Gösta Berling's Saga

  Lagerlöf frankly revealed the impact Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution had made on her as she wrote Gösta. The “people from the woods” march on the cavaliers in chapter 32, “The Girl from Nygård”—“dark, embittered men jostle down toward Ekeby’s great estate; hungry women with crying children on their arms.” Moreover, Carlyle’s urgent rhetoric, engaging and stirring his audience, informs Lagerlöf’s own apostrophic style. Similarly, the powerful and often abusive language of the prophets in the Old Testament crops up whenever the theme of “God’s storm” appears. Like other Swedish children of her time, Lagerlöf had been spoon-fed on the cadences of the Charles XII Bible, an equivalent to the King James version. As the chapters “Drought” and “The Girl from Nygård” richly prove, Lagerlöf possessed a particular genius for panoramas of disaster, and there are several such passages in her work: the slow death of a herd of two hundred goats, freezing in the forest, which touches off the madness of Gunnar Hede; the sinking of the passenger liner L’Univers in Jerusalem I, an uncanny foreshadowing of the Titanic’s collision with the iceberg; the drowned sailors after the Battle of Jutland, floating in their lifejackets, their eyes picked out by gulls, in Bannlyst (The Outcast, 1918). Sometimes her biblical allusions are quietly hilarious. Congratulating Squire Julius on his retinue of happy girls, she writes, “Fortunate are they who can rejoice at the sunshine of life and do not need a gourd to shield their head!” Here she’s referring to God’s gracious effort to console Jonah in his discontent after his adventure with the whale: “And the Lord prepared a gourd and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head to deliver him from his grief.”

  Once Gösta had become a Swedish bestseller, marketing efforts were made to emphasize the festive, jovial existence of Gösta Berling and his crew. The drawings by Georg Pauli in later Swedish editions often resemble nothing so much as the illustrations by “Phiz,” Hablot Knight Browne, for Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Certainly there is a great deal of rollicking humor in Gösta, the “special Swedish exuberance” praised by Fredrik Böök—the eventual kingmaker of the Swedish Academy, the man behind Thomas Mann’s Nobel Prize in 1929. Böök also fostered the belief that “the bitter and the negative” were “completely foreign” to Lagerlöf. The connoisseur of arts and letters Hans Emil Larsson wrote that “she can scarcely paint anything but the comfortable, the solid, the good,” perceptions that propelled Lagerlöf swiftly into the status not only of a national icon, but also of a dependable provider of benevolent parables.

  Undoubtedly, the strong admixture of humor, on many levels, contributed to Gösta’s fame. Lagerlöf does not hesitate to undercut her loudmouthed hero as he and the trusty Beerencreutz, pulled in the sleigh by the black steed Don Juan, abduct the surprised but willing Elisabet Dohna from Sheriff Scharling’s birthday party at Munkerud: “Beerencreutz . . . look, this is life. Just as Don Juan races away with the young woman, so time races away with every person.” Beerencreutz tells him to shut up: “Now they’re coming after us!” Yet Gösta will not be silent: “I am Gösta Berling . . . lord of ten thousand kisses and thirteen thousand love letters. Cheers for Gösta Berling! Catch him, if you can!”

  Gösta returns to Ekeby that night, in that wonderful epilogue to chapter 10, one of the parade pieces in the book. The old cavaliers want to sleep, but Gösta will not stop talking. “He just talks” (Han bara pratar, in plain Swedish). After he has held forth for a while, “a few snores began to sound behind the yellow-checked curtains,” but “most of [the cavaliers] swore and complained at him and his follies.”Lagerlöf’s Gösta resembles another splashy hero of European fiction of the time, D’Annunzio’s Andrea Sperelli in Il Piacere (Pleasure, 1889), the master of all the arts, the constant orator, the constant self-praiser. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, from 1890, likewise unbelievably gifted and handsome, comes to a fall far more radical than Andrea’s or Gösta’s—he is perhaps fetched by the devil, as he loses his eternal youth. Gösta, maybe, is in danger of being fetched by the evil one too. Still, as Sintram points out, he is not yet ripe.

