Sigrid Undset and Willa Cather
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Copyright © 1999 by the Willa Cother Pioneer ISSN 0197-663X Memorial and Educational Foundation (’l’he Willa Cather Society) Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter and VOLUME XLII, No. 3 Red Cloud, Nebraska 68970 Winter-Spring, 1999 Telephone (402) 746-2653 Sigrid Undset, 1882-1949~ Sigrid Undset and Willa Cather: Opera Omaha’s A Friendship ERIC HERMANNSON’S Sherrill Harbison SOUL During the darkest years of Hitler’s campaign to On November 11, 13, and 15, 1998, Opera conquer the world, two aging writers from different Omaha’s world premiere of Libby Larsen’s "Eric continents met in the concrete canyons of New York Hermannson’s Soul," an adaptation of Cather’s 1900 and nurtured a warm friendship centered on an story originally published in Cosmopolitan magazine, ecstatic response to nature. Sigrid Undset (1882- played to sold-out houses for its three performances. 1949), winner of the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature, Numerous critics from this continent and abroad had been an outspoken critic of the German Reich, attended, and thoughtful reviews appeared in papers and was forced to flee the Nazi invasion of her native from Omaha, St. Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Norway in April of 1940. Travelin~g with a small party Lincoln, Boulder, Montreal, Toronto, New York, Tokyo, up the winding Gudbrandsdal valley (home of her most and London. Following are reviews from the Omaha- famous fictional heroine, Kristin Lavransdatter) the World Herald and from The Wall Street Journal, portly 58 year-old woman trudged in her heavy fur coat followed by some excerpted comments by WCPM through woods and snowfields, flung herself into board member and distinguished Cather scholar Susan ditches to duck air raids, took shelter with strangers Rosowski. (Continued on page 54) (Continued on page 59) - 53 - SIGRID UNSET AND CATHER time together, sharing meals, stories, travel itineraries, (Continued) and a mutual passion for plants and flowers. This was, as Hermione Lee has noted, the only close in steep mountain farms, and sent words of encour- friendship Cather ever enjoyed with a female writer of agement to her countrymen from tiny rural telegraph her own stature and generation,6 and the same was offices. However exhausted and fearful about the fate true for Undset. of her two sons left behind with the Resistance, she Undset spent the war years in America working as never failed to take note of the advancement of "soldier of the Resistance" n writing and lecturing spring: across the country in the anti-Nazi cause. In June There is a good smell from the melting snow, a fra- 1945 she returned to Lillehammer, exhausted, dis- grance of pine needles, it smells of moss and wet couraged, and grief-stricken. In addition to her earth wherever a stony mound juts up out of the son, she had lost her mother and daughter shortly snow. And through the crowns of the trees whis- before the invasion; many friends and relatives had- pers a sweet, soft murmur -- a murmur which suffered in concentration camps; and Bje~keb~ek, her became audible each time the drone of the planes’ stately timber home with its collections of art and motors receded a little .... 1 antiques, had been used as a brothel by vindictive SS From the bombed and burnt coastal cities of troops. Andalsnes and Molde she and other refugees boarded On March 17, 1946, Undset wrote to Cather from a trawler headed north. As the boat wove stealthily in Bjerkeb~ek (apologetically in pencil, because "ink runs and out of fjords and inlets, she again meditated: so on this paper"), describing in considerable detail the Norway is so beautiful; it is past belief that anything wartime fate of many of her friends and neighbors, and so beautiful is real. Stern, wild, with the mountain the straitened post-war living conditions in Norway. wall rising straight out of the sea, peaks and crags The letter opens with this paragraph: reaching toward heaven, buried in snow and ice -- Very often I think of you and wonder, how are with few and poor strips of land here and there you now? Meeting you was one of the happiest under the mountain, where there was room for a things that happened to me in America, and I small farm .... 