It's very unpleasant, but it's true - Pelle the Conqueror takes an idealistic turn

“It’s very unpleasant,” said Ellen, with a shudder.  “But it’s true.”  (Ch. 23)

A mother is commenting on a painting by her son Lasse that depicts a scene of a sad working-class on-the-job accident.  She describes one side, the miserable side, of Martin Andersen Nexø’s Pelle the Conqueror, his four volume novel of a Danish farmboy’s development into a leader of the international class struggle.  Then there is the joyful side stated in the title:

“Everything seems to turn out well for you, Pelle,” said Morten suddenly.  (Ch. 23)

Which is what happens at the end of idealistic Bildungsromanen.  All of the suffering and struggle creates the person.  The last volume, Daybreak (1910), is where Nexø can demonstrate his results of his experiment.

Morten, last seen as a fanatical Communist has become an almost bourgeois writer.  Guess what book he plans to write after the line above, less than a page before the novel’s end, guess its title.  Pelle himself becomes a bookworm for a period – “People wondered, at the library, over the grave, silent working-man who took hold of books as if they were bricks” (Ch. 7).  Karl Marx and Henry George are favorites, and a curious passage involves a long mental argument with Darwin and Origin of Species (Ch. 9) which leads to Pelle opening a cooperatively-operated shoe factory.

Please note that along with all of these books, Pelle’s son is, at the end of the novel, studying to be a painter of the fine art variety.  Daybreak is where artistic and intellectual matters become important for the first time.  Nexø is thinking in developmental stages.  At the library, Pelle becomes friends with a patron, a wealthy librarian, Brun, sadly afflicted with booklung (“the dust of the books attacked his chest, and every minute his dry cough sounded through the room”) who assists Pelle in various ways.

Brun has a strange resemblance to the patron in an earlier development novel, Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer (1857).  The more I looked, Daybreak began to resemble Stifter, like a proletarian Indian Summer.  The introduction of a gardening theme made me sure that Nexø knew Stifter:

They soon became familiar with the plants in their own way, and entered into a kind of mystic companionship with them, met them [the plants!] in a friendly way and exchanged opinions [with the plants!] – like beings from different worlds, meeting on the threshold.  (Ch. 11)

Later there is a discussion of whether or not plants think.

Much of the material of Daybreak is practical: the mechanics of a cooperative business, or plans for worker housing.  But such was the case for Stifter’s novel, too, even if the concerns were more aesthetic.  By the end, everything must be in order.  Order is unfortunately not the most artistically interesting aspect of Nexø’s world, although it rounds off the four novels logically.

To reiterate: the first volume, Childhood, a surprising masterpiece, easy to recommend widely.  The next two, Apprenticeship and The Great Struggle, lesser but still well written and conceived.  The last volume of Pelle is artistically the worst of them.  It is more abstract, with more of Pelle thinking.  There is less room for the raggedness of life so well described in earlier volumes.  But it is good enough that anyone who has read the first three would be nuts to skip it.

Life began to be a bit easier when he had drowned himself in the sewer - in volume 3 Pelle the Conqueror continues to be good

Having now read the third volume of Martin Andersen Nexø’s Pelle the Conqueror (The Great Struggle, 1909) I can answer the question that had worried me – does Nexø ruin his fine novel of the life of a poor Danish farm boy by turning it into Communist propaganda?  The title was a bad sign, and this is the book where Pelle moves to Copenhagen and becomes a labor organizer.

Also, I had to shift translation.  After the great 1987 film version of Pelle the Conqueror, the first two volumes were newly translated in complete versions, but volumes 3 and 4 are still only available in the 1913 which I was warned leaves out the earthy stuff, for example the word “stomach.”  So of course as I was reading the novel, all I could think about was how the word “stomach” was probably supposed to be right there.  It was like the book was haunted.

But no, so far so good.  The novel, by the end of volume 3, is the story of a man who becomes a labor organizer, a Bildungsroman in which a good part of the Bildung involves the solidarity of the international working class.  The one character who is a genuine Communist is presented as saintly but crazy, a religious fanatic (“’Revolution is the voice of God,’” Ch. 16).  In a novel that is not full of literary references, he feels like a refugee from Dostoevsky:

“’Last night I dreamed I was one of the starving.  I was going up the street, grieving at my condition, and I ran up against God.  He was dressed like an old Cossack officer, and had a knout hanging round his neck.’”

