Shooting wild duck

The high tragedy of ordinary people

MICHAEL MEYER

A review by Michael Meyer, published in the TLS of January 17, 1997, of Robert Ferguson’s biography of Henrik Ibsen, who died on May 23, 1906.
When Henrik Ibsen wrote his first play in 1849, the drama was no longer regarded as a medium in which a serious statement could be made about modern problems. For that, one turned to poetry or the novel, or essays or sermons.
Poets still tried their hand at plays, but as a literary exercise, always in verse and always about the upper reaches of society. Yet by 1899, when Ibsen wrote his last play, writers throughout the Western world, such as Shaw and Hauptmann, were using the drama to mould people’s opinions, and this change was – not in part, but wholly – due to Ibsen. Whereas the Greeks, Shakespeare and Racine had been the best of a great school in their time, Ibsen was on his own, writing in a language which hardly anyone knew and which had produced no previous writer of worldwide significance. He showed that high tragedy could be written about ordinary people, living in the kind of back parlour to which the audience would return after the play, talking simply and dealing with topics discussed in debating societies and on street corners – corruption in local politics and whether a woman had the right to leave her husband and children.
Ibsen made people rethink beliefs they had never seriously doubted, and, by the turn of the century, was the most famous writer in the world after Tolstoy.
As the author of an earlier life of Ibsen, to which Robert Ferguson pays flattering tribute in his introduction to this new biography, I must declare an obvious interest. Ferguson is well qualified to attempt the task, since he has lived for some years in Oslo and has written two award-winning radio plays. He has trawled assiduously through old Norwegian newspapers and articles published since the appearance of my book in 1971, unearthing an important letter, which shows that Ibsen’s inability to pay maintenance for his illegitimate son almost landed him in gaol. He has also tracked down the supposedly lost diary of Emilie Bardach, with whom Ibsen became infatuated at the age of sixty-one, although, sadly, he finds nothing significant to quote from it beyond the previously published extracts. His other new material consists mainly of minutiae, which will be of most interest to students of nineteenth-century Norwegian local life, such as a long letter about steamship shares and rather more than we need to know about Ibsen’s son Sigurd’s attempts to enter Norwegian politics. But he tells the outwardly uneventful story of, at any rate, the first half of Ibsen’s life very readably. It is the second half of Ferguson’s book that I find difficult to admire, for there is little sense of the wider theatrical and literary scene, and he spends much of it denigrating the final twelve great prose dramas from The Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken. He seems almost to prefer their lame precursor The League of Youth, a dated attempt at political farce which is hardly ever staged today; and even his favourite, Peer Gynt, he finds “an uncontroversial fable on the triumph of true love”, when, on any but the most superficial level, it is surely a deeply disturbing play, and aroused great controversy when it first appeared.
None of the famous prose plays escapes Ferguson’s condemnation. He finds the children’s lines in A Doll’s House “perfunctory and their presence a crude flaw in the illusion”, apparently unaware that our seeing them underlines the hardest part of Nora’s decision to go away. In An Enemy of the People, Ferguson complains of “tricks”, and that Ibsen “de-individualises” all the hero’s opponents, making the Mayor “as evil a character as Bishop Nicholas in The Pretenders but a far less convincing human being”, so that one wonders if he can ever have seen this, or any of the prose plays, decently staged. Certainly not The Wild Duck, for he finds in it “an artificiality about scenes that . . . can, if not played with great care, slip over into the obvious, creating a too-vivid awareness of Ibsen’s creative presence on stage as the manipulator of his characters”. That is equally true of Shakespeare, if he is poorly played.
On Rosmersholm, Ferguson is particularly bewildering. He thinks it is the first of Ibsen’s plays to bring together “the public, quasi-political . . . and the private family world” (what about The Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People?), imagines Ibsen shares the bigoted Dr Kroll’s view that Rebecca’s waywardness is the result of her illegitimacy, and believes that Freud, many years later, was the first to suggest that she had an incestuous relationship with her father, as though this were not obvious from a close reading of the text. It is this – not her illegitimacy, which does not obviously bother her – that makes her feel so tainted that she cannot marry Rosmer when he asks her.
