26 The New York Review
Escape Artist
Morten Høi Jensen
Henrik Ibsen:
The Man and the Mask
by Ivo de Figueiredo,
translated from the Norwegian
by Robert Ferguson.
Yale University Press, 694 pp., $40.00
Henrik Ibsen’s last play, When We
Dead Awaken (1899), opens on a late
summer morning at a seaside hotel. The
famous sculptor Arnold Rubek and his
young wife, Maja, newly returned to
Norway after many years abroad, are
sitting on the lawn in a pair of wicker
chairs, drinking champagne and seltzer
and reading the newspaper. After some
lighthearted conversation about the
surroundings, Maja asks Rubek if he is
happy to be home again. He’s not sure.
“Perhaps I’ve been away too long,” he
says. He grows irritable, they begin to
argue, and soon Maja is complaining
about Rubek’s restlessness. “You can’t
find peace anywhere,” she says. “Not
at home, not abroad. You’ve become a
total recluse of late.”
As many critics have noted, there’s
more than a little of Ibsen in Rubek.
In 1891 he too returned to Norway,
having spent nearly three decades liv-
ing abroad. And like Rubek, he was by
then world famous; his plays sold hun-
dreds of thousands of copies and were
performed in theaters all over Europe
and the United States, provoking scan-
dal and acclaim in equal measure. Yet
unlike Rubek, Ibsen was no recluse. He
settled in the middle of Kristiania (now
Oslo), appearing twice a day at the
same café, a habit he’d picked up when
he lived in Munich. There he was, his
stately head resting on its august ped-
estal of beard, his lapel affixed with the
blinding number of orders and medals
showered on him by various monarchs
and heads of state. Tourists, many of
them young women, would clamor to
catch a glimpse of the famous writer,
prompting the Norwegian novelist
Arne Garborg to quip “To be in Mu-
nich and not see Ibsen is like being in
Rome and not seeing the pope.”
Yet rather than simply repose in his
literary fame, Ibsen remained rest-
lessly prolific. Between 1877 and 1899,
he averaged a new play every two years,
each one more controversial than the
last. In the final years of his life, de-
spite having suffered a heart attack and
three strokes that left him paralyzed on
the right side of his body, he thought of
writing more. “I do not see how I will
be able to stay away from those old
battlefields for long,” he wrote in 1900.
The year before his death in 1906, he
cried out in his sleep, “I’m writing! It’s
going really well!”
The Norwegian historian Ivo de
Figueiredo’s biography Henrik Ibsen:
The Man and the Mask is a document
of determination, a record of Ibsen’s
tireless energy and discipline, and the
transformation of a poor Norwegian
merchant’s son into an international
literary phenomenon who revolution-
ized modern drama. But it is also, more
penetratingly, an account of the trans-
formation of man into mask. “Henrik
Ibsen’s life is like a long, gradually
drying plaster cast,” de Figueiredo
writes. “He became his own statue, an
icon, a tourist attraction.” So monu-
mental was his mask that it can be dif-
ficult to see the human being behind
it. (Even friends and acquaintances
found Ibsen “taciturn,” “tight-lipped,”
and “not especially articulate.”) But
rather than attempt to remove the
mask, de Figueiredo accepts it as part
of the truth of Ibsen. “This is a book
about Ibsen’s life,” he explains, “but it
is also a book about the myth of Ibsen
that has taken shape over more than a
century now, and which is impossible to
ignore.”
First published in Norway to coincide
with the centennial of Ibsen’s death,
Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask
appeared in two volumes between
2006 and 2007, totaling a little over
one thousand pages. A single-volume
edition of 700 pages appeared in 2010,
and it is this version on which the pres-
ent translation is based. Curiously, the
translator is Robert Ferguson, author
of Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography
(1996), a book notable for dismiss-
ing everything Ibsen wrote after Peer
Gynt (1867) as a betrayal of his true
poetic gifts.^1 Ferguson’s contribution
to the present volume is no less eccen-
tric. His attempt to retain the informal,
conversational tone of the original
Norwegian never quite sounds natural,
while de Figueiredo is too indulgentof cliché. If one were to remove all the
banal sentences tacked on at the end of
otherwise substantial paragraphs, my
guess is this book would be fifty pages
shorter: “Yes, indeed, spring really had
come to Ibsen’s life, and the summer
that was to follow was no less remark-
able”; “He had a way with words, you’d
have to give him that; and he wasn’t
bad when it came to writing them down
either.”
