Lioness of Literature: Sigrid Undset in USA

She was called "Lioness of Literature". When she arrived in the United States in 1940 she was considered one of the foremost authors in the world. During five busy years of war she used all her position and influence to mobilize the fight against nazism. Commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt she wrote the book "Happy Times in Norway" in order that American school children should understand what Norway looked like before the German occupation. Sigrid Undset considered it a personal victory when President Franklin D. Roosevelt uttered the well-known words "Look to Norway" and the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies.

This year, one hundred years after her literary debut, an entirely new biography of Sigrid Undset will be published. Based on some newly discovered material from archives in Texas and specially dedicated to Ellen Vollebaek, Sigrid Undset’s biographer Sigrun Slapgard writes about the arrival in the US of the Nobel Prize Winner:

"Welcome to these shores", said the Western Union telegram she had received while they were in port in Hawaii. It was already late August 1940. Now she was standing on the upper deck, leaning towards the rail of "S/S President Cleveland" and watched as the coast line of California emerged. Soon she saw the sky line of San Francisco, her first stop. "Arriving San Francisco on the Cleveland about 26^th", she had cabled her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. "Welcome to these shores and may you find joy and happiness here", he had cabled back with a warm invitation: "Let us know if there is anything we can do for you". Knopf also told her that her latest novel "Madame Dorthea" was selling very well.

Sigrid Undset’s travels to Vinland had followed an Eastern path, like an Asian she arrived in America with a newly acquired kimono made of silk and bought in Japan. She had traversed a Russia in a lamentable state on the Transsiberian railway, and had days enough in Japan to write numerous letters home to those whom she could reach without German censorship. "I take the chance and send you a small greeting from here since I am told that the mail is even more uncertain from America", she wrote from Kobe to her friend Fredrik Paasche whom she had not said properly good bye to when she left Sweden. "And luckily we are about to begin the last leg of this our journey around two thirds of the globe. Now they say with certainty that the ship will live from here to San Francisco on the 11^th – and I am very much looking forward to arriving in a place where I may start working". (Letter to Paasche, August 9, 1940, NBO). For each nautical mile the steamer consumed of the Pacific Ocean she felt that she came closer to her own country; San Francisco was the first stop on her journey home. There she would contribute to the cultivation of the word that was the heading over the country and also over what she believed in herself: Freedom. There she would recruit more people to fight for the recovery of the lost freedom of Europe and Norway. "The wine of democray", she noted on her writing pad. This was her Vinland: "Now it is only the road across America that leads us back to the future", she wrote (Return to the future), p 171). During her long journey she had already collected a number of ideas for the appeals she had planned to hold, and for the articles she had planned to write.

It was like a homecoming to her when Ragnhild Brænne, her relative and friend from summers and holidays in Trøndelag, stood and received her in the harbor of San Francisco. Ragnhild was not only a dear friend from the summers at Munkaunet, she was the daughter of her father’s, Ingvald Undset’s, good friend Bernhard Brænne, who later became a Cabinet Minister. A warm hug and some words in the local dialect of Trøndelag made her forget all those other things that she hated: Journalists that called her name, wanted her to stand for pictures and to behave like a world celebrity. Sigrid Undset was clinging to Ragnhild Brænne and was willingly transported up the steep streets to Fairmont Hotel on the top of the city center of San Francisco. She let herself sink into the deep leather sofas in the hotel lobby while the others took care of her room and luggage. Then she surprised her son Hans by declaring that she actually wanted to say a couple of words to a journalist that had come to meet her. A representative from Knopf had already made sure that she had received a copy of the American edition of "Madame Dorthea"; now she repeated with a low voice and in an archaic and verbose English the words from her writing pad: a salute to the Western civilization and to America, the land of freedom.

Sigrid Undset undoubtedly made an impression on the journalist. The next day the interview made big headlines: "Her grief is too great for tears [….] her words were passionless", it said. The journalist used a metaphoric language he found suitable: "On Hitler’s altar of hate she had delivered her eldest son, glad that he should have died in the cause of democracy". (San Francisco Chronicle, Augsut 27, 1940). With unpolished nails, the journalist wrote, her strong white hands rested on a copy of her recently published book, "Madame Dorthea". Sigrid Undset was quoted saying that she always would remember "her ancient Norwegian home, Lillehammer, that rises toward the sky on the shoulder of a mountain. The bombs fell in her garden, the bombs pursued her during her fleeing, the article continued. However, she would not have been Sigrid Undset if she had not used the occasion to challenge the American jounalist:

"I love England", she said suddenly, "next to Norway, I love England". This was her first greeting to an America that was not willing to join in the war against the Germans. Sigrid Undset had arrived in America, not to bring peace, but sword.

Skåbu, March 2007

Sigrun Slapgard