The Lady from the Sea is “Ibsen’s weakest play since An Enemy of the People”, and again one can only suppose that Ferguson has never seen it properly done, as in Michael Elliott’s famous 1979 production with Vanessa Redgrave. Hedda Gabler fares little better. Brack’s famous last line: “People don’t do such things!” is too feeble a response when a young woman has just blown her head off . . . Of course there is a sense in which a “surprise” last line like this can never work, for as audiences we are so familiar with the events that . . . the actors are the only ones in the theatre who are taken by surprise. . . We judge the playing of these lines but we cannot feel them. A similar problem exists with the climax to A Doll’s House . . . . It is obvious that an intellectual problem is being worked out.
If familiarity breeds such coldness, none of us would be moved by the climax to Hamlet or by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Of The Master Builder, “the Solness-Hilde situation . . . is the least satisfactory from a dramatic point of view . . . . At several points, Ibsen deliberates the possibility that Hilde is somehow not a real person at all.” I should like to know where Ibsen even remotely suggests this. Little Eyolf’s strength “lies in the conversations, not the plot”. Strangest of all: “In the plays of his middle years, from The Pillars of Society in 1877 to Hedda Gabler in 1890, Ibsen tended to neglect the psychology of his male characters to (concentrate) on the female’s”, a conclusion which will astonish any actor who has attempted Oswald, Dr Stockmann, Hjalmar Ekdal, Gregers Werle, Rosmer, Lövborg or Brack. Ferguson allows some merit to Borkman, albeit on curious grounds – that it contains “no lines like Little Eyolf’s ‘The crutch is floating’ for disrespectful young members of the audience to laugh at”, and because he thinks “Borkman is Ibsen’s first character since Julian (in Emperor and Galilean) whom it is possible to like”, Stockmann being “too arrogant” and Rosmer “too indecisive”, as though one could never like anyone indecisive, and as though Borkman were not fatally arrogant and self-centred.
There are a few errors in the book. Ibsen was not “wealthy” at the end of his first four years in Italy, merely comfortable, living as parsimoniously as he did, nor in his last years was he “very wealthy” (his account books, to which Ferguson never refers, shows how modest his earnings were compared with those of much lesser authors in England). He surely returned to spend his last years in Norway, not because “Suzannah, with Sigurd’s support, had presented him with an ultimatum”, for which there is no evidence, but because he wanted to be close to his son, who was starting a career in Norway. Ferguson reiterates the old canard that Ibsen was influenced by Scribe, despite Ibsen’s repeated dismissals of the latter and the fact that there is nothing in Scribe which Ibsen could not have learned from his beloved Ludvig Holberg. To say that the young women with whom he became infatuated in old age “had little or no influence on his writing” must seem incredible to anyone who has read or seen Heddaand The Master Builder. Little Eyolf played to full houses in London in 1896, not because “Ibsen’s name was already big enough to outweight (sic) critical disapproval”, but because, after a few performances, the fashionable Mrs Patrick Campbell took over the leading role.
There is much implausible speculation. “One feels, not least from the occasional references in his letters to the pleasures of bathing in the Mediterranean, that there was a suppressed sensualist in him.” How can anyone read Peer Gynt, Hedda or The Master Builder without realizing that? “The very slight hint of a failed budding romance between Sigurd and Hildur Andersen might also account for Sigurd’s desultory progress through life.” There is no evidence whatever that there was anything serious between Sigurd and Hildur; Ibsen’s son enjoyed a long and notably happy marriage with Bjornson’s daughter Bergliot, and his political failure was due to his having a cosmopolitan outlook at a time when only unquestioning nationalism was acceptable in Norway, as later in Ireland. A new biography of every major writer should appear at least every twenty-five years, and Ferguson’s book is honest and provocative, but the general effect is as of a life of Picasso which regarded everything that he painted after his Blue Period as a series of aberrations.