The Last Letter Home (2 page)

To ensure the verisimilitude of his story, Moberg did extensive historical research in both Sweden and the United States. He studied county records in Småland and read many collections of letters that immigrants in America had sent to relatives in Sweden during the nineteenth century. His studies also included trips to the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg. This research gave him a record of living conditions in nineteenth-century Sweden and a feel for life aboard sailing vessels in the days when emigration had not yet become an industry backed by large steamship companies.

Some readers have felt that
The Emigrants
is the most successful of the four volumes largely because Moberg was writing about his home turf, the Smålandish countryside. No one can doubt that his novel gives an accurate and inspired account of the way the author’s predecessors lived and saw the world. From a Minnesota point of view, the reader is reminded that this first volume carefully traces the customs of the Smålanders, who were the most numerous of the Swedish immigrants to this state and whose descendants still make up the largest number of Minnesota’s ethnic Swedes.

In order to build a historical framework in which his characters Karl Oskar and Kristina could move in the New World and especially in frontier Minnesota, Moberg embarked in 1948 on a study trip through the United States. An inexperienced traveler with little knowledge of English, he nevertheless gathered an impressive array of documentation that placed his immigrants in the mainstream of frontier experience.

Moberg carried out his studies in the archives of the Swedish-American museum in Philadelphia, among the Swedes of Minnesota, and through back issues of Swedish-American newspapers. His firsthand contacts with Swedish Americans in Chisago and Washington counties afforded him invaluable information on the lives of those people’s immigrant forebears.
Unto a Good Land
places the immigrants on American soil.
The Settlers
and
The Last Letter Home
offer an accurate overview of pioneer life in Minnesota. These novels give details of a riverboat trip up the Mississippi River, the challenge of staking out a claim in the wilderness, the devastation of grasshopper plagues, the fear of Indians, the pace of life during the Civil War, and the difficulties faced by European immigrants in adjusting to the culture of the New World.

Moberg left nothing to chance in documenting the daily life and historical events of Minnesota from 1850 (when Karl Oskar and Kristina arrive in Minnesota) until 1890 (when Karl Oskar dies). The novelist’s friends in Minnesota told of receiving letters from him inquiring about the nature of thunderstorms in the state, the cost of postage stamps in the nineteenth century, the number of daylight hours in summer, as well as distances between different parts of the state. Moberg even insisted that friends show him firsthand what animals strange to a Swede, such as crickets and skunks, looked like.
⁹
Indeed so insistent was Moberg that his fictional tale also be used as instructional history that he appended a bibliography of his sources to the Swedish edition of the Emigrant Novels. In this Borealis Books edition that bibliography is published for the first time in English.

On only one major historical point did Moberg allow the exigencies of plot construction to interfere with the dictates of historical accuracy. There are no known cases of a group of Swedish settlers journeying directly to and settling permanently in Minnesota prior to 1860. At midcentury the pattern of Swedish migration in the Midwest invariably included an initial stay of several years in Illinois or Iowa. Only after the immigrants had gotten their feet on the ground among fellow countrymen in those states did they venture up the Mississippi to more remote Minnesota. In taking Karl Oskar and his group straight from the East Coast to Minnesota, Moberg emphasized the true, hardy pioneer nature of his characters’ journey.

Writing the Emigrant Novels

Like the fictional Karl Oskar, Moberg himself wanted to be the first on the scene. He saw himself as a literary discoverer and pioneer, a fact that presents some intriguing questions to American readers. Knowing something of Moberg’s personal relationship with America can serve as a helpful guide in understanding some of the themes he developed in the Emigrant Novels.

“We’re off to a good start,” Moberg told reporters in Stockholm as he departed on his first trip to the United States in June 1948.
¹⁰
On that occasion, he entertained friends and journalists by playing the harmonica. For better or for worse, he was unable always to maintain such high spirits during the years after his arrival in America. Indeed his own meeting with America was one of joy mixed with bitter disappointment.

