The Islander

A biography of Halldór Laxness

Halldór Guđmundsson

Translated from the Icelandic by
Philip Roughton

The publishers would like to thank the following for the permission to reproduce the photographs which appear on pages 487–490 of this book:

Halldór aged around fifty: Jón Kaldal; Halldór with his parents: Gunnhild Thorsteinsson & Co; María and Málfríður Jónsdóttir: María Halldórsdóttir; Halldór at Clervaux Monastery: Laxness family; Sænautasel farm: Skúli Guðmundsson; Kristín Valgerður Einarsdóttir: Jóhanna Stefánsdóttir; Halldór in 1934: Einar Laxness; Inga and Halldór in Nice: Einar Laxness; Halldór at the Bukharin trial: popperfoto.com; Vera Hertzsch with Erla Sólveig: Benjamin Eiriksson; Auður Sveinsdóttir at the age of twenty: Laxness family; Halldór at the memorial sculpture: Laxness family

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders.

However, the publishers will be glad to rectify in future editions any inadvertent omissions brought to their attention

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by MacLehose Press

This paperback edition published in 2023 by

MacLehose Press

An Imprint of Quercus Editions Limited

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

Originally published in Iceland as Halldór Laxness, ævisaga by JPV, ÚTGÁFA, Reykjavík, 2004

Copyright © 2004 by Halldór Guðmundsson

English translation copyright © 2008 by Philip Roughton

This translation is published with the financial assistance of Baugur Group, Kaupthing Bank and the Fund for the Promotion of Icelandic Literature.

The moral right of Halldór Guðmundsson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52943 374 6

www.maclehosepress.com

HALLDOR GUDMUNDSSON is an Icelandic author, a former publisher and the first director of Harpa, Iceland’s main concert hall. His biography of Halldór Laxness, The Islander, was awarded the Icelandic Literary Prize. He lives in Reykjavik.

PHILIP ROUGHTON is a scholar of Old Norse and medieval literature and an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature, having translated works by numerous writers including Halldór Laxness and Jón Kalman Stefánsson. He lives in the north of Iceland.

One

An Unwritten World

Childhood and Adolescence
1902–1919

At that time nothing had been done; young writers arrived at a nearly unwritten world.

Halldór Laxness

HALLDÓR LAXNESS WAS EUROPE’S LAST NATIONAL POET. NOT BECAUSE the entire Icelandic nation loved him but because almost everyone in the country took an interest in his writing. No-one was neutral. Like the Century of Extremes in which he lived, Halldór was a man of extremes himself; extraordinarily amiable and discreet and at the same time audacious and critical with his pen. The writer and the man were often at odds; he was bold in his literary vision – and in his mistakes. He had the ability to control circumstances and people to such a degree that everything would revolve around him and his goal of writing stories. His ambition was boundless and sometimes indelicate. But he wrote out of inner need, not in order to ingratiate himself with others. The contrast between lofty vision and earthly existence tugged at Halldór all his life; from this tension came the sparks of his creativity.

The Story of the Stone

“Nowhere have I found the echo of the divine voice in my heart except at one stone in the fields of the farm at home,” the nineteen-year-old Halldór writes in the autobiographical story “My Holy Stone”. The stone loomed large on the hill behind the farm, a short distance from the cleft where the river ran down and formed a stone pool in the gorge. It was at this stone that Christ appeared to the narrator, one bright midsummer day when he was seven. Christ addressed the boy, and afterwards “all things lost their radiance to that childhood memory of standing face to face with the Redeemer”.

It is often faithful children that experience visions of Christ, and Halldór pokes some fun at his youthful vision in the memoir The Saga of the Seven Masters many years later. It is the same vision, changed only to suit the formal demands of the narrative, as with so much else in Halldór’s memoirs:

On Easter morning when I was seven years old . . . I experienced a revelation . . . The sun had come dancing up as befits the Saviour at Easter, even when the weather is cold. I was just standing behind the house . . . feeling something of a sense of resurrection, just a touch cynical, looking eastwards; and as I was standing there I heard these words whispered from somewhere out in the universe: “When you are seventeen years old, you will die.”

The memory works as an admonition to Halldór to hold fast to his writing: there is not much time left for him, even while it provides the occasion for a little self-irony, in contrast to the pious tone of the story. But common to both these narratives – sixty years apart – is their description of a youthful revelation. The boy had caught a glimpse of a higher world, which led to a new understanding: from that time on nothing mattered except his writing.

Halldór’s aesthetic sense was shaped by his youthful revelation: art granted a glimpse of a higher world, of the beauty of the world of dreams. To write poems or tell stories would always be partly an attempt to capture this world, store its essence against the drudgery of human life. When Halldór was sixteen he wrote the following lines, which appear in Child of Nature, his first novel to appear in print:

Dead is all without dreams

And sad the world.

The hill where Gljúfrasteinn, Halldór’s adult home, stands now was part of the farm of Halldór’s childhood, and early on he had set his sights on it. He wrote to his mother from Los Angeles in 1928: “You must not . . . sell the land. If I can make some money, I will build a house up by the ravine.” Seventeen years later he achieved his goal. Gljúfrasteinn means “the stone in the ravine”, where the Kaldakvísl River runs down into Mosfellsdalur, where a seven-year-old boy experienced a revelation.

There was another stone that Halldór had set his sights on. In the spring of 1971 he wrote to his wife Auður Sveinsdóttir from Italy saying that he had been thinking of trying to get someone to “pull that beautiful stone unscathed from the [Kaldakvísl] and put it on the lawn”. The task fell to Auður, as did most of the work at Gljúfrasteinn, and in April of that year she sent Halldór news that the stone had been removed from the river the day before, a job that required six people and two pieces of heavy machinery. One man fell into the river, and the dog Lubbi “ran off to Seljabrekka”. Now the stone stands on the lawn at Gljúfrasteinn, a silent witness to the youthful dreams of the writer, an image of the beauty that compelled him to write.

*

Halldór Guðjónsson (who was to change his surname) was born in Reykjavík on 23 April, 1902. Just over seventy years later he described the circumstances of his birth as follows:

People in the know tell me that I was not born in the wooden house on the plot at Laugavegur 32, where the maid dropped me out of the window, but rather in the stone house . . . where the cat jumped into the cradle to claw at the face of the child as it slept; and was hanged for doing so.

Halldór’s parents, Guðjón Helgi Helgson and Sigríður Halldórsdóttir, were living in Reykjavík when Halldór was born. In a manuscript biography of Halldór written when he was barely thirty, Stefán Einarsson, then professor of linguistics at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, records that Halldór’s father came from the Mýar district in the west of Iceland

and was raised “on the parish” at Hvítársíða, because all his people were completely impoverished. He was . . . thrifty [and] became a dry-stocksman in Reykjavík but did road building in the countryside in the summer; due to his energy and skill he was made a foreman, and he earned a good wage.

Iceland experienced as many changes in the twentieth century as other Western societies did in three hundred years. In 1900, the country was like an “unfulfilled dream”, as the poet Hannes Hafstein put it; it bore the marks of centuries-old stagnation but contained the seeds of modernity. Halldór’s father was born in 1870.

The term “dry-stocksman” – a wage labourer in a fishing village, one who has no farm tenancy or livestock – comes from a bygone age. Such wage labourers were also called “vacant men”, because they lived in houses without land; well into the nineteenth century only men who owned land or other property had the right to vote in Iceland. Urban areas, the market economy, bourgeois culture, workers’ unions: these things were only just making an appearance when Halldór himself was born.

Guðjón was a highly valued road worker. At the turn of the nineteenth century the inhabited parts of Iceland were connected only by footpaths and tracks over endless moors, creeks, grassy plains and bare sandy wastes, cut here and there by glacial rivers that could become impassable at the slightest change in the weather. The main means of transport, for those who did not walk, was either horse or horse and cart. Guðjón and others like him built roads in teams of twenty to thirty young men using horses and carts to transport the tools.

By the time his son was born, Guðjón owned a small stone house at Laugavegur 32, along with a large garden. By then he had been living in Reykjavík for almost ten years, having married Sigríður Halldórsdóttir, who had lived for some time at a little farm Melkot in Reykjavík, on 7 November, 1896. Sigríður was born in 1872 to a farming family in the south of Iceland. Her mother, Guðný Klængsdóttir, whom Halldór would later immortalize, had been widowed when Sigríður was only ten years old. She had then moved in with her sister, Guðrún, who lived at Melkot on land belonging to one of the old estate farms in Reykjavík. Guðrún lived with her husband, Magnús Einarsson. Melkot became for Halldór a symbol of the lost paradise of his youth, and the model for the farm Brekkukot in the novel The Fish Can Sing (1957).

A detailed description of Reykjavík in 1900 is given by the poet Benedikt Gröndal. The inhabitants numbered just over six thousand, and the city could not exactly be described as elegant, dogs and street urchins being the “dominating element”. The city had two policemen and, says Benedikt, would have been completely overrun if a crowded foreign ship had docked in its harbour.

Anything urban about Reykjavík was brand new. Well into the 1800s inhabitants had to fumble along from house to house in pitch darkness during the winter; the first street lamps were not put in until 1876, and when the municipal government received an offer from an English company in 1888 to light the streets with electricity, it was quickly rejected: people had never heard such a ridiculous proposition. In 1870 there was a total of ten two-storey houses in Reykjavík, and the inhabitants numbered around two thousand, but in the next thirty years the population tripled and the town centre actually started to resemble a city. These decades were extremely difficult out in the countryside, and thousands of people, mainly from the east and north, emigrated to North America. Guðjón and Sigríður, however, were among the many who moved from the west and the south to Reykjavík.

Good fortune visited the household at Laugavegur when Halldór was born; the couple had previously had a stillborn girl. In 1903 Guðjón wrote his sister a letter that testifies to the young parents’ daily concerns:

There is little news . . . except that we feel tolerably well, thank God. Little Halldór is quite energetic and behaves himself well; he was weaned two weeks ago and was peculiarly nonchalant about it . . . his mother . . . has been ill on and off since before Christmas . . . although for the most part she has been able to be up and about . . . Guðný has stayed with little Dóri [a nickname for Halldór] during the nights since he was weaned . . .

Guðjón also mentions that he was seeking out as much work as he could get, since, “my position in life demands that I not miss any opportunity”. At the time he was doing piecework as a stone worker, but reckoned on going west to do road work during the summer.

