I first met Bill Holm in spring of 1976 when I drove 60 miles from the Molden Farm near Milan to Minneota with my friend Alan Kittelson to attend a class in Modern Scandinavian Literature.
We were a little early and Bill’s cousin Daren answered the door, and a little bashful as we entered the little white house and sat in the living room. Bill filled the room and sat on the piano bench. It wasn’t long before the other students arrived and we quickly began a discussion of Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness.
Bill was generous funny and engaging and I experienced one of the best discussions about literature I had ever participated in with a small group of all ages interested in learning more about a remote group of writers. Now that may on the surface not seem like much but I’ve talked literature with Oxford Dons, poets, and scholars from some of our best graduate and undergraduate institutions. Bill believed passionately in the power of good literature but also believed in the intelligence of the common folk. Probably something that explains why Iceland is one of the most literate nations. It also reminds me of what another Scandinavian American I admire once said. Thorstein Veblen once said the smartest man he ever met was his father and that he learned more from him about economics and the way the world works than anyone else he had encountered.
This is I believe Bill’s unshakable belief in democracy and that when people stay close to the earth and to their understandings of how the world works locally and day to day, things go better. It’s when these slick schemers come into our communities with promises of how to get rich quick or promises that if only we gave them all kinds of breaks allowing them to move jobs elsewhere and exempt them from having to pay their share gold would rain down on us from above.
Bill wrote about the wisdom of his neighbors that came from years of working close to the earth and from using practical ways to solve problems together. Bill celebrated the everyday life of the people around him understanding their rare genius for living in harsh conditions and surviving. For the two years I taught in Milan I would wander over to Appleton Sunday mornings for church services at Gethsemane Episcopal, where Carol Bly attended regularly. Occasionally she would bring Robert along and from time to time Bill would come and play organ or harpsichord and sing the hymns from memory. This was before Bill published the “Music of Failure” to be followed by “Coming Home Crazy” and “The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth.”
Bill had an uncanny way of transforming the world around him into the world of his imagination, that is, this larger than life person was able to see those around him in that same larger than life way. It wasn’t clear as his hands skated over the black and white keys of the harpsichord that this metaphysical transformation was taking place but it was.
I think Bill mostly enjoyed the opportunity to perform and offer the occasional troublesome question. He frequently reminded me that the reason the Icelander Eric the Red had left Norway was to get away from the Christians. Again he reminded me of Veblen in his irreverence. In a 1925 translation of the Laxdala Saga Veblen describes the results of the descent of the Holy Church on to the Scandinavian peoples. Describing the shift from the Viking age he said, “Indeed the gospel of Sin and Redemption was accepted by them with alacrity and abandon would argue that they had already been bent into a suitable frame of mind . . . the fortunes of that people, from the advent of Christianity onward, swiftly tapered off into a twilight-zone of squalor, malice, and servility, with benefit of clergy.”
In his other writing just like Bill, Veblen celebrated the true heroism of the common folk who created an economy out of their toil and holding to common beliefs of the importance of community, curiosity and a tendency always to make things better.
Bill’s passion for a world that understood fairness and the common good as bulwarks against cruelty, predation and meanness of spirit; where one could enjoy good food, good literature and good music in the company of good friends will long inspire me.
In 2008 Bill was awarded the prestigious McKnight Distinguished Artist Award. You can download the booklet honoring him here.
March 7th I took the 3 and half hour drive with a couple of friends to Minneota to say goodbye to Bill. Daren was there ushering people in, it was a fitting tribute to a man with strong loyalties to his hometown and the people who live there. Bill was fond of identifying them not as Republicans or Democrats, or Lutherans or Catholics but as Icelanders. But this was also a tribute to a man of letters and a man of the world with a far reaching gaze. Someone who knew we have more to gain from accounting are likenesses than arguing about our differences. The world is a little emptier without Bill in it, but his expansive spirit is still with us in his writing and we are the richer for it. If you haven’t read him you should.