I am not convinced that Nexø ever quite figures out how to dramatize the union organizing side of the novel, a hard problem, but he has no difficulties with scenes of the life of the poor in Copenhagen.  Much of the novel is set in a slum tenement, the “Ark,” that gets most of the best writing:

When he passed from the brightly lit city into his own quarter, the streets were like ugly gutters to drain the darkness, and the “Ark” rose mysteriously into the sky of night like a ponderous mountain.  Dark cellar-openings led down into the roots of the mountain, and there, in its dark entrails, moved wan, grimy creatures with smoky lamps…  Here they moved about like greedy goblins, tearing away the foundations from under the careless beings in the "Ark," so that one day these might well fall into the cellars…  (Ch. 8)

The building is the sewer drain of the city, collecting its waste people.  Another favorite detail is the “bluish ring of vapor [that] always hovered, revealing the presence of the well, that hidden ventilation shaft for the thronging inmates…  (Ch. 17)

That miasmatic shaft is where the novel begins, actually, where the children play on the “sticky flagstones” where “all that one touched wore a coating of slime.”  Yet Pelle thinks of this pit as the setting of a fairy tale (those goblins are his).

… the waste-pipes stuck straight out of the wall, like wood-goblins grinning from the thicket with wide-open mouths, and long gray beards, which bred rose-pink earthworms, and from time to time fell with a heavy smack into the yard…  in the greenish, dripping darkness, sat curiously marked toads, like little water-nymphs, each in her grotto…  (Ch. 1)

Eventually the goblins make one of the above metaphors made literal during an especially severe winter, when the desperate residents begin plundering the building itself for fuel, first the moldings, then the railings, then every second step of the staircase, then – well, you can guess the fate of the “Ark.”

It is clear enough that there is an argument here, but it is made with the tools of art.  Too bad Nexø rarely makes the portions about union organizing as vivid, the great Parade of the Unions that ends the novel excepted.

So, on to Volume 4, Daybreak, which is perhaps where Nexø ruins his novel by etc. etc.

The title quotation, from Chapter 9, makes the novel sound more miserable than it really is.

“It’s probably that socialism, isn’t it?” - Pelle The Conqueror, Volume 2 - suspense in starvation itself

At the end of the first volume of Pelle the Conqueror, our young hero was triumphantly, expectantly leaving the countryside for the town, farm labor for a skilled trade, and his father for independence.  In Volume II, Apprenticeship (1907), he achieves all of that but is ground back into the dirt.  At the end, he is leaving again: next stop, in Volume III, Copenhagen and who knows what else.

Behind him he had left everything, and he just kept staring forward – as if the great world might appear at any moment before the bow.  He didn’t bother to think about what was to come or how he would grapple with it – he simply longed for it!  (concluding lines)

Does the third volume end the same way, more or less?  It almost has to, doesn’t it, given that there are four volumes.  Down then up, four times.

The second part of Martin Andersen Nexø’s novel is still quite good.  The first book was better, certainly, for a number of reasons:

1.  Pelle’s father, Lasse, is a wonderful character, and by necessity there is now less of him.  Whenever he does appear, the novel perks up.  In future volumes, he is presumably gone for good.  The new minor characters are still just as good.

2.  In the middle of the bildungsroman, the story is less satisfying on its own.  The first book had a natural place to end.  I now have a dilemma.  Stephen T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally translated only the first two volumes of Pelle, so if I want to continue I will have to resort to the bowdlerized 1913 version.  But what choice do I have; I can’t stop in the middle.

3.  Maybe this is just me, but with stories like this I always find the childhood of the character more interesting than his adolescence.  This is true in Dickens, in Proust, you name it.  The authors are following an accurate model of development, where the child is working on his relationship with the outside world while the teenager becomes more self-involved and awkward.  The child’s defeats are mostly from something external, the adolescent’s from his own humiliating mistakes.

Having said that, a couple of Pelle’s most significant obstacles in Apprenticeship are also external, and an important part of his larger story, which ends, I believe, with Pelle becoming a labor organizer (Nexø was himself a Communist).

First, Pelle is now poor, perhaps poorer than he was on the farm:

There was suspense in starvation itself: were you going to die of it, or weren’t you?