Moberg’s period of legal residence in the United States lasted from 1948 to 1955. During that time he held two different immigrant visas and spoke repeatedly of settling permanently. As he told one Swedish reporter: “That which I find most attractive [in America] is the sense of freedom. It appears to me as if the authorities here have more respect for the individual than at home, and I like that.”
¹¹

Gustaf Lannestock, Moberg’s translator, wrote of the novelists’s high hopes of gaining wealth and fame in the United States. Lannestock argued that Moberg in the late 1940s envisioned a promising future for himself as a writer and an adopted son of America until his aspirations were suddenly disappointed in the mid-1950s by a series of personal reverses, chiefly in disagreements with his American publishers, who Moberg felt had unjustifiably censored the Emigrant Novels.
¹²

It now seems clear, however, that Moberg—to his own surprise—began experiencing mixed emotions about the New World as early as 1948. On one hand he admired the material success of Americans and appreciated the generosity of ordinary citizens. Especially appealing to him was the sense of independence and self-reliance exhibited by American workers. In America he found none of the obsequiousness toward the monied classes so common in Sweden. Here a man was judged “for what he can do.”
¹³

On the other hand some aspects of American life proved to be less agreeable. The oppressive summer heat, the perceived absence of a vital literary life among the common people, and the conservative religious politics of middle America were among Moberg’s earliest complaints. By the beginning of the 1950s, his dissatisfaction extended to the political sphere. He was angered by the disruption caused by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Communists and responded with disgust when Charlie Chaplin was expelled from the country for his leftist sympathies. In an exasperating personal confrontation in 1955, the Internal Revenue Service in New York required Moberg to deposit nine thousand dollars as a lien against possible back taxes before he could return to Sweden for a visit.

Moberg’s general views on the United States were crystallized in his attitudes toward two states: Minnesota and California. He returned to Minnesota several times after his initial 1948 visit. He found the people hard-working. Swedish farmers in Minnesota had opened up more land for cultivation in a hundred years than farmers in Sweden had managed since the Viking Age, Moberg stated with pride. The Swedish settlement areas and the Småland-like countryside around Lindstrom in central Chisago County appealed to him. Visits to Swedish cemeteries in Minnesota inspired some of his most poetic nonfictional accounts of America as he imagined the lives and deaths of his beloved Swedish farmers in fields far from home.

Everyday life in Minnesota proved to be more prosaic, however. Moberg lamented the drabness of the state’s small towns, and the November chill brought uncomfortable reminders of Sweden. Still, it was the intolerance and bigotry he found in the Lutheran churches of the Upper Midwest that provoked him most. In the long run, the climate of Minnesota, both meteorological and spiritual, proved to be too rigorous. The North Star State bore the unmistakable stamp, he wrote, of Calvin, Zwingli, and northern European puritanism.

If Moberg had a love affair with America, it was with California. Beginning in the autumn of 1948 he lived in Carmel, where one of his American aunts rented a house to him. In the sunshine there and in close proximity to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Moberg basked in what he called the joyous spirit of Petrarch and Bocaccio. Here he completed
The Emigrants
and began
Unto a Good Land.

And it was here that he met Gustaf Lannestock, who became his translator. Lannestock was a native Swede who resided in Carmel, where he worked in real estate and collected rare books. They met by chance while walking on a California beach in the late 1940s. Moberg persuaded Lannestock to undertake the translation of the novels. Lannestock stayed with the translation project through the entire tetralogy. The friendship formed through this project lasted until Moberg’s death.

Moberg was not to stay put, however. A case of wanderlust (which was to last seventeen years) had taken control of him, as he explained years later. He moved to Florida in 1953, then back to the Monterey-Carmel area, eventually to Laguna Beach in California, and even spent some time in Mexico, with short stops in New York interspersed. In 1955 he returned to Europe, bothered by the political and literary winds blowing in America and admitting his failure at adjusting to American culture. He completed the emigrant tetralogy in Europe.

