The Last Letter Home (3 page)

In addition, it bears mentioning that a recurring motif in Moberg’s nonfiction writings was his admiration for the spirit of enterprise he saw in Americans. Yet he was equally as shocked by what he perceived as their callous individualism and lack of sympathy for the less fortunate in society.
¹⁸
No character better embodies these traits than Karl Oskar, whose qualities of diligence and practicality are counterbalanced by his impatience with and lack of understanding for Robert, the incurable dreamer. Karl Oskar is also skeptical about Native Americans because he considers them lazy.

The Emigrant Novels should be seen, in short, in their full realistic light. They are stories of blighted hopes as much as of personal fulfillment. Of all Moberg’s characters, only Ulrika and Jonas Petter gain a kind of lasting happiness. Most of the others (from Inga-Lena to Kristina) succumb soon after their arrival here or long before their time. In the end, Karl Oskar remains, old and lonely, residing in Minnesota in body only.

Moberg saw at firsthand the difficulty of ever totally adapting to a new culture. He remained forever Swedish, perhaps despite himself. And in his novels he dramatized the problems of adaptation. Still, more than any other Swedish writer he succeeded in bridging the gap between the Old and New Worlds, between Sweden and Minnesota. The great resurgence of ethnic interest among Swedish Americans and their relatives in Sweden, which began in the 1950s and 1960s, was triggered largely by the Emigrant Novels.

Moberg strove to debunk the old heroic myths of Swedish history. But in his tales of the immigrants to Minnesota, he succeeded in his own right in creating a significant popular image. The figures of Karl Oskar and Kristina, the ultimate commonfolk, speak so powerfully to our imagination that they assume a dimension larger than life. Like many other contrasts in his life, this ironic twist would have hit home with Vilhelm Moberg and appealed to his literary sensibility.

Moberg’s writing style has been a subject of discussion since the 1960s when critic Gunnar Brandell denied him a place among the great creative artists of modern Swedish literature. According to Brandell, Moberg wrote a solid everyday prose that did not adequately express shades of difference or depict characters in sufficient depth. Moberg lacked “lyrical resources,” Brandell concluded.
¹⁹

Since that time several writers have defended Moberg’s writing style. Gunnar Heldén pointed out Moberg’s strengths in dealing with three central motifs in classic lyricism: nature, love, and death.
²⁰
Sven Delblanc described Moberg’s prose style as
en poesi i sak,
that is, a style that pays steady attention to small details, thus creating a harmony and poetry of everyday life without reliance on the neat turning of phrases or on striking images.
²¹
Finally, Philip Holmes explained Moberg’s use of alliteration, phrase-pairs, and repetition in his prose. These devices allowed Moberg to slow his narrative tempo and to strive “for clarity and fullness of expression.”
²²

Holmes described the Old Testament and the medieval Swedish laws as major influences on Moberg’s writing style. Moberg strove in his prose to produce the thought patterns of rural people from the nineteenth century. Although unlettered, these people were confronted with and forced to sort out a new world of impressions and complicated emotions. Mobergs task was to give a realistic voice to his characters. His success in finding this voice speaks for his creativity.

Roger McKnight

Gustavus Adolphus College

NOTES

1
. Magnus von Platen,
Den unge Vilhelm Moberg. En levnadsteckning
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1978), 310.

2
. Vilhelm Moberg, “Där jag sprang barfota,”
Berättelser ur min levnad
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1968), 29–46.

3
. Von Platen,
Den unge Vilhelm Moberg,
9.

4
. Moberg, “Från kolbitar till skrivmaskin,”
Berättelser ur min levnad,
119.

5
. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,”
Berättelser ur min levnad,
292.

6
. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” 293, 298.

7
. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” 294. For similar comments in English, see: Moberg, “Why I Wrote the Novel About Swedish Emigrants,”
Swedish Pioneer Historical Quarterly
17 (Apr. 1966): 63.

8
. Gunnar Eidevall,
Vilhelm Mobergs emigrantepos
(Stockholm: Norstedts, 1974), 19–20.

9
. For discussions of Moberg’s research methods, see Philip Holmes,
Vilhelm Moberg
(Boston: Twayne, 1980), 110–32; Ingrid Johanson, “Vilhelm Moberg As We Knew Him,”
Bulletin of the American Swedish Institute
(Minneapolis), no. II (1956); Bertil Hulenvik,
Utvandrarromanens källor: Förteckning över Vilhelm Mobergs samling av källmaterial,
ed. Ulf Beijbom (Växjö: House of Emigrants, 1972).

10
. Don Josè [pseud.], “Vilhelm Mobergs amerikabagage nära att gå till Europahjälpen,”
Svenska Dagbladet,
June 4, 1948, p. 11.

11
. Sven Åhman, “Vilhelm Moberg ser på USA,”
Nordstjernan,
May 26, 1949.

12
. Gustaf Lannestock,
Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika
(Stockholm: Zindermans, 1977), 36. Much of our knowledge of Moberg’s life in America is derived from the two men’s correspondence and from this volume.

13
. For works in English detailing Moberg’s impressions of America, see Moberg,
The Unknown Swedes: A Book About Sweden and America, Past and Present,
ed. and trans. Roger McKnight (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988); McKnight, “The New Columbus: Vilhelm Moberg Confronts American Society,”
Scandinavian Studies
64 (Summer 1992): 356–88. Moberg expressed many of his opinions in letters to Lannestock; these letters are now in the House of Emigrants in Växjö, Sweden, and are referred to in “The New Columbus.” See also Lannestock,
Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika
(in Swedish). My comments here and five paragraphs below are based on these works.

