Catholic Culture Needs More Champions

Here is a sad fact: The only English-language biography of arguably the greatest Catholic novelist of all time is a self-published mess, one that misses much of the greatness of its subject. Is Catholic culture so irrelevant that we can’t have a decent, professional biography of Sigrid Undset?

Don’t apologize if you’ve never heard of The Art of Compassion: A Biography of Sigrid Unset by Yola Miller Sigerson. The author apparently began her research about 1980 and did not publish until 2006, when she or her heirs gave up on finding a mainstream publisher and went the Xlibris route. I say apparently because this well-researched but amateur end product has no author note or bibliography; it doesn’t even have an index. How could you take it seriously? At Goodreads, the social networking site for book fans, The Art of Compassion did not register a single rating in five years, until mine. I gave it 2 stars out of 5, only because the book is essential reading if you care about Undset.

Sigerson’s author bio notes that she was “the lighting designer for the Original Ballet Russes when Sol Hurok brought it to America.” It lists other credits, mostly theatrical, but the only qualification Sigerson seems to have for writing this biography is a passion for her subject. The big problem for Catholics is, the author has an interest in women’s studies, which is okay, and a pronounced antipathy to the Catholic Church, which is not.

How could she understand the most daring, revolutionary thing Undset ever did: becoming a Catholic in a country, Norway, with fewer than 3,000 Catholics and a state religion, Lutheranism, that considered her conversion a scandal?

The problems for an English-language biographer are two: the Norwegian language and a reticent family. Most of the scholarship about Undset and her two Nobel Prize-winning masterpieces, Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, is Norwegian, and the work (including some of Undset’s own writings) has not been translated. Meanwhile, Sigerson notes that Undset’s heirs were wary of talking about her: “At Undset’s request, her family has, until recently, protected her private life from public scrutiny, but I have been fortunate in establishing excellent relationships with surviving relatives and friends.” Based on sketchy footnotes, these interviews mostly occurred in 1981 and 1982.

There are a thousand priceless details here, from the author’s childhood in Norway to Undset’s later years when she was exiled to America during World War II, then returned home, tired, alone, worn out, living only until 1949.

Childhood details: Her father was an archaeologist whose PhD thesis was titled “The Iron Age in Northern Europe.” Sigrid, Sigerson writes, “was a precocious child and [her father] lost no time in beginning her training as an archaeologist. Before she had much of a vocabulary, she could say ‘blunt-edged axe’ and ‘shaft-hole axe,’ and he allowed her to play with his priceless artifacts.” Why do these details resonate? Here’s why.

Papa died when Sigrid was only eleven, and Undset grew up fascinated with early Norse and Icelandic history. Her two great works imagine a time when the old Norse ways were giving way to Catholic culture. In Kristin Lavransdatter, the purest, most touching relationship is that between Kristin and her father, Lavrans. Kristin’s fall from grace results from disavowing her father’s values. In The Master of Hestviken, a tetralogy, the first book is titled The Axe, and the ancestral battle-axe Kinfetch remains a powerful, threatening, though largely quiet background symbol to the entire four-book set.

Adult details: Thanks to Sigerson’s research and writing, it was possible for me to imagine two of my favorite female Catholics sitting down to tea, with much to talk about. From 1940, when she escaped the German occupation of Norway through Finland, Moscow, Siberia, Japan, and San Francisco, Undset spent most of the next five years in Brooklyn. In New York, she developed a friendship with Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker. In a letter to her sister, Undset provided a vivid portrait of the remarkable American activist:

“She is not in the least bit beautiful, but in her simple, nearly poor little party dress she was one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. Heroine and Saint, that is what one feels when one is close to her. She is worth the whole trip to America just to have met her again.”

Day was a great admirer of St. Catherine of Siena, the subject of Undset’s last book, a biography published posthumously. Sigerson’s discussion of Catherine of Siena is typical of the way she treats Catholic subjects throughout the book. Sigerson seldom substantiates her claims with direct quotations; she simply draws conclusions. So with Catherine:

“[Undset] had begun to question so many of her strongly felt and oft-stated theories [means what?], that her biography of St. Catherine began to take an unexpected direction. . . . With her strength ebbing, disillusioned in the power of religion to influence human behavior, . . . fearing that governments, education, and political maneuvering wouldn’t help, there was nowhere to turn for solutions. Humanity was hopelessly headed towards its destruction, and the only thing one could do was to pray for some kind of magical [magical?!] intervention from unknown sources. Catherine of Siena was a simple illiterate girl [not true, she learned to read at a young age, according to Undset’s bio] who had devoted herself to the poor and was supposed to have succeeded in uniting the Church . . . The descriptions of her highly erotic ecstasies [I have read Catherine of Siena—what erotic ecstasies?!], her epileptic seizures, and the miracles she was supposed to have performed [emphasis mine], miracles which the greatest thinkers and most important leaders of the Church were incapable of creating [yes, and?]—had changed what was supposed to have been a biography of a saint, to a feverish and often unintelligible final statement from a broken, sexually undernourished, disappointed woman.”

Get the idea? Raise Undset on high for 270 pages and then write her off as broken, sexually undernourished, and disappointed? With biographers like Sigerson, what author needs critics?

Read this book cover to cover if you care about Undset and her work, as I do. Then pray for a better biography.