Martin Birck’s Youth

Martin Birck’s Youth

By Hjalmar Söderberg.

Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. Preface
5. Martin Birck’s Youth
   1. The Old Street
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
      9. IX
      10. X
      11. XI
      12. XII
   2. The White Cap
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
      7. VII
      8. VIII
      9. IX
      10. X
      11. XI
      12. XII
      13. XIII
      14. XIV
   3. The Winter Night
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To
A. G. H. Spiers
Critical friend
Friendly critic
This volume is cordially dedicated
By the translator

Preface

It is a sad thought that everyone cannot enjoy Söderberg, that this master of delicate and incisive realism, this prince of humorists, is⁠—for Anglo-Saxons, at least⁠—an acquired taste. But it is well to face at the outset the fact that Söderberg is a European Continental, an Anatole France of Sweden. To those who believe that a man is unvirile or at least anemic if he refuses to believe in human perfectibility this attitude toward life will seem barren and depressing, one to encourage discouragement. How much pleasanter to feel with Pippa, not only at 7 a.m. on a May morning, but at all hours and seasons, that “all’s right with the world”! To insinuate the contrary is to give sanction to those doubts which, if they overtake even the most confident of us at unguarded moments, should all the more be repressed. What is culture if it is not sweetness and light? Listen to Söderberg: “Why all this optimism when not one of the old problems is solved?” And again, one of his characters affirms, “I believe in the lust of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul.”

We read fiction for pleasure. What does this new Swedish novelist offer in compensation for a somewhat despondent view of life? He himself rather hesitates to tell us and in this very hesitation we may, if the faculty be in us, discern one of his chief attractions. Söderberg is reticent because he wishes to present the truth as he sees it without exaggeration and without prejudice. He colors his picture neither with the golden glow of the untroubled believer nor with the red zeal of the revolutionary. He is honest to such a degree that he will not stress his own honesty. On the contrary, he doubts his very doubt: “How could I, a boy of sixteen, be right and all my elders and betters wrong?” And again in Martin Birck, “he was not quite certain that truth in itself could produce happiness, but history had taught him that illusion created unhappiness and crime.” And yet all the more from this unobtrusiveness we divine the intellectual honesty of the skeptic, which bursts out only once in the present novel: “Would a man never come who did not sing, but spoke, and spoke plainly!” Such a man has the right to “paint the thing as he sees it,” to revalue the time-honored beliefs and customs of the past in the light of his own experience.

We may, I think, trust in Söderberg’s fidelity to his vision as in that of few living writers. He collects his data carefully and transmits them simply. In that there is always stimulus to a reader who appreciates how difficult it is to do. But he might do all this and be no more than a good photographer.

As we follow the everyday run of events in Martin Birck, we may at first be impressed with their perfect verisimilitude and yet incline to class the author as unoriginal. In that respect, though probably in no other, the prose of Söderberg resembles the poetry of Wordsworth. Few readers will progress more than a page or two without that sense of the significant in the commonplace which is the very soul of originality. Söderberg has followed the famous counsel of Flaubert to De Maupassant: “Look at an object until you have seen in it everything that anyone else can see, and then look until you perceive what no one else has seen!” Rarely has any prose been fuller of implications⁠—emotional, psychological, moral⁠—than Söderberg’s. To reread him is invariably to be surprised at all one has missed before. One passes through life with him as one might walk through a meadow with a great naturalist or stroll through a city at night with Whistler. The trivial is clothed with meaning, the habitual is touched with magic. The world of Söderberg lives; it lives in beauty.

And as one grows more and more conscious of the author’s pregnance in matter, one is equally delighted with the