The Seducer

The Secretary

And so some reviewers felt that Thinking Big was actually a series of programmes on modern Norse mythology; and, certainly as far as Trygve Lie is concerned, they might have had something there, considering that, from boyhood onwards, Trygve Lie, first Secretary-General of the United Nations, had stood as an almost mythical figure in Jonas Wergeland’s life, inasmuch as Lie’s spirit seemed, as it were, to hover over the lakes around Grorud. Not only was the statesman buried just a stone’s throw from the church — every time Jonas visited his mother at the Ironmongery he also had to pass the house in Grorudveien, right opposite the woollen mill and a short walk from the station, that had been the UN Secretary-General’s home from the age of six. And naturally there hung a picture of him in Grorud School, in the dining hall — a ‘Big Brother is watching you’ sort of thing. The dining hall was a place Jonas normally associated with the constant din of yelling and screaming, with bottle tops shooting past like flying saucers and jet-propelled carrots forever whizzing through the air. The only time when things quietened down was when the deputy head suddenly yanked the door open and pointed to the picture of Trygve Lie, as if this was somehow supposed to make them feel ashamed of themselves, or bring it home to them that they would never manage to become Secretary-General of the UN by throwing food about like that. So from an early age Jonas had the idea that in global terms this was actually Trygve Lie’s role: to make sure that a crowd of hooting lads did not go around chucking bits of carrot at one another.

It very quickly became clear to Jonas Wergeland, while they were putting together the programme, that many people, Norwegians too, had rather mixed feelings about Trygve Lie, or regarded him, for some reason, as a second-rater whose appointment to the UN amounted to little more than a poor compromise. So there was no shortage of material for the regular spot in each programme which Jonas Wergeland called ‘the whisperers’: two individuals, pictured in silhouette, whispering to one another, exchanging snide remarks about the programme’s hero — a pretty common Norwegian phenomenon when you come right down to it, and one that can be studied every time, i.e. every few years or so, that a Norwegian citizen wins acclaim on the international scene. Quick as a wink, up pops some other zealous Norwegian with a green-eyed look about him, who feels it incumbent on him to tell all those who have allowed themselves to be taken in just how ludicrously undeserving of success this fellow-countryman is. If he is really lucky, there will be scores of neighbours and relations ready to provide plenty of spicy details with which to elaborate upon this assertion.

In Trygve Lie’s case there was no shortage of material. The whisperers began by having some fun with the harmless fact that Trygve Lie’s English pronunciation was little short of comedy-hour standard — their imitations of this were actually very funny. Then they turned to whispering, far more maliciously, about how Trygve Lie gave in to McCarthy’s paranoid ‘reds under the bed’ hysteria and granted the FBI access to UN headquarters, to investigate the people who worked there, before rounding off with an even softer, poisonous sequence on the blackening of Dag Hammerskjöld’s name, all presented in the form of vague rumours, interspersed with little hints and insinuations — just as in real life — where the viewers were left to fill in the gaps for themselves: ‘Didn’t he make a lot of not exactly pleasant remarks about Dag Hammerskjöld?’ — ‘Bad-mouthed him something rotten, you mean.’ — ‘The way I heard it, he called him both one thing and the other’ — ‘Oh, yes, especially the other’ — ‘And wasn’t there even some crude reference to Hammerskjöld’s sexual proclivities?’ — ‘Just because he was a bachelor’ — ‘Somebody said that Hammerskjöld had to put Lie on the carpet’ — ‘Uh-huh, and ask him to curb his imagination’ — and so on and so forth, blithely, whisperingly anonymous.

The programme’s central scene was shot in NRK’s biggest studio. Jonas Wergeland wished to concentrate on the very heart of Trygve Lie’s work: his tireless struggle to safeguard the fragile peace. At no other time in Lie’s life did this manifest itself more clearly than during a heroic 32-day tour made in April and May of 1950, during which Lie journeyed halfway around the world, to Washington, London, Paris and Moscow in order to hand over in person a document which he had written, rather grandly entitled ‘Memorandum on principles for consideration in the preparation of a twenty-year program to achieve peace through the United Nations’. In actual fact this tour more or less amounted to a personal attempt to save the UN from dying the death — the Soviet Union had already boycotted the Security Council in protest at the exclusion of communist China. Trygve Lie tried, in other words, to prevent a rift between two irreconcilable blocs, to put an end to the Cold War. A fitting task for a Norwegian, really: the battle against the cold. On the huge film set Jonas Wergeland had arranged four groups of tables and chairs, to represent the four capitals and the summit meetings held there. Lie was then trundled round the floor in a circle, sitting in a miniature aeroplane, from one group — i.e. city — to the next, and at each stop he presented his memorandum and spoke to the heads of state and their foreign ministers. The floor of the set showed the UN’s blue and white map of the world with the North Pole and, hence, Norway too, at its centre, encircled if not with a laurel wreath, then certainly with olive branches as if this were another race in which a Norwegian would win his laurels.

