World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  That this new beginning should coincide with the arrival of one Júel J. Júel, a scheming confederate of the manager’s—the man with the marvelous broad-brimmed hat—is, we suspect, a slyly effective commentary by Laxness on what Marx characterized as the witchcraft of economics. ríhross, who would bring the marvels of modern capitalism to the village, is also the guiding spirit of the Psychic Research Society. To raise money for their plan to capitalize the Regeneration Company, Júel and ríhross, like any good mafiosi, insure the Palace at Summerlands for a huge sum of money and then arrange to have it burned to the ground, leaving Ólafur once again homeless. Very shortly thereafter—such is the pattern of “coincidence” in the poet’s life—he receives a letter from Jarþrúður, who he has not seen since the long-ago night of Jónas’s wedding, and who now insists that he honor the promise he made to one day marry her. Ólafur, as ever, capitulates before the power of the word. With this paired turn of events Laxness has everything in place for the third book.

  The title of this third book, “The House of the Poet,” can be interpreted both literally and figuratively. Literally it designates the next phase of Ólafur’s tormented pilgrimage. Some time after the destruction of the Palace of the Summerlands—insurance money from which has now rejuvenated the Regeneration Company, boosting Pétur ríhross in his monopolistic ambitions—we find Ólafur and Jarþrúður living in their own little shack, called “The Heights.” Things have changed. While Jarþrúður is still his “intended,” they have a child, Margrét, a sickly little girl much beloved by Ólafur. The passing of five years has brought the poet responsibilities, and with these a much more complicated relation to his soul’s vocation. Writes Laxness, modulating as he does so effectively from the idiom of daily life to a rich prophetic cadence: “If it ever happened that the poet felt a little obstinate and complacent, perhaps even touched with a certain arrogance at being a poet, such feelings vanished the moment his intended started to cry—not to mention if the little girl started crying as well. It was hard to say which was strongest in the poet’s soul—the desire to please or the fear of hurting. When happiness came to this poet in his solitary moments, he was free and did not have a house. When he saw before him their tear-stained faces, he suddenly had a house. To be alone, that is to be a poet. To be involved in the unhappiness of others, that is to have a house” (326–327).

  But the pull of poetry, the spirit, what Ólafur calls “the Voice,” remains powerful, declaring its own imperatives: “Every time he was allowed to go out, and not on some routine errand connected with his livelihood or his home, it was as if he were being given the world for a little while. However small a digression it was from his everyday routine, the Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice as of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned” (336–337).

  Again, Laxness sets into stark opposition the claims of the world and the claims of the spirit. The world, for Ólafur, is both the domestic—his suffocating, sorrowful bond to Jarþrúður and his genuine love for Margrét, who will soon be taken by illness—and the public, the societal. In these next pages the conflict between union forces and property—socialism and capitalism, if you will—will come to a head, first with the stand-off between the ríhross’s organization, the so-called Society of True Iceland (its nationalist chauvinism obviously, but not exclusively, a phenomenon of the Thirties) and the Laborers, who are cast by their adversaries as nonpatriotic agitators. Though Ólafur struggles to stay uninvolved, he is pressured from both sides— by his friend Örn as well as by Jarþrúður, who has thrown in her lot with the Society.

  While there are escalating protests and threats of work stoppage, the full-out battle never quite materializes—scandal at a distance destroys the financial structure of the Society and the workers ultimately get their most basic demands met. Orchestrating the conflict in its local terms, moving between straight-on and satirical scenes of agitation and encounter, Laxness has given the forces at large in Europe and America their particular Icelandic refraction.

  Laxness had himself turned to socialism during a two-year stay in America in the late 1920s, which not surprisingly put him at odds with many sectors of his society, and this third book puts on display the two very different strains of his writing sensibility. The passionate rhetoric of Örn carries no sarcastic undertones: “He who doesn’t choose justice isn’t human. I have little fondness for that pity which the coward calls love . . . What is love? If a loving person sees someone’s eye being gouged out, he howls as if his own eye were being gouged out. On the other hand he isn’t moved at all if he sees powerful liars utterly rob a whole people of their sight and thereby their good sense as well” (408).

