HENRIK IBSEN (according to Michael Meyer) and ROSMERSHOLM (according to Shaw and Freud) & EDVARD GRIEG (according to Finn Benestad and Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe) - and the bit about RILKE

 HENRIK IBSEN (according to Michael Meyer) and ROSMERSHOLM (according to Shaw and Freud) & EDVARD GRIEG (according to Finn Benestad and Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe) - and the bit about RILKE

 

 

There are several coincidental reasons as to why this Scandi-themed essay was written: my wife has Norwegian ancestry, her grandmother once worked as a maid for GRIEG in Bergen, and, also a long time ago, I did a University of Auckland Masters paper on Ibsen and Strindberg, with a focus on Strindberg’s correspondence with Nietzsche. Then recently picking up a second-hand volume on Ibsen by Michael Meyer sparked a renewed interest, remembering also that we visited GRIEG’s Troldgaugen house in Bergen in 2015, returning with GRIEG memorabilia and GRIEG’s complete orchestral works on CD, notably his Peer Gynt suite, which is of course based on Ibsen’s play. Finally, perhaps, as I now found out to my surprise, Ibsen (and Rilke) lived in Munich for many years, the city where I lived as well for some time (first as a student at LMU, and later with my future wife). 

 

Meyer’s quite monumental biography of Ibsen (paperback version) is a fascinating record of Ibsen, the man and his work and travels, interwoven with the politics of his time, and as such a valuable history lesson. Not having taken a great interest in playwrights in general (apart from Brecht, and teaching a few Shakespeare plays in my role as an English high school teacher in New Zealand, which was a rather soul-destroying activity since the low-decile working-class students rather contemplated a career at McDonalds than pursuing high-brow English literature) this current study of Ibsen was also a good lesson in play writing and theatre production. It occasioned me to watch a number of Ibsen plays (on screen) and delve more deeply into one particular script, namely that of Rosmersholm. The latter, because Meyer had noted that both Freud and Shaw had commented on that play in some detail. Being a fan of Shaw’s writing (not so much of his plays) as one of the most incisive voices in English literature - not to speak of his socialist and vegetarian leanings that agree with me – one is of course cognisant of Shaw’s expertise as a theatre critic. I was also interested to find out if Meyer’s position on Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism is valid, namely his assertion that Shaw’s focus on Ibsen’s supposed socialist views and feminist emancipation – corresponding to Shaw’s own views - was counterintuitive. Meyer’s occasional baffling comments on the nature of sexuality in Ibsen’s plays (and of the man himself) were also an incentive to consult Freud’s Oedipus analysis of Rosmersholm, a topic that always arouses, as it were, the attention of the reader – if not the voyeur. Having mentioned Rilke in the title, I should explain that Meyer in his grand conclusion quotes Rilke at length in his praise of Ibsen – in my estimation a piece of mystical eccentricities, which I initially put down to a poor translation from the German. Having sourced the original German text I will show that I (as a native speaker of German) am not that much wiser.

 

In terms of my personal investigation of GRIEG’s time at Troldgaugen, I seek to establish  when my wife’s grandmother worked at Troldgaugen, wondering what GRIEG was up to at that time in his life, and what my wife’s grandmother might have glimpsed there as a housekeeper – as much as we saw when vesting Troldhaugen as tourists.

 

While Strindberg is not mentioned in the title, he will nevertheless make the odd appearance as Ibsen’s admirer and literary enemy, and in the context of the Scandinavian political and cultural wars of the time, perhaps reflecting the never-ending process that endures around the world to this day.

 

So, let me begin with Ibsen’s life trajectory as portrayed mainly in Meyer’s biography, which is of course a remarkable tale of a self-made literary career, achieved with equally remarkable tenacity, given that the early beginnings were less than favourable. Escaping his father’s financial and social meltdown – Ibsen forever remembering the latter humiliation of losing social respectability – we are treated to Meyer’s chapter entitled ‘The Apothecary’s Apprentice 1844 – 50’ in the small town of Grimstad, a provincial backwater at the time. Working like a slave in the Apotek (as a native German speaker one does recognise such words from the German equivalent of Apotheke, noting also Ibsen’s later use of German phrases in his plays, as well as the general tendency in Scandinavia in those days to learn German as a second language, ahead of French and English, (Ibsen never learnt English or French) he nevertheless found time to read and write and discuss literary matters with a few likeminded friends in Grimstad. One of the most amazing things that happened at the Apotek is glossed over by Meyer, namely that Ibsen at the age of 18 fathered a child (a son) with one of the two the maidservants of the Apotek. What strikes one first is, that while Ibsen as an apprentice was paid very poorly, the owner of the Apotek nevertheless also employed two female maidservants whose bedroom was next to Ibsen’s, and he had to pass through their bedroom whenever he left his own, at any time of the day or night. In the first instance one has to get used to the idea that in those days (all over world, it seems) even landed families of very modest means had maids, cooks, gardeners in the style of feudal societies. Once Ibsen was married and always struggling to keep his wife and son fed and clothed, there was always, surprisingly to me, a maid looking after the child and the household. Once Ibsen was financially secure, various housemaids (in Norway and abroad, as in Rome, Dresden and Munich) kept up a seemingly 24-hour cooking and cleaning service. Contrast this with life today whereby even well-to-do middleclass families would not even dream of having servants at their beck and call – they only marvel at the rich and famous who do, nowadays called personal assistants. The second point is of course a timeless one, one that Meyer curiously refers to as:

 

Else (aged 28) … She was, moreover, his husmor, which means that it fell to her to see to his personal needs, such as mending. She attended to other needs too.

 

This coy euphemism is in stark contrast when Meyer elsewhere does not mince his words when it comes to sex. That an 18-year old male has sex with a 28-year old female is nothing unusual in itself but that an 18-year old fathers a son in the process must surely be of a fairly monumental consequence for both of them – or maybe not at all if we look at how societies at various ages (including our own) have dealt with so-called illegitimate children, called bastards at times, as much as the unfortunate housemaids were called kitchen sluts. The 18-year-old Ibsen, despite his straightened circumstances nevertheless stemmed from a family of social status (even his relatively impoverished father was still accorded a social position on the ladder) while the housemaid has no social standing at all. Else is sent on her way with the baby to live with her impoverished parents, receiving minimal child support to the age of 14, and with Ibsen never ever communicating with Else of the growing child. It is curious that Meyer does not dwell on these matters, especially given that Ibsen in his Rosmersholm play makes a big deal about it, i.e. Rebecca West desperately not wanting to be an ‘illegitimate’ child. Ibsen never acknowledged his ‘illegitimate’ son, even when in his old age his son showed up in Christiana (Oslo). To the modern ear, this sounds like an absolute abandonment and black mark on Ibsen, even more so when Ibsen himself had some doubts raised about his own illegitimacy. The social shame of being born out of wedlock would seem to be a major issue for woman’s (and men’s) emancipation (or ennoblement as Ibsen put it) but it seems to be swept under the carpet even in modern times. When later discussing Freud’s take on the supposed Oedipus complex in Rosmersholm, we will also look at the wider issues of sex and procreation. Suffice to say here that fathering a child must be a juncture in anybody’s life, hence it will remain a complete mystery as to why in Ibsen’s case neither his biographer nor Ibsen himself raise the matter as a key development that requires more than a couple of pages in a 900-page treatise. One also misses this issue in Shaw who as a socialist thought of Ibsen as a fellow traveller (more again when discussing Rosmersholm in detail). 

 

Ibsen’s next journey, in not quite passing his matriculation to go to university in Christina, is coupled with the equally painful reception his first play Catiline which was published with the help and financial backing of one of his enthusiastic friends. Even so, I know from personal experience, what it is like to get a book/play published for the first time, i.e. the exhilaration of seeing one’s name on the cover – and given Ibsen’s youth (22 years old) at the time, it was no doubt a huge incentive to keep going, no matter what the obstacles might be and however much the mainstream critics might rubbish him. Indeed, this incredible obstinance kept him going where many another aspiring writer (playwright/artist) would have thrown the towel long ago. As we shall see shortly, Ibsen had a very lucky break in marrying his Suzannah who supported him through thick and thin, never doubting for second that her Dr Ibsen (as she referred to him) is destined for greatness as a playwright. Also, as with many a successful career, luck and being at the right place at the right time plays a major role, and so Ibsen met Ole Bull, the by then famous Norwegian violinist and supporter of the arts, who offered him a way out of the miseries in Christiana, in the shape of a job (albeit poorly paid) as a dramatic author to assist the Bergen Theatre (which Ole Bull had sponsored). Ibsen spent six years there, Meyer noting:

 

            … years of poverty, bitterness and failure, learning the alphabet of his craft.

 

This seems to be an overstatement as Ibsen found the love of his life in Bergen, leading to an entanglement of amazing coincidence, i.e. having netted his Suzannah (from an upper-class family in Bergen due to Suzannah’s step-mother being a then famous Danish author having invited Ibsen for a soiree) whose best friend Karoline eventually married Bjornstjere Bjornson who was to be nearly as famous as Ibsen as Norway’s foremost poet and supporter of Norway’s independence from Sweden – Ibsen and Bjornson having a most colourful relationship that will be commented upon later on. The most amazing point though was that that Suzannah and Karoline told each other that should they get married and have a son and daughter each, the son and daughter should get married. And this is exactly what happened, as bizarre as it sounds, the chances of it happening being rather small. In the event, Ibsen proposed to Suzannah, and they were engaged. It was not for another two and half years before they got married. Meyer does not provide any details – perhaps none are recorded – of their relationship at the time, i.e. given that Ibsen had already fathered a child (did he tell Suzannah about it?) did they have sexual encounters prior or during their engagement? Given that Suzannah’s stepmother was a libertine (a contemporary noted, according to Meyer, that the stepmother was disappointed that Ibsen showed more interest in Susannah than in herself) one wonders what Suzannah had in mind. Did she follow the social conventions, that on the surface prescribed virginity before marriage, and below the surface exercised her upper-class upbringing, that in a reverse to the upper-class male maid relationship, allowed for an upper-class female manservant escapade, in the guise of Lady Chatterley’s affair with her gardener, or say, Katherine the Great with her well-hung peasants? Since Meyer noted that Ibsen – despite the seeming evidence to the contrary in his fling with the maid – was sexually shy (ashamed to even expose his penis to the doctor) one can only wonder what exactly went on, the secrets that only Doctor Freud could have uncovered by putting Ibsen on the couch, thus arriving at an analysis that might explain Ibsen’s great work as libidinal sublimation (a theory I personally question, cf. D H Lawrence and Frieda). 

