Svenska Litteratursällskapet: Samlaren: Abstracts: Gedin
David Gedin, ”Miserable Wretches Are We”, new light on Heidenstam’s attack on Fröding in 1896.
In 1896 Gustaf Fröding’s” poem ”En
morgondröm” (”A morning dream”) was prosecuted for
indecency. Fröding himself, who was popular with the public, was not
held responsible for the poem. It was said he was sickly and lacking in judgment.
Instead, the newspapers pointed to his close acquaintance, Verner von Heidenstam,
as the responsible party. Heidenstam, it seems, panicked. He demanded that
Fröding reject the accusation and tried not to take any part in defending
the poem.
According to the established view, these events were solely the result of
Heidenstam’s thoughtlessness, but newly released letters from Heidenstam
to his closest friend, Oscar Lever-tin, sheds new light on the issue.
The letters show Heidenstam demeaning and disparaging Fröding long before
any legal action took place. Probably, this was done as a part of Heidenstam’s
effort to create a new rôle or position for himself as a writer. In
contrast to the socially conscious authors of the 1880’s, Heidenstam
established himself as an aristocrat, contemptuous of the bourgeois audience,
whose sole artistic responsibility was aesthetic, not ethical.
Society, however, did not yet support that kind of artistic identity. There
were only a few scholarships and the critics still regarded themselves more
as servants of the public than interpreters and mediators of the authors.
Though Heidenstam did more than anybody to change the situation, by the founding
of the Swedish Writers’ Union in 1893 and by turning the newspaper Svenska
Dagbladet into a forum for modern criticism in 1897, writers like Selma Lagerlöf
and Gustaf Fröding could still succeed in combining a large audience
with artistic status. Among them, Fröding was the most dangerous competitor
to Heidenstam by also being a male poet.
At this particular time, when Heidenstam seemed about to conquer the larger
public with his novel about Charles XII, Karolinerna, he was, in effect, directly
challenging Fröding’s position. Privately discrediting Fröding
among their colleagues meant he could not later officially defend him without
losing respect. Also, if his actions were made public, it would be a fatal
blow to the elitist position he had created (in contrast to the more savage
rôle of the still dominating Strindberg).
At the time of the fast and dramatic development leading up to the trial,
Heidenstam was in Norway. Because of the delay in the flow of information,
his attempt to control the events turned into a bizarre farce, where his actions
only kept making his situation worse, until he declared himself too ill to
participate and withdrew into isolation.
During all of this Heidenstam was working on Karolinerna. Interestingly, at
this time the novel changes from being a study of the Swedish people during
a tragic time of hardship and sacrifices, into a hagiology of the misunderstood
hero-king. Though it could be argued that Heidenstam already had begun shifting
from what appears to be a genuine feeling for ordinary people towards the
abstract notion of the Nation, events during those frantic weeks in 1896 seem
to have had a decisive alienating effect on him. After this point popular
culture in Heidenstam’s view was equivalent to vulgarity.