Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (2 page)
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Authors: Henrik Ibsen
The playwright’s birthplace, Stockmanngården in
Skien
,
Norway
. The house was burnt down in 1886.
Another view of the birthplace — the white building in front of the church
The centre of Skien today
Translated by Anders Orbeck
Henrik Ibsen was born into a well-to-do merchant family in the small port town of
Skien
, noted for shipping timber, in Telemark county,
Norway
, in 1828. Although at first he enjoyed a privileged childhood, his upbringing was heavily influenced by how his father became the victim of unfortunate financial transactions in the mid-1830s. In the course of one year, the merchant Knud Ibsen was obliged to close down his businesses, his properties were auctioned off and the family’s prosperity was abruptly reversed to poverty.
Life in Skien was very sheltered, offering little satisfaction to the ambitious and forward thinking Ibsen.
Aged fifteen, he left his hometown for Grimstad to begin apothecary studies. In the course of his time in Grimstad he made his earliest attempts as a poet and in September 1849 had a poem published for the first time,
In the Autumn
.
Ibsen’s first play,
Catiline
, was written over the first three months of 1849, when the young playwright was only twenty years old and currently working as an assistant to the chemist Lars Nielsen in Grimstad. Ibsen wrote most of the play at night time, in the precious few hours he had left free to him for study and composition, which explains why the majority of the drama is set in the evening.
At the same time as working as a chemist’s apprentice, he was studying for the examination qualifying for university entrance. Therefore, he had private coaching in Latin, and among other works he read the Roman historian Sallust’s account of
Catiline
and
Cicero
’s famous Catiline speeches. These ancient texts were to inspire Ibsen’s first foray into play writing.
After completing the play, Ibsen read
Catiline
to his two closest friends in Grimstad, Christopher Due and Ole Carelius Schulerud, who were very enthusiastic about his work. Due made a copy of the manuscript and Schulerud took it to the Christiania Theatre and also arranged publication in book format. Nevertheless, the board of the theatre rejected the play and every bookseller they took it to also declined the work. However, Schulerud did not give in until he had had his friend’s work published. With the aid of a sum of money he had inherited, he had
Catiline
published on commission by the bookseller P. F. Steensballe in
Christiania
. The play was published under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme on April 12th
The play recounts the story of Lucius Sergius Catilina, a Roman politician of the 1st century B.C., who led a conspiracy to overthrow the
Roman
Republic
and in particular the power of the Senate.
Catiline
has rarely been performed and over thirty years passed between the publication of the first edition and the first performance. When this took place - on December 3rd 1881 at Nya Teatern in
Stockholm
- it was not the text of the first edition, but that of the second that was used. Ludvig Oscar Josephson directed the production. The audience showed great interest in the production, but the reviews were mainly negative.
Ole C. Schulerud and Christopher Due, Ibsen’s close friends that supported the publication of his first play
The first edition’s title page
Cicero
Denouncing Catiline (far right) by Cesare Maccari
The drama
Catiline
, with which I entered upon my literary career, was written during the winter of 1848-49, that is in my twenty-first year.
I was at the time in Grimstad, under the necessity of earning with my hands the wherewithal of life and the means for instruction preparatory to my taking the entrance examinations to the university. The age was one of great stress. The February revolution, the uprisings in
Hungary
and elsewhere, the Slesvig war, — all this had a great effect upon and hastened my development, however immature it may have remained for some time after. I wrote ringing poems of encouragement to the Magyars, urging them for the sake of liberty and humanity to hold out in the righteous struggle against the “tyrants”; I wrote a long series of sonnets to King Oscar, containing particularly, as far as I can remember, an appeal to set aside all petty considerations and to march forthwith at the head of his army to the aid of our brothers on the outermost borders of Slesvig. Inasmuch as I now, in contrast to those times, doubt that my winged appeals would in any material degree have helped the cause of the Magyars or the Scandinavians, I consider it fortunate that they remained within the more private sphere of the manuscript. I could not, however, on more formal occasions keep from expressing myself in the impassioned spirit of my poetic effusions, which meanwhile brought me nothing — from friends or non-friends — but a questionable reward; the former greeted me as peculiarly fitted for the unintentionally droll, and the latter thought it in the highest degree strange that a young person in my subordinate position could undertake to inquire into affairs concerning which not even they themselves dared to entertain an opinion. I owe it to truth to add that my conduct at various times did not justify any great hope that society might count on an increase in me of civic virtue, inasmuch as I also, with epigrams and caricatures, fell out with many who had deserved better of me and whose friendship I in reality prized. Altogether, — while a great struggle raged on the outside, I found myself on a war-footing with the little society where I lived cramped by conditions and circumstances of life.
Such was the situation when amid the preparations for my examinations I read through Sallust’s
Catiline
together with
Cicero
’s Catilinarian orations. I swallowed these documents, and a few months later my drama was complete. As will be seen from my book, I did not share at that time the conception of the two ancient Roman writers respecting the character and conduct of Catiline, and I am even now prone to believe that there must after all have been something great and consequential in a man whom Cicero, the assiduous counsel of the majority, did not find it expedient to engage until affairs had taken such a turn that there was no longer any danger involved in the attack. It should also be remembered that there are few individuals in history whose renown has been more completely in the hands of enemies than that of Catiline.
