The Settlers (3 page)

Even Karl Oskar’s material success is tainted. First, he never fully understands the emotional impact of his leaving his own aged parents in Sweden. By the same token, he is slow to grasp the irony of his statement to Kristina that his children one day will thank him for taking them to America, when in fact they grow up to marry into other ethnic groups and leave Karl Oskar behind much as he had left his own parents. Furthermore it is ironic that the period of Karl Oskar’s rising prosperity on his Minnesota farm corresponds to the general time of Kristina’s death. It is after Kristina’s passing that Karl Oskar seals his fate by questioning God for the second time in his life.

In addition, it bears mentioning that a recurring motif in Moberg’s nonfiction writings was his admiration for the spirit of enterprise he saw in Americans. Yet he was equally as shocked by what he perceived as their callous individualism and lack of sympathy for the less fortunate in society.
¹⁸
No character better embodies these traits than Karl Oskar, whose qualities of diligence and practicality are counterbalanced by his impatience with and lack of understanding for Robert, the incurable dreamer. Karl Oskar is also skeptical about Native Americans because he considers them lazy.

The Emigrant Novels should be seen, in short, in their full realistic light. They are stories of blighted hopes as much as of personal fulfillment. Of all Moberg’s characters, only Ulrika and Jonas Petter gain a kind of lasting happiness. Most of the others (from Inga-Lena to Kristina) succumb soon after their arrival here or long before their time. In the end, Karl Oskar remains, old and lonely, residing in Minnesota in body only.

Moberg saw at firsthand the difficulty of ever totally adapting to a new culture. He remained forever Swedish, perhaps despite himself. And in his novels he dramatized the problems of adaptation. Still, more than any other Swedish writer he succeeded in bridging the gap between the Old and New Worlds, between Sweden and Minnesota. The great resurgence of ethnic interest among Swedish Americans and their relatives in Sweden, which began in the 1950s and 1960s, was triggered largely by the Emigrant Novels.

Moberg strove to debunk the old heroic myths of Swedish history. But in his tales of the immigrants to Minnesota, he succeeded in his own right in creating a significant popular image. The figures of Karl Oskar and Kristina, the ultimate commonfolk, speak so powerfully to our imagination that they assume a dimension larger than life. Like many other contrasts in his life, this ironic twist would have hit home with Vilhelm Moberg and appealed to his literary sensibility.

Moberg’s writing style has been a subject of discussion since the 1960s when critic Gunnar Brandell denied him a place among the great creative artists of modern Swedish literature. According to Brandell, Moberg wrote a solid everyday prose that did not adequately express shades of difference or depict characters in sufficient depth. Moberg lacked “lyrical resources,” Brandell concluded.
¹⁹

Since that time several writers have defended Moberg’s writing style. Gunnar Heldén pointed out Moberg’s strengths in dealing with three central motifs in classic lyricism: nature, love, and death.
²⁰
Sven Delblanc described Moberg’s prose style as
en poesi i sak,
that is, a style that pays steady attention to small details, thus creating a harmony and poetry of everyday life without reliance on the neat turning of phrases or on striking images.
²¹
Finally, Philip Holmes explained Moberg’s use of alliteration, phrase-pairs, and repetition in his prose. These devices allowed Moberg to slow his narrative tempo and to strive “for clarity and fullness of expression.”
²²

Holmes described the Old Testament and the medieval Swedish laws as major influences on Moberg’s writing style. Moberg strove in his prose to produce the thought patterns of rural people from the nineteenth century. Although unlettered, these people were confronted with and forced to sort out a new world of impressions and complicated emotions. Moberg’s task was to give a realistic voice to his characters. His success in finding this voice speaks for his creativity.

Roger McKnight

Gustavus Adolphus College

NOTES

1
. Magnus von Platen,
Den unge Vilhelm Moberg En levnadsteckning
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1978), 310.

