Thomas Bernhard
Correction
Preface
I was introduced to the work of Stig Dagerman by his daughter, Lo, nearly twenty-five years ago. At the time we were both mothers of preschool sons, and in the way of mothers overseeing playdates, we had begun to exchange brief biographies as we sat together on Lo’s back deck while our boys played their imaginary games in her yard. I learned that Lo’s father had been a Swedish writer of much renown, a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, and a playwright. He was also a journalist. In 1946, he had been sent on assignment to postwar Germany to record the devastation there, one of the first independent journalists to do so. His second wife, Lo’s mother, Anita Björk, was an actress. He committed suicide in 1954, at thirty-one, when Lo was younger than our sons were when we met.
Of course, I asked if her father’s work was available in English. Lo had a British edition of German Autumn, her father’s collected articles about the German people after the fall of the Third Reich; a book of short stories called The Games of Night; and a novel, A Burnt Child. She hoped eventually, she said, to find some time (as working mothers of preschool children, we were well familiar with that how to find the time refrain) to seek out an American translator for her father’s work.
Our four-year-olds were running and calling in the yard. A suburban autumn, as I recall. It so happened, I told her, that among my graduate students that semester there was a very bright and talented young fiction writer named Steven Hartman, who was also fluent in Swedish.
It’s inevitable, perhaps, that while reading Steven Hartman’s translations of Stig Dagerman’s stories collected here in Sleet, I find myself recalling something of the substance of those days when Lo and I were young mothers standing watchful on the periphery of our small sons’ games. Young boys, after all, imaginative young boys, appear often enough in these stories: large-eyed, as one thinks of them, tentative, observant, loving, lonely. And I suppose it could be argued that the various autobiographical settings of the stories, from the small farms and villages — Dagerman himself spent his first six years living on his grandparents’ farm in Älvkarleby — to the working class flats of Stockholm — where he later lived with his father and stepmother — have a kind of parallel in the urban/rural convergence that is a secluded backyard in a busy American suburb. But personal experience and its attendant associations seem insufficient to explain the depth of feeling that these stories achieve. For me, there is something at work here that calls to mind much more than the circumstances of my own introduction to Stig Dagerman’s writing. It is, I think, a tremendous generosity of heart, an overwhelming empathy expressed in tandem with a keen awareness of the inevitable suffering, the loneliness and pain, the pettiness and cruelty, that make up the human experience. There is a compassion to Stig Dagerman’s clear-eyed vision of the world that causes me to recall as I read these stories not merely the circumstances that brought me to his work, but the less tangible experience of being a young mother watching over a young child’s play: that heady mix of caution, joy, pride, fear, helplessness, and love.
I confess that this was not what I expected to find from this tragic Swedish writer when I opened German Autumn, the first of his works that I borrowed from his daughter. I expected darkness. Angst. The void. Hopelessness. But what I found instead was an account of human suffering unbiased by politics or nationalism, hatred or revenge. An account of human suffering given with both a novelist’s eye (“A big bare room with a cement floor and a window that has been almost entirely bricked up. A solitary bulb hangs from the ceiling and shines unmercifully on three air-raid-shelter beds, a stove reeking with sour wood, a small woman with a chalk-white face stirring a pot on the stove, a small boy lying on the bed and staring up apathetically at the light,”) and a moral vision that managed to maintain, “respect for the individual even when the individual has forfeited our sympathy and compassion … the capacity to react in the face of suffering whether that suffering may be deserved or undeserved.” Dagerman writes:
People hear voices saying that things were better before [Hitler’s defeat], but they isolate these voices from the circumstances in which their owners find themselves and they listen to them in the same way as we listen to voices on the radio. They call this objectivity because they lack the imagination to visualize these circumstances and indeed, on the grounds of moral decency, they would reject such an imagination because it would appeal to an unreasonable degree of sympathy. People analyze: in fact it is a kind of blackmail to analyze the political leanings of the hungry without at the same time analyzing hunger.
An imagination that appeals to an unreasonable degree of sympathy is precisely what makes Dagerman’s fiction so evocative. Evocative not, as one might expect, of despair, or bleakness, or existential angst, but of compassion, fellow-feeling, even love. The brief story “To Kill a Child,” as unsparing as it is — “Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease” — ends up being a lament, not a shrug; a lament for all of us at the mercy of merciless time, unwitting victims of life’s circumstances. Dagerman rivals Joyce in his ability to depict the intractable loneliness of childhood, but time and again, in stories like “The Surprise,” “The Games of Night,” and the marvelous “Sleet,” he tempers this loneliness with brief gestures of hope, connectedness: the poem on the phonograph record, the bright coins from his father’s drinking companions, the warm hand of the aunt from America. There are tears in these stories, for sure, cruelties, eruptions of violence, but none of this is offered without pity and even in his stories in which irony reigns — “Men of Character,” “Bon Soir” — Dagerman never turns a cold eye on his creations.
Greta in “Bon Soir,” a ship’s dishwasher with teeth that “look like they’re covered in cement, sweating cement,” has propositioned Sune, the story’s fifteen-year-old protaganist. He is repulsed by her but also charmed by the thought of a woman waiting for him in one of the ship’s cabins. And then, while the boat is docked, he sees her being led away by two detectives; he later learns she has been spreading venereal disease in the port.
