An Offprint from the Swedish Literature Bank, 2019
Originality is a Quality
Karl Ragnar Gierow (1904-1982)
Presented by Tom Hedlund
Original text translated by Chris Hall
ORIGINALITY IS A QUALITY
‘Originality is a quality, rather than a mode of expression – it is a simple truth, unassuming and unnoticed. He who possesses that quality may both learn and borrow from others; what he does will nevertheless always remain his own. He who lacks it may work himself to death in striving for a distinctive voice; what he says will, in any case, not be his.’
So true are these words, so precise and direct, while also tinged with a particular bitterness. The history of literature confirms the admittedly not-so-simple truth: that original writers can make loans their own without ever losing their originality. The great innovators are not infrequently unabashed borrowers.
Although Karl Ragnar Gierow, the man behind the earlier quotation, cannot perhaps be referred to as a literary innovator, he must be said to have fitted his own description in a singularly personal way. While he learnt and borrowed expressions and idioms, he did so in a manner that only served to strengthen his originality.
He was born in Helsingborg on 2 April 1904, the second of four siblings. His father, like his father before him, was a priest and school inspector. After graduating in 1922, Gierow studied in Lund, where he became acquainted with, among others, Hjalmar Gullberg, Frans G. Bengtsson, Ivar Harrie and Ingvar Andersson. He concluded his studies in 1934, attaining a Ph. Lic. in Philosophy. Earlier, in 1928, he had married his childhood sweetheart Karin Hellmer – the setting for one of his early love poems was Pålsjö Forest in Helsingborg. Over time, he came to write several more love poems, often highly emotional in tone – not least after his wife’s death in 1971. He died in Stockholm on 30 October 1982. (Biographical data and a rich selection of texts relating to Gierow can be found on the comprehensive website http://karlragnargierow.se/).
In the literary environment of emerging modernism, it is hard to find a Swedish poet more originally traditional than Gierow. This is especially so with regard to form, which for Gierow is neither ‘a mode of expression’ nor a technique he resorts to casually, but something he employs and develops into a personal hallmark. The idiom, even if familiar in a superficial sense, ‘will nevertheless always remain his own’. If his late poetry collections with their strict observance of form are considered against the backdrop of what was typical of the time, their originality becomes clear: quite simply, no one else wrote that way in the 1970s and early 1980s.
In fact, his register is extremely broad. His poetic feet move perfectly and his frequently inventive yet unforced rhymes fall exactly where they should. And yet, in combination with the technical brilliance of the verse, its style traverses all levels from the grand rhetorical to the everyday immediate, not to say prosaic.
By no means was there any lack of inspiration from older poets. His comrades from the time he spent in Lund, Frans G. Bengtsson and especially Hjalmar Gullberg, had fused strict external form with not infrequently modern use of language in a way that could appear anachronistic or otherwise divergent in terms of style. But since originality is a quality rather than a mode of expression, it became impossible to confuse Gierow’s work with that of any other poet. In a most unusual manner, Gierow manages to use verse to lift bare prose, rendering it even more naked and meaningful:
Fallen leaves and faded autumn
yet another year kindle
my heart that needs solace
and in the hollow of my breast
sits on pins and needles.
This example is taken from Gierow’s final poetry collection, I daggkåpans mantelfåll (In the Hem of the Lady’s Mantle, 1983), published posthumously. In the final line, the poet uses, with all serious intent, a linguistic cliché which acquires a sudden and painful poignancy by virtue of the heart seeming literally to have been pinned to the chest cavity. In such a way might a prosaic model gain completely new substance when employed in a traditionally structured poem.
This sure handling of form was present in Gierow’s poetry from the very beginning. He almost always allows the beat and rhythm to coincide so that the verse flows freely and without hindrance. Although he rarely employs pure reversals of accent – exceptions to this tend to be rather subtle and are found mostly in the dramas – his verse is richly varied on account of the stressed syllables being accorded different degrees of stress. In those cases where the motifs and language contrast with the traditional elegance of the verse, various stylistic breaks arise, which afford his poetry its very particular character.
THE EARLY POETRY
Solen lyser (The Sun Is Shining, 1925) is the title of the 21-year-old Gierow’s debut poetry collection. Sunshine is almost defiantly present from the very first poem, in which the barometer, regardless of the current state of the weather, ‘believes / in the sun, that shines, and in beautiful weather’. In poems as unaffected as they are exquisitely effected, daylight plays over young love interspersed with melancholy. But the breaks in style are already present:
My soul was like a bow without a string,
my heart was as if a parched meadow,
my mind was like a wallet without money,
I myself a lone jack in poker,
and I longed for and was led after thee,
and I went and mourned — and you came to me.
