The elf and the Erdgeist

Älvan och jordanden. En biografi om Mirjam Tuominen och Torsten Korsström

Tuva Korsström

Schildts & Söderströms 2018

Tuva Korsström’s loving yet hyper-aware analysis of her parents, their work and their marriage combines several literary genres. In essence the volume is an autobiographical essay that expands into a double biography. While the story contains a wealth of psychological and material detail concerning its protagonists, it is dominated by a central perspective: the third view provided by its author, the quiet observer who emerged from it and who later researched and recorded it all, both from documents and from personal memory. 

As one critic has noted, the marriage of Mirjam Tuominen (1913-1967) and Torsten Korsström (1909-1964) ‘lasted [in practice] only a little longer than the Winter and Continuation War. In it, the daughters Kyra and Tuva were born.’ The marriage reflects the social turmoil and political contradictions of the war years in Finland, a state pf dissension that official Finland later tried to suppress and was clearly a major factor contributing to  Mirjam Tuominen’s existential and personal torment. The book’s calm exploration makes sense of the internal and external conflicts, and the reader gains a unique acquaintance with Mirjam Tuominen’s writing – a body of work that vividly and painfully forms an essential part not only of Finland’s literature, but also of its history. 

Finland-Swedish Literature Today - Series

On the occasion of Tua Forsström's election to the Swedish Academy, Opulens has a series devoted to contemporary Finland-Swedish writing. Authors profiled so far include Tuva Korsström and Merete Mazzarella, and there are apparently more articles in the pipeline. Series editor Ivo Holmqvist has some wry historical notes on the Finland-Swedish presence in the Academy:

Så är det också skamligt länge sedan någon från Finland återfanns där. Den ombytlige Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt som var född i den östra rikshalvan blev invald på stol nr 14 i maj 1786. Åtta år senare uteslöts han, för påstådda politiska stämplingar. 1805 togs han åter in, fast på stol nr 17 som han tvangs lämna 1811 när han förvisats ur Sverige. Han är den ende som suttit på två stolar i den församlingen.

On the outlook for the newest Finland-Swedish member, Holmqvist is encouraging, though he can't  help pointing to some of the commentary that has greeted the latest appointment:

Dagens Nyheters kulturchef hör till dem som hälsat Tua Forsström välkommen fast han samtidigt undrade om hon är tillräckligt stridbar, och här på sidan noterade Helena Lie nyss att det är ”en ytterligt patriarkal hegemoni Forsström träder in i (motbevisa mig gärna, jag är idel öra) så frågan är väl hur länge Forsström kommer stå ut i ett sådant sällskap om det fortsätter som hittills.” Det är nog en onödigt pessimistisk blick in i framtiden även om föregångare som Kerstin Ekman, Lotta Lotass, Sara Danius och Sara Stridsberg satt exempel genom att frivilligt lämna församlingen.

Älvan och jordanden

In Älvan och jordanden (Schildts & Söderströms 2018) Tuva Korsström has written a double biography of her parents, the poet, short story writer, essayist and painter Mirjam Tuominen (1913-1967) and the graphic artist and lector Torsten Korsström (1909-1964). Besides being a profoundly personal document, the book is a substantial contribution to the history of Finland-Swedish literature, and also provides a remarkable degree of background on the political, social and cultural development of early to mid-twentieth century Finland.

Mirjam Tuominen - 8

By Tuva Korsström

(continued)

The poems

DOWN

Down in straight lines the birds
silent O silent
down down
into an earth that opens like a sea
into a sea you plunge.
Up up.

It closes.


In her first collection of poems Under jorden sjönk (Under the Earth Sank, 1954) Mirjam Tuominen abandons the attempt to surround her investigation of the inner world with fictive descriptions of the outer. The characters and milieus of her short stories give way to expressions of the pure self, the idea, silence and a now clearly-enunciated awareness of God:


MAKE ME TEACH ME


Make me pure
teach me silence
make me whole
teach me new words
words that are not words
words that are as silence
whole pure
not self-abandonment
not accusation
not defence
not thesis
not antithesis
but synthesis.
May life and death
hold each other in balance.

