ALL writing is hard. Creative writing is intellectual drudgery of the hardest kind. Creative innovation, particularly on a fundamental scale, requires a still more exceptional degree of concentration and energy. To spend one’s entire working life continually advancing the creative frontiers in one’s art implies a level of self-discipline and intellectual industry which few writers have ever possessed. Yet this was the consistent pattern of Henrik Ibsen’s work. It is hard to think of any writer, in any field or age, who was more successfully devoted to it. He not only invented modern drama but wrote a succession of plays which still form a substantial part of its entire repertoire. He found the Western stage empty and impotent and transformed it into a rich and immensely powerful art form, not only in his own country but throughout the world. Moreover, he not only revolutionized his art but changed the social thinking of his generation and the one that came after. What Rousseau had done for the late eighteenth century, he did for the late nineteenth century. Whereas Rousseau persuaded men and women to go back to nature and in so doing precipitated a collective revolution, Ibsen preached the revolt of the individual against the ancien régime of inhibitions and prejudices which held sway in every small town, indeed in every family. He taught men, and especially women, that their individual conscience and their personal notions of freedom have moral precedence over the requirements of society. In doing so he precipitated a revolution in attitudes and behaviour which began even in his own lifetime and has been proceeding, in sudden jumps and spasms, ever since. Long before Freud, he laid the foundations of the permissive society. Perhaps not even Rousseau, and certainly not Marx, has had more influence over the way people, as opposed to governments, actually behave. He and his work form one of the keystones of the arch of modernity.
Ibsen’s achievement is all the more remarkable if we take into account the double obscurity of his own background. Double because he was not only poor himself but came from a small, poor country with no formal cultural tradition at all. Norway had been powerful and enterprising in the early Middle Ages, 900-1100 AD; then a decline set in, especially after the death of her last wholly Norwegian king, Olaf IV, in 1387; by 1536 it was a province of Denmark and remained so for nearly three centuries. The name of the capital, Oslo, was changed to Christiania, to commemorate a Danish ruler, and all the higher culture was Danish-poetry, novels and plays. From the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, Norway got what was known as the Eidsvoll Constitution,1 which guaranteed self-government under the Swedish Crown; but not until 1905 did the country have a separate monarchy. Until the nineteenth century, Norwegian was more a rustic, provincial dialect than a written national language. The first university dated only from 1813 and it was 1850 before the first Norwegian theatre was built in Bergen.2 In Ibsen’s youth and early manhood, the culture was still overwhelmingly Danish. To write in Norwegian was to isolate oneself even from the rest of Scandinavia, let alone the world. Danish remained the language of literature.
The country itself was miserable and dejected. The capital was a small provincial town by European standards, with only 20,000 inhabitants, a muddy, graceless place. Skien, where Ibsen was born on 20 March 1828, was on the coast, a hundred miles to the south, a barbarous area where wolves and leprosy were still common. A few years before, the place had been burnt down by the carelessness of a servant-girl, who was executed for it. As Ibsen described it in an autobiographical fragment, it was superstitious, eerie and brutal, sounding to the roar of its weirs and the screaming and moaning of its saws: ‘When later I read of the guillotine, I always thought of those sawblades.’ By the town hall was the pillory, ‘a reddish-brown post about the height of a man. On the top was a big round knob that had originally been painted black…From the front of the post hung an iron chain, and from this an open shackle which looked to me like two small arms ready and eager to reach out and grab me by the neck…Underneath [the town hall] were dungeons with barred windows looking out on the marketplace. Through those bars I saw many bleak and gloomy faces.’3
Ibsen was the eldest of five children (four sons, one daughter) of a merchant, Knud Ibsen, whose ancestors were sea-captains. His mother came from a shipping family. But when Ibsen was six his father went bankrupt, and thereafter was a broken man, cadging, bad-tempered and litigious-Old Ekdal in The Wild Duck. His mother, once beautiful, a frustrated actress, turned inwards, hid herself away and played with dolls. The family was always in debt and lived mainly on potatoes. Ibsen himself was small and ugly and grew up under the additional shadow of rumoured illegitimacy, said to be the son of a local philanderer. Ibsent intermittently believed this, and would blurt it out himself when drunk; but there is no evidence it is true, After a humiliating childhood, he was sent to the gloomy seaport of Grimstad, as an apothecary’s assistant, and there too his luck was poor. His master’s business, long failing, toppled over into bankruptcy.4
Ibsen’s slow ascent from this abyss was an epic of lonely self-education. From 1850 he worked his way through university. His privations, then and for many years after, were extreme. He wrote poetry, blank-verse plays, drama criticism, political commentary. His earliest play, the satire Norma, was not produced. The first to get on the stage, the tragedy Cataline, also in verse, was a failure. He had no luck with the second to be staged, St John’s Night, His third play, The Warrior’s Barrow, failed in Bergen. His fourth, Lady lngar of Ostraat, in prose, was put on anonymously, and that too failed. The first work of his to attract favourable notice, The Feast at Solhaug, was a trivial, conventional thing in his view. If he followed his natural inclinations, as in the verse-drama Love’s Comedy, it was classified as ‘immoral’ and not put on at all. Yet he gradually acquired immense stage experience. The musician Ole Bull, founder of the first Norwegian-language theatre in Bergen, took him on as house author at £5 a month, and for six years he was a theatrical dogsbody, working on sets, costumes, box office, even directing (though never acting; it was his weakness that he lacked confidence in directing actors). The conditions were primitive: gas-lighting, available in London and Paris from about 1810, did not arrive until the year he left, 1856. He then had another five years at the new Christiania theatre. By prodigies of hard work he inched his way to proficiency at the craft, then began to experiment. But in 1862 the new theatre went bankrupt and he was sacked. He was now married, deep in debt, harassed by creditors, depressed, drinking heavily. He was seen by students lying senseless in the gutter, and a fund was set up to send ‘the drunken poet Henrik Ibsen’ abroad.5 He himself was constantly writing petitions, which make pathetic reading today, to the Crown and Parliament for a grant to travel in the south. At last he got one, and for the next quarter-century, 1864-92, he led the life of an exile, in Rome, Dresden and Munich.
The first hint of success came in 1864, when his verse-drama The Pretenders got into the repertory of the revived Christiania theatre. It was Ibsen’s custom to publish all his plays first in book form, as indeed did most nineteenth-century poets, from Byron and Shelley onwards. Actual productions did not take place, as a rule, until years later, sometimes many years. But slowly the number of copies of each play printed and sold rose: to 5000, 8000, then 10,000, even 15,000. Stage presentations followed. Ibsen’s celebrity came in three great waves. First came his big verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, in 1866-67-at the time Marx was publishing Capital. Brand was an attack on conventional materialism and a plea to follow the private conscience against the rules of society, perhaps the central theme of his life’s work. It aroused immense controversy when it was published (1866) and for the first time Ibsen was seen as the leader of the revolt against orthodoxy, not just in Norway but in all Scandinavia; he had broken out of the narrow Norwegian enclave.