2
. Vilhelm Moberg, “Där jag sprang barfota,”
Berättelser ur min levnad
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1968), 29–46.

3
. Von Platen,
Den unge Vilhelm Moberg,
9.

4
. Moberg, “Från kolbitar till skrivmaskin,”
Berättelser ur min levnad,
119.

5
. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,”
Berättelser ur min levnad,
292.

6
. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” 293, 298.

7
. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” 294. For similar comments in English, see: Moberg, “Why I Wrote the Novel About Swedish Emigrants,”
Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly
17 (Apr. 1966): 63.

8
. Gunnar Eidevall,
Vilhelm Mobergs emigrantepos
(Stockholm: Norstedts, 1974), 19–20.

9
. For discussions of Moberg’s research methods, see Philip Holmes,
Vilhelm Moberg
(Boston: Twayne, 1980), 110–32; Ingrid Johanson, “Vilhelm Moberg As We Knew Him,”
Bulletin of the American Swedish Institute
(Minneapolis), no. 11 (1956); Bertil Hulenvik,
Utvandrarromanens källor: Förteckning över Vilhelm Mobergs samling av källmaterial,
ed. Ulf Beijbom (Växjö: House of Emigrants, 1972).

10
. Don Josè [pseud.], “Vilhelm Mobergs amerikabagage nära att gå till Europahjälpen,”
Svenska Dagbladet,
June 4, 1948, p. 11.

11
. Sven Åhman, “Vilhelm Moberg ser på USA,”
Nordstjernan,
May 26, 1949.

12
. Gustaf Lannestock,
Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika
(Stockholm: Zindermans, 1977), 36. Much of our knowledge of Moberg’s life in America is derived from the two men’s correspondence and from this volume.

13
. For works in English detailing Moberg’s impressions of America, see Moberg,
The Unknown Swedes: A Book About Sweden and America, Past and Present,
ed. and trans. Roger McKnight (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); McKnight, “The New Columbus: Vilhelm Moberg Confronts American Society,”
Scandinavian Studies
64 (Summer 1992): 356–88. Moberg expressed many of his opinions in letters to Lannestock; these letters are now in the House of Emigrants in Växjö, Sweden, and are referred to in “The New Columbus.” See also Lannestock,
Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika
(in Swedish). My comments here and five paragraphs below are based on these works.

14
. Moberg,
Min svenska historia
(Stockholm: Norstedts, 1971), 1:14.

15
. Sigvard Mårtensson,
Vilhelm Moberg
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1956), 202.

16
. Sven Delblanc, “Den omöjliga flykten,”
Bonniers litterära magasin
42, no. 6 (Dec. 1973), 267.

17
. Rochelle Wright, “Vilhelm Moberg’s Image of America,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1975), 34–40.

18
. McKnight, “The New Columbus,” 384.

19
. Gunnar Brandell,
Svensk Litteratur 1900–1950: Realism och Symbolism
(Stockholm: Förlaget Örnkrona, 1958), 261.

20
. Gunnar Heldén, “Vilhelm Mobergs lyriska resurser,”
Emigrationer: En bok till Vilhelm Moberg 20-8-1968
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1968), 215–29.

21
. Delblanc, “Den omöjliga flykten,” 266.

22
. Holmes,
Vilhelm Moberg,
126.

Introduction to
The Settlers

Moberg gave the Swedish title
Nybyggarna
to this the third and longest volume of his epic series.
The Settlers
is a direct translation of the original title. Moberg finished the novel in 1956 at his home at Väddö, north of Stockholm. By that time he had given up on his attempt to settle in America and was again residing in Europe.

