We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who influenced them. This month, we spoke with 2009 National Book Award recipient Colum McCann (Twist, Let the Great World Spin) about “patriot of elsewhere” John Berger, and with 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award winner Torrey Peters (Stag Dance, Detranstition, Baby) about the humor and empathy of Halldor Laxness.
Colum McCann on John Berger
Why did you want to discuss Berger?
I think John Berger was one of the great voices bridging the 20th and 21st centuries. He wrote about art and politics, but he also wrote about farmers and rural doctors and motorbiking. His work has a depth and a charm and an intelligence that was more or less unmatched in recent literature. I got to meet him in the late 1990s and we had a close relationship right up until his death. We wrote letters to one another and spent some time in Europe together hanging out. They were some of the best days of my literary life.
Were you familiar with what his writing process was like? I imagine he was exceptionally careful with his thoughts and words.
Well, let me tell you a story which perfectly illustrates not so much his writing process as his thinking process. We were together in Paris, and we'd had a long evening talking philosophy and writing and telling each other stories. We were also slightly overserved. So I asked John where he was from, and he replied that he was from Basingstoke in London. I knew that already and in my heightened state I asked him a rather frantic question: “Yes, I know that, but where are you from from?” Which is a terrible question at the best of times. And he sat back and took one of his silent moments and said, “I am a citizen…” And then he paused for a long time. It was one of those wonderful moments when John was thinking of what he should and could say. And finally he said, “No, no,” and then he paused again and said, “I am a patriot of elsewhere.” Which is about the most wonderful phrase I have ever heard. He was not a citizen of elsewhere, but a patriot of elsewhere. Which is a phrase that I will bring to my grave. I think it suits him very much. And it's a story I return to again and again. I think the essence of John is there—a patriot of elsewhere.
Which of his works most stands out to you?
His most famous book was probably Ways of Seeing, which is a seminal work that examines how we see art and photography. It's still mandatory reading in most art schools but also in political academies because John was a famous Marxist too. But behind all that he really cared about the ordinary man and woman. I just adore his very simple love story To The Wedding, which was published in the mid-1990s. It's told by a blind Greek marketman, a peddler, in a series of interlocking vignettes. It's romantic and tough all at the same time. It's also an AIDS story that will take your breath away. As love stories go, this is one of the most beautiful.
Reading his novel G, he strikes me as one of those writers who is far more about ideas than story. Would you agree with that?
I would agree with that up to a point. G is very much an ideas-driven project. And John certainly had his ideas and he cleaved to them. Yet he didn't discount the people who live in and around the ideas. He knew the human pulse as well as anyone.
It seems to me that he placed a lot of importance on the human and societal value of writing and art, as opposed to artists who view their work as a primarily creative endeavor.
I don't think he would make a distinction. I think he wanted to see and know artists who saw their creative endeavors as an essential part of their human and societal value. He knew, essentially, that writing mattered, but it only mattered if we were prepared to live our lives in a way that reflected our work. All of it was, and is, laced together. Language, image, humanity.
Torrey Peters on Halldor Laxness
Why did you choose Halldor Laxness?
I think Halldor Laxness wrote one of the great books of the 20th Century—Independent People—and I think his writing has become more relevant in this century. I feel that his great subject is the needs of the individual versus the needs of the collective, and that this subject often risks pulling writers towards preachiness, stiffness, and political absolutism. Yet Laxness doesn’t just avoid those traps in Independent People—reading it you wouldn’t even know those traps exist. It’s just so funny and sharp and humane without ever being sentimental. You come to see what Laxness is saying through an emotional rather than intellectual resonance, and I’d go so far as to name that resonance as love.
When did you first read Independent People?
I came upon it accidentally. I was living in the Dominican Republic and desperate for anything in English or translated into English, so I probably wouldn’t have picked it up based on a description of it. The book opens with a grumpy sheep farmer dragging his poor bride out to some terrible field and then cursing a long-dead witch, then discussing with other sheep farmers the problem of piles in sheepdogs. I remember being like, what the hell is this book? And then suddenly, I kind of got on its wavelength and it grew both magical and funny to me. It seemed to anticipate the magical realism of Marquez, Faulkner’s haunted sense of place, and yet somehow was lighter than both of them. And that’s before you even get to what Laxness is actually trying to communicate! It’s this incredible father-daughter story, about the ugly stubbornness of trying to make it as an individual and how painful it can be to be dependent on others, especially when they let you down, either through their own mistakes or simply because of luck or poverty or exploitation. The farmer, Bjartur of Summerhouses, is the most pig-headed frustrating protagonist and yet I love him so tenderly. Meanwhile I literally tear up when I think of his daughter Asta-Sollilja. And god, the ruthlessness with which Laxness can treat these characters whom he teaches you to love—it is savage!
What do you enjoy about his work on the page level?
He can write a joke, he can write a gut punch, he can describe a landscape, he can do an epic legend, he can tell you about the fluctuating prices of commodities during the First World War, and he can do complex satire. I remember how in depicting the bailiff’s wife, he sketched the smug self-congratulatory condescension of a do-gooder in the barest of sentences.
Laxness was imprisoned and ultimately expelled from the U.S. after writing critically of it. What do you think of his role as a socially conscious writer?
He was a socialist all his life and a Stalinist for a salient portion of it. He praised loudly and often the Soviet Union. He won the Nobel in 1955 at the height of the Cold War, and his reputation was defined by that moment in that era. I think it was a long time before his writing could be considered outside of that context. But I guess I would say that I don’t really feel like praising or condemning his specific politics, which seem to me to be very much of his time and place, yet the sense of justice and ethics and empathy that you find in his fiction, well, that seems of the highest order to me.
What do you think writers should learn from Laxness?
I don’t want to speak for other writers, but for myself, I would like to know how to write so truly epically—the book is influenced by Icelandic sagas—yet so lightly. I mean, come on: one poor sheep farm, one stubborn guy, and in it you have all of the sweep of capitalism, of family, of folklore, of nature's cruelty, of human grit—and yet a reader laughs the whole time. Except when you are weeping over the murder of a beloved cow.
