The Trial of Sören Qvist. Janet Lewis

      The Trial of Sören Qvist

      Swallow Press books by Janet Lewis

      The Wife of Martin Guerre

      The Trial of Sören Qvist

      The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron

      Good-Bye, Son, and Other Stories

      Poems Old and New, 1918–1978

      Selected Poems of Janet Lewis

      The Trial of Sören Qvist

      Janet Lewis

      Introduction by Kevin Haworth

      Swallow Press — Ohio University Press

      Athens, Ohio

      Swallow Press

      An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

      www.ohioswallow.com

      © 1947, 1974 by Janet Lewis Winters

      Introduction © 2013 by Swallow Press / Ohio University Press

      All rights reserved

      To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Swallow Press / Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at [phone] or [phone] (fax).

      First Swallow Press / Ohio University Press edition published 1983

      Printed in the United States of America

      Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ™

      23 22 21 20 19 18 17 13 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Lewis, Janet, 1899–1998.

      The trial of Sören Qvist / Janet Lewis ; introduction by Kevin Haworth.

      pages ; cm

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-8040-1144-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4054-9 (electronic)

      1. Qvist, Sören Jensen, –1626—Fiction. 2. Denmark—History—Christian IV, 1588–1648—Fiction. I. Title.

      PS3523.E866T7 2013

      813'π iv.52—dc23

      2013016753

      To Maclin Guérard

      Contents

      introduction vii

      Foreword for the First Swallow Press Edition xv

      The Trial of Sören Qvist xvii

      One 1

      Two 10

      Three 28

      Four 33

      Five 47

      Six 62

      Seven 76

      Eight 82

      Nine 92

      Ten 103

      Eleven 115

      Twelve 124

      Thirteen 137

      Fourteen 144

      Fifteen 153

      Sixteen 168

      Seventeen 172

      Eighteen 181

      Nineteen 190

      Twenty 198

      Twenty-One 203

      Twenty-Two 209

      Introduction

      The Trial of Sören Qvist is the second novel in Janet Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, following The Wife of Martin Guerre. Though not as well known as Martin Guerre, for some critics Sören Qvist is their favorite of Lewis’s novels. Fred Inglis, who wrote often about Lewis, declares of the book, “Probably it is the most perfect of Janet Lewis’ novels, and among the most perfect of any novels.”1

      As in Martin Guerre, the plot of Sören Qvist derives from Samuel March Phillips’s Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, a legal casebook given to Lewis by her husband, the poet Yvor Winters. The original case of Sören Qvist, as described by legal historian Phillips, is the “most striking case of circumstantial evidence, in which the testimony against the accused was altogether fabricated by the accuser.”2 A local landowner, Morten Bruus, conspires with his brother to accuse a local pastor of murder. A history of ill will is well known; a body is discovered; the evidence, though far from conclusive, points to one man, with consequences for all those around him.

      What drew Lewis to the story, however, was not so much the final outcome of the case but the situation that made it possible, the fascinating and self-contradictory character of Sören Qvist, pastor of the quiet village of Vejlby in a rural section of Jutland, Denmark, not far from the German border. Phillips writes:

      He was a man of excellent moral character, generous, hospitable, and diligent in the performance of his sacred duties; but he was also a man of constitutionally violent temper, which he lacked the ability to restrain, and consequently subject at times to fierce outbreaks of wrath, which were a scourge to his household when they occurred, and a humiliation to himself.3 In Phillips’s briefly sketched story of Sören Qvist, Lewis found the conditions that recur in all of the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, from Martin Guerre to Sören Qvist to, later, The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron: a vivid historical setting at a time of political transition; the weight of moral authority (invested, in this case, in the pastor himself, a man of good works and dedication to the poor); and, most importantly, a fascinating individual around whom the legal machinations revolve. As Lewis told the Southern Review in an interview, “I start with a person and then work out the implications. I’m concerned with seeing why a person acts in certain ways.”4

      There is much in Sören Qvist that feels strikingly contemporary, despite being written more than fifty years ago and set hundreds of years before the present day. As in so many of today’s television crime procedurals, forensic evidence is arrayed against the suspect, who cannot explain why the evidence points to him. Under pressure from the authorities he confesses, but unlike the common television version, here we cannot comfort ourselves that justice has been served. Something more complex has occurred, both in the way that the good pastor Sören Qvist must confront his own flaws, and in how the legal system proves itself inadequate to judge him. To this forceful narrative Lewis adds her knack for the authenticating detail: the peeling paint of an old tavern, the heel missing from the boot of a long-time traveler, a dusting of snow on the green kale—grown to feed the hungry—in the fields around a rural church. The seventeenth-century Denmark that Lewis recreates in Sören Qvist is no stuffy museum piece. Rather it is a living, breathing series of moments, rooted in strong characters and animated, scene by scene, by what the critic Inglis calls Lewis’s “cool distribution of attention,” leading the reader through the story.5

      Sören Qvist carries the power of classic tragedy: a good person, prominent in the community, is pulled down by a central flaw. He is, as Lewis notes in her foreword to the book, “one of a great company of men and women who have preferred to lose their lives rather than accept a universe without plan or without meaning.” Sören Qvist is guilty of something, to be sure, even if it is just the self-knowledge that he could murder another man. The pastor knows that he has that terrible capacity within himself, feels it just under the surface of his role as the kind clergyman. What, then, is the proper punishment for being an imperfect man? To what do we really answer?—the evidence as marshaled by other flawed humans? or a higher sense of what kind of people we should be? These are the great and moving questions that The Trial of Sören Qvist puts before a reader visiting a small village in Denmark in the autumn of 1625.

      The