Martin Birck’s Youth

To
A. G. H. Spiers
Critical friend
Friendly critic
This volume is cordially dedicated
By the translator

Preface

It is a sad thought that everyone cannot enjoy Söderberg, that this master of delicate and incisive realism, this prince of humorists, is—for Anglo-Saxons, at least—an acquired taste. But it is well to face at the outset the fact that Söderberg is a European Continental, an Anatole France of Sweden. To those who believe that a man is unvirile or at least anemic if he refuses to believe in human perfectibility this attitude toward life will seem barren and depressing, one to encourage discouragement. How much pleasanter to feel with Pippa, not only at 7 a.m. on a May morning, but at all hours and seasons, that “all’s right with the world”! To insinuate the contrary is to give sanction to those doubts which, if they overtake even the most confident of us at unguarded moments, should all the more be repressed. What is culture if it is not sweetness and light? Listen to Söderberg: “Why all this optimism when not one of the old problems is solved?” And again, one of his characters affirms, “I believe in the lust of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul.”

We read fiction for pleasure. What does this new Swedish novelist offer in compensation for a somewhat despondent view of life? He himself rather hesitates to tell us and in this very hesitation we may, if the faculty be in us, discern one of his chief attractions. Söderberg is reticent because he wishes to present the truth as he sees it without exaggeration and without prejudice. He colors his picture neither with the golden glow of the untroubled believer nor with the red zeal of the revolutionary. He is honest to such a degree that he will not stress his own honesty. On the contrary, he doubts his very doubt: “How could I, a boy of sixteen, be right and all my elders and betters wrong?” And again in Martin Birck, “he was not quite certain that truth in itself could produce happiness, but history had taught him that illusion created unhappiness and crime.” And yet all the more from this unobtrusiveness we divine the intellectual honesty of the skeptic, which bursts out only once in the present novel: “Would a man never come who did not sing, but spoke, and spoke plainly!” Such a man has the right to “paint the thing as he sees it,” to revalue the time-honored beliefs and customs of the past in the light of his own experience.

We may, I think, trust in Söderberg’s fidelity to his vision as in that of few living writers. He collects his data carefully and transmits them simply. In that there is always stimulus to a reader who appreciates how difficult it is to do. But he might do all this and be no more than a good photographer.

As we follow the everyday run of events in Martin Birck, we may at first be impressed with their perfect verisimilitude and yet incline to class the author as unoriginal. In that respect, though probably in no other, the prose of Söderberg resembles the poetry of Wordsworth. Few readers will progress more than a page or two without that sense of the significant in the commonplace which is the very soul of originality. Söderberg has followed the famous counsel of Flaubert to De Maupassant: “Look at an object until you have seen in it everything that anyone else can see, and then look until you perceive what no one else has seen!” Rarely has any prose been fuller of implications—emotional, psychological, moral—than Söderberg’s. To reread him is invariably to be surprised at all one has missed before. One passes through life with him as one might walk through a meadow with a great naturalist or stroll through a city at night with Whistler. The trivial is clothed with meaning, the habitual is touched with magic. The world of Söderberg lives; it lives in beauty.

And as one grows more and more conscious of the author’s pregnance in matter, one is equally delighted with the perfect consonance of his manner. He gives not only the thing in itself, but the feel of the thing, the overtone. His curious felicity is never startling or precious, it is simply adequate. How far this may be recaptured in translation may of course be an open question. Here at least is an attempt from the short story “Margot”:

It was a cool night in the early part of October. The moon was up; a cold, moist wind was blowing. The big buildings on Blasieholm formed a dark mass, whose broken and irregular edge seemed to be catching at the wisps of cloud that drove forward against a deep-blue background. The still, heavy water of Nybro Inlet mirrored a broad glittering moonpath in oily rings, and along the wharves the lumber sloops raised a thin and motionless forest of masts and tackle. In the upper air was haste and tumult; the clouds hunted each other from west to east, till over the woods of Djurgården they congested into a low black wall. It was as if Heaven were breaking camp for a journey, for a flight.

The reader of Martin Birck will find any number of similar passages, in description, character-drawing and the power of the author to express his own reactions on life and art.

