IBSEN by Michael Meyer. 865 pages. Doubleday. $12.95.
Henrik Ibsen kept a live scorpion in an empty beer glass on his writing table. "From time to time the brute would ail; then I would throw in a piece of ripe fruit, on which it would cast itself in a rage and eject its poison; then it was well again." As usual in an Ibsen scene, opera glasses are not needed to recognize the symbolism. Tiny, armored, venomous, Ibsen was an ailing spirit whose dramas stung the 19th century's conscience and gave European theater a new seriousness. After launching into poetic tragedy (Brand, Peer Gynt), Ibsen imported social realism from the novel and invented modern prose drama (A Doll's House, Ghosts). Then he passed on to the great pagan passion plays of his old age (The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, Little Eyolf).
The exploitation of women, the trap of marriage, the dead weight of the Establishment, the isolation of the individual in the modern world-Ibsen's issues are once again the issues of the hour. But as his plays revive so do their somber ambiguities. To assume that the facts of an author's life inevitably illuminate the meaning of his writing is to commit the biographical fallacy; and in this huge biography-the first full portrait done since 1931-Michael Meyer makes that error on a grand scale. Even so, his book is the richest discussion of Ibsen's life and work ever published.
Suzannah's Steel. Born in 1828 in a tiny Norwegian lumber town, he was seven when his well-to-do father's finances collapsed. About the same time, Henrik became convinced (incorrectly, his biographer suspects) that he was illegitimate. He writhed under this double disgrace, and when he left home at 15 it was forever-he saw his parents only once after that. Withdrawn and stumpy, he was apprenticed for six years to an apothecary. By day he brewed prescriptions over a kitchen stove; by night he wrote radical poems and skits that read like bad Kipling. At 23, indirectly because of a stormy verse drama he had written, he was offered the post of director and playwright at the theater in Bergen. His first four plays flopped, and as a director he was a washout. Too shy to tell his actors what to do, he sat in the back of the theater tugging at his beard or hurried away from confrontation muffled up in a huge romantic cloak that made him look like Mickey Rooney playing Goethe.
Finally he found a girl, a handsome, forceful young woman named Suzannah Thoresen. After only two meetings, Ibsen begged her to marry him and make him "something great in the world." From the first, says Meyer, it was a marriage of creative convenience. Day after day, Suzannah packed him off to commune with his scorpion, whipped up his flagging spirits, shooed his time-wasting friends away. "Ibsen had no steel in his character," she said flatly. "I gave it to him." The steel soon made its mark. In 1863, Ibsen wrote The Pretenders, his first popular success. On the strength of it, after wangling a $400 grant from the government for a year in Italy, he headed south with his wife and small son. He stayed for 27 years.