The South Wing

Alexander Kielland was a famous Norwegian author from the mid to late nineteenth-century. His novels dealt primarily with social issues and he was a strong critic of Norwegian and European society throughout his life time. In this interview, Damian Kelleher discusses Alexander Kielland’s novel Skipper Worse with Christopher Fauske, who recently translated the work into English.

For Damian’s review of Skipper Worse, click here

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Damian: Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. You have recently translated Norwegian author Alexander Lange Kielland’s late nineteenth century novel, Skipper Worse, into English. Kielland is an important author in Norway, but he isn’t known much outside of that country. Skipper Worse, along with much of Kielland’s work, has been out of print more often than in. So, why Kielland? What attracted you to him?

Christopher: Well, it started with the accident years ago when the oil rig Alexander Kielland capsized in the North Sea. It was pretty dramatic and extensively covered by the media, so it got me to wondering who the rig was named after. I grew up in England with a Norwegian father, an interpreter and translator, and when I asked him about Kielland he recalled him as one of the authors he’d read in school and had enjoyed. I think my dad told me that Kielland was the most gifted of all the writers in terms of the care and precision with which he used language. That’s what made me decide to try my hand at putting something of his into English.

DK: Tell us a little bit about Skipper Worse. The back of the novel states that Kielland belongs in the company of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Katherine Mansfield. Do you believe that Skipper Worse is a particularly indicative work by which to make this comparison? If so, why?

CF: I wrote the blurb on the back as a way of attracting potential publishers, so perhaps it’s a little hyperbolic, but I don’t think so really. Like Dickens, Kielland has a remarkable eye for the small details that define personal relations. But unlike Dickens, Kielland is the soul of brevity and he has a sharp humour that’s hard to miss but which contains both humanity and something starkly judgmental. So that’s why I think of Wharton and Mansfield. Like Wharton, he focuses on social convention as a way of suggesting the struggle between individual desire and societal expectations. Like Mansfield, Kielland draws connections between the geographic perimeter and the cultural center. Like all three authors, Kielland is someone who ultimately believes in both the possibility and the necessity of a cultural commons and societal space, but, more like Wharton and Mansfield, he worries constantly about the individual price of this need. It’s important to stress that Kielland’s similarities to these authors are coincidental, mediated through his knowledge of French writers and the influence of Georg and Edvard Brandes, or indicative of some cultural meme rather than a result of direct knowledge.

Skipper Worse does serve as terrific stand-alone exemplar of Kielland’s fiction, and I think it reflects his style, interests, and outlook very well. I selected it for translation in part for its ability to be read as a novel that doesn’t really require any cultural knowledge, and for its brevity. Kielland’s full glory is best seen in his related trio of novels, Gift (Poison), Fortuna (Fortune), and Sankt Hans Fest (Midsummer’s Celebration). Incidentally, Fortuna, which talks about money coming and going and no one really knowing how or why, and it not being at all clear that there is any real benefit to these transactions, has been getting some discussion in Norway recently as a result of the current financial situation. But Skipper Worse is a fine example of Kielland’s style.

DK: I was reminded constantly of the similarities between Kielland and his French and English contemporaries.

CF: So far as we know Kielland did not read English well. He spent time in Denmark with the Brandes and visited France and would have been exposed there to discussion of English literature and its continental counterparts in a manner quote distinct from what we would most likely have gleaned while at university in Norway. Kielland’s major continental influence was de Maupassant, and he was less of a “nationalist” writer than his Norwegian contemporaries. Kielland had more of an 18th century than a 19th century sense of nationalism, seeing Norway as part of a western European tradition rather than as an exemplar of a unique culture. While he knew and honored Norwegian tradition, he was more of a liberal internationalist than a progressive nationalist. He had a sense of patriotism more in keeping with the French sense of “patri” than with the Anglophone sense of the same word.