 

In any case, Ibsen had departed for another job at the Norwegian Theatre in Christiana, hence their engagement over a long time was conducted by frequent letter writing, a habit they both kept up for the rest of their lives. One may note here that they were quite often apart, at one stage Suzannah having spent nearly a year recuperating in Italy while Ibsen was ensconced in Christiana. Rumours that Ibsen was having affairs with young woman when Suzannah or Ibsen was away (or even in each other’s presence) were fiercely denied by both of them. Freud might have suggested that Suzannah increasingly became a mother figure to Ibsen in her unwavering support for the great man who instinctively knew that he owed large parts of his success to her. 

 

Now, given they were married in June 1858 and their son Sigurd was born on December 1859, we can assume the proper procedure of Sigurd having been born in wedlock and not outside of it. Her hitherto best friend Karoline had become her enemy who gossiped about Suzannah having declared that she will not have another child, insinuating that she had ceased sexual relations with Ibsen. Meyer puts this down to malicious gossip, and while Meyer notes that Ibsen’s private life is a closed book (e.g. Suzannah burnt all private correspondence with Ibsen before her death, saying their private life was exactly that) he also speculates that even if Suzannah had declared that they would not have any more children (as indeed it happened) it does not mean that they creased sexual relations. 

 

Whatever the story, Ibsen the playwright struggled from play to play (some nine up to 1863), confounding the critics with script titles like the aforementioned Catiline and the likes of The Feast at Solhaug, The Vikings at Helgeland, Love's Comedy and The Pretenders, when in 1863 a major political event shaped Ibsen’s view of Norway for decades to come. Long forgotten today (I certainly never learnt about it in my history lessons at high school in Germany) it involves Schleswig and Holstein, at the time part of Denmark. Due to a dynastic squabble, the two duchies were claimed by the Germans under Bismarck, who promptly invaded and occupied Schleswig and Holstein. Ibsen and many other Scandinavian nationalists expected Sweden (and its associated Norway) to come to Denmark’s aid, but nothing came off it and Denmark was forced to give up the two duchies to the Germans. Ibsen saw this as a betrayal, an act of cowardice, addressing a poem ‘To Norway’:

 

            ‘Twas but a lie in festal song,

            A kiss that Judas gave,

            When Norway’s song sang loud and long

            Beside the Danish wave.

 

One would have thought that his scorn should be more directed at the Germans rather than accusing his countrymen of cowardice in not standing up the might of the German League at the time. What is also interesting is that even in the late 19^th century, Europe was still a patchwork of aristocratic lands that changed hands every time some duke or duchess did not have a ‘legitimate’ successor, or if by marriage lands were amalgamated and/or divvied up according to the whims of the emperors, kings and sultans that ruled their lands by absolute decree.

 

In any case, Ibsen’s old friend (and sometimes enemy) Bjornson, quite remarkably, had raised enough money for Ibsen and his family to travel overseas, and as such there was the unhappy confluence of leaving Norway as a country he now detested. The destination was Rome (strangely via Berlin where he saw the Germans parading the Danish canons that were captured). Ibsen was not to set foot in Norway again for some 10 years and a further seventeen before he returned to live there. Like many a great writer he wrote his best work in exile. Why Rome? Do all roads lead to Rome, now and then? (while I have travelled the world, and in Italy, I’ve never been in Rome – how about that?). Rome in Ibsen’s time was still a papal state under the protection of the French Emperor while outside of Rome Garibaldi changed the history of Italy by rabblerousing battles for independence from foreign kings and queens. While Meyer provides many a description by Ibsen and his contemporaries living in Rome at the time, it is hard to envisage what it must have been like. The most interesting aspect is that of the almost clichéd expatriate scene, namely in Ibsen’s case the Scandinavian Club in Rome, which is a home from home, negating any efforts of having to socialise with the locals. Having worked and lived in various locations in the world, I have personal experience of expatriate life whereby the birds of a feather flock together in a gilded cage from which one can observe and freely criticize the unfortunate locals who live a life of second-class citizenry – lest one meets the local grandees. While Ibsen and his Scandinavian compatriots go on hikes in the countryside, meet in cafés to drink cheap and plentiful wine – Ibsen on occasion has been accused of being an alcoholic, especially when being offensive when drunk – and generally wander around all the ancient marvels that the city has to offer, there is a sense that Ibsen in particular mainly enjoys the mild climate as compared to freezing Norway, all the while Norway – not Rome - being on his mind. Meyer assiduously details Ibsen’s yearly accounts – as does Ibsen – and while the finances are a struggle still, Ibsen and his family seem to survive quite well, especially with Suzannah’s frugal household regime. Meyer reports on various occasions that Ibsen and family, even to the well-to-do end in Christiana, never established a homely family atmosphere in the sense of comfortable or even artistic furnishings, happy, it seems, to live in sparsely furnished but roomy lodgings most of their life. Even so, there always seemed to be enough money for a maid.

 

Ibsen continued his highly disciplined regime of writing, even when travelling, keeping up his correspondences with a large number of people in Scandinavia, his agents and publishers, and of course with his literary playwright projects. 

 

Here one can note Ibsen’s methodology – as described well by Meyer – that often sprang from singular ideas that over often a long time evolved into a script, struggling with Act 1 with many revisions, and then often quickly finishing with the rest of the Acts. The impetus may have been stories he had heard or read about in Norway, being the raw material to express his peculiar view of life, incorporating his messages to the world by way of characters that often-resembled people he knew, especially in his later plays. So, like many famous writers of fiction – e.g. Saul Bellow – produced many a roman à clef, and as such one might describe many of Ibsen’s plays as theatre à clef (unlike with Bellow, it was never a case of revenge porn, i.e. while some of the characters were clearly identifiable, they did not suffer any great insults). 

 

Given that Ibsen had written all his plays up to this time in verse, one must not forget that he was both poet and playwright, his poetic output also including many a song lyric. Let us jump ahead a bit, so as to begin with Peer Gynt and Edvard Grieg, combining Meyer’s biography with that of Benestad & Schjelderup-Ebbe of Grieg. While Grieg as a young boy might have crossed paths with Ibsen in Bergen, their first meeting as adults was in Rome, where Grieg spent some five months, and according to Meyer, Grieg and Ibsen got on well, talking amongst other things about a possible collaboration of an operatic version of one of his earlier plays. While nothing came of it, Grieg on his return to Christiana had written to Ibsen asking him for supporting his application as Kapellmeister at the Christiana Theatre, which at that time was managed by Bjornson, Ibsen’s patron. Nothing came of it as Bjornson had made an appointment before he got Ibsen’s letter. Towards the end of 1866 Ibsen announced that he is working on a ‘long dramatic poem, having in its principal a part-legendary, part-fictional character from Norwegian folklore during resent time.’ It’s a totally surreal story line, a sort of Scandinavian noir that defies easy analysis – Freud should have tried his hand on this one instead of Rosmersholm – of a life lived that has no rhyme (and yet it is literally rhymed) and reason other than man being himself, of missed love and affection – found only at the end. A man wandering the world (North-Africa) to return to his home without any possessions, without having anything gained – essentially a sad story, one that is too often the real story of mankind, to have lived a life on the margins of society, of people without a history, only becoming characters of folklore, of figures of some fascination, of magic (trolls) and god-like phantoms, of seduction and imaginary sex (not a cardinal sin), of coming to rest in the lap of the woman who always believed in you, always loved you, even though you never were there with her, until now, late in old age. To perform this as a 5-act play, as envisaged by Ibsen, was at the time beyond any conception of what can be staged in provincial Norway, or even in the other more advanced European or American theatrical metropoles. First published in 1867 it took another 7 years or so before Ibsen considered to have the play staged in Christiana. By then, having been acknowledged as a world-class playwright, there was more willingness on part of the Christiana Theatre to give it a go. 

 

Ibsen was not particularly musical, but he liked sing-alongs, and he wrote quite a number of song lyrics for various occasions. Peer Gynt had of course quite a number of scenes that required what is somewhat disparagingly called ‘incidental music’  - a feature of many a theatre production at the time, quite apart from opera – so the question was as to who could compose the required pieces. Grieg was of course the man of the hour, on the way of gaining an equally world-class reputation as a composer (but still not well off financially), even though Ibsen did not really appreciate classical music as such. Hence, somewhat condescendingly, he wrote to Grieg the by now famous letter, detailing the musical requirements with an offer of a 50/50 financial reward for the production rights. Grieg was none too impressed, but the money seemed irresistible. And so began the great, but occasionally flawed, partnership that made Peer Gynt synonymous with music and play, more so the latter, as Grieg’s initial ‘incidental’ music blossomed into a stand-alone work that far outshines the play in its musical form. Benestad & Schjelderup-Ebbe devote a whole chapter to this process (summarized here). They note that both Grieg and Ibsen realised that composing music for this vast play (even in abridged version) would be time consuming, and while Grieg started straight away after his acceptance, there was slow progress. Grieg also noted the restrictions posed by the Christiana orchestra’s capabilities, but Ibsen encouraged him to compose according to the ideal standard, a somewhat idealistic notion that Grieg could not countenance. Furthermore, Grieg became less enthusiastic as he progressed, writing to a friend  in April 1875 ‘I am still plugging away at the music for Peer Gynt, and it doesn’t interest me’. Grieg thought of parts of Peer Gynt reeking of ‘exaggerated Norwegian nationalism and trollist self-sufficiency’ and while he thought of Ibsen as a great dramatist, Grieg did not consider Peer Gynt as one of his great works. Nevertheless, there were parts in Peer Gynt that Grieg liked very much, and understandably he composed his best music for these parts, e.g. the scene where Solveig sings. Despite various misgivings, Grieg completed the project by July 1875. Grieg was not able to attend rehearsals, but he sent the orchestra leader in Christiana a very detailed letter suggesting improvements that were not easily discernible from the score submitted. This is the beginning of Grieg’s long process to edit, improve and add to the original music, so that it grew ever more into a stand-alone suite of compositions. Grieg was also encouraged by the first performance in Christiana which was lauded for both its music and acting. By 1885, Grieg reports that he had ‘almost totally reconceptualized and reorchestrated the music’, including four new pieces. The suites were played, and are played and recorded still today, throughout the musical world, in the orchestral version, in the composer’s own arrangements for piano, and in countless other arrangements. Even so, the complete score of all the Peer Gynt music was only published in 1908, a year after Grieg’s death. But even during Grieg’s time, the Peer Gynt music became Grieg’s greatest triumph. While Grieg and Ibsen never really saw eye to eye, Grieg on hearing of Ibsen’s death in 1906, wrote in his diary:

 

Although I was prepared for it, the news came as a shock. How much I owe him! Poor, great Ibsen! He was not a happy man, for it is as if he carried within him a chunk of ice that would not melt. But under this chunk of ice lay a fervent love of humanity.

