Under the Influence
I met Ibsen in Oslo.
Ibsen makes people take strange trips. Not a lot of people know that it was, actually, an overdose of Ibsen that sent, the sailor,Thor Heyerdahl, out on the Kon Tiki on his first epic voyage in the 1960s. He said that he was testing ancient sailing methods but really he was in search of Little Eyolfe.
A dependency on Ibsen made me do it. It drew me to the richest source. The dealer was a guy named Winge, Stein Winge, Director of the Norwegian National Theater at the time. The festival was his idea. He has a lot to answer for. Two dozen different theater groups from around the world performing Ibsen plays in their native language. The Maori version of “A Doll’s House” was not to be missed.
I was pedaling the streets of London doing my usual stories about witches, surfing, omnibologists and Abba impersonators. I was disgusting. I’d interview any weirdo to make a buck, including politicians. Then a call from a colleague in Warsaw put me on the path to heaven: an Ibsen Festival. It was like Bolivian marching powder to an advertising executive. I needed a fix. I made a beeline to British Rail, booked a ticket and after what seemed an Eternity and actually was an Eternity, I stepped off the train in Oslo. Well, actually it was Copenhagen, but I thought it was Oslo.
I got back on the train.
Welcomed with open arms by the Festival committee I spent a lost week wandering the streets like Knut Hamsun’s hero in “Hunger.” The fijord looked pitiless all week. The fine weather added a diabolical contrast. But on Saturday morning a little irony had been gingerly mixed in. The ripples lapped teasingly against the yacht hulls, smacking the quais with a studied insouciance.
I was looking for pity, other than my own, but any that was lurking must have been swept out to sea like Little Eyolfe by the undercurrent. I shuddered and cast a jaundiced eye at the fijord (I always carry a jaundiced eye in case I need it).
With a cheek full of irony I started to drag myself through spotless streets past effortlessly beautiful Scandinavian people. Women like Brigitte Nielsen. Men like Dolph Lundgren. There are more beautiful women in Oslo per square mile than anywhere except maybe a Baywatch casting call. I felt like Omar Sharif in Dr Zhivago struggling feverish and lonely against the current of mankind. Then I saw that my coast was merely caught in the door of the pub I was exiting. I released myself with the help of a passing policeman.
Something was drawing me inexorably toward my destiny: 1 Arbien Street where I would confront the ghost of my tormentor, Henrik Ibsen.
I had Bayer aspirin headache #421. It was Ibsen who was to blame. His characters danced in my head like a hundred wraiths. Hedda Gabbler was especially annoying. Didn’t she know that women had the vote already? Some people just can’t transcend their historical context. So with scientific precision uncommon to my approach to any of life’s other problems, I had decided that the only way to rid myself of Ibsen was to go and confront the great man where he lived.
At his apartment I was greeted by a typical middle class woman. She looked me up and down. She surveyed my writer’s stubble. I hadn’t shaved for several days. She eyed my jeans and my unruly hair. She was exactly the kind of woman who drove Ibsen crazy. Her hair was perfect, even her breath was starched.
“So you are a writer?” she scoffed. She arched one perfectly trimmed eyebrow in disgust. No wonder Ibsen used to roll around drunk in the Oslo snow.
“Journalist,” I said shyly.
“What paper?” she barked. I was getting ready to sit up and beg or go fetch the paper.
I told her.
“Well, I guess I will have to take your word for it,” she said bitterly.
She moved away. She ordered me to sit and wait while she finished her tour. Some people pay to visit the house.
I needed a sympathetic ear. I felt like the Wild Duck. I was at the end of my tether. The hunters were crouching in the undergrowth. I wanted to throw myself at her feet and explain my situation – to describe how I had been drawn north to Norway by a mysterious force greater than myself, namely my bank manager. I wanted to share the angst of a 48 hour train journey across Northern Europe, to voice the unutterable pain of having ingested seven Ibsen plays during that time, to reveal the horror of seeing Little Eyolfe’s eyes staring up at me from my soup.
