Scandinavians by Ferguson Robert;

Author:Ferguson, Robert; [Ferguson, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Nils Strindberg’s remains. Grenna Museum, The Andrée Expedition Polar Centre.

* You can see the film at https://youtu.be/dJM62aIN.

† White Island.

‡ Hear it at https://youtu.be/XtgIxU8TCyY.

Interlude

Ibsen’s Ghosts

IN LATE DECEMBER 1843, A FEW MONTHS SHORT OF HIS sixteenth birthday, Henrik Ibsen left Skien on the coastal ferry Lykkens Prøve, debarking four days later in Grimstad, a small town on the south coast of Norway. Winter that year was particularly severe – the newspaper in nearby Arendal reported temperatures of minus 10–11 degrees Réamur in his first week, and a north-westerly gale that brought with it 3 feet (1 m) of snow. Two ships sank off the coast with heavy loss of life. Ibsen had come to take up a post as assistant to the local apothecary, a man named Reimann. He was wearing his confirmation pontificalia and his luggage consisted mainly of a large number of books. His hopes at this stage were divided between the ambition to become a doctor and the dream of becoming a painter.

Charged with being Ibsen’s surrogate father as well as his employer, Reimann was to prove a second unsatisfactory male role-model for the youth. Already heavily in debt by the time Ibsen joined him, during his brief, troubled period operating as an apothecary, Reimann had a tendency to escape from his problems into drink. Perhaps it was these early experiences of ineffective father-figures that contributed to the low opinion of men characteristic of so many of Ibsen’s works.

His pay at Reimann’s was poor, the food merely sufficient, the living accommodation cramped. The ground floor consisted of two rooms, the Reimann family’s sitting room and the dispensary itself, which also functioned as a post office. Upstairs were three connecting bedrooms. The Reimanns and their youngest children slept in one, Henrik in the next with the three older boys, and the two household maids, Marie Thomsen and Else Sofie Jensen, in the third. The door between the two outer rooms was left open at nights in cold weather, as the maids had no stove of their own and needed to share the heat from the adjacent room. When the night-bell rang, Ibsen would attend to the customer, pulling on his dressing-gown and passing through their room to descend the steep staircase to the dispensary. For someone of Ibsen’s reserved nature such a lack of privacy must have been distressing. Yet for the next six years he was compelled to live ‘in the open’ like this. The effect on his personality was profound. In time it turned the need for privacy into an incurable pathology.

Grimstad was in many ways similar to Skien, although with 800 inhabitants it was less than half the size. Most of its young men went to sea once they left school, and even the meanest wage-earner would invest some part of his savings in a trading ship. The streets were narrow, poorly lit and without sewage – the gutter ran down the centre of the main street. There was no mains water-supply, and water had to be drawn from wells, either public or private.

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