 

I am not sure that I totally agree, for no man can be happy, as long as there is in this world a man left who is not happy. 

 

As an interlude to conclude with Grieg, let us briefly tell the story of my wife’s Norwegian grandmother, who worked as a maid in the Grieg household just before he died. My wife’s mother had it written down that her mother had told her that when she arrived at the Grieg household it was in a bit of a mess and Grieg apologized, upon which she replied, ‘I’ll worry about the mess, and you just play the piano’. No other details have been recorded. Said grandmother eventually made it to Kenya where she operated a beauty salon in Nairobi, married a Swede and had two daughters, one of whom eventually married a British man (born in Kenya), had two daughters, and moved to New Zealand after Kenya’s independence. Such is our personal connection to Grieg and Norway. When we visited Bergen, and of course Troldhaugen in 2018 we closely perused the old photographs in the livingroom just in case my wife’s grandmother was in one of them. It is not known how long after Grieg’s death she remained at Troldhaugen, but probably it was not for long. After Grieg’s death his wife Nina Grieg spent most of her time in Copenhagen, and it is not known if she dissolved the Troldhaugen household, or if it was kept until she was forced to sell Troldhaugen in 1919 to Consul Joachim Grieg, after vain attempts to get the public to take over responsibility for the artists' home. According to the Norwegian biographical notes all the furnishings and movables were sold at auction, the composer's cabin and Grieg's grave were moved. Fana municipality received Troldhaugen as a gift from Joachim Grieg in 1923. Under Aslaug Mohr's leadership, things were put back together, and in May 1928 Troldhaugen was opened as a museum, to Nina Grieg's great satisfaction. We had bought a bust of Grieg as a memento, which we passed on to one of our nieces who is on her way to become a great pianist. 

 

Back to Ibsen and the bit of my (exaggerated) personal connection with Ibsen, i.e. having lived in Munich on several occasions not too far from the Maximilian Strasse where Ibsen spent some six year (1885-91). Nowadays this is one of the most prestigious shopping streets in Munich, and in Ibsen’s time it was no less a fashionable address. As Meyer stated numerous times, while Ibsen’s various apartment lodgings were never very homely, Ibsen always paid attention to real estate location, preferring to be in the center of the cultural life of the city he was living in. Munich is of course well known for its museums, art galleries, architecture, parks and beer gardens – and Maximilian Strasse is right in the middle of it. Bavarian culture and traditions are sometimes compared to the Norwegian way of life, so Ibsen might have felt right at home – not to speak of the sometimes-miserable weather and cold winters. Munich in Ibsen’s time was not a metropole, nor is it now – although for diehard Bavarians it has always been so – and as such cheaper to live in than say, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen or even Christiana (Oslo). Given Ibsen’s ambiguous attitude towards the aristocracy – advocating that the working classes be en-nobled to the level of the noble aristocracy, and whereby, presumably, the aristocracy becomes de-nobled in comparison– he was happy to report that

 

We are now living handsomely and spaciously in the smartest and most aristocratic street in Munich, and yet pay only half the rent we had to pay in Rome.

 

Bavarians to this day seem to be enamoured with aristocracy, in love with mad King Ludwig still and his castles (I went to Gymnasium Hohenschwangau, just below the fairytale castle Neuschwanstein) – Ibsen’s apartment block had a bust of him in the foyer – and all the old favourites like the Thurn and Taxis, and the Poccis (my wife and I visited the latter old lady in her Starnberg castle – well, due to straightened circumstances she lived in an annex, having rented out the main building – known to us as one of her sisters had emigrated to Kenya where she became part of the Nairobi expatriates my wife comes from). Ibsen just liked to bask in the atmosphere, one supposes. His daily walking routine was so precise that one of his young lady fans (a painter) always bumped into him (surprise, surprise) just as he entered his favourite café, always sitting at the same table, alone, sipping seltzer and schnapps, observing the world around him for exactly one hour. One wonders what Suzannah was doing all day apart from telling the maid what to do.  Their son Sigurd had grown up and had just gotten his first diplomatic posting to Washington. Suzannah kept the apartment like a fortress with few visitors allowed – other than those she considered as important in Ibsen’s career as a playwright. As always, she made absolutely sure that nobody could ever disturb Dr Ibsen during his morning to lunch routine of writing. 

 

Having returned to Munich after a sojourn in Norway, he brought back plenty of ideas for a new play. While he did not always feel particularly welcome back home, he was most impressed with his old friend and patron Count (!) Carl Snoilsky and his new wife whom Ibsen visited for four days or so. The new wife, as the story goes (and as told by Meyer) has regenerated Snoilsky’s literary ambitions which had all but died under the puritan tutelage of his first wife, who after their divorce died of consumption, with some people accusing the count of having caused it – Ibsen not being one of them. Even so, he was impressed with the new wife, her vitality and strength of character. So, there is an idea: old wife stultifies husband, a new one to the rescue? Is there a price to pay? What about his own situation? Suzannah has supported him through thick and thin, she made him, so while in his imagination he might fancy a young, attractive woman for a replacement of the old nagging wife, he knows instinctively that it is best left to the imagination, and perhaps a bit of flirting with the young ones who seem all too eager to please him. But the Snoilsky story is another kettle of fish, not really very dramatic. How to turn this eternal conundrum into a drama? A tragedy? Thus, Rosmersholm is born, or so it seems according to Meyer’s account. In this connexion, one should not forget that Ibsen’s lifelong, ambiguous preoccupation with male-female-female relationships may also have been triggered by his shameful consequence of his first (sexual) encounter when he was 18, having fathered a son, only to deny him and his mother any love and recognition. As we shall see Freud may have missed a point on this account as well.

 

As an interlude, before progressing to Rosmersholm, there is a telling anecdote from Ibsen’s time in Munich, i.e. while many of his plays were being performed in Germany, his at the time still mildly controversial play Ghosts was banned by police in the provincial Bavarian town of Augsburg (to get around police censorship in those days such plays were performed as private functions). I had a similar experience as a student at LMU in Munich in 1970, rehearsing a theatrical piece by and with the Austrian performance artist Hermann Nitsch, when the police stormed the theatre and arrested the main actors (I was in the noise orchestra and escaped) for allegedly disturbing the peace by acting an erotic scene. Bavaria is still a very oppressive society, and I am a bit puzzled that Ibsen in his time stayed in Munich for such a long time. While he began to contemplate his permanent return to Norway, he may well have wondered if his equally conservative homeland is worth the struggle one has to endure as a liberal, left-leaning individualist like Ibsen. 

 

In the meantime, the ‘what if’ question seemed to find an anchor in his conception of Rosmersholm which he completed in 1886. Like practically all of Ibsen’s plays, Rosmersholm was read in book form long before such a play was actually performed. I did the same: reading it carefully (in Archer’s English translation) from beginning to end – I have not been able to find a recorded performance on-line. 

 

To assist the reader who is not familiar with the play, I will quote GB Shaw’s extensive essay on Rosmersholm, including some quotes from the beginning of his Quintessence of Ibsenism (Meyer however dismisses it as a brilliantly misleading book, with a narrow focus on women’s rights). Shaw as the master theatre critic, playwright and writer is ever so witty in his assessments.so as to disallow any critical annotation – although I will try, including some of Meyer’s misgivings (inserted comments in italics). Following this I will discuss Freud’s take on Rosmersholm.

 

In the introduction of Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism we can see what it is that Shaw admires in Ibsen:

 

Materialism, in short, only isolated the great mystery of consciousness by clearing away several petty mysteries with which we had confused it; just as rationalism isolated the great mystery of the will to live. The isolation made both more conspicuous than before. We thought we had escaped for ever from the cloudy region of metaphysics; and we were only carried further into the heart of them.

 

Yet many who today echo Lassalle's demand that economic and political institutions should be adapted to the poor man's will to eat and drink his fill out of the product of his own labour, are revolted by Ibsen's acceptance of the impulse towards greater freedom as sufficient ground for the repudiation of any customary duty, however sacred, that conflicts with it. Society — were it even as free as Lassalle's Social-Democratic republic — must it seems to them, go to pieces when conduct is no longer regulated by inviolable covenants.

 

Love, as a practical factor in society, is still a mere appetite. That higher development of it which Ibsen shews us occurring in the case of Rebecca West in Rosmersholm is only known to most of us by the descriptions of great poets, who themselves, as their biographies prove, have often known it, not by sustained experience, but only by brief glimpses.

 

While in full agreement with the first two paragraphs, the last paragraph seems somewhat problematic in that ‘love’ as lust (‘appetite’) is somehow a lower form as distinguished from a ‘higher development’ – as in Rosmersholm, which I don’t quite see, in particular and in general. One assumes that Shaw includes himself in the class of great poets who only experience love in brief glimpses. One wonders why? Shaw was celibate up the age of 29 and then only engaged in a few non-platonic relationships, reported to be sexually shy, as much as Ibsen. Reich’s proposed solutions to the oppression of ‘free’ love might have been a step too far for both Ibsen and Shaw.

 

This question of ‘love’ as framed by Ibsen and Shaw comes up again and again as we shall see in the essay on Rosmersholm quoted in full below:

 

Ibsen did not in The Wild Duck exhaust the subject of the danger of forming ideals for other people, and interfering in their lives with a view to enabling them to realize those ideals. Cases far more typical than that of the meddlesome lodger are those of the priest who regards the ennobling of mankind as a sort of trade process of which his cloth gives him a monopoly, and the clever woman who pictures a noble career for the man she loves, and devotes herself to helping him to achieve it. 

