November issue

Was it Steinbeck or was it Hemingway? Or was it actually neither of the two? Won-dering what I am talking about? Read on for a mini scoop. Every year around Lucia, Swedish newspapers tell the story of how the Swedish Lucia once managed to scare a Nobel Laureate in Literature out of his wits. And each year there is speculation on which literary giant it was and whether the story is at all true. All Nobel Prize winners stay at Stock-holm?s Grand Hotel (that you can read about on page 30). As the prize ceremony takes place on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel?s death, the winners also get to experience the Lucia celebration that takes place on December 13. Many of them have no idea what Lucia is all about so they are taken by surprise when they are woken up by young voices singing Santa Lucia and white-clad maidens serving them coffee and buns. The memory of Lucia with candles in her hair is probably one of the most exotic memories they bring home with them from Sweden. But for one Nobel Laureate in 1930, the Lucia experience, exotic as it may have been, was less than pleasant. The Ameri-can author Sinclair Lewis was a heavy drinker and he had reportedly also suffered from bouts of delirium. Nobody knows exactly what went through his mind when he was woken up on a dark morning by a white-clad blonde with candles in her hair and the sounds of a melancholic song about driving out the darkness in the world with light (it was lucky he did not understand the words). What we do know is that Lewis panicked big time. He screamed out loud and hid his head under the blankets as Lucia and her attendants made a quick retreat. It was really embarrassing, said my mother. She was the Lucia. Fluent in English, German and French, she was at that time the secretary to Mr Segerstr娬e, the legendary head of Grand Hotel. As my mother was also pretty, she was the natural choice for Grand Hotel?s Lucia for several years in a row. I still have autographed copies of books by Pearl S Buck, Eugene O?Neill and John Gals-worthy that she received from the authors. But there is nothing in that collection from Sinclair Lewis. Whenever the story about the author who was scared by the Lucia is told in Swedish papers it is connected to either Ernest Hem-ingway (1954) or John Steinbeck (1962). But now you know that it took place already in 1930.