The stringless instrument and the heart’s parched meadow would have been well suited to an older love poem in terms of their easy-flowing, rhyming form, while the wallet and jack seem more to belong to the student-type poetry of which Gierow was a master practitioner. In the same year that his debut work came out, Gierow took over the editorship of the student magazine Lundagård, where such style breaks were a feature of its more or less gallows-humorous poetry. Several of the magazine’s anonymous ‘Q-verses’ – satirical poems portraying persons familiar to the reader – were, in fact, authored by Gierow himself. Employing a different kind of verse to that of his student poetry, Gierow, even in his debut collection, nevertheless brought an emotional depth to the not easily wedded combination of traditional verse form, everyday objects and comic rhyme. A similar blend, albeit in a more developed and refined form, may be found scattered throughout his later poetry. The heart that sits on pins and needles from his final collection is such an example, imbued as it is with a pain that is absent from his debut work.
This pain made its first appearance in his second collection of poems, published only three years after the first: Den gyllene ungdomen (Golden Youth, 1928). The golden period that Gierow and his young contemporaries came to experience in the wake of the First World War belonged to what is usually called the Lost Generation, a post-war cohort that had been deprived of faith in all ideals and would, indeed, turn out to be an inter-war generation. The technical brilliance of the verse is more evident here than in his debut collection.
Pain, however, remains largely confined to the private realm. The series of poems on the subject of conscription is largely concerned with being separated from one’s beloved, and various complications are suggested in a suite of love poems. But there is also a sense of disillusionment that would develop to its full effect in the two subsequent, highly contemporary collections Ödletid (Age of Lizards, 1937) and Vid askens rötter (At the Roots of the Ash, 1940).
Nothing ages as quickly as poetry that is focused on its particular time. Indeed, it may be easily forgotten as soon as the period to which it is a response falls into oblivion and becomes history – that which, to avoid the repetition of mistakes, ought really to be retained in our memory. However, it also remains true that a poem of this kind that fails to shed light on what is temporary lacks any chance of survival. Gierow looks for and finds a pattern in contemporary events. The title poem in Ödletid is a kind of evolutionary panorama in which the Age of Dinosaurs returns, now manifested by ‘lumbering armoured hulks’, ‘grey leviathans’ and ‘murderous dragons’. Man, who once conquered the animals of prehistory, has now created a new era of reptiles.
One of the poem’s curiosities is its use of the first person. ‘The lizard killer dances. / Call me king’ declares man in triumph. When the previous age returns, it is man who is responsible: ‘An age of lizards have I created, / I who was weak.’ It is also in this first-person form, where the ‘I’ represents humanity, that the notion of the individual’s personal responsibility is grounded. The poem ‘Försvarsförbund’ (Defence Pact) in Vid askens rötter is about manning the border ‘from Skanör to Torneå’: ‘On the other side of that border / is an army of injustice. // There does the wolf claw, disguised as a lamb, / and violence holds sway.’ However, in the final stanza, what initially appears to be a poem about being ready to defend territorial and political borders takes an unexpected turn: ‘On the map, that border does not run. / It runs straight through me.’
This emphasis on personal responsibility is moreover repeated elsewhere in Gierow’s writing, which is often linked to questions of morality. In his dramas, Gierow is keen to pit good against evil, often within a complex framework. He formulates the matter most frankly in the verse drama Domkyrkospel (Cathedral Play), written in 1946 for the 800th anniversary of Lund Cathedral:
The evil one
is not power, but lies behind power,
is not a lie, but lies behind a lie,
is not fear, but is the source
of all the fear and all the power and lies in the world.
That is my name. The name of evil is me!
The ash referred to in Vid askens rötter is the mythical Yggdrasil of Old Norse cosmography; the book also opens with a collection of ‘Watchmen Songs’ and a motto from the Icelandic epic Völuspá. In the seventh of the watchmen songs, the poet – with brutal precision – formulates a situation involving a hopeless choice. The first stanza begins: ‘Take up your arms!’ and ends: ‘You who give way in weakness, / when threatened with violence, / are lost.’ The second stanza sets off from the opposite direction: ‘Lay down your arms!’ but ends with the same disillusionment: ‘You who can only win, / when resorting to violence, / are lost.’
While ‘Förening’ (Union), a suite of love poems inflamed by the anxieties of the day, at times approaches the brusque matter-of-factness of Gullberg’s ‘Kärleksroman’ (Love Novel) from barely a decade earlier, it is also candidly open about ‘our fear of losing / any single one of those days we have left’.
OFFICIAL ROLES AND DRAMA
More than two decades would pass before Gierow was published again in book form as a poet; needless to say, other work came in between. In 1930, he had been employed as a literary advisor at the publishing house Norstedts Förlag, remaining there until 1937, when he began working for the Swedish Radio Service, Radiotjänst. In 1946–51 he was head of Svenska Dagbladet’s literature department and, in 1951–63, Director of Dramaten, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. In each of these positions, he made significant and highly praised contributions.