 

Perhaps the modern reader deserves an explanation for the ‘meddlesome lodger’ which in those times was a quite common phenomenon, by which landlords rented out rooms in their own houses to supplement their income, or else accommodated relatives or friends of friends who were in straightened circumstances. Even in my student days in Munich, I remember my first ‘lodging’ being in an apartment of an old lady who rented out a room to students – with strict rules as one had to pass through her living room to get to one’s bedroom (sounds a bit like young Ibsen’s scandalous lodging that occasioned him having to cross the bedroom of the maids when exiting his own room). 

 

In Rosmersholm, the play with which Ibsen followed up The Wild Duck, there is an unpractical country parson, a gentleman of ancient stock, whose family has been for many years a centre of social influence. The tradition of that influence reinforces his priestly tendency to regard the ennoblement of the world as an external operation to be performed by himself; and the need of such ennoblement is very evident to him; for his nature is a fine one: he looks at the world with some dim prevision of " the third empire." He is married to a woman of passionately affectionate nature, who is very fond of him, but does not regard him as a regenerator of the human race. Indeed she does not share any of his dreams, and only acts as an extinguisher on the sacred fire of his idealism. He, she, her brother Kroll the headmaster, Kroll's wife, and their set form a select circle of the best people in the place, comfortably orbited in the social system, and quite planetary in ascertained position and unimpeachable respectability. Into the orbit comes presently a wandering star, one Rebecca Gamvik, an unpropertied orphan, who has been allowed to read advanced books, and is a Freethinker and a Radical—all things that disqualify a poor woman for admission to the Rosmer world. 

 

One should note that in the play Rosmer’s wife is already dead and one learns of her life and fate only through the dialogue of the other characters. Indeed in the first scene with Rebecca West (nee Gamvik – a crucial aspect later in the play and for Freud’s analysis but not for Shaw) and the housemaid, we learn about the basic circumstances that have happened in the past, setting the scene, as it were. That Rebecca as a poor orphan was allowed to read ‘advanced books’ and is a ‘Freethinker and a Radical’ only becomes clear in the following scenes. Her past becomes an important aspect only later on. Note that Rosmer’s wife is described by Shaw as an ‘extinguisher’ of her husband’s ideals and ambitions, a throwback to the Snoilsky backstory that fascinated Ibsen.

 

However, one must live somewhere; and as the Rosmer world is the only one in which an ambitious and cultivated woman can find powerful allies and educated companions, Rebecca, being both ambitious and cultivated, makes herself agreeable to the Rosmer circle with such success that the affectionate and impulsive but unintelligent Mrs Rosmer becomes wildly fond of her, and is not content until she has persuaded her to come and live with them. Rebecca, then a mere adventuress fighting for a foothold in polite society (which has hitherto shown itself highly indignant at her thrusting herself in where nobody has thought of providing room for her), accepts the offer all the more readily because she has taken the measure of Parson Rosmer, and formed the idea of playing upon his aspirations, and making herself a leader in politics and society by using him as a figure-head.

 

In the play this is all in the past and only learnt from the present dialogues.

 

But now two difficulties arise. First, there is Mrs Rosmer's extinguishing effect on her husband — an effect which convinces Rebecca that nothing can be done with him whilst his wife is in the way. 

 

Again, we only learn this through the present dialogues as Mrs Rosmer is already dead.

 

Second — a contingency quite unallowed for in her provident calculations — she finds herself passionately enamoured of him. The poor parson, too, falls in love with her; but he does not know it. He turns to the woman who understands him like a sunflower to the sun, and makes her his real friend and companion. The wife feels this soon enough; and he, quite unconscious of it, begins to think that her mind must be affected, since she has become so intensely miserable and hysterical about nothing—nothing that he can see. The truth is that she has come under the curse of the ideal too: she sees herself standing, a useless obstacle, between her husband and the woman he really loves the woman who can help him to a glorious career. She cannot even be the mother in the household; for she is childless. Then comes Rebecca, fortified with a finely reasoned theory that Rosmer's future is staked against his wife's life, and says that it is better for all their sakes that she should quit Rosmersholm. She even hints that she must go at once if a grave scandal is to be avoided. Mrs Rosmer, regarding a scandal in Rosmersholm as the most terrible thing that can happen, and seeing that it could be averted by the marriage of Rebecca and Rosmer if she were out of the way, writes a letter secretly to Rosmer's bitterest enemy, the editor of the local Radical paper, a man who has forfeited his moral reputation by an intrigue which Rosmer has pitilessly denounced. In this letter she implores him not to believe or publish any stories that he may hear about Rosmer, to the effect that he is in any way to blame for anything that may happen to her. Then she sets Rosmer free to marry Rebecca, and to realize his ideals, by going out into the garden and throwing herself into the millstream that runs there. 

 

All this is the backstory, learnt from present dialogue. Shaw seems to explain to the reader - or to the audience of the play – how the play is built upon a past that only becomes known in the present. To the innocent reader or audience this may prove to be a cognitive load that is not easily translated into what is happening at present – and indeed many of Ibsen’s plays can be very confusing, especially when viewed the first time, and possibly with actors who suffer from the same problem. Ibsen as the playwright does not take any prisoners when it comes to letting the audience decipher the contingent past through the present. Ibsen’s dictum was that his plays are configured to make the audience think, not just enjoy it as entertainment that the French comedies at the time provided so easily – and which is still true today. Complex story lines are difficult to follow and are unlikely to become blockbuster successes. Still, eventually there were enough people to appreciate the Ibsen plays to make him a household name.

 

The only forward item is the ‘letter’ that Mrs Rosmer had written to the Radical – why would she do that? – that eventually serves a sub-plot and evidence that she was not mad in seeing what Rebecca was all about, apart from killing herself. Meyer does comment on the ‘letter’ device in traditional theatre as a cheap trick, one that Ibsen, despite his innovative stage plays, employs with customary relish. 

 

Now follows a period of quiet mourning at Rosmersholm. 

 

            This is where the play begins.

 

Everybody except Rosmer suspects that Mrs Rosmer was not mad, and guesses why she committed suicide. Only it would not do to compromise the aristocratic party by treating Rosmer as the Radical editor was treated. 

 

The Radical newspaper, or the editor thereof, was once upon a time respectable citizen as a local teacher but was exposed and denounced (including by Rosmer at the time as a clergyman) of an extramarital affair.

 

So the neighbours shut their eyes and condole with the bereaved clergyman; and the Radical editor holds his tongue because Radicalism is getting respectable, and he hopes, with Rebecca's help, to get Rosmer over to his side presently. Meanwhile the unexpected has again happened to Rebecca. Her passion is worn out; but in the long days of mourning she has found the higher love; and it is now for Rosmer's own sake that she urges him to become a man of action, and brood no more over the dead. 

 

This idea of a ‘higher love’ seems to be a perennial obsession, if not by Ibsen, then at least by the religious and philosophical currents of the day, as noted by Shaw before.

  

When his friends start a Conservative paper and ask him to become editor, she induces him to reply by declaring himself a Radical and Freethinker. To his utter amazement, the result is, not an animated discussion of his views, but just such an attack on his home life and private conduct as he had formerly made on those of the Radical editor. His friends tell him plainly that the compact of silence is broken by his defection, and that there will be no mercy for the traitor to the party. Even the Radical editor not only refuses to publish the fact that his new ally is a Freethinker (which would destroy all his social weight as a Radical recruit), but brings up the dead woman's letter as a proof that the attack is sufficiently well-founded to make it unwise to go too far. Rosmer, who at first had been simply shocked that men whom he had always honoured as gentlemen should descend to such hideous calumny, now sees that he really did love Rebecca, and is indeed guilty of his wife's death. His first impulse is to shake off the spectre of the dead woman by marrying Rebecca; but she, knowing that the guilt is hers, puts that temptation behind her and refuses. Then, as he thinks it all over, his dream of ennobling the world slips away from him: such work can only be done by a man conscious of his own innocence. To save him from despair, Rebecca makes a great sacrifice. She "gives him back his innocence " by confessing how she drove his wife to kill herself; and, as the confession is made in the presence of Kroll, she ascribes the whole plot to her ambition, and says not a word of her passion. Rosmer, confounded as he realizes what helpless puppets they have, all been in the hands of this clever woman, for the moment misses the point that unscrupulous ambition, though it explains her crime, does not account for her confession. He turns his back on her and leaves the house with Kroll. 

 

Kroll, Rosmer’s dead wife’s brother is the bad guy in the play, a right-wing obsessive, and he corners Rebecca by trying to establish her status as an illegitimate child – which she denies despite the evidence brought forward by Kroll – and thereby attributing to her, her low social status, resulting in her psychopathic ambition and cruelty that led to his sister’s suicide. We will see that Freud makes something much more out of this conundrum.

 

She quietly packs up her trunk, and is about to vanish from Rosmersholm without another word when he comes back alone to ask why she confessed. She tells him why, offering him her self-sacrifice as a proof that his power of ennobling others was no vain dream, since it is his companionship that has changed her from the selfish adventuress she was to the devoted woman she has just proved herself to be. But he has lost his faith in himself, and cannot believe her. The proof is too subtle, too artful: he cannot forget that she duped him by flattering this very weakness of his before. Besides, he knows now that it is not true—that people are not ennobled from without. 

 

As noted again and again, Ibsen thought that ‘ennoblement’  of the working classes could not be achieved by outside influence, like political (socialist) parties, but by self-realisation, a concept that has endured to this very day in various disguises. The interesting question is what would happen to the bad old aristocratic classes if the working classes are in this way ennobled? Death by guillotine? Re-education in gulags? Or will the bad old aristocrats see the error of their ways and distribute their wealth to the newly ennobled working classes and all live ever after happily?