Guðjón and Sigríður were swimming somewhat against the current of the times when Guðjón sold his house in Reykjavík in 1905, bought the Laxnes farm in the Mosfell district, about twelve miles from the town, and moved there with his family. This meant a change in the family’s fortunes, because now Guðjón was at home much more often. He generally did road work for between five and seven weeks during the summer, never too far from home.

It was in June, 1905, that the household of six travelled on horseback from Reykjavík to Laxnes. The group included Halldór’s grandmother Guðný Klængsdóttir, and two workers. Once on the farm, there were usually more people about: servants, day labourers during haymaking and guests. Halldór considered it his great fortune to have been raised in such a busy household. There was a great deal of work to be done improving the land, and both sheep and cows were kept there; later a small telephone exchange was set up. New guests were always arriving – not least because of the farm’s location on the path over the Mosfellsheiði heath. Guðjón quickly became swamped with work for the local church (he held a seat on the parish council from 1907 until 1919).

Although Halldór grew up in excellent conditions according to the standards of the time, Laxnes was not considered a particularly good farm. The hayfields were in bad condition, tussocky and wet. But the previous occupant had built a house out of wood and corrugated iron. At the time, the Laxnes house lorded it over others in the area because they were made of turf. Guðjón put his road-work experience to good use and built a road leading to the farm, thought to be the first raised, paved “drive” in the valley. He also renovated the house, installed water pipes and drains, and built an extension. The neighbouring farmer, Jónas Magnússon, described Guðjón’s house in 1915 as “one of the best and most spacious homes in the district”.

Guðjón worked at improving the land, most importantly by attempting to level the tussocks; all the work was done with hand tools. A description of the farm given in the Property Valuation Book of the Kjós District From the Year 1918, compiled by Björn Bjarnason, a farmer near by, says that the farm’s hayfields were on lowland, some of them quite marshy, but that they were “almost completely flat”, suggesting that Guðjón had not been careless in his work. The same description also gives the following information under the excellent heading “Crew”: “7 cows, 6 horses, 130 sheep; for haymaking 5–6 people.”

The image that Jónas Magnússon creates of Guðjón, in an article written many decades later, has a saintly air about it. Guðjón was constantly at work though not particularly strong; he was energetic and likeable, and had a knack for getting others to work hard without raising his voice. He was prudent, and always had enough work, as one can see from a letter that he wrote to his sister on 23 June, 1910:

I am mainly going east to the Þingvellir area, and will be improving roads there, and also to Mosfellsheiði, Laugardalur, and Biskupstungur; I wish that I had wings to fly between teams.

Jónas describes Halldór’s mother as “always happy and genial in her daily occupations, but at the same time quiet and reticent by nature”. She is also said to have been an entertaining conversationalist in familiar company and particularly good with children.

One could say that Jónas gives an idealised portrait of Halldór’s parents; yet it is clear that Sigríður and Guðjón had a strong sense of morality and the work ethic; one suspects that people then took more pains to live well than they do now.

Halldór wrote in a letter to his biographer Stefán Einarsson that there had always been a feeling of good accord at home, and in his memoir In the Fields of Home (1975) he writes:

In those days warm-heartedness, scrupulous behaviour and respect for one’s neighbours were to be found where we now have computerized justice; there was a beauty in human relations that people could not live without despite everything else.

Jónas describes how Sigríður in fact had no special liking for farm work and took no pleasure in raising livestock, since she had not grown up doing such things. But she took on farm work anyway.

The circumstances of an artist’s youth might not be as significant as how he responds to and takes advantage of them. In Halldór’s case one particular thing made a huge difference: his father was a musician.

Like other aspects of bourgeois culture, playing musical instruments at home did not have a long tradition in Iceland. In the first half of the nineteenth century there were only seven pianos in Reykjavík, and a foreign visitor suggested that a European composer would have had a hard time recognizing his own music due to Icelanders’ lacklustre musicianship. There were violins, guitars and other instruments available, but ensemble playing was unknown until the Horn-playing Society of Reykjavík was founded in 1876, the same year that the first street light was put in and Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen performed in full in Germany. But Icelandic musicianship gained ground, and it became more common for young people to take harmonium or organ lessons, not least so that they could play in church; and of course every member of a church congregation could sing, for better or worse. Guðjón started a choir at Lágafell Church, for which he played the organ and violin; he was considered a talented violinist. When Halldór was seventy he remarked in a television interview that his first memories were of lying on the floor at home, snuggled up near the organ’s foot-pedal. In When I Left Home (1952), the autobiographical novel he started in 1924, he gives this description of his father’s violin playing:

He played daily, whenever he returned from work, and when evening came on he sat in the twilight by the living-room window and played, and I can still see his cheeks silhouetted in the window, and outside the gleam of the new moon, and autumn clouds in the west creating strange shadows. As a child I learnt to play the violin a little, but gave up quite early. But my father thought me suited to singing and gave me a harmonium. I was eleven years old. We got an uncle to come to the farm to teach me the fundamentals of this instrument; ever since then music has been my most blissful delight, and when I die I want to hear music.

Halldór was twenty-two when he wrote this description, but he could have written it much later on in his life. In many of his writings he calls music the highest art, and music is a symbol of the dream visions of a higher world. Music seems for him to be the stuff of revelation, of something entirely different from everyday life. It is in music that one detects the connection between father and son, the inheritance from the ever-struggling farmer and road builder in the writer who never did an honest day’s physical work.

Guðjón was also a good storyteller, and could – when time allowed – tell an entire corpus of anecdotes, along with “character descriptions of peculiar men” with whom he often had to do business. Guðjón had an animated and prepossessing narrative ability; he told his stories in a quiet voice, with a gentle wry smile and a delivery “as if he were a trained church-reader”, says Jónas Magnússon. There is much to suggest that Halldór was closer to his father than his mother, although Sigríður would show him invaluable support on his path towards becoming a writer. But that path was not within his sight as a child in the first decade of the new century.

*

Halldór did not remember much of his infancy, but he was often ill as a child, sometimes dangerously so, for instance, when he contracted polio. The Surgeon General Guðmundur Björnson saved his life when he was three. Later he became quite strong, but he was sure that he bore the marks of his childhood polio, among them his hesitant speech, which impressionists never grew tired of imitating after he had become famous.

Halldór was an eccentric child. “I started to live my own intellectual life at a very early age”, he wrote to Stefán Einarsson. Testimony to youth is found primarily in a letter written to Stefán towards the end of Halldór’s stay in America in 1929 (similar in style to the chapters on his youth in When I Left Home) and in the memoir In the Fields of Home. The latter is bathed in a gentle clarity, reflecting the warm mood of old photographs, the disasters of youth turning into humorous incidents. In the letter to Stefán, on the other hand, Halldór consciously distances himself from the countryside, and the arrogance of the newly moulded cosmopolitan peeks out:

Of those members of my family who are now living, not a single soul among them has earned a higher education or won any sort of recognition for anything, as far as I know . . .

He felt so completely different from his family in so many things that only the word mutation would apply if one were searching for a biological explanation. He certainly honours his parents in his letter to Stefán, but his heart is bent upon expressing his own detachment:

I had deep respect for my father, deeper than I have had for any other man, and this feeling dug itself so deep into my soul that even today I often still dream of my father with the same original sentiment. My mother did not have much influence on me in my youth – at least not overtly . . . One of the deepest sorrows that I have ever experienced was when my mother burnt a great deal of my writing, stories and poems that I was constantly composing when I was about seven. Afterwards I always treated my writing as I would a murder – I was always writing, but as soon as I wrote something I would put it under lock and key and allow no living person to see it, and I never spoke to anyone about what I wrote . . .

Quite frequently in Halldór’s books one encounters a lonely, artistically inclined boy who has a limited number of things in common with the other members of his family. The letter exaggerates: Halldór’s parents were incredibly tolerant of their son’s long vigils over his books, writings, drawings and dolls. Halldór was something of an outsider, however. Many years later Þorsteinn Magnússon recalled his old playmate Halldór in an interview, saying:

Halldór did not come out to play very often . . . He was always thinking about things and of course writing, but he wasn’t a show-off. He never enjoyed ball games or any of the other games that we played . . . He came across early on as being a bit peculiar . . .

Halldór probably sums up most people’s opinions from that time:

The boy at Laxnes sits ten hours a day scrawling in notebooks. He can’t be stopped from doing this. He isn’t like most people. It must be a great hardship for his parents. The parish must feel sorry for them.

It must not be forgotten that well into the twentieth century Icelanders spent nearly all of their time working to survive. The writer Þórbergur Þórðarson, who was slightly older than Halldór and grew up in an isolated district, was no less “peculiar” as a child. He described the prevailing view as follows: “To mess around drawing, map making and minting coins, and waste time in idiotic surveying and shipbuilding – that was not work, but rather pauperism, cursed beggary.”

Halldór’s narratives about his youth in the countryside, written fifty years apart, are disparate in tone. His statements from the 1920s are dramatic and critical, whereas In the Fields of Home is far more good-natured. Earlier, Halldór says that he feels closer to his father, later, closer to his mother. For these discrepancies there is a simple explanation: during the 1920s he was still trying to distance himself from Laxnes, attempting to break free from the bonds of Icelandic xenophobia, whereas during the 1970s he was making his way back home.

Guðjón describes his nearly nine-year-old son in a letter to his sister:

My Dóri has started doing a few light jobs outside when the weather is good, and when he is inside he most often likes being with books or a paper and pen; he is a very bright and pleasant boy, remembers what he reads and can retell it in an entertaining way.

Guðjón pride is obvious despite the fact that farm work did not capture the child’s attention. In When I Left Home, the narrator describes himself as follows:

It’s as if I have an innate aversion to labour. I shall soon be twenty-two and have never, to this day, done an honest day’s work, as they say in the countryside. When I was a child at home, there were few odd jobs that I did without sulking, even moaning. My parents probably found it difficult to understand me although they would certainly have liked to. My eagerness for reading indicated that I was not a complete lazybones, because if I had the opportunity I would sit diligently over my books from morning until night, paying heed to nothing else. When it became fairly clear that I would never “be inclined to farm work”, I was no longer required to do any more physical work, and I can be eternally thankful that my parents were so understanding and did not make me tear my child’s shoes to tatters in contemptible slavery.

Everything concurs on one detail: Halldór wrote constantly from the time he was seven. He writes to Stefán Einarsson that he had been a “commonplace errand boy and milkman in others’ eyes, but a very uncommon philosopher ‘before God’”. Until his two sisters, Sigríður and Helga, were born in 1909 and 1912, the fact that he was an only child must have increased his feeling that he was special.

