Halldor Laxness - Culture for Writers?

JC turned me onto Halldor Laxness by lending me Independent People.. Then I read something where Annie Proulx mentioned him and then I read Susan Sontag introducing Under the Glacier. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, so I looked up his Banquet speech.

This struck me as very much of what I recall of his novel:

...Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child.

I recall my friends whose names the world never knew but who, in my youth, and long into my adult life, guided my literary work. Though no writers themselves, they nevertheless possessed infallible literary judgment and were able, better than most of the masters, to open my eyes to what was essential in literature. Many of those gifted men are no longer with us, but they are so vivid in my mind and in my thoughts that, many a time, I would have been hard put to distinguish between which was the expression of my own self and which the voice of my friends within me.

***

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives’ work, have not been preserved for posterity. They live in their immortal creations and are as much a part of Iceland as her landscape. For century upon dark century those nameless men and women sat in their mud huts writing books without so much as asking themselves what their wages would be, what prize or recognition would be theirs. There was no fire in their miserable dwellings at which to warm their stiff fingers as they sat up late at night over their stories. Yet they succeeded in creating not only a literary language which is among the most beautiful and subtlest there is, but a separate literary genre. While their hearts remained warm, they held on to their pens.

I read Roland Barthes' Preparation of the Novel while in prison wherein he speaks of the will to write and the will to publish and how the two are not necessarily the same. Write as if you will be published, for there is a standard to be met, even if you do not plan on ever publishing what you write. Even if we do not publish, we create a culture of writers and for writers

Therein lies the reason for me to read literature - however you define that word - so I know the standards to be met by my own writing.

The Great Midwest need not be a wasteland.