 

She has no more to say; for she can think of no further proof. But he has thought of an unanswerable one. Dare she make all doubt impossible by doing for his sake what the wife did? She asks what would happen if she had the heart and the will to do it. "Then," he replies, "I should have to believe in you. I should recover my faith in my mission. Faith in my power to ennoble human souls. Faith in the human soul's power to attain nobility." "You shall have your faith again," she answers. At this pass the inner truth of the situation comes out; and the thin veil of a demand for "proof", with its monstrous sequel of asking the woman to kill herself in order to restore the man's good opinion of himself, falls away. What has really seized Rosmer is the old fatal ideal of expiation by sacrifice. He sees that when Rebecca goes into the millstream he must go too. And he speaks his real mind in the words, "There is no judge over us: therefore, we must do justice upon ourselves." But the woman's soul is free of this to the end; for when she says, "I am under the power of the Rosmersholm view of life now. What I have sinned it is fit I should expiate," we feel in that speech a protest against the Rosmersholm view of life—the view that denied her right to live and be happy from the first, and now at the end, even in denying its God, exacts her life as a vain blood-offering for its own blindness. The woman has the higher light: she goes to her death out of fellowship with the man who is driven thither by the superstition which has destroyed his will. The story ends with his taking her solemnly as his wife, and casting himself with her into the millstream. It is unnecessary to repeat here what is said before as to the vital part played in this drama by the evolution of the lower into the higher love. 

 

Shaw’s take on the ending seems to me as confused as is Ibsen’s original construct, for why should Rebecca, as a liberated (socialist) woman, commit suicide to prove her ‘higher love’, for it is never explained by Shaw or Ibsen, or by anyone else I know of, what the purported difference is supposed to be between ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ love – for if anything, this ‘higher love’ is a fabrication designed by the ruling classes to keep the working classes at bay.

 

Peer Gynt, during the prophetic episode in his career, shocks the dancing girl Anitra into a remonstrance by comparing himself to a cat. He replies, with his wisest air, that from the standpoint of love there is perhaps not so much difference between a tomcat and a prophet as she may imagine. The number of critics who have entirely missed the point of Rebecca's transfiguration seems to indicate that the majority of men, even among critics of dramatic poetry, have not got beyond Peer Gynt's opinion in this matter. No doubt they would not endorse it as a definitely stated proposition, aware, as they are, that there is a poetic convention to the contrary. But if they fail to recognize the only possible alternative proposition when it is not only stated in so many words by Rebecca West, but when without it her conduct dramatically contradicts her character — when they even complain of the contradiction as a blemish on the play, I am afraid there can be no further doubt that the extreme perplexity into which the first performance of Rosmersholm in England plunged the Press was due entirely to the prevalence of Peer Gynt's view of love among the dramatic critics.

 

Now Shaw does seem to offer an explanation of sorts, namely that as per Peer Gynt, human love is a natural biological phenomenon (as in a cat) and that the conservative critics of the day can only think of spiritual love, and as such have to condemn the play. This point of view of ‘low love’ equalling all love, does not seem to have played out in Rosmersholm, given Shaw’s occasionally convoluted interpretations. Maybe here Meyer has a small point in denouncing The Quintessence of Ibsenism as The Quintessence of Shavianism, or else Meyer missed the point that Ibsen and Shaw in their private lives and loves resembled each other in uncanny ways, e.g. the marriage of intellectual but not sexual conveniences, the obsession with young women and the forever unanswered question what could have been had they satisfied their low love instincts instead of sublimating their libidos for the high art of literature. 

            

Which brings us to the father of libidinous literature, Sigmund Freud who commented at large on Rosmersholm. It is not quite clear to me why Freud zeroed into Rosemersholm as a case of Rebecca’s Oedipus Complex revealed, and subsequent behaviour explained by the trauma. Again, as with Shaw, we shall quote Freud’s text at length and annotate accordingly (in italics).

 

If we have been unable to give any answer to the question why Lady Macbeth should collapse after her success, we may perhaps have a better chance when we turn to the creation of another great dramatist, who loves to pursue problems of psychological responsibility with unrelenting rigour. Rebecca Gamvik, the daughter of a midwife, has been brought up by her adopted father, Dr. West, to be a freethinker and to despise the restrictions which a morality founded on religious belief seeks to impose on the desires of life. After the doctor's death she finds a position at Rosmersholm, the home for many generations of an ancient family whose members know nothing of laughter and have sacrificed joy to a rigid fulfilment of duty. Its occupants are Johannes Rosmer, a former pastor, and his invalid wife, the childless Beata. Overcome by ‘a wild, uncontrollable passion’ for the love of the high-born Rosmer, Rebecca resolves to remove the wife who stands in her way, and to this end makes use of her ‘fearless, free’ will, which is restrained by no scruples. She contrives that Beata shall read a medical book in which the aim of marriage is represented to be the begetting of offspring, so that the poor woman begins to doubt whether her own marriage is justifiable. Rebecca then hints that Rosmer, whose studies and ideas she shares, is about to abandon the old faith and join the ‘party of enlightenment’; and after she has thus shaken the wife's confidence in her husband's moral integrity, gives her finally to understand that she, Rebecca, will soon leave the house in order to conceal the consequences of her illicit intercourse with Rosmer. The criminal scheme succeeds. The poor wife, who has passed for depressed and irresponsible, throws herself from the path beside the mill into the mill-race, possessed by the sense of her own worthlessness and wishing no longer to stand between her beloved husband and his happiness. 

 

This is how Freud summarizes the backstory. Rebecca’s ‘criminal scheme’ is lifted only from the ‘letter’ Beata had written to the Radical, and from Rebecca’s own admission of having driven Beata to suicide. That Rebecca had ‘illicit intercourse with Rosmer’ is but a guess on Freud’s part that is never stated explicitly in the play. The contrary guess may also be justified as Rosmer only proposed marriage to Rebecca – and he was refused by Rebecca since she had by then entered the state of ‘higher love’ that is asexual – in order to entertain a sexual relationship, one he would never consider outside marriage, even at his stage of becoming a liberal (in Ibsen’s mould) if not a ‘freethinker’. 

 

For more than a year Rebecca and Rosmer have been living alone at Rosmersholm in a relationship which he wishes to regard as a purely intellectual and ideal friendship. But when this relationship begins to be darkened from outside by the first shadow of gossip, and at the same time tormenting doubts arise in Rosmer about the motives for which his wife put an end to herself, he begs Rebecca to become his second wife, so that they may counter the unhappy past with a new living reality (Act II). For an instant she exclaims with joy at his proposal, but immediately afterwards declares that it can never be, and that if he urges her further she will ‘go the way Beata went’. Rosmer cannot understand this rejection; and still less can we, who know more of Rebecca's actions and designs. All we can be certain of is that her ‘no’ is meant in earnest. How could it come about that the adventuress with the ‘fearless, free will’, who forged her way ruthlessly to her desired goal, should now refuse to pluck the fruit of success when it is offered to her? She herself gives us the explanation in the fourth Act: ‘This is the terrible part of it: that now, when all life's happiness is within my grasp—my heart is changed and my own past cuts me off from it.’ That is to say, she has in the meantime become a different being; her conscience has awakened, she has acquired a sense of guilt which debars her from enjoyment. 

 

As noted above, Rosmer’s marriage proposal is just that – to enter into a sanctioned sexual relationship – but what puzzles Freud is Rebecca’s sudden refusal, or rather the explanation of it, and as such is now searching for the hidden meaning.

 

And what has awakened her conscience? Let us listen to her herself, and then consider whether we can believe her entirely. ‘It is the Rosmer view of life—or your view of life at any rate—that has infected my will.… And made it sick. Enslaved it to laws that had no power over me before. You—life with you—has ennobled my mind.’ This influence, we are further to understand, has only become effective since she has been able to live alone with Rosmer: ‘In quiet—in solitude—when you showed me all your thoughts without reserve—every tender and delicate feeling, just as it came to you—then the great change came over me.’ Shortly before this she has lamented the other aspect of the change: ‘Because Rosmersholm has sapped my strength. My old fearless will has had its wings clipped here. It is crippled! The time is past when I had courage for anything in the world. I have lost the power of action, Rosmer.’ Rebecca makes this declaration after she had revealed herself as a criminal in a voluntary confession to Rosmer and Rector Kroll, the brother of the woman she has got rid of. Ibsen has made it clear by small touches of masterly subtlety that Rebecca does not actually tell lies, but is never entirely straightforward. Just as, in spite of all her freedom from prejudices, she has understated her age by a year, so her confession to the two men is incomplete, and as a result of Kroll's insistence it is supplemented on some important points. Hence it is open to us to suppose that her explanation of her renunciation exposes one motive only to conceal another. 

 

            So, what can this ‘other’ motive be?

 

Certainly, we have no reason to disbelieve her when she declares that the atmosphere of Rosmersholm and her association with the high-minded Rosmer have ennobled—and crippled—her. She is here expressing what she knows and has felt. But this is not necessarily all that has happened in her, nor need she have understood all that has happened. Rosmer's influence may only have been a cloak, which concealed another influence that was operative, and a remarkable indication points in this other direction. Even after her confession, Rosmer, in their last conversation which brings the play to an end, again beseeches her to be his wife. He forgives her the crime she has committed for love of him. And now she does not answer, as she should, that no forgiveness can rid her of the feeling of guilt she has incurred from her malignant deception of poor Beata; but she charges herself with another reproach which affects us as coming strangely from this freethinking woman, and is far from deserving the importance which Rebecca attaches to it: ‘Dear—never speak of this again! It is impossible! For you must know, Rosmer, I have a—a past behind me.’ She means, of course, that she has had sexual relations with another man; and we do not fail to observe that these relations, which occurred at a time when she was free and accountable to nobody, seem to her a greater hindrance to the union with Rosmer than her truly criminal behaviour to his wife. Rosmer refuses to hear anything about this past.

 

Freud seems to suggest that the “I have – a past behind me” phrase that is uttered by Rebecca at the time of Rosmer’s first marriage proposal, is somehow carried through to the very end of the play, which is not correct, i.e. Rebecca confirms with her last words that they are now a couple “Yes. We are one. Come! We go gladly”. The two are united in deathly love, not prevented by Rebecca’s past that in part had caused her earlier to refuse Rosmer’s larger-than-life marriage proposal. In other words, Freud is determined to show that this ‘past’ is the key to the whole play, from beginning to end.

 

We can guess what it was, though everything that refers to it in the play is, so to speak, subterranean and has to be pieced together from hints. But nevertheless, they are hints inserted with such art that it is impossible to misunderstand them. 

 

It might be an exaggeration to claim that ‘hints’ are impossible to understand. Isn’t it the meaning of hints that they are mostly if not always ambiguous?