In 1934, Gierow had written an audio play for Radioteatern for the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. It included a suite of poems later published in Ödletid. Four years later, he wrote a new radio play for the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war. From these works, the curious 1914–1918 In Memoriam (1939) was born, a collage of voices from different sources interspersed with some of Gierow’s own poems. This may be regarded as a form of period document in which the tongues of time are allowed to speak for themselves in describing the arrival and progress of the First World War. In the preface to the new edition of the book in 2018, Peter Englund states laconically that, at the time Gierow was ‘putting his finishing touches to this book, two weeks of peace remained in Europe’. The Age of Lizards was upon us.
In the 1940s, Gierow the radio dramatist began to turn his hand to stage drama, here too showing himself to be a poet of the times. As such, he managed to appear both anachronistic and timeless: the first of these in the sense that almost all the dramas are written in verse, and the second in that his subjects and environments often belong to an indefinite past and sometimes bear mythical elements, allowing contemporary conflicts and their moral dividing lines to be portrayed in all their complexity and nakedness. Gierow skilfully exploits the particular stylization inherent in the verse, and we should moreover be reminded that this, with one exception, is blank verse, the multi-toned instrument developed by Shakespeare, among others.
Verse was not an entirely unfamiliar mode of expression in contemporary drama. Although, when commenting on Gierow’s verse dramas, mention is often given to T. S. Eliot and Maxwell Anderson – the latter of whom Gierow once translated – Gierow himself regards two translations he produced in the 1930s as having provided the catalyst. In particular, a translation produced for Radioteatern of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus appears to have been crucial: ‘There I was not only stimulated by the verse, this original, most indispensable and indeed most natural form of dramatic expression, but also encountered a set of problems which, I felt, resonated with me.’ (Vänkritik. 22 samtal om dikt tillägnade Olle Holmberg (Criticism from a Friend, 22 Conversations About Poems Dedicated to Olle Holmberg, 1959)). Marlowe was a contemporary of Shakespeare and, like him, wrote in blank verse.
The previously mentioned Domkyrkospel (printed in 1946) had been preceded by Rovdjuret (The Predator, 1941) and Helgonsaga (Saint’s Saga, 1943). These are set in the past – Rovdjuret in an unspecified medieval age and Helgonsaga on the Orkney Islands in the early 12th century. In both, as in the drama Färjstället (The Ferry Landing, 1946), where ‘events play out from the afternoon to the following morning once upon a time’, the problem of evil is portrayed, doubtless drawing on the prevailing climate in which it had free rein.
As Åke Janzon suggests in Vänkritik, this is not historical drama in the true sense – eras and environments are freely stylized. Janzon nevertheless claims that the previously mentioned plays are ‘essentially Christian dramas’. Given that Vänkritik is a book in which critic and author engage in a dialogue, Janzon asks why the Christian problem ‘has been so indispensable to Gierow – indeed, why it has been so strikingly more alive for him as a playwright than as a lyricist?’
Interestingly, Gierow answers rather evasively: ‘If I were to address that question fully – assuming I can and am prepared to do so – my comments would soon end up swelling into a confessional statement, for which this little dialogue has no room nor, indeed, is the place.’ Instead, he points to how ‘drama is still, as it was in the very beginning, a rite, a cult, a religious act’. Of course, this also suggests that drama has, from its very inception, been linked to issues of religion: man’s relationship to ‘something superhuman or, indeed, beyond human, with a power, a driving force, a destiny, law, cause and consequence outside the dominion of man’.
It is no secret that Gierow’s dramas met with the least success when compared with the rest of his oeuvre. Knut Ahnlund dwells on this for a moment in a memorial article published by Svenska Dagbladet on the day of Gierow’s funeral, 11 November 1982, and similarly in his induction speech at the Swedish Academy upon succeeding Gierow. (Both the article and speech can be found on Gierow’s website: http://karlragnargierow.se/). Ahnlund observes that the dramas ‘had magnificent but also rather problematic features’, while also emphasizing the author’s ‘predilection for the motif of salvation and transformation’. He suggests that Färjstället – with its myths and magic, its variously raw and tender verse – would be worth producing on the stage once again.
Subsequent to the previously mentioned dramas, Gierow was published on a further two occasions as a playwright, both times in verse: in 1961 with Cembalo and in 1971 with Den fjärde vise mannen (The Fourth Wise Man). The former, named after the Crimean port town now known as Balaklava, is an existential drama inserted into a historical situation: namely, the Venetian siege of a Genoese city in the 1430s. The latter, with its biblical motif – albeit of timeless significance – was evidently out of kilter with its day. At its centre is King Herod, who, to put it simply in the context of this extremely complicated drama, commits evil deeds in the vain pursuit of goodness. Rather than flexible blank verse, this is a six-beat pattern and therefore the rather heavier trimeter.
