Water to water

By : Søren Vinterberg

Although Cecil Bødker's writing style cannot be imitated, she has, perhaps more than any other living Danish children's author, been a model for other writers - not to be directly copied, but in a different way:
   Her simple and yet subtle manner of writing about complex human relationships serves as a standard for other books for children. And her development of this talent has apparently inspired other Danish authors, who previously won recognition through their books for adults, to try writing for children as well. During the 1980s authors such as Peter Seeberg, Hanne Marie Svendsen, Klaus Rifbjerg, Henrik Nordbrandt, and Maria Giacobbe all began writing children's books long after their fiction and poetry for adults had won acclaim, both in Danish and in translation to various languages.
   None of these children's books however, has achieved the same international reputation as Cecil Bødkers series about the boy Silas and the later twovolume work about Jesus, Mary's Child („Marias Barn", 1983) that have been published all over the world. And in 1976 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal from the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).
   Cecil Bødker (bom 1927) was trained as a silversmith, but she has evidently shaped her writing career in the same way that a vast tapestry is put together: each motif and each detail is meticulously and individually crafted - but all the threads for the entire piece exist from the very beginning.
   And in the beginning was the poem. Cecil Bødker debuted with the poetry collection The Sabadilla Blossoms („Luseblomster") in 1955. This was followed by two other collections of increasing importance in 1956 and 1959. The publication of her first book came two years after Villy Sørensen's debut with his short story collection Strange Tales ("Sære historier", 1953) and a year before the first books by Klaus Rubjerg and Peter Seeberg came out.

In her early poems, Bødker's sensitivity to the secret life of children makes an especially strong impression. A poem about Adam's rib is a precursor of another common theme in her later works: women's laborious struggle to attain autonomy and independence.
   The short story collection The Eye ("Øjet") from 1961 contains even more hints of her later works in embryonic form. Here we see recurring characters and motifs: catastrophic situations or the shock of displaced time after a catastrophe (for instance, in the stories "Snow", "The Bull", "The Last Day", and "The Ram"), with the focus on the experience of women or children. The role of the outsider (as in the stimes "Ismael" and -The Deaf One's Door" is also a common theme, with its necessity as a demonic counterpart to the "normal".
   Three of the stories ('The Uncreated", "Staircases", and the title story "The Eye") are meditations on the limited ability of human beings to depict reality. In Danish modernist style, they are allegorical images of the fundamental unreliability of the senses and categorical logic, which the physicist Heisenberg formulated in his Uncertainty Principle. Here Bødker comes closest to her contemporary Danish colleagues.

After a series of experiments with drama, longer works of fiction, and another volume of poetry, Cecil Bødker embarked on the second half of her writing career - children's books.
   The Danish Academy had established a competition for the best Danish books for children or young people, and in 1967 Bødker’s book Silas and the Black Filly („Silas og den sorte hoppe") took first prize.
   The Silas books, now in eleven volumes, are both historical and fictional novels. The exact time and place of the events are not given, but we can imagine Central Europe in the 16-1700s, based on the gallery of characters, the props, the means of production, etc. And the narrative begins in the same way as the short story "The last Day" in the collection The Eye: A boy comes floating down a river. This boy, Silas, is a differnt kind of hero from the ones we know from novels about boy detectives or resistance fighters. He is certainly resourceful, self-reliant, and hardened by the harsh circumstances of life. But he is pleasantly free from those superhuman, adult abilities and experiences - incomparable courage, meticulous deductive logic, etc. - with which the heroes of children's books are usually endowed out of narrative poverty. Silas is his own person. His only not entirely realistic helper is the flute that he took from the traveling circus, which he fled in order not to become a sword-swallower like his stepfather. With the flute he is able to control the wild black filly and other horses. But this semi-magical instrument loses importance as the basically realistic series develops.
   Silas is an orphan by his own choice - in contrast ro all the other figures in the fairy tales and in children's literature, from Romulus and Remus to Hector Malot's Remi and Dickens's Oliver Twist, and from Johanna Spyri's s Heidi all the way to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan. Silas encounters other outsider-children, such as the lame Ben-Godik and Maria with the empty eye sockets. He meets the children of the rich merchants in town and the poorer children in the city.
   Throughout the books, this little band of children builds their own collective on Mt. Sebastian, which juts up where the river divides. It is a fortress against the surrounding world, but also a children's utopia, where everyone is important and has responsibility, and where Silas's role as leader is gradually overshadowed by the greater insight of the female members - especially that of blind Maria. She is the one who, with her highly developed intuition, understands that the arch-enemy, a masculine, witch-like woman, bears her demonic destiny like a cross. She is actually a hermaphrodite (probably the first of her kind to appear in Danish and international literature for children), and identical with the child who once disappeared into the mountain. The revelation of the secret is also the "un-demonizing" of the enemy: the "Witch" gradually grows cooperative, just as the mountain troll in fairy tales is tamed by the sound of his true name.

This entire "collective, psychological Bildungsroman," however, is woven into a series of concrete events, which carry the external tension and at the same time lend the narrative realistic detail. The depictions of trade and agriculture, building and survival techniques are as extensive as in Laura Ingalls Wilder's pioneer epic and create what Mary McCarthy, in a famous essay, called "The Clumps of Facts in the Pot of the Story”.
   The Silas books have also been acclaimed in world literature as a children's story about the freedom of human beings to choose their values and different ways of living together, under the external pressure of circumstances.

Two of Denmark's most famous illustrators have done the drawings for Cecil Bødker's children's books. In the 1970s a series of her retellings of the myths from Genesis was published with illustrations by Ib Spang Olsen (born 1921, awarded the IBBY Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1972). And in 1983 and 1984 Mary's Child, a two-volume retelling of the New Testament, came out, both illustrated by Svend Otto S. (born 1916, awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1978).
   The stories about the life of Jesus bear traces of Bødker's shift toward a specifically female view of the world, which is apparent in the Silas books and in her books for adults as well. It is particularly strong in the Ethiopian tale, The Salt Dealer's House ("Salthandlerskens hus") from 1972, and in the novels Eva's Echo („Evas ekko") from 1980 and Think of Jolande („Tænk på Jolande") from 1981. Emphasizing the human aspect of Christ, the books about Jesus are called Mary's Child, also because the entire story is told as the woman experienced it: his mother Mary, afraid and skeptical about his actions as an adult, and his little sister, enthusiastic and convinced, but unable to explain why he has the effect he does on her.

In Nazareth and in other villages the women meet at the well to discuss events great and small as they draw up the lifegiving water. Water is a symbol that courses throughout all of Cecil Bodker's works, lifegiving and annihilating - from embryonic fluid or spring water to the great flood, the Deluge. In her new series of simple, popular novels for adults, depicting harsh rural life in Denmark in the start of this century - the universe known from Martin Andersen Nexø's work - Bødker has placed several characters in an outsider-collective, somewhat reminiscent of Silas's on Mt. Sebastian. The Water farm ("Vandgården", 1989) is the name of the place and also the title of one of the books, which tells the story of the orphan Tavs (originally published in 1971, revised edition 1989) and his girlfriend Malvina (1990).
   As early as in one of her first poetry collections ("Anadyomene", 1959), Bødker placed the earth, the rocks, and the crushing male forces of the universe in opposition to the currents of water, the storm, and the fall: the female, seaborn life. It is the same water that Jesus walked on and that Silas sailed in, into the ranks of the world classics of children's literature.

This article has earlier been published in Danish Literary Magazine no 1

Translated by Tiina Nunnally