We Murderers: A Play in Three Acts by Guðmundur Kamban

Scandinavian drama of an American marriage

Playwright Guðmundur Kamban was born in Iceland. He moved to Denmark for college and remained in Copenhagen for most of his life, although he lived briefly in New York, London, and Berlin. His play We Murderers was first staged in Denmark in 1920. The play is set in New York, where Kamban and his wife had recently lived for a year or two. In 1970, We Murderers was published in English as one of about a dozen books in the Nordic Translation Series from the University of Wisconsin Press. One notable thing about this series is that the University of Wisconsin has made these translations freely available to the public. The books can be downloaded from the UW Libraries website, allowing curious readers to sample the works of 20th-century Scandinavian writers, many of whom are revered in their home countries but little known in America.

We Murderers presents the tumultuous marriage of Ernest and Norma Macintyre. They had previously enjoyed a happy and stable marriage, but since Norma took a solo vacation to Florida, their relationship has not been the same. Norma has recently taken up flying lessons with an instructor named Mr. Rattigan, whom she met in Florida. She swears that there is nothing romantic happening between them, but Ernest is a very jealous husband who resents the amount of time his wife is spending with another man. Norma thus feels she has to lie to Ernest when she spends time with Rattigan, and her mother and sister aid her in her deceptions. Ernest has had enough and demands a divorce. Norma refuses to agree to a divorce, and swears that she will change her behavior to please her husband. For Ernest, however, their love has been tainted by dishonesty, and he will not settle for anything less than true love and complete devotion.

There is a touch of Eugene O’Neill in this, but it would be early-career O’Neill, as seen in such forgettable plays as Welded, Diff’rent, and The First Man. This ain’t no Long Days Journey Into Night. Kamban clearly sympathizes with Ernest in this conflict, but to readers a century later the husband’s stance seems like unreasonable overreacting. Kamban’s views of love, as voiced by Ernest, seem pretty high-falutin a century later. Even the title, We Murderers, is rather pretentious for what today feels like a rather pedestrian marital drama.

Why would a Scandinavian playwright set his play in New York? Perhaps the Danish audience would have liked that. The bigger question is, why would anyone translate it for this series? If you’re doing a series on Nordic literature, why not translate books that give some insight into Scandinavian life? For the American reader, this little play about a New York marriage is not very special. The introduction by D. E. Askey informs us that Kamban was satirizing American society but if so, this isn’t a very biting satire.

The story of Kamban’s death is one of the saddest that I’ve ever heard. On the day that World War II ended in Denmark, Kamban was wrongly suspected of being a Nazi collaborator and was shot in the head in front of his family. During his life, Kamban was also reputed to have psychic abilities. He sounds like an interesting man, but this play unfortunately is not very interesting. Of the several volumes I’ve read in the Nordic Translations Series, this is the weakest entry. Thankfully, it might also be the shortest book in the series, so it doesn’t require a major investment in reading time.
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