Interlude Notes

1. ‘To stop the rats getting up’

Rattus norvegicus is known as the Norwegian rat from an early misapprehension that it originated in Norway. Also known as the common, street, sewer, barn, brown or wharf rat. Where brown and black rats occupy the same habitat, in this instance an apartment block, the black rats will tend to live on the upper floors while the brown rats seek the lower levels. Brown rats were long thought to be a major source of bubonic plague and the probable cause of the Black Death. In Ibsen’s 1894 play Little Eyolf, an old woman known as the Rat Wife arrives at the Almers’ house asking if there is anything ‘gnawing away in the house’ and offering to lead the rats away to drown in the fjord. The Almers tell her they have no need of her services. Their crippled son Eyolf, however, becomes fascinated by the woman and is drawn to follow her down to the water, where it is he who drowns.

2. ‘Tell me, did you know my husband in Grimstad?’

While living and working in Grimstad, Ibsen spent much of his free time painting. A watercolour of the local harbour is among the few survivals of this interest. He also wrote Rypen i Justedal (‘The Grouse in Justedal’) under an early nom de plume, Brynjolf Bjarme. Although he announced it on the title page as being in four acts, he never got further than the middle of the second act. The fragment is set in a remote part of Norway in the years immediately after the Black Death, which by the middle of the fourteenth century had wiped out over half the population of the country. It is based on a legend concerning a number of families in the Sogn district of central Norway who secluded themselves in the Jostedal valley, in an attempt to escape the ravages of the plague. Some years later a group of travellers passing through the valley found only dead bodies on the farms they encountered. At the most remote of these, they saw footsteps that led away and up into the mountains. Following them, they discovered the only surviving member of the community, a young girl who had reverted to a feral existence and could speak only three words: Mor, vetle rjupa (‘Mother, little bird’). Nine years later he made another attempt to use the legend as the basis for a libretto to be called Fjeldfuglen, ‘The Mountain Bird’. Only fragments of it survive. The tale of the feral girl contined to haunt Ibsen. The wild hermit girl Gerd, in his great breakthrough play Brand from 1866, sounds a strong echo of her.

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The harbour at Grimstad, c. 1850. A painting attributed to Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen Museum, Oslo.

3. ‘Sigurd. He’s a diplomat.’

During their first year in Italy, in Ariccia, while Ibsen was working on Brand, his family were poor and lived an austere life, which in some ways reflected the domestic life of Brand, Agnes and little Alf that Ibsen was describing in his play. Suzannah was the disciplinarian in the family, ensuring her husband sat down at his desk for work each day, making sure that he was left undisturbed, and raising their son Sigurd herself, without the aid of a nanny. When she had to go out and leave the child on his own she would place a wad of cotton wool on the floor and tell Sigurd that he was on no account to pass beyond it until she was back. In later life, Sigurd Ibsen often recalled that wad of cotton wool, and how he would stare at it as though hypnotized until his mother returned and raised her spell.

The boy had something of his father’s nature, a fierce mixture of the rebellious and the submissive. He would sometimes give way to impulses that called for him to push the pot plants off the window sill down into the street below. Once, when travelling with his parents, he was compelled to wear a sailor’s hat which he detested. In the carriage taking them down to the harbour he threw it away; it was retrieved. On board the ship he threw it into the water; someone rowed out and rescued it. Completing the final leg of the journey by train, he was at last able to get rid of it by hurling it through the open window of the railway carriage.

Sigurd showed the same qualities of disciplined boldness in adult life as a diplomat in the Norwegian-Swedish Foreign Office based in Stockholm, and then later in Austria and the United States; but he became the object of resentment in certain quarters for the way in which his career seemed to profit from his father’s great celebrity. Leaving the diplomatic service in 1890, he campaigned for the establishment of a chair in the new discipline of Sociology at the University of Kristiania, and towards the end of the decade he delivered a series of lectures on the subject that were well attended but failed to convince the university board of his fitness to head the new department. He was instead made Director General in the country’s Department of the Interior with responsibility for building up a Foreign Office. This was at a time when the Norwegian campaign for independence from Sweden, which had been gathering pace over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, began its final acceleration towards the drama of 1905.*