DK: You write in your introduction that Kielland wrote in a careful and precise Norwegian, rescuing words from lapses in meaning or from straightforward disappearance from the language. How much does this aspect of Kielland’s craft affect the word choices and sentence structure of the English Skipper Worse? How responsible do you feel to replicate this careful and precise language?

CF: Translating Kielland was fascinating. I found myself more and more relying on the Norwegian equivalent of the OED, checking and re-checking to see what possible third or fourth meaning Kielland might be trying to imply in his choice of a word. But that was not perhaps necessary. Kielland’s precision is more in using words the way the “acacdemy,” if you will, would have argued for their use. In English, I suppose, you could say he is a writer very well aware of the difference between disinterested and uninterested, and he’s not going to point out that he knows the difference because he’s trusting that his reader does. Similarly, he would know the difference between the phrases “the past ten years,” and “the last ten years.”

His other great care is in using the right terms to describe the time, so it’s not just a plot device to distinguish between the two sects that meet in the central female character, the Herrnhutters and the Haugians. He’s also very careful in describing the oil in the lamps used to light the night in Sandsgaard, in the type of shoes, hats, etc. the people are wearing. He’s not going to settle for, say, “shoes,” when he can say “Balmorals,” or “Oxfords.” The reader might not know the difference, but he does. One thing this does, by the way, is help build confidence in his eye for detail. You get the sense reading Kielland that the way he describes something is the way it is. He shared this trait, by the way, with his sister, the painter Kitty Kielland.

Once I figured out what how Kielland was using the language, it by and large freed up the translation. I had to be careful to retain a certain formalness and exactness to the prose, but there weren’t any linguistic tricks to have to worry about, except for a couple of really well-signaled jokes at the expense of characters who would drop into German or French (or English on one occasion) to try to suggest a worldliness perhaps not theirs. The French and German I left alone; the English I left in English.

One other benefit of this realization was that when it came to religious texts I either used the King James version of the Bible, if I was dealing with a biblical quote, or I tried to have the hymns sound as if they were from Hymns Ancient and Modern, the traditional hymnal of the established Church of England.

DK: In Skipper Worse, Kielland begins many of his paragraphs with men, but, or derfor, therefore. You note that this is a stylistic decision rather than one imposed by the Norwegian language. You chose to keep them in place when not too jarring, but otherwise altered the text to ensure that paragraphs began in a manner familiar to contemporary English readers. How common are these type of decisions, and how do you feel they impact upon the act of translation? Are you drastically altering Kielland’s style by removing these aspects of his writing, or are you better serving the intent of his work by rendering it in a manner comfortable to English readers?

CF: I think the challenge here is that this trope is specific to Skipper Worse, so obviously Kielland intended the reader to notice it in the original Norwegian. This made the decision of ignoring many of the conjunctive openings something to ponder. If this habit were simply a tic of everyday Norwegian it would be easy to justify ignoring it in English, just as we don’t put commas in quite the same places as Norwegian does. But Kielland is in some sense drawing attention to the mechanics of the story. In the end, though, in this case it seemed that trying to even come close to replicating the style ran the risk of reminding the reader that this version is a translation, rather than achieving the effect Kielland was apparently looking for.

Beside this question, Skipper Worse can be translated without a whole mess of questions about style because, as I said, Kielland’s strength is his care for the exactness of language rather than being somebody interested in pushing the boundaries of language. In Kielland’s case, and because of this care about language, you don’t have to worry about archaisms creeping in, or anachronistic word choice, rendering him into fluent English respects the Norwegian.

Skipper Worse is, I suspect, a novel that doesn’t raise many of the questions that literary translations often have to deal with. The difficult questions sort of solved themselves, using the King James version, for example. This is quite different from the challenges that would result from trying to prepare a scholarly edition that had to tackle questions of offering readers an exhaustive context and that would require lengthy notes about Hauge, the trading patterns of ships sailing to and from Stavanger, etc.

