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thereafter—such is the pattern of “coincidence” in the poet’s life—he receives a letter from Jarþrúður, who he has not seen since the long-ago night of Jónas’s wedding, and who now insists that he honor the promise he made to one day marry her. Ólafur, as ever, capitulates before the power of the word. With this paired turn of events Laxness has everything in place for the third book.
    The title of this third book, “The House of the Poet,” can be interpreted both literally and figuratively. Literally it designates the next phase of Ólafur’s tormented pilgrimage. Some time after the destruction of the Palace of the Summerlands—insurance money from which has now rejuvenated the Regeneration Company, boosting Péturríhross in his monopolistic ambitions—we find Ólafur and Jarþrúður living in their own little shack, called “The Heights.” Things have changed. While Jarþrúður is still his “intended,” they have a child, Margrét, a sickly little girl much beloved by Ólafur. The passing of five years has brought the poet responsibilities, and with these a much more complicated relation to his soul’s vocation. Writes Laxness, modulating as he does so effectively from the idiom of daily life to a rich prophetic cadence: “If it ever happened that the poet felt a little obstinate and complacent, perhaps even touched with a certain arrogance at being a poet, such feelings vanished the moment his intended started to cry—not to mention if the little girl started crying as well. It was hard to say which was strongest in the poet’s soul—the desire to please or the fear of hurting. When happiness came to this poet in his solitary moments, he was free and did not have a house. When he saw before him their tear-stained faces, he suddenly had a house. To be alone, that is to be a poet. To be involved in the unhappiness of others, that is to have a house” (326–327).
    But the pull of poetry, the spirit, what Ólafur calls “the Voice,” remains powerful, declaring its own imperatives: “Every time he was allowed to go out, and not on some routine errand connected with his livelihood or his home, it was as if he were being given the world for a little while. However small a digression it was from his everyday routine, the Voice began to echo at once. It was the same Voice as of old. The difference was that when he was a child he thought he knew what it was, and that he understood it, and he gave it a name; but the older and wiser he became, the more difficult he found it to say what it was, or to understand it, except that he felt it called him away from other people and the responsibilities of life to the place where it alone reigned” (336–337).
    Again, Laxness sets into stark opposition the claims of the world and the claims of the spirit. The world, for Ólafur, is both the domestic—his suffocating, sorrowful bond to Jarþrúður and his genuine love for Margrét, who will soon be taken by illness—and the public, the societal. In these next pages the conflict between union forces and property—socialism and capitalism, if you will—will come to a head, first with the stand-off between theríhross’s organization, the so-called Society of True Iceland (its nationalist chauvinism obviously, but not exclusively, a phenomenon of the Thirties) and the Laborers, who are cast by their adversaries as nonpatriotic agitators. Though Ólafur struggles to stay uninvolved, he is pressured from both sides— by his friend Örn as well as by Jarþrúður, who has thrown in her lot with the Society.
    While there are escalating protests and threats of work stoppage, the full-out battle never quite materializes—scandal at a distance destroys the financial structure of the Society and the workers ultimately get their most basic demands met. Orchestrating the conflict in its local terms, moving between straight-on and satirical scenes of agitation and encounter, Laxness has given the forces at