The Discoverer (9 page)

Not until years later, did Jonas realise that it was at that moment that he came up with the idea – in a flash, you might say – for his programme on Henrik Ibsen, one of the twenty-odd episodes of
Thinking Big
, a splendid
television
series in which each individual programme was as carefully arranged in relation to the others as the pipes in an organ. When that time came, he could not have said where he had got it from – he called it inspiration – but the image stemmed, of course, from this incident: with a woman kneeling in a church. And a possible miracle.

Jonas Wergeland’s programme on Henrik Ibsen did not touch on the less sympathetic sides of the writer’s character: his arrogance and pomposity, his
ruthless ambition and, at the same time, his pathological shyness, his
pedantry
and penchant for the formalities, not to mention all the shameless
arse-licking
he did in order to obtain honours, his infatuations with very young girls, his drinking, his sexual inhibitions. Nonetheless: seldom has a
programme
been so roundly condemned. Ibsen researchers and other members of the literati were particularly outraged, describing it as libellous. Because Wergeland’s story about Norway’s national bard – a fictional drama in the spirit of
Brand
and
Peer Gynt
– dealt with a man on his knees, a man who, in the course of a few minutes, underwent a total transformation.

The key scene opened with Ibsen – in Rome on business – sitting
disconsolately
outside an osteria in the magnificent Piazza Navona, drinking wine. He was turning over several projects in his mind, but it was the text of
Brand
which was giving him the most trouble. He was getting nowhere. Like Duke Skule in
The Pretenders
he was beginning to have doubts about himself, about his calling. He was afraid that the disparity between the absolute demands and the realities of the situation, between his aims and his abilities, was too great. He sipped his white wine, gazing at the fountain in the centre of the square, at Bernini’s evocative figures and the water splashing into the basin, the four jets meant to symbolise the world’s four great rivers and, hence, the four corners of the globe; tumbling water, a cascade which – as it was
presented
on television – reminded him of the waterfalls at home in Norway, the wild landscape of western Norway, the darkness of the water, dangerous forces, the magical powers of the water nixie, the risk of drowning: thoughts which moved him to drink more white wine, get even drunker. And in Jonas Wergeland’s rendering it was here, while looking at this fountain, that Ibsen conceived his ‘A verse’ – not printed until years later – which was recited as the screen darkened: ‘To live is – to do battle with trolls / in the vaults of the heart and the mind. / To write is – to sit in judgement on oneself.’

Henrik Ibsen got to his feet, a mite unsteadily, and wove off into the shadows as the sound of bubbling water intensified. The next shot showed the writer standing in a massive doorway, the next again in some dark place, a cave – a studio set conjured into existence by NRK’s best carpenters and designers. To the viewers it looked as though Ibsen had stepped inside his own brain or the vaults of his heart, and truly did have to do battle in there with trolls and dwarfs. They saw the writer being hunted, tormented, saw Ibsen’s innermost worries swarming around him in the form of ghosts: ‘You’re not Knud Ibsen’s son!’ snorted a gnome. ‘Why do you deny me?’ asked a father. Elves danced around Ibsen, chanting that he was bankrupt,
bankrupt
. A girl waved a poem at him, crying that he had broken their
engagement
; a policeman appeared to arrest him and take him off to do hard labour
at Akershus Fort. ‘You have lost your faith in God,’ hissed a troll. The most distinct and most oft-recurring figures were, however, a woman and her son, a child whom one understood to be Ibsen’s own, the boy he had, at the age of eighteen, fathered on a serving maid in Grimstad ten years his senior. Henrik Ibsen sat in judgement on himself. His face bore the marks of pride and a passionate will, and of guilt, shame, pain and sorrow. His lips moved. Jonas Wergeland inserted a quote from
Brand
, the play on which Ibsen was then working: ‘O, endless the atonement here. – / In such confused and tangled state, the thousand twisted strands of fate’, and ended with Brand’s cry at the end of the third act: ‘Give me light!’

