I am not sure that he is right, Professor. If you examine the key scene in the Undset programme, the walk through an English forest, you will notice how it seethes with botanical life; one could quite safely say that this scene was a visual kiss from Linnaeus. I think his colleague underestimated, and misunderstood, Jonas Wergeland’s creative genius: was blind to the way in which he was forever reworking his original ideas to produce simpler and simpler solutions, moved by a desire — ideally, at any rate — to reduce the chaotic raw material of each life to a few surprising strands, preferably no more than two, which he could twine together, like a double helix, in such a way that they nevertheless provided a picture of a complex, organic life.
You could say that with their ‘unveilings’ the newspapers were only giving Jonas Wergeland a taste of his own medicine, since that’s exactly what he set out to do to his heroes, to unveil them, as in removing the veil from them. This is demonstrated in exemplary fashion in the opening scene of the Undset programme in which the central character slowly, lingeringly, looking straight at the camera, unbinds her coil of hair, that characteristic braid so often seen in pictures of her, and lets her long locks tumble down over her shoulders — this in itself coming as a shock of relief to many viewers, especially faithful women readers of Sigrid Undset’s books who were used to the standard book-jacket portraits: the chaste features and the hair pinned up tightly on the top of her head, like a crown of thorns, an image which, even before one opened the book, spoke of a content suffused with momentous gravity, with the weight of the dark weft of human lives. Right at the very start Jonas Wergeland shattered this main cliché about Undset and showed her to be — apparently, at least, and thanks largely to Ella Strand’s magnetic presence — a lusty woman, a woman capable of torrid embraces and passionate kisses, of enjoying a drop or two, of laughing even.
A nigh-on impossible thought: Sigrid Undset laughing. It was almost indecent, like being offered a peek inside the legendary Undset shell. But this was the very aspect which Jonas Wergeland highlighted, because in his eyes — and setting aside her undeniable gifts as a storyteller — the key to Undset’s artistic success lay in her sensuality, her recognition of the power of the senses, of love as an unstoppable primal force, reminding one not so much of historical novels as of the books of an author she herself greatly admired: D. H. Lawrence. In a way — and this is something which many people considered paradoxical — the programme on Sigrid Undset was the most erotic in the whole of Jonas Wergeland’s television series with its undercurrent of almost startling lust, a covert voluptuousness which was perceived more by the intuition than by the eye.
Personally — if I may say so — I consider the Undset programme as a prime example of how well Jonas Wergeland succeeded in conveying the essence of a life simply by twining two aspects together to good effect. One of the programme’s two main elements was a walk around the National Gallery in London, the other a stroll through the vestiges of an ancient oak forest outside the city in Middlesex — in Sigrid Undset’s life both of these events took place on her honeymoon in 1912, during the six months spent by the newlyweds in England, possibly the happiest half-year of her life, a time when she herself was in love, when she made mad, passionate love — a thought almost as alien to her readers as the idea that their own parents must once have had sex.
Sigrid Undset strolls among the huge, old oak trees, through the countryside in which she felt most at home, just as Shakespeare and Chaucer were possibly her greatest sources of inspiration. She is walking with her husband, the painter Anders Castus Svarstad; it is late summer, she is pregnant, although it doesn’t yet show. The scene is vibrant with light and colour; the camera cuts occasionally to shots of wild flowers and small birds, all the things in which Undset took an interest. Jonas spent a lot of time working on the mood of this scene, to give the viewers an impression of how the forest embodied both light and dark, how it was positively vibrant with mythology and history — and, not least, with the spirit of the age of chivalry. It was during this stay that Sigrid Undset started making notes for a book on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. At one point the couple stop in their tracks, and one hears the distant sound of battle, sword on sword. Through the use of trick photography Jonas suddenly showed them walking along clad in medieval dress, Sigrid Undset wearing a striking brooch pinned to her dress, on loan from the University Museum of Antiquities: a round, silver brooch ornamented with an exquisite tracery.
In the second sequence, a parallel walk which was woven, or crosscut, into the first, one saw Sigrid Undset strolling through London, an industrial city full of the clamour of machinery, with a book in her hand, smoking a cigarette; Sigrid Undset, a modern woman, walking through the doors of the National Gallery — she had originally wanted to be a painter — where the camera followed her through rooms filled with pictures, this too a mythological forest of sorts, until she stopped in front of Botticelli, one of her favourite painters, in front of his ‘Venus and Mars’, a painting which depicts the almost transcendental character of Nature and of the two figures resting in the forest.
These two elements merged together, therefore, when the newlyweds — back in the strand formed by the first sequence, came to a clearing in the forest where they sat down on the grass, Svarstad leaning back with his eyes shut, she looking pensive, such that they assumed exactly the same positions as Venus and Mars in the Botticelli painting in the gallery. Jonas had Undset glance fleetingly at the sky, as if she really were looking in the direction of Venus — not knowing, of course, that a crater on that planet would one day be named after her — before letting the couple drift into a passionate embrace. This scene encapsulated two key ingredients in Undset’s universe: a couple succumbing to carnal desire, in rapturous performance of the sexual act, and the dense forest in the background, a symbol of the inescapable dark side of life. The programme closed with a blatant sex scene, lingering kisses and ecstatic embraces in the grass, on the bounds of the permissible, and yet with a touch of the religious about it, as if there were a connection between physical love and religion. Not unexpectedly the NRK management had to put up with complaints from the Christian Broadcasting Circle.
Towards the end of the scene Jonas had the camera pull up to reveal that the couple had now moved — if, that is, they had not been there all the time — to the Palace Gardens in modern-day Oslo; the camera panned across the city, down towards Karl Johans gate and the Parliament building. It is not unreasonable to imagine that, with this surprising device, Jonas Wergeland wished to make a point about Norway being stuck in a permanent Middle Age.