Published in 1877. William Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London. Translated by G.L. Tottenham.

Read the book here. Also: I previously reviewed Lie’s first novel The Visionary here.

Jonas Lie was a latecomer of the Young Norway generation of the later 19th century. Since the publication of the novels Synnøve Solbakken and Arne at the end of the 1850s, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had won renown as a writer of novels and plays which celebrated the Norwegian peasant and revived the Norse epic tradition for a generation hungry for literature independent of the cultural dominance of Denmark. Henrik Ibsen, meanwhile, was critical of his native land and wrote (in Danish) plays that took sharp aim at contemporary mores when it came to marriage, politics, and established religion. Yet both Bjørnson and Ibsen were schoolmates of Jonas Lie and were in agreement that if their friend was a bit queer, he showed promises of genius; but it took until the age of 38 before Lie began his fiction-writing career. He had been a journalist, then a lawyer and a speculator in a number of businesses, but when the Norwegian economy went into depression in 1867, Lie and his wife Thomasine were ruined financially, buried under insurmountable debts.

Writing, then, became the fallback option for Lie. He resolved to repay his debts by becoming a novelist, though as Hjalmar Boyesen points out, this was a hopeless idea as far as paying the debts went. As far having success as a novelist, on the other hand, that pursuit Lie proved very able at: His first novel, The Visionary—a Nordland love story which I have reviewed here—became an immediate success, though his next two books were not as well received. Boyesen, in his essay on Lie, says that Lie’s first book of short stories were not up to the quality of The Visionary, and they do not seem to have been translated into English. Boyesen says that though Lie’s second novel, The Barque Future, did not appeal to public taste, it contains much to recommend it and marks the beginning of a group of Lie’s novels which garnered him, for a time, a reputation as a sea novelist—something like a Norwegian Captain Marryat.[note]This is not so unexpected a turn given the great number of episodes in The Visionary that take place on water; it seems to have been a primary mode of transportation in the Nordland.[/note] The pinnacle of Lie’s success at this stage of his career, we are told, came with the publication of The Pilot and His Wife. Jesse Muir, translator of Lie’s The Visionary, says of Pilot:

A book in every respect greatly in advance of its predecessors. Though written almost entirely in an Italian village, it has been justly described by an able critic as “one of the saltiest stories ever published.”[note]We may take this statement as an indication of what depths of obscurity Herman Melville had sunk into by the 1870s.[/note] It placed Lie on a higher pedestal than he had ever before occupied, and brought him into line with Ibsen and Björnson. “The Pilot and his Wife” made its author a popular Norwegian writer, and as it has been translated into several European languages—there are, I believe, two English versions—it was the first step towards the wider reputation Lie now enjoys.

While it is true that The Pilot and His Wife constitutes a marked advance on The Visionary in terms of the psychological depth of the characters[note]I criticized the former book for being somewhat unconvincing in its handling of protagonist David Holst’s mental illness.[/note] and the degree to which Lie grapples with contemporary issues of marital relations and women’s rights, to a modern reader the novel seems still a little too tentative and tidy in how these issues are handled, however edgy these episodes may have been at the time.

The Pilot and His Wife is the story of Elizabeth Torungen and Salvé Kristiansen, who eventually become the titular spouses, but not before an against-all-odds marriage plot that unfolds over the book’s first half and takes us halfway around the world to such out of the way locales as Sao Paulo and New Orleans.

Elizabeth is a bright, tomboyish sort of girl living with her father Jacob on a sequestered island off the coast of Norway. Father and daughter Torungen rarely see visitors, which is why it is something of an event when young Salvé and Mr. Kristiansen visit each year, and these early chapters show in more abbreviated form those sweet scenes of a boy and girl growing up together which we are presented with David and Susanna in The Visionary. Here, however, the reasons for the breaking off of the relationship are in the more complicated love plot; for Elizabeth finds herself also charmed by Carl Beck, the handsome and charming scion of a well-to-do shipping family whose father, Lieutenant Beck, is a person of some influence in the Norwegian maritime bureaucracy.

As the three grow older, Salvé becomes a grizzled pilot, known for his skill in getting ships to shore in the most perilous conditions. Jacob Torungen dies, and Elizabeth moves to the town of Tromö, where the young Beck arranges to have her placed as a servant in the Beck home, the better to be able to pursue the enchanting girl in love. As will happen in plots such as this, all that was meant to turn out one way ends up being torn down and cast asunder: there are misunderstandings, mismatched of feeling, conflicted feelings, Elizabeth not knowing what she wants, the hardy Salvé acting out in the face of rejection, young Beck confident in his ability to triumph and win Elizabeth’s hand. In telling all of this, Lie shows a certain storytelling economy that one might not have expected from a wild Nordland bard—an economy that presages a later phase of Lie’s career when he became a renowned Realist.