There were numerous books at home, and in In the Fields of Home Halldór describes the first book he remembers, which he called Bótólfur; he heeded his grandmother’s advice and paid attention not to the text but to the mysterious illustrations, and did not come to realize until much later that the book was a collection of excerpts from Grimm’s fairy tales in Danish. He delved into Andersen’s folk and fairy tales, but throughout his life remained dubious about the Danish writer due to Andersen’s schoolmasterly moralising. Halldór also read some translated novels and other literature, and became acquainted at an early age with the Felsenburg Stories, German romantic literature from the eighteenth century, in Icelandic translation.

The day before his tenth birthday, Halldór wrote and dated “Bylaws of the Children’s Club of Mosfellsdalur”, including the following statement of purpose:

To cultivate good conduct in words and deeds. Members of the Club may not swear or use foul language, neither at their meetings nor elsewhere. They shall make a habit of using fair speech, and speak pure Icelandic.

The club held its meetings on Sundays, and members had to be under fourteen. By 1915 club members were being encouraged to participate in sports, and the maximum membership age was raised. A list of thirteen members exists from the same year, written in the hand of Ólafur Þórðarson from Æsustaðir, one of Halldór’s childhood friends. They wrote to each other on and off for several years, among other things concerning club matters. It is in these letters that Halldór first describes his idea of adopting a pseudonym, the name Lax.

Having seized him at an early age, Halldór’s passion for writing never left him. In a letter to Stefán Einarsson, he said:

I wrote thousands of pages at home in Laxnes and had trunks full of finished notebooks – novels, stories, poems, magazines and newspapers (which I “published” for myself), essays about religion, politics, philosophy – everything between heaven and earth, and finally diaries.

What shaped this inclination? A youthful revelation, an innate gift of genius? Clearly Halldór was a talented boy who had a rich need to create and who was happy in his own world. He played with dolls – there was a feminine side to him as to many male artists – and strong female characters later became one of his trademarks.

A storyteller must have room inside him for many different characters and the characters that he creates reflect parts of him. It has been suggested that what distinguishes artists in their youth is not particularly their surpassing talent, but rather their unquenchable thirst to express themselves. Halldór was raised on a farm in a country in which literature was the only cultural inheritance of any worth; was it not natural for him to try his hand at becoming a writer?

What did he write in Laxnes, before he moved to Reykjavík at the age of thirteen? His writings from the time are not preserved, but he described them in this way much later:

I think that the concoction that this totterer came up with in his father’s house from the age of seven to twelve was the product of an immature inclination to express himself, which is innate in certain people even if they do not unburden themselves in books. It is precisely this healthy inclination, or perhaps unhealthy passion, which learned men feel to be most appropriately named in German, and which is called in that language die Lust zum Fabulieren.

At a young age Halldór found contentment in weaving narrative webs. The parents of this blond, bright dreamer provided him with the best opportunity they could: the year after Halldór finished elementary school, he was sent to Reykjavík to study drawing and music.

*

It always proved difficult for Halldór Laxness to write about his parents; he was generally not open about his feelings. On the other hand there was one woman in Halldór’s youth whom he loved, and about whom he had no qualms in speaking: his grandmother. Guðný Klængsdóttir, who was born in 1832, lived with Halldór’s parents at Laxnes to an extreme old age, and Halldór spoke of her so often that for a time other Icelandic writers felt that they too should invent such a grandmother, an old woman with an inexhaustible well of stories and wisdom from days long past.

Halldór spent a great deal of time with this old woman when he was young. He says in When I Left Home: “I . . . was raised at the feet of the nineteenth century . . . among folk from the part of the Icelandic people that was cut from the cliffs of antiquity.” As an example of his grandmother’s views about the modern world, he describes her reaction to the telephone: “. . . although that monstrous telephone rang endlessly in her ears . . . she died with the full conviction that telephones were nothing but vanity and chasing after the wind”.

Halldór’s grandmother was the line that connected him with Iceland’s past. She had an independent, strong, ancient grasp of the language, knew an incredible number of stories and was typical in being accustomed to relentless, uncomplaining drudgery. She has her own place in his books: in Independent People (1934–5), for example, Halldór creates a portrait of a young man saying farewell to his grandmother before he travels out into the world armed with his grandmother’s good advice; and in The Fish Can Sing, the grandmother is the personification of charity and the soul of the common people. His grandmother was both sufficiently beloved and sufficiently distant to become story-material, a symbol of the best of Icelandic popular culture, to which he remained faithful all his life.

Adolescent Years in a Small Town

As Halldór’s adolescent years approached, he read almost everything he could get his hands on. The elementary school for the Mosfell district was a “mobile school”, which meant a school that moved from farm to farm. This arrangement was common throughout the country, and well into the twentieth century there were still journeyman teachers who travelled between farms. Halldór fondly recalled the influence that elementary school, and especially his first teacher, a young woman, had on his development:

She was . . . a spiritual encourager, an inspirer of goodness, and an extremely energetic leader in our [youth] club, Miss Guðrún Björnsdóttir from Grafarholt. The patriotism that she inspired in us children was contrary to all tepid patriotism. The best of the culture of the world was not too good for the Icelanders, according to her beliefs. She never missed an opportunity to exhort us concerning what was noble and magnificent in the history of Iceland and its educational traditions. She was a conservative woman according to the standards of the time, which meant that she wanted all foreign contamination wiped clean from the country unconditionally. She strengthened this spirit of Icelandic conservatism within us.

Iceland had not yet achieved independence from Denmark; the country was both sparsely populated and poor, and its self-image was cloudy. In schools, social organizations and newspapers Icelanders constantly exhorted each other to education, to great deeds, to independence: people were shoring up their self-confidence in order to take on the new age alone and unsupported. In Halldór’s first writings this childish exhortative spirit is occasionally apparent. In his thirties he contested nationalism in a grandiose way, but he returned to it in his fifties: the conflict between being an Icelander and a man of the world stayed with him all his life.

Halldór’s first trip away from home was not a long one: in the autumn of 1915 he went to study at the Technical College in Reykjavík. This was the only school at which it was possible to study anything resembling the arts in Iceland. Guðjón’s foresight is revealed in his choice of this course of study for Halldór; in order to gain his son admittance, he contacted his supervisor, Chief Engineer Jón Þorláksson, later Iceland’s Prime Minister. Halldór described the interview as follows:

Jón thought the world of my father and came frequently to stay with us at Laxnes. He was a remarkable man. Father told him that I read quite a lot of books, was sometimes writing and always playing music. He needed to enrol me into some kind of art course and because of this he had his eyes on the Technical College for me . . . Jón . . . had been a spokesman for the Technical College for several years, knew the right people and could ensure this boy a place.

It was quite a change for the short, pale and, by his own admission, skinny secretary of the Children’s Club of Mosfellsdalur to find himself surrounded by students who were mostly grown men, studying wood-, iron- and stone working, or even baking or printing.

Halldór attended courses in various subjects, but mainly in drawing. His teacher was one of the pioneers of Icelandic painting, Þórarinn B. Þorláksson. Þórarinn held the first exhibition of work by an Icelandic painter in Reykjavík in 1900. One of Halldór‘s schoolfriends, Ásmundur Sveinsson, significantly older than him, would become one of the greatest Icelandic sculptors. Fifteen years later, Halldór called Ásmundur his first intellectual companion.

The coursework did not really suit Halldór: it was too regulated and uninteresting, and he may also have discovered that his talents did not lie in this area. It is difficult to judge now. One drawing from that autumn exists: a picture of Lord Byron that Halldór copied from a printed original, neatly done. In any case, his thoughts were not firmly fixed on the course, and as the year went by his interest ebbed away.

During the winter of 1915–16 Halldór also studied the organ and piano with the support of his father, benefiting from the instruction of another pioneer, Eggert Gilfer Guðmundsson, who, along with his brother, was one of the first professional musicians in Iceland. “Everyone thought I had the makings of a musical virtuoso,” Halldór says in When I Left Home, though this statement must be read with caution. It is certain that he cultivated his piano playing throughout his life, and he especially enjoyed playing Bach, as we shall see. But in his adult years he seldom played for others, because his desire for perfection was too strong. Among Halldór’s other teachers that winter was his Icelandic teacher, Jakob Jóhannesson Smári. Smári was a poet and widely read aesthete to whom Halldór would turn for advice about his literary attempts during the next few years.

*

There was more to learn than the arts in Reykjavík. The Industrial Revolution had finally reached Iceland in the shape of trawler fishing, which was begun there in earnest in 1907. Alongside the development of trawler fishing the labour-union movement began to gain strength, and the trawlermen’s strike in 1916 had extensive influence – these were the first organized disputes between workers and management in Iceland. In the same year, the Federation of Labour Unions, the Social Democratic Party and the Progressive Party were all founded. Reykjavík experienced a housing shortage due to the steady stream of country folk coming into the town; people were gathered into unsanitary hovels, and poverty was marked.

Not that these factors in his immediate environment had a deep influence on Halldór. He had other things on his agenda, namely, his writing:

After I was sent south . . . I wrote a novel in opposition to Redemption theory. It is one of the longest novels that has ever been written in Icelandic, compared to Lightning by Torfhildur Hólm, whom Þórður Sigtryggsson used to call the Sappho of Iceland when poking fun at his compatriot. Torfhildur’s book was about the victory of Christianity in ancient Iceland. For emphasis I called my book Dawn.

This is a curious story, whether it is true or not. In any case Halldór says in a letter to Stefán Einarsson in 1929:

In the winter of 1915–16, before I was confirmed, I was for a time in Reykjavík. There I wrote Dawn, a novel of six hundred thick pages, which still existed in tatters at home the last I knew of it.

Of the manuscript not one tatter remains, whether because his mother burnt it along with other old writings or because it was lost when he left Laxnes for good in 1928. It is noteworthy that Halldór took it upon himself as a thirteen-year-old to write a novel as a kind of showdown with one of the most renowned Icelandic novelists up to that time. Torfhildur might not have enjoyed much critical favour, but she had a significant readership and was the first Icelander to work as a professional writer. Decades later Halldór would become the second.

What sort of novel was Dawn? Its existence is corroborated in a short narrative in When I Left Home. There the novel is called Daybreak (the handwritten paper of the Youth Club of Mosfellsdalur was called Dawnlight) and is said to be nearly a thousand pages in length. The narrator recalls little of the book,

except that I tried to imitate the narrative style of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsson. The characters I had my heart set on most were stately men and idealists, who praised rationalism, performed charitable works, walked in the paths of God . . . The optimism and joy of life in Daybreak had to be absolutely intoxicating; these two things were the mightiest powers I knew. Many great events occurred in the book, such as murder, catastrophes, house burnings, thievery, engagements, marriages and divorces. There were meditations – and attacks – on everything that I knew to exist.

