Independent People (2 page)

Bjartur is for me one of the great twentieth-century literary characters—one of the immortals, like Humbert Humbert or Jay Gatz/Gatsby or Gregor Samsa or the four Makioka sisters. He is petty-minded and heroic; brutal and poetic; cynical and childlike. All these traits crystallize magnificently in the book’s great storm scene, in which Bjartur, gone off in search of a missing sheep, gets caught in a blizzard. Before it’s through, the storm will impose on Bjartur near-legendary trials. In the dead of the howling night, seeking to stay conscious, he turns to a characteristic refuge:

Ultimately, it’s a question of whether poetry—in combination with sheer cantankerousness—will suffice to keep Bjartur alive. He is reduced in the end to all fours, like the sheep he has searched for in vain:

At this moment, Bjartur might well consider himself alone in all the world. Were he to succumb to the blizzard, no one would know even where to search for his body. Indeed, he is still more alone than he realizes, since his wife—his first wife—is lying dead at home; she has bled to death in giving birth to Asta Sollilja.

Nonetheless, there
is
someone who has Bjartur uppermost in his mind—his maker, Laxness, who feels toward his creation so potent a blend of affection and exasperation that the books every page reverberates with the tension. And the reader, too, is tracking Bjartur’s every struggling step. For by the time you’ve passed through the storm with him, its almost impossible not to be rooting for that monomaniacal, unlovable, wonderfully stupid old bastard, Bjartur of Summerhouses.

When I tell people I meet that my favorite book by a living novelist is Halldór Laxness’s
Independent People
and am asked what its about, my reply is, “Sheep.” This is a story (I continue) in which farmers are forever analyzing sheep and examining sheep: it’s about tapeworm in sheep and lungworm in sheep and diarrhea in sheep. Whatever virtues the novel boasts, it’s bereft of glamour.

My reply is actually less facetious than might first appear, for while the book does keep large issues constantly in mind (the largest: mortality and memory and love and duty), it is also very much about dung and sheep-parasites; it sets the reader vividly, unforgettably, upon a farm. In Bjarturs household, there are no separate quarters for the animals, whose stinks and bleatings infiltrate even the dreams of the family. Any discoursing on the novel’s grander intentions must begin with the total, tactile claims of the land.

What is
Independent People
about? Like any big, great novel, it encourages a reader, earnestly wrestling with its scope, to encapsulate it into a single overarching theme. And like most big, great novels, it is varied enough that all such attempts soon come undone.
I’ve already said that at the heart of the book lies a war between father and daughter. But perhaps there is a still more pivotal subject: the war waged within a single spirit.
Independent People
presents the most gripping depiction I’ve ever encountered of the gradual, daily contraction of a human soul and its eventual salvation.

For in his victory over multiple adversity, in his slow and carefully husbanded prosperity, Bjartur somehow loses everything of import in his life. Near the close of the novel, he finds that he has attained his greatest dream—he has wealth enough to build a “proper home”—and he discovers his triumph is empty. Not only are both of his wives dead, but his children have died as well, or moved off. Finally Gvendur, his middle son—the boy he feels closest to—announces that he is emigrating to America. Bjartur is so disgusted he does not even rise from the trench where hes working in order to bid his son farewell.

And Bjartur is still standing in the mud when, a moment later, the entire novel realigns itself. Infinitesimally, everything turns. The book has presented the reader with cataclysmic events—deaths, betrayals, storms, love affairs—but when it reaches its climacteric, the narrative could hardly be quieter:

Bjartur may not yet realize it, but his life’s underpinnings have been removed. He has vowed to have nothing more to do with Asta Sollilja (Hasn’t she betrayed his trust? What matters it to him if she may be dying of consumption?), and he is a man who holds to his word absolutely. And yet he has, minutely, given way. He doesn’t quite know what is the nature of that irresistible force Asta Sollilja embodies (it is love), but the immovable object that is his own soul has been budged.

Bjartur’s soul dilates as slowly as it has heretofore narrowed. He is a man of resolute obliquity, who would never directly admit that he was wrong to have rejected Asta when she most needed him. So, as any wooer might, Bjartur begins his overtures toward Asta with a poem, which is delivered by Gvendur. It is an impacted verse of just the sort that Bjartur admires—tightly rhymed and alliterated—in which he speaks of a stone and of a flower that has “fled.” Asta Sollilja disdains the verses: “And tell him that I also know the empty, drivelling doggerel that he cudgels into shape with hands and feet. But I, I am engaged to a young man who loves me. He has been to school, and he is a modern poet.”

Modern poetry? Contemptibly lax in Bjartur’s eyes: “It’s just like diarrhea. End-rhymes and nothing more.” But merely so “no one shall say of me that I couldn’t write in these simple modern measures,” he prepares a second, more plainspoken poem for Asta, again to be delivered by Gvendur, and adds a postscript: “No, while there’s a breath of life left in me, nothing will make me go to her.” And a second postscript: “But if I die, you can tell her from me that she may gladly lay me out.”

Asta declares that she “can’t be bothered to listen to it,” and yet attends to it all the same. She then flies into a tirade—“while there’s a breath of life left in me, nothing will ever make me go back to Bjartur of Summerhouses,” but she, too, has an afterthought: “when I’m dead he may gladly bury my carrion for all that I care.”

