Alone is strong!
The most famous of all Buddhist parables
is that of the elephant and the blind men. It tells of the whim of a great
Indian king who, for his own entertainment, gathered together a group of men
who had been blind from birth and who had never encountered an elephant. He
placed them around his own royal pachyderm and asked them to reach out and feel
what was in front of them. They would be touching an elephant, he explained.
Then he asked them to describe to him what an elephant was. The blind man
standing behind the elephant took hold of its tail. An elephant, he said, is
like a broom with a long handle and a brush at the bottom. The blind man
standing beside the elephant touched its leg. An elephant, he said, is like the
column of a great building. The blind man standing near the elephant’s head
touched its ear. An elephant, he said, is like a big flat winnowing basket. The
blind man standing in front of the elephant touched its tusk. An elephant, he
said, is like a ploughshare. Upon hearing all these different answers, the
blind men began to quarrel amongst themselves about who was right and who was
wrong. And the great king laughed at their ignorance.
As a native English-speaking writer researching the life of
Willy Andersson Grebst from distant Australia with limited resources, I was one
of the blind men standing around the elephant. And what I felt with my hands
told me that an elephant is definitely homosexual. “So what!” you say. And I do
take your point – although you have to remember that we are dealing with Gothenburg
in the early 1900s when the boundaries of social morality were significantly
different from those we deal with today. As a Buddhist, too, I see the mind of
an “ignorant worldling” such as myself as a swirling cesspit of unwholesome
thoughts of many shades and varieties, occasionally interrupted by a wholesome
thought, a moment of clarity or wisdom. So it doesn’t surprise me when these
silly judgements spring up seemingly out of nowhere. From what I had before me,
Willy seemed so much like the classic artistic bachelor uncle. There was no
mention of wives and children. Not even in the emotionally charged obituary
that was published in his beloved newspaper Vidi
– a gushing obituary written by a distraught man who had been one of the first
persons Willy called to his side when struck by his fatal illness and who
subsequently helped nurse him to his death. The dying man had agonised long and
hard over whether Vidi should go to
the grave with him but no, in the end, he handed the editorship over to his friend
for safekeeping. On the internet, I found an article by a gay historian arguing
that Willy’s male associate, the new editor of Vidi, was a closet gay of the nasty self-hating kind.[1] So,
from afar, the whole thing seemed pretty straightforward: Willy was gay. That
was my mindset and, like all creeping mindsets, it expanded to fill in the many
blanks of the story with whatever it saw fit, including all the usual John
Inman and Dick Emery “Honky Tonks” stereotypes that the 1960s English-speaking generations
were raised on.
Then I arrived in Sweden and cold new winds began to blow.
One of the priorities high on my list was to acquaint myself with Vidi. Had Hans Erikson been submitting
articles to it from Australia as he had once claimed? I learned that the
University of Gothenburg held a complete set of Vidi on microfiche. So I found the library building in the vicinity
of Haga Cathedral and helped myself to one of the microfiche readers and the
tapes. The very first edition of Vidi
I stumbled upon had an advertisement for Willy’s book, My Little Princess [Min lilla prinsessan] stating that it was based
upon his relationship with his daughter. A daughter? Then, in Vidi of 9 April 1919, he printed an
article about his adventures in Manly, Sydney on a day when his wife refused to
leave the hotel because of oppressive heat. A wife? The picture was becoming muddier
and muddier.
