The Hopless Tragedy of the Immigrant

Roelvaag—the Immigrant Writer
Jan Myrdal

[Jan Myrdel is a Nordic writer, a Swedish one. The Nordic world—like the Slavonic to the East—is not a part of Europe other than in a very general, a geographic sense. History is important. Cultural roots go deep. Like their counterparts, the Soviet Nomenklatura, too has a literature. A Nordic one of sorts. It is represented by such people as the well travelled delegates from the PEN-clubs, the prize-giving members of the Swedish Academy and professors of what with a very German term in Sweden nowadays is called litteraturvetenskap—the Science of Literature.
Nordic literature is different. Not only is it—like the Slavonic—outside the main stream in Europe. The living Nordic literary tradition is a popular one, a refractory one.
Myrdal discusses here Ole Edvart Roelvaag, a typical Nordic writer who was himself an example of the tragedy of the immigrant.
Myrdal is familiar to Indian readers for his extensive write-ups on India’s on-going social revolution and resistance movements by sub-alterns throughout the country. His latest book Red Star Over India was released at the last Kolkata Book Fair. Incidentally the Government of India is reportedly going to impose ban on his free travel in India because of his chronicling of the Maoist Movement.]

My question is not if Ole Edvart Roelvaag was a major writer. He was. He still is. Giants In The Earth is a great novel. A great American novel. Even the critics said so when it was published. He got rave reviews and the novel became a best seller in the United States :
"...it makes almost all other tales of the Western frontier seem cheap." R M Gay, Atlantic's Bookshelf.

'This seems too me much the fullest, finest and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America." Walter Vogdes, Nation.

"This is an exceptionally satisfying novel." H E Dounce, N Y Evening Post.
But it is not quite as simple as that. O E Roelvaag was a major American writer writing in Norwegian. This opens a whole series of questions.

He got good reviews in Norway. But not quite so good as in the United States. And some of the then leading Norwegian critics were plain stupid. Like the romantic humanist Charles Kent who had this to say in Ord och Bild 1926 :
‘‘...but if we should believe Roelvaag then the Norwegian immigrants to 'The Middle West' around 1870 had no inner life in a real sense". Ord och Bild. 1926 p. 230.

But when O E Roelvaag had died then Charles Kent in Ord och Bild 1932 both published his photograph and wrote with great feeling that Roelvaag had been a remarkably gifted writer whose novels would live long for the Norwegian public. Critics are such. Yes O E Roelvaag was a writer. He wrote several novels. But such other works that I have read, as Pure Cold, are not great. And as for the sequel to Giants in the Earth—Peder Victorious and Their Father's God it does not reach the level of Giants In The Earth. That might be an unfair judgment though; O E Roelvaag died before finishing the whole planned saga of the settling, the final volume was never written. The work of which Giants In The Earth was the introduction remains a torso. It might also be that I find the language less interesting. I am not alone. As Herschel Brickel wrote on the publication of Peder Victorious :
"... the translation is often inept. There are anachronisms in slang and other details that will trouble the careful reader."

Giants In The Earth was not just a translation of the Norwegian original; it is a new version. And even though Norwegian should be closer to me and even though objectively speaking the language in I de dage and Riket grundliigges is more concrete and direct. I have always liked Giants In The Earth better. His English language in that novel—but not in Peder Victorious, sang for me. Even if the English language never really sang for him. This is a personal feeling. But not a private one. How it was determined says something about the position of O E Roelvaag as an American writer of Norwegian descent. I read Giants In The Earth when [ was twelve going on thirteen in New York 1939. I then considered myself an American. An immigrant of Swedish descent. I had turned my back on Sweden and was trying to get away from the Swedish language and I did not accept that Swedish but not English should sing for me. And I did not agree with those Norwegian and Swedish immigrants—O E Roelvaag had been one of the leading among them—who wanted to keep their national identity in America. I was not Swedish-American ; I was an American boy with Swedish forefathers. We all had such a pre-American ancestry even if we seldom talked of it. Some boys had Irish or German forefathers and I knew it; of others, like my best friend, Nelson. I still don't know from where his ancestors had come. We were American and I was violently American. I found the Swedish immigrants sickeningly Swedish. Serving meat balls full of bread crumbs at dismal Christmas parties in halls where the rickety chairs had been painted a depressing snuff-brown color. In the school library I studied the old volumes of Harper's Weekly. I loved the pictures of Thomas Nast and I could talk at great length about how the revolutionary German democrats who immigrated after 1848 found it necessary to struggle against Deutschtum and religious schools. That is the kind of immigrant—a rather typical one!—I was when first read O E Roelvaag.

