some poor ignorant Alabama tenant farmers in the thirties, discovered that their small, failed lives could not quite be described by normal American power values. He calls his book about them Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and comes to this con-, elusion about the poor and failed: they are human in precisely the same manner as ourselves, and therefore bottomless. It takes him hundreds of pages of thundering prose to grab the scruff of the reader’s neck, and shake him to the same conclusion. Money earned, suit brand, car model, school degree, powerful army, big bombs, bootstrap rhetoric, make no difference. Everything the success culture takes for granted turns to fog that burns off when you put light on it. At the bottom of everything is skin; under that, blood and bone. This simple fact shocked Agee and gave him a case of the ecstasy. Like poverty, alcoholism is a failure hard to deny, for denial leads to suicide. The ideas that Alcoholics Anonymous proposes to help alcoholics recover have in them the “true regret from the heart” and staying sober requires “good will and more good will.” An alcoholic must confess to his fellows: all greetings begin, “My name is Joe, and I’m a drunk.” Substitute your own name in that sentence and the music of failure sounds in earshot. Drunks black out, remember nothing; A.A. requires memory, the acknowledgment of actions’ effects on self and others, then apology and atonement. You must make right what you have put wrong with your drinking; pay just debts. Imagine America coming up from one of its blackouts to apologize to Cambodia, Nicaragua, the Sioux, interned Japanese, or the blacklisted. Imagine yourself.... The serenity prayer, spoken at every A.A. meeting, is the true Everything the success culture takes for granted turns to fog that bums off when you put light on it. At the bottom of everything is skin; under that, blood and bone. national anthem of the country of failure: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference. No bombs bursting in air in that one. Failure in national life: a little history of Iceland. What, then, shall we say in praise of the Bardals, all dead in a hundred years in America, and failed miserably by almost every definition our culture offers us? The Bardals came out of an immigrant culture that had succeeded at failure. They were Icelanders, and conscious of it, and though none of Frithgeir’s children ever saw their ancestral home, the called themselves “western Icelanders,” and could observe by looking at any television set that they were not quite American in the manner conceived in commercials and soap operas. The Icelandic immigration at the end of the nineteenth century took place, as did so many such movements, largely because of grinding poverty. The Icelanders, historically, showed talent for surviving nearstarvation, but, by 1875, an escape opened to them that was like none other in history. Free land was not an offer taken lightly. At 36 I went off to live in Iceland for a year or two, and had a look at the farms the ancestors of Minneota Icelanders left, including my own grandfather’s and the Bardals’. In 1875, the houses must have been dank turf- covered hovels, smelling of chamber pots and boiled fish, ceilings so low that generally tall Icelanders must have developed hunches stooping under their own roofline. In 1875, there were no roads, only horse tracks; no sophisticated-machines, only scythes and hand rakes; almost no light, heat, sanitation or plumbing. Aside from a handful of Christmas raisins or prunes, and daily rutabagas and potatoes, their whole diet consisted of boiled dried cod, boiled salt mutton, rotted shark, and a pudding made out of sour milk. They had never seen an orange, an apple, or corn, much less an avocado. They had little topsoil, a miniscule growing season sufficient for almost no food crops, interminable winters and grey, cold, drizzly summers, frosts in'June, snow in August, and icy sea fogs in between. They raised hardy old Viking sheep, a cow or two for milk, and hay that was really only native grass; to feed the animals. They moved around on small sturdy horses who coped with endless frost heaves, bogholes, cliffs, and gravelly, cold, glacial rivers that separated one remote farm from the next. Icelandic farmers lived, for all practical purposes, in the twelfth century until well into the twentieth. It is almost impossible for us to conceive the meanness and isolation of their lives. They occupied the outer edge of an island on the outer edge of Europe in poverty worthy of the most dismal backwater of the Third World in Africa or Asia. Iceland also had a history of losing, both geological and political. Settled by ninth century Vikings who organized the world’s first genuine Parliament, they were the only king- less Europeans, but lost that prize through their own interminable squabbling. And yet they did indeed make a great, though curiously austere, civilization. With no usable building stone, no musical instruments, no minable metals, and a paucity of food and shelter, they built the most substantial European literature of the middle ages by using the only equipment left to them on this barren rockpile: language, not Latin, but their own beloved vernacular Icelandic. What is the heroic subject of the greatest of that literature? Failure. The Sturlunga Saga chronicles with bloody detail the venial civil quarrels , that led to the breakdown of political structures and ensuing loss of independence. Laxdaela Saga records a willful ‘woman’s successive failed marriages and loves that make Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary seem by comparison cheerful. The gods themselves, in Viking mythology, were doomed to perish, and Valhalla is a temple of failure. In Njal’s Saga (a worthy companion to Homer) almost all the main