Vidi
itself showed no signs of being sexually ambivalent - quite the contrary, as a
matter of fact. On the front page of each and every edition published by Willy
was an article and photograph of some pretty, charming or glamorous belle he
had met and chatted with at the Hindås Tourist Hotel or on his travels. A
pretty young miss who wanted to become a dancer and was seeking his advice on
the choice of a teacher. That sort of thing. He very much gave the impression
of being a ladies’ man and, dare I say it, a flirt. The newspaper was sprinkled
with columns of witticisms about female psychology and jokes about male-female
miscommunication. When I later read Willy’s book about his honeymoon to Tierra
del Fuego, it became clear that he saw females as another species altogether:
their manner of thinking was a total mystery to him and a constant source of
grief flowed from the forthright tongue of his beloved who was quick to take
exception to his many innocent blunders. The most intriguing blunder of all was
seemingly made by both of them. They travelled through morally conservative,
Catholic South America not wearing
wedding rings and he inevitably slipped up by referring to her as señorita instead of señora:
It was not like I exerted myself for as long as possible to put off going to bed. Senor Villegas helped me. He saw the lay of the land. The inevitable moment finally arrived. I plucked up as much courage as I could and decided not to restrain myself. Did I have to run around and show our marriage certificate to every idiot in South America who doubted that we were truly married? I could frame it and hang it on a string around my neck! One shouldn’t be too sensitive out here in the wilds. One needs a thick skin and not to bother if people talk nonsense. But my wife was not of the same view. She gave me a proper dressing down. First, again, because I had been so thoughtless as to call her senorita. Then because I have been “disobedient”. The least a woman can ask of her husband was blind and unquestioning obedience, she said. How could she otherwise put up with him? If he goes around and thinks that he can do what he wants? If he doesn’t realise that it is in his own best interests not to say or do anything without first being told? I don’t understand. Was it not so simple that my dim mind could grasp it? I kept my cool. Despite the taunt about my dim mind. As I reiterated at this point, a wise sincere man should remain silent and let his wife talk till she is finished. It gives her mental relief. It achieves nothing to argue. If a woman sees a certain thing in a certain way, no arguments help. Nothing other than time can satisfy her that she is possibly wrong. So I alone took all the blame for what had happened. I explained that she was completely correct and that I, as usual, had behaved like a fool. I ought to go down to the cabins and wake our fellow passengers up one after the other. I wouldn’t let them escape until they had learnt our marriage certificate by heart. If they were unwilling, I would threaten them with a gun. My wife darkened. She wanted only to be sure that I admitted that I was foolish not to want to behave like other sensible men. I agreed even to this. One should do as the crowd does and not emancipate oneself. The world endures no disobedience. It wants to have everyone the same. It wants to have as little difficulty as possible with individuality. In this manner, I was defeated. But inside I saw it as a victory. I had avoided a conflict. He who yields in this world is a wise man, goes an Indian saying. He who defies, a fool. This I learned through marriage.[2]
So now I had to deal with the existence of a Mrs Willy Grebst and a daughter. This struck me as being particularly odd because of what Hans Erikson had written in The Rhythm of the Shoe. Erikson stated that he was the sole beneficiary of his Uncle Willy’s estate. “All his wealth he bequeathed to me,” Erikson wrote.[3] He said nothing of Willy having a wife and daughter, his cousin. The estate comprised a stamp collection second only in quality to the King of England’s and a rare and expensive collection of jade and ivories. When the time came for the estate to be liquidated on Erikson’s attainment of his majority, he fully expected to become a millionaire overnight. But why would Willy pass his entire estate to his nephew when he himself had a wife and daughter: a child who was “his little princess”? It just didn’t make sense.
Nevertheless, I scoured the sources available to me for
information about the wife and daughter. It was a frustrating exercise. They
are not mentioned on Willy’s mausoleum and nothing at all was said of them in
his Vidi obituary or the brief Dagens Nyheter note of his death. They
are not mentioned in the Swedish Writers’
Lexicon biography. I now knew that Willy had written two books about the
adventures of he and his wife on their farm in the Rocky Mountains. The books
were set around 1910 and were published in 1912 and 1913. I expect that Anders
Källgård and Bengt Öhnander were relying on these works when they stated that
Willy’s wife was an American. Willy’s honeymoon to Tierra del Fuego took place
in 1906. I myself have read this book but remain confused about his wife. We
are never told her name. Is it safe to assume she didn’t speak Swedish? As an
American, English would be her mother tongue. But we are not told what other
language or languages she could speak with one notable exception: at a delicate
moment in the book, she spoke to her husband with displeasure in German. The
book also contains reference to a marriage certificate obtained in Berlin. Willy
had studied in Germany and certainly spoke the language. Perhaps they met and
married in Germany? Öhnander, however, implies that the wedding took place in
America.[4] The
honeymoon book contains two photographs where Willy’s wife is captioned and two
others uncaptioned that she appears to be in. They are distant shots and whilst
she is clearly Caucasian, it is hard to make out her features. We see her
hatted and formally dressed, relaxing in an armchair and being entertained by
the Governor of Uschuaia and his wife. Then we see her formally dressed, her
shortish frame mounted on a beautiful piebald horse.
And what of Willy’s daughter? Öhnander threw me into total
confusion by writing that she was born in 1917. I wonder where he got that date
from? If it is correct, Willy’s wife and daughter were surely on the scene in Sweden at least three years before
Willy’s death and Hans Erikson’s “running off to sea” in 1920. Did they visit
him when he was dying? Were they present at the funeral in the Gustavi
Cathedral? Did Hans Erikson know his little girl cousin? And what became of
her? What terrible tragedy or family schism caused mother and child to
“disappear”? The questions just keep coming.