DK: This leads into another question: Where does the art of the translator lie? Is it more important to preserve the intent of an author, or their content? Or is this something that is dependant upon each author? I expect that there is a fuzzy area that shifts from author to author, with the very best translators finding the right harmony of content versus intent in their translations. How much does this sort of thinking come into your choices?

CF: I haven’t really thought about translation as a discipline. I am aware of the debate between those who prefer a more literal rendering of a text, an argument based, as I understand it, on the notion that a translation is inevitably flawed so one should in some manner remind the reader that he / she is reading a translation, and those who hold that a translation should read as if written by the author in the target language at the time of the translation. I think I’m instinctively sympathetic to this second position, but there are obvious problems. One is what to do with authors who are testing the language in the original (I’m thinking here, say, of the work of the oulipo group in France) because here the strains they impose on the original language must, in some sense, be different to the strains a translator can come up with, simply because of different grammatical and linguistic structures. Ambiguities are notoriously difficult to translate, for example. In the end, there’s a compromise the translator has to make between respecting the original and producing something worthwhile.

If a writer is experimental, I’d argue the emphasis should be on form rather than content–or, at least, that form should be the determining factor when questions arise. In an author such as Kielland I can’t imagine how you could do anything other than put content ahead of other considerations. As I said earlier, there was the question of how to deal with Kielland’s use of conjunctive openings to paragraphs. I think it was an obvious decision to ignore this whenever it resulted in some sort of strained English. Most novels that are translated, I suspect, are going to have some signals reminding the reader they are translations, even if only by cultural references, but people generally read novels in translation for the same reason they read novels in their own language, for the story.

Of course, what I’ve just said applies to novels. It’s not true of legal translation, or the translation of medical documents, for example. Poetry has its own challenges, I love Michael Ondaatje’s Elimination Dance / La danse eliminatoire for the fun it has with this question.

DK: Concepts such as the French ‘tu’ and ‘vous’, or the Norwegian ‘De’ and ‘du’ are difficult to render effectively in English in a single word. I imagine that a great deal of linguistic gymnastics must occur to properly convey the meaning of a simple De in place of a du, or vice versa. What exactly are the complexities associated with these words, and how do you tackle the problem?

CF: I bet it’s a lot harder when you’re translating from French. In Norwegian, though the De / du distinction existed into the 40s or 50s, it was always somewhat formulaic and the ease with which it vanished from the language indicates how little attention people really paid to the distinction. Kielland uses the distinction as a shorthand way to show the evolving relationship between Jacob Worse, the sea captain, and Morten Garman, his employer. At a key moment Garman addresses Worse as “du” rather than using the “De” he has employed to then, but this is specific to these two characters. Honestly, I’d have to go look at the original again to see if the Du / de distinction is employed anywhere else in the novel except in that relationship between Garman and Worse. So the De / du distinction is important in that part of the novel, but it’s very subtle and I think the distinction would only be noticed in Norway now because it’s a convention that has lapsed. I added the phrase “addressing him informally” where Garman first says “du” to Worse. I think it’s the only place in the novel where I added text that wasn’t there. Really, I only mentioned it in the introduction because it’s the kind of question translation theorists might pick up on, which gets back to the previous question.

DK: The great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote that he considered himself lucky that he could choose from any number of different translations of Homer’s Illiad, and that he had the luxury of selecting the translation which best suited the mood he was in at the time. His belief was that translation was as much an act of artistry, of sweat, of perseverance and difficulty as the initial creation of a text, because a translator was required to employ all their talent and ingenuity to the problem of creating a text that best served the original author and the language to which he was being translated. He lamented that, for him, there was, and could only ever be, a single Don Quixote, and envied the English for their many available translations. How does this align with your own beliefs about translation?

