When you have read Christine, as a publisher you will say: Congratulations

By : Klaus Rifbjerg

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When you have read Christine, as a publisher you will say: Congratulations, not only to the author but also to yourself. There are books whose inherent qualities are so evident that you need merely sniff at them to feel: Here it is! – and in the case of biographies there must necessarily be a coincidental sketch. It is not enough for the author to find her object interesting, to be occupied by the material, indeed, perhaps even in love with it, there must be a kind of superior blessing there which emanates directly from the intellectual and spiritual space in which both the writer and the subject find themselves. It is a matter of symbiosis, and it can be as vital as Helle herself describes it in an interview: when she looked up from her writing she expected, in the most literal sense, to find a page behind her chair with a cup of tea for her!

If Helle Stangerup and biography are to go on working together – and there are many reasons to believe they will – the next step is to find the new 'victim'. I know from a reliable source that a reconnaissance of the historical landscape has already revealed characters who hold the mutual characteristics which make a three-legged race feasible. I shall take care not to give away the identity of the chosen people – but I have already dropped a hint by indicating that more than one person is involved! But that is not important, the most important thing is that the voices have listened, that there is an echo that resounds not only in the long corridors of history but in the author's brain and heart.

I don't think Helle Stangerup is a militant feminist, but on the other hand it is significant and certainly not uncharacteristic that she writes about a woman, about women. Her attitude is different from the usual one and remote from the portrayal of women as cowed, helpless victims. There is very little of the victim about Christine, she is really the opposite: an enterprising, imaginative and extremely active person, a human being who loves to make decisions and initiate actions and has a definite sense of power. This might make her resemble a man, but it is not so, and in Helle Stangerup's portrait she demonstrates that the traditionally weak are often equipped with the most well-developed imagination and now and then plays tricks with greater sophistication than supposedly more virile and selfconscious men. These games have often – but no less effectively – been played from the wings – oh, gentle women, how powerful they are! – but what is noteworthy in Helle Stangerup's interest is that she not only wants to show a woman's strength, but also allows her character to carry the attributes of power.

This can be interpreted as meaning that women have nothing to be ashamed of – Good Lord, of course they haven't – but also that they should be seen in all their unashamed power and glory.

There is something aristocratic, even challenging, here, and perhaps it is the key to the success Helle has had, one of them at any rate. What gives Christine its resilience and creates the book's power to attract is this intrepid distinction. We find this also in Blixen, and perhaps it is not strange that both she and Thurman have played their parts here. In any case, Helle Stangerup and her book have in common with the latter that they tell the story of a woman who was not only master in her own house but also accepted the challenge of adventure and formed their own destiny in a tale that might well challenge the gods.

It is not only women who like to read about that kind of person, but men too. Publishers and booksellers and those who buy the books, all want to read about them. For this is a challenge worth accepting, here the stage is set for a confrontation that urges you to make the effort of reaching a higher level or at least establishing a relationship with the dream of what you yourself might achieve – if you wanted and dared to – and that regardless of sex!

For the biographer it is thus not only a question of conjuring up the right stage setting and interpreting obscure facts; what is vital is to formulate an attitude – your own – without in the very least dislocating the genuineness, indeed, the authenticity of the portrait you is attempting to draw. And in certain cases you can go so far that it almost becomes of secondary importance what the character was like 'in reality,' if only he or she lives on the paper so that it sparkles. I do not know if Marie Grubbe was as Jacobsen describes her. I only know that after his novel she is, and to such a degree that if the novel did not exist Marie Grubbe would, literally speaking, not have lived.

For we must not forget for a second that these are biographical novels - both in the case of J.P. Jacobsen and Helle Stangerup. They take liberties, but by doing so they heighten the reality-attribute of the characters, make them more attractive, more entertaining, for the good thing about the art is that it somehow, like these women, Marie, Christine, whatever they may be called, won't be satisfied, won't stand for being allotted a definite role and pattern, but strive the whole time to break it, escape from it, grow, indeed, become larger than life.

[…]

Dear Helle: You are lucky that there are so many possibilities that have not yet been dealt with in the portrait gallery of Danish history, far more than in Thurman's well-worked-over America. I am sure you will find them, those you can use, that is to say, those that can use you.

The above is an abbreviated version of Klaus Rifbjerg's speech, previously published in Det danske Bogmarked [The Danish Book Market], 17 March 1986.

Translated by Anne Born