Sandel, Cora (1880–1974)

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Sandel, Cora (1880–1974)

Norwegian author best known for her Alberta trilogy, which was described by the Christian Science Monitor as "one of the most complete portrayals of a woman's life that exist in modern fiction." Name variations: Sara Fabricius; Sara Jönsson. Born Sara Cecilia Margarete Gjørwel Fabricius on December 20, 1880, in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway; died on April 3, 1974, in Uppsala, Sweden; eldest child and only daughter of Anna Margareta Greger and Jens Schou Fabricius (a naval captain), both from families in which the men traditionally followed professions as government officials; attended public school in Tromsø, North Norway; art training (painting) at Harriet Backer's studio, Kristiania, 1899 and 1905, and in Paris from 1906; married Anders Jönsson (a Swedish sculptor), in 1913 (divorced 1926); children: Erik (b. 1917 in Paris).

Spent two years in Italy with husband (1913–15); spent a period in Brittany where she began to write (1918), otherwise stayed in Paris until 1921; moved to Stockholm, Sweden; had a temporary teaching post inTromsø (1922); published short stories under pseudonym; published volume I of the trilogy, Alberta and Jacob, her first novel (1926); divorced (1926), but continued to live in Sweden, except for a brief period in Norway (1936–39); published Alberta and Freedom and Alberta Alone (1931 and 1939); won first prize in Norwegian short-story competition for novella Nina (1939); awarded author's stipend for life by the Norwegian government (1940); published novel Krane's Café after the liberation of Norway (1945); Krane's Café adapted for the stage (1947), and filmed (1951); moved to Uppsala (1960); exhibited paintings (1972); Alberta and Freedom filmed and shown on television (1972).

Selected short-story collections:

En blå sofa (1927); Carmen og Maja (1932); Mange takk, doktor (1935); Dyr jeg har kjent (1945); Figurer på mørk bunn (1949); Vårt vanskelige liv (Our Difficult Lives, ed. by Odd Solumsmoen, 1960); Barnet som elsket veier (The Child Who Loved Roads, ed. by Steinar Gimnes, 1973).

Selected novels:

Alberte og Jakob (1926); Alberte og Friheten (1931); Bare Alberte (1939); Kranes Konditori (1945); Kjøp ikke Dondi (1958). All Norwegian titles published by Gyldendal, Oslo.

Selected translations:

Alberta and Jacob, Alberta and Freedom, Alberta Alone (all translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, Peter Owen, London, 1962, 1963, 1965); Krane's Café (translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, Peter Owen, London, 1968); The Leech (translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, Peter Owen, London, 1960); Cora Sandel: Selected Short Stories (translated by Barbara Wilson, Seal Press, Seattle, 1985); The Silken Thread: Stories and Sketches (translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, Peter Owen, London, 1986).

Sara Fabricius was born in 1880 in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, 25 years before the establishment of independence from Sweden in 1905. Her mother tongue was Norwegian, she was published in Norway, and she was rewarded with a writer's stipend by the Norwegian government. Yet she lived in other countries for most of her life, and guarded her privacy behind her pseudonym, Cora Sandel. She called this "my mania for anonymity." It should have been sufficient, she thought, for people to read her books. Writes Odd Solumsmoen: "Her detestation of all publicity is identical with her detestation of the superficial, of the sensational, of muddle, of any kind of literary ladies' tea party: in a word, of falsehood." It is significant that she adopted a female pseudonym. To be a 20th-century woman writer, and to write about women in order to champion their cause, became her entire purpose. Her brief autobiography reads: "I was a child in Oslo, a young girl in North Norway, a grown woman in France and Sweden, am growing old during World War II, had a son during the first war, and live in fear that he may be sacrificed during the second."

