Scherfig was the only child of a well-to-do Copenhagen family. Despite his conservative opinions, his father seems to have been loving, but hardly authoritarian. As an author, the depiction Hans Scherfig renders of his schooldays in the novel Det forsømte forår (Stolen Spring) (1940) is a far cry from his paintings jungle idylls. Here, children are left in the hands of sadistic, predatory school masters, who labor under the maxim "A box on the ears is good for the soul." The novel is satirical, while satire is rare in his painting. And whereas his painting works with strong colors and a very schematic composition, his linguistic style is complex and sharp, making use of an incredible variety of linguistic pitches. For example, when he is to reproduce a mathematics lesson, it becomes a parody of the language used in geometry texts, so that even the language depicts the chaos that reigns in the student´s mind.
There is much to indicate that Stolen Spring is the key to understanding the contradiction between Scherfig´s expression as a painter and as a writer. His experiences at school were quite a shock for the boy, who had not been familiar with authority and discipline at home. His reaction was to turn the language of authority against itself. For Scherfig, therefore, language became the arena for struggle and satire his preferred mode of expression. The arena of desire he preserved for his paintings, depicting life in his modernistic-utopian canvases.
Scherfig began to write out of necessity - in part because of economic grounds and in part because an eye disease for some years forced him almost to give up painting. His first novel was Den døde mand (The Dead Man) (1937), which is a light, little, satirical novel, set in the artists´ milieu of Copenhagen. Even this debut novel, which was meant as a joke, demonstrates Scherfig´s talents as a writer. A year later, a more perfectly realized work, Den forsvundne fuldmægtig (The Missing Bureaucrat), was published. The book tells the story of a government official who cannot handle freedom. His upbringing is such that, logically, he belongs in prison, where everything is ordered according to a clear set of guidelines. It is a novel about the debilitating effects of education. The satire, which Scherfig develops in and from this book, departs from ordinary, obvious satire. Scherfig appears to be speaking in a clear, artless voice, which resembles the voice of authority. However, this artlessness disguises another voice, one which is well-considered, distanced, and which brings about a crisis in language that forces the reader to realize that it is a satire. In its logic, Stolen Spring is a continuation of The Missing Bureaucrat, only is it not a grownup but a child who is the focus of the book. Nevertheless, it is still upbringing, family and suppression that are the themes.
Scherfig was a member of the Communist Party and as early as the 1930s, he wrote party press releases. The novel Idealister (Idealists), which could not be published in Denmark until after the war, deals with a political environment Scherfig knew well. Idealists are all those people, who have some partisan cause to promote: vegetarianism, free love, tax reform, occultism, etc. The book is populated with wickedly amusing portraits of all sorts of reformers. They are idealists, because they governed by the pursuit of an ideal, but they are also idealists in the philosophical sense - that is, they are not (and herein lies Scherfig´s critique) materialists. The book´s characters are ridiculous, but this ridicule is also philosophically grounded.
Nevertheless, Scherfig´s satire goes beyond his political loyalties.
Idealists does not at once read as a political novel but as a satire in the tradition of Holberg´s comedies. The message is not explicitly set forth in his novels but emerges as a consequence of the satire. However, this is not the case with his greatest novel, Frydenholm, from 1962.
Frydenholm is part of a Communist critique of Denmark´s official cooperation with Nazi Germany during the occupation. Some of the characters of Idealists overlap in this novel, but its message is much more openly political. For example, long, verbatim quotations from actual sources of the time are integrated into the text. There is no doubt that quite a number of young people grew up in the 60s, taking their interpretation of the occupation directly from Scherfig´s novel.
Scherfig is one of the greatest wordsmiths in Danish literature and one of its most reprinted authors. His satire was even successful as commentary. His many commentaries in the Communist daily newspaper, in which he flayed capitalist society and everyday life in Denmark, were masterful. However, his linguistic talent reached a limit, when he tried to write about societies to which he had given his support. He wrote a number of travel books about socialist countries. They are not satirical. To the contrary, they are strongly reminiscent of his paintings. The problem is simply that his paintings never claim to depict reality. His travel books do.
Scherfig´s ridicule can be quite wicked. Yet, there is often a certain fascination perceptible in his description of what is cockeyed or inconvenient. He wrote against occultism, pixies, spiritualism, and such things in a way that one detects a powerful attraction. His rationalism can be traced back to Holberg and Voltaire, but there is an abashed Romanticism in him that is only exhibited openly in his paintings and his attitudes toward socialist lands. He achieved a popular acclaim unique among artists in his class. Not least, Stolen Spring belongs among the absolute best sellers in Danish. One must believe that the combination of reflection and artlessness, rationalism and Romanticism, goes well together in the modern Danish mentality.
(1999)
