Unto A Good Land

by Vilhelm Moberg

  On the other hand some aspects of American life proved to be less agreeable. The oppressive summer heat, the perceived absence of a vital literary life among the common people, and the conservative religious politics of middle America were among Moberg’s earliest complaints. By the beginning of the 1950s, his dissatisfaction extended to the political sphere. He was angered by the disruption caused by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Communists and responded with disgust when Charlie Chaplin was expelled from the country for his leftist sympathies. In an exasperating personal confrontation in 1955, the Internal Revenue Service in New York required Moberg to deposit nine thousand dollars as a lien against possible back taxes before he could return to Sweden for a visit.

  Moberg’s general views on the United States were crystallized in his attitudes toward two states: Minnesota and California. He returned to Minnesota several times after his initial 1948 visit. He found the people hard-working. Swedish farmers in Minnesota had opened up more land for cultivation in a hundred years than farmers in Sweden had managed since the Viking Age, Moberg stated with pride. The Swedish settlement areas and the Småland-like countryside around Lindstrom in central Chisago County appealed to him. Visits to Swedish cemeteries in Minnesota inspired some of his most poetic nonfictional accounts of America as he imagined the lives and deaths of his beloved Swedish farmers in fields far from home.

  Everyday life in Minnesota proved to be more prosaic, however. Moberg lamented the drabness of the state’s small towns, and the November chill brought uncomfortable reminders of Sweden. Still, it was the intolerance and bigotry he found in the Lutheran churches of the Upper Midwest that provoked him most. In the long run, the climate of Minnesota, both meteorological and spiritual, proved to be too rigorous. The North Star State bore the unmistakable stamp, he wrote, of Calvin, Zwingli, and northern European puritanism.

  If Moberg had a love affair with America, it was with California. Beginning in the autumn of 1948 he lived in Carmel, where one of his American aunts rented a house to him. In the sunshine there and in close proximity to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Moberg basked in what he called the joyous spirit of Petrarch and Bocaccio. Here he completed The Emigrants and began Unto a Good Land.

  And it was here that he met Gustaf Lannestock, who became his translator. Lannestock was a native Swede who resided in Carmel, where he worked in real estate and collected rare books. They met by chance while walking on a California beach in the late 1940s. Moberg persuaded Lannestock to undertake the translation of the novels. Lannestock stayed with the translation project through the entire tetralogy. The friendship formed through this project lasted until Moberg’s death.

  Moberg was not to stay put, however. A case of wanderlust (which was to last seventeen years) had taken control of him, as he explained years later. He moved to Florida in 1953, then back to the Monterey-Carmel area, eventually to Laguna Beach in California, and even spent some time in Mexico, with short stops in New York interspersed. In 1955 he returned to Europe, bothered by the political and literary winds blowing in America and admitting his failure at adjusting to American culture. He completed the emigrant tetralogy in Europe.

  Themes in the Emigrant Novels

  Moberg had a strongly populist view of history and rejected the mythologizing “great man” approach so popular among Swedish historians and novelists before his time. He argued that older writers had praised the deeds of Swedish monarchs and statesmen in an effort to keep the commoners as loyal, unquestioning subjects of the ruling classes. This approach he described as historical casuistry and blamed it for creating feelings of “ultra-royalism,” “ultra-patriotism,” and “ultra-heroism.”14

  In the process of emigration, Moberg saw a historical movement set in motion and sustained by daring commoners who acted without a significant portal figure as their leader. Emigration changed history, according to this argument, in that it deprived Sweden of a cheap labor supply and aided America in the building of a new society. On a material plane, America is the land where people of modest means but the right abilities can thrive. Karl Oskar is undistinguished as a leader of men. He is only “one emigrant among many emigrants,” according to one critic.15 Yet he is successful as a farmer in America because he possesses the proper practical skills. Karl Oskar is thwarted in Sweden but sees his hard work rewarded with ever-increasing affluence in Minnesota.

  So interested was Moberg in this pioneering theme that he came to present his own actions in a similar, though more individualized, light. He wished to be viewed as the first in Sweden to practice the art of writing the documentary novel. Likewise, Moberg argued for his importance as the discoverer of the topic of Swedish emigration. Swedish scholars and writers before him had neglected the subject, he felt, because the movement revealed the Swedish government’s lack of foresight in failing to prevent it.

