I would ask you to bear in mind here that the sixties were just giving way to the seventies; bear in mind, too, that the Skipper Clement was on course for Frederikshavn and would very shortly have to pass through the very narrow channel into which Gabriel’s boat was now drifting, a stretch of water which, by the way, happened to be one of the most renowned in the history of Norway, for it is here on the seabed that the rusting hulk of the German battle-cruiser Blücher lies, testifying to the fact that something which no one would have thought possible did actually happen once, and in Norway at that.
But in the saloon, beneath a paraffin lamp, in the warmth from the wood stove, Gabriel was fulminating over this singular forgetfulness. Folk even forgot actual historical events. How could they? They neatly forgot, for instance, the disparities between ethnic groups living side by side in the same country. What was Jonas laughing at? By Christ, it was no laughing matter. How long, for example, did he think the Soviet Union was going to last, hm? Or what about some of these countries in the Balkans? They were only cobbled together willy-nilly anyway. ‘It’s only a matter of time,’ said Gabriel, ‘before the whole kit ’n caboodle blows sky-high. I’m telling you, Jonas: use your imagination.’
Sometimes Gabriel’s lectures took their outset in the boat itself, not least when he came to the subject of the Norwegian national character. Then he was liable to get up, duck inside one of the bunks and treat Jonas to a description of the inner skin of the hull, the pinewood lining and the outer shell overlaying this, the oak timbers; of the double frames and the ‘crooked knee-timbers’, launching off from this into expositions on everything from Viking ships and Norwegian prefabs to dragon-head patterns and the lumber trade with England. The first time Jonas came across the name of Colin Archer was in the middle of a discourse on the stave church at Lom.
Polar Opposite of the Nervous System
Every programme in the Thinking Big series generated sacks of letters to the editors of newspapers all over Norway as if an entire nation had suddenly rediscovered the art of putting their thoughts into writing, and the longer the series ran, the bigger the pile of letters grew. Most of those who wrote in were, of course, positive, and indeed in some cases praised it to the skies, thanking Jonas Wergeland in superlatives for opening their eyes to these unique individuals and in the process giving them a renewed self-confidence and pride in being Norwegian. A few correspondents were, however, more critical, and the programme which provoked the greatest volume of disappointed and irate letters was that on Fridtjof Nansen. ‘It is quite outrageous,’ wrote one viewer, speaking of course ‘on behalf of many’, ‘that a television programme about Fritjof Nansen, our national hero, should not say one word about, nor show one picture of the Fram, Colin Archer’s masterpiece of a vessel, this Columbus egg which was the absolute prerequisite for Nansen’s greatest triumphs. To present a profile of Nansen’s life without including the Fram is like profiling Ole Bull without his violin.’
And precisely because so many Norwegians had such a fixed idea, an almost stylized, romanticized image of Nansen, Jonas Wergeland’s biggest problem had been how to use the prism inside his head to refract and break up the powerful light emitted by Nansen and thus arrive at the spectrum or the story which would reveal more clearly than anything else all the facets and the depths of his character, some less well-known aspect, preferably having nothing to do with crossing icy wastes on skis, or polar bears or cheering crowds on the quayside at Christiania. And Jonas found this story: that of a man who stood on a chill plain and wept in front of a group of mothers.
But there was also a simpler explanation for the absence of anything to do with Nansen’s polar endeavours: Jonas Wergeland hated snow and ice. He hated skiing. So, even though he had to shoot some scenes by the river Glomma in the south-east of the country in wintertime, this was still less off-putting than having to film on location a lot further north.
The programme’s key scene, for those who may not remember it, depicted an incident which took place during the horrific famine in Soviet Russia in 1921, the most terrible disaster since the Black Death and a situation which became truly precarious after a pitiless drought-ridden summer left the valley of the Volga and large parts of the Ukraine utterly parched, putting twenty million people — some reports said thirty-five million — under threat of death by starvation. Fridtjof Nansen, who was already involved in relief work with prisoners of war and refugees, undertook to lead the rescue mission, for one reason because, as he said, it was his duty, and because he knew he could help, he had faith, he was in fact a land apart, accepted by all the parties involved, and this is what brings him — Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian in a broad-brimmed hat, in the wake of his famous speech to the League of Nations assembly in which he appealed to the most elementary humanitarian instincts and deplored their dismissive attitude — into the very midst of that heartrending tragedy on the banks of the Volga where, despite all the Russian intriguing, over the next couple of years he would be instrumental in saving the lives of possibly twelve to thirteen million people while being decried by heartless individuals, his fellow Norwegians among them, for aiding the Bolsheviks. Fridtjof Nansen, in Norway regarded primarily as a sportsman of sorts, but in Europe as a nation in himself, travels from district to district, observing the situation, while on the steppes the winter begins to make itself felt; he sees how people first slaughter dogs and cats and, when that source dries up, eat the thatch from the roofs of their outhouses or pulverized bones and horses’ hooves; in some places they resorted to the graveyards, digging up bodies simply in order to have something in their stomachs, everywhere he looks there are wasted faces and children with swollen bellies. Fridtjof Nansen, hard-bitten polar explorer, travels on, from place to place; around him people are eating grass and earth and it is here, in a small village on the banks of the Volga that Nansen finds himself surrounded by mothers lifting their children up to him to let him see how famished they are, and he has to turn them away, because there is not enough bread to go round; it is standing here, in his heavy overcoat with the fur collar and the familiar broad-brimmed hat, here, faced with these mothers with their starving children in their arms and no food to give them, that he breaks down and dissolves into tears. And this was the scene which Jonas Wergeland spun out and spun out, shots of the powerful body shaken by sobs, the valiant hero and the tears streaming and streaming.
When it came to the regular spot when Jonas stepped onto the set to talk to his central character, in this case it was more to offer comfort, since Nansen, in the shape of Normann Vaage, was so distressed that Jonas’s tentative inquiries as to what he had written about the Eskimos and how he felt about having an asteroid called after him, were simply dismissed as if they had nothing to do with him. By centring everything around this scene Jonas also managed to bring out an aspect of Nansen’s character which he felt that a lot of people overlooked: his melancholia, his introversion, his depressive personality. In Jonas Wergeland’s version of Nansen’s story, tears took the place of skis.
It must also be said that at no time have more people in Norway shed tears at one and the same time as when this programme was shown. Not because the images deliberately set out to elicit such a reaction, but because in its simple and fundamental clash between the moral obligation and the agonizing sense of impotence, it had something of the same heart-rending effect as the pictures from the horrendous famine in Ethiopia and Somalia in the eighties — and this despite the fact that it was a dramatized incident from a distant chapter in history.