November 7, 2019 27
In 1862, Kristiania Norske Teater
declared bankruptcy. Within the next
three years, the Norwegian Theater in
Bergen and the Throndhjems Theater
likewise closed their doors. Ibsen was
partly held responsible for the Norske
Teater’s demise. His calamitous per-
sonal affairs frequently got in the way
of his work as a director; on at least one
occasion, the theater committee was
forced to meet in the back room of a
café where Ibsen had taken to spend-
ing most of his time. What’s more, he
was growing weary of the predominant
style of modern theater, in which the
expressions and gestures of the actors
were highly artificial and their lines
delivered in epic-declamatory fashion
while facing the audience. Ibsen longed
to give realism primacy over idealism, a
development that would make him vul-
nerable to charges of crudity, immoral-
ity, and sensationalism.
In time, Ibsen’s plays would shed
their national-historical pretensions,
but as long as he lived in Norway he re-
mained caught between his interest in
questions about the role of the individ-
ual in society and the nation- building
imperatives of Norwegian drama. Given
his debts and the bankruptcy of the
Norske Teater, not to mention his fail-
ure to obtain government support, the
notion of moving abroad seemed in-
creasingly tempting. In a letter to the
Danish critic Clemens Petersen, Ibsen
wrote that he felt “spiritually isolated”
in Norway, something the relative suc-
cess of his play The Pretenders (1863)
did little to change. He needed to de-
fine himself as an artist, which didn’t
seem possible in his native country.
“I could never lead a consistent spiri-
tual life up there,” he wrote to his
mother-in-law. “I was one man in my
work and another outside of it—and
for that very reason my work failed in
consistency too.”
In 1864, with money raised by friends
and supporters (including Bjørnson),
Ibsen and his family left for Rome, a
change in circumstance that soon bore
fruit: his poetic drama Brand was
published in 1866 by Gyldendal, the
venerable Danish publishing house, in
a first edition of 1,250 copies. “Never
before had a single book exerted
such a powerful and immediate ef-
fect on readers in Denmark, Norway,
and even Sweden,” de Figueiredo
writes. (It was published simultane-
ously in both Denmark and Norway
and translated into Swedish in 1870.)
Ibsen’s story of an uncompromising
rural priest willing to sacrifice every-
thing, even his wife and child, for the
sake of his religious faith threw down
a gauntlet to prevailing notions of
what a drama is or should be. Gone
was the national-historical pathos of
his early plays; here, instead, was an
unsettlingly abstract and darkly reli-
gious verse drama better suited for the
armchair than the stage. “The whole
book bores me so much that I’ve still
not managed to read it all the way
through,” Bjørnson complained. Even
Ibsen’s publisher worried that Brand
“might not be understood by the ma-
jority of people.” But their anxieties
were unfounded. Within a year, it went
through three more editions, selling
over three thousand copies.
Ibsen’s life was dramatically al-
tered. Never again would he feel the
sting of poverty, as the sudden change
in his outward appearance signaled:
“He put aside his old, shabby clothes
and donned a new black velvet jacket,
a white linen shirt and a pair of kid
gloves,” de Figueiredo writes. In Rome,
local Italians called him Il Cappellone
for the broad-rimmed hat he took to
wearing as he sat in the cafés, holding
court with other Scandinavians over
carafes of wine.
But Ibsen changed in other ways
too. Brand and its equally acclaimed
successor, the picaresque Peer Gynt
(1867), marked a turning point in his
career. According to de Figueiredo,
Ibsen’s writing moved “inward towards
the personality, the individual and the
individual’s ethical responsibilities.”
One of the most illuminating aspects
of the biography is its portrayal of
Ibsen’s political evolution. This is no
easy task; Ibsen rarely involved himself
in political debates. His friends often
lamented his caution even as he pro-
voked storms of debate with dramas
that seemed almost plucked from the
headlines.
Still, Ibsen first tasted literary suc-
cess just as the individualist tide of the
nineteenth century reached its high-
est point; Brand was published only a
few years after John Stuart Mill’s On
Liberty and the same year as Charles
Darwin’s Origin of Species. In Scan-
dinavia, the ideas of Mill and Darwin
were central to the literary movement
that became known as the Modern
Breakthrough, whose main enforcer,
Georg Brandes, advocated a socially
and politically involved literature in-
spired by French writers. “That lit-
erature is alive today is shown by the
fact that it sets up problems for de-
bate,” Brandes famously claimed. And
though de Figueiredo downplays their
relationship, there is no doubt Ibsen
recognized in the younger Brandes a
kindred spirit. When they finally met in
Dresden in the summer of 1871, Ibsen
told Brandes, “You provoke the Danes,
and I’ll provoke the Norwegians.”
De Figueiredo traces the growing im-
portance of individual freedom in Ib-
sen’s life and writing back to the social
and political upheavals of 1848. “The
February revolution, the uprisings in
Hungary and elsewhere, the Schleswig
war—all this gripped me powerfully,”
he later recalled. As a young man, he
had composed idealistic battle hymns
for the Magyars’ struggle in the Hun-
garian Revolution, and for a while
even contributed articles to the official
newspaper of the first Norwegian labor
movement, led by the journalist Mar-
cus Thrane.
By the time he left Norway, however,
whatever faith he still had in collectivist
projects, whether social or national, was
coming apart. The Prussian invasion
of Denmark in the Second Schleswig-
Holstein War of 1864 became “an ob-
session” for Ibsen, not least because the
failure of Norway and Sweden to come
to Denmark’s defense revealed the hol-
lowness of Scandinavian brotherhood.
Ibsen’s bitter and ambivalent feelings
toward Norway were thus compounded
by the betrayal of the Danes. “It was a
lie in terms ornate, /A Judas-kiss, we
found, /When Norway’s sons rejoiced
of late/Beside the Danish sound!” he
wrote in his 1863 poem “A Brother in
Need.”The capture of Rome in 1870 by
the forces of the Risorgimento and theAnnouncingDonald Judd Interviews
The companion volume to the critically
acclaimed bestseller Donald Judd Writings.All new compilation featuring sixty interviews with
the artist, including an extensive selection of previously
unpublished materials.Published by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner BooksDavid Zwirner Books
Available at davidzwirnerbooks.com and wherever books are sold
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