Sandel's first 12 years were spent in the comfortable circumstances of a large, upper-middle-class family on Oslo's west side. Her father, serving in the navy, came and went, but in 1892 he took a post as a government administrator in Tromsø, a coastal port over half way between the Arctic Circle and the North Cape. The contrast must have been considerable between the Norwegian capital and this isolated outpost, which, at the turn of the century, was linked with the rest of this elongated country only by the regular visits of the coastal steamer, often delayed by storms. The journey took a week from Trondheim; there were two months of winter darkness when the sun never rose above the horizon. But there was no lack of congenial company or of activities such as amateur dramatics, youth clubs, and friendships made at the school for girls at which Sandel was educated. It was her observation of the frustrating and limiting lives imposed on the girls and young women of respectable families (expressed in the first volume of the Alberta trilogy) that turned Sandel's ambitions towards a career as an artist. In this she was helped initially by her father, who enabled her to spend some time at the painter Harriet Backer 's studio in Kristiania in 1899 and 1905, and later by an uncle, who assisted her in continuing her training in Paris after the death of her parents. Her need to escape from Norwegian society to the wider world of Europe nevertheless went hand in hand with her parallel loyalty to the language and culture of that society, reflected in the continued, close relationship with her literary friends and her publisher.

After moving to Paris for good in 1906, Sandel concentrated on her painting for the next decade. Her impressions of the Parisian artistic milieu were to find expression in Alberta and Freedom 15 years later: café life, the music hall, life classes, the stimulation of other artists, the poverty. "We were frozen and half starved," she said later; and 40 years on she wrote at the beginning of the novel Krane's Café, "Poverty is terrible. Of all so-called misfortunes, it's the one that affects you most deeply." Sandel was influenced by artists such as Oda Krogh , and by writers such as Colette , whose La Vagabonde she translated into Norwegian and published in 1952. Sandel was also able to continue what proved to be a lifelong friendship, begun at

school in Tromsø, with the pioneer of Norwegian university education for women: Ellen Gleditsch (1879–1968). She, too, was in Paris, to study with Marie Curie , and later she became the first woman professor of chemistry at the University of Oslo, as well as president of the Norwegian branch of the International Federation of University Women.

The two years spent in Florence after Sandel married the Swedish sculptor Anders Jönsson were happy ones, but the couple returned to experience a Paris torn by war and suffering material shortages. This period is reflected in some of her short stories. When her art professor, André Lhote, enquired why she was no longer attending his class at Colarossi's, adding that she must not stay away for lack of money, she admitted that she was pregnant. His reply was devastating: " Alors, c'est fini pour vous." (In that case, it's all over for you.) And so it proved where her painting was concerned. Her son Erik was born in 1917. During a stay in Brittany in 1918, she turned to writing; and when the Jönssons moved to Sweden in 1921 her canvases were used to protect her husband's sculptures on the journey. She commented later that ceasing to paint felt like having a leg or an arm amputated. But the notes which were to prove the basis of her trilogy traveled with her in her baggage.

The move to Stockholm was the beginning of the end of Sandel's marriage. In 1922, she left her child and husband to take a post in Tromsø teaching languages. She knew the town; her parents, though now deceased, had never moved south; and it was necessary financially. Her writings tell us that she would have had no wish to be in Oslo where she would have met with the disapproval of her bourgeois relatives. The following year, she returned, however, to Sweden, presumably for the sake of her son, and was not to visit Tromsø again until 1950. She settled outside Stockholm, and in 1926 was divorced from Jönsson. The same year saw the publication in Norway of Alberta and Jacob, which established her immediately as an important, though unknown, writer, and aroused the enthusiasm of both critics and public for its depiction of small-town life in North Norway. The initial printing of 9,000 copies was exceptional for such a small population. From now on, having found herself as woman and author, she was known as Cora Sandel.

To tell a little of the truth.
—Cora Sandel

Her independence was, however, again highly precarious where her economy was concerned. She took first prize in a couple of short-story competitions, and her hard work during the '20s and '30s resulted in the publication of several collections of stories in addition to the second and third volumes of the trilogy, a modern Bildungsroman in the tradition of Norwegian writer Camilla Collett 's Amtmandens døttre ( The District Governor's Daughters), as well as Sigrid Undset 's Kristin Lavransdatter (of which Sandel did not approve). The main theme of Sandel's fiction was that of women trapped by circumstance, often abandoning their hopes or striving for self-fulfillment. Her painter's eye is particularly in evidence in the stories. She is conscious of the effects of light and shadow, and of how her characters play out their scenes in the focus of the light. Her descriptions are built up with the care of a painter giving thought to the form of her images.