CF: Well, I suspect he’s largely right, but profoundly wrong in one important way. As to where he’s correct, I think it would be terrific to have five or six Skipper Worse versions available in English which had sought to reflect accurately the novel. I’m not sure what the differences between them would be, but they’d be there, and we would have an immediate set of choices about how to understand the novel that, perhaps, you don’t get reading it in Norwegian. But there’s more to it than that. Last night I saw the Cowboy Junkies in concert. There are a couple of songs I try to pay particular attention to whenever I hear them live. “Murder tonight in the trailer park” is one of them. The lyrics are very powerful, but it’s a song with an anger that’s very much driven by the music rather than Margo Timmins’ voice. How it is played really affects how you hear it. In that sense, I suppose, each version is a translation. But then there’s a song such as “This street, that man, this life” which they pretty much render as it is on the album, perhaps because it really can’t be improved. Anyway, that’s a song that I think may be the saddest song ever written. (Jane Siberry’s “You don’t need” may be the loneliest–perhaps it’s a Canadian thing), but the point is that when that song first came out I was single, living in Delaware, hanging out with English lit-type grad school friends, dating someone back in New Hampshire, and what I noticed about that song was in some sense abstract, immature. Those were days when we felt it important to believe we understood suffering, pain, angst, what I think is developmental but obviously indulgent adolescence. Now, I’m married, a father, older, all that. It’s a completely different song, absolutely heart breaking. I think it’s far better song now than it was then, but it’s not the song that’s changed.

Likewise, there’s an episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets, “A Doll’s Eyes,” that when I first saw it just blew my mind. It’s immensely compassionate, different from anything else on TV yet really, really tied in with what the show is about, and just plain powerful. Since our son was born I simply haven’t been able to watch it, Every time I start to watch it and the boy gets shot in the opening sequence, that’s just about OK, but as soon as the parents have to decide when to remove life support, whether to donate their son’s organs, when they start asking not for advice but for answers, when that happens I just can’t go on. So this great episode of TV (and, lord knows, there’s precious little great TV) is something I simply can’t watch any more. But the show hasn’t changed.

I would argue Borges had multiple Don Quixotes available to him. All in Spanish.

DK: Do you see your translation of Skipper Worse as a replacement of the previous English translations, or an addition? Did you consult the earlier texts during your work, and if so, how influential were they in deciding your approach? How much of your translation is a product of Kielland’s time, and a product of your own?

CF: Definitely a replacement. The only other English version I’m aware of was published in 1885 by the 3rd Earl of Ducie. It really is a “version,” about 2/3 the length of the original, omitting all the religious tracts and much of the religious discussion, and quite a lot else. I had it to hand for a while when starting out, but I soon gave up with it completely. That said, Ducie’s version met all the conventions of his time, and it’s quite possible that in another 100 years my version will be seen as hopeless. But until then, I definitely see my effort as a replacement.

The plot is Kielland’s. The interest in language we perhaps share. The decisions made in preparing the translation are of today, but as I’ve mentioned Kielland’s careful in his vocabulary so I didn’t have the option of doing what I wanted with the language. I couldn’t decide that Worse has a skiff at his command or a steamer. Kielland is very clear about what’s what throughout the novel.

I should mention here that there is an editor of the English, Jeffrey Voccola. I worked with Jeff several years ago at a small college just outside Boston. My area of expertise is eighteenth-century Irish church-state relations and writing. I don’t know if it was despite that or because of it that I really appreciated Jeff’s creative writer’s eye that smoothed out a lot of the wrinkles, wrinkles that might not really have been obvious to the casual reader but which I saw and Jeff noticed; so I suspect our ideal reader would have spotted these too.

DK: Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie, and Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson have been ill-served in the English language over the last century. Their works are difficult to find, and their impact in English, if any, seems slim a hundred years later. Why do you think this is the case? Do they tackle problems and discuss issues so fundamentally Norwegian that their works offer little to an outsider beyond cultural curiosity? Even Bjrnson, who carried away the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903, has faded away from English literary awareness. Why is this?

