Skipper Worse

Raise your hand if you have ever heard of Skipper Worse by Alexander Lange Kielland.  Anyone?  Anyone?

This novel was included in Charles Eliot’s series, Harvard Classics.  That series was intended to show that you could get the basic liberal education in a library which fit on a five foot shelf.  So, imagine the challenge—you have a mere five feet of bookshelf space and you want to put in all the classics.  So, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Plato, Aristotle. And so on.  Oh, and Kielland’s Skipper Worse.

A curious choice to put it mildly.  I had never heard of this book until a friend of mine, Chris Fauske, published a translation of the book.  Chris kept telling me the book was really good, so I finally bought I and it lingered on my bookshelf forever.  I felt guilty whenever I ran into him again that I hadn’t yet read it.  I finally did.  Chris was right; it is good.  That is what got me puzzling—why hadn’t I ever heard of Kielland or this novel in any other context?  And you can imagine my shock when I found it listed as one of the books in Charles Eliot’s (yes, Charles Eliot, President of Harvard, proponent of Great Books!) Harvard Classics.   Hard to get a bigger stamp of Great Book than that.

But, then it gets really odd:  Skipper Worse does not have its own page in Wikipedia.  Now we have a Great Book without a Wikipedia page!  I suspect this is a set of one.

And then, I discover that Harold Bloom didn’t list Kielland’s novel in the appendix of The Western Canon, which pretty much lists every work of high fiction ever written.

So, what do Charles Eliot and Chris Fauske know that the rest of the universe doesn’t?

Kielland is Norwegian and is part of the generation of writers that helped create Norway as a distinct country and people.  Publishing this work in 1882, he is doing for Norway much what Dickens was doing for England or Tolstoy was doing for Russia—trying to capture society as a whole in a novel.  Using this novel as the reference point (I have no other independent knowledge of Norway in the late 19^th century (yeah, clearly I have a critical failing in my education—how did 1880s Norway get skipped in every class I ever took???)), Norway was caught in a real cultural crossroads as an older maritime culture met a burgeoning commercial class met an intensely devout religious class.  Poor Skipper Worse.  (Can I note how hard it was to get over the fact that “Worse” is just his last name and not the English word “worse”?)  Skipper Worse likes to sail boats.  At the start of the novel he has just completed the first-ever Norway to Rio voyage.  (Almost, but not quite as important a voyage as Diaz rounding  the Cape of Good Hope, to be sure.)  The Skipper’s ship is named The Hope of the Family (insert “Symbolism Alert”). By the end of the first chapter, you know this is going to be one of those nice novels where a maritime hero settles back into the life of his beloved homeland.  Except it isn’t.  While he was away, Norway changed.  Skipper Worse’s old life no longer exists, and he is suddenly faced with a problem.  What world should he join?  There is the grand new commercial world where Skipper Worse can become a shipping magnate running a large-scale commercial enterprise.  There is the intense new religious community where Skipper Worse can thwart the devil and all his works through a life of simplicity and intense devotion.  And there is his tavern and his old friends where he can merrily get drunk and tell tall tales, but that doesn’t really work in with either of those other two worlds.  Oh, and there is a girl.  A young girl, much younger that the Skipper.  Maybe Worse can regain his lost youth with this younger bride; all the more important because Worse’s son is, well, not a good fellow (nothing to look forward to there).  Throw is some interesting characters from the commercial and religious worlds, and you have an intriguing portrait of Norway at a slice in time when Norway has to decide what it means to be Norway.

For the scope of the novel, it is surprisingly short; just 164 pages in the Fauske translation.  Yet despite being under 200 pages, I feel like I know this town, these people.  And it breaks my heart to see them so divided, so poised on the cusp of great societal upheaval, so unprepared for what the future will bring.  These are people who are simply not prepared for the 20^th century.

Another curious note, Skipper Worse is a prequel to Kielland’s earlier novel Garman & Worse.  But, for as much as I enjoyed Skipper Worse, I am not eager to read the sequel.  This is partly because I have such a quaint little picture of this town that I am not sure I want to know what happens next.  But, even more importantly, because Kielland is not exactly a household names, when you look him up on Amazon, all you find are a bunch of free Kindle versions of the books—which means translations which have now hit the public domain—which (generally) means, total hack-job translations.  In fact, you have to search by ISBN (978-0-89304-111-3) to get the Fauske translation of Skipper Worse.  Maybe if Chris ever translates the sequel, I’ll read it then.  [In the meantime, if you need a gift for a person who likes Great Books, get the Fauske translation of Skipper Worse—they are unlikely to have read it and they will enjoy it. (End commercial interlude.)]

On prequels: what is the first literary prequel ever published?  To qualify: an author needs to have written both the original and the prequel.   Retelling old myths doesn’t count—it has to be an original story followed by another original story that precedes the one already published.  I have not exhaustively thought about this, and I may be missing something really obvious, but it is just possible that Skipper Worse is the first one that would qualify.  I’d be happy to hear that this is wrong, by the way—I suddenly am quite interested in this matter.  (Don’t ask why I am interested. I have no idea why I get interested in anything.)

On Wikipedia: the lack of a Wikipedia entry on this book is more than just puzzling.  It also makes me wonder if I should take up a project about which I feel twinges of guilt all the time.  Should I be spending time each week improving Wikipedia?  I love Wikipedia—I use it all the time.  But, I often note small errors or omissions or things that it would be good to include.  I certainly know enough random, but kinda interesting things.  I could do this.  But, I never have.  Why not?  Surely working on a free, global encyclopedia is not a bad use of a half-hour a week.  Yet, I have been tortured with the idea that I should do this for years, and never once done so.  I have no idea why not.  But, I can say—creating at least a rudimentary Wikipedia page of Skipper Worse is certainly worth doing.

And a final note:  I have no idea what this even is, but it is pretty funny to discover this doing a Google search.  It’s too short to be the whole novel, but it may be episode 1.