It might well be that the works here mentioned are best presented as reading dramas. There are shifts and complications in all of them that encourage us to pause for a moment and think, perhaps even to retrace our steps. Nothing is particularly obvious, particularly where it appears to be so. With good and evil being lit from unexpectedly oblique angles, it is perhaps only in the head of the reader that all the issues and their ramifications can fully develop, undisturbed by a director’s placement of emphasis or demarcation of the drama. Ebbe Linde, in his somewhat reserved review of the première of Cembalo (Dagens Nyheter, 13 May 1961), specifically praises the text as enjoyable for self-study, and it is by no means hard to concur. Gierow the poet reaches great heights here, as in this monologue:
For even the illusion
of land, where the sea rests,
and waves, where the sand ripples, is real
and true, reflected in fragments of
something that does exist, but out of sight.
It must – in spite of everything, it must!
Otherwise –. Is this all there is?
This undogmatic idea of something that ‘exists, but out of sight’, plainly and easily formulated and, at the same time, lifted by the smoothest blank verse, has its counterparts elsewhere in Gierow’s writing. The speaker in the above passage is Johannes, a captured galley slave who turns out to have a completely different and higher social status – and given that he is not what he seems to be, is himself able to confirm his own suspicions. His audience in the matter, Theodora –who, out of necessity, lives for the moment – is horrified:
If things could have been different,
then all comfort, all forgiveness would be taken from us,
which life dispenses as it will!
If things could have been different –
that thought must be stifled, otherwise
we cannot live; he who utters it
must be silenced, or we perish
where we have been forced to sink.
While Theodora represents an opposite pole in the drama, she too speaks with the tongue of her author. Gierow’s entire literary oeuvre is, in various ways, built up of contrasts both ideological and stylistic, and it is natural that drama was to be his chosen form for allowing these contrasts to be set off against each other.
During the 1940s, Gierow had also dashed off scripts for seven films, including Snapphanar (Guerrillas, 1942) with Åke Ohberg as director, and Kungajakt (Royal Hunt, 1944), directed by Alf Sjöberg. His most lightweight drama, the witty prose comedy Av hjärtans lust (Heart’s Desire, 1945) with its sophisticated contemporary setting, was also ultimately made into a film (1960).
One particular initiative during his time as Director of Dramaten has received far more praise from various quarters than was ever bestowed upon the dramas he wrote. He focused heavily on productions of classic works, and the most renowned of these, which later became a classic in its own right, was the world première of Eugene O’Neill’s posthumously published drama Lång dags färd mot natt (Long Day’s Journey into Night, 1956), directed by Bengt Ekerot.
ESSAYS
Gierow’s versatility has rightly been emphasized by all who have written about him. His capacity for work seems to have been almost unlimited. Despite his many official engagements, he found time to write an extensive yet always spiritual wealth of essays. He appears to have been a master of every discipline, including the history of culture, literature, art and philosophy. Or perhaps, as he himself would have preferred to put it, he – unlike so many other commentators – only wrote on the subjects he had truly mastered. Unfortunately, much of his output remains only in the form of yellowed newspaper articles – not least as features in Svenska Dagbladet (albeit now digitally searchable for subscribers) – but two collections of his essays have been published: Mina utflykter (My Excursions, 1950) and Europa och tjuren (Europa and the Bull, 1972). However, there is by no means an excess of his work in book form, and it would be no surprise if a selection of his unpublished essays were to end up between the covers of a volume.
Despite all the research and learning invested in Mina utflykter, the greater part of it could be described as easy reading. Just over a third of the essays deal with the Orkney Islands and Scotland. These gave Gierow plenty of opportunities to contrast historical facts with perceptively recalled folktales, as in the case of the real Macbeth. A couple of essays deal with the history of the Canary Islands. These are both interesting and highly readable, not least for today’s charter travellers. There is also an eighty-page section on the geography and history of Skåne. His praise of provincialism, including but not limited to Scanian, as an assertion of independence may well feel foreign to us today; he would certainly not have agreed with the forms of expression it has taken in the modern era, whether locally or nationally. Even in his own time, he clearly saw downsides including ‘self-sufficiency, sometimes inflated to an unbearable complacency or otherwise confined to a more moderate negativity, as in an instinctive suspicion of all strangers and a persistent heckling of anything that comes from elsewhere’. Had he been alive today, he would likely have developed his thoughts on these negative aspects.
The book’s concluding essays are concerned with authors; the most extensive section consisting of four essays focuses on Kafka. It is from one of these that this presentation’s opening quotation on the subject of originality is taken.
In the preface to Europa och tjuren, Gierow himself provides fairly detailed reading instructions: ‘What grounds for a sense of anticipation do we find around us, here where we stand?’ As may be surmised from this particular wording, the book’s fifteen very different essays are set against a somewhat gloomy background. However, Gierow refrains from calling himself a pessimist. ‘From the lips of the true pessimist, not a word would pass. What good would that serve?’
