William Heinesen

Biography

In 1981 there were rumours that William Heinesen would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote to the Swedish Academy and withdrew his candidacy. He explained later that the Faroese language had once been held in low regard and even suppressed, and that a prize for an author writing in Danish would strike a blow at Faroese efforts to create an independent culture. In his view, the prize should go to an author who wrote in Faroese.

He himself wrote differently, and there were reasons for that.

Heinesen was born on 15 January 1900 in Tórshavn. His father, a merchant and shipowner, was Faroese by descent; his mother, who had artistic gifts, was Danish. The house was a busy trading business, and the clash between commercial town life and the artistic world would become a recurring theme in his books. At home he spoke Faroese, but he grew up before Faroese was taught in schools, so Danish remained his literary language. All his books were later translated into Faroese. He read the first chapters of his novel aloud to the painter Sámal Joensen-Mikines, fearing that his Danish was not good enough.

In his youth he spent several years in Denmark with his friend and cousin, the writer Jørgen-Frantz Jacobsen. He studied in Copenhagen and began to publish there; he returned to the Faroe Islands in 1932. He was influenced by the poet Otto Gelsted and by the circle of left-leaning artists of the 1920s. For a time Heinesen ran the family trading firm without giving up literature.

His first collection, “Arctic Elegies”, appeared in Copenhagen in 1921. It was followed by “Haymaking by the Sea” (1924), “Songs towards the Depths of Spring” (1927), “The Stars Awaken” (1930) and “The Dark Sun” (1936). His first novel, “Windswept Dawn”, came out in 1934, and “Noatun” in 1938. Then came the books on which his reputation rests: “The Black Cauldron” (1949), about the aftermath of decadent living and religious hysteria; “The Lost Musicians” (1950), in which he left the social realism of his early work for straightforward storytelling; and “Mother Pleiades” (1952). The novel “The Good Hope” (1964) grew out of the figure of a seventeenth-century pastor, Lucas Debes, and Heinesen had to reproduce the Danish of that period. Asked how long the book had taken him, he answered: “Forty years. But then I did other things in between.” In 1965 it won him the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. From the 1950s he also wrote short stories, in the collections “The Enchanted Light” (1957), “Gamaliel Possessed” (1960) and “A Cure for Evil Spirits” (1967). In 1976 came “The Tower at the Edge of the World”.

He called Tórshavn “the navel of the world”, and almost everything he wrote is tied to that town. To my mind, his main note is the quarrel of light with darkness, of creation with destruction, and he draws the line between good and evil unclearly. One aphorism of his is often quoted: life is not despair, and death shall not rule. He described himself as religious in the broadest sense of the word.

Alongside this ran his work as a visual artist. From the 1950s he made pastels with a strange, slightly enchanted atmosphere: underground worlds, and satirical drawings of politicians, businessmen and hypocritical preachers. He is also known for drawings of the townspeople of Tórshavn in earlier times, about a hundred book illustrations, posters, magazine graphics and record sleeves. In his last years he painted the assembly hall of a school in Tórshavn with scenes from the Sigurd lays, and from about 1975 he spent ten years working seriously on paper collages. He did a great deal to organise, inspire and criticise Faroese visual art.

Honours came from 1960: the Holberg Medal (1960), membership of the Danish Academy (from 1961), the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize (1965), the Critics’ Prize (1980), the title of honorary citizen of Tórshavn (1980), the Karen Blixen Medal (1985) and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize (1987). In 1968 Heinesen travelled to Moscow for an international symposium on the influence of Maxim Gorky on world literature. Russian editions include “The Enchanted Light” (1961), “The Black Cauldron” and “The Lost Musicians” in one volume (1974), “The Tower at the Edge of the World” (1983), and poems in an anthology of Faroese poetry (2017). His books have been translated into nineteen languages.

Heinesen died in Tórshavn on 12 March 1991, at the age of ninety-one. A picture book, “The Winged Darkness”, appeared after his death, in 1999.