What manner of man is this quiet interpreter of the life about him? Hjalmar Söderberg was born in Stockholm, 1869. The outward tenor of his way has been uneventful. After trying journalism in a provincial town he tired of “serving caviar to the Boeotians” and returned to his native city, the background of nearly all his work. He first achieved distinction in the “Storiettes,” miniature stories usually told in the first person and based on some casual incident of daily life. In this form he is unsurpassed. Martin Birck, his first novel, published in 1907, was partly inspired by Niels Lyhne, the work of his elder Danish contemporary, J. P. Jacobsen, but was mainly autobiographical. Söderberg was also influenced by the modern French novelists, especially Flaubert, Maupassant and Anatole France. The last named he translated. He wrote two other novels, Dr. Glas and The Serious Game, and two plays, Gertrud and The Hour of Fate, besides numerous collections of short stories. His last long book is Jehovah’s Fire, an historico-religious narrative. Some early poems and a small sheaf of criticism complete the tally of his rather moderate output. Of recent years he has been living in Copenhagen. He has never married.

How little this dry recital of facts has to do with the real case in point! The genius of Söderberg is inherent in the temperament of the man. In appearance he is homely, stoutish, and suave, a bit Bohemian but decidedly a gentleman. Quiet, observant, unpretentious, and rather indolent, he gives an impression of infinite leisure and tolerance which is largely borne out by his writing. His mind is a rich, seemingly passive soil, in which small events take root and grow, as it were, without an effort on his part. Therein lies the unique charm of his stories; their unforced, organic quality.

But in the simplicity of Söderberg there is infinite subtlety. He lets life speak through him because he realizes that in the last analysis nothing speaks as persuasively as life. In his presentation there is a skill beyond praise. With all his naturalism and tranquillity of style, he gives us great moments, moments of profound insight, of wistful loveliness, of quaint and surprising humor. After all, things do not choose themselves or arrange themselves in right relation on the canvas; they only seem to do so. Without obtruding his personality Söderberg speaks to the mind and emotions of his audience in no uncertain terms.

What does he give us finally? First, perhaps, the delight of seeing nature and humanity clearly and the greater delight of entering imaginatively into the essence of both. His truth has the beauty of understanding. We find that life does not need to be idealized to be beautiful; it needs only to be realized. And as a corollary he gives us a sympathy in this manifestation which is not unlike that of Whitman, for it is the sympathy of acceptance. There is a tone of sadness, sometimes of almost tragic depth, in the knowledge of “what man has made of man,” and with it a smile of forgiveness. What we understand we pardon. Men and women are lovable in spite of, largely no doubt because of, their mistakes.

But also men and women are irresistibly funny. Söderberg has almost exactly the mood of Jaques in As You Like It. But whereas Jaques is dry, Söderberg is sly, with an ingenuous slyness that never, as with Sterne, slips off into a leer. How he enjoys letting his people amuse us, in watching with us their self-important gestures, the eternal passions that fade away in a month or a year, their curious delusions about fame and money and respectability! If these people could see themselves! And as we look, we may perhaps be a little mortified to see ourselves. How foolishly we have wasted our energies and annoyed those about us, for what? Perhaps we shall be a little more lenient to the faults of others from now on. The laughter which Söderberg evokes is thoughtful laughter.

Are we then given no positive impulse, is there no meaning in life, nothing worth striving for? “Perhaps not,” says Söderberg. And yet, pessimist though he is, he has a reticent pride of his own. He cannot, we feel, tell a lie, cannot force anyone in his stories to do or think anything that is not in character. Furthermore, he adumbrates through the philosophy of Martin the ideal of writing “so that each and all who really cared to could understand him.” And, like most of Söderberg’s simple statements, that means considerably more than appears on the surface.

Enough, perhaps more than enough, has been said to indicate the mood for best enjoying Martin Birck. To call further attention to details would only tend to spoil the pleasure of those attempered to appreciate it. I must return to the original statement that the reader’s reaction to it will be peculiarly personal. For myself, I differ almost completely from the author in his conclusions about life, I object strongly to his rather supine attitude, yet I admire and love him. I find him as brilliant as the modern French masters, and much more kindly. He has given me more than have nine-tenths of the worthy authors with whom I agree. There is in him a strict sense of truth, a tenderness, a humor which put him definitely on the side of the angels. He will annoy, will scandalize, many excellent people, but I am afraid I am not sorry that he should. He has been called the enfant terrible of Swedish literature. Perhaps we have been taking him too seriously; no doubt he himself will think so. After all, there is something perennially fascinating about a naughty child.