  But there is a deep division in this author, for he asks us to heed the unmistakable passion of Ólafur, too. When he is roused to speech at a public meeting, he declares that “whoever is a poet and a scholar loves the world more than all others do, even though he has never owned a share in a boat, yes, and not even managed to be classed as a quarryman. The fact is that it is much more difficult to be a poet and write poetry about the world than it is to be a man and live out in the world. You hump rocks for next to no pay and have lost your livelihood to thieves, but the poet is the emotion of the world, and it is in the poet that all men suffer” (301). Is this a contradiction or is there a strange fusion of the transpersonal, a deep compatibility between the views of the political idealist and those of the martyr poet?

  If Laxness lets the political struggle resolve the tumult of concrete circumstance—a nod to the determining power of concrete circumstances and Marxian materialism—his working through of the opposition between the world and the spirit is a good deal more ambiguous and suggestive.

  This latter conflict is given its final and most wrenching twist in “The Beauty of the Heavens,” the last book of World Light. As the section opens, Ólafur and Jarþrúður have relocated to the remote community of Bervík. They are now married. Ólafur’s last-ditch effort to dissolve the unhappy relationship and send Jarþrúður away has failed and he has concluded that for better or worse—mostly worse—they are fated to be together. He now tries to salvage a life for himself by working as a district schoolmaster. But it is this very engagement that leads to his undoing. Staying the night at the home of one of his pupils, Ólafur ends up getting into the girl’s bed, and in short order his indiscretion is discovered. He is accused of sexual assault, tried, convicted, and sent away to the capital city, Reykjavík, to serve out a prison sentence. The most unworldly of men—here is a true Dostoevskian touch—finally has his face pushed down into the vile muck of the world. He is guilty and he must pay, and there is not a vestige of uplift to be found.

  But Laxness, ever maneuvering his oppositions and tensions, has in fact set the poet up for his tragic apotheosis. If the crime was carnal— the result of his desperate yearning for womanly solace, even if in the bed of a precocious adolescent—the final release will be overwhelmingly spiritual. Spiritual and romantic, I should say. In his last days of confinement, when he has done plumbing abjection, coming to know and befriend some of the vilest of his country’s citizens, he has a prophetic dream in which his admired poet Sigurður Breiðfjörd appears before him in a golden chariot: “And he spoke four words. He spoke one mysterious name. This name echoed through that myth-like dream, and in a flash it was woven with letters of fire across the soul’s heaven: ‘Her name is Bera’ ” (559).

  Soon after, when Ólafur is preparing to board the ship that will return him to his village, he sees a young woman waiting in the crowd, and is instantly smitten. He recognizes the hand of his fate. Laxness’s description captures, yet again, the poet’s fundamental innocence and unworldlin
ess, not to mention his susceptibility to beauty: “She was wearing a light coat, bareheaded, with quite a large suitcase by her side. What attracted his attention before anything else was the youthful freshness of her skin, the unbelievable wholesomeness of her coloring; yet she was closer to being pale than ruddy. Although something in the skin was related to the creaminess of summer growth, she was nonetheless closer to the plants, especially those which bear so tender a flower that the lightest touch leaves a mark. To protect her, Nature had covered her with a sort of magic helmet of invisibility . . .” (564). Making her acquaintance, Ólafur insists that her name is Bera, though she denies it.

  Ólafur’s spiritual longing has become tyrannical in him. Nothing will sway him from the conviction that this girl is his destiny. What is remarkable is that she seems willing enough to accept the intensity of his attentions:

  “Don’t you think it funny that we should be alone here in a strange place?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “What about you?”

  “In reality we have never existed until this moment,” he said.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said.

  “You and I were somewhere else before, certainly; but not We,” he said. “Nor the place, either. Today the world was born.”

  “Now you’re trying to frighten me again,” she said, but looked at him and smiled a little, so that he would not think she was angry (574).

