The Holdfast Sanctity of Sigrid Undset

When I traveled to Norway for the first time, I was already a devoted reader of Sigrid Undset and in awe of her courage and character. A Nobel laureate novelist and convert to Catholicism, Undset endured profound suffering in her life: the death of her disabled daughter; the breakdown of her marriage; the loss of her newly engaged son in the early days of the Nazi invasion; the forced separation from her home and loved ones during the war years. By the time she returned to Norway in the summer of 1945, she was broken both physically and emotionally, with little in the world to console her beyond her beloved garden—now in shambles—and the few remaining dear friends in Lillehammer, who had sheltered her books and even some of her prized geraniums during the occupation. Cuttings from these plants still grace the windowsills of her beloved Bjerkebæk, now a museum. 

Everywhere I went that spring, mentioning my love for Undset lit up eyes, elicited anecdotes, prompted the appearance of various volumes by and about her, and ushered in conversations more like those between old friends than awkward new acquaintances trying to surmount language barriers. In one of those encounters, a young deacon gave me a Sigrid Undset prayer card approved for private devotion. 

On one side it bears a simple image, a photo of Undset, her chin resting on her left hand, and “yours truly” (in Norwegian) in vintage typeset above Undset’s signature. She looks thoughtful, more than a bit weary, sad, perhaps, yet calm and determined (the word “indomitable” comes to mind). On the other side, a prayer, petitioning her intercession in the hope that she may one day be counted among the saints. A line from the prayer stands out: Hun holdt fast ved troen i liv og i lære, i motgang og i medgang. A rough English equivalent invariably flattens the alliteration: “She held fast to the faith in life and in learning, in bad times and in good.”

To “hold fast” implies intense effort in turbulent circumstances; if the waters were not so choppy, one wouldn’t need to cling so desperately. After Undset converted to Catholicism in 1924, the waters got choppier, as she endured ridicule, derision, and suspicion. Writing in 1930, Ida Coudenhove Görres distills the secular disappointment over Undset’s first post-conversion novel, The Wild Orchid: “Her work was so pure before!” she imagines such readers saying. A few decades later, Ibsen scholar James Walter McFarlane, borrowing D. H. Lawrence’s term, called Undset “immoral” for letting her faith inform her fiction. She had put her thumb on the scale by embracing Catholicism, committing the literary intelligentsia’s unpardonable sin.

Because of her faith, Undset was thwarted in her attempt to purchase land on Selja Island, with its ruins of a monastery dedicated to Irish St. Sunniva, who was martyred there. So it was fitting that Bishop Frederik Hansen of Oslo announced the opening of Undset’s cause for canonization on Sunniva’s Feast Day, July 8, at the conclusion of the annual pilgrimage to Selja.

Many saints have led exemplary lives, lives that may bear little resemblance to ours yet inspire us through their holiness. When the New York Times paid tribute to Archbishop Fulton Sheen on December 10, 1979, the day after his death, readers were reminded that “he neither smoked nor drank; he took no holidays; he was indifferent to food and amusements.”

No one will ever write such encomia about Undset. She was a chain smoker; she struggled with her weight, with alcohol, with bouts of depression. And yet, she held fast. She defended the dignity of the most vulnerable and called out tyranny and despotism when it was neither fashionable nor safe to do so. 

Had she been around today, she would, I suspect, be weighing in on contemporary issues with fearless conviction, without regard to chasing “likes” or reposts or combox affirmations. She was not aiming to be popular; she was intent on being truthful. Writing in the 1940s to Ferris Greenslet, then editor at Houghton Mifflin, Willa Cather called Undset “one of the most mercilessly truthful people I have ever known.”

Her bluntness could be off-putting, but it was balanced by a tender side that those who truly knew her were blessed to see. “She is so big and strong and, I might almost say, savage!” remarked Cather in a letter to a friend, noting: “At the same time as gentle as a lamb.”

Writing in her life of Mère Marie of the Ursulines in the early 1930s, the great essayist and biographer Agnes Repplier remarked on the often sanitizing brush of those who write about saints: “It is the lamentable habit of hagiographers to exclude from their narratives any circumstance which might possibly link them with life, to deny to the subjects of their pious memoirs any characteristic which savors too strongly of humanity. In their desire to be edifying they cease to be convincing.” Repplier, along with writers like Waugh in his biography of Edmund Campion and Undset herself in her posthumously published life of St. Catherine of Siena, helped usher in a more capacious understanding of the saints. Perhaps it is precisely that link with life, that savor of humanity, that renders Undset such a compelling and convincing Christian witness. 

“Every time I see her,” writes Cather of her visits while Undset was living at the Hotel Margaret in Brooklyn, “she brings a large peace and relaxation.” She continues:

She is just all a great woman should be—and on a giant scale. She is a wonderful cook, a proficient scholar and has the literature of four languages at her fingers ends. There is nothing about wild flowers and garden flowers that she doesn’t know, and she is able to make plants thrive and bloom in her very humble and gloomy little hotel rooms. Besides all this, there is in the woman a kind of heroic calm and warmth that rises above all the cruel tragedies and loss of fortune that the last three years have brought. She simply surmounts everything that has been wrecked about her and stands large and calm;—she who has lost everything seems still to possess everything, and the small pleasures can still make her rather cold eyes glow with marvelous pleasure. She combines in herself the nature of an artist, a peasant, and a scholar. She is cut on a larger pattern than any woman I have ever known, and it rests me just to sit and look at the strength that stood unshaken through so much.

Sigrid Undset once described the saints as “those men and women who have resisted the temptation of asking themselves how cheaply they can slip out of this or that obligation to God without endangering their ultimate chances of His mercy when they die. . . . The saints are those who always say in their hearts ‘Lord, what can I do for Thee in the short lifetime which Thou hast given me? For night cometh when no man can work.’”

Undset never stopped asking, “Lord, what can I do for thee?” Throughout the past year, I’ve sought her counsel and guidance for everything from family turmoil to gardening woes. I’m convinced that this friend of God is working from the other side of the veil to comfort and calm me, to help me hold fast in our bewildering age. 

Paying tribute to Undset after her death on June 10, 1949, the New York Times noted, “She had had her own share of anguish, but she called upon us to be courageous. . . . It was she who comforted us, not we her.”