The young writer most likely adopted a rationalistic stance for his moderately anti-clerical novel, since Torfhildur Hólm’s book was about the victory of Christianity in Iceland. The most remarkable thing about this huge manuscript – if in fact it was so long and filled with events – is the way in which it reveals that Halldór had discovered his abilities as a writer. He had succeeded in spinning a story from within himself, and in his letter to Stefán Einarsson he says that the novel is more “genuine” than the books that came later, unspoilt by scholarly pedantry. The writing of Dawn was Halldór’s first ambitious conflict with another writer, and the novel was the apex and conclusion of his youthful obsession with writing.

In fact one man had managed to look at this manuscript: Jakob Smári. The writer Guðmundur G. Hagalín, who was Halldór’s good friend in the years that followed, bears witness to this in his autobiography. Hagalín tells of how, when he was eighteen, he paid a visit to Smári to ask the poet’s opinion of his writing. Smári told him that a fifteen-year-old boy had come to him with a long novel; this would have been Halldór (although the age is wrong). Hagalín asks if the novel is any good:

It is understandably not a piece of art, but in it several threads are woven together. The writer makes an attempt to give each person his own particular characteristics, and he presents ideas that bear witness to unusual flights of fancy and wonderfully complex issues.

During his first winter in Reykjavík Halldór did not spend much time socialising; for the most part he kept to himself, writing or practicing on the piano when he was not attending courses at the Technical College. He lived at Vegamótastígur 9 with some distant relatives, Davíð Jóhannsson and Guðrún Skaftadóttir. In the spring he returned to Laxnes to prepare for his confirmation, which he made in the church at Lágafell in May, 1916. But Halldór was not the same boy who had left the countryside the previous autumn. He cared little for his catechism and played the prince by reading Georg Brandes and Tolstoy, as well as by quoting from the great work by Ágúst H. Bjarnason, A Conspectus of the History of the Human Spirit (1905–15).

As Stefán Einarsson wrote in his biography:

Halldór was not the only one of those young Icelandic confirmation candidates who went to the altar during those years with the catechism on their lips and the books of Á.H. Bjarnason in their minds; what that man gave to Icelandic youth through his writings represents a remarkable educational achievement, although they were not popular with all of the priests.

Bjarnason wrote his great work on the history of Western thought in Icelandic, a strong factor in its popularity and influence. He was no radical, but his works were written in the spirit of nineteenth-century rationalism and scepticism: they explained ideological movements within a narrative context without passing judgement from a Christian perspective. His book thus raised suspicions among many rural folk, although they affected young readers strongly.

Halldór was one of these young readers. That he had been a religious child is clear, but he had quickly lost interest in Bible stories and traditional family readings and started seeking other goals. He was “searching for higher values”, as he put it later, and this search was as ingrained as his passion for writing. Halldór was never content with what was generally accepted; he had to find his own way, and he cultivated this attitude early on in his writing style. Above all, he wished to avoid using clichés that would fail to make an impression on his readers, even if they contained grains of truth. The rebellious yearning evident in his writing was at odds with the courteous and charming man, and this “discrepancy” would puzzle many of his political opponents later on.

Although Halldór enjoyed making a show of himself by quoting from writers who made at best only a middling impression on his Lutheran instructors, and had even threatened that he would not accept confirmation, he changed his tune uncomplainingly when he sensed his mother’s disappointment: “She said that she could not believe it of me that when it came down to it I would disgrace my family.”

Halldór’s music studies benefited the congregation at Lágafell Church. When Guðjón was away, he had to find a substitute to lead the choir and play the organ. Halldór sometimes took over this task, most frequently during the year in which he was confirmed. He did, however, play down his musical accomplishments in an interview many years later:

I saw quickly that the trick of playing the organ in church was simply to play slowly enough. If I sailed too quickly through the hymns the congregation would quite simply lose the melody . . . This was naturally not due to any sort of musical gift of mine . . .

When Halldór was growing up, books and newspapers specifically intended for children were only just beginning to be published in any significant way and teenagers simply did not exist; they were just small adults. Childhood did not last long at that time in Iceland. It is enough to look at Halldór’s confirmation photographs to see the child playing the man. The same quality can be seen in his first work, when he tries to write like a middle-aged man. He does not truly indulge in “being himself ” before The Great Weaver from Kashmir (1927), an extremely pretentious book.

On 19 March, 1916, a work by Halldór Guðjónsson appeared in print for the first time, not under his own name, but under his initials. The article, “Hot-Spring Trout and Hot-Spring Birds”, was published in the daily newspaper Morgunblaðið, which had been in circulation for just over two years. The piece could almost have been written by an eighteenth-century naturalist. “H.G.” strikes a pose and informs his readers about creatures that live in hot springs:

Within the Landmanna highland pastures are so-called “baths”. These are boiling hot springs, in a tiny hollow. Visitors to the Landmanna area often camp on the hills by the banks of these “baths”, and it is convenient to get kettles of hot water from just in front of one’s tent; these hot springs are said to contain many . . . fish. The hillmen once caught a fish there with a pole. It weighed approximately 1 pound. It was reddish in colour but pink where it was wounded. This fish must have been quite poisonous. They gave it to one of the dogs, and the dog fell down dead upon eating it.

The writer of the article suspects that readers might not believe his story and cites his sources in footnotes, naming Book on Iceland (1746) by the German Anderson, the eighteenth-century Icelandic poet and antiquarian Eggert Ólafsson and Journal of the Icelandic Literary Society (1887). What’s more, an anonymous old woman is cited as a witness to the existence and behaviour of hot-spring birds. The concluding words of the article can hardly be doubted: “This phenomenon and many others in nature need to be studied further.” It is difficult to see now what compelled Halldór to publish this article, except the basic urge to see something one writes in print. In any case the editors of Morgunblaðið seemed somewhat perplexed and introduced the article with the rare parenthetical statement that they had been asked to publish it.

The first step had been taken. That year Halldór Guðjónsson from Laxnes published several other articles in newspapers, under either a pseudonym or his own name. In the June issue of the magazine Youth, he published a letter about the children’s paper Sunshine, which was then being printed as part of the second-most popular newspaper for Icelanders in North America, Lögberg (the Tribune). This article is thought, along with the letter (“Sunshine Children”) printed in Sunshine in Canada on 15 June, 1916, to be the first material Halldór published under his own name. He had written to Youth “so that young people in Iceland could become somewhat acquainted with their little compatriots – the Icelandic youth in North America”. His tone is not that of a child writing for children but that of someone who considers himself to be both experienced and educated. He says about Sunshine:

It is written mainly by children, for children. It is amusing to see their childish, innocent writing styles . . . It is clear . . . that these children are quite clever; they write in an orderly manner, although they are young.

The greeting to the “Sunshine Children”, beginning with the words, “Good day to you, dear children”, is also written in a fatherly tone remarkable for a fourteen-year-old boy. Halldór encourages the children to love their fatherland at the same time that he expresses his appreciation for the Icelandic sagas, mentioning that he had read them all by the time he was eleven. The article shows some spirit, especially when Halldór describes the arrival of spring:

When the snow melts from the mountainsides and the hollows, when ice and cold flee from the dells, when the sun inches its way higher and higher into the sky, when the nights start to shorten and the days to lengthen – although the heaths are still snowy and not an iota of spring warmth is reflected on the mountain peaks – when green needles start to spring up from the ground for the sheep to graze, when the ewes start to lamb, the lambs to play in the fields, the children to bring out their toys and build houses, when grown-ups start to put in order that which the winter has left disordered, when everything is on the upswing in Iceland, when everything seems to rise from its winter sleep, then it is spring.

That same autumn Halldór sent the “Sunshine Children” another greeting, in which he tells them how things are when autumn comes to Iceland, clearly with the previous epistle in mind:

When the wind and the rime draw nigh, when the sun inches its way back down from heaven each day, when the nights start to lengthen and the days to shorten, when the grass starts to fade, the tiny Icelandic birch forest to shed its leaves, when everything seems to be on the downswing in Iceland – then it is autumn.

Why was Halldór interested in this connection with children in Canada? One reason might have been the influence of his father’s foster-brother, Daníel Halldórsson, who had moved to Canada in 1912 and who offered to support Halldór if his father wanted to send him to Canada. It is likely that such a journey had crossed Halldór’s mind, since a large number of emigrations were still occurring at the start of the twentieth century.

*

June, 1916: there was something in the air of those bright, early summer days in the countryside: “The world [was] like a stage where everything [was] set up for an extravagant opera,” as Halldór put it in The Great Weaver from Kashmir. And once again he appears to have experienced a revelation, which is described in When I Left Home:

That night I did not come home. I continued eastwards to the mountain slopes where the birch grows and the sun first shines in the mornings, my soul one sea of joy and hymn of praise. The spring world and my youth, all was an angelic poem, I and nature one, eternity like harp-song in my heart. God, God! Bliss overwhelmed me . . . You are powerful and inexpressible, and I who am nothing but a breath of dust have received from you glorious gifts. I wish to perform great deeds and create with my hands unforgettable monuments to the glory of the one who granted me these gifts!

The perception of the divine was incredibly strong in this boy, despite the halfhearted way in which, several weeks earlier, he had been confirmed with the words of learned sceptics on his lips. The experience of another world, the world of beauty, was always a factor in Halldór’s artistic creations.

That June Halldór published some poems for the first time. They appeared in Morgunblaðið on 13 June, under the heading “Poems”; the poet called himself Snær the Wise. The compositions in the elegiac style of the time consisted of two quatrains, one entitled “Ditty” and the other “Waiting by Angry Old Women”; a short piece called “Motto for Stories and Songs”; and a lyric called “Morning Songs of the Shepherd Boy”. Snær the Wise – the clever, bright man (“snær” means “snow”): the name says something about Halldór self-image. And the talents of the fourteen-year-old poet are clearly displayed:

Though love be blazing in the morning,

Misfortune chills at the setting of the sun.

Of hatred beware, dear friend of mine

– now winter has come, though summer was here.

The Spinners of Fate do you harm,

You weep, and leave, you flee your land.

Halldór used the pseudonym Snær the Wise several times during the next few years, and his friends were quite familiar with the name. But he was not interested in promoting the poetry of the clever Snær. On the other hand, he did mention an article published under his own name in Morgunblaðið in the autumn of 1916, “An Old Clock”. Magister Sigurður Guðmundsson, one of Halldór’s secondary-school teachers during the winter of 1917–18, had the piece in mind when he told the young man who had come to visit him for the first time:

We have known about you since last year, when you walked up to Bragi’s door, and, like an ancient Icelander, announced your name and whence you came, as well as what clock you own.

