BOYESEN AND THE NORWEGIAN IMMIGRATION

Abstract

BOYESEN AND THE NORWEGIAN IMMIGRATION BY CLARENCE A. GLASRUD The career of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, "the first writer of Norwegian birth or blood to use the English language in the successful cultivation of literary art" has been subject to general misunderstanding for a number of reasons.1 The most important misconception involves Boyesen's writings about Norwegian immigration to the United States. Many of his stories fall into this category, and since Boyesen himself was a Norwegian immigrant, critics have assumed that he was well qualified to write on the subject. But Boyesen was not a part of the main stream of Norwegian immigration to the western states, and a study of his literary output will show that his serious interests were in other fields. Boyesen was twenty-one when he came to the United States as a graduate of the Royal Fredrik University in Christiania. When he died at forty-seven he had published twenty-four books, all in English; his uncollected magazine material would fill another twenty-four volumes. For more than twenty years he was a professor of Germanic literature at Cornell and Columbia universities. His popular reputation , a very considerable one from 1875 to 1895, has long since ceased to exist, but Boyesen has not been entirely forgotten . Histories of American literature give him scant mention and reveal a surprising ignorance of his work and its significance. He generally fares better at the hands of historians of intellectual and cultural movements, who still remember his courageous fight for realistic fiction dealing with important aspects of American life, and his strictures against the "Iron Madonna," the young girl magazine reader whose taste for romantic claptrap prevented American novelists 1 Laurence M. Larson, The Changing West and Other Essays , 82 (Northfield, 1987). Larson's essay in this collection is the best study yet published of Boyesen 's life and career. 15 16 CLARENCE A. GLASRUD from writing about serious matters, or from selling their fiction if they did.2 One further aspect of Boyesen's career has been generally overlooked: he was an important liaison man between European and American literature. The disposition to rate Boyesen an important writer on Norwegian immigration is a pitfall besetting those who know something about his work and career, but not enough, or those who are not well acquainted with the nature of Scandinavian immigration to the United States. One example will suffice: Boyesen's life and work spanned the entire late period of the Scandinavian migration. He began his literary career in America with two poems . . . which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for 1872. His influence ended with stories and articles published the year of his death, 1895. Between these two dates, 1872 and 1895, the Scandinavians came to this country in the thousands. Boyesen observed them, was himself a part of their migration and wrote about their problems with the authenticity of a careful historian.3 Hjalmar Boyesen was only technically "a part of their migration": he became an American because he was convinced that he could live by his pen only by writing in a major language like English.4 His own career, activities, and interests were so far removed from his fellow immigrants that he "observed them" only sporadically and superficially. The statement that he "wrote about their problems with the authenticity of a careful historian" is so far from the truth that it scarcely needs refutation. He had neither the intention nor the experience to play such a role. Boyesen did, of course, make some interesting observations about Norwegian immigration in his numerous stories and articles. These observations must be considered in the proper 'Boyesen uses the phrase, "the Iron Madonna who strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist" in "The American Novelist and His Public," an essay in his Literary and Social Silhouettes , 49 (New York, 1894). 8 George L. White, Jr., "H. H. Boyesen: A Note on Immigration," in American Literature (Durham, North Carolina), 13: 363 (January, 1942). 4 Boyesen, Writing My First Book, m Philadelphia Inquirer , October 1, 1893; and F. E. Heath, "Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen," in Scribner's Monthly , 14: 777 (October, 1877). BOTESEN AND IMMIGRATION 17 perspective: writings of his that...