And as Henrik Ibsen raised his head, the whole scene opened out. In a stunning dissolve, Jonas Wergeland had the surroundings change from the hall of the Mountain King to the interior of a church, St Peter’s Basilica itself. Through Ibsen’s eyes one gazed straight up at Michelangelo’s breathtakingly high dome. A ray of light streamed down on him, and to viewers at home it seemed that the light alone brought the writer to his knees.

Jonas Wergeland held this shot for a long time, an eternity in viewers’ memories: Henrik Ibsen, the greatest of all Norwegian writers, on his knees under that vast dome, that prodigiously ambitious span, on his knees before the papal altar, under Bernini’s bronze canopy, right next to the steps leading down to the tomb of St Peter, the rock on which the whole Christian church was founded, while all around him the light grew stronger and stronger. It was a provocative image, an image which, for many, accorded badly with the Ibsen they knew: a stubborn, antagonistic character who could not write unless bristling with resentment. But to Jonas Wergeland, this was where all of Ibsen’s future masterpieces had their beginnings: with him kneeling, humbly, under a cupola, in a church.

According to the programme’s version of events, Henrik Ibsen was, at this point, a disheartened man, plagued by thoughts of betrayal in his life and his art; a man who, in sitting in judgement on himself, was bound to find himself guilty. But on his knees under the dome of St Peter’s, under the image of the Almighty himself, he met with compassion, or rather: he was
granted
– like a gift for which he had not asked – forgiveness; he was set free.
Brand
was in all ways a reflection of this experience. Just as Ibsen had sacrificed a woman, Else Sophie from Grimstad, and the child he had with her, so too Brand
sacrificed
, ruthlessly, tragically, his wife and his son, and yet Ibsen concludes the play with a last line proclaiming: ‘He is
deus caritatis
!’ He is the God of love.

In St Peter’s, Ibsen found a light, a relief and a release which also rendered him receptive to the inspiration and, hence, the creativity which great art can bestow. The barbarians came to Ancient Rome and were civilised. So, too
with Henrik Ibsen.
Brand
– the new, revised, visionary play, that is – was in many ways a response to the works of art in St Peter’s. Most of all to the dome. Michelangelo’s mighty vault gave Ibsen courage, the courage to give his imagination wing. To go out on a limb. The courage to go against the accepted taste, the courage to do something crazy. To say: On the contrary. All or nothing. The works of art in that church, and everywhere else in Rome, did not merely provide him with a new yardstick, they also prompted him to ask himself another question: what is a man. It was here, in St Peter’s Basilica, that Ibsen made up his mind to be a person who asked questions rather than one who answered them. It was here that he began to perceive the possibility of depicting people as no one before him had done.

Through Ibsen’s eyes, television viewers saw him discover the key to his future works. Looking up, he caught sight of the four large mosaic
medallions
at the four corners of the dome: the four evangelists, four writers, each of whom had presented his version of one man’s life. Ibsen may also have been reminded of the four rivers represented in Bernini’s fountain on the Piazza Navona. He had a vision: he was standing at the intersection point of four powerful spotlight beams, could feel their influence flowing through him, his mind could run in four directions at once. And at that very moment – so Jonas Wergeland postulated – it came to him, the idea of writing four different versions, four stories about the same man, only he would give him four different names: Skule, whom he had already portrayed, Brand, Peer and Julian. Four characters. And yet one. Presenting, when seen together, a picture of Mankind, its depth and its breadth.

Beneath that boundary-breaking cupola in Rome, Henrik Ibsen was
liberated
from his stunted self. He was free to become someone else, also as a writer. Henrik Ibsen had been transformed. He had blundered into St Peter’s as a troll, enough in himself, and walked out a man.

Jonas Wergeland was, as it happens, firmly convinced that Ibsen’s latterly so renowned sphinx-like countenance, his aloof demeanour was a mask he assumed to save revealing anything of his Caritas moment.