Norway’s independence finally brought to an end the associations and separations set in train 500 years earlier by the Kalmar Union, in 1397. During the nineteenth century, from the chaos surrounding the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the transfer of sovereignty in Norway from Denmark to Sweden, the Norwegians had emerged with a constitution of their own that gave its parliament powers of self-regulation very similar to those handed to the devolved parliaments of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s that were intended to kill nationalism ‘stone dead in the water’. Norway in the 1890s enjoyed all the freedoms of independence except a Foreign Office and consular service of its own. Sigurd Ibsen’s brief was to build up a Norwegian Foreign Office, with the establishment of an independent consular service as a secondary demand. He wrote articles for the newspaper Dagbladet highlighting the failings of a joint diplomatic service, and was opposed by supporters of a continued union, both sides using the newspaper columns as a forum for debate in a way that remains characteristic of the Scandinavian way of doing things, with all aspects of important public matters being extensively articulated and discussed on the way to reaching a conclusion.

Very often the contributors to these debates were prominent writers. Having abolished the aristocracy in 1821, Norwegians in the nineteenth century turned increasingly to poets and writers as leaders of opinion. The first of these dikterhøvdinger, or poet chieftains, was the poet Henrik Wergeland, whose long campaign to remove the opening paragraph of the constitution that prohibited Jews and Jesuits from entering Norway finally succeeded in 1851, six years after his death at the age of thirty-seven. The mantle then passed to the playwright, short-story writer and poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Ibsen’s great friend, rival and almost exact contemporary, a more extroverted and charismatic orator and public man than Ibsen, whose greater ethical power made itself felt through work rather than through speeches. The value of these dikterhøvdinger was that their insight and intelligence were respected without being binding in the old way of a formal aristocracy.

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Sigurd Ibsen. Wikimedia Commons.

Sigurd Ibsen was in favour of an independent Norway, but not fanatically so. He was a cosmopolitan who had lived most of his life abroad and been educated at the universities in Munich and Rome. His daily exposure in Germany and Italy to the colonies of expatriate artists, writers and thinkers from Denmark, Norway and Sweden resident in these cities made him a natural pan-Scandinavian, with little of that mixture of aggression and patriotic fervour with which most of his fellow-countrymen, less well-travelled and experienced in the ways of the world, viewed the prospect of life as an independent nation. In 1903, at a time when the clamour for independence in the country was becoming deafening, he was appointed Norwegian prime minister in Stockholm. The issue of a Norwegian consular service appointed and run from Norway was raised and flatly rejected by the Swedes, at which point Sigurd realized the complete inevitability of the dissolution of the union. His way forward – calling for further discussions between the two governments, another general election in Norway, amendments to the Norwegian constitution that would ensure the legality of the secession and, crucially, the offer of the crown of Norway to a Bernadotte member of the Swedish royal family as a way of appeasing the Swedes – was completely at odds with the momentum for immediate action that was sweeping Norway. There was no place for him in the new Norwegian government formed in March 1905 by Christian Michelsen, and despite the valuable groundwork done by Sigurd Ibsen in arguing the need for independent foreign and consular services, he found himself pushed out into a political wilderness from which he never returned.

On 7 June 1905, the Norwegian parliament passed a unanimous resolution declaring that Oscar II was no longer King of Norway and that the union of Norway and Sweden was dissolved. In August the issue was put to the country in a referendum, in which 368,208 people voted for the dissolution and just 184 against. Women were not eligible to vote, but a quarter of a million of them signed a petition that also called for an end to the union. The Swedish Army began preparing an invasion of Norway. The Norwegians responded by sending armed forces to protect the borders in the east of the country. Russia, Sweden’s only supporter among the great powers, was fatally distracted by its war with Japan and the domestic Revolution of 1905, while Great Britain warned Sweden not to attempt an invasion, sending a warship to Kristiania to guarantee the peace. Sweden was left with little option but to accept the situation, and did so formally in talks held in Karlstad in October. In a second referendum, Norwegians voted by an overwhelming majority to reject republicanism in favour of a monarchy, and the crown was offered to the Danish Prince Carl, who was given the name Håkon VII, picking up the thread Norwegian patriots and historians believed had been dropped at Kalmar in 1397, following the death in 1380 of Håkon VI, the last king of a truly independent Norway.