  Their shipboard relationship, erotically charged but Platonic—if this is not a contradiction—is magical. Knowing that they must soon part, Ólafur nonetheless draws closer and closer to what feels to him like the purpose of his life. Meeting the girl on the deck one night, he realizes: “With one glance the eyes of beauty, wiser than all books, could wipe away all the anxiety, guilt and remorse of a whole lifetime. She had come to see him in the secrecy of this night to rehabilitate him, to give him the right to live a new life where beauty would reign alone” (583).

  But of course a love like this cannot survive. The two part, as they must. And when he returns to Bervík, heartsick with longing, Ólafur tries to resume his old life as best he can. He is consumed by longing for his Bera. Then one day he hears from his old messenger friend, Reimar, now a traveling postman, that his beloved is dead. He refuses the information: It cannot be.

  The last two chapters of the book take us out of the known world, the world that has caused Ólafur so much confusion and suffering, and in two great lurches lifts us free. Chapter 24 presents without commentary a fourteen-line poem, Ólafur’s deep response to the news he has received. Denying the ultimate reality of death, he writes:

  And though the hands that freed me now are dust And death’s cold handshake holds them in its grip,

  It doesn’t harm my song; my memory of thee Has taken root forever in my mind, Of tenderness and love and mercy kind, Just as you were when first you came to me; (595)

  Typical romantic sentiments, one might say, expressions of the common conceit that love is deathless and memory prevails over the eroding action of circumstance. But the short final chapter brings together the poet’s artistic faith and his deepest resolve, the resolve which turns sentiment into the most profound resolution. Ólafur, having followed the peculiarly twisting path of his fate, can now set forth to embrace his death. He sets off on an undefined journey across the great glacier that has loomed over his home; in a short while he has left the familiar coordinates of the old world behind:

  “Over the ocean, black clouds started gathering. He continued on, onto the glacier, towards the dawn, from ridge to ridge, in deep, new-fallen snow, paying no heed to the storms that might pursue him. As a child he had stood by the seashore at Ljósavík and watched the waves soughing in and out, but now he was heading away from the sea. ‘Think of me when you are in glorious sunshine.’ Soon the day of resurrection will shine on the bright paths where she awaits her poet.

  “And beauty shall reign alone.” (598)

  Somehow the term “suicide” does not do justice to Ólafur’s last decision. Suicide is an act of vengeance against the self. When Gerald Crich walked away into the snowfields in Lawrence’s Women In Love, that was suicide, a willed cutting the self away from life, an expression of utter despair. Ólafur’s end asks to be viewed poetically, as a continuation, a plunge taken, in full confidence, toward what he believes is a higher realization. The terms are elusive. The closing passage speaks of “resurrection,” but not in a Christian sense so much as an ultimate romantic apotheosis, the eternal union of lover and beloved. It also invokes beauty as the highest of all ideals—beauty as the perfect material manifestation of spirit. And this is fitting, for from the earliest days, back when he was a boy just coming into consciousness, Ólafur has found in beauty the poet’s truest intimation: that there is a purpose behind the screen of appearances; that the world is intended, not arbitrary. The recognition of the power of beauty made Ólafur a poet, and now—we very much want to believe—beauty will become his place of rescue. The world light of the title is the light that shines through from elsewhere, and Ólafur’s last leap is toward trusting it absolutely.

  BOOK ONE

  THE REVELATION OF THE DEITY

  1

  He was standing on the foreshore below the farm with the oyster catchers and purple sandpipers, watching the waves soughing in and out. He was probably shirking. He was a foster child, and therefore the life in his heart was a separate life, a different blood, without relationship to the others. He was not part of anything, he was on the outside, and there was often an emptiness around him. And long ago he had begun to yearn for some indefinable solace. This narrow bay with its small blue shells and the waves gently rippling in over the sand, with the cliffs on one side and a green headland on the other— this was his friend. It was called Ljósavík.

