Today we present the desk of the writer and poet Tarjei Vesaas. "A desk with a hidden bed," reveals his daughter Guri Vesaas to the journalist Alva Gehrmann.
In 1934, Tarjei Vesaas and his wife moved into Midtbø farmhouse in the south-eastern region of Telemark. The young couple straightaway got on with renovating the old house: they fitted more windows and added two verandas, painted the inside walls in a variety of bright colours and designed their own furniture. “My father used to say that if he hadn’t been a writer he would have liked to be a bricklayer. He also fancied himself as quite a competent joiner,” his daughter Guri Vesaas tells us as she shows us round her parental home.
Tarjei Vesaas is widely regarded as one of Norway’s most important 20th century writers. His fame rests above all on novels such as Fuglane (The Birds, Peter Owen 2013) and Is-slottet (The Ice Palace, Peter Owen 2009). Since 1964, his name has been attached to a prize for first-time authors, awarded annually by the Norwegian Authors’ Union.
In the rather isolated Midtbø farm, everything has been kept as it once was. Halldis Moren Vesaas, mother of Guri and Olav, was a poet. Unlike her husband, she was not an early riser; Tarjei would often be in his study at five in the morning, seated at the desk with its many small, open compartments, which he had made with his own hands. As ever, the compartments hold things like his small folder for stamps and newspaper cuttings.
His ‘secret bed’ with its built-in bookshelf and lockable cupboard is an unusual piece of study furniture that Vesaas kept next to his desk. There are two wooden boxes with lids on either side of the bed and, like a central piece of board, the lids could be pulled back to reveal the mattress underneath. Guri doesn’t know if her early-bird father actually slept in the bed: “But he must have taken great pleasure in designing and building it.”
From the study window, Tarjei could spot the postman coming along on the country road that runs just 100 metres from the house. There was always a lot of mail for him and he replied to everything as quickly and briefly as possible. The letter balance on the desk is apparently a relic, as is the little Dala horse, a gift from a Swedish colleague. The one new feature in the study is Guri’s display of some of her father’s published works for the visitors to see.
But the most important object is Tarjei’s old typewriter – a Remington. Once he had written a passage of text by hand, he would type a copy with three fingers. Guri remembers the sounds the children heard in the nursery next door: “I think he listened to his own low, murmuring voice as he read aloud what he had written and savoured each word. Next, staccato bursts of typing.” She and her brother often woke up to these sounds and, in the winter, they would also hear the crackling of the wood-burning stove. Taken together, they seemed the most calming, comforting sounds ever: “To us, they meant that ‘all is well in the world.’”
https://booksfromnorway.com/authors/Tarjei+Vesaas
Translated from the German by Anna Paterson