It is more than possible that my view of Peder Victorious subconsciously still is colored by this. But I know that I ought to read the book in the Norwegian version. Both because the book is decidedly easier to read in Norwegian than English and because the theme of the book - the conflict between the first and the second generation immigrant - is such that it directly concerns us in Scandinavia here and now. The novel has a bearing on our present day conflicts.

Today what O E Roelvaag wrote about the conflict between the first and second generation in America concerns all those large groups who these last decades have become immigrants to Sweden and Norway. Those who have become tragically hyphenated Swedes; not really accepted as Swedes by their blue-eyed neighbors and no longer able to talk with their grandparents! In his letter to professor Percy Boynton March 3 1929 he formulated the theme of the book in a way that is valid for the immigrant families in ghettos like those of Rinkeby or Sodertalje in present day Sweden :

"...between the first and second generations of/.../ Scandinavian Americans, the break is oftentimes brutal, though the human qualities may be just as fine. You will agree with me, I think, that it is a tragedy for mother and child not to be able to converse intimately with each other. Her songs he cannot understand. What her soul found nourishment in, he cannot comprehend. She seems to him a peculiar anachronism, a senseless, unreasonable being. Can you not feel the heartache of that mother as she sees the child slip away from her into another world? Thither she cannot follow, for she has not the key, and the magic password she does not know. Can you understand her utter helplessness? And can you understand, too, that the child suffers a loss which he can ill afford? There are tragedies in life for which language has no adequate expression—this is one of them."

My feeling when I first read Peder Victorious—before the present large immigration to Sweden—that it was not up to the standard of Giants In The Earth was thus irrational; it can be seen as determined by a conflict between the reality of my being Swedish and my attempt to be an American.

(In order not to be misunderstood I should point out that I later on changed back from English to Swedish as I was forcibly de-Americanized and made to the Swede I now am. I had my first papers as an American citizen but after taking part in the anti-fascist youth movement in Sweden during the war I was, when going back to school on a "lejdbat" in 1944, as a Communist barred from re-entering the United Suites. As a subversive I was allowed back for two weeks only in 1966 with a special visa from the State Department.) Giants In The Earth is not the only novel about Nordic immigration and the settling—the land—of the plains. But it is the best, the most genuine. When O E Roelvaag heard that Johan Bojer was coming to America to write a novel about the immigration he was triggered to start wnting the novel he had long planned. Johan Bojer's Voregen stamme (The Emigrants) was a novel written by a visitor. Vilhelm Moberg wrote a fascinating novel about the emigrants from the peasant poverty of Sweden : Utvandrarna (The Emigrants). The novel ends when the emigrants take their first steps on American soil in New York on midsummer of 1850. It is a great novel. In its own way as great as Giants In The Earth.

The following novels he wrote in the series, those of the immigration and settling are good Vilhelm Moberg. Good novels; he also spent a long time collecting material on the Swedish immigration. But they lack the genuine quality of what O E Roelvaag could write. They are construed. In itself that is not surprising. O E Roelvaag was but not Johan Bojer or Vilhelm Moberg, an immigrant.

A generation after Vilhelm Moberg Sven Delblanc who had grown up in Manitoba would write a truly great and gripping realistic epic about the struggling Swedish settlers, his own folks. His trilogy. Samuels bok (The Book of Samuel), Kanaans land (The Land of Canaan) and Maria ensam (Maria alone) is closer to Roelvaag than to Moberg. Sven Delblanc also remarked that what Vilhelm Moberg wrote about plowing on the pairie proved that Moberg himself had never gone behind a plow on the pairie.