At the same time she crosses the border between illness and health, abnormality and normality which she has described many times in her books. She is no longer a sensitive but objective witness who can give reports from both sides. She gradually retreats into a clear-sighted privacy of her own, an isolation that is sometimes very frightening:

THE CRY

There is a cry in the forest:
I want to go home
the keys have fallen
the paths have disappeared
I cannot get there
I am badly frightened
I have frightened myself very very badly
they have frightened
I have frightened
I want to go home to the dolls there at home
home to the stove the fire the hearth.

(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 6

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

Two of the most enjoyable essays in Stadier concern the letters of Proust and Strindberg. Proust was one of Mirjam Tuominen's constant companions and she read the volumes containing his letters over and over again. Her description of Proust is characterized by the tender irony she used when writing or talking about her literary favourites. Proust was just another of those unpractical victims who make themselves hopelessly absurd whenever they undertake something.

His letters are as a rule very considerate, so considerate that they may seem to consist of nothing but politeness, flattery, almost. He is so polite that his politeness sometimes kills itself and becomes an impoliteness, because his equally great need for sincerity gets in the way. The result is an intricate arabesque with a succession of constantly new explanations, each of which annihilates the last.

Strindberg was one of the authors whom Mirjam Tuominen read intensely for a while but later rejected. She describes in her essay, not without irony this time, too, the restless Strindberg who included the whole world in his private life and then suffered from having it there, who could not live without women and then suffered from being at their mercy.
She writes with perspicacity about Strindberg's paranoia:

He could renounce neither woman nor the world... Subsequently mankind appeared to him as divided into two halves, one containing enemies, and the other containing people who were not yet his enemies...
For Strindberg Sweden was Little Puddleton, and anything else one would not have expected, it gave him paranoia, and that is very understandable, even if one might have wished that his brain had retained the upper hand.

It is worth noting that a large number of Tuominen's prototypes were men: mostly unusual, 'unmasculine' men like Kafka, Proust, Rilke or Hölderlin. What preoccupied her, just as it would preoccupy the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva decades later, was not the problem of masculine and feminine but that of marginality and dissidence.
Female artists who fascinated Tuominen included, for example, the Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran, the Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel, the French philosopher Simone Weil, and the Finland-Swedish painter Helene Schjerfbeck. These women, like her male favourites, are characterized by the vulnerability of marginal beings. They are all in pursuit of the same self-consuming search for the the absolute.
Of Cora Sandel, Tuominen writes:

This writing is in the highest degree feminine, as feminine as Strindberg's is masculine, it constitutes an index of features that are normally feminine, raised to an intensified and therefore abnormal level of emotion in the same way as Strindberg in his writing becomes an index of the `normally masculine at an extremely heightened level of emotion. I have never seen a portrait of Cora Sandel and I have no idea what she looked like, but something of the same terrifying, at once defenceless and strong, expression that is reflected in Helene Schjerfbeck's self-portraits emanates from her writings; a white face with dark, wide-open eyes, the expression of a being mercilessly incorporated into the nerve of life's essence and with the same mercilessness exposed to the conditions of reality; extreme sensitivity and extreme, overpowering temperament are here united, the fruit is extreme shyness, a scream of existential agony.

(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 5

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)
Prototypes

Besk brygd concludes with essays on Edith Södergran, Franz Kafka and Hjalmar Bergman. 1949 saw the publication of Tuominen’s essay collection Stadier (Stages), which contains studies of Valéry, Proust, Rilke and Cora Sandel, among others. Tuominen was an assiduous reader of literature in the Nordic languages,  German, French, and to some extent also Spanish and Italian. She had extraordinary literary intuition and, while she still wrote reviews in newspapers she often introduced new names there. She was one of the first people in Finland to write about Kafka, and was drawn to Hölderlin years before he was rediscovered by literary fashion, though she seldom used literature as a source of news items. The essays in Besk brygd and Stadier indicate that she wrote only about writers whom she liked and with whom she felt a spiritual affinity.
Of Kafka, she writes:

This latterday relative of Jesus of Nazareth was born in Prague and grew up in an incurably bourgeois home.
One may wonder if there is anything so immensely liable to have a hostile effect, an effect that is deeply and inwardly incurable to the bottom of the soul, on a growing poetic force that senses its possibilities but as yet has no idea of its own existence, than the helplessly arch-bourgeois mentality.

For Tuominen, Franz Kafka became n almost ideal object of identification. Both are victims and outsiders. They feel surrounded by despotic executionerss who want to reshape and adapt them to 'normal', bourgeois life. Both bear the harshest executioner within themselves.

