The Last Letter Home Read online

  THE LAST LETTER HOME

  The Emigrant Novels

  Book I

  THE EMIGRANTS

  Utvandrarna

  Book II

  UNTO A GOOD LAND

  Invandrarna

  Book III

  THE SETTLERS

  Nybyggarna

  Book IV

  THE LAST LETTER HOME

  Sista brevet till Sverige

  The Emigrant Novels

  Book IV

  * * *

  THE LAST

  LETTER HOME

  Vilhelm Moberg

  * * *

  Translated from the Swedish by Gustaf Lannestock

  With a New Introduction by Roger McKnight

  The characters and situations in this work are wholly fictional; they do not portray and are not intended to portray any actual persons.

  Borealis Books is an imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

  www.borealisbooks.org

  © 1959 by Vilhelm Moberg (Sista brevet till Sverige/The Last Letter Home)

  First published by Albert Bonniers Förlag AB, Stockholm

  Translation © 1961, 1978 by Gustaf Lannestock

  New material © 1995 by the Minnesota Historical Society. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to Borealis Books, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.

  The Minnesota Historical Society Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  International Standard Book Number 0-87351-322-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moberg, Vilhelm, 1898–1973.

  [Sista brevet till Sverige. English]

  The last letter home / Vilhelm Moberg.

  p. cm. — (The emigrant novels / Vilhelm Moberg ; bk. 4) (Borealis books)

  ISBN 0-87351-322-3 (paper)

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-87351-716-4

  1. Swedish Americans—History—19th century—Fiction.

  I. Title. II. Series: Moberg, Vilhelm, 1898–1973.

  Romanen om utvandrarna. English ; bk. 4.

  PT9875.M5S513 1995

  839.73'72—dc20

  95-15845

  A note on the pronunciation of the Swedish names

  å is pronounced like the a in small (see Småland, literally Small Land)

  ä is pronounced like the a in add

  ö is pronounced like the ea in heard

  j is pronounced like y

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION TO THE EMIGRANT NOVELS

  INTRODUCTION TO THE LAST LETTER HOME

  BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR THE EMIGRANT NOVELS

  SUGGESTED READINGS IN ENGLISH

  PREFACE

  The Country That Changed Them

  PART ONE

  I. OLD ABE CALLS

  II. I AM CONCERNED WITH YOUR ETERNAL LIFE

  III. THE FIRST COMMANDMENT FOR EMIGRANTS

  IV. THE SETTLERS’ HOLY DAYS

  V. THE TOMAHAWKS ARE BEING SHARPENED

  VI. KRISTINA DESERTS HER MILKING STOOL

  VII. HAS GOD INFLICTED THIS UPON US?

  VIII. THE LETTER FROM SWEDEN

  PART TWO

  The Astrakhan Apples Are Ripe

  IX. THE RIVER OR THE FONT?

  X. THE ASTRAKHAN APPLE TREE BLOOMS

  XI. KRISTINA IS NOT AFRAID

  XII. AND A NEW CIVIL WAR BROKE OUT

  XIII. EVERY WHITE MAN MUST DIE!

  XIV. WHILE KARL OSKAR KEPT NIGHT WATCH

  XV. THE ASTRAKHAN APPLES ARE RIPE

  XVI. THE THIRD COFFIN

  XVII. SONG UNDER THIRTY-EIGHT GALLOWS

  XVIII. ONE MAN DID NOT WISH TO SUBMIT

  XIX. THE LETTER TO SWEDEN

  PART THREE

  XX. THE FIRST CHILD TO LEAVE THE HOUSE

  XXI. THE BRIDAL CROWN WITH PRECIOUS STONES

  XXII. THE FARMER AND THE OAK

  XXIII. THE LETTER TO SWEDEN

  EPILOGUE

  I. THE MAP OF LJUDER

  II. THE LAST LETTER HOME

  Introduction to the Emigrant Novels

  Vilhelm Moberg: The Early Years

  “Hot-tempered, easily moved, and changeable” was how the Swedish novelist Vilhelm Moberg once described himself.1 He might have added that in the first half of the twentieth century he was both the most widely admired and the most deeply distrusted of all Swedish authors. A man of humble origins but immense ambition and strong opinions, Moberg spent his entire literary life championing the rights of the common people. This tendency, combined with his volatile temperament, earned Moberg a deep, abiding respect from the general reading public while it created barriers for him among conservative critics, politicians, and religious leaders.

  Moberg’s biography has many elements of a rags-to-riches tale. He was born on August 28, 1898, in a small family cabin in southern Småland, historically one of the most impoverished areas of Sweden. The region had long been known as “darkest Småland” because of the people’s conservative Lutheranism and reluctance to accept other religious views. During Moberg’s childhood years, only one railroad station existed in the vicinity of his family home, and the horse was still the most common mode of transportation. Clothes were made locally and often paid for by barter.

  Moberg’s father was a career soldier who farmed a small plot of forest land. His mother, who lived into her nineties, cared for the family. Although Moberg in his later nonfictional works remembered this rustic setting as the spot “where I ran barefoot,” his boyhood was one of hardship.2 He received just five years of formal schooling and was the only boy in his family who survived to adulthood. Even in his fifties, Moberg recalled the frustration of trying to satisfy his hunger for learning in an environment where the teaching was poor and books scarce.