The second wave came in the 1870s. With Brand he became committed to the play of revolutionary ideas but he reached the systematic conclusion that such plays would have infinitely more impact if presented on stage than if read in the study. That led him to renounce poetry and embrace prose, and with it a new kind of theatrical realism. As he put it, ‘verse is for visions, prose for ideas.’6 The transition, like all Ibsen’s advances, took years to accomplish, and at times Ibsen appeared to be inactive, brooding rather than working. A playwright, compared to a novelist, does not actually spend much time in writing. The number of words even in a long play is surprisingly small. A play is conceived not so much logically and thematically as in spasms, individual theatrical incidents, which become the source of the plot, rather than developments from it. In Ibsen’s case, the pre-writing phase was particularly arduous because he was doing something entirely new. Like all the greatest artists, he could not bear to repeat himself and each work is fundamentally different, usually a new step into the unknown. But once he had decided what he wanted to happen on stage, he wrote quickly and well. The first important fruits of his new policy, Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), coincided with the breakdown of the long mid-Victorian boom and a new mood of anxiety and disquiet in society. Ibsen asked disturbing questions about the power of money, the oppression of women, even the taboo subject of sexual disease. He placed fundamental political and social issues literally on the centre of the stage, in simple, everyday language and in settings all could recognize. The passion, anger, disgust but above all interest he aroused were immense and spread in widening circles from Scandinavia. Pillars marked his breakthrough to the audiences of central Europe, A Doll’s House into the Anglo-Saxon world. They were the first modern plays and they began the process of turning Ibsen into a world figure.
But, being Ibsen, he found it hard to settle down to the role of social-purpose playwright, even one with an international following. The third great phase in his progress, which again occurred with accumulating speed after years of slow gestation, saw him turning away from political issues as such and towards the problem of personal liberation, which probably occupied his mind more than any other aspect of human existence. ‘Liberation,’ he wrote in his notebook, ‘consists in securing for individuals the right to free themselves, each according to his particular need.’ He constantly argued that formal political freedoms were meaningless unless this personal right was guaranteed by the actual behaviour of people in society. So in this third phase he produced, among others, The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892) and John Gabriel Borkman (1896), plays which many found puzzling, even incomprehensible at the time, but which have become the most valued of his works: plays which explore the human psyche and its quest for freedom, the unconscious mind and the fearful subject of how one human being gets control over another. It was Ibsen’s merit not merely always to be doing something fresh and original in his art but to be sensitive to notions only half-formulated or even still unexplored. As the Danish critic and his onetime friend Georg Brandes put it, Ibsen stood ‘in a sort of mysterious correspondence with the fermenting, germinating ideas of the day…he had the ear for the low rumbling that tells of ideas undermining the ground.’7
Moreover, these ideas had an international currency. Theatregoers all over the world were able to identify themselves or their neighbours with the suffering victims and tortured exploiters of his plays. His assaults on conventional values, his programme of personal liberation, his plea that all human beings should have the chance to fulfil themselves, were welcomed everywhere. From the early 1890s, when he returned home to Christiania in triumph, his plays were increasingly performed all over the world. For the last decade of his life (he died in 1906) the former chemist’s assistant was the most famous man in Scandinavia. Indeed, along with Tolstoy in Russia, he was widely regarded as the world’s greatest living writer and seer. His fame was spread by writers like William Archer and George Bernard Shaw. Journalists came thousands of miles to interview him in his gloomy apartment in Viktoria Terrace. His daily appearances at the café of the Grand Hotel, where he sat alone, facing a mirror so he could see the rest of the room, reading the newspaper and drinking a beer with a cognac chaser, were one of the sights of the capital. When he entered the café each day, punctual to the minute, the entire room stood up and raised their hats. None dared to sit down again until the great man was seated. The English writer Richard le Gallienne, who like many people came to Norway expressly to witness this performance, as others went to Yasnaya Polyana to see Tolstoy, described his entrance: ‘A forbidding, disgruntled, tight-lipped presence, starchily dignified, straight as a ramrod…no touch of human kindness about his parchment skin or fierce badger eyes. He might have been a Scotch elder entering the Kirk.’8
As Le Gallienne hinted, there was something not quite right about this great humanist writer, already embalmed in popular esteem and public honours in his own lifetime. Here was the Great Liberator, the man who had studied and penetrated mankind, wept for it, and whose works taught it how to free itself from the fetters of convention and stuffy prejudice. But if he felt so strongly for humanity, why did he seem to repel individual people? Why did he reject their advances and prefer to read about them only through the columns of his newspaper? Why always alone? Whence his fierce, self-imposed isolation?
The closer one looked at the great man, the odder he appeared. For a man who had stamped on convention and had urged the freedoms of bohemian life, he now struck a severely orthodox figure himself; orthodox, perhaps, to the point of caricature. Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Marie Louise, observed that he had a little mirror glued into the inside crown of his hat, which he used to comb his hair. The first thing many people noticed about Ibsen was his extraordinary vanity, well brought out in Max Beerbohm’s famous cartoon. It was not always thus. Magdalene Thoresen, his wife’s stepmother, wrote that when she first saw the young Ibsen in Bergen, ‘he looked like a shy little marmot…he had not yet learned to despise his fellow human beings and therefore lacked self-assurance.’9 Ibsen first became a fussy dresser in 1856 after the success of Solhaug. He adopted the poet’s frilly cuffs, yellow gloves and an elaborate cane. By the mid-1870s, his attention to dress had grown but in a more sombre mode, which fitted in well with the increasingly shuttered facade he presented to the world. The young writer John Paulsen described him in the Austrian Alps in 1876 thus: ‘Black tailcoat with order ribbons, dazzling white linen, elegant cravat, black gleaming silk hat, gold spectacles…fine, pursed mouth, thin as a knife-blade…I stood before a closed mountain wall, an impenetrable riddle.’10 He carried a big walnut stick with a huge gold head. The following year he got his first honorary doctorate from Uppsala University; thereafter he not only indicated his wish to be addressed as ‘Doktor’ but wore a long black frock coat, so formal that the Alpine peasant girls thought him a priest and knelt to kiss his hand on his walks.11
His attention to dress was unusually detailed. His letters contain elaborate instructions about how his clothes are to be hung in the wardrobes and his socks and underpants put away in chests. He always polished his own boots and would even sew on his own buttons, though he allowed a servant to thread the needle. By 1887, when his future biographer Henrik Jaegar visited him, he was spending an hour each morning dressing.12 But his efforts at elegance failed. To most people he looked like a bosun or sea-captain; he had the red, open-air face of his ancestors, especially after drinking. The journalist Gottfried Weisstein thought his habit of pronouncing truisms with impressive certitude made him resemble ‘a small German professor’ who ‘wished to inscribe on the tablets of our memory the information, “Tomorrow I shall take the train to Munich.” ’13
There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous. Even his most uncritical admirers found it hard to defend. He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them. Ibsen had a certain skill in drawing and often sketched these tempting baubles. His first surviving cartoon features the Order of the Star. He would draw the ‘Order of the House of Ibsen’ and present it to his wife.14 What he really wanted however were decorations for himself. He got his first in the summer of 1869 when a conference of intellectuals-a new and, some would argue, sinister innovation on the international scene-was held in Stockholm to discuss language. It was the first time Ibsen had been lionized: he spent an evening drinking champagne at the royal palace with King Carl XV, who presented him with the Order of Vasa. Later, Georg Brandes, on his first meeting with Ibsen (they had long corresponded) was amazed to find him wearing it at home.