She appeared oblivious to Ibsen’s influence. It was just a job to her and nothing more. And yet .. . surely beneath her pancake make-up, her carefully appointed rouge, her expensive grey rinse, there lurked some common humanity. How could I explain that in one week I had witnessed enough Ibsen in enough different languages to last a lifetime?
But she had icebergs in her veins. I was a scale model of the Titanic cracking up against her icy scull. She was a pitiless as a fijord. I wanted her to share my angst, to swoon with the depression I had felt when I paid for my first beer in Ibsenville and realized that I could have bought a six pack for the same price in Daytona Beach. The things we do for art . . .
All week long I had been slumming with the theater crowd. A bunch of criminals. A gang of thespians. We met every night for our Ibsen fix. I didn’t know which way was up anymore. The Masterbuilder could have knocked me over with a feather. The previous night during the Romersholm intermission, a famous American theater producer had been dragged kicking and screaming from the theater.
“You have crippled my whole life!” she raved. “I am not thinking of all that about mother --- But it’s thanks to you that I am continually haunted and harassed by a guilty conscience.”
We shook our heads in sympathy. We knew how she felt. We were cowed and spiritless as well.
In hospital they treated her with forced viewings of the Marx brothers. Laurel and Hardy were saved for the really hard cases. Doctors agreed she could have no more contact with Ibsen until she stopped repeating:“I am a wild duck. I am a wild duck. . . etc.”
I am feeling calmer as I write these words at Ibsen’s desk in the study he used up to the last days of his life. His portrait stares down at me. His beady eyes and Jerry Garcia beard force me to repress an urge to go “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah” and thumb my nose at him.
Ibsen Smibsen.
I turn my gaze to the window and look out on the palace Ibsen must have seen while he worked here where I was sitting. How would he react to a whole city haunted by his characters? Ibsen this. Ibsen that. Ibsen t-shirts. Ibsen seminars. Ibsen for breakfast, lunch and supper. A belly full of Ibsen. Even the pigeons find his statue irresistible. His gaze is as pitiless as a fijord. That memory’s embedded in my heart like a Viking arrow, like the anarchic brilliance of the Russian version of Per Gynt, like the vision of Regina’s bosom in “Ghosts.” Perhaps the most searing memory, though, is The National Theater director’s diatribe at Speaker’s corner against the construction of the Ibsen parking garage.
It was a “movie moment,” as William Goldman would say.
I looked up at Ibsen. He met my gaze.
“Ibby,” I said. “You’ve got to help me. I’ve got to kick this habit.” He didn’t say anything because of course paintings don’t talk, but I thought I noticed a slight flicker of a smile across those thin, cruel lips. Or maybe it was the caffeine.
It was an existential instant. I saw the joke. Suddenly I was delivered. Ibsen was having us on. He was taking the mickey. We were a load of schmucks.
The guide returned just then. She seemed different somehow, more human. She sat down and I put my head in her lap and while she hummed In the Hall of the Mountain King I told her everything. Like a confessor she removed my burden.
“Why don’t you take a break?” she purred. “Go and see an action movie or something. You should take a more relaxed view of things,” she said.
I decided to head to the nearest cinema for a good dose of violence. I fairly skipped along the road believing I was cured, which I enjoyed believing as I enjoy believing all things I passionately want to believe, such as it is possible to find a woman who doesn’t like shopping and that she will fall in love with me.
Back at the Burns pub, the unofficial Ibsen Festival pub, Jels, the barman asked: “When are you going back to London?”
“Soon,” I said wistfully. “But perhaps I’ll have one more Ibsen for the road.”
Jel’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you think you’ve already had one too many?”
I took one last stroll down to the fijord. Still pitiless. Too bad. No one leaves this town without being marked.
Note: The Ibsen Festival is a real event that takes place in a fictional country called Norway.