characters are swept up in a violent tide that culminates in the deliberate burning to death of Njal’s whole family, including aged wife and grandchildren, inside his house. It is surely a cautionary story, designed to be told to an audience themselves afflicted with a quarrelsome nature and a taste for recrimination and revenge. The Icelanders, by facing the drastic failures of their history and nature, created a literature that held the national ego together through 600 years of colonial domination, black plague, leprosy, volcanic eruption, and famine that by 1750 reduced this already half-starved population to half the size it had been at its settlement time. The most wretched Icelandic household had those books and read them; they were the ballast every Icelander carried through the long centuries of failure. A saga reader visiting Iceland now, expecting blood-thirstiness or violence from the population, is in for disappointment. He finds instead a mild, harmonious, democratic welfare state, just and literate, almost without murder, theft, or any violent crime. Doors are left unlocked and lost billfolds returned to strangers. Poverty in any sense an Ameri-. can might understand is unknown. It struck me while I lived there, and must equally strike many American tourists, that Iceland is what America says it is and is, in fact, not. Our literature, too, is full of failure—-the sunk Pequod and the dead crew in Moby Dick, Hawthorne’s vision of failed love in an icy community, Huck Finn on the raft choosing evil, and Whitman’s great poems in praise of death —but we do not carry these books around inside our public life as Icelanders carry theirs. What distinguishes Icelandic from American failure is the sense of responsibility. It was neither Norwegian, Dane, black .plague, nor polar ice who wrecked Iceland’s independence, fertility and prosperity; their literature makes absolutely clear that it was Icelanders themselves who did these things. We made terrible mistakes and we alone, they say to one another in books. Viewing their history generously, you might even be inclined to share blame for troubles with Norway, Denmark, or at least bad luck, but Icelanders will have none of it. It is a matter of national pride to have behaved so stupidly in the past and survived as a nation to learn something from it. Alteration is possible if you stop in time; this is one of the clear lessons both of A.A. and of history. In addition, there is a certain pleasure that comes from swallowing your own failure. A great deal of Icelandic humor grows out of these indigestible lumps of history. Nothing that is itself can conceivably be termed a failure by the transcendental definition. But things must acknowledge and live up to their selfness. This is fairly effortless for a horse or a cow, more difficult for a human being, and judging by the evidence of history, almost impossible for a community or a country. When it happens occasionally, as I argue that it did in the case of the Icelanders, it creates a rare wonder, a community that has eaten its own failures so completely that it has no need to be other than itself. Iceland has no army, because an army cannot defend anything genuinely worth defending. In my more melancholy utopian moments, I think America would be better defended without one, too. The Bardals came out of that failure tradition, and it schooled them well for their hundred years in America. Friends of mine meeting Pauline for the first time would remark on her aristocratic bearing. There was no bowing and scraping in her; she met bank presidents and failed farmers It struck me while I lived there, and must equally strike many American tourists, that Iceland is what America says it is and is, in fact, not. with the same straightforward kindness. And why, given the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the rhetoric of American history, should she not? Her soul was not tied to a bank account or elegant clothes, and whatever difficulties life dealt her, she remained Pauline and that was sufficient. No one can steal the self while you are sleeping if it is sufficiently large in your body. A country with a sufficient ego casts off paranoia about plots to steal its factories and merchandise, and behaves with grace and mildness toward its neighbors. But an alcoholic protects that weak self by filling it with whiskey. A stock speculator in the twenties filled it with Dusenbergs, ermines, Waterford chandeliers, and Newport villas. When these toys disappeared abruptly, the now defenseless self stepped to the window and, taking advantage of the fact that it lived inside a heavy body, dropped out. Some alcoholics drive off cliffs if you take whiskey away. An empty country, then, protects itself at all costs against the idea of its own failure, lest some part of its weak psyche understand that it must commit a sort of suicide whenever it is tempted to feel the “true regret.” A hundred years ago, this was serious, but not final. A country more or less blown off the map, even a large one, would still be populated by deer, muskrats, fox, weeds and grass. Since 1945, self-building has become a matter of life and death for the whole planet. We have now reached the point in human history where some cure is absolutely necessary, some embracing of wholesome failure. Bill Holm is one of Minnesota’s most renowned authors. He presently lives in Minneota. This essay is abridged from an original essay of the same name, which can be found in Prairie Days published by Saybrook Company. Stuart Mead is a Twin Cities painter. Connie Gilbert has managed her graphic design business since 1982, and has worked with clients such as American Public Radio, Dataserv, and the Community Design Center. 8 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1988
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