*

In the autumn of 1916, Halldór returned to Reykjavík, where he spent the next two years studying for the exams for his secondary-school diploma from the Reykjavík Lyceum, sitting them in the spring of 1918. He lived at Laugavegur 28 with one of his father’s friends, Árni Einarsson, a merchant, and his family. Now he was staying in a respectable middle-class home with three rooms, good-quality furniture, paintings on the walls and a grand piano that he was sometimes allowed to play. And there was the merchant’s daughter and her friends, all of a similar age, awakening premonitions of adventures to come.

The war in Europe was a distant rumbling to the young people in Reykjavík. What did get them to prick up their ears was the idea that Iceland was going to become a free and sovereign state. Little by little a kind of cultural stage was taking shape in Reykjavík. During the First World War the town became the headquarters for the publication of Icelandic books and journals, taking over from Copenhagen and Winnipeg. Respectable journals were transferred home and new ones founded; in 1917, eighteen journals were published in Iceland, a number that increased significantly during the 1920s. This development allowed greater breathing space for debate about the future of Iceland; nothing was off limits in the papers. At the same time a tiny group of academics was being formed. According to the 1910 census almost a thousand people were working in so-called “intellectual work”; of these most were teachers, but thirty-three were listed as journalists and writers, although none of them could precisely have been called professional writers of belles-lettres. A year later the University of Iceland was established, and thereafter the number of academics increased steadily.

Despite a temporary setback in the economy during the 1910s, a large percentage of young people were convinced that spring was in the air. Young men met at the youth and debating clubs of Reykjavík to discuss the future. Although the first telegram was sent from Iceland to the outer world in 1906, the country was still accustomed to ships bringing news and ideas from further south; the telegraph was for emergencies. In the debates held by young Icelanders during the war years, movements that people their own age on the Continent had abandoned years earlier sometimes found new life. Nordic Naturalism was most influential in the field of prose, while young poets wrote in a late Romantic style that was occasionally somewhat abstruse. The next poetic composition that Snær the Wise published was an excellent example of this misguidedness.

At this time Jakob Smári was the editor of a newspaper called the Country and supported a branch of the Independence Party. Icelandic political debates during the war often focused on complicated policy issues concerning the relationship with the Danish king and government, issues that are difficult to understand nowadays. It was in the Country that Snær the Wise published his next poem, on 13 April, 1917. It was written in honour of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and bore the title “On the Birthday of the Kaiser”, although the Kaiser had turned fifty-eight several months earlier. The poem begins with the words: “Hail, Wilhelm the Bold!/ Stout-hearted kinsman, brother and friend.” In defence of the fourteen-year-old poet, it should be said that his wish is that the heroic fight waged by Wilhelm and his forces should end in brotherhood and peace. It is undeniably peculiar that Halldór should have published a poem in honour of the Kaiser in the same year that the historical event occurred that would shape his political thought later on – the Russian Revolution – and that his poem should be published in a paper founded in response to the clash of opinions concerning Icelandic special interests within the Danish government.

In 1917, Halldór became acquainted with a group of young men who shared his interests. He met Tómas Guðmundsson, who would become one of the greatest Icelandic poets. Tómas and Sigurður Ólafsson, later an engineer, lived together one house away from Halldór on Laugavegur. Tómas and Sigurður decided to fast-track their exam preparation by taking private lessons and finishing a two-year course in one winter. They advertised for a third man to share the cost of the lessons and received a number of replies. Tómas says: “Among the applicants was a certain young man, bright of appearance and slim, with thick, long blond hair, who introduced himself as Halldór Guðjónsson, a writer from Laxnes.” The three became good friends. About their shared interests, Tómas said:

At that time I was gripped by a relentless passion for poetry, whereas Halldór himself had already become a productive writer. I don’t think it’s too much to say that he came to town that autumn with almost an entire trunkful of original compositions: novels, poems, essays, and diaries. That winter he’d also sit most days writing, for longer or shorter periods of time, if I remember rightly; he was, in short, the greatest workhorse I’ve ever seen when it came to writing.

With Halldór’s thoughts so firmly fixed on writing, it must have seemed particularly expedient to take private lessons for the secondary-school exams. One of the teachers hired by the three companions was Magister Sigurður Guðmundsson, later principal of the Akureyri Lyceum and one of the best-known Icelandic schoolmasters. Among Halldór’s other teachers that winter were Árni Sigurðsson and Ingimar Jónsson, who both became clergymen. But Halldór was distracted and did not attend lessons regularly, prompting his father to intervene. Guðjón contacted Halldór Kolbeins, another future minister and later a good friend of Halldór. Gísli Kolbeins, Halldór Kolbeins’ son, said:

Guðjón said that his son’s laziness was causing him some concern. Halldór needed to be educated. He said that he’d arranged for him to study with others, but that Halldór didn’t turn up for his lessons. He just forgot about them.

Despite making promises, the young writer also “forgot” to attend lessons with his namesake, and he had Halldór Kolbeins’ persistence to thank when he passed his exams; Kolbeins would catch him out walking when he was supposed to be at school and drag him to his lessons. Halldór himself described the situation:

I was extraordinarily undisciplined when I first started studying with private tutors. I only went to the class when I felt like it, and otherwise wrote and composed poetry for the newspapers. I thought about everything except for scholarship, and was a worry to everyone.

He nonetheless earned his secondary-school diploma from the Reykjavík Lyceum in the spring of 1918.

The main problem Halldór faced as a boy was the problem he wrestled with all his life: how to find a balance between artistic creation and everyday living. Art was always foremost to Halldór, but he needed a kind of equilibrium to be able to work at it. In the next decade he found it difficult to achieve any sort of balance, and the psychological stress he experienced because of this might be considered the “growing pains” of the poet-to-be. He had trouble unifying his inner and outer lives, finding for the latter the form within which the former could find fulfilment. He often felt as if his inner life was suspended on the edge of a precipice; his childhood bliss had dwindled, and revelations about a higher purpose thoroughly disturbed him.

Sometimes Halldór tried to prove to himself and others that he was not having difficulties with these sorts of things, that he was a responsible and upright young man. A good example of this can be seen in the article “Diaries and Accounts”, which was published in Vísir on 10 December, 1917. It begins with the words: “Young students, and all young people in general, should keep both diaries and accounts.” It is as if a grown and slightly boring man is holding the pen here; he exhorts people to keep diaries because of how entertaining it can be to recall events from one’s youth, memories that take on “an alluring and comforting aura of innocence”, and he goes on to say that diaries can be particularly useful for older people writing their autobiographies. Account statements are no less important:

It is very useful for itinerant labourers, for example, to be able at each month’s end to take account of their status and see to which side they lean. I am acquainted with many cases among my peers and even among older people in which their accounts have saved them from unnecessary waste. This can also help form useful habits in other areas and has various other beneficial effects.

It did not occur to Halldór to follow his own advice, as he admitted to a girl he knew at that time:

Never in my life has it crossed my mind to keep a diary . . . even less an account book. If I happen to come into possession of a króna I spend it immediately.

In his teenage years Halldór was in fact far from being the awkwardly responsible boy he pretended to be in his article. He gained good marks in his exams, but they meant the end of his career in terms of academic accreditation. He started at the Lyceum in 1918 and was placed in its fourth grade, but was frequently indisposed. He described this in a letter to Stefán Einarsson ten years later:

I have never lived through anything so miserable as my year in the fourth grade. I could not focus my mind on anything, never slept until it was nearly morning, had no appetite. Once I was blind for two hours! . . . closer to death than life from mental anguish, Weltschmerz, hypochondria, angina and insomnia and I was constantly thinking that I would die or lose my mind!

He was plagued by the disquietude that grips creative people when they feel they are wasting their time, and it should not come as a surprise that he dropped out of school early in 1919.

The Red Booklet, a manuscript housed in the National Library of Iceland and containing the first draft of the book that later became When I Left Home and, later still, The Great Weaver from Kashmir, confirms this anguish. It is not autobiographical in a strict sense, but bears witness to its author’s hesitancy and soul-searching, as Halldór pointed out to Stefán Einarsson. Morbidity often gripped Halldór during the years following his confirmation, and he spent many sleepless nights brooding over the futility of everything, sometimes so intensely that he thought he was going mad. School did not save him. He writes in The Red Booklet:

My nights that winter were what I would call hellish. And then my room-mate would wake me up for school . . . I was tired and stiff after my insomniac night, had studied nothing, and because of this felt sick about everything having to do with school.

He often got himself a doctor’s note at such times.

Not all of his days were like this, however, and that year marked a turnabout for Halldór; his resolution to become a writer became fixed in his mind, and his interest in others’ poetry, his friends and his surroundings increased. He continued to publish while he studied for his exams, and his first short stories appeared in the journal Animal Rights. The very first, “Wages”, was published in two parts, in the autumn of 1917 and at the start of 1918; the second, “Zeus”, was published in the autumn of 1918. Both appeared under the pseudonym Snær the Wise. The animal rights movement was popular at the time. Tryggvi Gunnarsson, the founder of the SPCA in Iceland, wrote about animal rights in the Almanac of the Patriots’ Society in 1904; any encouragement to Icelandic farmers to treat horses and dogs properly was useful at the time. “Wages” deals with the shameful lot of horses and “Zeus” with the fate of dogs; both stories are quite sad. The writer’s conclusion in “Wages” is clear: “Animal rights have a long way to go in this country.”

“Zeus”, on the whole a better story, is the first draft of another story, “The Poet and Zeus”, that Halldór published several years later in Berlingske Tidende and again in Icelandic in the collection Several Stories (1923); it was finally used as the basis for a film script called Kari Karan in 1928. The first version of the story tells of a young philosopher who owns a dog but betrays it for a woman. The dog wanders far and wide and is treated poorly everywhere it goes, but the woman betrays the philosopher, who finally runs across the dog again, frozen to death. A strong sense of sympathy for the powerless, and an antipathy toward betrayal, underline both stories.