 

Between Rebecca's first refusal and her confession something occurs which has a decisive influence on her future destiny. Rector Kroll arrives one day at the house on purpose to humiliate Rebecca by telling her that he knows she is an illegitimate child, the daughter of the very Dr. West who adopted her after her mother's death. Hate has sharpened his perceptions, yet he does not suppose that this is any news to her. ‘I really did not suppose you were ignorant of this, otherwise it would have been very odd that you should have let Dr. West adopt you …’ ‘And then he takes you into his house—as soon as your mother dies. He treats you harshly. And yet you stay with him. You know that he won't leave you a halfpenny—as a matter of fact you got only a case of books—and yet you stay on; you bear with him; you nurse him to the last.’ …‘I attribute your care for him to the natural filial instinct of a daughter. Indeed, I believe your whole conduct is a natural result of your origin.’

 

Note this last outrageous sentence is uttered by the nasty Kroll character, hence assuming that Ibsen as the godfather of anti-behaviourism is making this very point. And yet Freud in the first sentence above seems to suggest something similar, i.e. ‘something occurs that has a decisive influence on her future destiny’. Or maybe this is an unfair accusation as Freud has never asserted that – as does Kroll the nasty behaviourist – illegitimate children are bound to grow up as bad people, or worse that adolescents who might have been subject to incest will by necessity turn into monsters.

 

But Kroll is mistaken. Rebecca had no idea at all that she could be Dr. West's daughter. When Kroll began with dark hints at her past, she must have thought he was referring to something else. After she has gathered what he means, she can still retain her composure for a while, for she is able to suppose that her enemy is basing his calculations on her age, which she had given falsely on an earlier visit of his. But Kroll demolishes this objection by saying: ‘Well, so be it, but my calculation may be right, none the less; for Dr. West was up there on a short visit the year before he got the appointment.’ After this new information, she loses her self-possession. ‘It is not true!’ She walks about wringing her hands. ‘It is impossible. You want to cheat me into believing it. This can never, never be true. It cannot be true. Never in this world!—’ Her agitation is so extreme that Kroll cannot attribute it to his information alone.

‘KROLL: But, my dear Miss West—why in Heaven's name are you so terribly excited? You quite frighten me. What am I to think—to believe——?

‘REBECCA: Nothing. You are to think and believe nothing.

‘KROLL: Then you must really tell me how you can take this affair—this possibility—so terribly to heart.

‘REBECCA (controlling herself): It is perfectly simple, Rector Kroll. I have no wish to be taken for an illegitimate child.’

The enigma of Rebecca's behaviour is susceptible of only one solution. The news that Dr. West was her father is the heaviest blow that can befall her, for she was not only his adopted daughter, but had been his mistress.

 

Now Freud goes on to interpret all these supposed hints as proof of incest. I doubt that Ibsen was ever to suggest this. Freud should have focussed on Ibsen’s guilt of having fathered an ‘illegitimate’ child instead, for this seems to be the strange contradiction in Rebecca who as an emancipated woman should have no ill feeling towards illegitimate children, even if she was one herself. Ibsen must have suffered from this contradiction: being an emancipated liberal in theory but a conservative in practice.

 

When Kroll began to speak, she thought that he was hinting at these relations, the truth of which she would probably have admitted and justified by her emancipated ideas. But this was far from the Rector's intention; he knew nothing of the love-affair with Dr. West, just as she knew nothing of Dr. West's being her father. She cannot have had anything else in her mind but this love-affair when she accounted for her final rejection of Rosmer on the ground that she had a past which made her unworthy to be his wife. And probably, if Rosmer had consented to hear of that past, she would have confessed half her secret only and have kept silence on the more serious part of it. But now we understand, of course, that this past must seem to her the more serious obstacle to their union—the more serious crime. After she has learnt that she has been the mistress of her own father, she surrenders herself wholly to her now overmastering sense of guilt.

 

While Freud seems to indicate at one hand that neither Kroll nor Rebecca actually knew about these assertions, these assertions on the other hand now become matter of fact, so much so that Rebecca, according to Freud, now considers this ‘crime’ as the ultimate reason for refusing Romer’s marriage proposal. While actual incest with minors is no doubt a crime committed by the adult, one can hardly blame the victim to have committed a ‘crime’  - an insinuation that Freud seems to attribute to Rebecca. But as we can guess by now, all of this is going to lead to the Oedipus complex (since we are dealing in this case with the female version, one may be reminded that Jung renamed it Elektra complex).

 

She makes the confession to Rosmer and Kroll which stamps her as a murderess; she rejects for ever the happiness to which she has paved the way by crime, and prepares for departure. But the true motive of her sense of guilt, which results in her being wrecked by success, remains a secret. As we have seen, it is something quite other than the atmosphere of Rosmersholm and the refining influence of Rosmer. At this point no one who has followed us will fail to bring forward an objection which may justify some doubts. Rebecca's first refusal of Rosmer occurs before Kroll's second visit, and therefore before his exposure of her illegitimate origin and at a time when she as yet knows nothing of her incest—if we have rightly understood the dramatist. 

 

As I said above, I doubt that Freud has ‘rightly understood the dramatist’, for two reasons: Rebecca is a figment of Ibsen’s imagination and as such not subject to psychoanalysis – only the dramatist is. As far as we know there is not the slightest suggestion that Ibsen ever experienced incest or even knew about any cases in his family or amongst his friends. Unless it is totally hidden, why would Ibsen bring up this subject in his play? What certainly is a hidden taboo is the issue of illegitimate children, and this seems to be a key element in Rebecca’s story. Unless one wants to insinuate that Dr West as a ‘freethinker’ subscribed to paedophilia – a notion one cannot put past characters like Kroll – there is no suggestion that Ibsen dropped any such hints, especially less so as his conception of ‘freethinkers’ was by and large a positive one (and paedophilia a negative one). Of course, one can also argue that Freud is just pointing out that the Oedipus complex is a part of growing up, having incestuous fantasies – but actioned only in extreme cases, no doubt having traumatic consequences. It would seem strange to make Rebecca an example of this. Since Freud is on occasion accused of fixation, one might cite this as an example, i.e. seeing the Oedipus complex acted out in every conceivable circumstance, finding clues where none exist. 

 

Yet this first refusal is energetic and seriously meant. The sense of guilt which bids her renounce the fruit of her actions is thus effective before she knows anything of her cardinal crime; and if we grant so much, we ought perhaps entirely to set aside her incest as a source of that sense of guilt. 

 

            Why call it a ‘cardinal crime’ when she is the victim of that supposed crime?

 

So far we have treated Rebecca West as if she were a living person and not a creation of Ibsen's imagination, which is always directed by the most critical intelligence. 

 

Since we raised this objection above, Freud seems to evade the objection with a most curious phrase, namely that Ibsen’s imagination ‘is always directed by the most critical intelligence’. Does this mean that Ibsen’s imagination can be – or in fact is – grounded in real life, so that his characters are, if not real living people, almost as real as real people, hence subject to psychoanalysis. A curious argument!

 

We may therefore attempt to maintain the same position in dealing with the objection that has been raised. The objection is valid: before the knowledge of her incest, conscience was already in part awakened in Rebecca; and there is nothing to prevent our making the influence which is acknowledged and blamed by Rebecca herself responsible for this change. But this does not exempt us from recognizing the second motive. Rebecca's behaviour when she hears what Kroll has to tell her, the confession which is her immediate reaction, leave no doubt that then only does the stronger and decisive motive for renunciation begin to take effect. It is in fact a case of multiple motivation, in which a deeper motive comes into view behind the more superficial one. Laws of poetic economy necessitate this way of presenting the situation, for this deeper motive could not be explicitly enunciated. It had to remain concealed, kept from the easy perception of the spectator or the reader; otherwise serious resistances, based on the most distressing emotions, would have arisen, which might have imperilled the effect of the drama. We have, however, a right to demand that the explicit motive shall not be without an internal connection with the concealed one, but shall appear as a mitigation of, and a derivation from, the latter. And if we may rely on the fact that the dramatist's conscious creative combination arose logically from unconscious premisses, we may now make an attempt to show that he has fulfilled this demand. 

 

Freud is now crediting Ibsen with having written a play that seeks to portray subconscious motives – motives that only a trained psychoanalyst like Freud can detect? That Ibsen has been credited with writing psychological dramas – with hidden motives – as opposed to the common (and often comical) dramas where all the characters wear their hearts on the sleeve, as it were, hence not placing too much cognitive a load on the audience. Ibsen’s plays certainly make you think, but not in the way Freud is suggesting, i.e. delving into the deepest and darkest recesses of human (sub)consciousness that arise from psychosexual development. That Dostoyevsky delved into the psychology of the murderer in Crime and Punishment, is no doubt a great achievement in the evolution of the novel, but one would not have to entertain Freud in adding that the murderer was destined to do what he did by some sort of experience of the Oedipus complex – other than to say that all humans are subject to the Oedipus complex – which may well be true – but noting that every individual will react to this conundrum in his/her own unique way, forging a life that in ordinary circumstances needs no help or interference from psychoanalysis. Rebecca being an extraordinary character would have no doubt benefitted from such an analysis, together with some of the other mentally unstable protagonists. But that’s what most serious theatre is for: to present complex characters that defy easy analysis. 

 

Rebecca's feeling of guilt has its source in the reproach of incest, even before Kroll, with analytical perspicacity, has made her conscious of it. If we reconstruct her past, expanding and filling in the author's hints, we may feel sure that she cannot have been without some inkling of the intimate relation between her mother and Dr. West. It must have made a great impression on her when she became her mother's successor with this man. She stood under the domination of the Oedipus complex, even though she did not know that this universal phantasy had in her case become a reality.

 

So how could have this have made a great impression on her if she did not know that this universal fantasy had become in her case a reality? Freud seems to contradict himself a lot.

 

When she came to Rosmersholm, the inner force of this first experience drove her into bringing about, by vigorous action, the same situation which had been realized in the original instance through no doing of hers—into getting rid of the wife and mother, so that she might take her place with the husband and father. She describes with a convincing insistence how, against her will, she was obliged to proceed, step by step, to the removal of Beata. ‘You think then that I was cool and calculating and self-possessed all the time! I was not the same woman then that I am now, as I stand here telling it all. Besides, there are two sorts of will in us, I believe! I wanted Beata away, by one means or another; but I never really believed that it would come to pass. As I felt my way forward, at each step I ventured, I seemed to hear something within me cry out: No farther! Not a step farther! And yet I could not stop. I had to venture the least little bit farther. And only one hair's-breadth more. And then one more—and always one more. And then it happened.—That is the way such things come about.’ That is not an embellishment, but an authentic description. Everything that happened to her at Rosmersholm, her falling in love with Rosmer and her hostility to his wife, was from the first a consequence of the Oedipus complex—an inevitable replica of her relations with her mother and Dr. West.