2 cherish the memory of those evenings with you and Forced to turn east by a naval blockade, she made a Miss Lewis so much. When my books returned from that church basement out in the country, where long, sorrowful journey via Sweden -- where she kind friends had hidden my library, and I unpacked learned that her oldest son had been felled by a your books, it was quite a different thing to handle German bullet n across poverty-stricken Siberia, them (I have not been able to put them up yet, as saber-rattling Japan, and an uneasy Pacific. Finally the German females who lived here during the she crossed the American continent, where she occupation had used my bookshelves for firewood, established a home base in the congenial Norwegian and it takes time and a lot of money to get new neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights for the duration of ones, material being wanted in the first place to re- the war. build our burn-out [sic] towns and places), thinking of you as a friend I know now. Your picture which For more than a decade before her arrival in New Alfred Knopf sent me from you years ago I also York Undset had been corresponding with Willa unearthed from the attic, where my "roomers" had Cather, the American novelist eight years her senior. put away pele-mele the things they did not want -- Cather, who had written so much about Scandinavian which was not much. It is a little broken and soiled, immigrants in the Midwest, was at that time very but all the more dear to me.7 popular in the Nordic countries, and Undset’s own The main substance of the following article is a sister had translated Lucy Gayheart in 1936.3 Undset tribute to Undset written by Willa Cather after they was equally popular here after Kristin Lavransdatter were once again separated by the Atlantic. It was appeared in 1921; English editions of a few of her submitted to the Norwegian journalist Olav Paus Grunt, earlier and all subsequent works had followed.’ translated to Norwegian, and published in the maga- Both writers had quickly recognized a strong zine Urd in 1946, shortly after Undset’s return home similarity in their approaches to the natural world, from her exile years in the United States. history, and religion, and began to exchange letters in It happened that on the day she was preparing this the 1920s. Now in unexpected proximity, Undset was tribute Cather’s secretary was away, so her niece eager to meet the American writer she so admired. Helen Cather Southwick, who was visiting, typed the This was arranged by their common publisher and text from her aunt’s dictation. This segment of Paus friend Alfred Knopf, who wrote to Cather at Whale Grunt’s article has been transcribed, with permission, Cove, Grand Manan, on September 4, 1940, that from Mrs. Southwick’s carbon copy. Though it may not "Sigrid Undset and her remaining son reached New have been the final version Cather submitted, it York yesterday morning. She seems to have stood up resembles the translation in all important respects, and under her troubles very well indeed and is anxious to is, to my knowledge, the only surviving version in meet you when you get back. I think you will like each Cather’s own English prose. Paus Grunt’s translation other." ~ His hunch was right, and over the fiveyears is the only form in which the tribute has been pub- Undset lived in New York the two women spent much lished before. -54- SIGRID UNDSET IN AMERICA famous writers in exile with greater virtuosity in spoken By Olav Paus Grunt English, and who were more polished lecturers. But In the four or five years Sigrid Undset lived in the how often I heard, when several of them appeared United States she chose to settle away from the main together, that it was Sigrid Undset’s simplicity, sin- line of traffic, in one of the small quiet streets of cerity, and freedom from empty rhetoric that had the Brooklyn Heights. She had found a little apartment in deepest effect and left the most lasting impression. the outlying ’~/ictorian" Hotel Margaret, a modest but During her residence in the U.S.A. the novelist of comfortable residence. The parlor -- a corner room course became acquainted with a number of America’s with several windows looking out over the street -- most prominent authors. One of them, Willa Cather, was full of books, flowers, and pictures. Work and has sent me the following beautiful tribute to her. domestic life had erased all traces of the impersonal Certainly Willa Cather is so well known here that any hotel-suite from this room. A book-loving visitor like further introduction would be redundant.’ Books such myself had the special delight of scanning through as A Lost Lady, My Mortal Enemy, and Death Comes bookcases jammed to overflowing with books; books for the Archbishop have long since become classic also lay around on tables and chairs. One was always works in American literature. This is what Miss Cather welcome to take a jour, ney of discovery through wrote to me about Madame Undset: Madame Undset’s books, while she herself, true to old- "It would be superfluous to make any tribute to time Norwegian hospitality, went to the kitchen to prepare afternoon coffee for her guest.