A number of people have pointed out that this programme rests on a somewhat objectionable assumption: that Ibsen died and was restored to life, became a new man. Became more than he had been. What people did not know was that Jonas had made this assumption on the basis of personal experience. In one discussion he did, however, claim that in
Peer Gynt
Ibsen himself had hinted at something similar. In several scenes, Peer appears to die, and yet goes on living – on the high moors, in the hall of the
Mountain
King, in the Asylum, on the boat home. As for Henrik Ibsen, from that summer on, more than one person observed a sudden and marked difference
in his manner. He became more impulsive, for a long time he read nothing but the Bible and he changed his whole style of dress. This new sense of freedom boosted his self-confidence. The following year, in his ambitious application for a poet’s pension he wrote – in a hand which had also
undergone
an abrupt transformation – the words which Jonas Wergeland used as the title of his television series: Ibsen would, as he said, fight ‘to arouse the Nation and encourage it to think big’.

Jonas Wergeland, still merely an announcer with NRK television, sat in a church, at an organ, and he too saw a light of sorts: a woman clad in
brilliant
orange, on her knees before his father’s coffin. The final strains of ‘Love divine all love excelling’ still hung in the air. Jonas did not know whether this occurrence, the woman down by the altar, was going to bring everything to a halt, make time stand still, but he got ready, anyway, to play the postlude while the coffin was carried out to the hearse which waited to take it to the crematorium. Time went on. The strange woman got to her feet and met the eyes trained on her from the packed pews. The precious stones in her earrings flashed. What an amazing figure, Jonas thought to himself. In her orange coat, in such a gathering, she looked like a butterfly on a winter’s day, a peacock butterfly caught in a snowstorm. A creature who lifted the lid off this funeral scene to reveal that it was all about something else, something more. No one knew – no one ever discovered – who she was or why she did it. Whether she belonged to a past time or, as Jonas was inclined to believe, to a parallel time. As she walked – no, strode – up the aisle she seemed,
wordlessly
, to be saying: ‘You are wrong, this is not a church, it is a palace; that is not an organist in that coffin, but a king.’

Then she was gone. A glowing ember leaving behind it only ashes, dead and black.

Jonas, however, was left with the feeling that she had lit a spark within him. Or that she had blown more life into the tiny flame which he had become aware of earlier when his eye lighted on the nape of Margrete’s neck. He focused on his music, prepared to play the postlude, which was in fact a prelude. The same piece that his father had been playing when he died, Bach’s prelude in A minor. As if picking up where his father had left off. A triumph. Jonas raised his hands and, as he did so, in a flash he saw how the most
disparate
threads of life intertwined in this room, at this moment; how seemingly parallel, unconnected events suddenly came together to form harmonies, music, a prelude which showed him that his own life had not even begun yet. Did it always take a death to render complex matters simple?

Jonas played the first few bars, with the A note held as a pedal point, like a prolonged insistence on new beginnings, on life. Jonas threw himself into
this work which, strictly speaking, he was in no way qualified to play, but which he managed to play nonetheless, played it so that the whole church shook. And the longer he played, the greater became the feeling of something of colossal importance welling up inside him, something which had long lain buried, and as he neared the end of the piece, as he caught himself holding his breath, one thought outweighed all others, the thought of taking his talent seriously, because he had the opposite problem from Ibsen: he had the ability, but he lacked the will. Jonas made the air vibrate with his playing, and perhaps because he had long since been imbued with the geometric beauty of this moment, and because the music felt like a crystalline net in which every fragment reflected all of the others, and because he was sitting in a small church, building a cathedral out of music, he found that he had already made up his mind: he longed to have more wind in his sails. He would approach his bosses at NRK and ask to be allowed to make programmes. And some day – again he was reminded of those metro stations in Moscow – some day he might create a series presenting the bright spots, the underground stations, in the collective life of Norway, a series of programmes which would encourage the whole nation to think big. Maybe, the thought struck him as the echo of the final chord died away and a hush fell in the church, such a series could even be regarded as life-saving.

On the way down to Turtagrø he turned back several times to look up at the three peaks behind us. ‘They remind me of the pyramids at Giza,’ he said. Late in the afternoon, down by the car, he stood for a moment regarding Store Skagastølstind, the mountain we had climbed. As if considering
something
. Then: ‘I’ve seen the Great Pyramid at Cheops,’ he murmured at length, ‘but this is greater.’ To me it sounded as if he were saying: I was dead, but now I am risen.

