FIRST SIGHT OF NORWAY
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY
MY first sight of Norway, three weeks ago, was of the ragged islands and long rocks that fringe the south-west coast. My next was of the unromantic airport of Stavanger in faltering rain. There was brown grass and no snow at Stavanger. I began to feel disappointment, and then doubt. But soon afterwards, on the way to Oslo, we were over the high snow mountains which rose fold after fold beneath us, the thin clear sunlight beams reflected on their slopes. These sunbeams were horizontal. You had the illusion that they were propelling or supporting the aircraft as it hovered rather than flew above this landscape of total snow. Then, in their turn, the snow mountains gave place to mile after mile of dark-grey pine-forests, with the long loops of white lakes here and there. There were clearings in which houses and barns stood at right angles to one another like the oblong farmsteads I had read of in Hamsun's Growth of the Soil. Ski-tracks and sled-tracks were clearly visible, curving from door to door. Even from the air this landscape gave an impression of profound silence, and later, when I had been on foot Into such forests, I realised that this impression was correct.
As we came down at Gardemoen, fifty kilometres north of Oslo, the sun was sinking. The colours in the sky began to change to jade-green and to violet—one of the manifold permutations of that startling northern daylight which, interpreted by contemporary Norwegian painters, has produced a palette that the uninitiated foreigner might judge exciting but inexact. As the Oslo bus crawled along the ice-bound roads, lamps were being lit in the small wooden houses and the village shops. Children were slithering about on skis, grown-up people were trudging briskly back to their evening meal. These wayside glimpses gave me a first sense of the speed of the Norwegian winter scene. The landscape may be still and silent and locked in snow, but the human figures in it glide swiftly, nonchalantly back and forth. The lighted interiors of the houses on the way to Oslo filled one with an overpowering curiosity.
Architectually, the city of Oslo is not beautiful, but it may be rated so for its superb situation. With the Oslo Fjord as its water-front, with snow-covered hills above and behind it, and lying under the Norwegian sky which is itself one of this country's greatest beauties, Oslo is a fine place. Most of all, it is an intensely endearing city: the old National Theatre faces the ugly Storting across the trees of the Studenterlund, where the statues of Ibsen and Bjornson, Holberg and Wergeland stand. Up above, at the top of Karl Johan, the long, flat palace stares down upon the city centre from a hill. There are old restaurants in Oslo, streets of architecture which we should dub Victorian, a few remaining wooden houses of the period after the Napoleonic wars, one quarter which is not unlike Georgetown in Washington, and other districts filled with painted blocks of modern flats. "I always get a living- room feeling when I come to Oslo" the son of the great Bjornson once remarked. I soon found this to be the sensation that Oslo gives. Even in its over-crowded post-war condition, which means that rooms in most private flats and houses are requisitioned for lodgers, life in Oslo retains a marked originality, resilience and charm.
One of the main charms of this capital, of course, is the speed with which you can leave it. You take an electric train, travel a distance no greater than that from Notting Hill to Marble Arch, and you are high up in the forested hilltops of Frogneseteren or Holmenkollen. It is this ease of escape which makes everyday life for everyday people so enjoyable in Oslo. After offices, shops or factories have closed, people take their skis and go off into the forests for as many hours under the pine-trees as they like, or they can go skating on the illuminated rinks which lie like shining alabaster dishes on the hillside below you, as you sit in the restaurant at Frogneseteren, looking down over Oslo's sparkling lights. This opportunity for free enjoyment, this balance between work and Nature, partly accounts for the strong and refreshing impression of democracy which you get in Norway. In a country in which there are now few rich, there are also no slums, and almost no poor : or, at any rate, to be. poor in Oslo is not as crippling and destructive as to be poor in London, Paris or New York.
The most one can record after two weeks in a strange country is the impact it has made upon oneself. The impact of Norway is an extraordinarily vigorous and violent impact, for it is a nation of extreme physical and mental vitality, and of an optimism and courage which even the dangers of the present political situation cannot damp. The faces in the streets are sturdy, healthy faces, with here and there a pale and thoughtful countenance which might come straight from an Ibsen play. There is an elasticity in people's walk and in their move- ments: the berry-red wool caps and scarves of the children—one curious result of enemy occupation, when to wear red became a sign of solidarity and was forbidden by the Germans—seem to symbolise the gaiety and hopefulness of post-war Norwegian life. In Oslo, in- tellectual vigour is considerable. In spite of the heresy that its heyday is over, the old National Theatre mounts a succession of finely acted plays both old and new—Ibsen, of course, and Strindberg, but also Wilde, Tennessee Williams and Synge. There are several first-rate bookshops, filled with new Norwegian, English and American books. There are excellent intellectual periodicals.
In architecture, above all in painting, there is great enterprise and vigour, supported in both these cases by a thoroughly justified, even aggressive, self-confidence. The rage for fresco painting—for the serious decoration of factories, schools, restaurants— is epidemic all over Norway. The uncompleted new Town Hall of Oslo, a massive building of brick-coated concrete which towers over the Oslo Fjord, is at the moment seething with creative activity. Excellent concerts are given in the Aulla, decorated by Munch, and these the royal family (who, in Norway, patronise the arts) assiduously attend. Oslo, in fact, is the capital of a country in renascence.
The sense of Norwegian national consciousness seems indeed to have been strengthened, though not of course reborn, in the war. Young architects are no longer willing to design American-Colonial or mock-Corbusier houses for their clients. Like the young Norwegian painters, they draw inspiration from essentially Nor- wegian things—from the old country-houses and farms, from the motifs to the Viking ships in Professor Bragger's museum at Bygdey, or the houses, house-interiors, pictures and sculpture in the great Folk-Museum nearby. • The preservation of the old wooden farms—some of them dating back nine hundred years—is now general in Norway. It was started at Lillehammer, the home town of Sigrid Undset, a place amongst those I have seen in these last weeks. There is a calm and self-confidence about these old houses (which are furnished with their original furniture) which gives one a very clear conception of the simple and sound traditions, the ancient roots, of contemporary Norwegian life. It is charac- teristic that there is also an admirable modern picture gallery in Lillehatnmer.
Grieg once applied to his own musical aims a remark made by Ibsen about his plays. "I want to build homes for the people," said Ibsen, "in which they can be happy and contented." This seems to epitomise the trend of modern Norwegian government and life. In spite of the severe material shortages and of the dangers of foreign politics, there can be few European countries in which the people are able to feel so happy and contented as they seem to be in Norway to- day. There are certainly few countries in which a stranger on a first short visit can be made to feel so genuinely, so passionately, at home.
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