

To: MacDonald, Graeme

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This mail has been sent by Graeme Macdonald.

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Laxness, Halldór (1902-)

Icelandic poet, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, was born in Reykjavik. When he was three years old, his parents moved to Laxnes, a farm in nearby Mosfellssveit parish; in addition to his farming, the lather worked as a road construction foreman. By his own account, in his autobiographical Í túninu heima (1975; In the Hayfields of Home), Laxness began to try his hand at writing as a child. He first left home to study music, then attended a special secondary school (gymnasium) in Reykjavik but did not graduate. Instead, he dedicated himself to writing, publishing his first novel, Barn Náttúrunnar (1919; Child of Nature), at the age of 17.

Following this, he stayed for a time at the Benedictine monastery of Saint Maurice de Clervaux in Luxembourg, where he studied and led a life of religious devotion; he was received into the Catholic Church in 1923. Laxness spent the next year at a Jesuit-run school in England---Champion House in Osterley, Middlesex---and then alternately in Iceland and on the continent of Europe, including Sicily, where he worked on Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmír (1927; The Great Weaver from Kashmir). A tour de force, this broadly based novel tells of the struggle of a young man torn between his religious faith and the pleasures of the world; although he rejects the latter for his calling, he pays a high price. The book is clearly influenced by most of the artistic and cultural currents that placed their mark on Western Europe in the years after World War I, although Laxness's writings from this period specifically bear the imprint of surrealism and Catholic mysticism and, as for individual figures, the influence of August Strindberg and Otto Weininger (1880-1903). The style and narrative technique of Verfarinn mikli frá Kasmír made a clean break with the epic-realistic tradition of Icelandic fiction---a tradition that Laxness, however, was to readopt in the next phase of his literary career in which he wrote his broad novels of social criticism. Because Laxness abandoned the Catholic faith during the writing of this first major effort of his, Vefarinn signals the end of the first stage in his development, which might be described as bourgeois psychological fiction.

In 1927, the year when Vefarinn appeared, Laxness, went to the United States, where he stayed until 1929. This experience caused a profound change in his ideological outlook. He observed glaring social inequities and turned to socialism, as he claims in the autobiographical Skáldatími (1963; Poets' Time)---more because he saw the unemployed poor in parks than from reading socialist writings. While in the United States, he, nevertheless, became acquainted with the novel of social concern through the works of authors like Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. Laxness's newly adopted socialist views soon found strong expression in a collection of essays entitled Alþýðubókin (1929; The Book of the Plain People). In the next year he published of his only volume of verse: Kvoeðakver (1930; A Sheaf of Poems), which evinced more pronounced surrealist effects than any other book of Icelandic poetry from this period.

Although Laxness has lived in Iceland since 1930, he has also traveled extensively, and some of his many stays in Europe have been of long duration, so that his works have been written in foreign parts as well as at home. His permanent residence is at Gljúfrasteinn in Mosfellssveit, the parish of his youth.

Laxness's fiction dealing with social issues began with Þú vínviður hreini (1931; You Pure Vine) and its sequel, Fuglinn í fjörunni (1932; The Bird in the Shore; Eng. tr. of both, Salka Valka, 1936). The scene is a small Icelandic fishing village early in this century, where an awakening labor movement is pitted against merchants and fishing entrepreneurs. In Sjálfstoett fólk I-II (1934-35; Eng. tr. Independent People, 1945), Laxness turned to the life and condition of Icelandic farmers; the central character is the peasant Bjartur, who, although forever doomed to be the slave of prosperous farmers and their commercial interests, stubbornly views himself aa the most independent person on earth. The author takes a still another tack in a subsequent tetralogy comprised of Ljós heimsins (1937; The Light of the World), Höll summarlandsins (1938; The Palace of Summer Land), Hús skáldsins (1939; The Poet's House), and Fegurð himinsins (1940; The Beauty of the Sky; Eng. tr. of all four vols., World Light, 1969). Here, the protagonist is Ólafur Kárason, a hapless folk poet in Iceland, whose obvious faults do not prevent him from winning the reader's sympathy.

By 1940, and especially later, Iceland's independence and its place in the world became a central theme in Laxness's essays, a theme that also gave rise to a trilogy of historical novels with a focus on a peasant living around 1700: an archetypal Icelander locked in a dubious contest with oppressive authorities and foreign power. On one level, the work---consisting of Íslandsklukkan (1943; Iceland's Bell), Hið ljósa man (1944; The Bright Maiden), and Eldur i Kaupinhafn (1946; Fire in Copenhagen)---symbolizes the eternal struggle of the Icelandic nation for its existence in the past. But it also points to the present and the future, implying a warning concerning the fate of Iceland in a world of conflict between large powers, particularly in the context of foreign military bases. The facilities made available to the United States became an overriding issue in Icelandic politics soon afterwards, and Laxness's Atómstöðin (1948; Eng. tr. The Atom Station, 1961) assails bourgeois politicians for having sold out to American interests.