He would have been still more astonished to discover that Ibsen, by the next year, was already soliciting for more. In September 1870 he wrote to a Danish lawyer who dealt with such matters, asking his help in getting him the Order of Danneborg: ‘You can have no idea of the effect this kind of thing has in Norway…A Danish decoration would much strengthen my standing there…the matter is important to me.’ Two months later he was writing to an Armenian honours-broker who operated from Stockholm but had links with the Egyptian court, asking for an Egyptian medal which ‘would be of the greatest help to my literary standing in Norway’.15 In the end he got a Turkish one, the Medjidi Order, which he delightedly described as ‘a handsome object’. The year 1873 was a good one for medals: he got an Austrian gong and the Norwegian Order of St Olaf. But there was no relaxation in his efforts to amass more. To a friend he denied he had ‘any personal longing’ for them but ‘when these orders come my way I do not refuse them.’ This was a lie, as his letters testify. It was even said that, in the 1870s, in his quest for medals, he would sweep off his hat when a carriage passed by bearing royal or noble arms on its side, even if there was no one in it.16
That particular story may be a malicious invention. But there is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits’.17 All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated. Sometimes he wore them even in broad daylight. Returning to Norway by ship, he put on formal dress and decorations before going on deck when it docked in Bergen. He was horrified to see four of his old drinking companions, two carpenters, a sexton and a broker, waiting to greet him with shouts of ‘Welcome old Henrik!’ He returned to his cabin and cowered there until they had gone.18 He was still at his tuft-hunting even in old age. In 1898 his anxiety to get the Grand Cross of Danneborg was so great that he bought one from a jeweller before it was formally awarded to him; the King of Denmark sent him a jewelled specimen in addition to the one actually presented, so he ended up with three, two of which had to be returned to the court jeweller.19
Yet this international celebrity, glittering with his trophies, gave an ultimate impression not so much of vanity, let alone of foolishness, but of malevolent power and barely suppressed rage. With his huge head and thick neck he seemed to radiate strength, despite his small stature. Brandes said ‘he looked as though you would need a club to overpower him.’ Then there were his terrifying eyes. The late-Victorian period seems to have been the age of the fierce eye. Gladstone had it to the point where he could make a Member of Parliament forget what he was trying to say when it was turned upon him. Tolstoy likewise used his basilisk eye to strike critics dumb. Ibsen’s gaze reminded people of a hanging judge. He instilled fear, said Brandes: ‘there lay stored within him twenty-four years of bitterness and hatred.’ Anyone who knew him at all well was uneasily aware of a volcanic rage simmering just below the surface.
Drink was liable to detonate the explosion. Ibsen was never an alcoholic or even, except briefly, a drunkard. He never drank during periods of working and would sit down at his desk in the morning not only sober and un-hung-over but wearing a freshly pressed frock coat. But he drank socially, to overcome his intense shyness and taciturnity, and the spirits which loosened his tongue might also inflame his rage. At the Scandinavian Club in Rome his post-prandial outbursts were notorious. They frightened people. They were particularly liable to occur at the endless testimonial and celebratory banquets which were a feature of the nineteenth century all over Europe and North America but were particularly beloved of Scandinavian man. Ibsen appears to have attended hundreds of them, often with disastrous results. Frederick Knudtzon, who knew him in Italy, tells of one friendly dinner at which Ibsen attacked the young painter August Lorange, who was suffering from tuberculosis (one reason why so many Scandinavians were in the South). Ibsen told him he was a bad painter: ‘You are not worthy to walk on two feet but ought to crawl on four.’ Knudtzon adds: ‘We were all left speechless at such an attack on an unoffending and defenceless man, an unfortunate consumptive who had enough to contend with without being banged on the head by Ibsen.’ When they finally rose from dinner, Ibsen was unable to stand and had to be carried home.20 Unfortunately the drink which knocked his legs from under him did not necessarily still his savage tongue. When Georg Pauli and the Norwegian painter Christian Ross carried Ibsen home, wearing all his medals, after another celebration dinner in Rome, he ‘showed his gratitude by incessantly giving us his confidential opinion on our insignificance. I, he said, was “a frightful puppy” and Ross “a very repulsive character”.’21 In 1891 when Brandes gave a big dinner in his honour at the Grand Hotel in Christiania, Ibsen created an ‘oppressive atmosphere’, shook his head ostentatiously during Brandes’ generous speech in praise of him, refused to reply to it, saying merely, ‘One could say much about that speech,’ and finally insulted his host by declaring he ‘knew nothing’ about Norwegian literature. At other receptions at which he was the chief guest he would turn his back on the company. Sometimes he was so drunk he would just say, repeatedly, ‘What, what, what?’