The novelist’s initial plans called for
The Settlers
to be the final volume of a trilogy. He decided to expand his series to a fourth book only when he realized that the immensity of his subject matter “required approximately 1,000 pages in addition to the scope planned [for the Emigrant Novels] from the beginning.”
¹

Moberg’s dissatisfaction with the American publisher Simon and Schuster’s editing and marketing of his books increased in the mid-1950s. This disappointment was partly due to the fact that sections of
The Settlers
and
The Last Letter Home
were left out or shortened in the American version, published in 1961. Moberg complained to his translator Lannestock that his novels had been “castrated” by the publisher. The novelist added that he would leave America out of all his future literary plans.
²

One of Moberg’s most serendipitous moments in Minnesota occurred several years before he began writing
The Settlers.
He came into contact with a friend who directed him to the Minnesota Historical Society archives, where he found the journals of Andrew Peterson, a Swede who emigrated from the province of Östergötland in 1849 and arrived in Carver County, Minnesota, in 1854.
³
Peterson staked out a claim near present-day Waconia, married a Swedish woman from the area, and farmed there until his death in 1898.

Peterson was unique in that he wrote a daily journal in Swedish for forty-four years. He recorded family activities, farm doings, and church life. He also gave brief details about confrontations with Native Americans in 1862 and concerns about the Civil War. Moberg took copious notes on Petersons journals and used information in Petersons nine ledger volumes to form the skeletal outline of Karl Oskar’s life in Minnesota.
⁴

It is in
The Settlers
that Moberg begins to develop this Peterson-like outline. The details of farm life presented in the chapter “Man and Woman in the Territory” illustrate this development. Karl Oskar’s listing of his years’ harvests in “Starkodder the Ox” is also representative of the type of information found in Peterson’s journal in regard to everyday farm life. While the Peterson journals supplied Moberg with little imaginative material, they gave him much purely factual information about crops, harvests, and seasonal activities on a nineteenth-century Minnesota farm.

The chapter “Starkodder the Ox” also illustrates how Moberg combined historical knowledge with his literary imagination. In an 1849 issue of the
Minnesota Pioneer,
Moberg found a true story of a settler, caught in a snowstorm, who killed two oxen and placed his dying sons in the warm carcasses, only to see the boys freeze to death anyway.
⁵
Karl Oskar performs the same action with Starkodder in an effort to save his son Johan.

Despite the rougher aspects of frontier life depicted in
The Settlers,
Moberg remained sensitive to the needs of family life, especially to the concerns of women. He took great pains to portray Kristina’s spirituality and Ulrika’s increasing Americanization. Through the first ten years of settlement, the immigrants encounter the religious and ethnic diversity of America. In addition comes the realization that they will never see Sweden again. While Ulrika faces these situations head-on (she is almost literally born again), Kristina more introspectively places her faith in predestination and the will of God.

Moberg put an equal amount of care into his descriptions of Arvid’s and Robert’s fates. Where Moberg could be rather unsympathetic to some of his more dominant male characters, he showed a sensitivity toward weaker, less fortunate males that is remindful of his kind portrayal of Kristina and Ulrika. Although Moberg saw the folly of Arvid’s and Robert’s adventures in the West, he sympathized nonetheless with their plight. It seems clear, in fact, that if Karl Oskar was a persona for Moberg’s practical side, Robert represented the author’s imaginative, creative bent.

In earlier versions of
The Settlers,
Moberg included a note to American readers explaining that he had prioritized the needs of literature above purely geographical facts. Moberg wrote: “In the interests of fiction I have taken certain liberties with geography, time and distance in the passages describing the travels of Robert and Arvid.”
⁶
Behind this somewhat mysterious note lies a small episode. Lannestock pointed out to Moberg that since Missouri has no deserts it was not possible to have Arvid die as he does in the novel. Moberg replied that the location of the event did not matter since he was writing a symbolic tale. Neither Lannestock’s nor Simon and Schusters repeated protests convinced Moberg to change the location of the episode involving Arvid. Lannestock wrote of the affair as an uncharacteristic lapse in Moberg’s exacting efforts to achieve verisimilitude. The above-mentioned note was a compromise worked out between Moberg, his agent, and the publisher.
⁷