Laxness wrote one more novel that belongs to the social-issue phase of his career, Gerpla (1952; Eng. tr., The Happy Warriors, 1958), a satirical work with a setting in the Middle Ages and deriving from Fóstbroeðra Saga and Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, among other sources. Still the author addresses himself to contemporary realities: the Cold War and the worship of dictators like Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin. The novel is specifically an attack on blind political loyalties and on warfare and its atrocities. Imbued with a pacifist spirit, Gerpla describes the tragic fate of a poet victimized by his belief in the power and glory of a worldly ruler.

Although all the major works of fiction written by Laxness from 1930 to 1952 have a pervasive element of sharp and alert social criticism, they also contain various strands that foreshadow his later emphases, such as folk wisdom molded by Icelandic tradition and Oriental philosophy akin to the Taoism of Lao-tze, a school of thought of crucial importance for him.

Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, an honor that led to a world tour in 1957 and 1958, at the invitation of the United States, China, India, and others. In Laxness's writings since that time, social criticism has yielded to philosophical concerns and closer focusing on individual problems. The first such work, Brekkukotsannáll (1957; Eng. tr., The Fish Can Sing, 1966), has as its themes the destructive effect of faked renown and the danger threatening the artist who serves any interest outside his creation. On the other hand, the Taoist ideal---to avoid aggression and to help all---is held up as a means of salvation.

Paradisarheimt (1960; Eng. tr., Paradise Reclaimed, 1962) traces the experiences of a convert to a new religion, who moves to another part of the world to seek the paradise that has been promised him. Unable to find it there, he returns to his abandoned farm in Iceland, realizing that the most important human task is to cultivate the place of one's own origin, a conclusion recalling Voltaire's Candide, a work Laxness translated into Icelandic. He has also translated fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Gunnar Gunnarsson.

In his writings from the last two decades, Laxness has persistently voiced his skepticism of all systematized ideologies, glorifying instead undogmatic protagonists---his own mouthpieces, it seems; as a rule, they are people who have separated themselves from the world by refusing to participate in the mundane affairs of ordinary human beings.

Laxness wrote little fiction during the 1960s but turned to drama instead---a genre he had actually worked in much earlier, although on a minor scale: Straumrof (1934; Short Circuit) and Silfurtúnglið (1954; The Silver Moon). But now the several plays appeared in a rapid succession: Strompleikurinn (1961; The Chimney Play), Prjónastofan Sólin (1962; The Sun Knitting Shop), and Dúfnaveislan (1966; Eng. tr., The Pigeon Banquet, 1973). His plays are typically humorous and of satirical intent, showing obvious influences from Bertolt Brecht and the theater of the absurd. They have, however, not matched his fiction in popular appeal.

Collections of essays by Laxness have appeared at a steady rate throughout his entire career, and he has been an enthusiastic proponent of intellectual debate in Iceland. In his later years, he has published numerous essays within the general sphere of medieval studies and early Icelandic history. By the late 1960s, he had resumed his writing of fiction. His recent novel Kristnihald undir Jökli (1968; Eng. tr., Christianity at Glacier, 1972) is heavily influenced by Taoism, as is the documentary novel Innansveitarkronika (1970; A Parish Chronicle). Guðsgjafarþula (1972; A Rhyme of God's Gift) has a setting strongly resembling that of Salka Valka ; the action is, however, seen from a diametrically opposed vantage point, and the author's attitude has changed from radical social criticism to liberalism of a mildly conservative cast.

Halldór Laxness is by far the most famous Icelandic writer of the 20th century. His creative powers are unequaled: no other author has dealt so imaginatively with practically all aspects of human life in Iceland, and he has at the same time, more than anyone else, given direction to the self-understanding and the general outlook of his countrymen of today. He is an absolute master of style. His adaptability has few parallels anywhere. Time and again he has shifted his ideological position in drastic ways, and his entire career as an author has been a restless search for whatever it takes to create the ultimate text. But despite the many facets of his art, all works by Laxness carry one unchanging signature, namely, the bantering wit of the true humanist.

See: P. Hallberg, Den store vävaren (1954), and Skaldens hus (1956); Scandinavica: An International Journal of Scandinavian Studies (special issue devoted to the work of Halldár Laxness: supplement [May 1972]: Sjö erindi um Halldór Laxness (1973);

P. Hallberg, Halldór Laxness (1971), and Halldór Laxness (1975).

Sveinn Skorri Höskuldsson

View Preface for the Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature

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From: Literature Online [ Sent: Fri 20/03/2009 12:49

To: MacDonald, Graeme

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Subject: Literature Online

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This mail has been sent by Graeme Macdonald.