The Old Street

I

Martin Birck was a little child, who lay in his bed and dreamed.

It was twilight of a summer evening, a green and tranquil twilight, and Martin went holding his mother’s hand through a big and marvelous garden where the shadows lay dark in the recesses of the walks. On both sides grew strange blue and red flowers, swaying back and forth in the wind on their slender stalks. He went along holding his mother’s hand, looking at the flowers in wonder and thinking of nothing. “You must pick only the blue ones; the red ones are poisonous,” said his mother. Then he let go her hand and stopped to pick a flower for her; it was a big blue flower he wanted to pick, as it nodded heavily, poised on its stem. Such a marvelous flower! He looked at it and smelled it. And again he looked at it with big astonished eyes; it wasn’t blue, after all, but red. It was quite red! And such an ugly, poisonous red! He threw the naughty flower on the ground and trampled on it as on a dangerous animal. But then, when he turned around, his mother was gone. “Mamma,” he cried, “where are you? Where are you? Why are you hiding from me?” Martin ran a little way down the walk, but he saw no one and he was near to weeping. The walk was silent and empty, and it was getting darker and darker. At last he heard a voice quite near: “Here I am, Martin. Don’t you see me?” But Martin saw nothing. “Here I am all the time. Why don’t you come?” Now Martin understood: behind the lilac bush, that was where the voice came from. Why hadn’t he realized that at once? He ran there and peeped; he was sure his mother had hidden there. But behind the bush stood Franz from the Long Row, making an ugly face with his thick, raw-looking lips, till he finished by sticking out his tongue as far as he could. And such a tongue as he had; it got longer and longer; there was no end to it; and it was covered with little yellowish-green blisters.

Franz was a little rowdy who lived in the “Long Row” slantwise across the street. The Sunday before he had spat on Martin’s new brown jacket and called him “stuck-up.”

Martin wanted to run away, but stood as if rooted to the earth. He felt his legs grow numb beneath him. Then the garden and the flowers and the trees had vanished and he was standing alone with Franz in a dark corner of the yard at home by the ash barrel. He tried to scream, but his throat was constricted. …

II

But when he woke, his mother was standing by the bed with a clean white shirt in her hand and saying, “Up with you, little sleepyhead; Maria is off to school already. Don’t you remember that the pear tree in the yard is to be stripped today? You must hurry if you want to be there.”

Martin’s mother had blue eyes and brown hair, and at that time the glance of her eyes was still bright and smiling. She laid the shirt on the bed, nodded to him, and went out.

Maria was Martin’s big sister. She was nine. She went to school and already knew what many things were in French.

But Martin still had slumber in his eyes and the medley of the dream in his head, so that he couldn’t bring himself to get up.

The curtain was drawn back, and the sun shone straight into the room. The door to the kitchen stood ajar. Lotta was laughing at the kitchen window while she chatted with someone; it was sure to be Heggbom, the porter. Finally Heggbom began to sing down in the yard with his rummy voice.

“If I had King Solomon’s treasure chest
With money in heaps and masses,
I’d off to Turkey and never I’d rest
Till I’d bought me a hundred lasses.”

“What would you do with them all,” inquired Lotta; “you that can’t manage even your own wife?”

Martin couldn’t hear what Heggbom answered, but Lotta began to laugh with all her lungs. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she said.

Now the porter’s wife had come into the yard, it sounded as if she was throwing out a tub of dishwater. With that she began to scold Heggbom, and Lotta as well. But Lotta only laughed and slammed the window.

Martin lay half awake, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. There was a crack that was just like Mrs. Heggbom if one looked at it right.

The clock struck nine in the neighboring church, and when it had stopped striking, the clock in the hall began. Martin jumped out of bed and ran to the window to see if the pears were still on the tree.

The pear tree in the yard was beloved by the children and cats. It was old and large, and many of its boughs were already dry and dead, but the others still furnished blossoms and greenery every spring and fruit every autumn.