The troll in the parlour BOOKS
PATRICK ANDERSON
In April 1864 Ibsen began his twenty-seven years' exile from his native country. Like Torvald and Nora Helmer of A Doll's House, or the Chekhovian would-be sculptor Lyng- strand in The Lady from the Sea, he turned to the south. Disappointed and almost destitute, he had as much need of the sun as Agnes in fear for the health of her baby on Brand's north-facing precipice, or poor doomed Osvald crying against the endless rain at Rosenvold. As he crossed the Alps that May he echoed the sentiments of many another northerner from Winckelmann to Goethe and Heine, from Milton to Gray and Shelley : `the beauty of the south suddenly revealed itself to me, gleaming like white marble. It was to affect all my later work, even if the content thereof was not always beautiful.'
At the age of thirty-six Ibsen was a Nor- wegian nationalist recently embittered by his country's refusal to go to the aid of Denmark when its provinces of Schleswig-Holstein were attacked by Prussia. Sporadically feted as a provider of odes for festivals, he had 4Iready written a number of largely unsuccessful plays in which he echoed saga and folk-ballad as he nursed 'the great kingly thought' of a united homeland. Norway was backward, poor, smugly scattered over inaccessible fjords and linked politically with Sweden. Shocked by the cata- strophic collapse of his father's fortunes when he was eight, he had repudiated his family with the exception of his sister, Hedwig.
After six years as an apothecary's appren- tice in the barren little port of Grimstad and a brief spell at university, he had found em- ployment in the theatres first of Bergen and then of Christiania, as Oslo was then called; he had coached the actors (although too timid or proud to make many interventions), de- signed the sets (he was something of a painter) and added up the accounts. The atmosphere was stiflingly provincial, the actors too inex- perienced to undertake difficult parts and the plays available usually Danish or French. Even the Norse in which he and his fellow nationalists wrote was still unfixed and barely respectable. His Christiania appointment was at the newly founded Norwegian rival to the established 'Danish' theatre; after some years it failed. At the same time the government refused to give Ibsen the pension 'he so desperately needed.
This enormously seminal but unhappy period of youth and young manhood is now described -by Mr Michael Meyer, an Ibsen scholar who has also revitalised the translation of the plays, Till :Henrik :Ibsen : the Making of a Dramatist, -l888-18644(ItattiDavis 50s). am not 'aware that any study in such detail has hitherto appeared in English. Mr Meyer's is a patfent, thorough, well-documented work, obviously in- dispensable to the student, and it seems cavalier to add that its necessary insistence on third- rate provincial theatres and distant con- troversies, together with the polemical but otherwise uncommunicative nature of its hero, renders it a trifle dull. Ibsen could, we are told, be merry; Ibsen could even be drunk; but for his wonderful, wild humour, and his instinctive, almost animal sympathy with some of his characters (Nora's lust for macaroons, Hjalmar Ekdal's comments on his 'wavy' hair, Dr Stockmann's wearing the Mayor's hat, and so on) we have to turn to the work begun in the south.
It was now, quite simply, that Ibsen revo- lutionised European drama and incidentally achieved such international acclaim that brands of coffee and cigarettes were advertised as `a la Ibsen.' Moving away from the trivial pieces bien faites of Scribe and Sardou—in England there was little but the 'slovenly chaos' described by Granville-Barker—he turned a play into much more than a naturalistic com- ment on society, suffusing it, In the spirit of Sophocles or Shakespeare, with a vision of life. He did not, however, necessarily abandon the theatrical conventions of the play of intrigue (Krogstad's letter, the revelations about the parentage of Regina or Rebecca) any more than he dispensed with the fashionable experi- ments in realistic presentation (he went beyond these in his instructions for the mood-lighting of The Wild Duck) but he put such things to profoundly serious uses.
