Laxness and Garbo

(Google translate from the Borgarleikhúsið website)

Halldór Kiljan Laxness was going to be famous in Hollywood. He had a passionate film for young people and wrote in 1927 his friend Erlendi in Unuhúsi:

“I felt quite uncontrollably long to go to Hollywood and make 10 movies. I’m convinced that nothing like me is like the film. "Everyone knows the story of Sölva Völku, which has become one of Halldór’s most affectionate stories, and the one that broke his path to international happiness, but fewer may know that the novel of the novel was not a story but a draft As a movie script, and with the draft he called Salka Valka or A Woman in Pants, Halldór Laxness thought young about the true adventures of the west of the ocean, for example, about his stay: “The film here is wonderfully interesting and I have the best hopes to get Into it… The life here in Hollywood is quite dreadful tonight… ”

For a while, it seemed that Halldór's fame of Hollywood would come true because it was only scarce from landing a deal with M.-G.-M . Studios. : “When these lines are written, everything looks like I'm going to Iceland with four filmmakers: Karlstjörnu… female star, director and camera man. I’ve been able to make Hollywood interesting…” The female that Halldór talks about here was nothing but Greta Garbo and it would certainly be interesting to see her starring in an American film about Salka Valka. “Oh, that's exciting, I’ll tell you. If it gets through, I’m “made”. But something went on for the film to come to Iceland - it was this summer and it was necessary that the picture be recorded during the longest day. And before the last Icelandic summer was the team. The film company did not want to make an agreement with Halldór in advance and the councils resigned. In Halldór's letter comes another tone, and he says he is now deadly in America and the film industry. He returns to prose and article writing and drafts Independent People while still in Los Angeles. It is not until a few years later that he sends out the novel Salka Valka. For example, it may be said that the collusion of the American film company with Halldór has become Icelandic literature for happiness.

Who knows what the poet would have done if Salka Valka had been filmed and he really became “made” in Hollywood as he talked about. Had we not got an outstanding film designer in Halldór Kiljan Laxness? Maybe we can thank Greta Garbo’s fame and her childhood fate In the summer of 1928, the young author went on another way - which saved Icelandic literature from becoming a large number of his major wonders.