Although Snær the Wise published poetry, it is clear that Halldór was more inclined towards writing stories. During his youth there was little in the way of a novelistic tradition in Iceland. Boy and Girl by Jón Thoroddsen, which may be said to be the debut of the Icelandic novel, had been published in 1850, but the novel did not come into its own until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and then under the influence of naturalism and Georg Brandes. The short story was more common and well past the nineteenth century poetry commanded more respect than the writing of prose fiction; this was still apparent in the works of Halldór’s peers. A pioneer among Icelandic novelists was Torfhildur Hólm, and at the time when Halldór published his animal-rights stories, two novelists (both realists) were already quite popular with Icelandic readers: Jón Trausti and Einar H. Kvaran. Jón Trausti was the pen name of the printer Guðmundur Magnússon. His novel Halla (1906) marked a turning point: a romance, it gave at the same time a broader description of everyday life than had ever appeared in prose. Jón Trausti did not have any formal education, and in fact had been raised in the most wretched poverty, but he was intimately acquainted with the people around him, and Halla was the first of a great series of novels focusing on Icelandic rural life. This fictional world was, however, foreign to Halldór. In 1918, when Halldór was struggling to complete what became his first published novel, Jón Trausti published his final one, Old Bessi, a conservative work that had no appeal whatsoever for the young writer.

It was a different case with Einar H. Kvaran. Einar was influenced by radical Brandesism, but later professed milder ideals of Christian charity and forgiveness; early in the twentieth century he became captivated by the latest fashionable movement, spiritualism, devoting himself to it for the rest of his life. With Higher Power (1908), he published the first true novel of Reykjavík, later writing more novels, and plays and essays. Halldór wrote his first book review about Einar Kvaran and spoke warmly of him later. He respected Einar’s clear style, his use of everyday language and avoidance of archaicisms, his desire to improve social conditions through his writing, and, as Halldór expressed it in an essay written on the occasion of Einar’s death in 1938, the way in which he allowed “himself to choose his protagonists from among the wretched and the downcast”.

To begin with Halldór was most heavily influenced by the Scandinavian authors who were popular in Iceland at the start of the twentieth century. In his memoir The Saga of the Seven Masters (1978) he relates how in the spring of 1919 he read Norwegian writers such as Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Jonas Lie and Alexander Kielland, all of whom had only recently died. They belonged to a different age from Halldór, and later he seemed both ashamed of their influence and reluctant to discuss novels about Scandinavian rural life.

Other Norwegian writers that Halldór read included Sigbjørn Obstfelder, whose works were introduced to him by Guðmundur Hagalín in the winter of 1918–19; their influence can be seen in The Red Booklet, as can that of books by the writer with whom Halldór would share a love–hate relationship for the next several decades, Knut Hamsun. The works of these Scandinavian authors laid the groundwork for the novel that Halldór wrote during his year at secondary school, and which became his first and only contribution to pastoral literature, Child of Nature (1919). When his style started to develop independently, it was in opposition to such literature. Although he had grown up in the countryside and read books about the countryside, he divorced himself completely from both. He did not wish to be considered a Scandinavian writer, and even in his old age he turned up his nose if he was called a poet of the countryside.

There were advantages to the fact that the novel, the literary form of bourgeois society, was so undeveloped in Iceland when Halldór was taking his first steps as a writer. In an interview with Ólafur Ragnarsson seventy years later, he observed: “At that time nothing had been done; young writers arrived at a nearly unwritten world.”

*

Despite the peace accords in Europe and the granting of sovereignty to Iceland, the autumn of 1918 was a sad one. A deadly influenza epidemic ravaged the country, beginning in late October. Almost five hundred people died from this flu, half of them in Reykjavík (and among them the poet Jón Trausti). It was a huge loss of life for such a close-knit society. Halldór, who contracted the flu along with his room-mate, Sigurður Einarsson, described the situation in his memoir:

Friends of ours who were not susceptible to the flu came to visit and said that people in town were dying like flies and were being laid out two by two in the church’s makeshift morgue, where it was possible to see the corpses through the windows; besides this every meeting place was filling up with bodies, some in trunks, some under sheets.

An undated message from Halldór to his parents, written around the time that he was finally able to rise from his sickbed, says:

I just wanted to let you know that I am still the best of a bad lot today from the influenza. I was quite bad yesterday, but the fever had gone down greatly this morning. Everyone is in bed: the shops and bakeries, schools and dance halls are closed. The printers and papers have stopped publishing.

Just before this, the room-mates at Laugavegur 28 had, like other Icelanders, witnessed a great natural disaster, when the Katla volcano erupted violently on 12 October, covering almost the entire country with an ashy cloud. The cloud did nothing to diminish the young writer’s intimations of Doomsday, and, according to The Red Booklet, he tried one night to wake his room-mate and talk to him about this: “‘Don’t you think it’s terrifying to see the earth burning?’ ‘Oh, we’ll let it burn!’ he answered as he lay down again. ‘We probably can’t put the fire out anyway!’”

When Iceland was declared a sovereign state within the Danish kingdom on 1 December, 1918, the news was received rather dully by the residents of Reykjavík. Halldór writes of the formal ceremony held that day in The Saga of the Seven Masters:

It took place in the bitter cold of late autumn; I remember the mud and slippery ice under the sky’s low clouds. In this bleak weather everyone who wasn’t dead gathered together to celebrate our sovereignty at Bakkarabrekka and Lækjargata and to have a look at the Ministry Building. A brass band played. A Danish officer parading a little group of sailors marched up carrying an Icelandic flag and raised it over our Ministry Building, to symbolize that the Danes were hereby handing over to us Icelanders this cursed land; he then saluted and marched to his ship with his sailors.

Halldór’s description, written sixty years after the event, is an example of how he liked to satirize all things ceremonious – and to write ceremoniously about things that other people found banal. His description of the weather does not agree at all with contemporary accounts. The daily newspaper Fréttir gave this account of the ceremony:

Yesterday the town was rollicking. People cast off the plague-nightmare and joyfully shook the two hands that the day extended to them. The weather was most beautiful, perfectly clear and dry. The sun shed its rays over the town shortly before the ceremony was to begin.

The speeches, the band music, the beautiful uniforms and the flag-bearing are described, and the article concluded solemnly: “The ceremony was perfect. Everyone present participated wholeheartedly and celebrated Iceland’s newly received sovereignty.”

Halldór made some other good friends in 1918, including Sigurður Einarsson, who became his room-mate the following winter. Sigurður, born in 1898, was four years older than Halldór and had a strong influence on him, as indicated in The Saga of the Seven Masters. It was primarily Sigurður’s eloquence, in both poetry and prose, that affected Halldór, along with his vigorous imagination, his aristocratic bearing and his confidence. Halldór viewed Sigurður as a “fabulist, whom I shrink from calling a fantastic liar”. Sigurður could not do anything without it ending up as an extraordinary adventure, and poetry poured out of him all day, every day. In the manuscript of When I Left Home, the protagonist of The Great Weaver from Kashmir, Steinn Elliði, appears, and there he resembles Sigurður Einarsson to some degree:

His speech shimmered; ideas and metaphors thrust themselves forth from all directions like strange birds, seven swords in the air; his voice dulcet and measured, puns tripped from his lips like young doves, power blossomed in his eyes, freedom laughed in his movements.

In the 1940s Sigurður would become one of the first and most popular Icelandic radio announcers and, according to Halldór, put his talents to excellent use, always sounding like a man of experience when delivering news of brilliant discoveries in the sciences and arts. One does not have to look far to see bits of Sigurður’s personality in many of Halldór’s characters, from Garðar Hólm to Godman Sýngmann.

The Reykjavík Lyceum was the only such school in Iceland at that time, and thus the student body was comprised of people from different backgrounds and varying ages. An interest in poetry brought many of Halldór’s fourth-grade classmates together, and early in the autumn of 1918, Halldór, Sigurður Einarsson, Tómas Guðmundsson and others founded the poetry club Milky Way, which held just one meeting. At this meeting Halldór read an elf-ballad he had written. A long poem from Child of Nature, it is without question the best poem he had written up till then; it resembles folk poetry, and is sincere and unpretentious. This was, however, not the style Halldór adopted for all of his poetry that autumn. On 31 October he published under his own name, on the front page of the daily newspaper Fréttir, a poem called “The Sea Wave”. This poem is undeniably morose, with lines such as “The booming of the waves/ gnawed at the roots of my heart,” and also displays Halldór’s penchant for archaic language. Halldór said that the editors revised this poem, but he was extremely proud of seeing his poetry in print, and in The Red Booklet he writes of the happiness he would feel when this happened:

One day a poem that I wrote was printed on the front page of one of the Reykjavík newspapers, and was criticized fairly by several intelligent people with whom I spoke.

Those were the days when newspapers in Iceland printed poetry on their front pages. Fréttir was short-lived; it had been founded the previous spring for a specific purpose, “to work tirelessly to make it known to all the peoples of the world that Iceland is a sovereign state”. The paper’s editor was a poet, Guðmundur Guðmundsson, known as the “School Poet”, and that autumn Guðmundur Hagalín, Halldór’s friend, had been appointed assistant editor. Halldór’s poem took up the central column of the front page; the day before, a love poem by his friend Sigurður Einarsson, “Smile”, had taken up the entire front page, leaving room only for the paper’s name and an advertisement for Politicos cigars and Embassy cigarettes.

Other members of Halldór’s class at the Lyceum included, besides Sigurður Einarsson and Tómas Guðmundsson, Richard Beck, who became a professor of literature in America, and Sveinbjörn Sigurjónsson, later school principal and the brother of Ísleifur from Copenhagen, who would go on to play a part in Halldór’s life. The Lyceum’s fifth grade included Guðmundur G. Hagalín and Jóhann Jónsson, and in the sixth grade was Davíð Stefánsson, who won the hearts and minds of young Icelanders with his book of poetry, Black Feathers (1919).

Davíð was seven years older than Halldór, and they did not get to know each other that winter. Jóhann Jónsson later became one of Halldór’s closest friends. In his 1929 letter to Stefán Einarsson, he wrote:

I did not spend much time with poets during my secondary-school years – I had too much respect for them to push myself to approach them. Tómas Guðmundsson and I, however, were good friends. He had great poetic fancies and later published a book of poetry.

Tómas was a country boy like Halldór. Halldór later said of him: “Tómas and I were the same vintage of unnamed wine. We read each other’s poetry and understood it. We were, I hope, like wine that has just started to ferment.”

Jóhann Jónsson was introverted, lame from tuberculosis, and reflected the image of a late Romantic poet so well that his friends called him Lord Byron. Guðmundur Hagalín also wrote poetry during those years, but was a happy and playful storyteller by nature, with a background in the fishing culture of the Westfjords. In 1952 Peter Hallberg was assembling a book about Halldór’s youthful writing and sent him a list of questions in which he asked whether it was true that Halldór had sometimes been called Halldór the Singer during those years. Halldór answered:

I have no knowledge of ever having been called a “Singer”. But because I knew a little bit about music, I probably attracted some attention on my travels in the countryside – I was able to play and sing for audiences in places where such things were quite out of the ordinary . . .

