IN LATE DECEMBER 1843, A FEW MONTHS SHORT OF HIS sixteenth birthday, Henrik Ibsen left Skien on the coastal ferry Lykkens Prøve, debarking four days later in Grimstad, a small town on the south coast of Norway. Winter that year was particularly severe – the newspaper in nearby Arendal reported temperatures of minus 10–11 degrees Réamur in his first week, and a north-westerly gale that brought with it 3 feet (1 m) of snow. Two ships sank off the coast with heavy loss of life. Ibsen had come to take up a post as assistant to the local apothecary, a man named Reimann. He was wearing his confirmation pontificalia and his luggage consisted mainly of a large number of books. His hopes at this stage were divided between the ambition to become a doctor and the dream of becoming a painter.
Charged with being Ibsen’s surrogate father as well as his employer, Reimann was to prove a second unsatisfactory male role-model for the youth. Already heavily in debt by the time Ibsen joined him, during his brief, troubled period operating as an apothecary, Reimann had a tendency to escape from his problems into drink. Perhaps it was these early experiences of ineffective father-figures that contributed to the low opinion of men characteristic of so many of Ibsen’s works.
His pay at Reimann’s was poor, the food merely sufficient, the living accommodation cramped. The ground floor consisted of two rooms, the Reimann family’s sitting room and the dispensary itself, which also functioned as a post office. Upstairs were three connecting bedrooms. The Reimanns and their youngest children slept in one, Henrik in the next with the three older boys, and the two household maids, Marie Thomsen and Else Sofie Jensen, in the third. The door between the two outer rooms was left open at nights in cold weather, as the maids had no stove of their own and needed to share the heat from the adjacent room. When the night-bell rang, Ibsen would attend to the customer, pulling on his dressing-gown and passing through their room to descend the steep staircase to the dispensary. For someone of Ibsen’s reserved nature such a lack of privacy must have been distressing. Yet for the next six years he was compelled to live ‘in the open’ like this. The effect on his personality was profound. In time it turned the need for privacy into an incurable pathology.
Grimstad was in many ways similar to Skien, although with 800 inhabitants it was less than half the size. Most of its young men went to sea once they left school, and even the meanest wage-earner would invest some part of his savings in a trading ship. The streets were narrow, poorly lit and without sewage – the gutter ran down the centre of the main street. There was no mains water-supply, and water had to be drawn from wells, either public or private. During his first two years there, Ibsen’s life was lonely and uneventful. He immersed himself in the work, spending his time preparing adhesive tape, heating up valerian root, and acquiring a basic knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs. He had not initially been enthusiastic about the job; but with the coming of spring, he warmed to the task and wrote to his friend Poul Lieungh in Skien that he was ‘extremely well content, and have never regretted coming here. Reimann is very good to me and does everything possible to encourage my interest in the work, which was not great to begin with’. During this period his pleasures were solitary. On his Sundays off he would either row out to nearby Maløya to collect herbs, or climb in the local hills with his paintbox and paint landscapes. At night he studied, hoping to pass the university matriculation exam which would allow him to take the so-called ‘Norwegian’ medical exam, a sort of university degree without Latin. Often he would stay up reading and writing until two in the morning.
Between working for Reimann and pursuing his own studies, young Ibsen remained an unknown quantity for the youth of Grimstad. On the few occasions on which he did venture out into company, he was obliged to participate in pastimes and amusements that cannot have brought him much pleasure. These included arm-wrestling and primitive weight-lifting contests with local boys. His solitary ways and introspective nature made him an object of suspicion for the young working class, and he was often ducked in the snow. The local girls nicknamed him Spætus, ‘Tich’. He found the company of older people more congenial. One companion of this early period was Mina Wahl, a Danish woman nine years his senior, who worked as governess for the local parish priest and who shared with Henrik an interest in landscape painting. Another was Svend Fjeldmand, also an immigrant into the community, a serious-minded man in his late forties who helped out in the shop, chopping ingredients and washing bottles. He and Henrik sometimes walked over to the cemetery at Fjære on Sundays.
With the maids in the house, there developed an enforced intimacy. The kitchen maid, Marie Thomsen, remembered that in his unhappiest moments Ibsen would complain of his father’s neglect, and lament that he felt he would never find his rightful place in the world. Such confidences aroused maternal instincts in the women. The nanny Katrine made him a dressing-gown. He clashed often with the sharp-tongued Marie Thomsen, but as quickly as the tempers flared they would subside again. Able to observe the youth at close quarters, the maids could see for themselves that there was substance to his claims to be different. His capacity for study impressed them, as did his artistic talent. The Reimanns too were impressed by his paintings and hung them on the walls of the house.
The other maid in the house was Else Sofie Jensen, known as Sofie. At twenty-eight, she was ten years older than Henrik, and by the standards of the time an old maid. Like him, she was from a family that had come down in the world. Her grandfather was Christian Lofthus, a Norwegian landowner who, in the 1780s, had agitated against the exploitation of local people by the Danish king’s agent and led a number of minor insurrections, which ended with his arrest and imprisonment in Akershus, where he died in 1797. Ibsen later tried to write a novel based on Lofthus’s story. Whether as the result of a sustained relationship, or simply in an unplanned moment, Henrik and Else Sofie became lovers early in 1846. She fell pregnant, and in the summer went home to her parents’ house in Børkedalen, east of Lillesand, where she gave birth to a son on 9 October. Ibsen never saw her again, nor did he ever see his son. Following a grudging admission of paternity, he was ordered by county resolution to contribute to the upkeep of the boy, christened Hans Jakob Henriksen, until he reached the age of fourteen. It was an obligation Ibsen struggled to meet. In his twenties, as his debts mounted, he was at one point sentenced to a term of hard labour in a debtor’s prison in Kristiania (Oslo), a fate from which only the intervention of friends saved him.
No surviving letter of Ibsen’s, nor any interview with his friends, contemporaries and family members, contains any reference to the existence of this son; nor was Hans Jakob mentioned in any biography of Ibsen until more than forty years after the great dramatist’s death. The shame and the need to keep the incident hidden intensified an already secretive nature and nurtured that obsession with nemesis which became the chief characteristic of his greatest art. Much of the energy that fuelled his subsequent career as a dramatist came from the tension between a sense of having fallen from grace, and a fierce determination to prove that he had not fallen from grace at all. In its final manifestation it became a need to reform society, to provoke it into becoming the kind of society that would have punished neither himself, nor his lover, nor their son, with the burden of secrecy and shame that spoiled so much of the joy of life for all three of them.
Ibsen’s Ghosts, the play that follows, uses Ibsen’s own retrospective technique to describe what might have happened had these ghosts from his own past suddenly reappeared to haunt him at the height of his fame.