As he approaches the gangplank Sune notices something peculiar and disquieting. Paul and the drunken first mate and several others are just standing around on the foredeck, idly waiting for something. And now the door swings open and out steps the small, slender man in the trench coat. He turns and holds the door for Greta, as the large, heavy-set man with the cigar clenched between his teeth walks directly behind her with a small, shabby suitcase in his right hand. In single file they walk up the foredeck gangplank and suddenly Greta spots him there. She looks up at him hastily, and later he will think back on that look many times — something impossible to forget.
“Bon soir,” she says and almost drops her handbag. “Bon soir.” And that’s when he notices she is crying.
Life may be merciless, but the creator of this scene — who notes Greta’s shabby suitcase, her hasty look, her pitiful “Bon soir,” her fumbled handbag, her tears — is not.
The long last story collected here, “Where’s My Icelandic Sweater?” is both a comic masterpiece and a heartbreaking depiction of degradation and loneliness. Knut is a bore, a drunk, a braggart, and yet even as the reader is absorbed into his careening and very funny interior monologue of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-delusion, we are given the opportunity to recognize, too, the very human longing at the heart of his nature. Like the cheerful man in “To Kill A Child,” what Knut wants is a simple impossibility: to gain back a single minute of his life.
Here on the old man’s couch, stripped pretty much naked, blubbering … And this is where we sat, me and hi
m, the last time we ever saw each other … this is right where the old man put his arm around me and gave me a big squeeze. And then he got up and went over to that dresser there and rummaged around in the drawer for something. After a while he got his hands on what he was after and he laid it out right here on the table. A little sweater.
“’Member this, Knut?” he said to me. “’Member this Icelandic sweater? I picked it up for you one Christmas in the city. And you, well, I ain’t never seen a kid so goddamned pleased with anything in my life …”
I could do with that Icelandic sweater right about now. The old man, he had it in his hands the last time I was here. I sure could do with it, alright, to hold under the blanket whiles I think about the old man.
There is much tenderness in this moment, as there is in every Stig Dagerman story, a tenderness that does not seek to distract the reader from what is terrible about human experience, but manages instead to confirm it. Were it not for such tenderness, after all, cruelty would be of no matter. Were it not for those fleeting moments of connection, loneliness would not sting. Without an imagination that appeals to an unreasonable degree of sympathy, human suffering — the suffering of the likes of Knut and Greta, or of the people of Germany after the Second World War — would be met with no more than the skimming indifference we afford the inevitable, or dismissed as no less than what such characters deserve.
Stig Dagerman possessed just such an imagination. No doubt it caused him much pain. But as the stories collected here prove, there is redemption in such an unreasonable degree of sympathy: by its grace, by the grace of the artist who wields it, tenderness survives, fellow-feeling, the mercy that merciless life itself does not provide, but that we might still offer to one another, in joy and fear and helplessness and love.
ALICE MCDERMOTT
Translator’s Note
While covering postwar Germany as a foreign correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Expressen in the fall of 1946, Stig Dagerman was advised by a fellow correspondent in the Allied Press Corps “with the best of intentions and for the sake of objectivity to read German newspapers instead of looking at German dwellings or sniffing in German cooking-pots.” The implicit criticism stemmed from Dagerman’s ambition to chronicle the supposedly “indescribable” realities of life for ordinary Germans in a land left in ruins at a time when world sympathies for the German people were at an all-time low and the need to judge and punish the guilty was at an all-time high, when the Press Corps and all the world were focused on the drama and expiation of the Nuremburg war crimes trials.
Dagerman sought instead to chronicle as nakedly as possible the suffering of all the remaining victims of the war and its ravages with an eye unaffected by the collective need to assign guilt for the atrocities of a horrendous Nazi Regime. What followed were a series of articles, later collected in the book German Autumn, that examined the very nature of human suffering and the moral complexities of justice.
As he came to understand just how much his own motivations were at odds with those of the international press corps, Dagerman wrote in frustration to fellow Swedish writer Karl Werner Aspenström in the midst of his assignment in Germany:
A journalist I have not yet become, and it doesn’t look as if I’ll ever be one. I have no wish to acquire all the deplorable attributes that go to make up a perfect journalist. I find it hard to meet the people I meet at the Allied Press hotel — they think that a small hunger-strike is more interesting than the hunger of multitudes. While hunger-riots are sensational, hunger itself is not sensational, and what poverty-stricken and bitter people here think becomes interesting only when poverty and bitterness break out in a catastrophe. Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible. I’ll never master that.
If journalism was the art of coming too late as early as possible, then in short fiction Dagerman sought its antithesis, the art of coming in time. In his focus on fragile human subjects, particularly young people swept up in or swept aside by circumstances and forces much greater than themselves, Dagerman sought to trigger links of identification and empathy that could give his readers an understanding of the tragedies of human suffering before they became faits accomplis.