The darkest section includes a discussion of war in ‘Para bellum’ and of our Western culture in ‘Bönen på Akropolis’ (Prayer on the Acropolis), as well as the concluding title essay on how the Greeks crushed the culture of Crete. Thus ‘the most human-friendly culture we know was turned to dust’. He asks himself: ‘Why must it perish? What was our advantage?’ That which he refers to as ‘the Cretans immediate joy in the present’ could not measure up to ‘our anguished search for truth, our terror, our guilt’. For ‘without the brooding, pain and guilt of the Westerner, Greek culture would never have thrived, Christianity would not have come into the world, and we would all have wandered around lost, as bewildered as our hearts’. Unreflective happiness had nothing to set against all this.
Gierow the philosopher was literally given voice in a speech called ‘De oumbärliga fördomarna’ (The Indispensable Prejudices) held at the Academic Society in Lund. The audience at the time must have been unceasingly attentive, since the text is undoubtedly the most complicated in the collection. Rather easier to absorb and continuously interesting is the long essay ‘Bibelns språk och tidens’ (The Language of the Bible and of Today). The investigation of Eugene O’Neill’s long medical history, the conversation with Arthur Koestler and the discussion about the Nobel Prize that Tolstoy never received all contribute to the varied nature of the collection.
A couple of the essays are more personal, such as the light-hearted tale of the poet’s visit to his grandmother’s grave together with his grandfather. He also offers glimpses of his childhood in ‘Granne med Birger Sjöberg’ (Neighbours with Birger Sjöberg), originally given as a speech for the Birger Sjöberg Society and later printed in the Society’s Yearbook of 1969. Besides his memories of Sjöberg, Gierow writes about the Eneborg of his youth, including its large garden, during which time he was, in fact, a neighbour of Sjöberg. In closing, he tells us that he and his wife have bought the final remaining burial plot in one of the two cemeteries near his childhood home. ‘In the section next to ours lies Frida’s songwriter and the poet of Kriser och kransar (Crises and Wreaths), and I will again, as once before, be a neighbour of Birger Sjöberg, without either of us knowing about the other.’
Gierow states that Sjöberg’s poetry collection Kriser och kransar (1926) made a strong impression, albeit not to the extent that it influenced his own poetic expression. Admittedly, Sjöberg writes metrically bound and rhymed verse on an advanced level, but his complicated imagery is largely modernistic. Kriser och kransar therefore becomes a kind of bridge between tradition and modernism in a manner that would later be emulated by Hjalmar Gullberg, as Gierow points out in his essay. A virtuoso of verse, Gierow himself would nevertheless follow a slightly different path.
ACADEMY DUTIES AND MEMOIRS
In 1961, Gierow was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy. There, he succeeded Hjalmar Gullberg, a friend from his student days (the induction speech can be found on Gierow’s website, http://karlragnargierow.se/). In 1964–77, he held the position of Permanent Secretary, since Dag Hammarskjöld, who was supposed to have taken over the role, had died in a plane crash near Ndola.
As a member of the Academy, he was also active in other ways. He wrote three memoirs, two of which were about former Academy members: Abraham Niclas Clewberg-Edelcrantz (1964, new edition 2008), Benjamin Höijer (1971) and Johan Henrik Thomander (1975). These three men were all complex personalities, and Gierow’s nuanced accounts each provide sensitive and perceptive analysis. It is clear that Gierow felt a sense of kinship with them all, just as he had a special feeling for the late 18th and early 19th centuries in which they lived and worked: Clewberg-Edelcrantz (1754–1821), Höijer (1767–1812) and Thomander (1798–1865).
Clewberg, in 1789 ennobled Edelcrantz, was not only a member of the Academy but also a man of unusually wide-ranging talents including, when required, being a competent poet. Technically gifted in many different fields, he introduced the optical telegraph in Sweden and was responsible for the construction of Eldkvarn, a steam mill built on the site where Stockholm City Hall now stands. For a long time, he was also a theatre director in Stockholm – not since he had any particular inclination for the theatre but because he was considered capable by Gustav III and, as such, placed in the post.
Multi-faceted individual that he is, Clewberg-Edelcrantz reminds Gierow how, when faced with a person racked with inconsistencies, one is easily lured ‘to rationalize foundations as durable as quicksand and reconcile contrasts that, by their very nature, cannot be united’. Gierow does not fall for any such enticement, whether in the case of Clewberg-Edelcrantz or anyone else. In fact, it is a fundamental element of his view of humanity to draw our attention to the very inconsistencies of those he portrays.
Benjamin Höijer, who was both inspiring and controversial for his time, does not however receive a great deal of attention as a commentator today. While admittedly mentioned as a key influence in almost any overview of Swedish romanticism, largely due to his connections with contemporary German philosophers, he is rarely in the limelight these days.
Höijer was an unusual character who lived and worked in an intellectually cramped time that failed to accord him the space he deserved. It took a change of government before he finally, only three years before his untimely death, became Professor of Philosophy at Uppsala University. He was never made a member of the Academy.