Themes in the Emigrant Novels

Moberg had a strongly populist view of history and rejected the mythologizing “great man” approach so popular among Swedish historians and novelists before his time. He argued that older writers had praised the deeds of Swedish monarchs and statesmen in an effort to keep the commoners as loyal, unquestioning subjects of the ruling classes. This approach he described as historical casuistry and blamed it for creating feelings of “ultra-royalism,” “ultra-patriotism,” and “ultra-heroism.”
¹⁴

In the process of emigration, Moberg saw a historical movement set in motion and sustained by daring commoners who acted without a significant portal figure as their leader. Emigration changed history, according to this argument, in that it deprived Sweden of a cheap labor supply and aided America in the building of a new society. On a material plane, America is the land where people of modest means but the right abilities can thrive. Karl Oskar is undistinguished as a leader of men. He is only “one emigrant among many emigrants,” according to one critic.
¹⁵
Yet he is successful as a farmer in America because he possesses the proper practical skills. Karl Oskar is thwarted in Sweden but sees his hard work rewarded with ever-increasing affluence in Minnesota.

So interested was Moberg in this pioneering theme that he came to present his own actions in a similar, though more individualized, light. He wished to be viewed as the first in Sweden to practice the art of writing the documentary novel. Likewise, Moberg argued for his importance as the discoverer of the topic of Swedish emigration. Swedish scholars and writers before him had neglected the subject, he felt, because the movement revealed the Swedish government’s lack of foresight in failing to prevent it.

Just as Karl Oskar stakes his claim in Chisago County four years before the first historical permanent settlement of Swedes there, so Moberg, by his own reckoning, turned virgin literary soil in depicting the lives of ordinary Swedish Americans in Minnesota. In this respect, Moberg’s fertile creative imagination took control over his otherwise strong sense of realism. While no critics have questioned the historical accuracy of the Emigrant Novels, it is clear that other writers (both Swedish and American) had preceded Moberg in recording Swedish settlement patterns in the United States. In fact, Moberg listed names of some of those researchers in his own bibliography for the novels.

Still, Moberg’s faithful depiction of the lives of humble people involved in a historic undertaking remains constant throughout the Emigrant Novels. This narrative consistency is one of the strengths of the series.

Reading the Emigrant Novels as a psycho-history of Moberg and his America is perhaps equally as instructive as searching for historical motifs. Scholars have often asked how Moberg’s personal impressions of America after 1948 influenced the directions his epic narrative takes. It is tempting to view the storyline as leading in a linear fashion from poverty and oppression in the Old World to affluence and freedom in the New World. A more complex set of psychological variables can be seen to enter the novels, however.

In this connection, the Swedish novelist Sven Delblanc has pointed out how the dictates of realism led Moberg to conclude that the basic human condition is constant regardless of time and country.
¹⁶
Likewise, Professor Rochelle Wright considered how Moberg—in spite of his early infatuation with America—often portrayed the new land as a “shadow kingdom,” a land to which one’s relatives disappeared, never to be heard from again. America was the great divider of families.
¹⁷

Karl Oskar and Kristina illustrate this theme. While Karl Oskar believes in their future in America with almost total optimism, Kristina sees their emigration as the abandonment of age-old traditions and the loss of an ancient Swedish birthright. Moberg never allowed the reader to forget Kristina’s homesickness for her native Småland.

Even Karl Oskar’s material success is tainted. First, he never fully understands the emotional impact of his leaving his own aged parents in Sweden. By the same token, he is slow to grasp the irony of his statement to Kristina that his children one day will thank him for taking them to America, when in fact they grow up to marry into other ethnic groups and leave Karl Oskar behind much as he had left his own parents. Furthermore it is ironic that the period of Karl Oskar’s rising prosperity on his Minnesota farm corresponds to the general time of Kristina’s death. It is after Kristina’s passing that Karl Oskar seals his fate by questioning God for the second time in his life.