CF: To a large extent I’m guessing here, but I don’t think there’s any reason to search for some great conspiracy behind this. The first factor, of course, is how much gets written in English and published. If you are a reader in Britain or the U.S. it’s simply impossible to read everything published. It’s not even possible in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, but there you can get a pretty decent sense of trends and patterns. Publishers such as Text in Melbourne or Coach House in Toronto have a chance of making a mark that their counterparts in the UK and the U.S. don’t. Or when one of those publishers does appear, I’m thinking of Edinburgh publisher Cannongate’s renaissance a few years ago, they end up as part of a larger enterprise. So you really don’t need to read works in translation if your first language is English. I mean, recent books I’ve read are Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt, Night Work: The Terry Sawchuk Poems by Randall Maggs, Dressed for Death by Donna Leon, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby. There’s a lot of variety there. I haven’t felt any need to look for something different. This isn’t as true in countries with smaller populations, so the translation business is to a certain extent bound to be one way.

But there’s more to it than this. Put simply, I don’t imagine for a moment that Skipper Worse would get published in English now if it were offered as an original manuscript. Regardless of the book’s many merits it is not something I could see a publisher taking a chance on. So why would anyone bother to translate except as an exercise? The press run for the book is 1,000 copies. Europa is starting to publish titles in translation in a systematic way but, again, if you look at their list the focus is on books that will sell well. And why not?

Kielland, Lie, Bjornsen, all are wonderful writers, and all deserve to be better known outside of Norway, but they are also at least in part writers who depend for their power on Norway. And Norway is not a place that’s particularly well known or interesting geo-politically. So there’s no pressing need to know its authors as there might be for Chinese or Indian writers today. Perhaps the spate of Scandinavian detective novels in English will inspire some interest in other writers from those countries, but perhaps not.

Knut Hamsun has some staying power in English, I suspect for his influence on later writers and the fact that he definitely can be described as fitting a certain genre, at least those novels of his that are always in print in English–Hunger anyone? The other Norwegian great in English, of course, is Henrik Ibsen, but he’s been preserved in part because of the stage-ability of his plays. Frankly, I think his best writing is not well known in English. It’s available if you look for it, but it’s available because of Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House, which are two of a piece and, depressingly, despite their widespread circulation not as interesting as An Enemy of the People or Brand among others.

DK: There is a strong current of religion running through Skipper Worse, particularly throughout the last half when Jacob Worse marries. Yet it seems as though the characters use the strength of their religious belief as a screen to protect them from their true feelings their passion. Sins of the flesh are a constant preoccupation, with the heavy weight of religion used as a bludgeon to dissuade lovers from coming together. Worse’s young wife Sara uses religion as a chastening tool, humbling and emasculating her husband with threats of Satan and Infernal fire. Does Kielland’s Norway, then, resemble the uptight stuffiness of the Victorian English of about the same time? How does sexuality and passion work in the ordinary lives of Norwegians?

CF: This is the part of the novel that is most interesting, I think. Kielland’s partially addressing a societal inevitability here when he writes about Norway. The Lutheran church was not just established in his day, it in many ways functioned as an arm of government. It was far more instrumental in how people lived their lives than was any church readers in English will be familiar with, I suspect. There are complications from this for the state, for the church, and for individuals, and Kielland recognizes this and speaks to it very directly through the various characters, through the choices they make, but also through the choices they feel they cannot make.

I might be influenced here by my own work on the Church of Ireland in the early eighteenth century, and also by my related but subsidiary interest in the Church of England in the American colonies on the eve of 1776, but the way I’m reading Skipper Worse is that Kielland is bringing to the analysis a very sympathetic view of Christianity as it should be practiced, of the strength of purpose the Lutheran church would have if it got out of the business of being a civic institution and focused on its religious authority.

