Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.06.2013, Síða 36

Halldór And Friends:
Reminiscence
On my first night, I found myself in
the now-defunct Reykjavík watering
hole called Oðal. I was standing at
the bar next to a man who was so
well dressed that I took him to be
either the Belgian ambassador or
an extremely successful surgeon.
After a bit of preliminary chit-chat
(What did I think of Iceland, etc.), he
ordered a double brennivín for both
of us, then said: "I'm a murderer..."
This is a real conversation stop-
per. What can you say in reply?
"Well, I'm an American," I told him
rather shakily.
"It's true," the man remarked. "I
murdered my wife."
The calm way in which he said
this made killing one's wife seem
like a quite reasonable thing to do.
He went on to tell me that he was
on leave from prison, adding that
no matter what you did in Iceland,
whom you killed or beat up, you
could leave your prison cell just so
long as you reported your where-
abouts to the police every four
hours.
"Iceland sounds like a very toler-
ant country," I said.
"Oh yes. It even tolerates people
like me."
"How did you happen to kill your
wife?" I asked.
"Too much brennivín," he re-
plied. "By the way, would you like
another double brennivín?"
No, my treat, I said, and I bought
us both bottles of ginger ale.
I decided I would have to balance
the scales by meeting a non-mur-
dering Icelander, so the next day I
called up Halldór Laxness, and he
invited me to visit him in Mosfellss-
veit that very afternoon. Only in Ice-
land, I thought, can you find a Nobel
Prize winner's telephone number in
the phone directory, ring him up,
and then be invited for a visit, all in
only a minute or two.
I took the Þingvellir bus to Mos-
fellssveit. After I arrived, I saw liv-
ing evidence that Halldór had not
murdered his wife, for that wife,
Auður, greeted me at the door. Such
things are a comfort to a traveller in
a strange land for the first time.
"Halldór is upstairs reading
Proust," Auður told me, and then
made me some coffee.
When Halldór finally came down,
I asked him if he liked reading
Proust.
"Nei!" he said. "Certainly not!"
"Then why are you doing it?"
"Because my publisher requires
it."
I was appalled. Here was this gi-
ant of world literature, a man who'd
written twenty or thirty books, and
his publisher wanted him to read
Proust, presumably to inject a dose
of French civility to his staunchly
Icelandic oeuvre.
As it happened, my ears were
less than perfectly attuned to Ice-
landic English: Halldór hadn't been
reading Proust; he'd been reading
the proofs for his forthcoming book.
Later I surveyed his library,
which had translations of his works
in a variety of languages, but there
were far more translations in Dutch
and Polish than there were in Eng-
lish. Remember: this was the early
1980s, several years before his
works began appearing in England
or America. In fact, my then editor,
when I mentioned Halldór to him,
said, "Hall door lacks who? Never
heard of him."
"It's a pity you're not better
known in America," I told Halldór.
"I am not Agatha Christie!" he
proclaimed. And then, as if to prove
this point, he lit one of the large
cigars that had become his trade-
mark. After he smoked half of the
cigar, he put the other half in a pipe
and smoked it, thus proving that a
genuinely creative individual can
smoke a good cigar right down to its
final ash.
Proust didn't go away. For the
remembrance of things past—or
maybe I should say persons past—
was the theme of my last evening in
Iceland, when I attended a séance in
Kópavogur sponsored by the Helgi
Pjeturrs Society. An eminent Icelan-
dic geologist, Helgi Pjeturrs was an
avid believer in the spirit world; he
also believed Icelandic was the lan-
guage of the Afterlife, and that all
Afterlifers were obliged to learn it.
He died, or at least his physical part
died, in 1949.
There were eight of us at the sé-
ance, all holding hands and look-
ing expectantly at each other: who
would grace us with their presence
tonight? Then all the lights went
out except for a globe of the world
illuminated by a single light bulb.
The medium went into a trance, and
nothing happened for ten or fifteen
minutes. At last the first presence
arrived—Helgi Pjeturss himself (he
always comes first, I was later told).
Helgi welcomed us to the séance as
if he was welcoming us to his home.
There were several other pres-
ences who had some connection to
the people in the room. One of them
was an Italian who wanted to reas-
sure his Icelandic friend that he was,
as the medium declared, "all right."
Yet how, I wondered, can you be "all
right" when you're dead?
And then the medium was speak-
ing in the low, deep voice of...Abra-
ham Lincoln! Abe told us that he
was all right, too. He was living in
the Andromeda galaxy and learning
Icelandic. He did not bear a grudge
against John Wilkes Booth or any-
one else. All he hoped for was world
peace. Oh yes: Icelandic was a very
difficult language...
"Wasn't that nice?" one of the
séance-goers observed to me after-
wards. "The medium brought forth
a fellow countryman of yours just
because you were here."
Yes, it was nice, I had to agree.
Especially since the medium could
have hauled out a considerably less
desirable dead president than Abra-
ham Lincoln. But it was also a typi-
cal example of Icelandic hospitality,
wherein the guest is offered an un-
encumbered window on what might
well be the most eccentric place in
the world, no, the whole universe,
including the Andromeda galaxy.
- Lawrence Millman
Literature
“‘I am not Agatha Christie!’ he proclaimed. And then,
as if to prove this point, he lit one of the large cigars
that had become his trademark.”
I first visited Iceland thirty years ago in my capacity as a travel writer. Why I chose Iceland, of all
places, was simple: no one I knew had ever gone there. Likewise, I'd recently been travelling in Scot-
land's Outer Hebrides, where I'd been subjected to the Free Kirk, a religion so dour that it makes
ordinary Presbyterianism seem dangerously licentious, and I felt like I needed a change.
36
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The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 8 — 2013