Pelle was poor enough that everything lay ahead of him, and he possessed the poor man’s wide-open spirit  (68)

Nothing more material than food and its absence.  “Why should you carry on as if the world were collapsing because you didn’t have a tub of pork and a heap of potatoes to face the winter with?” (68)  Pelle has to learn how to be poor.

The other external force is industrialization.  Pelle falls into one of the worst possible apprenticeships, shoemaking, just as mass production is wiping out shoemaking as a skilled trade.

“It’s probably that socialism, isn’t it?” says Jeppe scornfully.  (126)

But Jeppe, a master shoemaker on the verge of obsolescence, has it backwards.   I am a little bit worried that Pelle the Conqueror will become more didactic – no, I mean propagandistic – as it goes along.  But so far, so good.

An incomparable day - the joys of Pelle the Conqueror

I do want to write a little bit about the joys of Pelle the Conqueror, not just the language but the liveliness of the book.  It has occurred to me that the movie, for all its virtues – it is superb – exaggerates the misery of the story by greatly compressing the timeframe.  Pelle is “eight or nine” (17) when the novel begins and a teen by the end, the toughest, smartest kid in town.  The film has to crowd all of horrible stuff – the infanticide, the brain damage, the, um, the castration – into a period commensurate with a lack of change in the actors, especially the boy who plays Pelle.  So in the book, these little tragedies occur over the course of years rather than months.

So how about some of the novel’s joy.

Christmas Eve came as a great disappointment.  (75)

Off to a bad start.  Pelle’s father Lasse is no longer young, so Lasse and Pelle are low ranked even among farmhands.  Farm animals do not have holidays, so someone has to stay home.

There was dried cod and rice pudding on Christmas Eve, and it tasted all right…  (76)

The normal diet is herring and porridge, so this is an improvement.  Still.

Lasse and Pelle went to bed.

“Why is there Christmas anyway?” asked Pelle.

Lasse scratched his hip reflectively.

“That’s just the way it is,” he answered hesitantly.  “Well, then it’s the time when the year turns around and goes upward, you see…  And of course it’s also the night when Baby Jesus was born!”  It took him quite a while to produce this last reason, but it also came with perfect assurance.  “One thing goes with another, you see.”  (76, ellipses in original)

One of my worries about the subsequent novels is that they presumably have much less Lasse, a loss.  Hey, look what the words did there, neato.

Let’s try another holiday.  Chapter 18, the longest in the book, covers a memorable Midsummer Eve.

There were jars of stewed gooseberries, huge piles of pancakes, one hard-boiled egg apiece, cold veal, and an endless supply of bread and butter…  In the front was placed a small cask of beer, covered with green oats to keep the sun off it; there was a whole keg of aquavit and three bottles of cold punch.  (181)

Now that’s more like it.  The farm workers visit all the local sites, like the old tower and the valley with an echo.

“What is Karl Johan’s greatest treat?”  And the echo answered right away: “Eat!”  It was extremely funny, and they all had to try it with their own names – even Pelle.  When that was exhausted, Mons made up a question that made the echo give a vulgar reply.
“You shouldn’t teach it stuff like that,” said Lasse.  “What if some fine ladies came up here, and he started calling that after them?”  They just about died laughing at the old man’s joke, and he was so delighted by the applause that he kept on repeating it to himself all the way back.  Ho, ho – he wasn’t quite ready to be thrown to the rats after all.  (189)

Yes, I will miss Lasse.

Maybe I should have just rambled in this chapter.  It is full of delights.

The music sounded so sweet in the ear  and in the mind;  memories and thoughts were purified of all that was ugly; let the day itself take its due as the holiday it was.  It had been an incomparable day for Lasse and for Pelle – making up for many years of neglect.  Too bad that it was over instead of just beginning.  (196)

as if some great beast lay hidden out there in the fog - admiring the scenery of Pelle the Conqueror

Pelle the Conqueror begins:

It was the first of May, 1877, just at dawn.  From the sea the mist came sweeping in, a gray trail that lay heavily on the water.  There was movement in it here and there; it seemed about to lift, but closed in again, leaving only a strip of beach with two old boats lying keel uppermost upon it.  The prow of a third boat and a bit of breakwater showed dimly in the fog bank a few paces off.  At regular intervals a smooth gray wave would come gliding out of the mist up over the clattering pebbles of the beach, and then withdraw again; it was as if some great beast lay hidden out there in the fog, lapping at the land.

