Munthe, Thomas. 1995. "Hudløst tilstede i verden" Filologen, 1995, no. 3. ©1995 by Thomas Munthe. English transation copy;1998 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer. Used by permission.
Bjørneboe is still strangely present in Norwegian society, 19 years after his death. The Oslo Public Library describes the interest around his books as enormous, and in connection with the 75th anniversary of his birth articles are constantly being written about him in the newspapers. But perhaps all this interest around him is one of the very clearest signs that he is really dead and will never publish anything again; of how unique he was, what a vacuum he left behind?
"Now who's going to tell it like it is," someone asked at the writer's bier one May day in 1976. And without judging later writers too strongly the question must be asked: Who among them have been present in Norwegian society in the same way that Bjørneboe was at his most intense? Are there any writers today who are besieged with letters, telephone calls and personal communications from people who feel that "Only you can help me"?
"Jens Bjørneboe's fate contains a challenge to us all," writes Fredrik Wandrup in his biography of the writer. He lived at times under an inhuman pressure, and for someone who was so taken up with other people's sufferings as he was it must have been dreadful to be forced to turn people away.
Bjørneboe maintained that a writer's most important quality was the capacity for empathy, for feeling others' suffering as his own. Then came translating sympathy into action. For Bjørneboe words too were actions, and one of the main tasks for a writer today is to make the words to mean something again, he believed.
Where does this empathy come from? As a small child he was often sick. Actually he could have died at the age of one from a serious lung inflammation, and he was sick a great deal in the first years of his life. This distorted beginning, lying sick indoors when he should really have been outside playing, may have helped to make him an outsider already from his earliest childhood. And those who have lived through suffering and the role of the weak find it easier to identify with others in the same situation later, if they don't slip over into cynicism or its obverse: Contempt for weakness. History is full of stunted children who have become "strong" adults.
Another episode should also be mentioned from Bjørneboe's childhood At the age of 15 he got hold of the book Peatbog Soldiers by Wolfgang Langhoff. This short book describes the conditions in a Nazi prison camp, and little Jens read it at one sitting. In addition to empathy a new question arose in Bjørneboe: Where does such wickedness come from?
"As I read the sun turned black," he wrote later. "Since then I have never been truly happy. For several years afterward it was impossible for me to conceive that the world still existed."
This question about the world's evil he would come back to and deepen again and again. When he had finished the trilogy on the history of bestiality in 1973 with the volume The Silence he wrote to his publisher that he had been walking through hell for 24 years -- that's how long it had been since he had published his first novel, Ere the Cock Crows. After the great exertion of the trilogy and the novel The Sharks (1974), Bjørneboe sat down to write his autobiography, With Horns and a Tail. He wanted to find his way to the seed in himself, back to the little shipowner's son "with bad milk teeth and long, dark curls almost down to his shoulders", find out how he had become what he had become. It was going to be a difficult task. In several letters to friends he writes of how painful it is to call up childhood memories. The biography begins with his first suicide attempt when he was 13. The reason for this attempt he doesn't get into directly, but merely concludes that he must have been born with his night-black depression. Outwardly he was a smiling child, apparently always in good humor.
We understand that already as a small child Bjørneboe was a complicated fellow. With a silver spoon in his mouth and looking like an angel painted by Raphael. One thinks of Johan Borgen's Little Lord when one reads about how he saw an inner meaning in innocent infractions. He liked to steal apples and play hooky, and he had two report cards: One which he got at school, another which he took home. He had a sense for the "criminal intelligence's amoral innocence," as he expressed it later. It was hardly any desire to become a criminal which lay behind this, but rather a need to set himself up against accepted laws and rules and authorities. Later he found an echo in the German philosopher Nietzsche and his commandment to question all inherited teachings. And the teachers at Kristiansand Cathedral School were in for it. He could sit and just stare at a teacher with a fixed look and an ironic smile until the teacher burst out: "Please stop! I can't teach if you're going to sit there and stare with those intense black eyes of yours." He recounted later that it wasn't primarily the teachers, but the system which he had the need to rebel against. "Today I actually suspect [the teachers] of having been fond of children," he wrote later.
Of course it couldn't go on like that. Despite his turning in compositions which were in a class by themselves he was expelled. He was transferred to a school in Flekkefjord, where he was expelled again in the spring of 1939. He takes his artium [college entrance exam] privately a year later. What kind of essay does the examiner want, thought Bjørneboe during the exam, wrote it and got a fine grade. The last nails were hammered into the coffin of Bjørneboe's trust in the public school system at the same time that the ideology of evil sank over Norway.
After having played the role of a juvenile delinquent Bjørneboe calms down noticeably after the occupation begins. He moves to Oslo, where he dresses like a dandy, acts the aesthete and Bohemian, and devotes himself completely to painting. Tailored suits, cigarettes in a gold case, and paintings like Moon Landscape; his model was Paul Cézanne. Through his cousin André Bjerke he comes into contact with Karl Brodersen, who introduces Bjørneboe to anthroposophy. Together they flee to Stockholm in 1943 when Bjørneboe learns that he is next in line to be called up for the German forced labor. Here he rooms in the house of an anthroposophic priest, takes part in anthroposophical study groups and sings in the Christian Community's choir. Here too he meets his first wife, the German-Jewish Lisel Funk, who is also interested in anthroposophy. They are married upon their return to Norway in 1945.
