Dark Decade: The Declining Years of Waldemar Ager

Abstract

by CLARENCE KILDE 7 Dark Decade: The Declining Years of Waldemar Ager Life sitively is ultimately cruel. This tragic has become and the the world conclusion is insensitively cruel. This has become the conclusion about the nature of life as depicted in immigrant literature . Whatever the race or nationality, to emigrate, to forsake one's native land forever, to experience permanent family separation, to part forever with friends, to desert ancestral firesides - this became an undertaking with uncertain consequences, including the peril of tragic failure. And the heavy heart of the emigrant often became "the divided heart" of the immigrant. The self was suspended in the tension between nostalgia over the past and anxiety concerning the future. How did the self endure this tension with its contrasting temptations - to homesickness or to horizons of hope? There were a few independent souls who abandoned America and returned to their homeland. Such was the case of the Norwegian immigrant author Kristofer Janson , in Minneapolis, and his young friend, Knut Hamsun , who dreamed of becoming a writer. There were also those who lacked the spirit of independence, those in bondage to inadequacy, who sought sólace in dreaming 157 Clarence Kilde over the past and who died of unspeakable loneliness and lie buried, often in unmarked graves, their only monument the fictional characters in immigrant novels. But the immigrant who neither returned to his native land nor died prematurely from lost dreams and a broken heart was the determinedly practical person. He drowned his thoughts of the past in deeds of vigorous action, having a relatively well-defined purpose and pursuing it with high and sustained courage. Immigration statistics tell us that most Norwegians came to the Midwest to plow and plant the fields; some planned and started small businesses; a very few seized the pen, giving a measure of meaning to the immigrant's life and setting worthy goals and purposes for his being assimilated into a new society. In this latter and smallest group of single-minded, purposeful activists was Waldemar Theodore Ager who came to America in 1885. He did not write with a pen, however, but with an endless number of pencils across nearly two score years as editor of the Norwegianlanguage weekly newspaper Reform in Eau Claire, Wisconsin . At the same time, he was author of six novels, eight collections of short stories and essays, and one historical narrative. A significant symbol of the compulsory thrift that marked the life of one publishing a newspaper and books in a foreign language, while providing for a family of nine children, was a legacy of Ball and Mason glass fruit-canning jars full of one-inch pencil stubs, their sharp points shaved with a pocket jackknife. The graphite of these No. 2.5 pencils communicated Ager's cardinal convictions upon the blank sides of scrap paper, printing-press spoilages in all shapes and sizes forever lying about in a job-printing shop. In his frugality he also used the blank sides of circulars that came third class in the mail. His abiding legacy, however, is the total corpus of 158 DECLINING YEARS OF WALDEMAR AGER writings during a half-century: the complete file of Reform , his collected short stories and poems, his essays and novels, his perceptive articles of literary criticism, and the unforgettable character of the person that emerges from these writings. The stature of the man as literary artist has been favorably judged by Einar Haugen: "In originality and talent he stands far above all who have produced in Norwegian-American literature, with the exception of Rplvaag." 1 And Ole E. Rplvaag himself, beginning in 1910, often praised his ability. In a letter to a friend shortly after the publication that year of Ager's first successful novel, Kristus for Pilatus (Christ before Pilate), Rplvaag said: "Artistically speaking, Waldemar Ager has reached a peak which it will be difficult for the rest of us to attain."2 This novel deserves initial attention for two reasons. In the half-century of Norwegian immigrant writing, from Gunnar by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen in 1874 to Rplvaag 's publication of Giants in the Earth in the original Norwegian in 1924 (I de...