His philosophical writings are extensive and often rather inaccessible. ‘While reading one of Höijer’s essays, one sees, before one’s very eyes, time shedding its skin,’ writes Gierow. Influenced by Kant, Höijer developed a philosophy rooted in humanity itself. ‘His starting point was the duality he found in his own self, in the self of every thinking person. It was that which was to be reconciled,’ writes Gierow, before quoting Höijer himself, who refers more precisely to a ‘pure self’, ‘a self only in a general sense’.
Gierow’s now lost thesis on theoretical philosophy was entitled ‘Individual Psychology and its General Scientific and Literary Prerequisites’. We cannot of course know how he approached the subject, but judging from the title, it seems natural that he would come to take a certain interest in the rebellious Höijer and his philosophy.
Of the three men previously mentioned, it is Thomander’s life that follows the most unusual course. He was born the unwelcome result of a casual liaison. Despite enduring a start to life that did not make for an easy childhood, his versatility led to both academic and ecclesiastical careers, and he was also elected to the Swedish Academy. The idiosyncratic composition of his personality has often been mentioned, and Gierow pays him a great deal of attention in that regard, while also here opposing a limited view of human nature: ‘It is only on paper that opposite views and qualities are incompatible, not in a human being. In other words, it is a truism to call Thomander a complex man; indeed, most are.’ Having said this, Gierow proceeds to deliver a meticulous characterization of Thomander’s complexity, using as his starting point the latter’s own reference to ‘a heart created in April and a mind cast in December’. If Thomander was sometimes outgoing and, on other occasions, reserved, emotionally whimsical and intellectually harsh, he also regarded creativity in general as ‘a meeting place of contrasts’, and in this he found richness rather than division.
THE LATE POETRY
‘Too great to be hidden away,’ writes Olle Abrahamsson (Axess 2015:6, reprinted on Gierow’s website: http://karlragnargierow.se/) in response to Gierow, the universally competent official, in his poetry ‘presenting himself as a failed figure’. It is an interesting observation which should nevertheless be nuanced. Failed though the figure indisputably is, are he and the author always identical?
It is certainly the case that Gierow’s first-person poetry revolves to a large extent around a vulnerable, disadvantaged individual. This poetic self is partly a character, one who is undoubtedly, in one way or another, rooted in the poet himself – who else? – but who also stands as a representative of humanity. There is, discernible here, a thread running through the whole of Gierow’s oeuvre which deals with the individual, the self and its representability.
Om livet är dig kärt (If You Value Your Life, 1963) marks Gierow’s return as a poet in book form. Those lines in ‘Kärlekssång’ (Love Song): ‘I have so short a time to live, / so long to lie dead’ are surely an expression of the poet’s own sentiments, although we can safely assume that these are shared by many of his readers. A poem that offers a different staging of the self is ‘Konsultation’ (Consultation), which could very well be based on an actual visit to a doctor. In the poem, the doctor considers the patient strong and healthy for his age and only suffering from ‘a certain kind of excess, a surfeit’. The cure is later stated to be ‘releasing the tension on the taut string’. It is therefore about taking things slightly easier, which is, in fact, anything but easy: ‘Yet I am neither the release nor the string. / The tension, which must be eased, is me.’
In the suite ‘Jordbrukare’ (Earthworker), whose Swedish title recalls but is not synonymous with the word ‘farmer’, the self – as in Ödletid – represents humanity. However, the focus remains on the individual, since no one can renounce their responsibility for the world having developed the way it has. Such matters, it should be added, remain only too relevant in our time. Interestingly, the earthworker is a man: ‘The leopard must become a garment / for my wife, such is the law of existence. / Everything else created is means. / Only I am the purpose.’ The existential wrestling that can be sensed here behind the scathing image of the masculine side of humanity leads into a religious discussion in which man, who cultivates and depletes the earth, is portrayed with biting satire. In the poem ‘Guds beläte’ (God’s Image), in which man is ‘the measure of all things’, everything culminates in a kind of faith for safety’s sake: ‘But nothing is older than faith, / and on the day of repentance / I expect / that I, in any case, / will be saved.’
Skall jag taga vara på min broder? (Am I My Brother’s Keeper?) published in 1968 is a rather more varied and irregular collection with several interesting insights into Gierow’s mindset and outlook on life. In the poem ‘Epitafiskt’ (Epitaphic), first-person perspective takes centre stage, and here too, this might well be viewed as a representative self:
So many good friends already gone to nought –
who on earth will give the speech for me?
Did I ever not come up short?
Is there anyone in need of me?
An increasingly sardonic tone begins to assert itself in Gierow’s late poetry. ‘Samvetets röst’ (Voice of Conscience) is an acerbic contemporary commentary on those who sign petitions and demonstrate against the injustices of the world: ‘If vain appeal / is the result / we can however rejoice / at the placard.’ What was supposed to have been an action is thus reduced to a mere gesture.
