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Moa Martinson (1890-1964) - original name Helga Maria Swartz |
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Self-taught novelist and journalist, who depicted the plight of the landless agricultural workers in the Swedish countryside. Born out of wedlock and growing up in the slums of an industrial town, Moa Martinson was the first woman writer among the worker-novelists, who gained international fame. Martinson has been called a "female Maxim Gorky." Her writings were often autobiographical. Although the first half of her life was filled with poverty and misery, her memoirs were also full of warmth and humour. "Paradoxically enough, I am mostly indignant not because I was denied the possibility to get a university education, but because I landed right in the same anonymous hell as my mother. Maybe it was even harder for me, for I was fully conscious that it was hell. I was clear about the injustice against all of us, and powerless. Once my mother said, "You cannot possibly write about everything; they would die of shame." Yes, she was right; it wouldn't do to tell everything, that would be too much, and some of the bad things should probably be complete forgotten; I don't know, maybe not." (from the foreword for My Mother Gets Married by Moa Martinson, translated and with an afterword by Margaret S. Lacy, New York: The Feminist Press, 1988, p. vi; translation of Mor gifter sig,1936) Helga Maria Swartz (Moa Martinson) was born in Vårdnäs in
Östergötland, the daughter of an unmarried factory girl, Kristina
Swartz. Moa's stepfather – when he was not unemployed – worked as a
farm laborer in around Norrköping.
He occasionally disappeared to drink with prostitutes. In Mother Gets Married
(1936) Martinson wrote that her mother was her best and most reliable
friend. She was six when her mother married for the first time. In
childhood Martinson was known as Helga. Her possible real father was a
soldier, a member of the upper class who refused to marry beneath his
station; he died the year she was born. At school Martinson was an
excellent student, although she changed school several times when her
family moved in search of work. After elementary school, Moa left home at the age of thirteen and
worked amongst other things in a restaurant kitchen at the Norrköping
Art and Industry Exhibition and as a cold buffet manager in Stockholm.
At 19, Martinson became pregnant. With the father of the child, a
cement worker named Karl Johansson, she moved to a small house in Ösmo,
where Karl had a farm called Johannesdal. Martinson lived there the
rest of her life. The marriage was unhappy – her violent husband, who
suffered from bouts of depression, drank and battered her. Between 1910 and 1916 Martinson gave birth to five sons. Two of her children drowned in 1925 in a creek near the house, and a few years later she was widowed, when her husband killed himself by blowing off his head with a dynamite. In 1929 she married – her name was at that time Helga Johansson – the young sailor and debutant novelist Harry Martinson, who was fifteen years younger. At the time Martinson was sick with pneumonia; most likely she saved his life. Martinson would share in 1974 the Nobel Prize for Literature with Eyvind Johnson. Both Moa and Harry had the same publisher, Albert Bonniers Förlag. In the 1920s Moa Martinson started to write for Social Democratic newspapers and labor publications, including the radical the women's weekly Tidevarvet, edited by Elin Wägner. Her thoughts and the style of her articles lead readers to believe that the writer was highly educated and widely read. Martinson became actively involved in the socialist movement, giving speeches and demanding better pay and living conditions for farm and factory workers. In 1922 she was elected as a local Social Democrat councillor. Filling gaps in her education Martinson devoured such authors as Dostoyevsky, Zola, Gorky, and especially Martin Andersen-Nexø. Another turning point in her life came in the spring of 1928, when she attended the Women Citizen's School at Fogelstad: "Here I began using new strata of my brain. What I had read on my own at home turned out to be useful." (Swedish Women's Writing 1850-1995 by Helena Forsas-Scott, 1997, p. 134)In 1934 Martinson participated, along with such writers as Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, André Malraux, and Rafael Alberti, in the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers. Gorky was chosen as chairman, and the new literary doctrine known as Socialist Realism was formulated. Harry Martinson, who had separated from Moa for a period, reunited with her. In 1935 he escaped to the North, and this time Moa issued a warrant through the radio. After that everybody in Sweden knew about their marriage problems. Martinson's first story, Pigmamma, written in 1924-25, appeared in serialized form in the journal Brand (Fire) in 1927. Since the late
1920s, she had used the pseudonym Moa, which originated from the novel Bræen (1908, The Glacier) by the
Danish author Johannes V. Jensen. The meaning of the name was "the mother of all." At the age of 43 she entered the male-dominated literary scene with the novel Kvinnnor och äppelträd
(1933, Eng. tr. Women and Apple Trees). It depicted the strength and
solidarity of several generations of working-class women in their
struggle with poverty and abusive, hard-drinking men. "It was a big
farm with poor soil. Tough, that soil was, contrary as old women or as
horses hard beaten. Soil that lay there, mossy and miry and matted, and
only spited you. Soil that pliantly spread itself out for birch roots
and useless wilderness, but set itself perversely against the
ploughsgare, against the spade and hoe, like a woman in bed who hates
her man." This novel contains a powerful scene of a woman giving birth. Martinson was the first in Swedish literature to describe it truthfully, not closing doors to the readers or romanticizing it in any way. Bonniers's plan to published the book in Germany was turned down by Martinson for political reasons. Kvinnnor och äppelträd