In 1940, Sandel attained a certain security through the award of a writer's stipend from the Norwegian government, but the Nazi occupation of Norway cut her off from her homeland for the next five years. During this time, she felt that patriotism demanded that she overcome her shyness and, like other Norwegians in exile in Sweden and the United States, she gave talks defending Norway and challenging the Swedish criticism that their neighbor should have put up a better resistance and not capitulated to the German invasion. She pointed out that such a small country could not buy weapons; there had been, after all, no question of rearmament, since there had been no involvement in World War I. "We were simply unable to afford cannon and bombers," she said. "We had not given much thought to the matter either. The idea of killing is foreign to a people like ourselves, used to devoting our lives to the daily struggle for existence."

Her stories and reminiscences dating from this period reflect her concern for the wider European situation as well as that of Norway. They include "Berit" ("Blue Anemones," translated by Rokkan), an account of Invasion Day (April 9, 1940) from the viewpoint of a little girl; "Til Lukas," a touching monologue by a Central European refugee writing to her lover who has been arrested by the Nazis (published in an anthology of Norwegian writing in exile, Utenfor norske grensen [Outside the Norwegian Frontier], Stockholm, 1943); and an ambitious allegory on Nazi expansion and European foreign affairs in the 1930s and 1940s. She may, in fact, have been one of the few Norwegians living in Sweden who had experienced war at firsthand before 1940 (always excepting those serving in the Norwegian merchant marine during World War I), and this resumption of hostilities was a profound disappointment to her. On Armistice Day 1918, she had written in her diary to her small son: "Peace. You do not understand it and will never understand it, for war will be unthinkable when you are grown up."

Despite these dark events, her humor had not deserted her, as Norwegians were to discover when Krane's Café was published in 1945. This was Sandel's tribute to Tromsø, and she admitted that it was her own favorite. The subtitle of the novel is "Interior with figures," and its scenic and dramatic form lent itself to successful adaptation as a play, with an additional act, by the playwright Helge Krog. It was performed for the first time in 1947, made into a film in 1951, and its popularity has been such that it has been staged many times since in Norwegian theaters. A charming collection of anecdotes, Dyr jeg har kjent (Animals I have known), subtitled "Stories for young and old," also came out after the Liberation.

Sandel's publisher, Gyldendal, awarded her an annual stipend in 1950 and issued her Samlede verker (Collected works) in six volumes two years later, adding a seventh in 1958 after publication of her final novel, Kjøp ikke Dondi ( The Leech). This won second prize in a European literary competition in 1960, when its author was 80 years of age.

Interest in Sandel remained strong in Scandinavia to the end of her long life, the last 14 years of which were spent in semi-retirement in Uppsala. In 1972, when she was 91, 30 of the pictures she had painted in her youth were exhibited in Stockholm; they included landscapes, still-lifes and portraits reminiscent of Cézanne, who was clearly not the "distant ideal" she made him out to be, but a real and visible influence on her work. The same year, she was able to see the television version of Alberta and Freedom, a medium scarcely imagined at the time when the novel was written. And in 1973 she was persuaded by Steinar Gimnes to publish stories and reminiscences dating from her early years as a writer, under the title Barnet som elsket veier (The Child Who Loved Roads). To her readers' surprise, it included the only poem she is known to have written, "Today the rose has been kissing the orchid," a wry little piece of advice to women revealing the combination of sympathy and irony that is her hallmark as a prose writer. Never, she told them, search for the vanished rose, for nothing is gained by loss. This was written at the age of 92, with the years in Florence in mind, according to her son; but it is interesting to remember that in the early 1970s Norwegian women were involved in the second liberation movement, and Sandel would have been aware of it. Cora Sandel's activities during her last decade were fitting reminders of her lifelong concerns, which continued up to her death in 1974, aged 93.