14
. Moberg,
Min svenska historia
(Stockholm: Norstedts, 1971), 1:14.

15
. Sigvard Mårtensson,
Vilhelm Moberg
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1956), 202.

16
. Sven Delblanc, “Den omöjliga flykten,”
Bonniers litterära magasin
42, no.
6
(Dec. 1973), 267.

17
. Rochelle Wright, “Vilhelm Moberg’s Image of America,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1975), 34–40.

18
. McKnight, “The New Columbus,” 384.

19
. Gunnar Brandell,
Svensk Litteratur 1900–1950: Realism och Symbolism
(Stockholm: Förlaget Örnkrona, 1958), 261.

20
. Gunnar Heldén, “Vilhelm Mobergs lyriska resurser,”
Emigrationer: En bok till Vilhelm Moberg 20-8-1968
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1968), 215–29.

21
. Delblanc, “Den omöjliga flykten,” 266.

22
. Holmes,
Vilhelm Moberg,
126.

Introduction to
The Last Letter Home

Moberg once estimated that he wrote three-quarters of the manuscript of the Emigrant Novels in California.
¹
He wrote all of
Sista brevet till Sverige
in Europe, finishing it in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1959. The Swedish title means “The Last Letter to Sweden.” In the 1961 American edition, the series was published as a trilogy, with
The Settlers
and
The Last Letter Home
presented as one volume. Lannestock explained: “Large parts of both books had been omitted; the publisher felt that they were of greater interest to European readers.”
²
Later editions of the series presented the tetralogy as a whole, however, as does this Borealis Books edition.

Details of the difficulties between white settlers and the Ojibway and Dakota people (also known as the Chippewa and Sioux, respectively) form an important subplot in
The Last Letter Home.
Numerous first-person accounts by both white and Dakota people document the shock and cruelty of the Dakota War of 1862. Moberg had read sections of the journals of Swedish immigrant Andrew Peterson, which tell how Peterson and other Swedes fled with their families to an island in Lake Waconia during the war.
³
Moberg also read historical texts to learn about events and other aspects of those troubled times (see his bibliography). Historians now argue about the validity of some of those texts, and readers should not accept Moberg’s use of historical sources uncritically.

Despite its relative briefness, the Dakota War of 1862 was a complicated series of events marked by acts of extreme brutality and exceptional humanity by different individuals on both sides of the conflict.
⁴
This is information of which Moberg was well aware; therefore, in describing the Dakota War in
The Last Letter Home,
he was faced with the difficult task of joining his narrative of actual historical events to a description of his fictional immigrants’ immediate experiences and emotions. For example, he incorporated into his novel the grisly accounts of mutilation of the bodies of whites by Dakota people. While some stories of this type may have a basis in fact, many others of questionable reliability were told by members of the military burial parties that reached the dead after several days. Exposure of the bodies to animals and August heat may have produced gruesome results that the whites were all too ready to blame on the Dakota.

Regardless of whether such stories were true or false, they were widely believed by whites in Minnesota in 1862. Moberg used them in his novel to heighten the sense of alarm felt by his fictional characters, whom he referred to as “the immigrated Europeans”
(de inflyttade européerna).
With limited access to factual reports in their own language,
⁵
such immigrant groups often saw the peoples and customs of the American frontier as strange and frightening. Their judgments were frequently based on rumors rather than on facts. This tendency may be seen as a case of one minority (the recent immigrants) being aroused against another (the Native Americans) by a lack of understanding that instilled suspicion and fear.

While some readers in the late twentieth century may find certain details in
The Last Letter Home
to be less than complimentary to Native Americans, it is interesting to note that in the late 1950s and early 1960s Moberg received numerous letters from American readers who protested that he had portrayed American Indians “as altogether too sympathetic and pleasant [a people].”
⁶
This reaction reflects the changing sensibilities and the tangled emotions of Moberg’s readers and of his fictional characters alike. In short, Moberg felt the necessity to depict in certain of his Swedish figures an apprehension about Native Americans. Since this perception was a historical fact among many immigrants, Moberg insisted that literary realism demanded that it be described as existing among various characters in the Emigrant Novels as well.

Readers wishing to assess Moberg’s own personal sentiments on this issue should understand that he was indeed sympathetic to Native Americans. He had a great interest in the culture of American Indians and saw the loss of their lands as a calamity. In Moberg’s own words, the white Americans’ treatment of the Native Americans was “one of the most reprehensible deeds in world history.” According to his own later writings, he felt he had written this same message into the Emigrant Novels. He wrote in 1968: “In my novels I laid the blame for the Indian uprising principally on the white man’s hard and inhuman treatment of his red brother.” Earlier American novels of the frontier had pictured Native Americans as bloodthirsty savages, Moberg wrote. He argued that he himself had gone against that tradition by portraying them as peace loving.
⁷

Determining the true relationship between actual nineteenth-century Swedish immigrants and Ojibway and Dakota people in Minnesota is extremely difficult because there are so few accounts written on the topic from a Swedish perspective. One line of reasoning is that the two groups enjoyed good relations. In 1932, Andrew Porter of Chisago County reminisced that his Swedish parents traded food with Native Americans in the 1850s and remained on good terms with them even when wild and unfounded rumors about Indian atrocities spread throughout the area in the late summer of 1862. Porter commented: “These Indians were very friendly and they never did any harm to people or stock.”
⁸
Likewise, Moberg himself talked with descendants of the first Swedish settlers around Chisago Lake. These people recalled their own parents’ tales of friendly contacts with Indians, who were “peaceful and nice,
if they were left to live in peace.”
⁹