Ibsen: A Biography by Michael Meyer, and: Ibsen: A Portrait of the Artist by Hans Heiberg (review)

1972 BOOK REVIEWS 481 at least documents his collision with it by examining the literary relationship existing between the two men; though I find somewhat disappointing his conclusion that, while Yeats is· the enduring poet, Shaw is merely "a great public man to whom his contemporaries were much indebted for the scourge of his wit." Shaw's plays for the last twenty years have been providing impressive demonstrations of dramatic endurance, despite their dated philosophy and theit author's insistence on their occasional function. The book concludes with Francis Warner's witty, and at times brilliant, discussion of the absence of nationalism in the work of Samuel Beckett. His consideration of the complementary relationship of Beckett and Joyce is stimulating; though his comparison of the wit of Wilde and Beckett is less so; and in view of Vivian Mercier's fine book The Irish Comic Tradition I feel that the Gaelic sphere of cqnsciousness in Beckett could have borne some analysis before the blunt conclusion was reached that Beckett's art has "no connection" with that of Synge and Yeats. All in all, however, the book is satisfying, scholarly and a welcome addition to the small shelf of Anglo Irish literary criticism. BRIAN F. TYSON University of Lethbridge IBSEN: A BIOGRAPHY, by Michael Meyer. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Be Company, Inc., 1971. xvii+865 pp. $12.95. IBSEN: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, by Hans Heiberg. Translated by Joan Tate. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971. 313 pp. $10.00. Ibsen once said he had written nothing he had not first "lived through," but the plays mirror his experience only obliquely. After the success of Brand he could afford to be reserved and respectable, and except for travels and some semi-serious flirtation with young women the rest of his active life was one long routine of work. The public honors and gilt-edged investments his plays got him may have been compensations for a shameful past, but shameful pasts are what his plays are about. By the time he realized that the rehabilitation was a misspent effort the pattern had been set. The surreptitious Ibsen is the quintessential Victorian. Nobody noticed when, silk-hatted and frock-coated, he torpedoed the Ark. The two books reviewed here are the first full-length studies of this life in almost forty years. Why have biographers failed to flock to it? Because the unfortunate corollary to the critics' belated discovery of the dark arid devious nature of the autobiography in the plays was the idea that the real Ibsen was inaccessible and the accessible Ibsen dull. Halvdan Koht's two-volume Life Of Ibsen in 1931 (first Norwegian edition 1928-29, revised 1954) did not dispel the myth. Koht's book will remain a major item in the bibliography even after the appearance of Meyer'S, but as an essay on Ibsen's creativity and not as the satndard biography by Norway's greatest Ibsen scholar that it could have been. Meyer respectfully names its shortcomings: it is inconveniently short on facts, and Koht, an historian active in Labor politics, was not sympathetic to Ibsen's fierce nonpartisanship . Meyer himself has his sights set on more immediate targets than the paradigmic meaning of Ibsen's career. He has collected the facts and put them together in a fluent and unmannered narrative. If most of the hard questions about Ibsen remain 482 MODERN DRAMA February at the end of his story, he has kept his promise "to provide the information from which the reader may hazard his own answer." An unsystematic check has turned up only three significant omissions. First, since Meyer chronicles the rest of the troubled Ibsen-Bjj2)rnson relationship so fully, he might have included a reference to the poem "Nordens Signaler," which Ibsen wrote as a scornful reply to Bjj2)rnson's call for Scandinavian rapprochement to Bismarck's Germany in 1872. Second, I miss the Swedish author Victor Rydberg's remark that the only time he heard Ibsen speak nonsense was when he was trying to expound the meaning of Emperor and Galilean. (The omission may be deliberate, for Meyer argues that the play is better...