The furry Norwegian

STIPIMM: “Sit on My Face,” by Monty Python

I finished another 650-page biography of a playwright last week, so I suppose it’s time for another book report.

Oh, quit your damn whining.

Actually, although I do have plenty to say about Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian playwright, I will try my best to keep it short. Which means it should only take an hour to read this post. Ahem.

When I read a nice hefty biography of Bertolt Brecht in support of Bridget’s Brechtian Brouhaha last summer, I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed the glimpse into an artist’s personal life, and how it related to his work. It inspired me to seek out and read another playwright’s biography while reading his plays as they come up in the book. But when I told Bridget that I wanted to find and read a book about Henrik Ibsen, her natural reaction was, “What the hell for?”

I didn’t really have a good answer. My only real reason was that I knew virtually nothing about him but suspected that he was worth knowing about. Before this fall, the only thing I knew about him was that he was a Scandinavian playwright; I couldn’t even tell you definitively what specific country he was from.

That changed when Bridget was assigned to read A Doll’s House for her Modern Drama class and asked me to read it with her. The play is probably Ibsen’s most influential and famous for a lot of reasons: in a time of strict roles for men and women in the home, it portrays a woman who strikes out on her own, abandoning her family; it is one of Ibsen’s best examples of the realist style he championed. After reading it, my interest in finding out about Ibsen was solidified, and so I sought out and bought the definitive biography on him, written by Michael Meyer – a hefty 650-page tome.

Two or three months later, I finally finished it. And here’s what I got to say about Henrik Ibsen.

1) He was one ugly motherfucker. And yeah, it’s all about those damn muttonchops. I can only be thankful that I did not live in a time when those furry extensions were fashionable. It’s not as though he couldn’t grow the rest of a beard – in his youth he had a big full bushy thing that buried most of his face. But later in life, he wanted to be able to see his chin and mouth. Perhaps he got tired of cleaning food out of it. Perhaps the missus didn’t like the itching on her naughty bits. Who knows? The biography gives no clues as to his facial hair motivations.

2) He was a snob. His family started out relatively well-off, but then his father was “ruined” in the Victorian sense and the family had to live meagerly. And after he left home, he certainly wasn’t living high on the hog for a while. He started out as an apothecary’s apprentice, making a pittance, and then worked as the artistic director of small theaters in Norway. No great salary there either. But even then, and especially as his star grew after his plays began to get noticed, he was an aristocrat without an aristocracy. He distrusted what he considered to be the under-educated masses. One of my favorite quotes of his is from his play Enemy of the People:

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.

Though it will certainly pain my democratic and socialist friends to hear me say it, I can’t help but agree with him. I guess I’m becoming a snob too.

3) He was a crusty old grouch. He didn’t like being in large groups of people, even when he was famous, and his mood reflected it. He much preferred being in smaller, intimate groups, and even then he preferred the company of younger men and women. He was very big on the energy of the youth, rightfully believing that it was they who appreciated his plays the most. He also had very set rituals in his day that he liked to follow, such that his friends and family would joke that they could set their watches by him. And yes, go ahead and think it, him being a grouch is another thing he has in common with me. Go fuck yourself, you damn proletarian.

Emilie Bardach, the first hot young piece of ass to get Henrik's dick hard

4) For most of his life, Ibsen lived within the sexual mores of the time. Indeed, with the exception of a fling with a maid that begot an illegitimate child when he was a teenager, he didn’t seem to do anything untoward or deviate from his marriage. The (for the time) frank content of his plays belie his true sexual nature, which was quite repressed. Oddly enough, it all changed in his 60s, when (prepare ye for an “Ewww”) he fame brought him in contact with women in their upper teens and early twenties who were all too willing to return the affections of a furry old man. He had three major “affairs,” which weren’t so much affairs as they were severe flirtations. At least, that’s all that the biographer can find – none of his young “mistresses” ever admitted that anything beyond kissing happened and even then, only one admitted to kissing at all. The biographer doesn’t definitively have an opinion whether these women were being modest in their advanced age, but he does speculate that Ibsen’s self-control would have stemmed from his genuine devotion to his wife, who was around his own age and to whom he had been married for decades. This gives me an out when, thirty years from now, Bridget finds the letters my way-too-young groupies have written to me: “But Bridie, I never touched them… just look at Ibsen!”

5) Plays? Oh yeah, when he wasn’t fantasizing about fucking 20-year-old Swedish stewardesses (or whatever they had in the late 1800s), he wrote plays. What was so special about them? Well, two primary things: 1) he was one of the first to write about "regular people" in a prose that reflected the way that "regular people" really spoke; 2) his subject matter was often controversial and took directions that other plays hadn't taken (e.g., the aforementioned A Doll's House, and Ghosts, which was much banned because it (gasp!) talked about venereal disease) Rather than give you an extensive history, let me just share a couple that I liked:

a. Peer Gynt: One of his earlier plays, it was a hefty piece that in a lot of ways reminded me of Brecht’s free-wheeling Baal. In it, Peer Gynt, a young libertine, basically lives life to the fullest, shirking responsibility, and using family, friends, and lovers, to get the life he desires. It’s a very episodic play, moving from year to year, locale to locale, with an imperfect character arc. But it is certainly interesting and, at times, fun. Two favorite moments: one where he escapes being forced to marry a troll princess through a little bit of luck (guys, haven’t we all been there?); and another when, after a shipwreck, Peer and a cook cling to a capsized lifeboat, and Peer decides to literally kick the cook off because otherwise the boat will sink. This play, because of its visual elements, would make a very fun movie – it was made into a film in the 50s, but I doubt then they had the visual sense or the filmic sense of humor needed to make it really take off.

b. Enemy of the People: A very political piece that revolves around a public crusader’s efforts to expose a town’s primary source of income – a public bath – as being dangerously polluted. While the liberal elements of the town at first rally to his side, the politicians who want to shut him up (including his brother, the mayor) demonstrate that the news getting out would ruin the town, including the businesses of the liberal folk. After that, the crusader’s support dries up and he’s painted as a loon who’s only trying to destroy the town. Painfully topical and fully of juicy and fun quotes, including the one above and another favorite, which will be a perfect way to abruptly end this post: “One should never wear one’s best trousers when going out to fight for freedom and truth.”