If we are to believe Willy’s account of his honeymoon, his
marriage did seem to get off to a rocky start and one can easily imagine it
splitting asunder after years of the kind of bitter arguments the newly weds
were quickly having. Willy’s personal motto was “alone is strong” and nowhere
do I get the feeling that he ever saw himself as part of a loving team with “a
good woman” standing behind him, backing him all the way. He strikes me as a
loner, through and through. Divorcees often despise their ex-spouses but it
takes a cold heart to completely walk away from a child, your own flesh and
blood. Did Willy have such a cold heart? Despite all his bluster and
disputation, he clearly held a deep community spirit and was happy to spring to
the defence of the poor, the sick and the lonely. But one also gets the
impression that he bore grudges and could be consumed by them. His hatred of Göteborgs Posten is the classic example;
the newspaper ended up suing him for slander in 1917 as a result of which he
was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment. Perhaps he and his wife split so
bitterly that he lost all perspective and gave his estate to his nephew as an
act of spite? Perhaps we will never know.
I share with Willy Grebst the burden of having too active an
imagination. Despite the paucity of my resources and the resulting inadequacy
of my research, I couldn’t help wondering if Willy’s wife and daughter were real.
Could they have been mere figments of his public imagination, a ruse to
disguise his closet homosexuality. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it. But don’t forget
that we are talking about someone of exceptional bravado here. Did Willy, as
alleged, write a book-length “eye-witness account” of the 1908 Messina
earthquake disaster purely from reading news despatches and embellishing them
with his rich imagination? If he did, just imagine the gall required to do such
a thing, to live a lie so publicly and so flagrantly. Writing an “on the scene”
account of Messina’s misery from that cosy little grey cottage at Hindås in
Sweden! The cheek of it!
It has been argued (not by me) that Willy’s close friend, Barthold Lundén - to whom he
entrusted the editorship of his beloved Vidi
– was a repressed homosexual who (after Willy’s death) desperately tried to
deflect detection by publicly railing against homosexuality and male
prostitution. Lundén’s anti-gay campaign began when he published an account of
his being molested [antastad] by a 17
year old male prostitute while taking a stroll near the Great Theatre [Stora Teartern]. “The cheek of you!”
Lundén had shouted as he tried to grab the miscreant. He described the feeling
of nausea that struck him when he touched the young man. Nils Weijdegård has
suggested an alternative interpretation of this encounter: that Lundén was
actually eliciting sex in a known gay beat, was seen doing so and was panicked
into acting out a case of molestation and writing about it to stifle any rumour
mongering. So, was Lundén a repressed homosexual? Were he and Willy secret gay
lovers who went to great lengths to conceal their “love that dare not speak its
name”? Including inventing a happy hetero-family for Willy?
Whoa! Okay,
I accept that this theory is “over the top” and well beyond the hard evidence.
It could probably be very easily debunked by someone with the time to plough
through contemporary records back in Gothenburg. So we have turned a full
circle and come back to the nagging problem we started with: what became of Mrs
Willy Grebst and the little princess? The challenge is there for interested
Swedes! To Willy’s ghost, if he is planning on haunting me for raising the
question of his sexuality, I can only say in my defence that I would never have
entertained it but for the Messina earthquake controversy and my own
Grebst-like imagination. Sorry!
To conclude this discussion of Willy’s sexuality and the
role it played in shaping his behaviour, we must deal with his erotica and
romance writing. It is typically straight and tame and sugar-coated - like the
“Story from Tahiti” he unsuccessfully tried to finish on his deathbed. It
interweaves several hetero-romances including that of Nature Man and his fickle
girlfriend, Maara, who had grown tired of the relationship and was thus happy
to escort Willy back to Papeete without so much as a backward glance at her
former lover (a comment on female psychology perhaps?). The writer’s energy
faded, however, and the story was never finished. Although no great loss to
Swedish literature, it was a source of disappointment to many Vidi readers who were left “hanging.” Whatever
happened to Salott, Geheri and Choo Chong? Did love triumph? I have the
impression that this stuff was primarily written to interest women but, of
course, gay male readers can imagine themselves in any role they desire. At the
end of the day, Willy’s erotica, whilst demonstrating a keen interest in human
sexuality, proves nothing about his own sexual inclinations. He was an artistic
man mixing in artistic circles and, in my mind’s eye, I have no difficulty
seeing him as a Gore Vidal bisexual who minded his own business. Maybe I should
do the same?
[2] Willy Andersson Grebst, En bröllopsresa i Eldslandet (Göteborg Förlagsaktiebolaget Västra
Sverige, 1913) pp 166-168, translated by A. Thelander