These weigh down the reading ex-
perience, which is a shame, because de
Figueiredo’s biography is commend-
able in almost every other respect. His
evocation of the cultural and political
tensions Ibsen lived through and al-
luded to in his writings is especially
illuminating. So too is his portrayal of
the giants in the wings, notably the Nor-
wegian playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørn-
son and the Danish Jewish critic Georg
Brandes. Above all, de Figueiredo dis-
plays a clear sense of why any biogra-
phy of Ibsen must also, on some level,
be a biography of European culture
and society—so representative was
the playwright of the age in which he
lived. “Ibsen’s career was coterminous
with the second half of the nineteenth
century,” de Figueiredo writes; “he ap-
pears to be almost a personification of
the divisions of the literary history of
the period.”Born in 1828, Henrik Ibsen only
emerged as a commercially successful
playwright after leaving Norway in the
mid-1860s. His childhood in Skien, a
market town southwest of Kristiania,
was blighted by his father’s near bank-ruptcy when he was seven, which forced
the family—there were five children in
total, Henrik the oldest—to move into
their country house. The social degra-
d at ion t hey su f fere d i s supp o s e d to have
been a formative experience in Ibsen’s
life, though the austerity was perhaps
more emotional than material. After
leaving home in 1843, he returned only
once, and with the exception of two sib-
lings he never saw his family again.
Ibsen found work as an apprentice in
an apothecary in Grimstad, where he
wrote his first play, Catalina, in 1849. In
the 1850s he began a career as a man
of the theater, working as a director
and producer in Bergen and Kristi-
ania, where he struggled to make ends
meet, drank heavily, and ran up debts
that dogged him for years to come. In
1858 he married Suzannah Thoreson,
and the next year she gave birth to the
couple’s only child, Sigurd. (While liv-
ing in Grimstad, Ibsen had fathered
an illegitimate child with a maid to
whom he was ordered by the court
to pay child support until 1860.) Due
to their precarious finances, the family
moved often, living in drafty houses or
cramped and leaking apartments. The
growing number of court cases Ibsen’s
creditors subjected him to meant that
he had to sell his furniture just to stay
afloat. On more than one occasion, he
could be seen careening through town
in torn clothes, incapacitated with
drink. He became the kind of person
people crossed the street to avoid.
He picked a propitious, if difficult,
time to involve himself in the theater.
Though Norway had gained politi-
cal independence from Denmark in
1814, the country lacked many of the
institutions and networks necessary to
sustain cultural life. Theaters were pri-
vately run and largely reliant on Dan-
ish acting troupes. Norwegian writers
depended on publishers in Copenha-
gen to sell their books. Public fund-
ing of the arts was not just limited but
actively opposed. Ibsen’s generation of
writers were therefore “the creators of
their own institutions,” de Figueiredo
writes. Many of Ibsen’s early verse dra-
mas reflect this; Lady Inger of Ostrat
(1854), The Feast at Solhaug (1855),
and The Vikings at Helgeland (1858)
drew on national-romantic themes and
Norwegian folk ballads and sagas. In
the early 1860s Ibsen even undertook
an ethnographic research trip to west-
ern Norway, hiking in the mountains
and collecting folk tales from local
peasants.
Along with Bjørnson (1832–1910),
his sometime friend and constant
rival, Ibsen was among the pioneers
of Norway’s emerging national theater
movement. This proved to be a mixed
blessing. In Bergen, where he served
as director and resident playwright
of the Norwegian Theater, audiences
cared little about artistic merit; they
just wanted to be entertained. On Sun-
days they came to the theater with their
pets and packed lunches to see the lat-
est French vaudeville comedy or light
romance. As de Figueiredo notes, “It
meant that the growth of the Norwe-
gian national theatre took place against
a background of chatter, laughter, boo-
ing, the sounds of people eating—and
the baying of dogs.”Henrik Ibsen(^1) The novelist Dag Solstad, in his review
of the first volume of de Figueiredo’s
biography, denounced Ferguson’s
book. “I very much doubt,” he writes,
“that it can be characterized as a seri-
ous Ibsen biography, with the demands
for professional standards it requires.”
See Dag Solstad, Artikler 2005–2014
(Oslo: Forlaget Oktober, 2015), p. 77.