  Like Andrea and, more discreetly, Dorian, Gösta is a seducer: the point is made repeatedly. However, the Danish critic Georg Brandes, himself notoriously priapic—in 1888 he drove the Scanian novelist Victoria Benedictsson, abandoned by him, to suicide—cast doubt on Gösta’s ultimate success with the ladies, an omission Brandes naughtily attributed to Selma’s inexperience: “throughout, one feels that the narrator is a maiden lady, for whom a large area of life . . . is a closed book.” Seemingly, Gösta takes none of his loves to bed, not Anna Stjärnhök, not Marianne Sinclaire, not even Elisabet, after their hole-in-the-corner marriage. For Brandes, the embraces “are cold as snow and the night.” The sparks of carnal fire ignited by Anna, Marianne, Elisabet, flicker out quickly.

  In 1942 Elin Wägner said that Gösta was “a diaphanous and elusive figure,” and Brandes thought that “psychology was the weak side” of the Saga. “The outlines of his form are given, but never more than the outlines. He stands before the reader, living, only in each separate situation, never as a whole, never as a human being.” These strictures are unfair to Lagerlöf’s implicative artistry. Gösta, an inordinately gifted speaker when the fit is on him, also has a gift for self-pity (he imagines his congregation rising up against him) and self-exculpation. He is vain, taking his revenge on the countess when she rejects his invitation to dance; it is “no honor,” she says, to dance with the man who has refused to help free his benefactress, the majoress. He is the poet who has never written poetry (so he says), but when he does, the product is ever so slightly mawkish, far less gripping than the sincere verses of rejected Marianne Sinclaire. Cowardly on occasion, he is also brave, soft-hearted, and empathetic: confronted by an animal “poet” and “king,” he cannot bring himself to shoot the charging bear at Gurlita Bluff.

  He can be thoughtlessly cruel: he decks out the dead-drunk Captain Lennart—the ex-convict, come home to his wife—as a robber. The deed resembles the nasty trick played on the drunken visitor in Rudyard Kipling’s “A Friend’s Friend” in Plain Tales from the Hills; but there the victim deserves the treatment. (Lagerlöf admired Kipling’s Jungle Book, which she read before starting out on Nils Holgerssons underbara resa [The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, 1906].) Nonetheless, Gösta may serve here as an instrument of the Almighty, moving in mysterious ways His wonders to perform: rejected by his wife, Captain Lennart becomes “God’s pilgrim.” The trick played on the feeble-minded, beautiful “Girl from Nygård” is more appalling: the planned wedding, at which she is left waiting “in the kitchen.” Gösta departs to dam off the flash flood threatening Ekeby, and then leaves that worthwhile and essential task in order to help the runaway Countess Elisabet.

  The Nygård girl, who bears a physical resemblance to Elisabet, returns to her forest home and falls to her death—accident or suicide? Anna Stjärnhök has accused Gösta, to the young Countess Elisabet, of having caused the death—a kind of suicide—of another simple soul, pious Ebba Dohna, surely a case of sour grapes on Anna’s part (Gösta having renounced Anna with lightning speed amid his protestations of pain at doing so). She tells Elisabet about the “murder” of Ebba Dohna, she says, falsely moralizing, because she does not want him “to become a married woman’s lover.” Three chapters later, she washes (she claims) her hands of Gösta after having learned that he abandoned the necessary task of saving Ekeby from the surging waters in order to serve as the countess’s “slave, her page.” “So I see . . . that God does not have only one string on his bow. I will put my heart at ease and stay where I am needed. He can make a man of Gösta Berling without me.”

  In the case of the Nygård girl, as in Ebba’s, Gösta’s excuses are flimsy: “I never promised the girl from Nygård that I would marry her! ‘Come here next Friday, then you’ll see something funny’ was all that I said to her. I can’t help it if she liked me.” Gösta delivers this excuse for the daft girl’s death in response to Elisabet’s outcr
y, “Oh Gösta, Gösta, how could you?” But Gösta has misapprehended the reason for Elisabet’s question. She has remonstrated with him because he told the mob threatening Ekeby that she “was good and pure,” not because he caused the Nygård girl’s death. Gösta, in his turn, says nothing more about the dead girl, but praises Elisabet’s “lovely soul.” Lagerlöf is full of surprises and hints. Can it be that Elisabet, like Gösta, is self-centered? The reader, who has become fascinated by Lagerlöf’s actually quite complex characters, is relieved to learn, in the next chapter, that Gösta, roaming the woods in suicidal despair, wants “to die at the place where the Nygård girl had been killed.” He feels remorse, after all, for the joke and its consequences.

