The Biographer's Tale (11 page)

“These heaps of flesh were inanimate but not immobile. They so to speak writhed or flowed together, moulding themselves into new forms. I was put in mind of some beautiful
sad lines of Alfred Tennyson's poem for Henry Hallam's lamented brother Arthur, so tragically cut off. It was published anonymously just as I left for this unknown country: Henry pressed a copy into my hand as we parted. It is a fantastical, fragmentary poem, but its grief rings true, and is a grief for the whole earth, for the loss of a faith.

“I wish I had not thought of this then, for now I always see these shadowy hills blood-red, and formed of blood.”

He sailed for England in January 1852 and arrived in April, exactly two years after his departure. On his arrival, he learned that Henry Hallam had died in Italy, in 1850, soon after he left, and that Henry's sister, Julia Hallam, to whom he had been—to what extent is not clear—emotionally attached, was a bride of two months' standing. In his
Memories of My Life
, published as late as 1908, he describes his relief on reaching the schooner in Walfish Bay. He sums up.

“This bald outline of a very eventful journey has taken little notice of the risks and adventures which characterised it … They must be imagined by the reader, otherwise the following paragraph will seem overcharged, which it is not.”

But the following paragraph is hardly charged at all. He begins it: “I had little conception of the severity of the anxiety under which I had been living until I found myself on board the little vessel that took me away, and I felt at last able to sleep in complete security.”

The rest of the paragraph is innocuous: summary thanks that he lost no men, survived grumbling and mutinous servants and the breaking-in of cattle, and the help of “an indolent and cruel set of natives speaking an unknown tongue.” He mentions tribal wars, “which had to be stopped before I could proceed” and undependable food. He thanks Andersson—who ultimately died in Damaraland—and Hans. His paragraph is
undercharged
. English reticence, or sheering away from what he set out to tell?

H
E WAS
a public man, and he made a daily public progress. He set out at two o'clock from Victoria Terrace, and walked to the Grand Hotel. He dressed carefully, always in the same clothes—a black, broadcloth frock-coat, black trousers, concertinaed at the ankles over highly polished, high-heeled black boots, a carefully folded umbrella, a glistening silk top-hat, a little fence of miniature medals. His white beard, and his white hair surrounded his sallow, unsmiling face, like the copious flare of a halo. He was a tiny personage, and carried himself stiffly erect, full of a dignity at once self-important and threatening. His lips were thin; his eyes, under their snowy ledges, have been called, finely, “fierce badger eyes.” Cartoonists found him easy to “take”; their images proliferated, all recognisable projections, all the same, all different. He knew he was looked at. He had constructed himself to be looked at. Famous men walk behind, or inside, a simplified mask, constructed from inside and outside simultaneously.
He groomed his parchment skin and his sleek boot-leather to turn back the light to the onlooker. The onlookers, even as they watched the precise, dandified advance, knew they saw the outside, not the inside. They let their imaginations flicker round the inchoate “inside,” which remained bland and opaque. He belonged to them, their countryman. They had never been sure if they liked him.

His effigies were round him in his lifetime. In his latter days, his statue stood outside the National Theatre, larger than life, looming through the snow. He was photographed, diminutive and bristling amongst the dignitaries, at ceremonies of dedication. There was a Platz named for him in Gossensass. There was a proposal to make a waxwork double of him to preside over a Freie Bühne festival in Berlin. They wrote to ask for the loan of an old suit. “Be so good as to tell this gentleman that I do not wear ‘old suits,' nor do I wish a wax model of myself to be clothed in an ‘old suit.' Obviously I cannot give him a new one, and I therefore suggest he order one from my tailor, Herr Friess, of Maximilianstrasse, Munich.” Sculptors and painters found him somehow inordinate. He had, he informed one of them, the largest brainpan ever measured by a certain German expert. Another, having asked him to remove his spectacles, was appalled by the disparity between his eyes.

“One was large, I might almost say horrible—so it seemed to me—and deeply mystical; the other much smaller, rather pinched up, cold and clear and calmly probing. I stood speechless a few seconds and stared at those eyes, and spoke the thought that flashed into my mind: ‘I wouldn't like to have you as an enemy.' Then his eyes and his whole body
seemed to blaze, and I thought instinctively of the troll in the fairy tale who pops out of his hole and roars: ‘Who is chopping trees in
my
forest?' ”

He was a man
mjök trollaukinn
, with “augmented inhumanity” as one ludicrous translation has it. He wrote:

Division and self-division. The trolls ensconced in the blood and under the pelt of the human creature; the writer, watching himself, summing up, delivering judgement. He wrote surrounded by a swarm of red-tongued gutta-percha trolls. “There must be troll in what I write,” he said. His monstrous troll came out only
in extremis
, when things were impossibly difficult. “Then I lock my door and bring him out. No other human eye has seen him, not even my wife … He is a bear, playing the violin, and beating time with his feet.”

So there he was, man and troll, badger and bear, black integument and lined parchment sac containing blood, bones, and busy creatures, proceeding towards the Grand Hotel, in Christiania, in Norway, which he did not want to think was home. “Up here among the fjords I have my native land. But-but-but: where do I find my homeland?” “Ten years ago, after my second absence of ten years, when I sailed up the fjord, I literally felt my chest contract with revulsion and a feeling of sickness. I felt the same during my whole stay; I was no longer myself among all these cold and uncomprehending Norwegian eyes in the windows and on the pavements.” In the South, he thought of the North.

He was a northerner who went south for light, for distance, in order to see the north, in light, from a distance. He crossed the Alps on May 9th 1864. On April 1, 1898, in Copenhagen, he spoke of the transition.