Hagalín describes in his memoirs how Halldór sometimes sat at the pedal organ in the rooms that they shared with Sigurður Einarsson and got the group to sing if he thought their conversation had run its course, although none of them was any good at singing except Jóhann. Hagalín adds this description of Halldór, the youngest boy in the group:

Halldór was especially courteous and quiet, sat for long periods and listened, but seemed sometimes to be distracted, with a dreamy expression as if he was looking at something in the distance. Anything coarse or vulgar was clearly not to his liking. He was not an eloquent speaker, he stammered and his voice was peculiar, but he was always cheerful and pleasant if the conversation turned to him. He was unjudgemental and always tried to add something positive, always tried to find a peaceful settlement when the debate got too heated, which did not happen often among these friends.

Halldór seems to have been something of an outsider, just as he had been in the countryside. These men could perhaps be called his acquaintances rather than his friends, with the exception of Tómas. Halldór was shy in their company and kept his dreams to himself. All of them became prodigious writers, and they had different points of view about the Cold War. Seldom have the effects of the Cold War on Iceland been better described than when Halldór wrote in a 1983 epitaph for Tómas Guðmundsson that they had “lived in an atmosphere in which best friends meet each other as strangers”.

During the winter of 1918–19, the paths of the poets in the fourth and fifth grades led to the Future, the Debating Club of the Scholarly Department of the Reykjavík Lyceum. Club members held meetings, read for each other, judged each other’s poetry and published their works in an occasional journal, Skinfaxi. In that winter’s first issue Halldór published the short story “Ingólfur”.

The narrator describes his youthful friend, Ingólfur, with whom he shares a passion for poetry. Ingólfur has blue eyes that can penetrate all dreamlands, and “fairer masculine locks” than the narrator has ever seen – the boys’ world of Halldór’s secondary-school years was not free from sexual ambiguity. Ingólfur’s characteristics are derived from Halldór himself: “I never saw him doing anything but playing the piano and messing around with poetry – I never saw him look at a school book.” Ingólfur, however, falls for a girl called Helga. She goes to America, and Ingólfur goes after her but does not find her, because her father, a rich merchant, will not hear of it. The narrator says nothing more of Ingólfur, except when he imagines him overseas:

It may be that he is searching for Helga – searching for her across the breadth of America, searching for her in the blind despair of love. It may also be that he is locked in some asylum, or that he is lying somewhere, unknown to anyone, beneath an indifferent gravestone in an American churchyard – dead along with his hopes and dreams.

The story, dated 15 September, 1918, is said to be from the unpublished collection, Portraits. It is related to the story about the philosopher and the dog Zeus – both Ingólfur and the philosopher become lost in their pursuit of a girl. In the same issue of Skinfaxi there is a story called “The Maggot”, described as the first chapter of Child of Nature by Snær the Wise, and the minutes for the meeting of the Future reveal that Snær the Wise is Halldór Guðjónsson. Child of Nature is the work that mattered most to Halldór from the summer of 1918 to the spring of 1919.

*

Child of Nature was Halldór’s response to the revelation he had when he was seven years old that he would die when he was seventeen. In his memoirs he says that the revelation had prompted him to finish the novel by the spring of 1919. Very likely he felt that the huge Dawn was unsalvageable, and that if he wanted to prove himself he would have to write a better book. Child of Nature was the first manuscript Halldór brought to a publisher, the bookseller Arinbjörn Sveinbjarnarson. Iceland’s book business resembled that of eighteenth-century Europe, since those who published books were most often also booksellers or bookbinders. Arinbjörn would not take a risk on Halldór’s book, so he did what many other Icelandic writers did well into the twentieth century: he took his manuscript to a printer. The managers of the Society Print Shop, the brothers Steindór and Þorleifur Gunnars son, agreed to fit the job in when they got the chance, as long as Halldór’s father was responsible for the cost. By the time the book was finally ready for printing, Halldór had gone overseas and Guðjón had died, and Sigríður Halldórsdóttir was left with the printers’ bill, along with other debts that Halldór had accumulated.

Nearly two hundred pages long, it was printed in a small, well-crafted volume; its author calls himself Halldór from Laxnes. In the preface to the second edition Halldór says that the novel was mostly composed during the summer of 1918, when he was sixteen and going around the town dressed “according to the fashion of a precocious lad fascinated by the facial portraits of most of the geniuses from the previous century shown in the World History and the Encyclopaedia”.

He goes on to say:

The book is at the same time the précis, the conclusion and sum of all that I wrote later; all my later books were simple expositions of the conclusions that I had come to in Child of Nature.

A romance that bears the marks of the Scandinavian pastoral literature Halldór read while growing up, the novel tells the story of Randver and Hulda. Randver is a young man who has travelled out into the wide world and returned home richer for his experiences; in him there is something of Steinn Elliði or Arnaldur. Hulda is a child of nature, independent and revolutionary, and her qualities are present in both Diljá (in The Great Weaver from Kashmir) and Salka Valka (in the novel of the same name, 1931–2). Randver wants to become a responsible, respectable farmer, and for Hulda to become his wife, but when she hears this she shouts: “‘Never! With what you have said tonight, you have spread cow dung on the hopelands of the child of nature, and covered her dreamlands with ice! Never!’” For a time the prospect of love seems dim, but finally they do come together, and on Randver’s terms, farming and avoiding trite indulgence and foreign vanity. Hulda has come to understand that “Randver had wished to honour her. He had pointed her toward the highest goal of life: joy in the toils of the day.” The concept of joy in the toil of the day comes up again and again in Halldór’s novels

Two reviews of the novel proved to be both kind and prophetic. On 6 November, 1919, the People’s Paper published a review saying that a reader should, despite the work’s shortcomings, “admire the dedication and daring of the youngster; and I think that we can expect the best from him when he matures in age and wisdom”. It concludes with these words: “And who knows, Halldór from Laxnes might turn out to be the promised child of the Icelandic people.” On 10 November, 1919, Morgunblaðið published a review by the journalist and writer Jón Björnsson, which did not beat around the bush:

This is the story of a child of nature by a childishly young man. The story is also quite childish. And art does not put up with childishness. It requires experience and knowledge. It demands a secure grip. It condemns groping. It is never content with bloodless sacrifices. But this is a bloodless and marrowless book.

Björnsson nonetheless gave the seventeen-year-old author some hope: “And yet . . . this young man might perhaps write something of more artistic value.”

Halldór had gone to Copenhagen and did not see the reviews until later, but Björnsson’s review stung him and he never forgot it, any more than he did any other negative review – he was always sensitive when it came to reviews. It must have allayed his distress, however, when, the following year, Jakob Smári – who always thought highly of Halldór – wrote a review for the journal Skírnir in which he said that here was a writer who would likely “become quite accomplished after maturing and experiencing more of life”. No watershed was reached when Child of Nature was published, and it did not sell very well either; the remaining stock passed from one speculator to another, until Halldór received a final statement in 1944, the year Iceland became a republic.

A Love Story was the novel’s subtitle. Was Halldór so familiar with love that he could write a novel about it at sixteen? Not if one accepts his statement in the preface to the second edition that the subtitle must have been based on a misunderstanding “to lure people to the book – like when Eiríkur the Red christened the glacier Greenland”. But in fact he had added the subtitle himself, and had started to show interest in girls. In a letter to his friend Einar Ólafur Sveinsson from the summer of 1924 he wrote:

I have never been more proud in my life as I was six years ago when I kissed a young woman for the first time. This was a young and rosy girl living on a farm here . . . She was wearing a green dress.

Country girls seemed to like Halldór. His playmate, Þorsteinn Magnússon, said in an interview much later:

I have heard that a young girl at Skeggjastaðir was in some ways the model for “the fair maiden” in Iceland’s Bell [1943–6], and I’m not sure that’s not correct. I remember the girl. Her name was Fríða. Beautiful girl. The girls liked Halldór.

Skeggjastaðir is on the northern side of the hill visible from Laxnes, suggesting that Fríða Einarsdóttir was the first girl Halldór kissed. There is also this amusing testimony from Guðmundur Hagalín, who went with Halldór to Laxnes early in the summer of 1919 and stayed with him for a while. On a hike up on to the heath,

. . . Halldór entrusted me, in a low and mysterious voice, with the news that just ahead lay the path to a blonde-haired maiden, who had the fairest blue eyes of any woman, white skin, and red, rosy cheeks, innocent like the first flower of spring on earth and so beautiful and delicate in her blossoming youth that one might not touch her – only thoughts, pure and clear like unsullied springwater could play around her – even from an immense distance. That he considered going to meet her – no chance. He only wanted to go as far north as the heath, so that he could see her farm.

“Perhaps then I will sense the aura of the smoky vestiges of the ling that she has picked with her slender white fingers.”

During the years leading up to his trip to Denmark in 1919, however, Halldór’s romantic adventures most likely occurred in the same place as so much else did: inside his head. Corresponding later with Peter Hallberg about this time, he says that his phobias and fancies were the same as other boys’; what distinguished him was that he had put them down on paper. But Halldór was different: he had an intense internal disquietude and an unquenchable need to express it. He spent time with men who were significantly older than him, and he did not develop personally as quickly as his writing did. Love must have been a matter for contemplation long before it became a practical problem. This mismatch continues: throughout the 1920s, as Halldór slowly gained more experience in love, he was enormously preoccupied with “woman” as a writer’s topic, whether he turned to Strindberg, Weininger or Freud. It was thus not surprising how well he was able to describe the contradictions of love later on. In his memoirs there is only one little love story from these years. Halldór is walking a young girl home from Laugavegur, and it is raining:

We could not say anything, nor could we disentwine our hands in the rain. I am certain that our combined heart was beating quite strongly. The rain came down on our warm, entwined fingers. But soon it had stopped.

Halldór lost interest in Child of Nature as soon as he finished it, and immediately started his next book. In March, 1919, he gave up on school entirely and moved back to Vegamótastígur 9. Apart from his walks into town and his meetings with friends, he was writing all the time. On 10 May, 1919, an advertisement appeared in Morgunblaðið that read: “Halldór Guðjónsson from Laxnes will read a chapter from his new, unpublished novel, Saturday evening the 10th of this month, 9 p.m. . . .” Tickets could be bought for 1.50 krónur at the Ísafold bookshop or on the door. “A smattering of people came, but I certainly gained little or nothing from it,” wrote Halldór in a letter to Hallberg, later on indicating that he had thrown out the novel he had read from.

