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1 I B S E N ’ S B L A C K P O O D L E G O R D O N R O G O F F Keen winds and boyish beauty were there from the beginning. Nature’s better writers – James Joyce and E. M. Forster among others – looked at old Ibsen as if viewing a cubist image of themselves in a mirror. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce sees ‘‘a spirit of wayward boyish beauty,’’ blowing through him ‘‘like a keen wind.’’ Forster, more foursquare yet prismatic, writes an essay called ‘‘Ibsen the Romantic’’ in which he declares outright that the dramatist ‘‘is at bottom Peer Gynt. . . . Side whiskers and all, he is a boy bewitched.’’ And all this is confirmed by Ibsen when he declares that he ‘‘must be a troll in what I write – a bear playing the violin and beating time with his feet.’’ What kind of boy? Neither sportsman nor miscreant, Ibsen, the oldest sibling of four brothers and a sister, liked swimming and fishing, both reliably distant from other people. ‘‘He was never a pleasant companion to us,’’ writes his sister, and once when she and the brothers threw stones or snowballs at the wall of young Ibsen’s door, begging him to play with them, he finally ‘‘rush[ed] out and drove us away.’’ Yet he did not know how to be violent: ‘‘When he had chased us far enough, he went back into his room again.’’ Strange to discover that later he loved to dance, propelled 2 R O G O F F Y perhaps by his enduring need for one woman or another to lure him into companionship, if only for a moment or two. Along the way he played with magic, painted figures in florid costumes, turning them into cutouts before placing them on wood blocks, early actors standing in his imaginary theater. In school, he buried himself in classical antiquity and anything in history that came his way, even as he kept on drawing while learning Latin and German. (Like Hedwig in The Wild Duck, he pored over books in English, one of them with Death as a frontispiece, but, again like Hedwig, he never deciphered the language.) One surviving memory of his birthplace, Skien, was the February Fair, ‘‘a happy time for us boys,’’ he recalls, when, after saving money for six months, they were ‘‘able to see the jugglers, and rope-dancers, and horse-riders, and to buy ginger-bread down in the booths.’’ And he reports further that on St. John’s Eve they would begin to collect fuel for the bonfires, haunting shipyards to beg for tar barrels – in short, enjoying sanctioned mischief. ‘‘No one disputed’’ their right to parade booty through the streets before stacking the bonfire where ‘‘a fiddler was perched,’’ not a bear, yet an indelible imprint in the boy’s collection of useful images and symbols. Even so, this was not a boy on his daily rounds: Ibsen’s recollection is that he saw such a procession often but only ‘‘once took part in one.’’ From the first, he was fitting himself for side-whiskers. Skien was the perfect crucible for cultivating the taciturn, unforgiving writer. Michael Meyer’s biography (1967) describes Norway at Ibsen’s birth as ‘‘still a very primitive country,’’ the first railway built only when Ibsen was a fully formed adult. Rural houses were often windowless, cattle packed together in unlit stalls through the winter, ‘‘without light or standing room . . . from which they were lifted out as living skeletons when spring came,’’ their ‘‘accumulated muck . . . shoveled out on to the fields.’’ What we now know as Oslo had only thirty thousand inhabitants; forests covered a quarter of the land; and there was no coal for heat, most of the people relying on the sea for commerce and sustenance. Ibsen’s early biographer Henrik Jaeger leaves the impression of a thoroughly German ancestry for Ibsen, infused with stern, Scottish blood, but as Ibsen’s friend, even while accounting for the life, Jaeger took his facts as they were arranged by the subject himself. I B S...

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