 

Again, this insistence that the real (or unreal) experience of the Oedipus complex absolutely determines one’s destiny, especially if it is a very bad/unhappy/traumatic one, seems just too fatalistic, and as such an illiberal approach. Freud by hammering the same point again and again, seems to get farther and farther away from what he really wants to say.  

 

And so the sense of guilt which first causes her to reject Rosmer's proposal is at bottom no different from the greater one which drives her to her confession after Kroll has opened her eyes. But just as under the influence of Dr. West she had become a freethinker and despiser of religious morality, so she is transformed by her love for Rosmer into a being of conscience and nobility. 

 

Freud seems to show his very conservative side with the expression ‘despiser of religious morality’, leaving the way open for one of his disciples, Wilhelm Reich, to get to grips with this oppressive religious morality and prescribe total freedom from it, as vaguely indicated before by GB Shaw in his potential denial of the difference between low (sexual) and high (platonic, religious) love. 

 

This much of the mental processes within her she herself understands, and so she is justified in describing Rosmer's influence as the motive for her change—the motive that had become accessible to her. The practising psycho-analytic physician knows how frequently, or how invariably, a girl who enters a household as servant, companion or governess, will consciously or unconsciously weave a day-dream, which derives from the Oedipus complex, of the mistress of the house disappearing and the master taking the newcomer as his wife in her place.

 

Freud who lived in the rarified world of servants and maids would have no doubt entertained the very fantasy from his point of view. It would be almost criminal to suggest that Ibsen too was the victim of the kitchen slut – weaving a day-dream – and as such felt no discernible, conscious guilt, let off by Freud, as it were. 

 

Rosmersholm is the greatest work of art of the class that treats of this common phantasy in girls. What makes it into a tragic drama is the extra circumstance that the heroine's day-dream had been preceded in her childhood by a precisely corresponding reality. After this long digression into literature, let us return to clinical experience—but only to establish in a few words the complete agreement between them. Psycho-analytic work teaches that the forces of conscience which induce illness in consequence of success, instead of, as normally, in consequence of frustration, are closely connected with the Oedipus complex, the relation to father and mother—as perhaps, indeed, is our sense of guilt in general.

 

This seems to be both a bizarre and at the same time quite logical conclusion. True enough, if the Oedipus complex is based on the reality of it, i.e. ‘successfully executed’ to put it bizarrely, then the consequences often induce mental illness (or in the original Oedipus, a physical reaction in blinding himself), while, if the Oedipus complex is resolved by unrealised ‘frustration’, the consequences are by and large a normal development without any detrimental effects. Freud’s deep dive into the mysteries of procreation is as fascinating as it can be repulsive, and yet, psychoanalysis in my estimation, is one of the best treatment options for mental illness. As Reich and later practitioners like Fritz Perls of the Esalen Institute have shown, verbal therapy can uncover the causes of mental illness and by making them conscious, healing them. Critics may dismiss such therapies as unproven and non-scientific but then again human (sub)consciousness is not exactly a field of biology (and chemistry, physics) or even sociology, anthropology and whatever natural science may be called upon, thus being hijacked by all manner of pseudo-sciences, be it behaviourism (debunked by the likes of Chomsky) or wellness cults that fleece the desperate seekers of mental and physical wellness. Freud’s assertion that we are all guilty of something unfortunately echoes the Christian myth of the original sin (debunked by Reich) when on the other hand he correctly observed that only the reality of the human condition – not the myth of it – can be the subject of deep exploration. Citing Ibsen and his play Rosmersholm in that connection is a somewhat fraught endeavour that does not always exemplify one of the deep human emotions that seem to be expressed in the Oedipus complex. As far as I know, Ibsen did not read much about Freud and Ibsen was dead (1906) by the time Freud actually coined the Oedipus complex in a paper in 1910. As such Freud is reading himself into Ibsen as much as Shaw (see above) was reading Ibsen as a reflection of himself (or so Meyer claims). 

            

Indeed, while Meyer attests Freud’s admiration of Ibsen, there is no suggestion of it being the other way round. Freud may have mistaken Ibsen’s focus on sexual politics (e.g. women’s liberation, as also per GB shaw) with sex itself. It is odd to remark that both Ibsen and Freud come off as puritans when it comes to personal pursuits of sex, and yet they seem to be obsessed by it in their imagination. Meyer too ascribes to Ibsen this peculiar fascination:

 

… but there is none of his plays, except Brand and An Enemy of the People, in which sex is not a major or decisive element.

            

Nothing excites the conservative mind (and the press) more than public discussions of sex, reacting with false indignation and hatred stemming from their own sexual frustrations (the opposite of Freud’s notion) and dysfunctions, invariably being imprisoned in loveless/sexless marriages. Too much of a fertile imagination – as with Ibsen and the like – may also on occasions backfire, revealing a somewhat unhealthy sexual appetite. One may accuse Meyer of such a diffraction when he speculates (in an almost Freudian faux-pas way) about the ‘decisive element’ in Ibsen’s play The Master Builder, which one critic described as the tragedy of an elderly architect who falls off his scaffold while trying to show off before a young lady. As in Rosmersholm, there is an elderly couple, marooned in a pleasant but humdrum marriage – enter a young lady who lifts the husband (the Master Builder) out of his comfortable, middleclass prison so that he can fulfil his true vocation as a great builder of towers and churches. The young lady in question, Hilde, steals herself into the Master Builder’s life by telling him that they had met once before when she was thirteen, and he had promised her kingdom come, looking down from one of his newly built spires. He denies the memory but takes her on – remember the then common practice of well-to-do households employing maids, governesses and what has been so disparagingly called kitchen sluts that provide sexual services for the Master of the Manor (to the relief of the Lady of the Manor, so she does not have to concern herself with such aspects of low love her husband would have otherwise bothered her with). Of course, Ibsen has no such low aspirations – Hilde’s high love is the means for realising his ambition of greatness. Or is it? Meyer cannot believe, perhaps like Freud, that there is no sex involved, while not obvious but as an underlying tension that actresses should somehow portray. So, when the Master Builder (his name is Solness) falls from his latest grand spire and lands dead at the feet of Hilde, she ends the play with the agonising cries “My – my Master Builder”. Meyer offers this quite astonishing take:

 

…and I do not think it is reading too much into the play to assume that when Hilde, at the age of thirteen, saw Solness standing dangerously at the top of the tower in Lysanger, she has her first sexual orgasm, and that she drives him to the top of another tower in order to repeat it.

 

Imagine a stage instruction for the ending: Hilde has an orgasm! (and while the first one was to be acted out only as a memory, one would wonder how Meyer would instruct the actress to visualize and verbalize it). Of course, one can have fun with all the spires and towers as phallic symbols, as much as one can cite the Trump Tower in today’s context. While I always cite Chomsky’s dictum that nothing is impossible, but many things are unlikely, I would put Meyer’s fabrication into the latter category. Ibsen, who by all accounts was a very inhibited person sexually, may well have had a vivid imagination to the contrary and found an outlet in his plays – keeping the low imagination always under wraps. Ibsen always insisted that he portrays real people like himself and people around him, all of whom are conservative in their public lives - admittedly with psychological undercurrents that suggest unresolved issues, like Ibsen’s yearning, in middle and old age, for youth – a common enough emotion that is not wholly focused on sex (as Freud and Meyer would have it) but more on the fear of death (OK, so the French have a saying for that too: la petite mort). Ibsen in an inscription for a young lady’s diary, wrote as follows:

 

            Oh, high and painful joy – to struggle for the unattainable!

 

There seems to be an air of transcendent innocence in Ibsen’s plays, embedded in the great themes of tragedy in theatre, as invented by the ancient Greeks, and as deftly analyzed by an Ibsen contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his (1872) book The Birth of Tragedy. Not that Ibsen cared much for Nietzsche, unlike his other nemesis (and occasional admirer) August Strindberg (remember that in my introduction I noted my university essay on the correspondence between Strindberg and Nietzsche).  

 

Meyer finishes his extensive and vastly informative biography of Ibsen with a tribute paid to Ibsen by Rilke, which Meyer calls ‘one of the most eloquent and penetrative tributes ever paid by one great writer to another’. The passage is lifted from Rilke’s only prose work The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, and on reading it, I wasn’t sure if this hyperbolic lyricism was just a poor translation from the German original, so I consulted the original. While not being a fan of Rilke (who BTW also lived in Munich for a while, like Ibsen) I nevertheless found the text quite astonishing, elevating Ibsen to the realm of literary sainthood (if you are an expert in translating from German to English, I leave it up to you to evaluate the translation by William Needham inserted; I could not ascertain the translated version used by Meyer which is different from that by Needham but similar enough for the purpose here – I will annotate from the German text version):

 

Du Einsamster, Abseitiger, wie haben sie dich eingeholt auf deinem Ruhm. Wie lang ist es her, da waren sie wider dich von Grund aus, und jetzt gehen sie mit dir um, wie mit ihresgleichen. Und deine Worte führen sie mit sich in den Käfigen ihres Dünkels und zeigen sie auf den Plätzen und reizen sie ein wenig von ihrer Sicherheit aus. Alle deine schrecklichen Raubtiere.

 

Loneliest and most remote of men, how they have caught up with you by your fame. How long ago is it when they were fundamentally opposed to you. And now they go around with you as if as if you were like them. And they take your words around with them in the cages of their darkness and reveal them in public places and tease them a little out of their safety. All your terrifying beasts of prey. 

 

I am not sure why Rilke thought of Ibsen as the ‘loneliest of man‘ and while Grieg thought of him with a block of ice in his heart, there is plenty of evidence of Ibsen enjoying a social life, outside of his rigorous discipline of not being disturbed in his writing schedule. And while Ibsen by today’s standards is not particularly controversial even amongst conservative folks, it may well be that in Rilke’s time a certain amount of hypocrisy was attached to Ibsen’s newfound fame, what with Rilke in overly dramatic form comparing his ideas to ‘beasts of prey’ that were displayed in cages lest they harmed the public audiences. Certainly, an interesting metaphor/simile!

