Among
literary topics I should like to explore were I suddenly granted another
lifetime is American literature orally preserved or written down in languages
other than English. There is quite a lot
of it. American Indian languages, which
preserved a vast store of history, legend, poetry, and song in oral form were
intensely and sympathetically study by early members of the American
Philosophical Society, including Jefferson.
The Relations or scientific
diaries of French Jesuits are fundamental primary sources of American historiography. A book written in French by Alexis de
Tocqueville is the classic of early
American political commentary. There
were important and long-running periodical literatures in several European and
Asian languages indispensable for students of American social history. German was particularly important, but Yiddish
is in a class by itself. English
versions of the classic stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer now necessarily find
their place in the beautiful volumes of the Library of America, an enterprise
devoted to the giants of our literature.
I recommend
Singer to Americans who on occasion try to find the lighter side of objectively
distressing situations. Is there still a
lighter side to ours? We face a pretty
bleak landscape these days. Just about
everybody is sick and tired of the pandemic and its constraints. Millions are unemployed and in financial
crisis. With good reason anxious parents
fret about their pent-up children. Half
the country seems to have adopted the brittle moral censoriousness of a college
campus. There are occasional comic
episodes, but they tend toward the sardonic.
A couple in a place called St. Johns, Michigan, run a bed-and-breakfast
out of what appears to be a big, beautiful old Midwestern house from the Civil
War era. I won’t ask why it is called
the “Nordic Pineapple,” but I deduce it has something to do with the Norwegian
heritage of its proprietress, whose name is Kjersten. That is surely the reason the establishment formerly
sported matching Norwegian and American flags attached to its stately front
pillars. It does so no longer. Righteous activists, ardent for racial
justice but a bit wobbly on heraldry, vilified and hounded the proprietors for
their blatant racism in the display of what they imagined to be the Confederate flag! The ignorance, one might hope, is
vincible—but probably not the woke self-righteousness it serves.
The "Nordic Pineapple" in pre-woke state
On the day
I encountered this grimly comical news snippet I happened to be reading Ole Rolvaag’s
great novel Giants in the Earth, a pocket-epic
glimpse of the Scandinavian immigration to the Great Plains in the decade after
the Civil War. (The Homestead Act had
been passed in 1862. This was in the
days when we had a functional government capable of doing important things even
in the midst of crisis.) Rolvaag, who
became a Professor of Norwegian at Saint Olaf College, published his book first
in that language. The English version (1927) pretty well put paid to the genre of the Romantic Western. Rolvaag himself had not been an immigrant of
the generation he treated in the novel, many of the episodes in which derived
from the childhood experiences of his wife.
The band of struggling Nordic farmers who pushed their way from
Minnesota into the huge solitude of the Dakota plains found little more evidence
of the benefit of “privilege” there than they had in the hardscrabble life of
the fisheries in the Lofoten Islands or in the reception center at Ellis Island.
As linguistically isolated from the majority
of other widely scattered European settlers as from the even more rarely encountered
native itinerant hunter-gatherers, their first assimilative struggle was
material rather than “cultural”, an unrelenting existential contest against the
vast emptiness, loneliness, and meteorological hostility of potentially fertile
flatlands previously untouched by human agriculture.
Professor Ole Rolvaag
The hard
life of the prairie pioneers is remembered in a family legend of my own, which
came from my maternal grandmother. Her
maiden name was Harrington. The
Harringtons were English Baptists of the John Bunyan variety. Although Dissenters (i.e., non-Anglicans)
formed the primary demographic among the American revolutionaries, there was
also a strong Tory strain among them. “My”
colonial Harringtons were staunch royalists as well as staunch Baptists, and
they moved (“fled” being the verb often used) to British Canada as the
revolutionary cause prospered. They were
part of a numerically significant migration.
But a century later, with the extraordinary industrial success of the
northern United States, and especially after the Homestead Act, quite a few of
them, including my infant grandmother’s family, returned to make a claim in the
surveyed lands of the Kansas, Nebraska, and Jefferson Territories. My grandmother’s family actually stopped in
Dakota, but considerably to the west, I believe, of the setting for Giants in the Earth. Early autumnal chills, presaging a severe
winter, were already in the air by the time the sod house was finished. Seven people lived in one large room. Then the snows came, blizzard after
blizzard. There was a primitive jakes,
set at a considerable distance from the house (English Baptists). As blinding snows were a weekly, sometimes
daily phenomenon, they had to lay out a lengthy rope-line guide to help find
it. One dark snowy afternoon a young
adult uncle of my grandmother’s quietly stepped out of the house to relieve gastric
distress. His protracted absence was not
noticed until darkness had fallen. Tardy
searches discovered the rope-line broken and footprints already completely
obscured by heavy fresh snow. They found
the frozen cadaver only a couple of months later in the spring thaw; it lay
well over a quarter of a mile from the house site. I think I have somewhere earlier mentioned
Michael Lesy’s remarkable book Wisconsin
Death Trip (1973), based on a unique cache of glass negatives made by a
nineteenth-century photographer in Jackson County, near La Crosse. The only actual photographs of many pioneers,
and especially children, are photographs of corpses. I also recommend the autobiography of John
Muir, among the greatest of true American heroes, who spent formative time on a
Wisconsin farm in that same neck of the woods even before the Civil War.
Such were some
of our very own American giants in the earth.
From every race and creed, they have continued to reappear in every historical
phase of immigration. If you haven’t
read Rolvaag, I would encourage you to do so.
His novel has no sex and practically no violence of the ordinary sort,
although the Norwegians do have to deal with the criminal intentions of some
Irish claim-jumpers. What it does have
is the bittersweet savor of agonistic life and the triumphs and defeats of
universal human aspiration.
