Sigrid Undset: The Wild Orchid
10/05/2024
"Life is disappointing." That may be the only line of dialog from Yasujiru Uzo's Tokyo Story that has remained in my memory. I recall the film pretty well visually and dramatically, but there isn't a great deal of sharp and memorable dialog in it, at least when one is hearing the Japanese and reading subtitles. In the film, the remark is made by a young woman who has already seen many of her hopes crushed.
In suggesting that the line may be the theme of this novel, I'm not giving anything away; it appears in the first chapter, and is a relatively minor disappointment. But it seems to promise more such. The orchid of the title is a flower called "gymnadenia." The protagonist of the novel, Paul Selmer, is a teenager in that opening chapter, and on a Sunday afternoon in spring he is helping his mother, Julie, with her garden.
"I'm so excited to see if anything will come of the gymnadenias I put in here last year--"
"Gymnadenia?" asked Paul. "Isn't that some kind of orchid?"
"Yes--white, with a sweet scent--I got some from Ringibu last year, from Halvdan. But you can't always be sure they'll come to anything."
Paul is filled with the promise of the flower:
Deep within him [Paul] had a feeling that the spring was something which was flowing over him, swelling from one second to the next, that it would wash over him and pass on.
"Gymadenia," he whispered softly.
A couple of months later, in July Paul returns from a trip of some weeks to find that the gymadenias have in fact done well, and his mother has put some in in his room.
There stood a little vase with some small green-looking flowers in it. Paul took it up. Frail stalks, with a few insignificant whitish little flowers growing up them. They had the faintest of scents....
He was frightfully disappointed.
The novel is not as dreary or bleak as that might suggest, in fact it's not dreary at all, but it does deal with the inevitable failure of life to live up to hopes, and just generally to evade our expectations, for better and worse.
The first thing anyone who has read Undset's most famous works, the multi-volume novels of medieval Norway Kristen Lavransdatter and Olav Audunsson (better known in English as The Master of Hestviken) will want to know is how this book compares to those. Not so very favorably, I would say. Which is not to say that this one isn't good, but it doesn't have the dramatic intensity and color of the medieval stories. That is in some degree a result of the difference between the active and harsh life of medieval Norway and the comparatively dull life of the early 20th century bourgeois.
It's a pretty straightforward story of the fairly ordinary life of Paul Selmer from adolescence until his early twenties. I don't recall that the exact date is mentioned, but the story seems to open around 1904, in what would be called in an English setting the Edwardian era. This would make Paul perhaps less than ten years younger than Undset herself, who was born in 1882, so we are seeing this period in Norway as she herself experienced it. Paul's parents are divorced, and I was a little surprised to find that the circumstance was not as unusual as I would have expected: within the first chapter or so Paul is comparing his situation to that of other children of divorce whom he knows.
His mother is an interesting character, a thoroughly progressive woman who believes that marriage, religion, and in general the conventions of society are outworn customs to which one need not and indeed should not defer. Paul is surprised to learn that it was she, and not his father, who had initiated the divorce, and it seems to have been not because she wanted to get out from under a tyrant, like Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House, but just because the situation seemed too far less than perfect. Yet like many human engines of social destruction she is herself an honest and responsible person: she is not, like so many women of our time who have freed themselves from marriage etc., always pathetically in pursuit of romance. As far as we are told, she has simply lived quietly and pleasantly with her children, supporting the family with a small printing business.
Paul has a great deal of respect and affection for Julie, and is more or less as disdainful of the old ways as she is. But he is as hard-headed a judge of her advanced beliefs as she has been of convention, and regards her general philosophy of independence and rationalism as shallow, or worse. And Paul's life, as far as we witness it here, becomes a critique not of the older bourgeois ways, but of the newer ones. He is a sort of character we encounter fairly often in 20th century literature: indifferent at best to the conventions of the preceding century, but seeing no clear alternative. He is not, however, a gloomy and alienated Prufrock type, but a lively and robust young man. He is disdainful, in what I think I can accurately call a Kierkegaardian manner, of the established Lutheran church. It is not, therefore, surprising that he becomes interested in the Catholic Church--not surprising to a reader of novels, I mean, though his type may have been pretty rare in real life.
He has a friend, a young woman named Randi (which struck me as slightly odd) who is a convert. He lives for a time in a rooming house run by a Catholic family. He becomes acquainted with a priest. When Julie and others of his family detect this interest, they are alarmed. There is a fair amount of conversation about religious matters, and it would not surprise me if some readers, especially those with no particular interest in the questions, would regard this is a novelistic flaw, a diversion from the story, and from more immediate matters of character and relationships. Well, perhaps some of these discussions are a bit too abstract or a bit too lengthy for fiction. But there is nothing more fundamentally human than the questions posed by religion.
There is one very broad sense in which this book resembles the medieval novels: it's a story of love and marriage, and a study of Christian faith. The treatment of the latter is, obviously, quite a bit different, and has to be, because of the vast psychological difference between medieval faith and modern post-Christian skepticism. And Paul's love life, which occupies a good deal of the story, is not nearly as dramatic as Kristen's or Olav's. But in the most elemental way it is still the same human drama of choices and consequences. I'll leave out any details, so as to avoid revealing too much. But he does get married, rather far into the novel, and there are reasons to believe that its sequel, The Burning Bush will reveal problems in the marriage which seem relatively mild cause for concern here. The Wild Orchid ends at the outbreak of World War I, with Paul having given up his earlier academic plans for a career running a company which sells household goods of various sorts. This is not the downfall that it might seem: he rather enjoys business and is good at it.
Another feature of The Wild Orchid which is not so much shared with the historical novels as identical to them is Undset's fascination with, and eye for, the natural world. I remember thinking, while reading one of the big books, that the way she described landscape, light, and weather seemed immensely fecund: always vivid, always detailed, never repetitive. She was, obviously, acutely sensitive to the smallest natural things and to the constantly varying conditions around them. The very first page of the book contains a long paragraph, so long that I don't want to transcribe it, in which Paul revels in the countryside he sees from a train. And these descriptions, always made with a sense of delight, are frequent.
Both The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush were written in the early '30s, after Undset's conversion and after Kristen and Olav. I wonder if Undset believed that Paul's trajectory toward genuine religious belief would be common in the disillusioned times in which she was writing. She was disappointed in that, of course--or at least I assume that by the time of her death in 1949 she could see well enough that very few people were following her lead. So perhaps the remark from Tokyo Story proves applicable after all. The future, of course, as far as we have yet lived it, would belong to Julie, not to Paul.
The translation is by Arthur Chater, who also translated The Master of Hestviken. Chater was English, and so naturally his translation of 20th century Norwegian speech comes out sounding pretty English-y. I found this just a bit disconcerting at first: would a Norwegian in 1908 call someone a bounder? But that's of course completely irrational on my part.
The edition I read is a recent reprint from Cluny Media, and it's a pleasure to read: well-made and handsome. I'm currently reading, also in their reprint, The Burning Bush, and will report on it in due course.