The reading gained him both some publicity and some kind reviews, although he described the experience as nightmarish in his memoirs. But the facts remain: a boy of seventeen advertised a reading in Reykjavík on a Saturday evening and charged an admission fee. No matter how reserved he was during his adolescent years, how tormented his soul was or how insecure he was in the company of other poets, two characteristics are evident here that became the key factors in his breaking free from his fear of the world into world literature: self-confidence and ambition.

A month later Halldór became involved in publishing a newspaper. He and Tómas Guðmundsson decided to publish a humorous periodical in Reykjavík, which after some deliberation they named Láki. Neither of them was old enough to accept responsibility for its printing, so they asked one of Halldór’s childhood teachers, Pétur Jakobsson, to become the official editor. When the four-page periodical was published, the only name that appeared in it was Pétur’s. The articles were published under pseudonyms.

The paper introduces itself like a spring blossom:

Láki is the many-sided man of spring. He lets his light shine for the first time one day in June, when springtime is in full bloom, precisely when the sorrels have sprung up and the angelica is green and the spring rains bellow with tremendous might, and form dark, muddy rivers in the gutters, which break out over all the banks – exactly like the thoughts of the youth.

In the second issue Icelanders are said to have in a thousand years

become fair of form and fearless under the nurture of severe frosts and savagery – phlegmatic and frugal under the protection of stupidity and narrow-mindedness, and niggardliness and scrimpiness have prevented them from being led astray in the whirlpool of life.

Although Tómas and Halldór put their hearts into their project, they lost interest quickly: the second issue of Láki was printed, but never circulated.

That summer Halldór reached a turning point: Reykjavík had nothing more to offer, and the impatience that was driving him away can be seen in Láki. A few days after his novel reading he wrote to his mother in Laxnes:

I want very much to travel across the sea. It is necessary for a man like me to become acquainted with life in as many forms as possible. You think perhaps that I am not sufficiently mature . . . but this is certainly a misunderstanding. I am more mature than many who are twenty or older . . .

One thing that helped to expand Halldór’s horizons was his acquaintanceship with Erlendur Guðmundsson and the boarding house called Unuhús (literally, Una’s House). Halldór went there for the first time in the spring of 1919, in the company of Guðmundur Hagalín, and Unuhús would become his refuge in the 1920s. Halldór’s writings about Erlendur and Unuhús have a mythological aura: Erlendur became for him something of a saviour, as well as the model for one of his first “Taoist” characters, the organist in Atom Station (1948). Halldór never wrote a plain word about Erlendur, according to an agreement they made, until after Erlendur’s death. In the manuscript of Stefán Einarsson’s biography, Halldór crossed out Erlendur’s name and wrote in the margin: “Erlendur does not want to be written about.”

Unuhús was a unique refuge for artists and writers, along with people who had nowhere else to go, as it had been since the turn of the century. In this red house at Garðarstræti 4, Erlendur’s mother, Una Gísladóttir, rented out rooms and ran a cafeteria. She offered her services at a lower price than anyone else did, and therefore many people who had little money looked to her; it would be the greatest of understatements to say that mother and son did these individuals a good turn. The folk who gathered there must have seemed a “ragtag lot”, to quote from Pétur Pétursson’s interview with María Guðjónsdóttir, who as a young girl helped Una out.

That spring Halldór met Þórbergur for the first time. Þórbergur recalled this meeting in an article commemorating Halldór’s fiftieth birthday in which he described their lives “since we met first in Unuhús, the hospital of the soul, where the paths of all Icelandic geniuses led for half a century”. The paths of these masters of narrative fiction were to cross frequently.

At Unuhús Halldór became acquainted with the idealistic currents of the time. People there preached spiritualism and theosophy, embraced the so-called “New Theology” and Rudolf Steiner’s theories and read up on yoga in the Bhagavadgita. Some, like Þórbergur, tried to bring together all of these things. Around this time Halldór first heard, from Erlendur, about the Tao-te-ching, or The Book of the Way and its Power, by Lao-Tzu. In The Red Booklet one of the narrator’s friends resembles Erlendur, and Halldór refers to the Tao for the first time:

I don’t recall having known any man who was as chaste and pure and rich with the Tao. He listened to every word that was said and never turned a deaf ear to anything; he understood everything, like a sage.

When Halldór went to Unuhús for the first time, it was to visit Stefán from Hvítadalur, the poet who had written Songs of the Traveller, one of the most talked-about books of poetry published during Iceland’s “sovereign year”. Stefán had wandered everywhere despite having suffered from tuberculosis. Halldór thought him somewhat cold and tormented at first:

But when he started talking, in a hoarse whisper, his eyes became softer; and when he laughed at us with his hoarse laughter a bright and gentle gleam shone forth from his blue eyes, like an unexpected gift.

It fell to Stefán to wrench Icelandic poetry free from the melancholia of the war years with his sincere, plaintive, unaffected verse. It was good for Halldór to meet such a man, and he immediately wrote to his mother: “Stefán is doubtless one of the greatest poets the Icelanders have; he himself is so interesting and peculiar, and so mysterious, that a man could never grow tired of him.”

This sums up precisely Halldór’s problem during the spring and summer of 1919. He had grown tired of the company he had been keeping in Reykjavík, needed something different against which to measure himself and his will to work as a writer. The morbid thoughts of his youthful years were still strong, and the search for a “higher value” was beginning to impel him, as it would for the next decade or so. The Red Booklet is a good indicator of this. The protagonist has just left secondary school, publishes poetry in the newspapers and is tormented by depression, fear and disquietude:

I was surrounded exclusively by half-educated people, young like myself, people who studied and planned to become leaders of the people and flag-bearers of the nation if they could. One could have said a lot of good things about them – previously I saw them only in the best light. I had believed in many of these companions of mine as demigods, but now my vision of them had suddenly darkened; their heedless behaviour brought antipathy into my heart, yes, almost disgust.

They sit most hours of the day in cafés, their conversations are nothing but meaningless noise, they do not walk gently through the doors of joy, but shout with laughter and rage and slam their fists on the table. For hours on end they discuss with undivided attention the glories of their last drinking binges.

The country boy who had experienced a revelation and planned to become a writer and improve the world with his books could not remain content with this company for much longer. Reykjavík was merely a sketch of a modern society. Everyone knew one other, and business was conducted according to family relationships and proximity. Industrialization had made little progress. In 1919 the Gutenberg print shop was the largest manufacturing enterprise in Reykjavík, with forty workers; society, on the whole still based on agriculture, was uniform and isolated. And no Icelandic writer could make a living from his books.

*

Then came a shock that would further erode Halldór’s relationship with his homeland – his father died. Guðjón contracted pneumonia and died on 19 June, 1919. Halldór was at Vegamótastígur the week before, busy with Láki and the proofreading of Child of Nature. He received the news in a letter from his mother delivered by someone from his district.

In October Halldór wrote his mother a long letter from Copenhagen, in which he describes how much he loved his father:

I think so exceedingly much about blessed father, and I feel that now, after his death, I know best what a great and good man he was, and how much I have him to thank, because it was always he who encouraged me and always awakened in me beautiful and noble thoughts.

He also explains that he had not cried when his father had died because he had known that it was just the body that had gone; his beloved father’s memory would live on. He had not been too concerned that people might think that he did not care. Quite the contrary: he had not wanted to discuss the loss with his mother because he had no desire to upset her further.

Like many of the letters Halldór sent his mother later on, this one contains food for thought. It is likely that he never spoke to her in the same way that he wrote to her. Those who knew Sigríður in her later years agree that she was loving but reticent and terse, and Halldór himself says that she had been averse to sentimentality. She and his father had scarcely talked about their feelings.

But in his letters to his mother Halldór could be genial, frank and sincere. He had become a man of written expression; it was in writing that he felt most comfortable, and writing opened the window to his inner life. In his manner he was most often disciplined and impeccably courteous – but in his writing he could be as frank, brusque and passionate as he wished to be. Distance formed the foundation for his sincerity.

From Halldór’s first trip abroad and the next quarter-century an enormous quantity of letters remains in which he frequently expresses his thoughts in unpretentious terms and sketches his feelings in bold strokes when the time is right. These letters are unique in that they display his tormented psychological state. Long before he started to cloak his life in his fiction, he started to turn his life into a story.

In the aforementioned letter to his mother he tells about the last meeting that he had with his father:

It was the Monday after Whit Sunday. My book was being printed, and I was supposed to read the first proofs the next day. The weather was gorgeous, sunshine and spring warmth, with light showers every now and then. Around midday I started thinking that it might be fun to run up to Lágafell, where a communion service was to take place. I got three of my friends, Hagalín being one of them, and we drove up and had quite a good time, as you might imagine. We arrived at the church in the middle of the sermon and stood at the back for the remainder of the service. I looked around for Father, and although I did not see him I reckoned that he was probably there, and that I would find him afterwards. And then at the end he came to us as we stood there at the door, on either side of the loft stairs. He greeted us as easily and gladly as ever . . . [H]e . . . went in with us and gave us all coffee and cakes and sat with us and talked with us so amiably and kindly, as was his way. And then he left, because there was a congregational meeting . . . that he had to attend, and he asked me to come there and say goodbye before I left.

I went back into the church, and the farmers were all sitting there, he in an innermost pew. We didn’t have the faintest idea then that seventeen days later his body would be dead, carried out of the church and laid down in the ground. I asked whether he wanted to talk to me a bit outside the church doors and we walked there. I asked whether he could help me pay for the car-trip, and he gave me 10 krónur. So I thanked him happily and said goodbye and bade him say hello to everyone at home. He extended his hand to me in a friendly way, which I never have forgotten, and said: “Bless you now, dear Dóri.”

We said farewell in the church porch and I never saw him again.

Don’t you think that this is beautiful, Mother? I have thought about this so much ever since.

This meeting is also described in The Saga of the Seven Masters, but in a different way. According to the book, Halldór had gone to ask his father for financial help with Child of Nature and Láki. “He smiled . . . and spoke only these words . . . and nothing more: ‘You will be looked after, dear Dóri.’ ” In between these two versions are sixty years, and sixty books.

*

On Thursday, 31 July, 1919, Halldór Guðjónsson from Laxnes boarded the Iceland, a United Danish Steamship Company ship, for Copenhagen. His mother had sold some property to pay for his journey. One of the first things Halldór did when he arrived in the big city was to have a business card printed, taping one to the door of the house where he was staying:

HALLDÓR FROM LAXNES

POËTA