“Over the high mountains the clouds hung like great, dark curtains, and beneath these we drove through the tunnel and, suddenly, found ourselves at Mira Mara, where that marvellously bright light which is the beauty of the south suddenly revealed itself to me, gleaming like white marble. It was to affect all my later work, even if the content thereof
was not always beautiful.” He had “a feeling of being released from the darkness into light, emerging from mists through a tunnel into the sunshine.”

He was, or had been, a narrow northern Puritan. He was shocked, and then exhilarated, by the excess of energy of Michelangelo and Bernini. “Those fellows had the courage to commit a madness now and then.” The Norwegians, he recalled contemptuously, “speak with intense complacency of our Norwegian ‘good sense,' which really means nothing but a tepidity of spirit which makes it impossible for those honest souls to commit a madness.”

It was his great desire to commit a madness like Michelangelo. Was it for fear of tepidity and dim light only that he fled Norway? Was there a madness, already committed, working away like yeast in the Norwegian small beer of his past, ready to explode the bottle? As a letter-writer, he was inhibited, crabbed, tortuously formal, uncommunicative. After leaving his home town, he never returned there, though on the occasion of his mother's death he wrote a stilted letter to his sister Hedvig, saying that he was just setting off for Egypt, but would like to receive letters. Later, he wrote to his father, who did not preserve the letter, but sent a reply, which was preserved, in which he said, “I tried to read your letter, but I couldn't understand it, I felt ashamed …”

It is doubly difficult for a famous man, once returned to his native land, not to make a pious pilgrimage to the place of his birth. Spectators of the public life are interested in its beginnings, in the source. It is patently untrue to claim that he himself was indifferent or uninterested. In 1881 he began an autobiography, rapidly abandoned, expressing surprise
that a street had been renamed for him. “Or so at any rate the newspapers have reported, and I have also heard it from reliable travellers.” He recorded a grim town—“nothing green; no rural, open landscape”—full of the sound of weirs and, penetrating the watery roar, “from morning to dusk, something resembling the sharp cries of women, now shrieking, now moaning. It was the hundreds of sawblades at work on the weirs. When later I read of the guillotine, I thought of those sawblades.” In the tall church, raised by a Copenhagen master builder, the child was exposed, by his nursemaid, sitting in the open window of the tower, high, high up. The unexpected sight of him there caused his mother to scream and faint. In the church, too, lived a demonic black poodle with fiery red eyes, the sight of which, at that same window, had shocked a watchman into falling to his death, bursting open his head in the square below. “I felt that the window belonged to me and the church poodle,” he wrote. Then he gave up his autobiographical enterprise. It clearly never tempted him into revisiting those scenes. Something forbade him. He stayed away.

Sometimes he described how he set his characters in motion. How, one may ask, does such a man set about constructing another human being, in some sense
ex nihilo
, an individual who was not there before, and now exists, but whose very identity must leave space for the creative puppet-mastery of a director, the defining touches of a costumier and a
maquilleuse
, the deliberate accidents of directed light-rays and non-functional, even painted, cloth, chairs and tables? Above all, how does he make such a person “real,” whatever that is, and yet leave that “reality” sketched and
incomplete, to be fleshed out, to be wormed into, to bulge and sag around the unimagined, unaccommodating perhaps, body, voice—and history, and soul, and human limitations—of an actor? And not even one, definitive, magisterial actor, but a succession of these too fleshy ghosts each filling out different pouches and pockets? How could he collaborate, in his work of imagination, with these unknown helpers or opponents?

Such descriptions as he left of this process—few, as always, fewer than one might reasonably hope or expect—are disappointing in this regard. They could have been written by a novelist, or even—stretching the imagination a little—by a biographer. There is perhaps a little more emphasis on the body and the voice, but this is scratching for grains in sand. In a way, his accounts are platitudes, multiplied in other records of other observers. Nevertheless, the precise form of his platitudes, his own platitudes, cannot be without interest; we should, if everything were accessible to know, be interested also in the precise combination of flora in his intestine, or layered convolutions in his brain. Do we have instruments for dissecting platitudes finely enough to yield precise local truths?

“Before I write one word,” runs this rare confidence, then, “I must know the character through and through, I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. I always proceed from the individual; the staging, the dramatic ensemble, all that comes naturally and causes me no worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. But I have to have his exterior in mind also, down to the last button, how he stands and walks, how he carries himself,
what his voice sounds like. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.”

Now we may ask—must ask, indeed, since it appears pointless to raise hypothetical theoretical barriers against such a profound and natural human curiosity—where these imagined humans come from? As we shall see, he compares them, ingeniously or disingenuously, to strangers met on a train. He observed those he met on trains, as a naturalist observes new and familiar species. With an overtone of moral judgement, added to pure observation. He is on record as having driven himself into rage and hatred over some unknown fellow-traveller, a woman, who slept in his railway-compartment all the way from Rome to Gossensass, without once looking out of the window. “What a
lazy
woman! To sleep the whole way! How can anyone be so
lazy
?… Most people die without ever having lived. Luckily for them, they don't realise it.”

But the people he, to use a primitive phrase, “made up” must in some sense be not only watched strangers but spun from his own fabric, sensed inside his own stance, seen through one or the other of those terrible disparate eyes?

“As a rule, I make three drafts of my plays, which differ greatly from each other—in characterisation, not in plot. When I approach the first working-out of my material, it is as though I knew my characters from a railway-journey. One has made a preliminary acquaintance, one has chatted about this and that. At the next draft I already see everything much more clearly, and I know the people roughly as one would after a month spent with them at a spa; I have discovered the fundamentals of their characters and their little peculiarities;
but I may still be wrong about certain essentials. Finally, in my last draft I have reached the limit of my knowledge; I know my characters from close and long acquaintance—they are my intimate friends, who will no longer disappoint me; as I see them now, I shall always see them.”