It is true that Ibsen was sometimes, in his turn, the victim of Viking intoxication. Indeed a book could be written describing Scandinavian banquets which went wrong during this period. At a particularly solemn one given for Ibsen at Copenhagen in 1898, the principal speaker, Professor Sophus Schandorph, was so drunk that his two neighbours, a bishop and a count, had to hold him up, and when one guest giggled he shouted: ‘Shut your——mouths while I speak.’ On the same occasion Ibsen was bear-hugged by an appreciative but drunken painter and shouted angrily, ‘Take this man away!’ When sober, he extended no latitude to behaviour of which he was habitually guilty. Indeed he could be very censorious. When a girl, dressed as a man, was illicitly smuggled into the Rome Scandinavian Club, he insisted the member responsible be expelled. Any kind of behaviour, whether pompous or antinomian, was liable to unleash his fury. He was a specialist in anger, a man to whom irascibility was a kind of art form in itself. He even treasured its manifestations in nature. While he was writing his ferocious play Brand, he later recorded, ‘I had on my table a scorpion in an empty beer glass. From time to time the brute would ail. Then I would throw a piece of ripe fruit into it, on which it would cast itself in a rage and inject its poison into it. Then it was well again.’22
Did he see in the creature an echo of his own need to get rid of the rage within himself? Were his plays, in which anger usually simmers and sometimes boils over, a vast therapeutic exercise? No one knew Ibsen intimately, but many of his acquaintances were aware that his early life and struggles had left him with a huge burden of unappeasable resentment. In this respect he was like Rousseau: his ego bore the bruises for the rest of his life and he was a monster of self-centredness in consequence. Quite unfairly, he held his father and mother responsible for his unhappy youth; his siblings were guilty by association. Once he left Skien he made no effort to keep in touch with his family. On the contrary: on his last visit to Skien in 1858, to borrow money from his wealthy uncle, Christian Paus, he deliberately did not visit his parents. He had some contact with his sister, Hedvig, but this may have had to do with unpaid debts. In a terrifying letter he wrote in 1867 to Bjornstjerne Bjornson, his fellow writer, whose daughter later married Ibsen’s son, he wrote: ‘Anger increases my strength. If there is to be war, then let there be war!…I shall not spare the child in its mother’s womb, nor any thought nor feeling that may have motivated the actions of any man who shall merit the honour of being my victim…Do you know that all my life I have turned my back on my parents, on my whole family, because I could not bear to continue a relationship based on imperfect understanding?’23 When his father died in 1877, Ibsen had not been in touch with him for nearly forty years. Defending himself in a letter to his uncle, he cited ‘impossible circumstances from a very early stage’ as ‘the principal cause’. By this he really meant that they had fallen, he was rising, and he did not want them to drag him down. He was ashamed of them; he feared their possible financial demands. The richer he became, the more able to help them, the less inclined he was to make any contact. He made no effort to assist his crippled younger brother, Nicolai Alexander, who eventually went to the United States and died in 1888, aged fifty-three: his tomb recorded, ‘By strangers honoured and by strangers mourned.’ He likewise ignored his youngest brother, Ole Paus, by turns sailor, shopkeeper, lighthouse-keeper. Ole was always poor but was the only one to help their wretched father. Ibsen once sent him a formal testimonial for a job but never gave him a penny nor left him anything in his will: he died in an old people’s home in 1917, destitute.24
Behind the formal family there was a yet more carefully concealed and painful tale. It might have come from one of Ibsen’s own plays-indeed in a sense the whole of Ibsen’s life is a furtive Ibsenesque drama. In 1846, when he was eighteen and still living over the chemist’s shop, he had an affair with the housemaid employed there, Elsie Sofie Jensdatter, who was ten years older. She conceived and bore a son, born 9 October 1846, whom she called Hans Jacob Henriksen. This girl was not an illiterate peasant, like Marx’s Lenchen, but from a distinguished family of yeoman farmers; her grandfather, Christian Lofthuus, had led a famous revolt of farmers against Danish rule, and had died, chained to the rock, in the Akershus Fortress. The girl, like Lenchen, behaved with the greatest discretion. She went back to her parents to have the child and never sought to get anything out of the father.25 But under Norwegian law, and by order of the local council, Ibsen was forced to pay maintenance until Hans Jacob was fourteen.26 Poor already, he resented bitterly this drain on his meagre salary and never forgave either the child or the mother. Like Rousseau, like Marx, he never acknowledged Hans Jacob, took any interest in him or gave him the smallest voluntary assistance, financial or otherwise. The boy became a blacksmith and lived with his mother until he was twenty-nine. She went blind, and when her parents’ house was taken away from them, she went to live in a hut. The son scrawled on the rock ‘Syltefjell’-Starvation Hill. Elsie too died destitute, aged seventy-four, on 5 June 1892, and it is unlikely that Ibsen heard of her death.
Hans Jacob was by no means a savage. He was a great reader, especially of history, and travel books. He was also a skilled carver of fiddles. But he was drunken and shiftless. He came sometimes to Christiania, where those who knew his secret were struck by his extraordinary resemblance to his famous father. Some of them planned a scheme to dress Hans Jacob in clothes similar to Ibsen’s own, and sit him down, early, at the table in the Grand Hotel which the great man habitually occupied, so that when he arrived for his morning beer he would be confronted by the ocular evidence of his own sin. But their courage failed them. Francis Bull, the great authority on Ibsen, says that Hans Jacob met his father only once. This was in 1892 when the son, penniless, went to his father’s apartment to ask for money. Ibsen himself answered the door, apparently seeing his son, then forty-six, for the first time. He did not deny their relationship but handed Hans Jacob five crowns, saying: ‘This is what I gave your mother. It should be enough for you’-then slammed the door in his face.27 Father and son never met again, and Hans Jacob got nothing in Ibsen’s will, dying destitute on 20 October 1916.
Fear that his family, both lawful and illegitimate, would make demands on his purse was undoubtedly one reason why Ibsen fought them off. The penury of his early life left him with a perpetual ache for security which only the constant earning, amassing and conserving of money could soothe. It was one of the great driving forces of his existence. He was mean, as he was everything else, on a heroic scale. For money he was quite prepared to lie: considering that he was an atheist who secretly hated the monarchy, his petition to Carl XV begging for a £100 pension is remarkable: ‘I am not fighting for a sinecure existence but for the calling which I inflexibly believe and know God has given me…It rests in Your Majesty’s royal hands whether I must remain silent and bow to the bitterest deprivation that can wound a man’s soul, the deprivation of having to abandon one’s calling in life, having to yield when I know I have been given the spiritual armoury to fight.’ By this time (1866), having earned a little from Brand, he was beginning to save. It started with silver coins in a sock, then progressed to purchases of government stock. In Italy, fellow exiles noted that he set down even the smallest purchase in a notebook. From 1870 until his first stroke in 1900 he kept two black notebooks, one recording his earnings, the other his investments, which were all in ultra-safe government securities. Until his last two decades his earnings were not large, at any rate by Anglo-Saxon standards, since his plays were slow to achieve worldwide performances and were in any case ill-protected by copyright. But in 1880 he earned, for the first time, over £1000, an enormous income by current Norwegian levels. The total continued to grow steadily. So did his investments. In fact it is unlikely that any other author ever invested so large a proportion of his earnings, between one-half and two-thirds during the last quarter-century of his life. What was it all for? When asked by his legitimate son, Sigurd, why they lived so frugally, he replied: ‘Better to sleep well and not eat well, than eat well and not sleep well.’ Despite his growing wealth, he and his family continued to live in drab furnished rooms. He said he envied Bjornson because he had a house and land. But he never himself attempted to purchase any property or even his own furniture. The last Ibsen apartments in Viktoria Terrace and Arbiens Street were just as impersonal and hotel-like as the others.
All Ibsen’s apartments, however, had one unusual characteristic: they appeared to be divided into two halves, with husband and wife each arranging a separate fortress, for defensive and offensive operations against the other.28 In a curious way this fulfilled a youthful vow, since he told his earliest friend, Christopher Due, that ‘his wife, if he ever acquired one, would have to live on a separate floor. They would see each other [only] at mealtimes, and not address each other as Du.’29 Ibsen married Suzannah Thoresen, daughter of the Dean of Bergen, in 1858, after a chilly two-year engagement. She was bookish, determined and plain, but with fine hair. Her bluestocking stepmother said of Ibsen scornfully that, next to Sören Kierkegaard, she had never known anyone with ‘so marked a compulsion to be alone with himself’. The marriage was functional rather than warm. In one sense it was crucial to Ibsen’s achievement because, at a time of great despondency in his life, when his plays were turned down or failures and he was seriously thinking of developing his other talent, painting, she forbade him to paint at all and forced him to write every day. As Sigurd later put it: ‘The world can thank my mother that it has one bad painter the fewer and got a great writer instead.’30 Sigurd, who was born in 1859, always portrayed his mother as the strength behind Ibsen: ‘He was the genius, she the character. His character. And he knew it, though he would not willingly have admitted it until towards the end.’