My drama was written during the hours of the night. The leisure hours for my study I practically had to steal from my employer, a good and respectable man, occupied however heart and soul with his business, and from those stolen study hours I again stole moments for writing verse. There was consequently scarcely anything else to resort to but the night. I believe this is the unconscious reason that almost the entire action of the piece transpires at night.
Naturally a fact so incomprehensible to my associates as that I busied myself with the writing of plays had to be kept secret; but a twenty-year old poet can hardly continue thus without anybody being privy to it, and I confided therefore to two friends of my own age what I was secretly engaged upon.
The three of us pinned great expectations on
Catiline
when it had been completed. First and foremost it was now to be copied in order to be submitted under an assumed name to the theater in
Christiania
, and furthermore it was of course to be published. One of my faithful and trusting friends undertook to prepare a handsome and legible copy of my uncorrected draft, a task which he performed with such a degree of conscientiousness that he did not omit even a single one of the innumerable dashes which I in the heat of composition had liberally interspersed throughout wherever the exact phrase did not for the moment occur to me. The second of my friends, whose name I here mention since he is no longer among the living, Ole C. Schulerud, at that time a student, later a lawyer, went to Christiania with the transcript. I still remember one of his letters in which he informed me that
Catiline
had now been submitted to the theater; that it would soon be given a performance, — about that there could naturally be no doubt inasmuch as the management consisted of very discriminating men; and that there could be as little doubt that the booksellers of the town would one and all gladly pay a round fee for the first edition, the main point being, he thought, only to discover the one who would make the highest bid.
After a long and tense period of waiting there began to appear in the meantime a few difficulties. My friend had the piece returned from the management with a particularly polite but equally peremptory rejection. He now took the manuscript from bookseller to bookseller; but all to a man expressed themselves to the same effect as the theatrical management. The highest bidder demanded so and so much to publish the piece without any fee.
All this, however, was far from lessening my friend’s belief in victory. He wrote to the contrary that it was best even so; I should come forward myself as the publisher of my drama; the necessary funds he would advance me; the profits we should divide in consideration of his undertaking the business end of the deal, except the proof-reading, which he regarded as superfluous in view of the handsome and legible manuscript the printers had to follow. In a later letter he declared that, considering these promising prospects for the future, he contemplated abandoning his studies in order to consecrate himself completely to the publishing of my works; two or three plays a year, he thought, I should with ease be able to write, and according to a calculation of probabilities he had made he had discovered that with our surplus we should at no distant time be able to undertake the journey so often agreed upon or discussed, through Europe and the Orient.
My journey was for the time being limited to
Christiania
. I arrived there in the beginning of the spring of 1850 and just previous to my arrival
Catiline
had appeared in the bookstalls. The drama created a stir and awakened considerable interest among the students, but the critics dwelt largely on the faulty verses and thought the book in other respects immature. A more appreciative judgment was uttered from but one single quarter, but this expression came from a man whose appreciation has always been dear to me and weighty and whom I herewith offer my renewed gratitude. Not very many copies of the limited edition were sold; my friend had a good share of them in his custody, and I remember that one evening when our domestic arrangements heaped up for us insurmountable difficulties, this pile of printed matter was fortunately disposed of as waste paper to a huckster. During the days immediately following we lacked none of the prime necessities of life.
During my sojourn at home last summer and particularly since my return here there loomed up before me more clearly and more sharply than ever before the kaleidoscopic scenes of my literary life. Among other things I also brought out
Catiline
. The contents of the book as regards details I had almost forgotten; but by reading it through anew I found that it nevertheless contained a great deal which I could still acknowledge, particularly if it be remembered that it is my first undertaking. Much, around which my later writings center, the contradiction between ability and desire, between will and possibility, the intermingled tragedy and comedy in humanity and in the individual, — appeared already here in vague foreshadowings, and I conceived therefore the plan of preparing a new edition, a kind of jubilee-edition, — a plan to which my publisher with his usual readiness gave his approval.
But it was naturally not enough simply to reprint without further ado the old original edition, for this is, as already pointed out, nothing but a copy of my imperfect and uncorrected concept or of the very first rough draft. In the rereading of it I remembered clearly what I originally had had in mind, and I saw moreover that the form practically nowhere gave a satisfactory rendering of what I had wished.
I determined therefore to revise this drama of my youth in a way in which I believe even at that time I should have been able to do it had the time been at my disposal and the circumstances more favorable for me. The ideas, the conceptions, and the development of the whole, I have not on the other hand altered. The book has remained the original; only now it appears in a complete form.
With this in mind I pray that my friends in
Scandinavia
and elsewhere will receive it; I pray that they will receive it as a greeting from me at the close of a period which to me has been full of changes and rich in contradictions. Much of what I twenty-five years ago dreamed has been realized, even though not in the manner nor as soon as I then hoped. Yet I believe now that it was best for me thus; I do not wish that any of that which lies between should have been untried, and if I look back upon what I have lived through I do so with thanks for everything and thanks to all.
HENRIK IBSEN.
Dresden, February, 1875.
