The Scorpion of the North

By Brad Darrach

IBSEN by Michael Meyer. 865 pages. Doubleday. $12.95.

Henrik Ibsen kept a live scorpion in an empty beer glass on his writing table. "From time to time the brute would ail; then I would throw in a piece of ripe fruit, on which it would cast itself in a rage and eject its poison; then it was well again." As usual in an Ibsen scene, opera glasses are not needed to recognize the symbolism. Tiny, armored, venomous, Ibsen was an ailing spirit whose dramas stung the 19th century's conscience and gave European theater a new seriousness. After launching into poetic tragedy (Brand, Peer Gynt), Ibsen imported social realism from the novel and invented modern prose drama (A Doll's House, Ghosts). Then he passed on to the great pagan passion plays of his old age (The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Little Eyolf).

The exploitation of women, the trap of marriage, the dead weight of the Establishment, the isolation of the individual in the modern world-Ibsen's issues are once again the issues of the hour. But as his plays revive so do their somber ambiguities. To assume that the facts of an author's life inevitably illuminate the meaning of his writing is to commit the biographical fallacy; and in this huge biography-the first full portrait done since 1931-Michael Meyer makes that error on a grand scale. Even so, his book is the richest discussion of Ibsen's life and work ever published.

Suzannah's Steel. Born in 1828 in a tiny Norwegian lumber town, he was seven when his well-to-do father's finances collapsed. About the same time, Henrik became convinced (incorrectly, his biographer suspects) that he was illegitimate. He writhed under this double disgrace, and when he left home at 15 it was forever-he saw his parents only once after that. Withdrawn and stumpy, he was apprenticed for six years to an apothecary. By day he brewed prescriptions over a kitchen stove; by night he wrote radical poems and skits that read like bad Kipling. At 23, indirectly because of a stormy verse drama he had written, he was offered the post of director and playwright at the theater in Bergen. His first four plays flopped, and as a director he was a washout. Too shy to tell his actors what to do, he sat in the back of the theater tugging at his beard or hurried away from confrontation muffled up in a huge romantic cloak that made him look like Mickey Rooney playing Goethe.

Finally he found a girl, a handsome, forceful young woman named Suzannah Thoresen. After only two meetings, Ibsen begged her to marry him and make him "something great in the world." From the first, says Meyer, it was a marriage of creative convenience. Day after day, Suzannah packed him off to commune with his scorpion, whipped up his flagging spirits, shooed his time-wasting friends away. "Ibsen had no steel in his character," she said flatly. "I gave it to him." The steel soon made its mark. In 1863, Ibsen wrote The Pretenders, his first popular success. On the strength of it, after wangling a $400 grant from the government for a year in Italy, he headed south with his wife and small son. He stayed for 27 years.

From Lear to Joyce. For Ibsen, as later for an Ibsen idolater named James Joyce, exile was creation's catalyst. Living in Italy, and later in Germany, lent perspective to his judgments and released his power. In less than two years he produced his first masterpiece. Brand is the epic tragedy of a zealot, a Norse Savonarola hurled to ruin by his own hubris. Published back home, it hit Norway like an Arctic blizzard, and Ibsen was hailed as the greatest Norwegian poet since the age of the Eddas. Two years later he published an even more stupendous poetic drama called Peer Gynt. Its hero is Brand's shadow, the orgiastically natural as opposed to the fanatically spiritual man. The tragic last act of the play, in which Gynt's whole life unravels in his mind at the moment of his death, is one of the great farragoes in world literature: a bridge that miraculously leaps the centuries between King Lear and Finnegans Wake.

Shattering Episode. At the height of his success as a dramatic poet, Ibsen suddenly risked his career by switching from poetry to prose and from romanticism to realism. In The Pillars of Society, he blistered the middle class for its greed and indifference; in A Doll's House, he pictured holy matrimony as a slave pen; in Ghosts, he symbolized hypocrisy as a social disease that destroyed the rising generation. An Enemy of the People stated flatly that the majority is always wrong. Amazingly, a Norway that had only had gas lamps for a generation leaped on these advanced ideas and demanded more. So did Germany, France and England. By the late 1880s, Ibsen had become Europe's most famous playwright, a stern alternative to Eugene Scribe and the French farce industry.

But once again Ibsen abandoned his course, this time for a painfully romantic interlude. At 61, a white-maned old man with one big eye and one little eye, Ibsen met a 19-year-old girl named Emilie Bardach and fell boyishly in love. "He means to possess me," Emilie informed her diary. "That is his absolute will." But Meyer says that caution intervened, possibly in the form of impotence. Emilie later told a friend that Ibsen had never even kissed her.

The episode was shattering to Ibsen. Meyer believes that in a few wild weeks he discovered the power and the wonder of love-and realized that the discovery had come too late. In any case, over the next ten years Ibsen's plays moved away from the passionate centers of life into the cold silence of ultimate considerations. Many of his contemporaries found Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm befuddling and repellent. But at this distance they seem startlingly modern. Their symbols invite psychoanalysis, their bareness prefigures Beckett, their dialogue is often as runic as Pinter's. In late Ibsen what is said often hides what is felt, and to reveal what is felt an actor must learn not only to speak the text but to act the context.

"Suburban Lady Macbeth." In the earlier, social plays, Ibsen's drama was the drama of contemporary issues: the characters are living ideas. Dr. Stock-mann, the idealist who heroically fights to improve his community in An Enemy of the People, reappears in The Wild Duck as Gregers Werle, a pre-Freudian busybody who demonstrates that helping people face their problems is often just a bland way of destroying them. Similarly, in Hedda Gabler, Nora, the relatively innocent victim of male chauvinism in A Doll's House, is re-examined as Hedda, a modern woman whose frustrated need to assert individuality transforms her into a "suburban Lady Macbeth."

After Hedda, social problem yields the stage to religious search. John Gabriel Borkman and Arnold Rubek, the heroes of John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), Ibsen's last two plays, are close portraits of the artist as an old man battling desperately to make some central sense of his life before it ends. Borkman, the industrialist, loses the battle. "Those mountains far away . . . those veins of iron ore, stretching their twisting, branching, enticing arms towards me . . . wanted to be freed. And I tried . . . But I failed." But Rubek, the artist, in the last scene of Ibsen's last play, climbs to the top of a mountain and is received into the everlasting snows.

Ibsen himself spent the last six years of his life, unable to write, staring out of his window in Christiania. "Leave that to me," he snapped at a visitor who asked how he felt about God. And one day, when a nurse announced that he was feeling better, the old curmudgeon found the ultimate putdown. "On the contrary!" he said, and died. . Brad Darrach

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