Naturally, Sigurd portrayed the marriage as a working partnership. Others at the time saw it, and him, differently. There is a harrowing picture of the Ibsens, during the Italian years, in the diary of a young Dane, Martin Schneekloth. Ibsen, he noted, was in ‘the desperate situation’ of finding himself married to a woman he did not love and ‘no reconciliation is possible.’ He found him ‘a domineering personality, egocentric and unbending, with a passionate masculinity and a curious mixture of personal cowardice, compulsively idealistic yet totally indifferent to expressing those ideals in his daily life…She is womanly, tactless, but a stable, hard character, a mixture of intelligence and stupidity, not deficient in feeling but lacking humility and feminine love…They wage war on each other, ruthlessly, coldly, and yet she loves him, if only through their son, their poor son, whose fate is the saddest that could befall any child.’ He went on: ‘Ibsen himself is so obsessed with his work that the proverb “Humanity first, art second” has practically been reversed. I think his love for his wife has long vanished…His crime now is that he cannot discipline himself to correct the situation but rather asserts his moody and despotic nature over her and their poor, spiritually warped, terrified son.’31
Suzannah was by no means defenceless in the face of Ibsen’s granitic egotism. Bjornson’s wife quotes her as saying, after the birth of Sigurd, that there would be no more children, which then meant no more sex. (But she was a hostile witness.) From time to time there were rumours of a parting. Ibsen certainly loathed marriage as such: ‘It sets the mark of slavery on everyone,’ he noted in 1883. But, prudent and loving security, he kept his own together. There survives a curious letter from him to his wife, dated 7 May 1895, in which he hotly denies rumours that he intended to leave her for Hildur Andersen, blaming them on her stepmother Magdalene Thoresen, whom he hated.32 Ibsen was often harsh and unpleasant to his wife. But she knew how to get her own back. When he grew angry, she simply laughed in his face, aware of his inherent timidity and fear of violence. Indeed, she played on his fears, combing the newspapers for accounts of horrible but everyday catastrophes, which she passed on to him.33 They cannot have been an agreeable couple to observe together.
Ibsen had equally chilly, and often stormy, relationships with his friends. Perhaps friends is not the right word. His correspondence with his fellow writer Bjornson, whom he knew as well as anyone, and for longer, makes painful reading. He saw Bjornson as a rival, and was jealous of his early success, his extrovert nature, his cheery, kindly ways, his manifest ability to enjoy life. In fact Bjornson did everything in his power to bring Ibsen to public recognition and Ibsen’s bleak ingratitude strikes one as pitiful. Their relationship resembles Rousseau’s with Diderot, Ibsen like Rousseau doing the taking, Bjornson the giving, though there was no final, spectacular quarrel.
Ibsen found reciprocity difficult. In view of all Bjornson had done for him, the congratulatory telegram he was finally induced to send on Bjornson’s sixtieth birthday is a minimalist masterpiece: ‘Henrik Ibsen sends good wishes for your birthday.’ Yet he expected Bjornson to do a great deal for him. When the critic Clemens Petersen published a hostile review of Peer Gynt, Ibsen wrote a furious letter to Bjornson, who had had nothing to do with it. Why had he not knocked Petersen down? ‘I would have struck him senseless before allowing him to commit so calculated an offence against truth and justice.’ The next day he added a postscript: ‘I have slept on these words and read them in cold blood…I shall send them nevertheless.’ He then worked himself up again and continued: ‘I reproach you merely with inactivity. It was not good of you to permit, by doing nothing, such an attempt to be made in my absence to put my reputation under the auctioneer’s hammer.’34
But, while expecting Bjornson to fight his battles, Ibsen regarded him as fair game for satire. He figures as the unpleasant character of Stensgaard in Ibsen’s play The League of Youth, a savage attack on the progressive movement. In this monument of ingratitude, Ibsen went for all the people who had helped him with money and had signed the petition for his state grant. He took the view that anyone of prominence was a legitimate target. But he bitterly resented any similar references to himself. When John Paulsen published a novel about a domineering father with a passion for medals, Ibsen seized one of his visiting cards, wrote the one word ‘Scoundrel’ on the back and sent it, open, addressed to Paulsen at his club-the same technique the Marquess of Queensberry was to apply to Oscar Wilde in the next decade.
Virtually all Ibsen’s relationships with other writers ended in rows. Even when there was no quarrel, they tended to die of inanition. He could not follow Dr Johnson’s advice: ‘Friendships must be kept in constant repair.’ He kept them in constant tension, interspersed by periods of silence: it was always the other party who had to make the effort. He came in fact close to articulating a philosophy of anti-friendship. When Brandes, who was living in sin with another man’s wife and so was ostracized in Copenhagen, wrote Ibsen a letter complaining he was friendless, Ibsen replied: ‘When one stands, as you do’-and, by implication, ‘as I do also’-‘in so intensely personal a relationship to one’s lifework, one cannot really expect to keep one’s friends…. Friends are an expensive luxury, and when one invests one’s capital in a calling or mission in this life, one cannot afford to have friends. The expensive thing about friends is not what one does for them but what, out of consideration for them, one leaves undone. Many spiritual ambitions have been crippled thus. I have been through this, and that is why I had to wait several years before I succeeded in being myself.’35 This bleak and revealing letter exposes, as with the other intellectuals we have been examining, the intimate connection between the public doctrine and the private weakness. Ibsen was saying to humanity: ‘Be yourselves!’ Yet in this letter he was in effect admitting that to be oneself involved the sacrifice of others. Personal liberation was at bottom self-centred and heartless. In his own case he could not be an effective playwright without ignoring, disregarding and if necessary trampling on others. At the centre of Ibsen’s approach to his art was the doctrine of creative selfishness. As he wrote to Magdalene Thoresen: ‘Most criticism boils down to a reproach to the writer for being himself…The vital thing is to protect one’s essential self, to keep it pure and free from all intrusive elements.’
