Two Female Artists Who Became Novels

By Tapani Ritamäki

Do the artist Helene Schjerfbeck and the poet Eeva-Liisa Manner have anything in common apart from the fact that they are both dead?
If one reads the two novels that have recently been written about them in Finland – by Rakel Liehu about Schjerfbeck, and Helena Sinervo about Manner – one discovers one thing at least: a vulnerability so strong that it almost makes it impossible to deal with daily life. The solution for both of them is the same (and not that unusual either): to turn to guardian angels, often – to be more specific – patrons. In Manner’s case there were several, but above all the art-dealer Sara Hildén (who left behind her a priceless collection of art in her own museum in Tampere) and her publisher, Jarl Hellemann. Schjerfbeck’s angel for a large part of her life was Gösta Stenman, who like Hildén was an art-dealer.
Additionally, of course, one must ask oneself whether the books about the two female artists have anything in common. Less than one might imagine, I would say. Both have been praised by the critics, but while Sinervo succeeds in approaching her main character directly yet without becoming disturbingly intimate, Liehu’s book feels, despite its many merits, unnecessarily breathless. I can’t decide which of them is truer to their subject (if that’s even necessary – they both belong to the genre of novel, after all), but with Sinervo that question never arises – the story is convincing as a story. With Liehu on the other hand, one wonders quite early in the book how she can know what she „knows“ (in fact, as soon as Schjerfbeck meets with the famous accident – a fall down a staircase – that leaves her disabled for the rest of her life). The dilemma is not cognitive; the reader knows that no research can ever reveal “how it felt”: not even all the letters in the world could do that. It is the text’s own movement between the external and the internal that must make one forget to make such demands for truth.
In Schjerfbeck’s case, the dark, life-changing event is clear: the fall down the staircase. Sinervo has perhaps had greater freedom, but also uses it more skilfully. The opening scene, in which the poet is standing in her house in Spain, contemplating the collapsed ceiling, is both deeply gripping and symbolic. Everyday life has shown itself in all its brutality, and matters are not improved by the fact that the repairer is a swindler who knows how to charge. Later in the book, there is a parallel occurrence – also to do with property. Manner has bought a farm in Ruovesi in central Finland, and has been cheated again: the farmhouse is falling down and the land is much smaller than she believed.
So it goes on, from disappointment to disappointment, in personal relationships too. But Sinervo’s narrative technique doesn’t allow for any sob-stories; Manner the poet also shows her shrewdness, her tough capacity for survival and her artistic nature. It’s not per aspera ad astra but per aspera ad aspera, yet with the ability to write as a stubborn and proud companion.
The same applies to Schjerfbeck, of course – creating as the dominant thread in her life – but Liehu’s tendency towards flat narrative often puts obstacles in our way: “The bubbling swamp of the sub-conscious”. As does her sentimentality: “I am a lone saxophone”, says Schjerfbeck – and instead of sympathising with the main character, one becomes furious with the author.
Neither Sinervo nor Liehu follows a strict chronology, but here too I feel that Sinervo’s greater faithfulness to the actual course of her subject’s life is a better choice than Liehu’s counterpoint technique, in which one jumps with abandon from the 1940s to the 1880s to the 1910s and back to the 1940s during the course of relatively few pages. There is nothing wrong with contrasting different periods with each other, but cut-up can also become a style in which one cuts away instead – in terms of the reading experience, that is.

Translated by Roy Hodson