‘Why did you go so close to the edge?’ I asked.

‘I thought I could fly,’ he said. ‘I thought I had sprouted wings.’

We reached Skjolden that evening. The village lay in shadow, but the sun was still shining on the slopes high on the east side of Lustrafjord and on the snow atop Molden, the peak which formed the cornerstone of a chamber in which the shining water constituted the floor and the mountains the walls. The blossom on the apple trees we drove past seemed luminous. The beauty of it was almost too much.

The
Voyager
was lying waiting for us at the Norsk Hydro wharf, below the old Eide farmstead; Hanna and Carl had sailed up the day before. We got ourselves settled in the old lifeboat, a genuine Colin Archer, built over a hundred years ago. For the next few weeks it would be our home. A boat that had saved the lives of hundreds of people in distress. A stormy petrel. A vessel designed to put to sea when others were making for harbour. The perfect mobile base.

Martin promptly disappeared into the galley, I heard chinking sounds coming from his tiny, but discriminatingly stocked drinks cabinet. ‘Here you are,’ he said, as he came up again with a glass for our guest. ‘A Talisker from the Isle of Skye, laced with the tang of the ocean. The perfect whisky for drinking at sea. Welcome aboard.’

‘Cheers,’ said our guest. ‘Here’s to a boat fit for an old lifesaver.’

We had to make the most of our days at Skjolden. Carl had been allotted the most important task: the stave church at Urnes. Martin would be
concentrating
on the natural wonders of the area, particularly the Feigumfossen waterfall and Fortunsdalen. Hanna would be visiting places like
Munthehuset
at Kroken, where so many painters had stayed. And I was to chart the
philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s movements in and around Skjolden. In the course of this work I found myself one afternoon on the hill above Eidsvatnet,
sitting by the foundations of his cottage, ‘Østerrike’. As I leafed through the fragmentary writings in
Philosophische Untersuchungen
, I was suddenly struck by the similarity between the project on which we were engaged and
Wittgenstein
’s
efforts to eschew the traditional limitations of the book form, where ‘b’ inevitably follows ‘a’. This made me wish that we could insert a ‘link’ to a small display – I envisaged a graphic image inspired by Wittgenstein’s clarinet – illustrating the connection between the fjord as form, as a network of branches, and the composition of his book.

We had been lucky with the weather. In the evening we were able to sit up on deck, exchanging findings and ideas while the sunlight slowly loosened its grip on the top of Bolstadnosi, behind Skjolden. Was there, for example, any correlation between Wittgenstein’s theories and the carvings in Urnes stave church? This was the sort of question we meant to encourage people to ask. Already we had some inkling of what our main challenge would be: of all the information we gathered – what should we take with us?

I think, though, that I spent just as much time observing our passenger, a man who had once had the whole nation in the palm of his hand and almost succeeded in steering it onto a different course, before he was sent to prison for the murder of his wife. Who was this man? I had taken it upon myself to uncover unknown aspects of his life. I had already written a long and
elaborate
rough draft which I was continually turning over in my mind, in parallel, so to speak, with my actual assignment.

I asked myself who I thought I was, to be undertaking such a task. I was neither a god nor a devil. I was a human being. I was a conjecturing
individual
. My style – even where my account sounded pretty dogmatic – could not help but be tentative, hypothetical. Full of eventualities and
qualifications
and reservations. Although I never actually said it, never revealed my scruples, my doubts and my unquestionable shortcomings, not even in
parentheses
, the whole thing was pervaded by an implicit ‘it
may
be that …’, or ‘as I see it …’. And yet sometimes, even when I was sitting up on deck, making more notes, I felt like a spirit drifting over the water, an omniscient spirit, a spirit with the power to create light, to separate sea from sky. It was easy to become enamoured of this illusion. I
knew
a lot, a nuisance of a lot, about the man sitting on a deck chest across from me. And I considered my youth an advantage. I was not interested in adding anything or tearing anything down. I simply wanted to understand: why did he do it?

