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.
Here on the old man’s couch, stripped pretty much naked, blubbering … And this is where we sat, me and him, the last time we ever saw each other … this is right where the old man put his arm around me and gave me a big squeeze. And then he got up and went over to that dresser there and rummaged around in the drawer for something. After a while he got his hands on what he was after and he laid it out right here on the table. A little sweater.
“’Member this, Knut?” he said to me. “’Member this Icelandic sweater? I picked it up for you one Christmas in the city. And you, well, I ain’t never seen a kid so goddamned pleased with anything in my life …”
I could do with that Icelandic sweater right about now. The old man, he had it in his hands the last time I was here. I sure could do with it, alright, to hold under the blanket whiles I think about the old man.
There is much tenderness in this moment, as there is in every Stig Dagerman story, a tenderness that does not seek to distract the reader from what is terrible about human experience, but manages instead to confirm it. Were it not for such tenderness, after all, cruelty would be of no matter. Were it not for those fleeting moments of connection, loneliness would not sting. Without an imagination that appeals to an unreasonable degree of sympathy, human suffering – the suffering of the likes of Knut and Greta, or of the people of Germany after the Second World War – would be met with no more than the skimming indifference we afford the inevitable, or dismissed as no less than what such characters deserve.
Stig Dagerman possessed just such an imagination. No doubt it caused him much pain. But as the stories collected here prove, there is redemption in such an unreasonable degree of sympathy: by its grace, by the grace of the artist who wields it, tenderness survives, fellow-feeling, the mercy that merciless life itself does not provide, but that we might still offer to one another, in joy and fear and helplessness and love.
ALICE MCDERMOTT
Translator’s Note
While covering postwar Germany as a foreign correspondent for the Swedish newspaper Expressen in the fall of 1946, Stig Dagerman was advised by a fellow correspondent in the Allied Press Corps “with the best of intentions and for the sake of objectivity to read German newspapers instead of looking at German dwellings or sniffing in German cooking-pots.” The implicit criticism stemmed from Dagerman’s ambition to chronicle the supposedly “indescribable” realities of life for ordinary Germans in a land left in ruins at a time when world sympathies for the German people were at an all-time low and the need to judge and punish the guilty was at an all-time high, when the Press Corps and all the world were focused on the drama and expiation of the Nuremburg war crimes trials.
Dagerman sought instead to chronicle as nakedly as possible the suffering of all the remaining victims of the war and its ravages with an eye unaffected by the collective need to assign guilt for the atrocities of a horrendous Nazi Regime. What followed were a series of articles, later collected in the book German Autumn, that examined the very nature of human suffering and the moral complexities of justice.
As he came to understand just how much his own motivations were at odds with those of the international press corps, Dagerman wrote in frustration to fellow Swedish writer Karl Werner Aspenström in the midst of his assignment in Germany:
A journalist I have not yet become, and it doesn’t look as if I’ll ever be one. I have no wish to acquire all the deplorable attributes that go to make up a perfect journalist. I find it hard to meet the people I meet at the Allied Press hotel – they think that a small hunger-strike is more interesting than the hunger of multitudes. While hunger-riots are sensational, hunger itself is not sensational, and what poverty-stricken and bitter people here think becomes interesting only when poverty and bitterness break out in a catastrophe. Journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible. I’ll never master that.
If journalism was the art of coming too late as early as possible, then in short fiction Dagerman sought its antithesis, the art of coming in time. In his focus on fragile human subjects, particularly young people swept up in or swept aside by circumstances and forces much greater than themselves, Dagerman sought to trigger links of identification and empathy that could give his readers an understanding of the tragedies of human suffering before they became faits accomplis.
His classic short story “To Kill a Child” is a fine example. For a meager fee of seventy-five kronor Dagerman was commissioned by the