Well—the two warring spirits already are largely reconciled. They are united eternally; in consigning their bones to each other, they have pledged their bond in the hereafter. It is merely in the little, fleeting business of life that they’re unworkably at odds—and the generous, ingenious way in which Laxness renders the unworkable
workable, effecting a reconciliation between father and daughter, constitutes the most intricate and moving scene in this most intricate and moving novel.

So brilliantly drawn are Bjartur and Asta that they risk overshadowing the book’s every other character. But with each rereading of the novel (six, and counting), I find myself marveling at just how accomplished is the entire supporting cast. There’s the credulous, book-loving Olafur of Yztidale, whose idolization of the printed word is such that he cannot conceive of a misprint; after consulting his almanac, he confidently announces to a group of fellow farmers that next year’s Easter will fall on a Saturday. And there’s the querulous Reverend Gudmundur, who “had bigoted opinions on every subject, but changed them immediately if anyone agreed with him.”

Even better—as good, in their way, as Bjartur and Asta—are Bjartur’s third son, Little Nonni, and Nonni’s grandmother. In this valley overlain by a supernatural curse, these two provide enchantment from a contrary, benign source. They are creatures straight out of a sunny fairy tale: he the enchanted third son, the dreamer, the one whose destiny is threaded with magic; and she the timeless, ageless crone, given to queer, perhaps vatic, pronouncements, who serves as fairy godmother.

They, too, have a “marriage” of sorts. They are not merely sleeping companions; they complete each other—give to each other some quality without which life would be lacking. For Nonni, the old woman represents a feminine clemency and a patient approval which he lost catastrophically with the death of his mother. For the old woman, there is the suspicion that Nonni alone hears her, as she mumbles and maunders through her day; he ties her to the land of the living. It isn’t as though the boy is actively listening to her prayers and her chants and her aphorisms. But the sounds of her voice are shaping him forever.

How do we know her voice will stay with him? You might think Nonni’s future would be a blank, given that he emigrates to America while still a boy, vanishing from our story. But as befits his status as the enchanted child of the fairy tale, Nonni is accorded special treatment within the narrative. Toward him alone, the novel repeatedly
looks forward: “And when later in life he thought of those days …,” “all his life through he remembered it, meditating upon it in secret…,”… the boy knew it well enough to remember it his whole life through.”

Before she died, Nonnis mother invested her son with a task whose implications neither he nor she fully understood:

But what can these stirring words,
sing for the whole world,
possibly mean to a little, ignorant Icelandic farm boy and his miserable, landlocked mother? Nonni knows only that this quest involves foreign countries, and when the opportunity to emigrate arises, he seizes it without hesitation. Slip of a boy though he may be, he approaches with gravity the maternal duty imposed by the elf-lady.

So Nonni disappears—only to remain. For he manages, present or absent, to suffuse the novel’s every page: this boy who “in years that were yet to come … relived this memory in song” is the presiding genius of the book. He departs from the valley that he might learn to sing—and though the authorial hints are subtle, they also look unmistakable: Nonni has ventured forth in the world in order to write books like … like
Independent People.
Whether or not Nonnis boyhood circumstances mesh with Laxnesss, he is a clear stand-in for the author. Quietly, almost parenthetically, Laxness remarks of Nonni that he is fated to become “greater than all other Icelanders.” Its a roundabout and comely act of self-assertion.

Nonnis personality is set off strikingly by his older brother, Helgi, his soul’s dark twin. The two boys are “complementary
antitheses.” They are both philosophers, given to elongated musings about religion and what would happen if time were to stop. But while the older boy is the unquestioned leader, a seeming tower of physical strength, it is he and not Nonni who will crack and shatter in the end. Nonni’s softness will, paradoxically, protect him, for in his dreaminess lies his refuge from life’s cruelty and rapacity. Helgi comes undone at his mother’s death. Nothing, not even prayer to the elves in the rocks, will restore her, and he arrives, in his earnest boy-philosophers way, at a terrifying nihilism. He claims to have seen Kolumkilli, the ghost-spirit who haunts the valley:

Helgi will nearly destroy the farm—bring ruination upon them all—before disappearing in the snow in a murky act of suicide. The presiding witch of the valley, Kolumkilli’s bloodthirsty mate Gunnvor, has claimed another victim. It seems the cycle is never to be broken. And yet little Nonni carries within himself the seeds of a magic greater than that of any fiend: he is, dawningly, the poet, the tale-bearer, the bard. The independent people of Nonni’s family will be redeemed by
Independent People.
He will rescue them all through the high-soaring sorcery of Art.

When Laxness buoyantly referred to himself, by way of a stand-in, as “greater than all other Icelanders,” he was making a claim that in time would become so overwhelmingly true as to look like an understatement. Given Iceland’s tiny size and its subordinate role in modern history (it did not declare independence from Denmark until 1944), its hardly surprising that Laxness is generally perceived not only as the country’s foremost artist of the century, but as its most influential citizen. He looms larger than any modern statesman or religious figure. Not merely through his fiction but through his journalism and essays and political stands, he has shaped the mores of his rapidly changing nation.

The reader who comes, unexpectedly, on the book of his life is apt to feel that nobody else fully appreciates it. This is an illogical feeling, of course—but why should our passion for books show any more sense than our passion for people? I’m continually having to rein in a boastful suspicion that I alone am
Independent People’s
ideal reader …