We watch the quickest motions of the story: The dual love triangles between Salvé, Elizabeth, and Beck, and between Beck, Elizabeth, and Marie Forstberg another smart young woman whom Elizabeth befriends at the Becks; how Beck schemes to win Elizabeth, making eyes at her at table, taking her side when his mother scolds the servant girl, trying to arrange to go alone on a boat trip with her, which she studiously avoids; how he makes a move on Elizabeth, unclasps his heart and begs her to marry him, or he might take desperate measures. (Won’t they all!) Under his direct pressure, she says, “Yes.” But as she goes to sleep, she is bothered by her decision; she shows a certain hesitancy, an independence of mind that was perhaps somewhat novel in books of this time period. The greater psychological complexity of Elizabeth as opposed to the utterly unhesitating Susanna of The Visionary is exemplified in passages like the one in which she decides against marrying Beck:

Small things often weigh heavily in the world of impressions. Elizabeth had been overpowered by what seemed to her the magnanimity of his nature when he had declared that he would elevate her into the position of his wife; she felt that it was her worth in his eyes which had outweighed all other considerations. That he should shrink from the inevitable conflict with his family she had on the other hand never for a moment imagined. She had no doubt felt herself that it would be painful, but had stationed herself for the occasion behind his masculine shield. When he now so unexpectedly began to press for time, at first even proposing to be away himself when the matter came on in his home, a feeling took possession of her which in her inward dread she instinctively clutched at as a drowning wretch at a straw, as it seemed to suggest a possibility even now of reconsidering her promise.

Ultimately, Elizabeth decides to flee from Beck’s pursuit. Yet by this time, it is too late for her to chase Salvé; since this is a marriage plot, our hero must be subjected to a course of trials before he may win for himself a wife. And so we follow Salvé through another quarter of the book on swashbuckling adventures around the world; and while exciting to read, there is little need to spoil any of the action here—and as seagoing action goes, it is occasionally gripping at a sub-Melville level—but for our purposes we can say that the marriage plot resolves itself with Salvé and Elizabeth finding each other in Amsterdam and getting married.

If the story ended there, the book would contain not that much to recommend itself aside from some picturesque descriptions of locales, some psychological and seductive maneuverings in the Becks’ house, and the aforementioned swashbuckling adventures of Salvé, and the aforementioned marriage plot. Luckily, it does not end there. What remains is a simple, affecting picture of a marriage and the mutual misunderstandings that could cause two successful protagonists in a marriage plot to not live happily ever after. Salvé, coming from a working-class background and of a lower social station than the Becks, cannot overcome certain tormenting suspicions about Elizabeth’s loyalty to him. As he first rises to the rank of captain of his own vessel, and then in one fateful night finds himself utterly ruined, he becomes an angry drunkard and takes out his frustrations on those around him, particularly his beleaguered wife and son. Meanwhile, Elizabeth resents Salvé’s gloomy manner, his bursts of rage, and his endless suspicion, but on a terrifying night at sea, with Salvé’s ship at severe risk of running aground and Salvé acting recklessly, racked with jealousy, Elizabeth makes a choice to hide her feelings for her husband’s sake.

All her defiance was gone. Her only source of courage now was to do anything or everything to keep his love. She felt ready for any sacrifice whatever—ready, without a sigh, to bear the burden of his suspicions all her life through if she might only keep his love. It was she who had made him distrustful, and it was upon her the punishment should fall, if she could not by persistent love bring him back to a healthy condition of mind again.
. . .
Her instinct at once suggested to her how she should begin. He should see that she on her side had entire confidence in him—confidence as absolute as the child’s there who was sleeping before her.

Elizabeth, Salvé, and their children survive the night, but Salvé does not change.

Marie Forstberg, meanwhile, has married the young Beck as was her desire, and yet neither woman finds themselves satisfied with their marriage. Marie sees that Beck is an empty man with no especial love for her:

She knew the secret about this man, so brilliant before the eyes of the world—that he was not a man. He lived and moved before her now like a defaced ideal, to which she was tied—to the end of her life. The bitterness of disappointment rankled in her mind, and was all the more poignant that she had to keep it shut up within herself and had no one to confide in. Her life had become a desert, and at the very moment when her husband would be making a brilliant little speech that called forth applause all round the table, she would seem to hear nothing but a rattle of emptiness.

When Elizabeth and Marie Forstberg (now “Fru Beck”) meet at the house of Elizabeth’s ailing aunt, the two women exchange a tender moment of mutual understanding. Both had engaged in the marriage plot and thought they ended up with the husbands of their dreams; neither had ended up happy. Elizabeth, who has sacrificed her own happiness for her husband for so many years, is beginning to find herself unable to stand it any longer.

What this is all leading to is a climax and a confrontation between husband and wife which speaks to the issues of the so-called “Woman Problem” that was in the air and being written about throughout Europe in the latter half of the 19th century. These last scenes are remarkable for their time, and an indication of a capacity for a certain higher register of emotional intensity which may be found in later books by Lie; it may be supposed that the confrontation between Elizabeth and Salvé suggested that Lie had quite progressive views for his time on these questions of the independence of women, though his writing is too careful and controlled to give these concerns more than an brief, attenuated treatment within the context of a somewhat conventional plot. The Pilot and His Wife may be thought of as an appealing mix of different ingredients—an affecting marriage plot here, an exciting sea story there, a dash of complex psychodrama there—in which no one ingredient overwhelms the mixture or is brought to the sublime potency of a masterpiece, but all are competently handled and suggestive of the potential for greater things.