  The engaged reader also feels some distress at the lot of refined Elisabet, marooned in the forest croft with her poet-fiddler Gösta, served and entertained by unbalanced Löwenborg and his painted piano table. The majoress says, “It will be a gloomy life for you, Gösta,” and adds, “for Elisabet too.” Indeed, the future for the novel’s cast looks very bleak. Love, or Eros, so often apostrophized, seldom turns out well. Anna Stjärnhök enters into a “marriage” with the dead fiancé, Ferdinand Uggla, she has never loved. The late-life marriage of Ulrika Dillner to Sintram, of course, is doomed from the start, and, luckily for her, is annulled thanks to Anna Stjärnhök’s valor. The miserly pastor of Broby blooms at the thought of a reunion, forty years too late, with the love of his youth. After their weekend of happiness, she departs, content at this new memory—“such a magnificent dream”—and the pastor “sat in his desolate home and wept in desperation.” Marianne Sinclaire, caught kissing Gösta in the tableau vivant, carried off by him, subjected to harrowing adventures (including the dreadful scene when, in the icy night, she is shut out of her father’s house), has her beauty ruined by smallpox, and is abandoned by Gösta, who puts the blame on her: “He didn’t want to be her plaything any longer.” In chapter 27, “Old Ballads,” Marianne is wooed and won by Knight Sunshine, Adrian [Löwensköld]. “It was not happiness, not unhappiness, but she would try to live with that man.”3

  As for the cavaliers,4 they have to leave Ekeby, despite their belated turn to honest work. Bound for his forest croft, Gösta will not accept the gift of Ekeby (already partly burned by the cavalier Kevenhüller’s final invention) from the dying majoress. Gösta delivers his farewell oration to them, but his words will do them no good, deprived of their refuge, as they are, by his decision. “The pains of old age awaited them.” He gives them cold comfort by wanting, he says, to believe that they have learned the answer to the questions of how “a man could be both happy and good.” Whether Gösta, eloquent to the end, realizes it or not, he paraphrases the Hávamál of the Elder Edda about the existential choice between selflessness and selfishness. The “dear old men,” the cavaliers, also get a handsome sendoff from the narrator, even more verbally gifted than Gösta himself.

  Selma Lagerlöf was scarcely the naïve or artless teller of tales as she was perceived by some observers, for example, the refined poet and judge of literature Oscar Levertin, to whom Georg Brandes had assigned the task of presenting Lagerlöf to Germany (1904) in a handsome series, Die Literatur. Thomas Mann, that master of irony, knew better. Introducing the Gesammelte Werke, the ten-volume set of her works issued in Munich (1924), Mann described the portrait of her included in it: her “bright, energetic face” looked toward the observer “in its pinched asymmetry, kindly and almost sly,” and sly she was. The chapter “Lady Musica” quite unbelievably requires the twelve cavaliers to perform Haydn’s Ninety-Second Symphony. Its mostly merry melodies are intended to lift Gösta’s gloom after Elisabet’s escape into an unknown fate. Löwenborg plays his soundless Beethoven on his piano table; is the reader supposed to think of deaf Beethoven? In the chapter’s last line, the “melancholy” of Gösta is dispelled; the Swedish word is mjältsjukan. Did Lagerlöf want her Swedish audience to think of “Mjältsjukan,” the famous confessional lyric of Esaias Tegnér, the son of Värmland, the erotically tormented Bishop of Växjö?

  Lagerlöf plays many little jokes on her readers. Sintram gets his name from a tale by Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué, Sintram und seine Gefährten (1815), about a splendid young knight from Drontheim (Trondhjem in Norway); in a reenactment of Albrecht Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel (Knight, Death, and Devil), this Sintram thrusts the cruciform hilt of his sword at the evil one and sends “the terrible stranger” flying. The prim British novelist Charlotte Yonge translated it as Sintram and His Companions, and the book became a children’s classic in late Victorian England. In chapter 4, “Gösta Berling, the Poet,” Gösta throws the three volumes, bound in red leather, of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou L’Italie (1814-15) to the wolves, pursuing him and Anna Stjärnhök through the winter night, as he sets forth in his sleigh to save Anna from marriage to ugly, old Dahlberg. Does this mean that The Saga of Gösta Berling will triumph over de Staël’s protracted tale of the fiery Corinne’s passion for the considerably less passionate Lord Oswald Nelvil? That Lagerlöf’s Värmland, in the North, is just as exciting as Corinne’s Italy, with its art treasures so minutely described?