Franz Kafka carried an extremely harsh executioner within himself. He was harsh with himself, exacting as to the quality of what he wrote, and equally exacting of other people.

In her Kafka essay, Mirjam Tuominen consciously or unconsciously defines herself and her writings. When she describes Kafka's irony, it is her own sense of humour she portrays, that of the physically passive, non-aggressive victim.
The irony of both writers is predominant in her analysis of Kafka’s story ‘Die Verwandlung’ (Metamorphosis). The metamorphosis is the only way of escaping the strains of normality:

Gregor Samsa persists in his existence as a beetle, he cannot part from this existence even by his own will, he lives in his dark, untidy bedroom, shabby and neglected, bitter and ashamed, guilty and yet neither ashamed nor guilty, because if he looks like a beetle in the eyes of the family, then there is nothing to be done about itl, then he must be a beetle, he wants to be a beetle, he has no wish to be the respected son, the good brother any more.

Tuominen concludes: 'In order to write a story like “Die Verwandlung” Kafka must have felt the conflict between the demands of his inner being and those of the world around him with extreme and almost intolerable intensity.'  She could hardly have found a more accurate definition of herself and many of her own characters.

(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 3

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

Mirjam Tuominen's Fiction

I have focused on two of Mirjam Tuominen's earliest short stories in order to highlight something that characterizes all her writing from the very beginning: a continuous study of life's inner essence, a deep penetration into its nerve. Perhaps this is what Hagar Olsson had in mind when she characterized Mirjam Tuominen's earliest short stories as 'not products of literature', but as objects that 'contain within their form the living word.'

During the 1940s the two early books were followed by a steady flow of short stories and essays: Visshet (Certainty, 1942), Mörka gudar (Dark Gods, 1944), Kris (Crisis, 1946), Besk brygd (Bitter Brew, 1947), Bliva ingen (Become No One, 1949), Stadier (Stages, 1949). Shortly after the outbreak of the Winter War Mirjam Tuominen had entered into an impulsive marriage, typical of those days, with Torsten Korsström, the man she had loved for several years. Since before the outbreak of war Torsten Korsström had obtained an art teaching post at the Teachers' Training College in Nykarleby, Ostrobothnia, his young wife had to spend the war years there, isolated in Finland's smallest town, far from her family, her friends and the intellectual circles of Helsingfors. Their daughter Kyra was born in 1941, their daughter Tuva in 1946. For most of that time Mirjam Tuominen's husband was fighting at the front. Contact was kept up through letters and short, intense visits.

This biographical background permeates the stories of the '40s. She depicts love between man and woman with all its eroticism, tenderness, struggle for power, and jealousy. She depicts childbirth and the mysterious closeness between child and mother. She depicts the small town and the Ostrobothnian plain. She depicts the war and the alarming upsurge of Nazi sympathies in the Finland of her day.

In routine literary contexts it was often pointed out that in her short stories Mirjam Tuominen specialized in describing children, animals, women and sick people. She certainly described and analysed all these beings with great psychological acuity, but it cannot be emphasized enough that at the same time she gave a picture of the whole society of that time. Through the deviant, who precisely because they stand slightly outside are particularly sensitive, Mirjam Tuominen registers the normal. Through the child she sees the adult, through the animal human beings, through the sick she describes the healthy, through the woman the man.

One of her most fascinating short stories is called 'Bara en hund' ('Only a Dog', from Walls, 1939). It is the long monologue of a dog, like many of Mirjam Tuominen's characters struggling to choose between its desire for independence and its need for love. At the same time the dog is witnessing his master's and mistress's painful divorce. The most obvious dissident and outsider in human society is the witch ('Jan and Marietta', from Certainty, 1942). Mirjam Tuominen was to return to this subject later on in her poetry, making it clear that her witches are consumed not only by the pyres that society lights, but also by an inner, ineluctable flame.

In the book that can be considered her farewell to the short story, Bliva ingen (Become No One, 1949) she summarizes and anticipates all her themes within one short tale, called 'In Absurdum'. It tells the story of a dancer who strives for absolute skill in her dancing and for absolute solitude in her life, who falls and badly injures herself, and who sees God as she is dying.

(to be continued)