Creative selfishness was Ibsen’s attempt to turn the vulnerability of his own character into a source of strength. As a boy he had been horrifyingly alone: ‘an old man’s face’, said his schoolmaster, ‘an inward-looking personality’. A contemporary witnessed: ‘We small boys didn’t like him as he was always so sour.’ He was only once heard to laugh ‘like other human beings’. Later as a young man his poverty dictated further solitude: he would go out for long walks by himself, so that other guests and the servants in his lodging house would think he was out to dinner. (Pitifully, Ibsen’s meanness later forced his son to similar subterfuge; unwilling to invite other little boys to his grim home, he would tell them that his mother was a giant Negress who kept his young brother, who did not actually exist, imprisoned in a box.) Ibsen’s long, solitary walks became a habit: ‘I have,’ he wrote, ‘wandered through most of the Papal States at various times on foot with a knapsack on my back.’ Ibsen was a natural exile: he saw the surrounding community as alien at best, but often as hostile. In his youth, he wrote, ‘I found myself in a state of war with the little community in which…I sat imprisoned.’36
So it is not surprising that Ibsen chose actual exile for the longest and most productive period of his life. As with Marx, this reinforced his sense of alienation and locked him up in an intensely parochial expatriate group with its quarrels and animosities. Ibsen began by recognizing the shortcomings of his isolation. In a letter of 1858 he described himself as ‘walled about with a kind of off-putting coldness which makes any close relationship with me difficult…Believe me, it is not pleasant to see the world from an October standpoint.’ Six years later, however, he was becoming reconciled to his inability to reach out to others, writing to Bjornson in 1864: ‘I cannot make close contact with people who demand that one should give oneself freely and unreservedly…I prefer to shut up [my true self] within me.’ His solitude became creative, a subject in itself. From his earliest surviving poem, ‘Resignation’, written in 1847, until he ceased to write poetry in 1870-71, it is the underlying theme of his verse. As Brandes said, ‘it is the poetry of loneliness, portraying the lonely need, the lonely strife, the lonely protest.’37 His writing, reflecting his solitude, became a defence, refuge and weapon against the alien world; ‘all his mind and passion’, as Schneekloth said of his life in Italy, was given to ‘the demonic pursuit of literary fame’. Gradually he came to see his egotistic isolation and self-concealment as a necessary policy, even a virtue. The whole of human existence, he told Brandes, was a shipwreck, and therefore ‘the only sane course is to save oneself.’ In old age he advised a young woman: ‘You must never tell everything to people…. To keep things to oneself is the most valuable thing in life.’38
But naturally it was unrealistic to suppose that such a policy could be kept under control. It degenerated into a general hostility towards mankind. Brandes was forced to conclude: ‘His contempt for humanity knew no bounds.’ The searchlight of his hatred moved systematically over all aspects of human societies, pausing from time to time, almost lovingly, on some idea or institution which evoked his particular loathing. He hated the conservatives. He was perhaps the first writer-the scout of what was to become an immense army-to persuade a conservative state to subsidize a literary life devoted to attacking everything it held dear. (When he came back for more money, one member of the grants board, the Reverend H. Riddervold, said that what Ibsen deserved was not another grant but a thrashing.) He came to hate the liberals even more. They were ‘poor stuff with which to man the barricades’. Most of them were ‘hypocrites, liars, drivellers, curs’. Like his contemporary Tolstoy, he had a particular dislike for the parliamentary system, which he saw as the source of bottomless corruption and humbug; one reason he liked Russia was because it had none. He hated democracy. His obiter dicta as recorded in the diaries of Kristofer Janson, make grim reading.39 ‘What is the majority? The ignorant mass. Intelligence always belongs to the minority.’ Most people, he said, were ‘not entitled to hold opinions’. He likewise told Brandes: ‘Under no circumstances will I ever link myself with any party which has the majority behind it.’ He saw himself, if anything, as an anarchist, foolishly believing (as many then did) that anarchism, communism and socialism were all essentially the same. ‘The state must be abolished,’ he told Brandes, who liked to collect his views. ‘Now there’s a revolution to which I will gladly lend my shoulder. Abolish the concept of the state, establish the principle of free will.’
Ibsen undoubtedly thought he possessed a coherent philosophy of public life. His favourite saying, which he gave to his character Dr Stockmann, was: ‘The minority is always right.’ By minority, he explained to Brandes, he meant ‘the minority which forges ahead in territory which the majority has not yet reached’. To some extent he identified himself with Dr Stockmann, telling Brandes:
an intellectual pioneer can never gather a majority around him. In ten years the majority may have reached the point where Dr Stockmann stood when the people held their meeting. But during those ten years the Doctor has not stood stationary: he is at least ten years ahead of the others. The majority, the masses, the mob, will never catch him up; he can never rally them behind him. I myself feel a similarly unrelenting compulsion to keep pressing forward. A crowd now stands where I stood when I wrote my earlier books. But I myself am there no longer. I am somewhere else-far ahead of them-or so I hope.40
The difficulty with this view, which was typically Victorian in its way, was that it assumed that humanity, led by the enlightened minority, would always progress in a desirable direction. It did not occur to Ibsen that this minority-what Lenin was later to call ‘the vanguard elite’ and Hitler ‘the standard bearers’-might lead mankind into the abyss. Ibsen would have been surprised and horrified by the excesses of the twentieth century, the century whose mind he did so much to shape.
The reason Ibsen got the future, which he claimed to foresee, so badly wrong sprang from the inherent weakness of his personality, his inability to sympathize with people, as opposed to ideas. When individuals or groups were mere embodied ideas, as in his plays, he could handle them with great insight and sympathy. The moment they stepped into his life as real people, he fled or reacted with hostility. His last group of plays, with their powerful grasp of human psychology, coincided with rows, outbursts and misanthropy in his own life, and a steady deterioration in the few personal relationships he possessed. The contrast between idea and reality is reflected in most of his public attitudes. On 20 March 1888 he sent a cable to the Christiania Workers Union: ‘Of all the classes in my country, it is the working class which is nearest to my heart.’41 This was humbug. Nothing was near to his heart except his wallet. He never paid the slightest attention to working men in real life or had anything but contempt for their opinions. There is no evidence he ever did anything to help the workers’ movement. Again, he found it politic to ingratiate himself with the students. They in turn liked to honour him with torchlight processions. But his actual dealings with them ended in a furious row, reflected in a childish and absurdly long letter he wrote to the Norwegian Students Union, on 23 October 1885, denouncing ‘the preponderance of reactionary elements’ among them.42
It was the same story in his relations with women. In theory he was on their side. It could be argued that he did more, in the long run, to improve the position of women than any other nineteenth-century writer. A Doll’s House, with its clear message-marriage is not sacrosanct, the husband’s authority is open to challenge, self-discovery matters more than anything else-really started the women’s movement. He has never been excelled at putting the woman’s case, and, as Hedda Gabler showed, few have equalled him at presenting a woman’s feelings. To do him justice, he occasionally tried to help woman, as an embodied idea, in real life too. One of his drunken banquet speeches was in favour of admitting women to the Scandinavian Club in Rome: it was particularly ferocious and may not have done their cause much good-one countess in the audience fainted in terror. However, he had no patience at all with women who actually participated in the cause, especially if they were writers too. At the disastrous dinner Brandes gave to him in the Grand Hotel in 1891, he was incensed to discover he had been put next to the middle-aged woman painter and intellectual Kitty Kielland. When she ventured to criticize the character of Mrs Elvstead in Hedda Gabler, he snarled: ‘I write to portray people and I am completely indifferent to what fanatical bluestockings like or do not like.’43 His idea of hell was to attend a protracted banquet at which he was seated besides an elderly suffragette or authoress-and there were large numbers of both in all the Scandinavian capitals by the 1890s. He tried hard to get out of a big formal dinner given in his honour at Christiania on 26 May 1898 by the Norwegian League for Women’s Rights. When it proved unavoidable he made a characteristically curmudgeonly speech.44 He was equally bad-tempered at a dinner in Stockholm given for him jointly by two women’s societies; but disaster was avoided when the ladies had the sense to put on a display of folk-dancing by pretty young girls, of which Ibsen, it was known, was passionately fond.45
One of the dancers was Rosa Fitinghoff, daughter of a woman who wrote children’s stories. She became the last of a long succession of girls with whom Ibsen had complex and in some ways vertiginous relationships. Ibsen seems always to have had a taste for extreme youth, which he associated bitterly with the unattainable. The first time he fell seriously in love, when he was working at the Bergen theatre, was with a fifteen-year-old, Henrikke Holst. But he had no money, the father objected, and that was that. By the time he had his first success, he felt himself too old and ugly and would risk a rebuff if he bid for a girl many years younger than himself. But he continued to contract liaisons dangereuses. In 1870 it was the brilliant young women’s rightist Laura Petersen. Four years later it was Hildur Sontum, a mere ten-year-old, granddaughter of his old landlady. The taste did not diminish with age: on the contrary. He was fascinated by the story of Goethe’s elderly feelings for the delicious Marianne von Willemer, which gave his art renewed youth. It became accepted that actresses, if young and pretty, could usually persuade Ibsen to do what they wanted, especially if they introduced other young girls to him. When he visited the Scandinavian capitals, girls would hang about his hotel; he sometimes agreed to talk to them, and would give them a kiss and a photograph of himself. He liked young girls in general but his interest usually centred on one in particular. In 1891 it was Hildur Andersen. Rosa Fitinghoff was the last.