I studied him surreptitiously. It was a rare privilege to be able to spend some days with one’s subject. Although he looked different after his time behind bars, after his first years of freedom – his hair was grey now, his face thinner, his skin oddly darker somehow – I was surprised to find that he
could stroll around Skjolden, check out the goings-on at the Fjordstova
community
centre – the climbing wall, the library – without being recognised. As far as I could tell, this did not bother him at all. Looked at objectively, though, this was quite something, in fact it was almost unbelievable: his visage had been erased, so to speak, from people’s memories. As if someone had pressed a huge ‘delete’ button.

His slide into oblivion had been a gradual thing, of course: long after he had exchanged the spotlit pedestal of television celebrity for the dim solitude of the prison cell he had remained the object of an interest bordering on mass hysteria. All the newspapers printed special supplements about him, detailing the high points of his career. Both the press and television behaved as if they were suffering from bulimia. They could not get enough of him. It was said that a number of women had tried to kill themselves, that they had been found clutching photographs of Jonas Wergeland. He had been an incandescent, edifying icon to the people of Norway, exalted and inviolable. Many people, I’m sure, can still recall how shocking it was, back in the infancy of television, when a newsreader got a fit of the giggles and thus revealed that he or she was only an ordinary mortal. But the wave of disbelief that swept the country when Jonas Wergeland, a national emblem, the nearest thing to a demi-god, was convicted of murder, was of another order entirely.

Even the most sensational scandals do not last for ever, though. After remarkably few years Jonas Wergeland was no more than a distant legend associated with the best of television broadcasting, He had been reduced to a word, a concept. If his name did crop up it was not uncommonly in the form of a superlative: ‘Wergelandian’. His television series – and other
programmes
made by him – had, however, a life of their own. The repeats had been running for years. The videos of
Thinking Big
also sold steadily. The reaction – an almost religious collective response – to the first showing could obviously never be repeated, but for that very reason perhaps, the artistic merits of the programmes came more into their own. Despite the
ephemeral
, soon to be outdated nature of the medium, Jonas Wergeland’s television series was an indisputable masterpiece. I am not alone in thinking this. A well-known English television critic wrote in his column in
The Sunday Times
that these programmes possessed the same undeniable quality and brilliance as the paintings of Rembrandt or Matisse. Nonetheless, these works of art had taken on a life of their own, independent of Wergeland’s person. There was no longer any connection between the name and the face. He could wander, unremarked, around a small Norwegian town, even pass the time of day with people without anyone recognising the features which they had idolised ten years previously.

One evening he was standing outside the old Klingenberg family home, where Wittgenstein had stayed during his first winter in Skjolden, when an elderly man happened along. They got talking. After a while I heard the other man say: ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what do you do for a living?’

‘I’m …’ Wergeland began, then stopped, as if he were trying to say
something
for which there were no words. ‘I am a secretary.’

Which was true. He was now working as a secretary. And he was clearly proud of it.

On our third and final day in Skjolden harbour, he asked me if I would act as driver for him; he wanted to show me something. When we got to Luster he instructed me to turn down a narrow road immediately after Dale Church. We zigzagged up the steep hillside and eventually emerged on a plateau to be met by the unreal sight of a huge, white crescent-shaped
building
, four storeys tall. ‘Welcome to Hotel Norway,’ he said. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I learned later that the place was up for sale, and that a lot of interest was being shown by the travel industry.

This ghostly establishment was Harastølen, an old sanatorium from the turn of the century. The fresh air and the surrounding pine forests had made it a perfect spot for the treatment of tuberculosis; there were still some signs, like the low-ceilinged ‘cure porches’ set into the embankment skirting the front of the main building, suggestive of a world of deckchairs and blankets – like that described by Thomas Mann in his novel
The Magic Mountain
. Later on, the premises had been used as a hospital for long-stay psychiatric patients.