Ideologically, the poems span a wide spectrum, from the atom as God’s creator to a crown of sonnets entitled ‘Den förste människosonen’ (The First Son of Man), which tells of a complicated spiritual court case. Here, the fratricide Cain – he who poses the question before God referred to in the collection’s title – is called to answer for himself. The poem ‘Gudstjänst’ (Church Service) ends confidently: ‘We are not abandoned. He whose star shone / gathers us from joy and misery / to the one / who is One.’ But Gierow is not simply a preacher intent on delivering glib pronouncements; as a poet, he assumes many different roles, and the last word is never said.
The ‘Modulationer’ (Modulations) suite, subtitled ‘Inskrift i sanden’ (Inscription in the Sand), has the feel of a notebook with its somewhat hastily jotted down snippets of text. Central to these is this comically rhymed and, indeed, only partly truthful little stanza of brutally perceptive ambivalence:
God I met, his features gay.
Amid his forehead, he glimpsed the day
one-eyed, and saw everything plainly.
I sought his gaze, my head
by two eyes divided
into the double vision with which I see clearly.
In 1970–83, the Riksdag conducted its activities from Kulturhuset on Sergels torg in Stockholm, while Parliament House – to which they later returned – was, throughout this period, used for poetry readings arranged by the Writers’ Centre. Gierow was among the poets invited, which prompted him to revisit his poetry and edit a slim volume of selected texts Ut mot udden (Out Towards the Headland, 1977). In the preface, he writes about the principle upon which his selections were based, which is not chronological but rather thematic: he has ‘over the years allowed certain motifs to come to the fore in order to reveal their affinity and relatedness’. The image of a poet who stubbornly wrestles with and constantly reformulates the great existential problems thus becomes even clearer. He moreover believes that ‘his selection, despite its brevity, should be able to provide a glimpse of the time in which I have lived and the person I became’. As such, it represents a meeting of the timeless and the time-bound.
It could well be that this work on the anthology stimulated the poetic impulse in him. Innan klockan slagit noll (Before the Clock Struck Zero, 1978) was a completely new collection, although the poems themselves were not always entirely new. In Kvar på bryggan (Left on the Jetty, 1981), two-thirds of which is a compilation, the first third taken from his earlier output and the second from Innan klockan slagit noll, Gierow discusses the genesis of the latter collection. In 1971, Gierow had become a widower following the death of his wife in a traffic accident. Long afterwards, he found among the papers she had left behind a number of his poems written during their summertime stays in Hästveda, Skåne. These apparently largely improvised poems – ‘when it was time for a smoke break, I sat down on a rock or stump and scribbled down whatever thoughts flew through my mind’ – then became the germ of Innan klockan slagit noll.
These improvisations are linked to nature, mostly against a backdrop of wistfulness, as in ‘Vedhuggarfilosofi’ (Woodcutter Philosophy), where the stump of the sawn-down oak tree leaves behind ‘a coded message, posted / to the person who thus learns, / what the straight trunk has cost / in terms of inner contortion’. Of course, the woodcutter philosopher is here just as much a woodcutter psychologist – if not more so.
The poem ‘Ovidius in Hästveda’ (Ovid in Hästveda) adopts a rather different stance. Based on Ovid’s poem about Baucis and Philemon, who, as a reward for having shown hospitality to visiting gods in disguise, were allowed to die at the same time and then transformed into an oak and linden tree respectively, Gierow writes about ‘a blackthorn hooking up with an oak’. In brief glimpses, the poem then depicts, in a somewhat playful tone, the development of a shared life together from youth to old age based on ‘faithful disharmony’. Ultimately, the poem makes an identification, the value of which as a biographical statement of truth no outsider can assess: ‘A thorny thicket, a gnarly-barked stump / transformed into an old man and woman, / and your name was to be Baukis, and mine: Phil-emon.’
Further into the collection, one finds poems of longing which are impossible not to associate with Gierow the private individual. This does not, however, render them private in the strictest sense. The most artistic of all these poems is ‘Minnesvård’ (Memorial), where the forget-me-not, this in itself unforgettable flower of traditional poetry, bears the poignant message of our own personal shortcomings and longing for the grave. As asserted in the poem that immediately follows: ‘Where you are, I want to be, / where I am, I want to leave.’ Further on in the same poem, a few lines follow which, in their seemingly artless honesty, become hugely poignant: ‘A widower stands there waiting, / for whom, goodness knows / hears the lift, opens slightly / but no one comes home.’
The dozen new poems included in Kvar på bryggan vary the theme of loneliness and death as relentlessly and with as much disillusionment as before. The final lines of the title poem exemplify this: ‘I now go on board, but one among all these / who do not even know I existed.’
One final collection was to follow: I daggkåpans mantelfåll (In the Hem of the Lady’s Mantle, 1983). By the time it had been published, its author had already passed away. In the preface, he writes that the poems had largely been written during the spring and up until July of 1982; in October that year, he was to board the ferry of which he had spoken in Kvar på bryggan. The title of his final collection may appear rather misleading. Rather than the sweet poetry of nature, this is a portrayal of the fragility of life, the constant threat to existence as embodied by a drop of dew ‘in the hem of the Lady’s Mantle’.