Throughout Skipper Worse, Kielland is very critical of hypocrisy among the sectaries, and it is obvious that his emotional sympathy lies with Jacob Worse and Morten Garman, but Kielland takes time to point out that there was real courage among the Haugians, a group who in crass American parlance we’d call fundamentalist, but who I think have a better parallel in the Methodist movement in England. Kielland absolutely admires the driving principles of Hans Nilsen Hauge and, in the old dyer who knew Hauge, he offers a character in the novel to speak to this. Kielland’s criticism of the Lutheran church in Norway is interesting if you think of him as a liberal, and I think he was. But the problem here is that in the U.S. the word liberal is utterly debased. Kielland’s liberalism ties in very closely with Methodism and with the progressive strand within both the Lutheran and the Anglican communions, the idea that religion can be both radical and conservative but must be removed from the business of writing social policy. Kielland desperately wants the church of Norway to be a moral beacon. He doesn’t for one moment believe it can be so long as it is in the business of governing.

The bind is that so long as the church and the state are intertwined, people are going to be intimidated into going along because social promotion, social success, economic stability are likely to be somehow connected to how both the church and the state see you. Hauge’s reforms in some sense failed because the church-state system simply absorbed his ideology, tempered it, and moved on.

Hans Nilsen Fennefos, the preacher in the novel, realizes this while he’s traveling in the north where he would seem to have had the type of nervous breakdown that Brand suffers in Ibsen’s play. Unlike Ibsen, though, Kielland has great faith in people and Fennefos recovers and identifies love and compassion as crucial. This is the point of his final speech in the novel, when he reappears to rescue the sectaries from the populace. If you want another Ibsen reference, this scene mirrors the end of A Enemy of the People except, again, that Kielland offers hope where Ibsen settles for futile defiance.

I think Sara understands this somehow, but she is trapped. In many ways, she is the most tragic character in the novel, not her sister Henriette, not Jacob Worse, but Sara, who has to marry a far older man she neither respects nor likes and certainly cannot love, and who has to forsake a love that would have been redemptive for both her and Fennefos. But what’s really interesting about Sara’s character throughout the novel is that while she is certainly driven by anger and resentment, it’s not all clear she doesn’t want Jacob saved. It’s not at all clear that she wouldn’t have welcomed his redemption, albeit that she goes about it in a way guaranteed to ensure failure. [I gave up thinking about the choice of Worse's first name by Kielland. It may well be reading too much into this to see Fennefos as Esau, as Sara's birthright, and Jacob Worse as in some sense stealing her, but there's obviously a parallel here and when the novel was written it was simply inconceivable that the reader would not have known the biblical story and Jacob's role in it.]

Kielland really does care about his characters. He even makes the point that Madam Torvestad doesn’t deserve all the despair that comes to her at the end.

One thing that makes the novel both tragic but also, I maintain, hopeful is that all the characters are self-aware. This is where the hopefulness comes in. Because people have made the conventions they can change them. This is another indication of Kielland’s liberalism, his belief in the possibility of the improvement of society through human agency. It’s not religion, per se, that’s the problem Kielland identifies; it’s what people have made of religion.

This is the heart of Kielland’s great fire. He’s both a radical and a conservative. This is what makes his journalism so fascinating, where he attacks the social policies of Stavanger for their lack of compassion, but at the same time he wasn’t a radical of the continental model, had no interest in seeing barricades in the streets. He simply wanted a society that practiced what it preached

That’s a long answer, but to get to your question about Victorian England: no, I don’t think there’s much a useful parallel there in a broad sense, but there is a definite sympathy between Kielland’s world view and that of social reformers such as Elizabeth Fry and Robert Owen in England, and Edvard Brand in Denmark. Kielland saw Norwegian society as worryingly moribund, worryingly constrained, and here he is exactly in line with Ibsen, but he saw the answer as a return to the roots of Lutheranism (without himself being particularly religious). Kielland was very influenced by John Stuart Mill and by Charles Darwin, but he understood that an honest, compassionate religion could be a great force for good. This gets us back again to Charles and John Wesley and Methodism.

As for sexuality and passion in the lives of Norwegians then (and now, I imagine): they are as necessary, as potentially overwhelming, and as in need of moderation as always and everywhere.

