‘All of it incredible, and all of it true. People gathered, for church services and at home. One party out at Åmot ended up at the doctor’s house, where we were offered an unaccustomed drink: real coffee. Both of us felt quite drunk as we cycled unsteadily home in the chill of the early morning, Tarjei singing so that the mountainsides re-echoed.’

If the circumstances of the book’s authorship were unusual, so was the form chosen by Vesaas for recording the Occupation years. Part allegory, part parable, on one level the novel describes the drab lives of the inhabitants of an enormous house that has suffered a catastrophe of supernatural dimensions; on another it depicts the struggle against the forces of darkness in poetic terms, combining biblical echoes with highly modem symbols. Yet there is sufficient realism and individual characterization, particularly of the figures on the side of the Resistance, to enable the reader to share the agony of their dangers, uncertainties and sufferings.

The House in the Dark was published in the autumn of 1945, along with many other hidden poems and prose works that saw the light of day during the first months of the peace. Now that we can look back on this period over a time-span of more than thirty years, it seems astonishing that the Norwegian experience of war could have been conveyed in such clear perspective by someone so intimately involved.

E.R.

¹ Published by Peter Owen, London, 1966.

² I Midtbös Bakkar, Aschehoug, Oslo, 1974.

1

In a Bewitched House

If anyone should ask what this huge object is, heaving and cracking in the darkness, it is a bewitched house.

Here, beneath a single, gigantic, convex roof, are collected countless rooms and corridors and narrow passages, cut off from the rest of the world by dense, oppressive darkness. There are open courtyards inside this extensive house, but the darkness lies over it all like a crushing weight. If anyone were foolish enough to climb up on to the roof in an attempt to see something, he would simply feel as if his eyes had been torn out. He would come down again quickly and crawl away home.

The house is cracking. No one knows exactly why, or how it started, but it is cracking all the time. A silent storm is raging inside it: a mounting tension that is being encouraged, and suppressed too, until it splits apart.

It’s this darkness.

It came while the house was asleep, settled over it, and will not go away. It sprang up like a seething spring, so that the windows were blinded and mouths became dumb, and from out of the darkness came people who held power. They lit up the corridors with their beautiful shining arrows. Then they set about making their own house within the house, and at once the silent storm began wearing it down.

So that now the stifled house is cracking from within and quaking from top to bottom. It can be felt as soon as you put your hand on anything connected with it.