I don’t know whether anyone remembers now, it is already so long ago, but it was here in the early nineties that the Bosnian refugees whom the Red Cross succeeded in having released from Serbian concentration camps and who then came to Norway by way of Croatia were interned. There were around 340 of them all told, counting their families. Many of them were severely traumatised; they had been subjected to what psychiatrists term ‘catastrophic stress’, they had witnessed the most appalling violence – ethnic cleansing – and were in a very vulnerable condition, one which could easily escalate into acute crisis. The Norwegian authorities meant well, I’m sure – they called it a transit centre – but it does not take much imagination to see that it was not good for people suffering from this sort of syndrome to live in such isolation – halfway up a mountain, deep inside a Norwegian fjord – for over a year. Things became so bad that the inmates staged a hunger strike. But not until over half of the refugees had applied to return to Bosnia – they actually preferred that war-torn region to Harastølen – did the baffled Norwegian immigration authorities realise just how embarrassing the whole
situation was. The refugees received a promise that they would be resettled in the surrounding community.

We stood with our backs to the old sanatorium, a brick colossus
honeycombed
with long corridors and little rooms. Most of the Bosnians had had to stay at Harastølen for a year and a half, some of them for almost two years. I shot a glance at Jonas Wergeland. I could see that he was moved. He knew what it was like to live in isolation, in degrading conditions. He had no trouble imagining how it would feel to have to live here for any length of time. The refugees’ Norwegian hosts did not, however, have the benefit of this experience or such insight. Here, in what had once been a treatment centre for TB sufferers and the insane, a desolate spot five hundred metres up a mountainside, these poor people had been stashed away, as if they were either dangerously infectious or crazy. As one of them so neatly put it: ‘I feel I have gone from one prison camp to another.’

We stood outside Harastølen, next to the remains of what had once been a cable railway, just the sort to run up to an ‘eagle’s nest’, and gazed across the fjord to the mountains on the other side. In the distance we could hear the sound of sheep bells, like the ones Norwegian supporters ring when cheering their skiers on to more gold-medal victories. Jonas was very quiet. Then, as I was making to leave he said: ‘Is it possible, do you think, to understand
everything
about Norway from such a marginal position as this, in the grounds of a disused asylum?’

And then he began to talk, to talk eagerly and at great length. It was years since I had heard him speak with such commitment. He spoke of how incredibly lucky he had been to grow up in an age marked by the greatest economic, social and cultural changes since the Stone Age. And in that era of unbelievable prosperity he had also had the good fortune to be living in the most privileged and sheltered corner of the globe. But that was also, he said, why he felt so ashamed.

Readers will, I hope, bear with me here, if I slip in a few thoughts on modern Norway plucked from that monologue, that confused blend of praise and blame, delivered by Jonas Wergeland at Harastølen, near Luster. Because, he said, standing here outside this old TB hospital, this erstwhile mental home and, briefly, refugee centre, he felt compelled to consider the growth of modern Norway. And the conclusion he had reached was that it had all happened too fast. That was why we had become so unsympathetic, so intolerant, so callous and forbidding, all affected by a collective, almost
panic-stricken
case of tunnel vision which permitted us to see only what we wanted to see and which, in our misguided struggle to safeguard what belonged to us, caused us to lose sight of the need for human solidarity and common
decency. He simply could not get his head round the fact that little more than a century ago Norway had been a country so poor, so doomed to scrimp and save, that the few gas lamps in the streets of its towns were not lighted on moonlit nights. Would he ever be able to understand this nation which, in the regatta of history, started out hopelessly far behind at the beginning of the twentieth century as a rot-ridden longboat with moth-eaten sails, and rounded the millennium buoy, suddenly in the lead, as a luxury yacht in a class by itself, all gassed up and bristling with electronic equipment – all of this almost without having to lift a finger, and with no one knowing quite how it had happened. Anyone would think a good fairy had flown over us and with a wave of her wand transformed a draughty log cabin into a
chalet-style
villa with ten rooms and underfloor heating in the bathroom. What had happened to us? Or rather: was it any wonder we didn’t know how to deal with our wealth? ‘We’re like a nation of stunned lottery winners,’ Jonas Wergeland said. ‘When people get rich too quickly they almost always lose their perspective. In this case a whole society was hit.’