Trygve Lie went round and round, a wheel with a desire for peace at its hub, presenting his utopian document, ten points for achieving peace. Viewers saw how he struggled, plodding round in a circle, a sort of outsize budgie wheel, shaking hands here, shaking hands there, with President Truman, Prime Minister Atlee, Prime Minister Bidault, Generalissimo Stalin and their staff. Making the same opening remarks every time. They all listened to him, they were all most polite, they all said the same thing, they all promised to study his memorandum carefully and with the greatest interest, they all appreciated his efforts, they were all truly grateful for this initiative, they all found his observations both enlightening and useful, but even while they were smiling and nodding approvingly, they were picking holes in his suggestions: in all honesty we doubt whether these points are of any relevance vis-à-vis the current situation, no, we cannot limit the use of the Security Council’s right of veto. Trygve Lie makes amendments, adds appendices, travels on, people smile and nod approvingly, but no, a meeting of the heads of state is not, in our opinion, the most burning issue at this time, and furthermore, we do not want to have anything to do with communist China. Trygve Lie puts up with all the quibbling, the insistence upon different wording, travels on, people smile and nod approvingly, but no, such a suggestion conflicts with our interests, we must be careful not to create false illusions, Twinkle, twinkle little bat and all that, accompanied by a hail of ‘at this moment in time’ and ‘the way we see it’ and ‘the time has come’. Trygve Lie travels on, people smile and nod approvingly, but no we are afraid that we cannot go along with the idea of regular meetings of the Security Council, nor do we have any faith in the notion of having a consultative assembly to discuss the problems associated with atomic energy, we are also extremely unhappy about the way in which the UN has handled the question of colonialism. Trygve Lie travels on, circling the room, traversing a light-blue and white flag of the world, on a utopian journey in the cause of peace on which the Soviet troika of Stalin, Molotov and Visjinski make a notably large number of objections, but Lie makes change after change, deletes and appends, refuses to give in. Trygve Lie travels in a circle from one capital to the next, following the curve of the olive branches, with Jonas Wergeland inserting intermittent clips of what was being said behind Lie’s back while he was busy at another table. The Russians called him an ‘American lackey’, while the Americans believed him to be a ‘Stalinist agent’, far too ready to make concessions to the Russians. To the British he was a simple man, little better than a peasant, and they were shocked by his lack of discretion in the playing of his political role, so far removed from the understated English style of diplomacy learned on the playing fields of Eton. The cynical Frenchmen laughed outright at the whole rash initiative, this attempt to raise earnest Norwegian morality onto a global plane — and all this while the viewers were watching Trygve Lie eventually pulling off his jacket, sitting there in shirtsleeves and braces, chain-smoking, a secretary for peace, a Sisyphus from Norway, undertaking the most impossible task in the world, trying to prevent another major conflict. Trygve Lie puts his shoulder to the wheel, keeps going, looks on the bright side, calls this tour of his a voyage of discovery; Trygve Lie in his shirtsleeves and braces, the personification of the Norwegian Labour Party, sitting at the helm of the world in a plucky endeavour to turn the entire globe into one good solid social democracy.

And all the while newsreel clips were flashing across a studio wall in the background, showing how the major powers and particularly the United States and the Soviet Union were arming themselves, building warships, tanks, rockets. And more particularly how stocks of nuclear weapons were building up month by month. And when Trygve Lie returned home from his one-man peace mission, suffering from a sore throat — brought on, one might almost think, by all that talking — but feeling almost certain that he had succeeded in arriving at some sort of consensus and possibly even managed to achieve his prime aim: a meeting in the very near future of all the government leaders, he was shown standing facing this newsreel backdrop, in his shirtsleeves and braces, chain-smoking, and watching as the images suddenly exploded; in June, scarcely a month after he completed his journey for peace, the Korean War broke out. Jonas Wergeland had unearthed some pretty harrowing scenes from the war which made a fitting contrast to Trygve Lie’s dogged, but hopeless and naïve struggle for peace.

Personally, I have a bit of a soft spot for this programme, perhaps simply because so many Norwegians underestimate, or have quite simply forgotten, Trygve Lie. To me — who can take an objective view of all this — Trygve Lie is Norway in a nutshell: not some brilliant intellectual figure but an idealistic and hardworking secretary. As far as I can gather, Lie must surely have earned himself the right to be called ‘the master-builder of the UN’ — after all, who can say how the United Nations would have turned out without him and the devotion he showed to the organization as an ideal, whatever standpoints might be taken or resolutions passed. Through his efforts during the delicate construction phase, Trygve Lie had a quite crucial influence on the greatest experiment in international collaboration the world has ever known. For that alone I take my hat off to him.

Not surprisingly, this programme proved to be one of actor Normann Vaage’s greatest triumphs. He was never better than here, playing Trygve Lie as if he himself, Normann Vaage personally, would rather die than see the world plunged into another war. People who had met Trygve Lie could hardly believe their eyes, declared that Normann Vaage was Trygve Lie, completely and utterly, down to the smallest gesture, and strangest of all: Normann Vaage so immersed himself in the part that many viewers could have sworn that his ears actually grew as large and prominent as Lie’s own — a feature which seemed to emphasize the man’s ability to be a good listener. Such empathy was symptomatic of the series as a whole. The subject matter itself seemed to bring out the best in the actors. Ella Strand, who played all of the female subjects, also became immensely popular during the year in which the series was televised. Together with Normann Vaage, she made guest appearances in all sorts of other programmes and her face and name cropped up everywhere: in advertisements, newspaper profiles, women’s magazines, at trade fairs up and down the country. People fought for a glimpse of them, as if they were the actual incarnation of those Norwegians in whom the public were suddenly taking a totally new interest.

In many ways these actors confirmed Jonas Wergeland’s theory that each individual embodies a host of different personas. That all Norwegians carried these heroes within themselves, as it were, one might almost say like a set of genes.

While going through all the material on Trygve Lie, Jonas Wergeland stumbled upon a side of the man’s character of which he had been unaware: Trygve Lie had been a keen tennis player, and a pretty fair tennis player at that. As late as 1938 he had become area champion in the over-forty class, and two years prior to that he had won an international tournament held at the Jordal Stadium in Oslo. This provided Jonas with a fresh angle on Trygve Lie. Not only did they both hail from Grorud, both were also fine tennis players.