was
followed by Sallys söner (1934), Rågvakt (1935) and Drottningen Grågyllen (1937). Motsols (1937)
was Martinson's only collection of poems. Almost everything Martinson wrote was
autobiographical or was based on the history of her home province. Her
most successful work is the trilogy Mor gifter sig (1936, Eng. tr. My Mother Gets Married), which a reviewer called "food for the dump,"
Kyrkbröllop (1938, Church Wedding),
and Kungens rosor (1938,
The King's Roses), about a young girl's relationship with her mother
and her path to independence. Tor Bonnier wished that Harry would help her with the editing of My Mother Gets Married. After the appearance of the novel, Martinson changed her publisher from Bonniers to the Social Democratic publishing house Tidens förlag. She had felt for a long time that Bonniers was more interested in his work than hers. The trilogy was reprinted in a low-price
series by the publishing company Folket i Bild in the 1940s and 1950s. Church Wedding
was printed in 1949 in a soft-cover edition of 90,000 copies. The
protagonist, Mia Stenman, grows up in the slums of Norrköping. At the
end she is only aged fifteen but her childhood is over, she works 15
hours a day and is harassed by her male co-workers. Mia decides never
to marry. The final volume was written in the third person. Martinson
emphasized in her 1956 foreword for My Mother Gets Married,
that "everything in this book is true even if some of the things too
sad to tell are left out. In the beginning I tried to camourflage a
little, but that didn't work." (My Mother Gets Married, translated and with an afterword by Margaret S.Lay, 1988, p. vi) In the 1940s Martinson published several books, which were based on her own experiences,
including Armén vid horisonten (1942),
Bakom Svenskvallen (1944) and Kärlek mellan krigen (1947). Her later novels were about proletarian
characters of the 18th and 19th
centuries. Den osynlige älskaren (1943) was about a young woman who has idealistic dreams about an
ideal man while her everyday
life is overshadowed by her brutal husband. However, she manages to raise her family out of poverty. The "Östergötland Epic," consisting of Vägen under stjärnorna (1940), Brandliljor (1941), and Livets fest (1949), was set in Martinson's home province, on a single farm, and traced the lives of its occupants through several generations. Moa Martinson served as a role model for woman writers in the Nordic
countries as late as in the 1970s, and feminist criticism has refreshed
her reputation – very much in opposition with Erik Hjalmar Linder, who
dismissed her in the 1960s in Fem decennier av nittonhundratalet as "the cheerful chronicler
of misery." (Swedish Women's Writing 1850-1995 by Helena Forsas-Scott, 1997, p. 131)
Usually Martinson's female charaters are strong and they strive for
independence. On the otrher hand, they are bound by their gender to bear and
care for children. Already in her first novel, Martinson explored female sexuality exceptionally boldly. Another central theme was the friendship between women. "Lita på en karl, man skulle ha stryk" (trust a man – you ought to get a good hifing), she once wrote. Martinson died in Södertälje on August 5, 1964. She was buried in the cemetery of Sorunda Church, where her husband was also buried. A film based on her life, Moa (1986), was directed by Anders Birkeland, Anders Wahlgren. Gunilla Nyroos played the title role. Officially Moa and Harry Martinson divorced in 1940.
The writer Ivar Lo-Johansson was a very good friend to them both, and depicted in Tröskeln
(1982) their marriage problems. Moa often wrote or called Lo-Johansson,
when she did not know her husband's whereabouts, or wanted to leave a
message for him. "Do not take wandering so seriously," Harry
Martinson used to say. Moa was jealous, and Harry – who needed a
mother figure – did not want to settle down and live an ordinary family
life. There were also literary differences – Moa was considered an
unpolished realist, who published autobiographical novels, and Harry a
talented modernist experimenting with different forms of narration,
although new
readings have pointed out that also Moa challenged conventional
literary canons, just like the modernists did. Moreover, Harry
Martinson wrote extensively in his early novels about his childhood and
youth. For further reading: Om Moa Martinson by Marika Stirnstedt (1946); Orädda riddare av penna by Carl Johan Björklund (1960); Moa i brev och bilder, ed. by Glann Boman (1978); Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, ed. Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); Kvinnornas litteraturhistoria by Barbro Backberger (1981); Harry Martinson och Moa by Sonja Erfurth (1987); Moa by Britt Dahlström (1987); Moa Martinson by Ebba Witt-Brattström (1988); Moa Martinson: ordet och kärleken by Kerstin Engman (1990); 'Livets egen runsten,' in Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria 3: Vita Världen 1900-1960, ed. Elisabeth Møller Jensen (1996); Swedish Women's Writing, 1850-1995 by Helena Forsås-Scott (1997); Vem är vem i svensk litteratur by Agneta & Lars Erik Blomqvist (1999); Mätt med främmande mått: idéanalys av kvinnliga författares samtidsmottagande och romaner 1930-1935 by Gunilla Domellöf (2001); Brev kring en resa utan mål: Harry, Moa och herrarna Bonnier by Bengt E. Anderson (2011); I Moas sak: från ny Moaforskning till Moaprisets historia, redaktör: Ebba Witt-Brattström; redaktionskommitté: Christina Duvander, Göran Eriksson, Moa Holmqvist (2012); I Moas sak: mer om Moa - biografiskt och litterärt, redaktör: Ebba Witt-Brattström; redaktionskommitté: Christina Duvander, Göran Eriksson, Tove Bergquist (2014); 'The Bamboos of Blekinge: The Writing of Cultures in Swedish Proletarian Fiction' by Paul Tenngart, in Journal of Literature and Art Studies, Vol. 5, No. 7 (July 2015); Moa Martinson: ett liv by Cilla Dalén & Annelie Drewsen (2022); Vi drabbade samman med våra ödens hela bredd: Författarparet Moa och Harry Martinson by Ebba Witt-Brattström (2024) Selected bibliography:
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