The silence of the rocks
Some thoughts from Sweden
Harry Martinson won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1974 and killed himself four years later. He wrote one of the few Swedish poems1 I properly know, about the rock carvings in Tanumshede.
The tongues are gone; we can’t imagine and will never hear The words that rang around the bulls they sacrificed. The words for harvest time and showers of hail Have passed away; with them have gone the words for man and woman. How did they sound the name they gave their long boats Whose ribs are carved so naked in the rock? We'll never hear what ”milk” was, nor the sun's name, Their love songs, words for senses, nor the words For eyes, nose, mouth and ear. How did they sound? The summer words that once lived in their mouths, Their words for winter snow and autumn apples: How did they sound the weighty name of death? We see it here but we can’t hear their voices.
Now I’m reading his novel about life as a tramp, Vägen till Klockrike, which I doubt that anyone will ever translate into English. I’d have a crack myself if anyone would pay for it.
It was published in 1948, and is set at the end of the 19th century in the later years of the great Swedish emigration — eight million people left for the US over a period of fifty years. One of the first unforgettable scenes comes when an emigrant ship leaves for America. The hero’s business partner and a woman that he loved are on board, but he is on the dock. The passengers throw to their loved ones on the shore one end of rolled up paper streamers, and as the ship pulls away, these are stretched out in a multi-coloured patchwork until they snap and fall into the water, there to be washed about in meaningless patterns until they sink.
That last sentence sounds like the pathetic fallacy only because it is. The novel is the story of a man squeezed out of society by technological change: when it opens, Bolle is a skilled hand cigar roller, hoping to make enough money to buy his passage to America. But he and his partner make only enough for one ticket. They gamble for it, and Bolle loses. After the ship departs, he takes to life as a tramp.
This was illegal, as it had been in most European countries for centuries. The Swedish law, dating from 1885, sentenced vagabonds to forced labour for up to three years; Martinson himself was only caught once, when he was 17, and walking from Malmö to Göteborg in search of a ship to sign on to. Two more offences and he’d have been sent to the penal colony island in lake Mälaren where his hero spends two years breaking rocks.
Why take the risk? Martinsson thought he had no other chance of escape to a decent life. His alcoholic father had died when he was four: two years later, his mother emigrated to America, leaving seven children to be brought up in local authority homes. He had run away to sea from his last foster home when he was sixteen.
His narrator, Bolle, considers this question too: he thinks the police and the risk of imprisonment are not the worst dangers of life on the road. Worse is the constant humiliation, and the necessary dishonesty of his dealings with the people who live in houses. They are frightened of him, and he is frightened of them. Their fear is both groundless and horribly contagious, and if it catches and overwhelms the beggar he can strike out in, mutual terror and become the creature she most feared. The fear of an ogre brings an ogre to life.
There is a horrible anecdote of a lumberjack who becomes lost in the forest for many days, and when he finally emerges, exhausted and emaciated, he slaughters a farm girl with his “Finnish knife” because she won’t stop screaming at the sight of him.
“There were moments when Bolle understood the mechanism that drives a ‘murder from fear’. Many times he had himself felt driven almost to the point of exploding with fury, wounded to his core by the insult implicit in a hysterical woman’s fear, while her terror and suspicion rose to become real panic.
“Perhaps the terrible deed would never have been done had she not cut him to the heart with her shrieking, battered as she was by her terror of the unknown. One never knows.”
Most of all Bolle misses the love of women. Finding the footprints of one young woman on a deserted beach, he carefully fills them in with ashes and sand, so that there will be no trace of her existence left.
He thinks that there is no freedom on the roads, only the constant need to come to terms with fear. The joy of the road came only in splinters of time. But a delight in life was real and often rose within him: neither the sun nor the moon looked down on him with the eyes of conscience and duty. Sometimes Bolle thought that was the reason he walked the roads: that a delight in life came to him straight from the sun and the moon, and this had never happened in the years when he made cigars by hand.
The book came out in 1948, the same year as it became legal for Swedes to belong to any church or sect they wanted, rather than to one of the six religious bodies recognised by law. A pedant might say that it was the first year it became legal to be an open atheist in Sweden. Naturally it had long been unnecessary for anyone on the Left to be a Christian. Yet the implicit Christianity is as strong as the nature mysticism. Who is Bolle, after all, if not the suffering servant, the stone whom the builders rejected? And it is very hard for me at least to distinguish the Swedish longing for nature from the Christian longing for God. Neither is cuddly or nice in the least. What they have in common is a sense of overwhelming reality. I am the way, the truth, and the life, says the forest to Bolle, and to you, if only you can listen.
That is not the only thing the rocks might say. On this visit I was haunted by yet another bit of Auden’s, from his poem In Praise Of Limestone:
... But the really reckless were fetched By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper: "I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
The point is not that this is a Christian book, or one that shows Martinson is “really” Christian; it’s just that the book makes no sense without a Christian framing. None of this misery would matter, and none of the love would count for anything, were it not for the conviction that every life is valuable in itself; and that is something that almost all of the forces in the novel deny. Only in the forest is it glimpsed.
Yet though I love the forests, and the lakes, it is the rocks that anchor me to Sweden: the uneven feel of rocks beneath my feet that makes me feel home again. Of all the places of my childhood, this was the only one to which I ever returned, and where I in turn guarded another child’s childhood. If I had been able to go back to Jugoslavia perhaps I’d have felt the same. I did, a little, visiting in Slovenia. But I never loved anyone there, and never sank back into the language. This is different, and better, and it’s the rock shelves, the whalebacks, old, chipped, long-enduring whales, that take me home.
Swedish original here: Flydda språk som ljöd kring offrens tjurar Kan vi aldrig ana eller finna Ord för skördeväder, hagelskurar, har gått bort med ord för man och kvinna. Hur lät namnet på den långa båten revbenspantad, avklätt tydligt ristad. Hur lät ordet mjölk, vad hette solen. Hur lät kärlekssången, sinnesorden, ord för ögon näsa mun och öra, sommarorden som i språket levde, vinterordens snö och höstens äpple? Hur lät namnet på den tunga döden Vi kan se, men vi kan inte höra.