Johan Bojer was a Norwegian novelist going to America in order to write. Vilhelm Moberg, a Swedish novelist writing about Swedish immigrants to America; O E Roelvaag was an American writer. His realism did not have to be construed as such. The same holds for a writer like Waldemar Ager. His Gamlelandets sonner (Sons of the Old Country) is more realistic, more living as literature than for instance Vor egen stamme (The Emigrants) even though Johan Bojer was a much more experienced and successful novelist. Realistic writing is not only a question of craftsmanship.

It is of course possible and necessary to write, to report, from another continent, another culture, another class as it is possible to write about another age; Heinnch Mann could write about king Henri IV of France to make relevant themes of the nineteen thirties visible; Egon Erwin Kisch could write about Mexico. But when it comes to novels, not even the most careful taking of notes can replace the experienced life. Such realism is realism in the second degree; realistic writing of what has been read and noted. To put it bluntly : An Emile Zola seriously studying the habits and the language of the people makes for less interesting reading than an Ivar Lo-Johansson—people himself! —writing his life.

The basic fact about the realism of Giants In The Earth is that the writer was himself an immigrant. He wrote from his own experience and the tales naturally told him. He just slightly changed the year and the setting from his own. But this basic fact is also the inner conflict of the work. It is an American novel written in a language which was not American.

Lincoln Colcord who was not only the translator but partly responsible for the English language version (how much and in what cooperation with O E Roelvaag is for the specialists to analyze) put it clearly in the first words of his introduction to the novel 1927:
It is a unique experience, all things considered to have this novel by O E Roelvaag, so palpably European in its art and atmosphere, so distinctly American in everything it deals with. Translations from European authors have always been received with serious consideration in the United States; in Roelvaag we have a European author of our own one who writes in America, about America, whose only aim is to tell of the contributions of his people to American life: and who yet must be translated for us out of a foreign tongue.

O E Roelvaag changed country, residence and political nationality - but not language and identity. There are writers who change their language as they change country. It is difficult but can be done and sometimes they succeed in a linguistic mimicry. Arthur Koestler switched from Hungarian to German and then continued through French to English. But he then was more international than English. The Polish Joseph Conrad became an English writer, a classic. The Rumanian Eugene Ionesco became a French writer, so French that he was elected to the Academy (but then his mother was French). The Greek Theodor Kallifatides has become a Swedish writer. To learn a language is not difficult but to change language is something else. Even when you learnt a language you don't change language as when you change dress; not even as when you change friends. To change language is a far deeper emotional experience than to change lover or marriage partner; it goes deeper than any love—it touches your very identity.

Language is not only words and grammar. It is gestures and voice. It is the way you keep your throat and mouth while speaking—feel your jaw as you change from Norwegian to English! But it is more. It is a whole world of memories and half memories that seldom reach a conscious level. Language structures your thinking; the way in wich you experience the world. You think differently in German and in Swedish: in English and in Norwegian. (Those of you who are marxists would find it rewarding to compare the terminology of Marx and Engels when they wrote in German and in French. Take for instance the famous statement by Marx from 1859 that, Die produk-tionsweise des matcriellen Lebens bedingt den sozialen, politischen und geistigen Lebcnsprozcss 'berhaupt and compare it with the by him approved French version :
La mode de production de la vie mat, rielle domine en general led, veloppement de la vie sociale, politique et intellectuclle.

It is more than two vocabularies; it has become—as his words tend to be used non-dialectically in a scholastic fashion!—the basis of two differing systems of marxism inside the general framework of what is called Marxist thought!

Languages are not parallel. Traduttore, traditore—translators, traitors—is not just a proverb. There is no such thing as a real translation, from one language to another. As soon as you begin to write something a little more humanly complex than mathematics and formal logic in one language you have written something untranslatable. I know. Now I have not worked in English for a generation and I find my language marked by disuse. But in the late fifties and early sixties I had lived in India. There I had to write for my living in English. For the second time I then thought about changing my language and while making a film in Cuba 1967 I took a material I had published in Swedish and wrote a novel in English; Confessions of a disloyal European. It was translated to Norwegian in 1970 by the way. Some years later it was to be published in Swedish. I was unable to do it. I knew what I had wanted to write but there was no direct link to Swedish. Jan Stolpe translated it.

