Conor Cruise O’Brien died December 18 at the age of 91. In the 1950s and ’60s, he wrote several articles for Commonweal under the pen names of Donat O’Donnell and John Caxton. This piece, published in the December 4, 1953, issue under the name Donat O’Donnell, was written while he was a minister in the Irish government’s Department of External Affairs.
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In the clear bright autumn air of Gothenburg the neon signs burn without a halo. The reporter who met me at the boat asked me—since I am an Irishman—about Senator McCarthy. I disclaimed knowledge, and went on. His next question was about Churchill: was he worth the Nobel Prize for Literature? I said that if the Prize was intended simply to honor great men, he obviously was, but if it was really, as one supposed, a literary prize, it should have gone to some serious writer, such as Mr. Ernest Hemingway. This interview appeared in the afternoon paper under the headline: “Churchill’s Nobel Prize Makes Irish Happy.”
It is depressing that, in coming to lecture on James Joyce, one should be questioned about Senator McCarthy and Churchill and it is characteristic, not of anything peculiar to Sweden, but of the anxious atmosphere of Europe in general. Politics everywhere are the surface preoccupation, or rather political ideas—even quite frivolous ones—are the form in which deep anxieties and doubts become articulate. A word like “McCarthy” is a nervous twitch, in some, or, with others, a little gesture of defiance: “here in the very shadow of Soviet Russia, we, at any rate, are not going to panic.” As for the Churchill Nobel Prize it is perhaps a symbol of the general, and detestable, tendency for “Western values” to huddle together, like sheep awaiting slaughter. Educated Swedes have an excellent knowledge of English literature and many of them are quite conscious that Sir Winston’s contributions to literature belong on the same plane as those of, say, Philip Guedalla. None the less it seems to give them a warm feeling to put literature, as it were, under the protection of the indomitable old man. If pressed about the muzziness of the whole proceeding, they have a last line of retreat: “After all, we gave it to Pearl Buck, didn’t we?”
It is easy to remember the predominance of politics when talking to a journalist or a member of the Swedish Academy: it is, more often, easy to forget it, in any one of those handsome clear-cut middle-class interiors which seem to speak at the same time of victory over a harsh environment, and of confidence in power to resist the new kind of harshness in the world’s climate, the cold wind from across the Baltic. The Swedish middle-class complains, gravely and moderately, of the high cost of socialism—the Swedish welfare state is the most advanced in Europe—of exorbitant taxes, of the euthanasia of the rich: it remains, however, quite visibly, the most solid and secure bourgeoisie in Europe, which is perhaps not saying a great deal. It is also, like the German middle class, deeply attached to the idea of culture, not as an extension or deepening of consciousness but, in the full sense of that significant word, as a heritage: a heritage which implies, like more material patrimonies, duties as well as privileges. A kindly Swedish magnate revealed to me that he was forfeiting an opportunity to go elk-shooting in order to attend a lecture of mine. It was clear from his appearance and style that he was an elk-shooter rather than a Joyce-fan, by disposition, so I remonstrated with him, telling him I did not think he would enjoy the lecture. At the word he stopped me with a stare of his pale blue eyes: “Thank you. I do not go to lectures in order to ennyoy myself.”
Such experiences-and they are frequent in Sweden—are usually generalized in the form: “The Swedes are a dull race.” Irishmen in particular are receptive to this idea: the most stupefying bore in any Dublin bar will wrap himself in the mantles of Sheridan and Congreve, of Wilde and Shaw, while he contemplates the clod-like dullness of the Swede. The judgment is true, to the extent that Swedish conversation, in English, lacks brilliance and agility; foreigners who can achieve these qualities while conversing in the Swedish language have a right to look down on the Swedes. Dullness, in the sense of stupidity, is not a Swedish quality: one meets few Swedes who are not at least shrewd, and I know one Swedish editor whose conversation has something better than the brilliance of Wilde: the force and sense of Dr. Johnson.
The notorious Dr. Emil Joystone has formulated, in The Autarkie of Earth a theory that there are three main sources of illusion—drink, sex and religion—and that no modern community can at present survive without copious supplies of at least two out of the three. “Otherwise,” in his view, “a state of illusion-deficiency leads to apathy and even suicide.” The Italians, in his view, get along with sex and religion: the Irish with drink and religion: the Swedes with drink and sex. He warns communities “working on an illusion-basis of only two-thirds” of the danger of interfering in any way with “either of the surviving illusion-habitats.” He relates, with his usual dubious statistical methodology, the high Swedish suicide rate to the increasingly stringent—and effective—liquor laws, and makes a series of coarse Swabian witticisms about the nature of the thread by which the Swedish people now hang.
Joystone’s remarks, absurd and offensive as they invariably are, point the way to a certain reality. What the vulgar think of as dullness among the Swedes is really melancholy: a sort of spiritual deficiency-disease, a polite desperation. Certain lines of Robert Penn Warren come, in Sweden, very easily to the mind.