The collection as a whole represents a form of preparation for death, written by a man whose eyes remain fully open, his psyche unsentimental but trembling with emotion – a complex character whose heart, as in the first poem cited in this essay, ‘sits on pins and needles’. In a dialogue poem, in which A questions B on his attitude to death and recommends that he seek help in his ‘hour of need’, B retorts:
When such a time of need has come upon me
I know just how I want things to be:
accompanied by someone I have thought of
without those I hope not to see.
In a different tone, and with a slightly different perspective harking back to the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, the collection ends:
But step by step and day by day grow
into year upon year until the years are enough,
and no one knows when the years are enough,
and from Hades calls out to me a shadow.
My friend, my darling, it is there I want to go.
THE PRICE OF ORIGINALITY?
In considering the full breadth of Gierow’s writing, the question arises of why it is that he has received so little attention for his literary contribution. Lauded as an innovator during his time at Radiotjänst, as well as in his role as Director of Dramaten, he was also a much-praised permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy. He moreover made an important contribution as a literary advisor at Norstedts and literary director at Svenska Dagbladet, and was well-reviewed for his literary work, even though his dramas were ultimately not of their time.
Could it be that he was simply too original? Poetry bound to a certain time may well struggle to survive into the future. However, much of Gierow’s early verse and the majority of his later work is reflective poetry of a kind that remains very much alive, notwithstanding its impeccably elegant form – for which he has doubtless been punished. Literary originality is a curious beast: the work must be original, yes, and yet certain expectations must be fulfilled. At the same time, poetry has left much of the established idiom behind and increasingly formed its own traditions of broken rhythms and complex imagery. No one could therefore have expected any genuine originality to be discernible in poetry that not only asked the weighty questions of life but was also extraordinarily traditional in style. The fact that Gierow posed such questions in a manner that was sometimes both naked and daring meant that readers could, out of sheer unfamiliarity, refrain from persisting with the text, or simply find themselves unable to do so.
The problem regarding the dramas has already been touched upon; it is perhaps as reading material that they can and should survive. The poetry in the verse dramas reaches the same lofty heights as in the poetry collections and is moreover shared between many different voices in such a way as to underline the composite nature of Gierow’s view on life and humanity.
The essays, multifaceted and spiritual as they are, ought to interest anyone able to look beyond ephemeral modernity and consider those events of the past that, in various ways, continue to affect us today. This also applies to the three memoirs Gierow wrote, in which he draws three literary giants out of the shadows.
While Gierow is demanding, as only the sophisticated writer can be, he also gives the reader an immediate return that only the demanding writers can provide: knowledge, insights, opened pathways of thought and new points of view, all conveyed in an erudite, lively and, at the same time, highly enjoyable form. Some of his works take time to digest, while others are immediately accessible. Let us hope that the judgment he, in his memoir of Thomander, casts upon the educational system of his time does not come to pass: ‘Once the goal of education at all levels, namely cultural amnesia, has been achieved, there is no return. In throwing our past into the tip, we ourselves irredeemably follow, there to remain. We have nothing to fear from the judgment of posterity, and by nothing, I mean exactly that: the abyss.’
‘Faced with herself, every human being is of a problematic nature, otherwise there is something wrong with her,’ writes Gierow in the essay ‘Kellgrens gulddosa’ (Kellgren’s Golden Box) from Europa och tjuren. In that respect, there was little wrong with Gierow; indeed, one senses here a reason for his writing taking the form it does.
In his induction speech at the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund describes his predecessor Gierow as an enigma. Not only was he simultaneously a competent functionary and an inspired writer – ‘for few other poets were the boundaries between everyday life and the creative moment so sharply defined’ – but also, in his private life, alternated between openness and strict inaccessibility. Ahnlund moreover notes how ‘throughout his mature poetic work and in the dramas, a deep minor tone dominates, occasionally with elements of a controlled cosmic despair’. This was balanced by ‘a voracious appetite for the world and its external geography, for history and philosophy, art and friendship’.
As revealed in the memoirs Gierow wrote of others, he was, with good reason, suspicious of overly unambiguous personal characteristics. In an essay from Mina utflykter, he praises his old friend from Lund, the historian Ingvar Andersson, declaring that he was ‘as a portrayer of human character, perhaps a nonpareil in Swedish historiography’, and agrees with his assertion that we should resist the temptation ‘to rationalize the picture, retouch the contradictions, “find the formula” for the character’. It is as if the reference to Andersson’s peerlessness, as well as his variously formulated convictions about the incongruity in each individual, were a warning for those who would subsequently dare to attempt to interpret his own character and deeds.
In our time, with its multitude of rapid conclusions and hasty formulations, Gierow’s manner of portraying people and events remains highly instructive. Behind his sharply crafted compositions lies a meticulous endeavour, all with a view to seeing beyond appearances and exposing what lies within.