  Just as Karl Oskar stakes his claim in Chisago County four years before the first historical permanent settlement of Swedes there, so Moberg, by his own reckoning, turned virgin literary soil in depicting the lives of ordinary Swedish Americans in Minnesota. In this respect, Moberg’s fertile creative imagination took control over his otherwise strong sense of realism. While no critics have questioned the historical accuracy of the Emigrant Novels, it is clear that other writers (both Swedish and American) had preceded Moberg in recording Swedish settlement patterns in the United States. In fact, Moberg listed names of some of those researchers in his own bibliography for the novels.

  Still, Moberg’s faithful depiction of the lives of humble people involved in a historic undertaking remains constant throughout the Emigrant Novels. This narrative consistency is one of the strengths of the series.

  Reading the Emigrant Novels as a psycho-history of Moberg and his America is perhaps equally as instructive as searching for historical motifs. Scholars have often asked how Moberg’s personal impressions of America after 1948 influenced the directions his epic narrative takes. It is tempting to view the storyline as leading in a linear fashion from poverty and oppression in the Old World to affluence and freedom in the New World. A more complex set of psychological variables can be seen to enter the novels, however.

  In this connection, the Swedish novelist Sven Delblanc has pointed out how the dictates of realism led Moberg to conclude that the basic human condition is constant regardless of time and country.16 Likewise, Professor Rochelle Wright considered how Moberg—in spite of his early infatuation with America—often portrayed the new land as a “shadow kingdom,” a land to which one’s relatives disappeared, never to be heard from again. America was the great divider of families.17

  Karl Oskar and Kristina illustrate this theme. While Karl Oskar believes in their future in America with almost total optimism, Kristina sees their emigration as the abandonment of age-old traditions and the loss of an ancient Swedish birthright. Moberg never allowed the reader to forget Kristina’s homesickness for her native Småland.

  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 l
ack 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 arnerikabagage 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

  Unto a Good Land

  Moberg finished the second volume of the Emigrant Novels in 1952 in Carmel, California. The Swedish original bears the title Invandrarna (The Immigrants). The English-language version, Unto a Good Land, followed in 1954. The English title is taken from the Old Testament, Exodus 3:8, a passage absent from the beginning of the Swedish edition.

  A novel of passage, Unto a Good Land carries the immigrants to the margins of American settlement areas. Their first period in Minnesota consists of an elemental encounter with nature on the one hand and the difficulties of dealing with a new language on the other.

  The distance the immigrants have traveled and the strangeness of their new environment make their sense of isolation more intense. At the same time, they are delivered, as in the Old Testament story, into virgin territory, a land of milk and honey, where the promise of freedom becomes a reality.

  The narrative moves at a leisurely pace between New York and Minnesota. This pace gives Moberg an opportunity to depict the immigrants’ amazement at the bustle and perils of city life in America as well as the miracle of rail travel, Both of these aspects have historical validity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Sweden was still largely agricultural and lacked an urban culture. Stockholm, the capital, was an ethnically homogeneous town of barely one hundred thousand inhabitants. In addition, most Swedes of the 1840s and 1850s would never have seen a train before. Even though the steam engine was pioneered in Sweden, construction of the Swedish national rail lines lagged behind that of Britain and the continental European countries and was not completed until the 1880s.

  Other aspects of Moberg’s narrative are also based on historical fact. Olof Hedström (1803–77) was an early Swedish immigrant who converted to Methodism and became a minister to seamen around midcentury in New York. As Moberg writes, he ran the Bethel ship in New York harbor. There he took in newly arrived Swedes and helped them with advice abo
ut America. Hedstrom’s brother Jönas (1813–59) was also a Methodist, a resident of Victoria, Illinois. He worked with the church and in real estate in western Illinois. The brothers were instrumental in guiding many Swedish immigrants to areas settled by their countrymen in downstate Illinois, where the newcomers often bought farmland.1

  Swedes traveling to Minnesota before 1870 typically came up the Mississippi River from Illinois or Iowa. They arrived by steamboat at St. Paul or in the Stillwater area, as does Moberg’s fictional group. In the nineteenth century Minnesota had several areas of strong Swedish rural settlement. Among those were Red Wing–Vasa in the southeast and New Sweden–Bernadotte in Nicollet County. Most typical of all, however, were Washington and Chisago counties. While Stillwater was the region’s English-speaking trade center, the countryside surrounding it was Swedish in culture and language. Karl Oskar’s land-taking near Chisago Lake is in line with actual settlement patterns.

  The fact that Moberg’s characters have several of their most problematic encounters with Stillwater tradesmen and residents reflects historical differences between town and country in that part of Minnesota. In the nineteenth century, areas of Washington and Chisago counties were so totally Swedish speaking that contacts with English speakers occurred only when immigrants needed to carry out legal proceedings, make registrations at city hall, or trade in local stores.