The two most significant were Emilie Bardach and Helene Raff, whom he met on an Alpine holiday in 1889. Both kept diaries and a number of letters have survived. Emilie, an eighteen-year-old Austrian girl (Ibsen was forty-three years older) recorded in her diary: ‘His ardour ought to make me feel proud…He puts such strong feelings into what he says to me…Never in his whole life, he says, has he felt so much joy in knowing anyone. He never admired anyone as he admires me.’ He asked her ‘to be absolutely frank with him so that we may become fellow workers together’. She thought herself in love with him, ‘but we both feel it is best outwardly to remain as strangers.’46 The letters he wrote to her after they parted were fairly harmless, and forty years later she told the writer E.A. Zucker that they had not even kissed; but she also said that Ibsen had spoken of the possibility of his divorce-then they would marry and see the world.47 Helene, a more sophisticated city girl from Munich, allowed him to kiss her but was clear their relationship was romantic and literary rather than sexual, let alone serious. When she asked him what he saw in her he replied: ‘You are youth, child, youth personified, and I need that for my writing.’ That of course explained what he meant by the term ‘fellow workers’. Helene wrote forty years afterwards: ‘His relations with young girls had in them nothing whatever of infidelity in the usual sense of the term but arose solely from the needs of his imagination.’48 Such girls were archetypes, ideas-made-flesh to be exploited in his dramas, not real women with feelings whom he wished to like or love for their own sakes.
Hence it is unlikely that Ibsen ever seriously considered having an affair with any of these girls, let alone marrying one. He had deep inhibitions about sex. His physician, Dr Edvard Bull, said he would not expose his sexual organ even for the purpose of medical examination. Was there something wrong with it-or did he think there was? One is tempted to call Ibsen, who theoretically at least had a profound understanding of female psychology, the male equivalent of a flirt. He certainly led Emilie on. She was over-imaginative and no doubt silly, and she had no idea Ibsen was using her. In February 1891 he broke off their correspondence, having got what he wanted. The same month, the critic Julius Elias related that over a lunch in Berlin Ibsen told him that:
he had met in the Tyrol…a Viennese girl of very remarkable character, who had at once made him her confidant…she was not interested in the idea of marrying some decently brought-up young man…What tempted, fascinated and delighted her was to lure other women’s husbands away from them. She was a demonic little wrecker…a little bird of prey, who would gladly have included him among her victims. He had studied her very very closely. But she had had no great success with him. ‘She did not get hold of me but I got hold of her-for my play.’49
In short, Ibsen simply used Emilie to get the idea for one of his characters, Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder, transforming her in the process and turning her into a reprehensible character. Not only Elias’s account but in due course Ibsen’s letters were published and poor Emilie was identified with Hilde.50 For more than half of her long life (she remained unmarried and lived to be ninety-two) she was branded as a wicked woman. This was characteristic not only of the way in which Ibsen pitched real people into his fictional brews but of his cruel disregard for their feelings in carelessly exposing them. The worst case of all was Laura Kieler, an unhappy young Norwegian woman whom Ibsen had met a few times. She was very much under the influence of her husband and in order, as she thought, to help him she stole; when she was detected, he treated her as an embarrassment and disgrace and had her put in a lunatic asylum for a time. Ibsen saw her as a symbol of the oppression of woman-another idea-made-flesh rather than a real person-and used her to create his fictional character of Nora in A Doll’s House. The immense, worldwide publicity this brilliant play attracted naturally cast a fierce spotlight on Laura, who was widely identified as the original. She was distressed and wanted Ibsen to state publicly that Nora was not her. It would have cost him nothing to do so and the letter in which he refused is a masterpiece of mean-spirited humbug: ‘I don’t quite understand what Laura Kieler really has in mind in trying to drag me into these squabbles. A statement from me, such as she proposes, to the effect that “she is not Nora” would be both meaningless and absurd, since I have never suggested that she is…I think you will agree that I can best serve our mutual friend by remaining silent.’
Ibsen’s ruthless character-exploitation embraced both those closest to him and virtual strangers. The play which wrecked Emilie’s life also damaged and hurt his wife, since Suzannah was understandably identified as the wife of Solness in The Master Builder, the co-architect and victim of an unhappy marriage. Yet another character in this play, Kaja Fosli, was an act of human larceny. A woman was surprised to get several invitations to dine with Ibsen, happily did so, was again mildly surprised when they abruptly ceased-then understood all when she saw the play and recognized bits of herself in Kaja. She had been used.
Ibsen often wrote about love and it was, after all, the principal theme of his poetry, if only in a negative sense of expressing the ache of loneliness. But it is doubtful if he ever did, or could, feel love for a particular person as opposed to an idea or a person-as-idea. Hate was a far more genuine emotion for him. Behind the hate was a still more fundamental feeling-fear. In the innermost recesses of Ibsen’s personality was an all-pervasive, unspoken, unspeakable dread. It was probably the most important thing about him. His timidity he inherited from his mother, who at every opportunity would lock herself in her room. Ibsen, too, as a child, would bolt himself in. Other children noticed his fear-that he was afraid to cross the ice on a sleigh, for instance-and ‘cowardice’, both physical and moral, was a word constantly applied to him by observers throughout his life.