  Lagerlöf was a patriot of her native province, tucked up against the Norwegian border, and the birthplace of great men—Tegnér; the historian Anders Fryxell (a very old man Selma knew in her childhood and celebrated in Mårbacka); the poet Erik Gustaf Geijer, Tegnér’s contemporary. One of Geijer’s often anthologized poems describes the independent peasant (one likes to think, from Värmland), another the charcoal burners who provided the fuel for the rural iron foundries attached to the Värmland estates. Geijer devoted a picturesque segment of his memoirs to this grand form of cottage industry; his father owned a foundry at Ransäter, not far from Gösta Berling country. The foundries were on the brink of their decline in the 1820s, when the novel is set; they would fall victim to the railroads and city factories. Water transportation from Ekeby, on the route taken by the cavaliers in chapter 17, “Iron from Ekeby,” was no longer necessary, nor were the countryside foundries. A nostalgia for the Värmland of the past emerged decades before Lagerlöf conceived Gösta—in Wermlänningarne, “tragic-comic speech, song, and dance play” (1846), by Fredrik August Dahlgren with music by Andreas Randel. (Oklahoma! might be a rough American equivalent.) Gösta’s success was prepared, in some measure, by Dahlgren and Randel’s beloved quasi-operetta.

  Sven Stolpe has made the alluring proposal that Gösta is, in fact, a series of “little operas,” with verbal arias, melodramatic situations, and, above all, the outsized emotions to be found in the nineteenth-century repertoire. And, as every operagoer knows, the characters in Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, are controlled by a God often appealed to or railed against. Just so in Gösta; in its “Prologue” or overture, the majoress says, when Gösta wants to lay himself down and die: “Oh, you may fly boldly, you wild birds, but our Lord knows the net that will catch you.” Never missing the chance for self-dramatization, Gösta agrees: “He is a great and strange God. . . . He has eluded me and rejected me, but he will not let me die. His will be done!”

  The full manuscript of Gösta was accepted by Fritiof Hellberg’s “humbug-house” in Stockholm, the derogatory term coined by the novelist Bo Bergman, who had seen the samples in Idun and looked forward to the book’s publication in a worthier venue. Some reviews were favorable: the young poet Gustaf Fröding, from Värmland, destined to become one of Sweden’s greatest poets, liked the way his compatriot conjured up the glories of their common home. Major critics were far less enthusiastic. The dean of the critical corps, Karl Warburg, thought Gösta was a “mightily strange narration” and was irritated by “the unnaturalness of the style” (his italics). He recommended that the authoress undertake “retellings of folk-tales . . . which she ought to be able to reproduce with a poetic mood.” A crueler blow was delivered by Carl David af Wirsén, the powerful secretary of the Swedish Academy; he compared Gösta to antiquated, sentimental novels aimed at a female au
dience. Composing the “modern” part of a monumental history of Sweden’s literature (1911), Warburg made torturous amends: “The faults of the book, which at first caught the eyes of professional critics and which, in several quarters, caused an undervaluing of its merits, were partly its jumpy, rather loose structure . . . and partly its uncontestedly, albeit not uncontested, mannered style.” Wirsén opposed Lagerlöf’s selection for the Nobel Prize, trying instead to advance the candidacy of Algernon Charles Swinburne, of all people.

  A sea change in The Saga of Gösta Berling’s fortunes came shortly; the above-mentioned Georg Brandes wrote his glowing review of the Danish translation for the tone-setting newspaper Politiken. Just returned from a Christmas vacation in Copenhagen, Selma sent her mother a clipping, “nice to read after Warburg and Wirsén, for Brandes is the most distinguished man in the North.” He made no bones about his enthusiasm for “the material’s surprising singularity and the originality of the presentation,” going on to the “narrative’s rhythmically fluid, often quite simply lyric style. Privately, the authoress must have written a great deal of verse in order to achieve this prose.” Gösta’s variety was wonderful: “[Lagerlöf] wanted to paint not a picture but a whole picture-gallery.” Yet Brandes, too, unmindful of the consequences, gave his authority to the notion of Lagerlöf as a “naïve” artist: “her warm, living imagination is like a child’s. Exactly like a child’s.” The child is full of surprises: “We are led along detours until, without being prepared, we suddenly stand face to face with what the author wants to show us.”