Being an anthroposophist in the Norwegian cultural milieu wasn't especially easy in Bjørneboe's time. (Whether it is today I have no idea.) This "German-Tibetan muddle," as André Bjerke called it, has been dismissed by many who have written about Bjørneboe as a youthful peccadillo. Bjørneboe broke with the movement in 1957, when he quit teaching at the Steiner School. In a 1970 interview in the now defunct Morgenposten he describes anthroposophy as "a closed, authoritarian movement . . . ever more cryptic, sectarian, self-absorbed and unworldly." And Karl Brodersen says that there isn't a trace of anthroposophy in Bjorneboe's writings, that he chose to forget it after the break. All the same, Inge S. Kristiansen has found enough Anthroposophy in his books to be able to write the book Jens Bjørneboe and Anthroposophy. Bjørneboe himself christened his daughters in the anthroposophical church in the 1960s, attended midnight mass there as late as 1973 and was buried from there by his own wish. It is interesting that Kristiansen claims to find the most anthroposophy in his last four books, the "History of Bestiality" trilogy and The Sharks.
After Bjørneboe's calculating artium essay on Wergeland was awarded an M [B+] he was so disenchanted that it was a long time before he willingly took up a pen, or a book by a Norwegian author. When he bought himself a typewriter for part of the income from a painting exhibition in 1946 it was because a problem had been oppressing him of late. As he worked at his painting wholly different questions kept buzzing around in his head -- questions about cultural politics, social and psychological problems. It's reasonable to assume that he was struggling with all the questions which necessarily arise in the wake of a world war. His existence as an exile had left deep traces in Bjørneboe's mind, even though it took time for him to work through the impressions. In Sweden he met refugees who could tell about friends and relatives murdered in the death camps and gas ovens. Now it was no longer just stories from a book. This must have affected the empathizing Bjørneboe strongly, but he was not yet ready to deal with it in artistic form. In the novel Moment of Freedom from 1966 the narrator tells of the remarkable fact that he painted flower pots and landscapes while the world was aboil around him. The personal experience of being an emigré was something else he took with him: ". . . later one discovers that one has become an emigré for life," he wrote in 1951. At that time he still had many journeys before him. We meet the emigrant and vagabond again, e.g. as the apprentice in Jonas, the record-keeper in Moment of Freedom and the second mate in The Sharks. But meantwhile he was turning from a painter into a writer.
"Sometimes I despaired because I couldn't manage to put the brakes on this unstoppable dialog while I painted," he said to Morgenavisen in 1971. "For me personally the transition was very, very difficult. . . . from painting to writing."
The transition was happening just the same: His first published work was a feature article in Aftenposten about the Swedish painter Ernst Josephson in 1947. He travels around Europe and sends home travel epistles which are printed in the same newspaper. But the main project in these years was still his first novel, Duke Hans, which was turned down by all the publishers. In an interview from 1959 he says that he probably "holds the Norwegian record in rejections." Not until 1972 was the book published by Gyldendal. In his foreword Bjørneboe writes how the book is "consistent with almost everything I have written since: the mind's meeting with reality, with the world of injustice and bestiality -- with the incomprehensible fact that a world which in itself is good and beautiful has become evil and unjust." To know that even Bjørneboe was rejected can be encouraging for people today who are wondering if they dare submit what they have written, but it took a great toll on the newly-married Bjørneboe. Later he wondered why he went on writing after such a reception. Finally it was André Bjerke who came to his aid. Bjerke was editor for the Riksmål organ Ordet, and printed some sonnets Bjørneboe had written in the course of a night at Bjerke's ice-cold apartment. Encouraged, Bjorneboe wrote more sonnets, so that in 1951 he could make his debut with the collection Poems.
In the 1950s Bjørneboe had an image as a political conservative. From a first glance at his debut book it isn't difficult to see why. Here he is writing sonnets and using rhyme in a time when modernism was setting the tone. Bjørneboe also makes use of Biblical motifs, and that hasn't been particularly hip since Nietzsche. In addition the whole thing is presented in Dano-Norwegian by an anthroposophist! On a somewhat closer reading, however, it turns out that the picture is more complex -- a fact whnich emerges most clearly in a long poem making up a third of the collection: Before the Solstice, dedicated to Hans Jæger. Here we get a glimpse of the political Bjørneboe which in my reading bears a strong resemblance to the attitude he showed for the rest of his life. Here is a tribute to the free human being with the critique of "the state's domination over the soul", the disdain for those who would rather let things be as they are and "stay cozy within a tested view of life," and a jab at the modern radicals:
At Jæger's corner table in the Grand Café
Nary a freezing Bohemian is to be seen.
So marvelous the forward strides of time
That the radicals of today are protected.
Earlier in the collection one can read the four first sonnets which were printed in Ordet, of which two are especially interesting with respect to his past and future. One is the poem Childhood, which is about the sick child who must stay indoors while he hears the others outside playing. But it is not an unqualifiedly sad poem, when it says that "it's good to lie here, dark and flat and still under the blanket", and that he is glad "not to have lent / my voice to swell that childish choir of tinkling / sounds, with edges cold and sharp as glass." It is difficult to read anything but the individualist Bjørneboe into this. Poem number two is The Emigrant. Here we get a glimpse of Bjørneboe the eternal emigré, who at that point had traveled much and had many journeys ahead of him.