In literature the sculptor is male. He is middle-aged, short and stocky. He stands squarely pounding stone for hours, the chisel dwarfed in his calloused hands. For some reason, his greying hair is curly. He is invariably humble, and if he has a temper, it is of the deep, eruptive kind, rarely seen. He is well-read, but hides it, and he is taciturn to the point of verbal ineptitude and seems devoid of literary imagination, as evidenced in the titles of his works: Standing form #14, Madonna and Child in Basswood, Green Female Torso. But for the patience, the humility, and the love of other art forms, I wouldn’t recognize him in any of the carvers I know.
Female stone carvers don’t even have a fictional stereotype. I keep looking for female sculptors in literature and find few, certainly few with whom I can identify, and almost none that serve as an inspiration. Fiction has not caught up to the reality that there are as many female stone sculptors now as there are male. And when novelists cloak their own creative frustrations in fiction, they like to portray themselves as painters.
Does it matter that sculptors are misrepresented in fiction? Hardly - we seem to find inspiration and role models elsewhere. It’s in the rainy months when the Symposia seem far away, that I wish for fictional peers, and to see that female sculptors’ lives can make sense.
The Stone Carvers
So I was hopeful when I picked up The Stone Carvers. Indeed it takes Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart 250 pages to get to the stone. The stone is the Vimy Memorial, created on Canadian ground near Arras in France in memory of the Canadian soldiers who died and were lost in the First World War. The memorial exists: its creator was Canadian sculptor Walter Allward.
Two carvers arrive from Canada to seek work at the monument. They are sister and brother, both taught to carve wood by their pioneer grandfather. Behind them are years and roads of loneliness.
“Someday,” Joseph said to his granddaughter, “someday something will happen and you will want to go back to the carving. You won’t be able to prevent yourself; that’s just the way it is. The world always somehow takes us back to the chisel. Something happens and we have to respond.”
They both respond. They carve, they heal, and they find love, tender and sincere. The sister opens up the rusted door between her heart and her chisel. And they return to Canada, fondly described as wilderness tamed by Bavarian woodcutters and steel cities with Italian gravestone carvers; Canada stretching along the St. Lawrence, having spilled its young sons of immigrants back into Europe.
The middle-aged spinster mourning a love cut short and a life that didn’t happen, and her brother, a run-away child turned hobo, with one leg destroyed in the trenches of war, certainly do not match any stereotypical image of sculptors. As carvers they are indeed unlikely. Our understanding and sympathy for them as people grow, in this long and strangely layered book, yet they never feel like sculptors.
The novel observes sculptors working. It observes carving. It never carves, it never breaks into the stone, is never on the inside. This is a careful book, well researched, with surprising passages of free, almost fantastical writing. It is also a reverent book, detailing tools and materials accurately, honouring both the inner and physical process of art, and cautioning the new carver.
“Yes,” the old man said, “the church is the place for your abbess, but not, of course, until she has achieved sainthood.” “But I am carving an abbess, not a saint.” “Any work of art,” said her grandfather, “must achieve sainthood before we set it free to roam in the world.”
If nothing else, The Stone Carvers will remind you to be grateful that you know what it is like to be on the inside of carving.
The Stone Carvers
by Jane Urquhart