DK: Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen writes in his introduction to Kielland’s Tale of Two Cities that A comparison with Daudet suggests itself constantly in reading Kielland. Their methods of workmanship and their attitude towards life have many points in common. The charm of style, the delicacy of touch and felicity of phrase, is in both cases pre-eminent. He also notes that, unlike Jonas Lie and Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson, who were more concerned with the earthy, morally upright peasants, Kielland had a strong French influence in his writing, something rare for a Norwegian. Do you agree with that, and if so, why was the French literature of the day so far removed from the other great Norwegian writers of the time?

CF: It’s certainly true that Kielland is far more “continental” in his style than his contemporaries, and it’s telling that both Garman’s sons are abroad when the story begins and heading for Paris. Garman’s own domestic influences are distinctly French, and Kielland is not being disingenuous when he positions the consul as essentially a calming influence in Sandsgaard, albeit one who finds himself unable to understand the revivalist tendencies in town. Kielland absolutely looked to the French for both aesthetic and social guidance, but he tempered that with a very practical Norwegian view point. He was very aware of the cultural differences between Norway and France, and what his work explores is how Norwegian traditions and culture can shape, and respond to, the continental European traditions that Kielland believed would strengthen the country and empower its citizens.

Kielland is more interested than his contemporaries, too, in the bourgeois–he shares this interest with Ibsen, though with a profoundly distinct conclusion–and he had this interest both because of his own family background but also because he did not want to romanticize the “the earthy, morally upright peasants.” Kielland mocks mercilessly the civil service, there’s that wonderful scene in Skipper Worse where the girls returning from the herring gutting pass the young men from school and Latin studyl. It’s hypocrisy not ignorance that bothers Kielland. And in Skipper Worse he’s able to turn his attention to the “the earthy, morally upright peasants,” who turn out not to be that morally upright either even where they are certainly earthy. Kielland’s frustration with the sectaries in Skipper Worse is that they do have access to appropriate moral guidelines and many of them twist those guidelines to their own ends no less effectively than the social elite who are able to manipulate the law or business practices to their own ends.

I think that Kielland’s point of view is not dissimilar to that of the Scottish sentimental philosophers, that right actions will result from right impulses, but that to a certain extent those impulses need the luxury of development, which is not something Norway’s climate offered most farmers or fishermen at the time.

But there is a lot of common ground with his fellow authors. In June 1885 the Norwegian parliament refused to grant a pension to Kielland, Bjørnson tried to get the pension granted the next year and when that failed he renounced his own pension. The objection to Kielland, by the way, was that his writings undermined Christianity. The whole argument toppled the government, which says a lot about how important writers were in Norway at the time.

As to why Kielland had this interest in French literature that his colleagues didn’t seem to share: it is partially, perhaps primarily, an accident of birth and education. Bjørnson was a pastor’s son from northern Norway, Lie struggled to make a living as a small-town lawyer and journalist before gaining fame as a novelist. Neither Bjørnson nor Lie had the time or the cultural background that Kielland had when it came to intellectual opportunity in their twenties and thirties.

Of course, Bjørnson also traveled in Europe, and he and Kielland met in France in 1878, but Bjørnson was 46 by then and Kielland only 29, so the older writer in some sense was traveling when his reputation was already established. Kielland was still learning.

DK: Thank you for answering these questions.

Christopher Fauske is the interim dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts. He is a scholar of early eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish literature and of church-state relations in Ireland and Britain during that time. He grew up in the United Kingdom but studied at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Delaware. For several years he was the coach of the UNH men’s rugby team, and later of the Smith College and UNH women’s team. He is the author or editor of several books, including Jonathan Swift and the Church of Ireland 1710-1724; Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context 1688-1729; An Uncomfortable Authority: Maria Edgeworth and Her Contexts; ‘Side by Side in a Small Country’: Bishop John Frederick MacNeice and Ireland, Together with a Consideration of the Bishop and his Son Louis, the Poet; and Money, Power; and Print: Interdisciplinary Studies on the Financial Revolution in the British Isles.