Sigurd Ibsen, condemned by the demands of his father’s calling to be a man without roots, his patriotism real enough but insufficiently driven for the needs of his fellow countrymen, made a mournful attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps and establish himself as a dramatist. His first play, Robert Frank (1914), was performed at the National Theatre and translated into several languages; a second, entitled Erindringens tempel (The Temple of Remembrance) in 1917 did less well. Inevitably, Sigurd was compared to his father as a dramatist and found wanting. After the First World War, he and his wife and young son spent most of their time abroad, in Italy and Germany. In 1920, he bought a villa in the southern Tyrol, not far from Gossensass, where he had lived as a boy.

Sigurd died of cancer on 14 April 1930. His son Tancred went on to become one of Norway’s most outstanding film-makers. Among the twenty-four films he directed was the first Norwegian talkie, a 1931 comedy entitled The Great Christening. Of the two theatres at the Oslo Cinemateket in Dronningens gate, one is named ‘Tancred’ after him. The other commemorates his wife, ‘Lillebil’, an actress.

4. ‘Tell me about the investiture. Did you speak to the King?’

Ibsen’s (true) story of his exchange with Oscar II of Sweden-Norway on the subject of the king’s preference for a lightweight early drama to the revolutionary tones of the late-period Ghosts sounds a faint echo of an entry in one of Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals, in which the philosopher describes a royal reception in Copenhagen and a meeting with Queen Caroline of Denmark in the course of which she told the philosopher that she had read his ‘Either and Or’ but failed to understand it. Kierkegaard gallantly accepted the blame for this failure; but he had noticed the slip and knew that the king had noticed it too, and that he was watching him. Kierkegaard wrote that Caroline’s mistake was ‘the kind of thing seamstresses etc. say’ and carefully avoided catching the king’s eye for the next few moments. Caroline would have found more exalted company than Kierkegaard’s seamstresses in Ibsen who, on the basis of Brand and The Wild Duck in particular, was so often charged with having been influenced by Kierkegaard, and whose standard response was that he had read little of the Dane and understood even less. No doubt, Ibsen was being disingenuous, as great writers tend to be in regard to their influences. Michael Meyer, who was a personal friend of Graham Greene, once told me that Greene was a great admirer of Knut Hamsun’s novels, Pan especially, and yet one searches the indexes of Greene biographies in vain for any reference to this influence.

The fame Ibsen enjoyed in his own lifetime was that of a lay monarch, a status tacitly recognized by the Swedish king. While he remained able to do so, Ibsen much enjoyed walking in the Queen’s Garden, a private section of the royal palace located directly opposite his apartment in Arbiens gate. One Tuesday afternoon he and his masseur, a man named Arnt Dehli, crossed the road only to find the gate to the park locked. Ibsen had failed to realize that the queen was in residence, and that on such occasions the park gate was always kept locked. As soon as the matter was brought to the attention of the king, Oscar ordered a key to be specially cut for Ibsen so that he might come and go in the park as he pleased.

5. ‘They had dressed him up in evening dress – like the doctor – top hat, morning coat, the lot.’

Jæger’s story derives from an account given by Francis Bull, which Bull heard from his father Edvard, Ibsen’s personal doctor during the last years of his life. A contemporary of Ibsen’s, the phenomenally prolific Rudolf Muus, author of 286 novels, none of which made his fortune, tells a related story in one of his many non-fiction books, Gamle Kristianiaminder (‘Memories of Old Kristiania’), a book about eccentrics in old Oslo. Among his subjects is a barber named Fredriksen, who worked in the Grønland district of the city and who occasionally traded on his strong resemblance to Henrik Ibsen to pretend that he actually was the great man. Muus describes one particular evening that began in a mood of reserved nostalgia but which became more and more animated as the drinking wore on, until presently Fredriksen-Ibsen was picking fights and insulting everyone in the room. Drunk themselves, the other guests responded in kind and a brawl ensued, which had to be broken up by the police. A sketch by Gustav Lærum recalls an occasion on which Fredriksen again dressed up as Ibsen and entered the bar of the Grand Hotel in central Oslo at about the time the dramatist usually showed up for his daily drink. Graciously acknowledging the greetings and curious stares of the other patrons, he took his seat and was still sitting there when the real Ibsen entered the premises. Muus tells us only that Ibsen ‘looked surprised and furrowed his brows indignantly’.

