Stig Dagerman - Sleet - Selected Stories

I was introduced to the work of Stig Dagerman by his daughter, Lo, nearly twenty-five years ago. At the time we were both mothers of preschool sons, and in the way of mothers overseeing playdates, we had begun to exchange brief biographies as we sat together on Lo’s back deck while our boys played their imaginary games in her yard. I learned that Lo’s father had been a Swedish writer of much renown, a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, and a playwright. He was also a journalist. In 1946, he had been sent on assignment to postwar Germany to record the devastation there, one of the first independent journalists to do so. His second wife, Lo’s mother, Anita Björk, was an actress. He committed suicide in 1954, at thirty-one, when Lo was younger than our sons were when we met.

Of course, I asked if her father’s work was available in English. Lo had a British edition of German Autumn , her father’s collected articles about the German people after the fall of the Third Reich; a book of short stories called The Games of Night ; and a novel, A Burnt Child . She hoped eventually, she said, to find some time (as working mothers of preschool children, we were well familiar with that how to find the time refrain) to seek out an American translator for her father’s work.

Our four-year-olds were running and calling in the yard. A suburban autumn, as I recall. It so happened, I told her, that among my graduate students that semester there was a very bright and talented young fiction writer named Steven Hartman, who was also fluent in Swedish.

It’s inevitable, perhaps, that while reading Steven Hartman’s translations of Stig Dagerman’s stories collected here in Sleet , I find myself recalling something of the substance of those days when Lo and I were young mothers standing watchful on the periphery of our small sons’ games. Young boys, after all, imaginative young boys, appear often enough in these stories: large-eyed, as one thinks of them, tentative, observant, loving, lonely. And I suppose it could be argued that the various autobiographical settings of the stories, from the small farms and villages — Dagerman himself spent his first six years living on his grandparents’ farm in Älvkarleby — to the working class flats of Stockholm — where he later lived with his father and stepmother — have a kind of parallel in the urban/rural convergence that is a secluded backyard in a busy American suburb. But personal experience and its attendant associations seem insufficient to explain the depth of feeling that these stories achieve. For me, there is something at work here that calls to mind much more than the circumstances of my own introduction to Stig Dagerman’s writing. It is, I think, a tremendous generosity of heart, an overwhelming empathy expressed in tandem with a keen awareness of the inevitable suffering, the loneliness and pain, the pettiness and cruelty, that make up the human experience. There is a compassion to Stig Dagerman’s clear-eyed vision of the world that causes me to recall as I read these stories not merely the circumstances that brought me to his work, but the less tangible experience of being a young mother watching over a young child’s play: that heady mix of caution, joy, pride, fear, helplessness, and love.

I confess that this was not what I expected to find from this tragic Swedish writer when I opened German Autumn , the first of his works that I borrowed from his daughter. I expected darkness. Angst. The void. Hopelessness. But what I found instead was an account of human suffering unbiased by politics or nationalism, hatred or revenge. An account of human suffering given with both a novelist’s eye (“A big bare room with a cement floor and a window that has been almost entirely bricked up. A solitary bulb hangs from the ceiling and shines unmercifully on three air-raid-shelter beds, a stove reeking with sour wood, a small woman with a chalk-white face stirring a pot on the stove, a small boy lying on the bed and staring up apathetically at the light,”) and a moral vision that managed to maintain, “respect for the individual even when the individual has forfeited our sympathy and compassion … the capacity to react in the face of suffering whether that suffering may be deserved or undeserved.” Dagerman writes:

People hear voices saying that things were better before [Hitler’s defeat], but they isolate these voices from the circumstances in which their owners find themselves and they listen to them in the same way as we listen to voices on the radio. They call this objectivity because they lack the imagination to visualize these circumstances and indeed, on the grounds of moral decency, they would reject such an imagination because it would appeal to an unreasonable degree of sympathy. People analyze: in fact it is a kind of blackmail to analyze the political leanings of the hungry without at the same time analyzing hunger.

An imagination that appeals to an unreasonable degree of sympathy is precisely what makes Dagerman’s fiction so evocative. Evocative not, as one might expect, of despair, or bleakness, or existential angst, but of compassion, fellow-feeling, even love. The brief story “To Kill a Child,” as unsparing as it is — “Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease” — ends up being a lament, not a shrug; a lament for all of us at the mercy of merciless time, unwitting victims of life’s circumstances. Dagerman rivals Joyce in his ability to depict the intractable loneliness of childhood, but time and again, in stories like “The Surprise,” “The Games of Night,” and the marvelous “Sleet,” he tempers this loneliness with brief gestures of hope, connectedness: the poem on the phonograph record, the bright coins from his father’s drinking companions, the warm hand of the aunt from America. There are tears in these stories, for sure, cruelties, eruptions of violence, but none of this is offered without pity and even in his stories in which irony reigns — “Men of Character,” “Bon Soir” — Dagerman never turns a cold eye on his creations.

Greta in “Bon Soir,” a ship’s dishwasher with teeth that “look like they’re covered in cement, sweating cement,” has propositioned Sune, the story’s fifteen-year-old protaganist. He is repulsed by her but also charmed by the thought of a woman waiting for him in one of the ship’s cabins. And then, while the boat is docked, he sees her being led away by two detectives; he later learns she has been spreading venereal disease in the port.

As he approaches the gangplank Sune notices something peculiar and disquieting. Paul and the drunken first mate and several others are just standing around on the foredeck, idly waiting for something. And now the door swings open and out steps the small, slender man in the trench coat. He turns and holds the door for Greta, as the large, heavy-set man with the cigar clenched between his teeth walks directly behind her with a small, shabby suitcase in his right hand. In single file they walk up the foredeck gangplank and suddenly Greta spots him there. She looks up at him hastily, and later he will think back on that look many times — something impossible to forget.

“ Bon soir ,” she says and almost drops her handbag. “ Bon soir .” And that’s when he notices she is crying.

Life may be merciless, but the creator of this scene — who notes Greta’s shabby suitcase, her hasty look, her pitiful “Bon soir,” her fumbled handbag, her tears — is not.

The long last story collected here, “Where’s My Icelandic Sweater?” is both a comic masterpiece and a heartbreaking depiction of degradation and loneliness. Knut is a bore, a drunk, a braggart, and yet even as the reader is absorbed into his careening and very funny interior monologue of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-delusion, we are given the opportunity to recognize, too, the very human longing at the heart of his nature. Like the cheerful man in “To Kill A Child,” what Knut wants is a simple impossibility: to gain back a single minute of his life.