I think you can see here what I meant by “plain style” as applied to Martin Andersen Nexø, and which I mean relatively, relative to Zola or the more florid mode of Jans Peter Jacobsen.  He is not trying to impress anyone with unusual colors or vocabulary.  Yet he easily communicates not just the look but the movement of the shore, even before the curious metaphorical turn at the end.  The wave as the tongue of a hidden sea monster is not so plain.

Assuming the reader has not, like I had, seen the movie, there is little clue what the book will be about or who might be observing the scene.  Pelle and his father Lasse are out in the fog at this point, out with the beast, coming to Denmark.

I cannot resist the next paragraph.  Still just scenery.

A couple of hungry crows were busy with a puffy black object down there, probably the carcass of a dog.  Each time the licking wave glided in, the crows rose and hovered a few feet up in the air with their legs extended straight down toward their booty, as if invisibly attached.  When the water sighed back out again, they dropped down and buried their heads in the carrion, but kept their wings spread, ready to lift off before the next lick of the wave.  This was repeated with the regularity of clockwork.

Nexø is serious about the tongue metaphor – it licks its way through the paragraph.  The crows are perfect, right?  The scene, previously organic becomes mechanical.  The clockwork leads to the introduction of people in the next paragraph, or actually just the sounds of people in the fog  – shouts, bells, a horn, oars.  More sounds: “a quarryman’s iron cleats on the cobblestones,” “a loud morning yawn,” a scolding and a slap, a Mendelssohn hymn.  And finally, the sight of some people, a boat crew.

They were leaning forward, their hands clasped and hanging between their knees, and puffing on their pipes.  All three wore earrings to ward off colds and other evils, and all sat in exactly the same position, as if each were afraid of being the slightest bit different from the others.

I guess those are people.  The funny thing about all of this, however good it is, is that the great virtue of Pelle the Conqueror is its characters, mostly vibrant Pelle and his pitiful father, but also lots of secondary and even incidental characters who are unlike these sailors individually drawn.  Maybe a glance at some of the characters tomorrow.

It looks pretty miserable - It was a glorious life - Pelle the Conqueror

The strange life of books.  I just finished the first volume of Pelle the Conqueror (1906) by Martin Andersen Nexø.  It’s a terrific novel.  Lots of people would enjoy it.  Young Pelle and old Lasse, his father, are Swedes working as laborers on a Danish farm that is almost feudal in its organization.  “’It looks pretty miserable,’ said Lasse” (183), and it is, yet “It was a glorious life, and Pelle was happy” (71).  Both are true.  Maybe that is part of why the book is so good.

Pelle is just a kid, running around with the cattle, happy when the sun is shining or school is out or adults are fair, unhappy when it is too cold or the schoolmaster makes him memorize hymns or when his father drinks too much.  The really miserable stuff goes on around Pelle in the adult world of violence, sex, and booze that he does not yet understand.  But he is a tough little kid.

Pelle’s childhood had been happy because of everything; mingled with weeping, it had been a song to life.  Weeping, as well as joy, is heard of music; heard from a distance it becomes a song.  And as Pelle gazed down upon the world of his childhood, only pleasant memories shimmered toward him through the bright air.  Nothing else existed, or ever had.  (239)

Now,  I think that in terms of prose that is the single worst piece of writing in the novel, but it says what I have been trying to say.  The style is normally not so blunt, but rather constrained by the limited point of view of either Pelle or his father.  Nexø had been reading some French novels, I would guess Zola, although Nexø ‘s style is plain where Zola’s is ornate.  Let me save this for tomorrow.

Pelle the Conqueror is a novel in four volumes, published from 1906 through 1910, and I have only read the first, Childhood.  How the later novels, 700 pages more, compare I do not know.  Childhood covers agriculture / the countryside; successive volumes move to apprenticeship / town and factory work / the big city, with Pelle eventually  becoming a labor organizer.  I accuse Nexø of schematism!  This sounds Marxist because it is – after World War II Nexø moved to East Germany! –  although I do not believe I would have figured it out on the evidence of Childhood alone. 