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Henrik Ibsen glares at his impersonator, the barber Fredriksen, in this drawing of their close encounter at Grand Hotel, Oslo sometime in the 1890s. From Rudolf Muus’ Gamle Kristianiaminder.

6. ‘Our women generally, not just members of the union but women generally, regard you as their champion.’

Ibsen’s role in the creation of the widespread perception of Scandinavian societies as especially advanced in the equality of the sexes is beyond dispute. Through female characters including Nora Helmer, Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel and Fru Alving, he focused, with a respectful insistence, on the equality of women with men at the same time as he insisted on their difference from men. For Ibsen the sexes were equal but different. By following the advocacy of the Danish critic Georg Brandes, that a modern play should concern itself with a discussion of modern problems, that it should talk about what people are talking about and be in effect an extended exploration of stories of everyday life that might appear in the daily newspaper, he developed an accessible and popular form of drama that became the structural and thematic model for some of the most important dramatists of the twentieth century, from George Bernard Shaw to Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Sweden’s Lars Norén.

If Ibsen in many ways shaped the future development of Norwegian society through his plays, the same can hardly be said of August Strindberg, that other great nineteenth-century Scandinavian dramatist, whose influence on twentieth-century dramatists came close to rivalling that of Henrik Ibsen. From an outsider’s point of view, the only thing the two had in common was that extremism that is so characteristic of the most celebrated Scandinavian artists, perhaps in itself an expression of the colossal effort it took to break free from the pressure to conform in small and what were then remote societies. (Although, on a visit last year to the Strindberg Museum at Drottninggatan 85, ‘The Blue Tower’, his last address in Stockholm, I was moved to see that it was Strindberg’s habit to keep his pens, pencils, spectacle cases and ink bottles arranged around his blotting pad in neat and almost military formation, exactly as Henrik Ibsen did in Arbiens gate.) Strindberg found a natural opponent in Ibsen and was passionately opposed to the view of women expressed in the plays of Ibsen’s later maturity, A Doll’s House in particular: he attacked Ibsen’s shattering play about a woman who leaves home and family in search of her true self in a short story Et dockhjem (A Doll’s House), and tried to confound its sympathies in a five-act play of his own, Herr Bengts hustru (Herr Bengt’s Wife), first published in 1882, six years after Ibsen’s play.

Margit, the ‘wife’ of Strindberg’s title, is a woman of noble birth whose parents have died and who is about to enter a convent. In the nick of time she meets and falls in love with a wealthy squire, Herr Bengt. The day after their wedding, Bengt’s financial situation undergoes a dramatic change for the worse. Unwilling to burden his wife with their troubles, he says nothing to her, and concentrates on restoring their fortunes through hard work. In due course they start a family. One day Margit notices that her rose-bushes are wilting. She sends the estate workers to a distant well to fetch water for them. A storm approaches, threatening the crops, and Herr Bengt is distraught to learn that Margit has sent the workforce away on such a footling errand. They quarrel. Bengt comes close to hitting her. Margit duly petitions for a divorce. She allows a childhood friend to pay court to her. Then she learns that it was to protect her and their child that Bengt kept quiet about their money troubles. She considers suicide but at the last moment her maternal instincts take over and she realizes she cannot abandon the child. Instead she asks Bengt to forgive her and the couple resolve to make a fresh start. Strindberg had positioned friends in strategic locations around the theatre on the drama’s opening night, to ensure its enthusiastic reception; but the professional critics were divided. Some complained that the dramaturgy was feeble and the final scene melodramatic, as Margit at last sees Bengt’s essential nobility and decency and understands that her place is beside him. Swedish critics who hailed Strindberg’s play as superior to A Doll’s House did so on ethical rather than dramatic grounds: Strindberg’s couple talk it through. They forgive each other and pledge themselves to a future together.

