Verner von Heidenstam

Biography

In the autumn of 1887 Heidenstam was finishing his first collection of poems in his parents’ house in Stockholm, on Karlavägen. A few months earlier, on 2 June, his father had taken his own life.

He was born on 6 July 1859 in Olshammar, on a manor by Lake Vättern that belonged to his mother’s family; she was born Rütterskiöld. His father, Nils Gustaf von Heidenstam, was a lighthouse engineer, and his mother came from a noble family. The family spent winters in Stockholm, but the writer always called Olshammar his childhood home. It had a large library with Xenophon, Tacitus and Plutarch. At the Beskowska school he did well at first and then worse: his health interfered, and he was also dyslexic and spelled badly all his life. At sixteen he had to leave school. In September 1876 he went with his cousin Ernst to Alexandria and Cairo, returned in the spring by way of Greece and Italy, and in the autumn set off again for the East, to Beirut, Jerusalem and Cairo. He wrote to his mother that he wanted to become a painter; she firmly objected. In his sketchbook he drew and painted, but he had already begun to write verse.

In 1880 he married Emilia Uggla and settled with her in Rome, where the Scandinavian artists’ colony received them warmly. In July 1881 they moved to Paris: by one account he intended to study at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme. Then he gave up painting, moved to San Remo in 1882 and took up poetry. After a brief secret visit to Sweden in the summer of 1883 he settled in the Swiss canton of Appenzell, in the village of Bühler, from where he often travelled to France and Italy. These journeys lie behind his book of travel sketches “From Col di Tenda to Blocksberg” (1888). In Switzerland he became friends with August Strindberg. In February 1885 Strindberg came to Bühler, and the three of them, Strindberg, Heidenstam and his wife, travelled to Rome, then to Paris and to the Swedish artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing. The friendship was uneven and broke off after Strindberg read Heidenstam’s first poems and responded with devastating criticism. The letter containing it has not survived, and we know its tone only from the replies.

“Pilgrimage and Wander Years” appeared in April 1888. The publisher Karl Otto Bonnier read the manuscript at home in the evening and recalled that from the first lines he knew a new, great poet had appeared. Where the naturalists had written of social misery and factory tedium, there was pleasure, colour and the East. In 1889 came the novel “Endymion” and the manifesto “Renässans”, in which Heidenstam declared naturalism exhausted and defended the artist’s freedom and the cult of beauty. Critics were divided, but the young writers of the 1890s followed him.

In 1892 came “Hans Alienus”, a mixture of verse and prose about a wanderer who becomes emperor in Rome and finds no happiness; it has autobiographical traits. In the spring of 1896, planning a book about Charles XII, Heidenstam travelled along the king’s route: Constantinople, Bender, Poltava, Moscow, Saint Petersburg. The two volumes of “The Charles Men” (1897–1898) showed the king and his soldiers as living people, not the bronze hero of Esaias Tegnér; the book sold more than 120,000 copies and became school reading. For it he asked his publisher for 16,000 kronor, a sum Bonnier called “fabulous”. There followed “Saint Bridget’s Pilgrimage” (1901), “The Forest Whispers” (1904), the epic novel “The Tree of the Folkungs” (1905–1907) and the school book “The Swedes and Their Chieftains” (1908–1910); the last was written to commission and, in the judgment of his biographer Per Gedin, came out dry. In 1910–1911 a quarrel with Strindberg flared up, in which Strindberg attacked the “Nineties” writers in newspaper articles; Heidenstam answered with the pamphlet “The Decline and Fall of the Proletarian Philosophy”, and in that controversy he came to be seen as the banner of the conservative camp.

In 1912 Heidenstam was elected to the Swedish Academy, and in 1916 he was awarded the Nobel Prize “as the leading representative of a new era in our literature”. The last significant collection was “New Poems” (1915), philosophical verse about a man who, in solitude, rises towards a higher humanity. He all but stopped writing for the public.

He was married three times: to Emilia Uggla, Olga Wiberg and Greta Sjöberg. For the last twenty years he lived with Kate Bang. He died on 20 May 1940 at his home, Övralid, in Östergötland. His autobiographical book “When the Chestnuts Bloomed” was published in 1941, after his death.