Ibsen was first of all a poet; the poetic Brand was his first great success and, as he himself said, 'To be a poet is to see.' Brand, Peer Gym and the last plays, especially, -cal- bodied his vision and his suffering. He was a difficult, withdraivn and, indeed, a tragically isolated person; when his rival and enemy- friend, Bjornson, scoffed that 'Ibsen is not a man, but a pen,' he could have added that this instrument probed a mass of hidden auto- biographical material, the twilight world where trolls and Vikings and puritanical pastors re- sponded to the ideas of Schopenhauer, Kierke- gaard and Nietzsche, exploring obsessions about Will and Choice and Sacrifice, posing the idea of vocation against the guilt-ridden legacy of the past. Few escape like Ellida Wangel the dark pressures which normally burden the bourgeois family in the form of sexual error, love rejected for reasons of duty or security, financial skulduggery, hereditary disease. Mrs Alving understands but cannot escape her ghosts; Rosmer and Rebecca are saturated with the infection of Rosmersholm; Hedda is her father's daughter; ruined Ekdal hunts tame rabbits as substitutes for the nine bears he killed in the forests of Hoidal; the Borkman mansion is a tomb. The best that can happen to most of them is that necessity is chosen and sacrifice willed. 'One must have something to create from, some life-experience. The author who has not that, does not create: he only writes books.' Thus Ibsen, who admitted - -that he was 'somewhat akin to' Solnes and that 'Brand. is myself in my best moments.'
This work led on to Strindberg, whom Ibsen admired, and to Chekhov, who claimed him as his favourite dramatist. The young James Joyce, preparing for a life of silence, exile and cunning away from a nationalism which seemed to him almost as parochial as Nor- way's, learned Norse in order to read and communicate with the master. But the ruthless honesty with which Ibsen explored his vision could be misinterpreted by a generation per- haps naively rebellious and eager for enlighten- ment, a generation which repeated Rebecca West's words, 'I wanted to play my part in the new day that was dawning—to have a share in all the new ideas.' Since this honesty, although essentially tragic, exploded a good deal of middle-class morality, it could be hailed by the Ibsenites as a beacon in the search for progress.
When in 1891 Ghosts was attacked by the London critics as 'an open-drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged,' while its author was said to resemble 'one of his own Norwegian ravens emerging from the rocks with an insatiable appetite for decayed flesh,' the Ibsenites were ready to take up the challenge. They, after all, read the plays in hopelessly inadequate' trans- lations and were quite unaware of-the clear, tough, pungently humorous and ironic nature of the Norse tongue: as Professor M. C. Bradbrook reminds us, 'Swift, Burns and Emily Brontë shaken up together in a bag might pro- duce something resembling Ibsen.' They thus tended to ignore the concentrated and subtly interlocking expressiveness or 'poetry' of 'the language (notably what amounts to a duet between Solness and Hilda in Act 2 of The Master Builder), just as they overlooked the sig- nificant relationship of each play to the entire corpus. What mattered to them was that they had discovered a Moral Teacher willing to discourse on the problems of the age: the New Woman, the New Morality. 'The slam of Nora's front door' was the thing, as it 'brought down behind it in dust the whole Victorian family gallery.' But if the restless wives of Wimbledon and Walsall and Dids.bury could identify with sweet, sly, flirtatiously feminine Nora, whose volte-face is perhaps not entirely convincing and whose-exit is at least quiet and inconclusive, they can scarcely have found Rebecca, Hedda and Hilda to be proponents of Fabian Socialism.
Ibsen always provides strong scenes and splendid acting parts but our interests today are captured, not so much by the plays 'that made him famous with his contemporary public—plays with ahigh degree of social com- ment and satire, such as Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People, or the elaborately demonstrated theses of A Doll's House and Ghosts—as by the poetic comedy of Peer Gynt or the phosphorescent, slightly suspect charm and the shifting symbolism of The Wild Duck, together with the plays that followed it. Shaw said that Shakespeare put ourselves on the stage but Ibsen added our situations. One has only to seed O'Neill or Tennessee Williams or Beckett to realise that 'our situations' break down into the basic facts of youth and age, dream and illusion, the anguish of being alive. Naturalism has always been restless; the tranche de vie has demanded psychological depth and then a tower or a cherry orchard; prosaic lives need the explanation of poetry. Ibsen looms behind all this, and Mr Meyer's meticulous study instructs us, to the extent that this is possible with a genius, in what loomed behind Ibsen.
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