That book was quite successful. I also had publishers, they wanted me to continue but I twitched back to Swedish. The reason was that I found that my English despite everything lacked depth. I wrote an English somewhat like my Bengali friends did. Or as Theodor Kalhfatideswrites Swedish. The language I wrote lacked a fourth dimension. That is not surprising. We acquire our real language—our mother-tongue—before we are four. We get our vocabulary, we develop our tonal system and we are formed to humans. Then we pass the threshold. After that we can begin to remember. Literature is national; we can no more really change language than change the color of our eyes.

August Strindberg tried to write in French a century ago. Had he been successful he would not have become a great French writer only at best a minor one and then just passed out of literature.

O E Roelvaag made a correct literary decision when he kept his Norwegian language. He could in fact not have changed to writing in English and still have become the great writer he was. But he was not only—as the Encyclopedia International put it 1964—an American novelist born in Norway; he was an American novelist bound to write in Norwegian and depending on translations in order to reach his American public. That he himself as an American was to a large extent responsible for rendering Peder Victorious in English made the novel less—and not more—accessible to his American readers. (Even he became a traitor to the original when he tried to translate himself.)

Many immigrant groups tried to establish and conserve their own ethnic culture in the United States. The Swedes had their churches and their newspapers. But the Norwegian immigrants set the great example. They consciously strove to establish and develop their own unique Norwegian-American culture. Between c. 1870 and 1940 there existed a real Norwegian literature in America, an independent one with a multitude of writers. Some of whom to their own surprise even sold several thousand copies and got money for writing!

In this situation established writers such as Waldemar Ager and O E Roelvaag tried to argue for a real cultural pluralism in the United States; for a Norwegian-American culture and literature astride the Atlantic, one foot in Norway and the Norwegian tradition and one in America and the new life.

Nearly seventy years ago when Giants In The Earth was first published P A Hutchinson thus could wnte in the N Y Times :
"That in Giants in the Earth this Norwegian-American immigrant has made a distinct contribution to the literature of the two countries there is no doubt". But already at that time this cultural pluralism was doomed; the specific ethnical Norwegian literature was in decline. As O E Roelvaag before he died understood the specifically Nordic ethnical cultures were being dissolved in the American melting pot. Some twelve years later the enthusiastic young immigrant Jan Myrdal would hail that melting pot when talking to the surviving romantic representatives of Swedish ethnicity.

I read that Upsala college, the one that once gave me—as it had given my father and other Swedes of American interest—a degree, is closing down. It does not make me happy even though it would have satisfied the Jan Myrdal of the melting pot fifty five years ago. Upsala college had been a long time changing from a Swedish-American institution to a non-ethnical one. The Swedishness faded, the Swedes around it simply-disappeared. In the end there was nothing left to support a Swedish institution in America. For small ethnical minorities there is no such a thing as a real cultural pluralism continuing beyond the first generations of newcomers to the host country.

The Norwegian immigrants made a heroic effort to create a living Norwegian-American literature. But all the Nordic literatures in America—together with the German, the Serbian, Kroat, Lithuanian and what have you—proved to be not viable. The Norwegian-American literature only took unusually long time to die.

That a French literature in North America is more than a possibility has its reasons; it exists because in Quebec the French are a nation. A Chicano literature also exists. The Mexican immigrants are in fact moving in and taking back their lost territories. Their culture has close links with Mexico on the other side of the river. Neither the French in Quebec or the Chicanos are examples of cultural pluralism. They are not ethnicities; they are nations.

Today the Norwegian-American literature is history. O E Roelvaag is the only such writer that still has a public. Even Waldemar Ager is largely forgotten. More; it worries me that my American publisher who is in his fifties says; —Roelvaag? I remember him. We had to read him in school more than thirty years ago. But rny daughter has not heard of him. For her generation he was not required reading.
I began by saying that Ole Edvart Roelvaag was a major writer. A living writer. Giants In The Earth is a great novel. A great American novel. But his greatness was an expression of his being a hyphenated American. The great dream he had of an independent and living Norwegian-American culture gave strength to his work but was just a dream never to be realized—which he also knew deep down and could describe.

O E Roelvaag was himself an example of what he wrote about; the hopeless tragedy of the immigrant. That makes his great work still more important for us. This is the age of the immigrant in Europe.

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 14 - 17, Oct 14 - Nov 10 2012

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