His classic short story “To Kill a Child” is a fine example. For a meager fee of seventy-five kronor Dagerman was commissioned by the National Society for Road Safety to write a cautionary tale as part of a campaign designed to get Swedish motorists to slow down on highways when speeding was becoming an increasingly difficult social issue with serious consequences for public safety.
What could have been an ephemeral and gimmicky work of public service fiction became perhaps the greatest short short story in the history of Swedish letters, for in this tale Dagerman took the simple redressing of a particular social problem as the starting point rather than as an end in itself and out of these mundane materials created a poignant tale of choice, chance, and human loss that rises to the highest levels of art, literary balance, and philosophical concision.
What makes this particular story gripping, like so many of Dagerman’s tales, is his earnest investment in short fiction as a vehicle of moral agency and insight, with a capacity to generate human empathy, identification, and understanding — a commitment, in short, to the art of coming in time.
STEVEN HARTMAN
Stockholm, Sweden
September 4, 2012
Sleet
To Kill a Child
It’s a peaceful day as sunlight settles onto the fields of the plain. Soon bells will be ringing, because today is Sunday. Between fields of rye, two children have just come upon a footpath that they have never taken before, and in the three villages along the plain, window panes glisten in the sun. Men shave before mirrors propped on kitchen tables, women hum as they slice up cinnamon bread for the morning meal, and children sit on kitchen floors, buttoning the fronts of their shirts. This is the pleasant morning of an evil day, because on this day a child will be killed in the third village by a cheerful man. Yet the child still sits on the kitchen floor, buttoning his shirt. And the man who is still shaving talks of the day ahead, of their rowing trip down the creek. And still humming, the woman places the freshly cut bread on a blue plate.
No shadows pass over the kitchen, and yet even now the man who will kill the child stands near a red gas pump in the first village. He’s a cheerful man, looking through the viewfinder of his camera, framing a shot of a small blue car and a young woman who stands beside it, laughing. As the woman laughs and the man snaps the charming picture, the attendant screws their gas cap on tightly. He tells them it looks like a good day for a drive. The woman gets into the car, and the man who will kill the child pulls out his wallet. He tells the attendant they’re driving to the sea. He says when they reach the sea they’ll rent a boat and row far, far out. Through her open window, the woman in the front seat hears his words. She settles back and closes her eyes. And with her eyes closed she sees the sea and the man sitting beside her in a boat. He’s not an evil man. He’s carefree and cheerful. Before he climbs into the car, he stands for a moment in front of the grille, which gleams in the sun, and he enjoys the mixed aroma of gasoline and lilacs. No shadows fall over the car, and its shiny bumper has no dents, nor is it red with blood.
But as the man in the first village climbs into his car and slams the door shut, just as he is reaching down to pull out the choke, the woman in the third village opens her kitchen cupboard and finds that she has no sugar. The child, who has finished buttoning his shirt and has tied his shoes, kneels on a couch and sees the stream winding between the alders, pictures the black rowboat pulled up into the tall grass of the bank. The man who will lose his child has finished shaving and is just now closing his portable mirror. Coffee cups, cinnamon bread, cream, and flies each have a place on the table. Only the sugar is missing. And so the mother tells her child to run over to the Larssons’ to borrow a little. As the child opens the door, the man calls after him, urging him to hurry, because the boat l
ies waiting for them on the bank of the creek, and today they will row much, much further than they ever have before. Running through the yard, the child can think of nothing else but the stream and the boat and the fish that jump from the water. And no one whispers to the child that he has only eight minutes to live and that the boat will lie where it is today and for many days to come.
It isn’t far to the Larssons’. It’s only across the road. And just as the child is crossing that road, the small blue car is speeding through the second village. It’s a tiny village, with humble red houses and newly awakened people who sit in their kitchens with raised coffee cups. They look out over their hedges and see the car rush past, a large cloud of dust rising behind it. The car moves fast, and from behind the steering wheel the man catches glimpses of apple trees and newly tarred telephone poles slipping past like gray shadows. Summer breathes through their open windows, and as they rush out of the second village their car hugs the road, riding safely, surely, in the middle. They are alone on this road — so far. It’s a peaceful thing, to drive completely alone on a broad road. And as they move out onto the open plain, that feeling of peace settles deeper. The man is strong and contented, and with his right elbow he can feel the woman’s body. He’s not a bad man. He’s in a hurry to get to the sea. He wouldn’t hurt even the simplest creature, and yet, still, he will soon kill a child. As they rush on towards the third village, the woman again shuts her eyes, pretending those eyes will not open again until they can look on the sea. In time with the car’s gentle swaying, she dreams about the calm, lapping tide, the peaceful, mirrored surface of the water.
Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease, and only one minute before a woman screams out in horror she can close her eyes and dream of the sea, and during the last minute of that child’s life his parents can sit in a kitchen waiting for sugar, talking casually about the child’s white teeth and the rowing trip they have planned, and that child himself can close a gate and begin to cross a road, holding in his right hand a few cubes of sugar wrapped up in white paper, and for the whole of that minute he can see nothing but a clear stream with big fish and a wide-bottomed boat with silent oars.
Sleet: Selected Stories Page 1