The 1987 Bille August film version of the book covers only the first volume of the whole thing.  The movie is actually more miserable than the novel, since it is so relentlessly focused on the world outside Pelle’s head, but is a joy to watch because of the acting and filmmaking, or so I remember it.  The movie inspired a revised translation of the first two volumes of the novel by Steven T. Murray, which, as far as I can tell are not in print.  An old translation is available online, but if you can get it you want the 1989 revision.  As the editor says in an afterword:

The 1913 translation of the present book, for example, omitted any references to sex (even barnyard procreation), bodily functions, body parts (the word “stomach” seemed to be particularly taboo), and anything else the translator deemed too immodest to put into print.  Needless to say, this resulted in mysterious gaps in the story, as well as wreaking havoc with the author’s style and intent.  (244)

Significant parts of the book would make no sense at all.  This novel is earthy.  That is a great part of its appeal, along with the characters, the interesting setting, the effective language, all of that.  Maybe a day or two more on all of that.  A lot of readers would like this book.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway - more Scandinavian books - I can't read all this

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with English, etc.  But it is easy to get me excited about literature, so suggestions are most welcome.  And if anything looks appealing, perhaps we can read it together.

Denmark

At the forefront are Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.  The former I read in some quantity just before I started Wuthering Expectations, which was a while ago, I admit, but close enough that I doubt I will revisit him now.  The latter is, I fear, a philosopher, and thus spinach.  In real life, I like spinach, so that is just a metaphor.

More to the point are two short books by Jens Peter Jacobsen, the 1880 novel Niels Lyhne and the 1882 collection Mogens and Other Stories.  Jacobsen has had a strange career in English, kept alive by the glowing testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke seems to rank Jacobsen with the Bible.  I should see for myself.

Another novel, Pelle the Conqueror (1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø, I have meant to read for twenty-five years since I saw the magnificent 1987 Bille August film adaptation.  The novel will unfortunately not feature Max von Sydow, but it likely has other virtues.  It is long – the film only covered a fraction of the book – and grim.  I have no idea how it is written.

Isak Dinesen’s work is from the 1930s and later, but so many of her stories are set in Denmark’s past that she would fit well with the older writers.   I am thinking of Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942) in particular.

By chance, unconnected to this project, I began reading the contemporary conceptual poet Inger Christensen, and I would like to continue my study of her work.  And I mean study – anyone want to help me work on her cosmic long 1969 poem it?  It (it) features elaborate mathematical patterns – tempting, yes?

Sweden

Even poking around, I still know nothing about Swedish literature.  August Strindberg obviously tops the list, and I hope to read a number of his plays, ranging from the 1888 Miss Julie to the strange 1907 Ghost Sonata.  But there are also novels, stories, essays, some freshly translated.  Please, I beg you, recommendations, guidance.

The Queen’s Diadem (1834) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is a novel I encountered a year ago in this post by seraillon.  It is either deeply original, or a knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or something in between.  The Hoffmann connection by itself would give me something to write about.

Hjalmar Söderberg is another novelist I met through book blogs.  I have read a number of convincing posts about his short, intense 1905 novel Doctor Glas.  If I like it, there are a couple of other Söderberg books in English.

Norway

Henrik Ibsen, of course.  I have read six Ibsen plays, I realize, yet I still feel at sea.  I want to read or re-read a good chunk of them, although I will likely follow conventional opinion and ignore his early phase.  Critics are always dividing Ibsen’s work into phases.  Expect lots of Ibsen.

Knut Hamsun had a long, complicated career, but I know him from his early novels Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  Talk about intense.  I would like to revisit those and also read another from the same run, Mysteries (1892).  Then – then I don’t know.  Hunger would likely make my Top 50 Novels of the 19th Century list, if I were to make such a thing.

Off the track – far, far off – is Farthest North (1897) by Fridtjof Nansen, a favorite of min kone, the account of his insane attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing his ship in the winter ice.  Eventually, he just decided to walk.  Utterly nuts.  Sounds wonderful.

Now, some trouble.  Henrik Pontoppidan, Karl Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlöf, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Frans Eemil Sillanpää – the early Scandinavian Nobelists, the ones who, unlike Hamsun or Sigrid Undset lost their place in English, or never had one.  I gaze upon these names in ignorant awe.

I have often thought that it would be a great book blog project to sort through these and other old prize winners.  I do not believe it is my project.  Yet already comments in the previous post have me warily eying a long, recently translated Pontoppidan novel, the 1904 Lucky Per, which sounds either like a standard attempt to move Naturalism into Danish, or else something much stranger.  Hmm hmm hmm.

Please feel free to correct my errors and recommend more books.