  In his teens and early twenties, Moberg worked as a manual laborer, chiefly among the lumberjacks and farm hands of Småland, and with great reluctance did his compulsory military service. His firsthand experiences from these years were later to serve as important motifs in his writings. Moberg left his parents’ home in 1916 to attend adult continuing education school (folkhögskola) in Grimslöv. A nearly fatal bout of influenza brought his final attempt at formal schooling to an abrupt halt.

  The enduring pattern of the aspiring writer’s life emerged in the decade of the 1920s. He worked as a journalist for small-town newspapers in southern Sweden, met his future wife, and got his start as a novelist. This period began what his biographer Magnus von Platen has called “the gigantic day of work at the writing desk, which his life came to be.”3 Moberg was nothing if not indefatigable. In addition to the daily routine of writing news stories, setting type, and selling advertising space, he wrote several novels before having one accepted for publication.4

  His literary breakthrough came in 1927 with Raskens: en soldatfamiljs historia (Raskens: the story of a soldier’s family). This novel, set in rural Småland, established Moberg as a writer for and of the common people and solidified his place among the ranks of the renowned Swedish working-class novelists (proletärförfattare) of the 1920s and 1930s. These authors, including Jan Fridegård, Ivar Lo-Johansson, and Moa Martinsson, were the first in Swedish literature to describe the lives of the lower classes from the perspective of men and women who themselves had grown up among the wor
king poor. Moberg’s depictions of the customs and way of life in Småland constituted his major contribution to this group of writers. The local realism in his early fiction was the foundation on which his popularity in Sweden was built. It was not until the publication of his four great novels about Swedish emigration to Minnesota that his fame spread to other countries in Europe and across the Atlantic.

  In 1929 Moberg moved north to Stockholm with his wife and family. Despite his restless spirit, he kept a permanent residence near that city until his death on August 8, 1973.

  Moberg and Emigration

  Since his childhood, America had been an ever-present reality for Moberg. Historically, this is not surprising. Of the 1.2 million emigrants who left Sweden for America between 1845 and 1930, more than three hundred thousand came from Småland. Moberg recalled the impact the waves of emigration had on him. In his collection of autobiographical essays, Berättelser ur min levnad (Tales of my life), he wrote that his mother and father came from families so poor that all their brothers and sisters emigrated to the United States, leaving only his parents to perpetuate their respective family lines in Sweden.5 He claimed more relatives in America than in Sweden itself.

  In his boyhood fancy, Moberg envisioned the word America as meaning “mer-rika” (more rich). The steady supply of America letters, the money orders in dollars, and the Swedish-American newspapers Moberg described as “invading” his boyhood home so sparked his imagination that at the age of eighteen he planned to emigrate himself, only to be stopped at the last moment, as he reported it, by his mother’s and grandmother’s laments that seeing a son off to America from the railway station was the same as attending the boy’s funeral.6

  Perhaps as a substitute for his blighted hopes, Moberg dreamed as early as the 1920s of erecting a literary monument to those of his family members who settled in the New World. This dream was not to be realized until the late 1940s. During the 1930s Moberg, long a staunch supporter of socialist reforms, attacked the ruling Social Democratic party for its perpetuation of the bureaucracy and for its support of the Swedish State Church. Later, when World War II broke out, he criticized the government in Stockholm for its failure to take a firm stand against Nazism. His bestselling novel Rid i natt (Ride This Night), although set in the seventeenth century, was read by many as a comment on the tyranny of the Nazi era.

  Moberg’s outspoken tendencies concerning national issues produced a two-fold personal effect. First, they guaranteed his disfavor among many influential public figures. Indeed Moberg remained embroiled in cultural debates on sensitive issues throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. He protested cases of blackmail and cover-ups in the Swedish police force and legal system and argued against the continued existence of the Swedish monarchy.

  Second, his political involvement—in combination with limitations on travel during World War II—delayed until 1947 the time when he could begin writing on Swedish emigration. By then Moberg was almost fifty. He was celebrated in Sweden yet disillusioned with the country’s leadership. Seen through the lens of his personal dissatisfaction and from the perspective of a war-torn Europe, the United States appeared to Moberg in the late 1940s as the world’s last bastion of freedom and democracy. He seems to have felt a genuine desire to record the contribution made by Swedish emigrants to the country he thought was the world’s only remaining hope. Looking back on this time in 1968, Moberg wrote: “I know that I have a genuine streak of stubbornness, a quality to be taken for better or worse. And I had made up my mind that I was going to cross the Atlantic Ocean in order to search out my unknown relations. For I could not get their destiny out of my mind. The older I became, the more it interested me.”7

  In 1945 Moberg began background study for what became the emigrant tetralogy and appears to have started actual work on the novels two years later.8 The first volume Utvandrarna (The Emigrants) appeared in 1949, followed in 1952 by Invandrarna (Unto a Good Land). The final volumes Nybyggarna (The Settlers) and Sista brevet till Sverige (The Last Letter Home) were published in 1956 and 1959. The author often referred to these books as a single work, the Emigrant Novels (Utvandrarromanen), and insisted that they be read as a documentary novel.

  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 sc
ene. 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