Six hundred and fifty pages might not seem excessive for a biography of Henrik Ibsen. He lived, after all, a relatively long life, dying in 1906 at the age of seventy-eight. He was an exceedingly prolific author, with an oeuvre of twenty-five plays as well as poetry and incidental writings. And of course there is his high place in the cultural firmament: he was, and remains, the most influential playwright since Shakespeare. He revolutionized the theater, changing its style, its content, its very purpose. And, most importantly, he helped thoroughly to alter ideas about morality—what one owes to oneself and what one owes to society—throughout Europe and America. His concerns, radical in their time, have become so commonplace in modern thought that many look on Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, The Wild Duck, The Master Builder, and all the others as mere cultural icons, de rigueur inclusions in regional repertories and college productions, and fail to be shocked and shaken by what they see on the stage. But this is only because we ourselves are products of the social revolution kicked off by Ibsen in the last years of the nineteenth century (and continued, most notably, by Freud), one that in certain ways has not yet played itself out. His characters' bids for personal fulfillment at the expense of social and religious institutions are unsurprising to us because the twentieth century listened to him and valorized such bids. The rebel without a cause became a cultural hero rather than a public menace.
Why, then, is Ivo de Figueiredo's new biography of the great man, Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask (translated by Robert Ferguson), excellent and elegant though it is, so hard to get through?1 In brief, it's because Ibsen the man (as opposed to Ibsen the artist) is just impossible to like. In fact, he doesn't seem to have a single redeeming quality. He's stingy, graceless, glum, vain, proud, domineering, ungenerous, supremely egotistical, ruthless, a control freak; on top of this he becomes, as he ages, quite a dirty old man. “The stories of his tactlessness are legion,” as de Figueiredo readily admits. Worse, so far as the reader is concerned, the master's vices are not of a dramatic or extravagant type; they are simply sordid and unattractive, making for dull reading. Literarily and artistically, Ibsen's greatness is undeniable, and de Figueiredo writes with commanding intelligence on the plays: all of the critical material in this book is fascinating. But the details of Ibsen's life are hardly edifying, and de Figueiredo, who has aspired here to write a definitive biography, relates them in agonizing detail. But I suppose we Americans should be grateful it is as short as it is, for it has been considerably abridged from the two-volume original Norwegian-language edition of 2006–07.
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