 

Da las ich dich erst, da sie mir ausbrachen und mich anfielen in meiner Wüste, die Verzweifelten. Verzweifelt, wie du selber warst am Schluß, du, dessen Bahn falsch eingezeichnet steht in allen Karten. Wie ein Sprung geht sie durch die Himmel, diese hoffnungslose Hyperbel deines Weges, die sich nur einmal heranbiegt an uns und sich entfernt voll Entsetzen. Was lag dir daran, ob eine Frau bleibt oder fortgeht und ob einen der Schwindel ergreift und einen der Wahnsinn und ob Tote lebendig sind und Lebendige scheintot: was lag dir daran? Dies alles war so natürlich für dich; da gingst du durch, wie man durch einen Vorraum geht, und hieltst dich nicht auf. Aber dort weiltest du und warst gebückt, wo unser Geschehen kocht und sich niederschlägt und die Farbe verändert, innen. Innerer als dort, wo je einer war; eine Tür war dir aufgesprungen, und nun warst du bei den Kolben im Feuerschein. Dort, wohin du nie einen mitnahmst, Mißtrauischer, dort saßest du und unterschiedest Übergänge. Und dort, weil das Aufzeigen dir im Blute war und nicht das Bilden oder das Sagen, dort faßtest du den ungeheuren Entschluß, dieses Winzige, das du selber zuerst nur durch Gläser gewahrtest, ganz allein gleich so zu vergrößern, daß es vor Tausenden sei, riesig, vor allen. 

 

That was the first time I read what you had said, when the words escaped and fell desperately upon me in my desert. As desperate as you yourself were at the end, you whose path is still marked out wrongly on every map. Like a crack this hopeless hyperbola of your path crosses the heavens, curving towards us only once before departing full of horror. What was it to you if a wife stays or leaves, and if one man is in the grip of vertigo and another of madness, and if the dead are alive and the living appear dead: what was it to you? It was so natural for you; you passed through as you would an antechamber and you didn't stop. But you lingered there, bent over, inside that place where what happens to us boils, condenses, and changes colour, inwardly. Further inward than anyone had ever been before; a door had burst open in front of you; now you were among the retorts lit by the fiery glow. You never let anyone accompany you there, mistrustful one, you would sit, noting distinctions between transitions. And there— because revealing things was in your blood and not in how you looked or in how you spoke--completely on your own you took the immediate decision to magnify this tiny thing (that you had first become aware of as you peered closely through the glass) in such a way that it might be gigantic before all the thousands who saw it. 

 

That Rilke saw in Ibsen a fellow tortured soul is a bit surprising, for while Rilke certainly was a very strange, often ‘desperate’ character leading a very unconventional life, Ibsen’s life trajectory in comparison was quite conventional, bathed in relative domestic bliss (albeit with the occasional longing to break out). Interestingly, as opposed to Meyer and Freud, there is no mention of sex, only the strange phrase ‘Was lag dir daran, ob eine Frau bleibt oder fortgeht‘ (What was it to you if a wife stays or leaves – in Meyer’s version ‘Frau’ is translated as ‘woman’) which seems to have no relation to Ibsen, other than Ibsen using female relatives, friends and acquaintances as composite models for his plays. Rilke, of course, had a very peculiar relationship with the female species, seemingly specializing in intellectual, artistically well-connected women who acted as his patrons if not providing sexual services. Rilke may be projecting here. Rilke’s apothecary metaphors sound as if lifted from Ibsen’s actual apprenticeship as an apothecary, or more likely link to Rilke’s own metaphysical tastes, painting Ibsen as some sort of enlightened alchemist who magnifies what is hidden on the inside. Rilke is the master of the unusual metaphor, simile, figure-of-speech. 

 

Dein Theater entstand. Du konntest nicht warten, daß dieses fast raumlose von den Jahrhunderten zu Tropfen zusammengepreßte Leben von den anderen Künsten gefunden und allmählich versichtbart werde für einzelne, die sich nach und nach zusammenfinden zur Einsicht und die endlich verlangen, gemeinsam die erlauchten Gerüchte bestätigt zu sehen im Gleichnis der vor ihnen aufgeschlagenen Szene. Dies konntest du nicht abwarten, du warst da, du mußtest das kaum Meßbare: ein Gefühl, das um einen halben Grad stieg, den Ausschlagswinkel eines von fast nichts beschwerten Willens, den du ablasest von ganz nah, die leichte Trübung in einem Tropfen Sehnsucht und dieses Nichts von Farbenwechsel in einem Atom von Zutrauen: dieses mußtest du feststellen und aufbehalten; denn in solchen Vorgängen war jetzt das Leben, unser Leben, das in uns hineingeglitten war, das sich nach innen zurückgezogen hatte, so tief, daß es kaum noch Vermutungen darüber gab.

 

Your theatre came into being. You couldn't wait for this almost spaceless life, compressed into drops by the centuries, to be discovered by different skills and become liable eventually to be stumbled upon by a few individuals who little by little come to share the same realization and finally demand to see for themselves these very grand rumours confirmed in a metaphor of the scene that they were presented with. You couldn't wait for this; you were there and you had to do what was hardly measurable: a feeling that rose about half a degree, the angle of deflection that you read from close up of an almost unencumbered will, the slight cloudiness in a drop of yearning and this nil colour-change in an atom of confidence: that is what you had to determine and keep known; for it was in such processes that life now, our life, was lived, the life that had glided into us, that had withdrawn so deeply inside us that it was scarcely possible any longer to make conjectures about it. 

 

Praising Ibsen as a pioneer playwright who was on the forefront of all the arts in terms of focussing on the psychological dramas of our lives, may well be deserved, although there were Ibsen contemporaries and near-contemporaries who also modernised the theatre experience in this way, e.g. Büchner, Shaw and Chekov (the latter not liking Ibsen). 

 

So wie du warst, auf das Zeigen angelegt, ein zeitlos tragischer Dichter, mußtest du dieses Kapillare mit einem Schlag umsetzen in die überzeugendsten Gebärden, in die vorhandensten Dinge. Da gingst du an die beispiellose Gewalttat deines Werkes, das immer ungeduldiger, immer verzweifelter unter dem Sichtbaren nach den Äquivalenten suchte für das innen Gesehene. Da war ein Kaninchen, ein Bodenraum, ein Saal, in dem einer auf und nieder geht: da war ein Glasklirren im Nebenzimmer, ein Brand vor den Fenstern, da war die Sonne. Da war eine Kirche und ein Felsental, das einer Kirche glich. Aber das reichte nicht aus; schließlich mußten die Türme herein und die ganzen Gebirge; und die Lawinen, die die Landschaften begraben, verschütteten die mit Greifbarem überladene Bühne um des Unfaßlichen willen. Da konntst du nicht mehr. Die beiden Enden, die du zusammengebogen hattest, schnellten aus einander; deine wahnsinnige Kraft entsprang aus dem elastischen Stab, und dein Werk war wie nicht.

 

As you were then, a timelessly tragic poet, committed to revelation, you had to convert this capillary action at a stroke into the most convincing gestures, into the things that were most present. So you set about the unprecedentedly violent act of your work that more and more impatiently and more and more desperately sought equivalents among visible things for what you had seen inside. There was a rabbit there, an attic, a large room where someone was pacing the floor, a chink of glass in an adjoining room, a blaze outside the windows; there was the sun. There was a church and a rocky valley that was like a church. But that wasn't enough. Eventually towers had to be brought in, and the whole mountain range, and avalanches that bury landscapes and spill onto a stage cluttered with tangible things, for the sake of things that were incomprehensible. There was no more you could do. The two ends you had bent together shot apart, your crazy powers escaped from your supple wand and your work came to nothing. 

            

Since Ibsen started out writing plays in verse – his skill in that compared to that of Shakespeare – notably his Peer Gynt, Rilke is not far off describing Ibsen as a ‘timelessly tragic poet’. In term of showing the inner life by means of outward appearances, Rilke goes through the list of plays in term of outward stage appearances, not forgetting churches (of ice), towers and spires. Not quite sure if ‘a large room where someone was pacing the floor’ might refer to Rosmersholm. Describing Ibsen’s creative power resulting from a tension like a bow bent end to end, and letting go, is yet another simile that only a Rilke can think of. I am not sure what Rilke meant by the rejoinder ‘und dein Werk war wie nicht‘, which translated as ‘and your work came to nothing’ doesn’t seem to make any sense, for Ibsen’s work did come to be of great influence.   

 

Wer begriffe es sonst, daß du zum Schluß nicht vom Fenster fortwolltest, eigensinnig wie du immer warst. Die Vorübergehenden wolltest du sehen; denn es war dir der Gedanke gekommen, ob man nicht eines Tages etwas machen könnte aus ihnen, wenn man sich entschlösse anzufangen

 

Who could otherwise understand why in the end, stubborn as you were, you didn't want to leave the window? You wanted to see the passers-by, for the thought had struck you that one day you might be able to make something of them, if you could make your mind up to get started.

 

Maybe this explains the ‘und dein Werk war wie nicht‘ in the sense that with his death all his work came to an end. What is really astounding is the last sentence, i.e. the idea that only through observing people one can make something of them in a play – or in any art form – if only one decides to get started. A simple but profound idea, for how many of us do observe life around us, having great ideas for the great novel, poem, play, painting, music – but never get around to actually doing it by getting started to do it. Ibsen explained his creative process by developing his characters in his head until they - literally – burst forth onto the page like real people, and even then there is a long process of editing and revising until the final draft is done, executed in Ibsen’s fine handwriting. Poetry in motion!

 

 

REFERENCES

 

 

Benestad, Finn & Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe (1988). Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist.

University of Nebraska Press.

 

Freud, S. (1916). Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work. The Standard 

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): James Strachey.

 

Ibsen, Henrik (1908). Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea. The Collected Works of Henrik 

Ibsen, Vol IX (with introductions by William Archer). New York: Charles Scribner and Sons.

 

Meyer, Michael (1979). Ibsen. Pelican Books.

 

Rilke, Rainer Maria (1910). Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Insel Verlag.

 

Shaw, G. Bernard (1991). Quintessence of Ibsenism. London: Walter Scott.