Although Ibsen and Strindberg never met they were aware of the relationship between them as polar and complementary. In 1893 Ibsen bought a portrait of August Strindberg by the Norwegian painter Christian Krohg and had it hung it on the wall of his study in Arbiens gate. Fascinated by the demonic eyes, he retitled it ‘Incipient Madness’ and claimed he was unable to write a line without ‘that maniac’ staring down at him. Late in the summer of 2015 I was invited to a breakfast at the Grand Hotel on Karl Johans gate by Christian Gjelsvik, an editor at Aschehoug publishing house, to meet some Portuguese students of Norwegian literature who were visiting Oslo. He had invited me along hoping I might say something intelligent to them about Knut Hamsun. Ivo de Figueiredo, who had recently published a biography of Henrik Ibsen, was there too. That morning there was a faint air of melancholy about the large, open dining room in which a coat-stand and a small table with a top hat resting on it have, for over a century, marked the spot where Ibsen took his daily dram after returning to Norway in 1891, for it happened to be the day before this historic establishment, so important to the cultural life of Norway, closed its doors and after 141 years submitted to a ‘makeover’. At some point in the conversation about Ibsen we fell to discussing which of these two titans of the theatre we would rather spend an evening with, Strindberg or Ibsen. When my turn came I replied, without much thought, Strindberg when young, Ibsen in my old age. But then immediately thought of Strindberg’s deliriously unfettered imagination, and of how just five years before his death in 1912 he had arrived at a belief that apes are descended from humans rather than the other way round, and suddenly wasn’t so sure of my choice after all.

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Portrait of August Strindberg, by Christian Krohg, 1893. Private Collection/© O. Vaering/Bridgeman Images.

7. ‘The police handcuffed him and took him away.’

Else Sofie Jensdatter never married. While she was able to, she worked as a washerwoman, and in her later years she lived on poor relief. She died aged seventy-four, in Vestre Moland on 5 June 1892, too early to have played any part in the imagined events of this play. Her son and Ibsen’s – Sigurd Ibsen’s half-brother, Hans Jakob – worked as a smith. Hans Jakob’s first wife, Mathilde, died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty, and the couple’s only child died in infancy. He married again in 1882 but lost both this wife and his second child to a smallpox epidemic that swept Lillesand that same year. Eighteen months later, he married for a third time, to Ida Gurine Olsdatter. For most of his life, Hans Jakob struggled with alcoholism. When he fell off the wagon, he would go on a binge, taking with him what was said to be his proudest possession, his birth certificate, and show it around in the bars in the hope of being treated to a drink: he was proud of who his father was and read his plays, and, like his shadow-brother Sigurd, even wrote himself, in his case occasional verse of which one example survives, a poem in nine stanzas written especially for the Lillesand Temperance Society. As I write this now, I recall the odd fate of Henrik Ibsen’s own birth certificate, which went missing, or was sold, along with the rest of his personal belongings after he emigrated to Italy in 1864 and his property was auctioned off in his absence to meet the debts he had left behind. Not long after Ibsen’s return to Kristiania in 1891 his birth certificate reappeared, sent in the post to Sigurd by an inhabitant of Bergen, who explained in a covering letter that he had called in at a watchmaker’s to pick up a timepiece that was being repaired, and found that the paper in which it had been wrapped for protection turned out to be the enclosed document.

Hans Jakob died of cancer in Lillesand in October 1916. Of the five children he fathered with Ida Gurine Olsdatter, three died in infancy, and of the two who survived one died of tuberculosis in 1922 at the age of twenty-seven. The other, sixteen-year-old Inga Hansine Hansen, lured like any Little Eyolf by the siren song of America, was among those who boarded the Danish emigrant ship SS Norge that steamed out of Copenhagen harbour on 24 June 1904. Four days later, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the vessel hit a submerged cliff off Rockall and sank within twenty minutes. There were 795 passengers and crew on board, but lifeboat places for only 250 of them. Inga was one of the 635 men, women and children who drowned that day, the largest single loss of life on one day in Norwegian history. Danes, Swedes and numerous Russian Jews were also among the dead. One of the Norwegians who made it onto a lifeboat was a young man named Herman Portaas, who later changed his name to ‘Wildenvey’ (vil den vei – ‘will go this way’) and became the outstanding Norwegian poet of his generation. In the oscillating trajectory of my thought, I now remember reading somewhere that his marked facial resemblance to Oscar Wilde, coupled with his choice of pen-name, led to persistent rumours in Norway that he was the illegitimate son of the author of An Ideal Husband.

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Herman Wildenvey and Oscar Wilde. Wikimedia Commons.

* In the twenty-first century the Norwegian example has been used by the Scottish National Party as a blueprint for its own campaign for independence from the United Kingdom.