Though your luck held and the market was always satisfactory,
Though the letter always came and your lovers were always true,
Though you always received the respect due to your position,
Though your hand never failed of its cunning and your glands always thoroughly knew their business,
Though your conscience was easy and you were assured of your innocence,
You became gradually aware that something was missing from the picture,
And upon closer inspection exclaimed: “Why, I’m not in it at all!”
Which was perfectly true.
It is, of course, a condition not peculiar to Sweden; it has been more publicized in other countries, such as France, where it is by no means so visible to the naked eye. Its prevalence in Sweden could be ascribed to various causes, leaving aside the frivolous, if suggestive, theses of Joystone. An Irish friend who lives in Sweden relates it all to “Gustavus-Vasa-and-his-two-wives,” a reference to the effigy in Uppsala Cathedral of that monarch, with a wife on each side of him. It is perfectly respectable really, and even creditable, but it lies there, for my friend, as a symbol of Laxity Condoned. This is less plausible, as a cause of melancholy, than the winter or the Russians. Nor do I believe that even these do much more than exacerbate a condition already present.
Why are Swedes sad? It is an unanswerable question, like that in the footnote to Finnegan’s Wake: Why have these puerile blondes those large flexible ears? Travelers, like dreamers, answer such questions with impressions. I think of three sober Swedes, met in different places, in whose eyes tears glistened as they spoke of Ireland: a reaction I have never observed in anyone except, oddly enough, a writer from the New Yorker. Intense and lengthy arguments on the fundamentals of religion come to mind: a professor, Voltairean in speech but Socratic in mind, famous for graveling the pastors of the Swedish church, admitting his regret that this was so easy to do: a few Catholics—altogether negligible as a proportion of the total population, but not insignificant as a fraction of the intellectuals—comporting themselves like early Christians under the reign of one of the milder pagan Emperors. The professor suggested that conversions, especially among women, were due to the guilt-and-Graham-Greene vogue, lending prestige and complication to sex in the long sub-arctic winters. This is probably true of a few people—one met people to whom the idea of sin seemed to commend itself by its aristocratic distinction but such oddities are present on the edge of every religious disquiet. The Swedish Catholics I met were mostly, as one would expect, very serious and very well-equipped, with the air of men and women resolutely embarked upon a desperate venture.
Were they, then, no less sad than other Swedes? I think that they were sadder. One cannot proclaim the solution: “The Swedes are sad because they are Protestants,” and leave it at that. Yet, on the whole, one cannot help, either, feeling that the clumsy equestrian statue of Gustavus Adolphus at Stockholm has more to do with it than that other Gustavus, connubially snug at Uppsala. Sweden, in the Thirty Years War, did more than any other nation to tear Europe apart. Swedish nationality, the Reformation, the Lion of the North, are intertwined inseparably. Yet Sweden, unlike England, is not to any degree culturally self-sufficient. The Swedes need Europe: they seem less nationalist and more European in feeling than are the other countries of the Continent. Is Swedish melancholy related to a sense of having in some way injured their heritage and disrupted the community to which they naturally belong? That may be a chimerical idea, induced, in my case, by the chance that I came to Sweden immediately after a visit to Rome, and was obsessed throughout the journey by the sense of a basic European dialectic, the attraction and repulsion between the Goths and Latin civilization.
However that may be, Stockholm is full of clubs for friendship to this or that European nation. England, naturally, is the object of greatest affection. Indeed the Swedish love of England—particularly strong in Gothenburg and the West—has something touching about it, when one considers how little it is requited: the English man-in-the-street thinks of the Swedes as funny, like other foreigners: the English intellectual dislikes Sweden, Switzerland and all other clean, progressive countries, and reserves his love for Italy, France and in rare but acute cases—Spain. Sweden will be sadder because Sir Winston cannot find time to come to Stockholm to receive his prize.
It is only in Southern Europe, among the Latins, that Nordic blondness, Nordic romance and even the solider Nordic qualities, are esteemed. The whole interplay of sympathies reminds one a little of O. Henry’s story of the tramp, the political boss, and the aristocrat. The tramp longed to shake hands with the boss: the boss with the aristocrat: and the aristocrat, racked with social guilt, yearned for the company of the tramp. The analogy will serve only just so far: there is no point in trying to identify the tramp or the
boss.
The importance of Sweden, and of Swedish melancholy, may well be that Swedes recognize, as other Europeans usually do not, that their country is only a fragment—not in the sense that it has lost some piece of territory, but in the sense that it has been broken off from the greater spiritual whole, with which it must re-establish contact. Here, by the wooden houses among the fir-trees and the lakes, at Sigtuna the old capital, near where in the Middle Ages the religious border ran between Christian and heathen, one feels the impact of the poet’s words: “The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.”