There was one particularly dark incident in his life, which occurred in 1851 when he was twenty-three and writing anonymous articles for the radical newspaper Arbejderforeningernes Blad. In July that year the police raided its offices and arrested two of his friends, Theodor Abildgaard and the workers’ leader Marcus Thrane. Happily for Ibsen, the police did not find anything in the office papers to link him to the articles. Terrified, he lay low for many weeks. The two men were sentenced and spent seven years in jail. Ibsen was too cowardly either to come forward on their behalf or to protest against the savage punishment.51 He was a man of words, not deeds. He was incensed when Prussia invaded Denmark in 1864 and annexed Schleswig-Holstein, and furiously denounced Norway’s pusillanimity in failing to come to Denmark’s aid-‘I had to get away from all that swinishness up there to become cleansed,’ he wrote.52 But he did not actually do anything to help Denmark. When a young Danish student, Christopher Bruun, who had volunteered and fought in the army, asked Ibsen-having heard his vociferous views-why he too had not volunteered, he got the lame reply: ‘We poets have other tasks to perform.’53 Ibsen was cowardly in personal as well as political matters. His relationship with his first love, Henrikke Hoist, broke up simply because, when her formidable father found them sitting together, Ibsen literally ran off, terrified. Many years later when she was married, the following conversation occurred between them: Ibsen: ‘I wonder why nothing ever came of our relationship?’ Henrikke: ‘Don’t you remember?-you ran away.’ Ibsen: ‘Yes, yes, I never was a brave man face to face.’54
Ibsen was an elderly, frightened child who became an old woman early in life. The list of things he feared was endless. Vilhelm Bergsoe describes him on Ischia, in 1867, petrified that the cliffs or rocks would collapse and scared of the height, screaming: ‘I want to get out, I want to go home.’ Walking the streets, he was always worried that a tile would fall on his head. Garibaldi’s rebellion upset him dreadfully as he feared blood in the streets. He worried about the possibility of earthquakes. He was scared of going in a boat: ‘I won’t go out with those Neopolitans. If there’s a storm they’ll lie flat in the boat and pray to the Virgin Mary insteed of reefing the sails.’ Another fear was a cholera outbreak-indeed, contagious disease was always a prime worry. He wrote to his son Sigurd, on 30 August 1880: ‘I much dislike the idea of your luggage being deposited at Anna Daae’s hospital. The children she attends are from a class of people among whom one might expect epidemics of smallpox to be rampant.’55 He worried about storms, both on sea and land, about bathing (‘can easily bring on a fatal attack of cramp’), about horses (‘well known for their habit of kicking’) and anyone with a sporting gun (‘keep well away from people carrying such weapons’). He was particularly scared of carriage accidents. He was so obsessed by the danger of hailstones that he took to measuring their circumference. To the annoyance of children, he insisted on blowing out the candles on Christmas trees because of the fire risk. His wife had no need to frighten him by reading out tales of disasters from the newspapers because he scoured the press himself-it was his chief source of material for plots-and fearfully studied accounts of horrors, both natural and man-made. His letters to Sigurd are extraordinary catalogues of warnings-‘I read in almost every Norwegian paper of accidents caused by careless handling of loaded firearms’-and pleas for circumspection: ‘Wire if there is the slightest accident.’ ‘The least carelessness can have the gravest consequences.’ ‘Be cautious and careful in every way.’56
His greatest horror was dogs. Bergsoe relates that on one occasion in Italy he became frightened of a harmless dog and suddenly began to run. The dog then chased and bit him. Ibsen shouted: ‘The dog is mad and must be shot, otherwise I shall go mad too.’ He was ‘foaming with rage and it was several days before his fear departed’. Knudtzon records a more striking, indeed sinister, incident, also in Italy. Ibsen and other Scandinavians lunched together in a restaurant and drank a lot of wine: ‘There was thunder in the air. Ibsen seemed from the start to have some worm of indignation in the depths of his soul. [It] weighed on him and demanded an outlet.’ When they rose to go Ibsen could not stand and two of them had to help him to walk. His attention was caught by an iron gate and ‘a huge dog behind it which barked angrily at us’. Then:
Ibsen had a stick in his hand which he now began to poke at the dog, one of those gigantic brutes which resemble small lions. It came closer and Ibsen poked and struck at it, trying in every way to madden it, and succeeding. It rushed at the gate, Ibsen prodded and struck it anew, and worked it into such a rage that, without doubt, had not the solid iron gate stood between it and us, it would have torn us apart…Ibsen must have stood teasing the dog for six or eight minutes.57
As this incident suggests, Ibsen’s life-long rage and his perpetual fears were closely linked. He raged because he feared. Alcohol anaesthetized the fear but unleashed the fury too; inside the angry man a fearful one cowered. Ibsen lost his faith early, or so he said, but he carried the fear of sin, and punishment, to the grave. He hated jokes about religion: ‘Some things one doesn’t make fun of.’ He claimed that Christianity ‘demoralizes and inhibits both men and women’ but he remained intensely superstitious himself. He may not have believed in God but he feared devils. He wrote in a copy of Peer Gynt: ‘To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.’ Bjornson wrote to him: ‘There are many goblins in your head which I think you ought to placate…a dangerous army to have around for they turn on their masters.’ Ibsen knew this well enough. He spoke of his ‘super-devil’-‘I lock my door and bring him out.’ He said: ‘There must be troll in what I write.’ In his desk he kept a collection of small rubber devils with red tongues.58 There were times, after a few glasses of spirits, when his reasoned critique of society collapsed into incoherence and fury, and he seemed a man possessed by devils. Even William Archer, his greatest advocate, thought his political and philosophical views, when closely examined, not so much radical as merely chaotic: ‘I am becoming more and more convinced,’ he wrote in 1887, ‘that as a many-sided thinker, or rather a systematic thinker, Ibsen is nowhere’. Archer thought he was simply contrary, against every established idea on principle. Ingvald Undset, father of the novelist Sigrid Undset, who listened to his half-tipsy rantings in Rome, recorded: ‘he is a complete anarchist, wants to wipe everything out…mankind must start from the foundations to rebuild the world…Society and everything else must be wiped out…the great task of our age is to blow the existing fabric into the air.’ What did it all mean? Very little, really: just the fallout from fear and hate contending for mastery in a heart which did not know, or could not express, love. The bars of the northern world are full of men holding forth in similar fashion.
In his last years, which began with an apoplectic fit in 1900, recurring on a smaller scale at intervals, Ibsen continued the alternating pattern of worry and rage, watched by his sardonic wife. His chief anxiety now was insurance, while his main source of irritation was physical debility and an intense dislike of being helped. Fury, as usual, got the upper hand. The resident nurse was told to disappear as soon as she had helped Ibsen into the street. When she failed to do so, ‘Ibsen swung his stick at her so that she fled back into the house.’ A barber came to shave him every day. Ibsen never spoke a word to him except once when he suddenly hissed: ‘Ugly devil!’ He died on 23 May 1906. Suzannah later claimed that, just before he did so, he said: ‘My dear, dear wife, how good and kind you have been to me!’ This seems totally out of character. In any case Dr Bull’s diary makes it clear he was in a coma that afternoon and incapable of speech. Another, and far more plausible, account gives his last words as: ‘On the contrary!’