  Did he have no one, then? Was no one kind to him except this little bay? No, no one was kind to him. But on the other hand, no one was downright unkind to him, not so that he had to fear for his life. That did not come until later. When he was teased, the teasing was mostly in fun; the difficulty was in knowing how to take it. When he was thrashed, the thrashing arose from necessity; it was Justice. But there were many things which did not concern him, thank goodness. For instance the elder brother, Jónas, who owned several sheep and a share in a fishing boat, once threw a basin of water over his mother, Kamarilla, as she was going down the stairs one evening. That was nothing to be concerned about. But when the younger brother, Júst, who was also a sheep-farmer and boat-owner, amused himself by picking him up by the ears because it was such fun finding out how much pain the dear little chap could stand, that did concern him, unfortunately.

  In springtime the brothers dug holes through the overhanging banks of the river farther up the valley and guddled for trout; then they threw the living fish at the boy toddling unsuspectingly nearby and shouted, “It bites!” That made him frightened, and the brothers found that great fun. In the evening they put one of these fiendish trout in an old wooden bucket right beside his bed. He thought the devil himself was in that pail. That night when he tried to sneak downstairs in mortal terror to take refuge with his foster mother, they cried, “The trout will jump out of the pail and bite you!”

  “They’re just making it up,” said the housekeeper, Karítas, the mother of the farm girl, Kristjána.

  Then the boy did not know whom to believe. You see, he could not be sure about anything these two women told him. They had very protruding eyes. Once he forgot himself when he had been sent to fetch a pony; he had been thinking about God and watching two birds paddling around on the foreshore. Needless to say he was thrashed for shirking. But while his foster mother was bringing out the birch from under her pillow, the widow Karítas felt constrained to say, “Serves him right, the lazy little so-and-so!” And young Kristjána added, “Yes, he’s always shirking!”

  But when he was thrashed he was never smacked very hard, only just a little because God’s justice is inescapable: God punis
hes all those who shirk. When the thrashing was over, he pulled up his trousers and wiped away his tears and sniffed. His foster mother went downstairs to see to the evening meal. Then the widow Karítas came over and patted his cheek and said, “Pooh, God doesn’t care at all, you poor wretch—as if He had time to bother about that!” Young Kristjána groped inside her bodice and brought out a warm piece of half-melted brown-sugar candy she had pilfered from the larder that morning: “Crunch it up quickly and swallow it down at once, and I’ll kill you if you tell anyone!” That was how kind and good and affectionate they could be because they had seen him being thrashed; and when they were kind to him, he did not think their eyes protruded much after all. They were never very unkind to him when there was no one else present.

  Magnína, the daughter of the house, taught him to read from a tattered old spelling book they had there. She loomed over him like a mound and pointed at the letters with a knitting needle. She cuffed him on the ear if he got the same letter wrong thrice, but never hard and never in anger, almost absentmindedly, and it did not worry him. She was stout and solid and blue in the face, and the dog sneezed whenever he sniffed at her. She wore two pairs of enormously thick stockings because her feet were always cold; the outer stockings were always hanging down and the inner stockings were sometimes hanging down, too. She never teased him for fun and never told lies about him to get him into trouble; she never picked on him when she was in a bad temper, and she never wished him down into the bad place. But she never came to his rescue when he was being teased or when he was being beaten without just cause; she never took his side when lies were told about him, and she was never cheerful.

  On the other hand there were times when she would do him a kindness quite without thinking. There was boiled salt fish for the midday meal, and in the evening there was hash and pickled tripe with pieces of sheep’s lung thrown in; sometimes the evening meal was only pickled tripe and milk. But the days were very long and the sea and the sky were gray and dull, and it was snowing on the mountain on the other side of the fjord, and she would be alone in the loft with the boy, and it seemed as if life would never end and never get any better. Then she would slip down to the larder and find herself a slice of rolled tripe or a piece of pickled brisket or some pickled lamb fries. The boy slavered on to the spelling book and she cuffed him on the ear and told him to stop spitting on the book. Then she would give him a piece of the brisket, right out of the blue, without any show of affection, as if nothing could be more natural. And his mouth and his throat and his whole body would feel wonderful for a while.