Article Text:

The bard of fire and ice

Brad Leithauser . Scandinavian Review . New York: Autumn 2002. Vol. 90 , Iss. 2; pg. 15 , 9 pgs

People: Laxness, Halldor Kiljan

Author(s): Brad Leithauser

Document types: Feature

Publication title: Scandinavian Review. New York: Autumn 2002. Vol. 90, Iss. 2; pg. 15, 9 pgs

Source type: Periodical

ISSN/ISBN: 0098857X

Text Word Count 2642

Abstract (Document Summary)

The life of Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness is examined. Laxness will long be remembered as one of the greatest European novelists of the 20th century and the man who renewed the great narrative art of Iceland.

Full Text (2642 words)

[Headnote]

Merely four years after his death, we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth. Halldor Laxness, a man apart yet always true to his origins, will long be remembered as one of the greatest European novelists of the 20th century and the man who renewed the great narrative art of Iceland. The following article, reprinted from The New York Review of Books, March 26, 1998, shortly after Laxness's death, hailed the "End of an Era."

A STORY AT ONCE HEARTENING AND HAUNTING and voluminous-it unfolded for nearly a century-recently reached its close. It was the tale of the life of the great Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness. He died on February 8 [1998], in a nursing home outside Reykjavik. He was ninety-five.

It was, additionally, a story implausible as any fairy tale. Its origins lay some twenty miles from Reykjavik, in the valley of Mosfellsdalur, where Laxness grew up. His name at birth was Halldor Gudjonsson. The pen name under which he journeyed out into the world (his books have been translated into more than thirty languages) was a self-creating, self-embellishing stroke, like many aspects of this singular, dandified man. He lived restlessly. His passage through life led him to a conversion to Catholicism and a sojourn as a Benedictine acolyte in a monastery in Luxembourg; to California and

Hollywood in the Twenties, and a friendship with Upton Sinclair; to Russia in the Thirties, where to his subsequent shame he embraced Stalinism; to Stockholm as the Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1955; to Utah in 1957, where he researched a novel about the Mormons; to India in 1958, as a guest of Prime Minister Nehru.

A few years ago, I picked up a tribute to Laxness in a used bookstore in Reykjavik. The volume consisted chiefly of photographs. Here's Laxness under a palm tree in Uruguay. Laxness in tuxedo, surrounded by five young women in sailor's caps who might be taken for contestants in a beauty pageant but who turn out to be auxiliaries of the Nobel festivities. Laxness eye to eye with a camel in front of Cheops' tomb. Laxness conferring with Pope John Paul II. He was a curious-looking man, with ample nose and ears, slightly off-center eyes, and a bristly little pushbroom of a moustache. It's hardly surprising that in photographs chronicling his accomplishments he has an exultant air. But he emerges also as self-assured-confident that his worldly triumphs come fully merited.

To anyone familiar at all with Iceland, Laxness's story appears more implausible still. Mosfellsdalur is a rural valley, where deep snows accumulate. I once visited a new acquaintance out there on a February day, stepping into a living room whose picture window radiated a cloudy, indeterminate glow. It was snow, piled against the glass, all the way up-the drifts must have been eight feet deep. ("It's nothing," my host remarked, with characteristic Icelandic disdain for mere weather. "I'll be able to see out of it again in a couple of weeks.") And of course the valley would have been far more remote in the early decades of this century, when Laxness was a boy. These days, it is linked to Reykjavik by a paved road; back then, the trip would have been a sizable pony-trek. Reykjavik these days is a mini-metropolis, with an opera company and tapas bars and indoor tennis courts; back then, your pony would have deposited you in a haphazard collection of patched-together houses, many hundreds of miles from the real civilization of Copenhagen, that royal city whose inhabitants seldom cast an over-the-shoulder glance at their gray windswept colony in the North Atlantic.

In perhaps his most tender and beautiful novel, The Fish Can Sing, Laxness presents us with a grandmother who "had learned to recognize the letters of the alphabet from an old man who scratched them for her on the ice when she had to watch over sheep during the winter" and a starveling hero who sleeps cocooned in copies of the London Times, "which in my young days was called the greatest newspaper in the world and sometimes reached Iceland as wrappings for goods from England." Laxness's books are a persistent tribute to those whose education was a tenacious victory over indigence and insularity: a tribute, ultimately, to a miniscule nation whose glittering literary heritage stands as a global wonder. Laxness himself was born into relative comfort-his father was foreman of a road-making crew-but there was no earthly reason to suppose he might eventually go on to the sort of linguistic prowess he achieved: a command not only of Icelandic and Old Norse, but also of Danish and English and French, with a good reading knowledge of German and Latin besides. His mastery over various languages and literatures was a task that asked of him more than brilliance, although he had plenty of that: it required the driving heart of a titan.

Unmistakably, he was a man apart, something he established in various ways. There was his precocity (he published his first novel at seventeen). And his dapper dress, his lifelong fondness for three-piece suits, homburgs, bowties, handkerchiefs (all of which had to be imported, of course). And a painstakingly finicky-an altogether bizarre-style of speech that for decades made him the most impersonated and parodied man in Iceland.