The young painter didn't exactly have a general showdown with the "rat's nest". No indication in his painting of a social tendenz. Quite the contrary. This was painting which pleased the milieu he came from— a milieu which, in writing and speech, he loathed.

The catalog shows the painter's circle of motifs, childhood's landscapes, childhood's rooms. "From Randøsund," "Rain in Randøsund," "The Caledonia," "The Railway," "Persille Street," "In the Garden," "Kristiansand," "At the Grand Piano," "Samovar...". Portraits: "The Debutante," "Mrs. Lisel Bjørneboe," "The Doctor," "Hamlet," "The Bookworm." Other: "Moon Landscape," "View toward the South, Stockholm," "Winter Road," "New Snow," "Grassy Hillside," "Birches in Snow," "Cold," "Snowy Air."

Traditional, figurative painting with emphasis on the coloristic. And many would doubtless add today: Painting without originality, lacking nerve and experiment and rebellion. Pretty pictures painted by a handsome artist.

A few years ago the Henie-Onstad Art Center at Høvikodden arranged a large Jens Bjørneboe exhibit. It received a merciless reception from the admirers of the writer Jens Bjørneboe. What the hell kind of petty bourgeois idyll was this? A insult to the chronicler of bestiality.

For my part I see nothing problematic in the contrast between Jens's Cézanne-inspired paintings and the older Jens Bjørneboe, the writer, attacker of the system.

How could such an aesthete in painting develop into such a boor of a rebel? That's the wrong question. Ask rather: Was Jens's painting good or bad painting?

Evaluated from the premises of the art of painting (without regard to bias, to questions of whether and how painting should be socially engaged, political, etc.), I think the painter Jens comes out well. At 26 he was already an experienced painter. His discipline is impressive; by discipline I mean that he immerses himself in the painting itself, in the painting's own world and color and form, light and shadow, contour and surface, harmony and disharmony ... without facile solutions, without shortcuts. And above all without concealing a lack of craft behind polemics.

He consciously refrains from provocative themes. He refrains from obvious strong expression. As a painter he is anti-literary through and through. And why? Because he is a painter and nothing but a painter. In that resides the discipline — and his intelligence as an artist.

Such self-discipline or self-imposed limitation commands even greater respect when one is aware of his social rage, his contempt for his own background. He keeps this in check, he doesn't let it affect the art in his art, engrossed as he is with mastering the painting's own laws and learning the craft to the bottom. He would have applauded Nietzsche's words about how "Kunst" [art] comes from "to know" [kunne], not from "to will," for in that case it would have been called "Wulst."

Whether Jens's capacity for self-discipline lay inside him, or whether it was due to influence, I don't know. Both, I should think. His friendship with the [Kristiansand] painter Edvard Vigebo surely meant a good deal. Vigebo was older than Jens and had already debuted as a painter. They went camping together for years before Jens began at the Art Academy, they rambled around the district with their easels, and Edvard kept his young friend and pupil in line: warm and cold colors, forget the perspective drawing, values, contrasts ... the subject is subordinate, the subject means little, Jens, stick to the painting. Isn't it a painter you want to be?

"Skudeviga," "Voje," "From Valle." The titles in the catalog are landscapes which the two open-air painters Jens and Edvard visited.

Through hard work as a painter Jens learned the art of the eye, the art of seeing. The eye's reflection, the eye's soul. That stood him in good stead when he became a writer. He who wants to expand his awareness and become clear-sighted had better master the art of seeing the world.

In the light of Jens Bjørneboe's later development some might feel tempted to evaluate his painting as unconsidered, intellectually unfulfilled ... a naive first stage which the heavily reflective Jens Bjørneboe left behind. They are wrong. The apparently unreflective qualities in Jens's paintings are to the highest degree a result of reflection, of intellectual maturity.

The years as a painter were a good school for the writer. The same will to self-discipline, and a wish to master the craft, marks the two first poetry collections. From a formal standpoint can these first poems cannot be called original, either. The influence of Rainer Maria Rilke and Olaf Bull is obvious. He walks in others' footsteps, in great footsteps. Here too it seems as if he is saying to himself: If it's a poet you want to be, then you'd damn well be a poet in the grand style. No shortcuts. You must master the form to the smallest detail.

In return, he fills the handed-down form with new content, with his own insight and experience, and uses the form to achieve experience and insight himself . . .

As with the paintings, so too the early poems. They stick in the craw of many Jens Bjørneboe fans. Beautiful but harmless poems, sure in style and form, but with much too "conservative" values. We had better forget the aesthetic Jens, and instead concentrate on the radical Jens, the anarchist. . . .

But Jens's strength as a so-called anarchist, and the fact that he out of all the radical assailants of the system in the Norway of the 60s and 70s has survived with his rebellion and still inspires the young, is due to this ballast of craft, and self-discipline. When he first tears his hair and lets fly at Power, at the authorities, it happens with a weight in his punches which the other rebels lacked.

The direction an authorship takes, often seems — for many quite demonstrably — to be determined by how a budding writer reacts negatively to his milieu, becomes aware of himself as a cognizant individual in relation to his environment, and places himself outside—in opposition.

A bourgeois background marked by moneybags, status and hypocrisy has more then once fostered left-radical writers. Some went all the way and embraced a marxist-oriented ideology. Indeed that must be said to have been the rule rather than the exception among Europe's intelligentsia in the 20th century.

For my part I evaluate an authorship's significance entirely according to how original, unpredictable and penetrating a writer is in breaking with a particular bourgeois background.

The writer Jens Bjørneboe went his own way. He didn't allow himself to be squelched by other writers' calling him reactionary; colleagues with the same kind of background as his, but who, unlike Jens, had chosen a more obvious break. In his point of departure Jens placed himself just as strongly in opposition to that background. But he was original enough, penetrating enough and rebellious enough to choose a different way, a different expression for his antibourgeois stance.

I mention this too as an introduction to another question. Jens Bjørneboe and the religious.

He grew up in a cultured, areligious home. Strong religious feelings were uncultured, and belonged to the common folk. To be sure, Ingvald [his father] attended Sunday services in Kristiansand Cathedral. But with the children he never talked about religious questions. Maybe he didn't have a chance, or didn't dare. It's also possible that his churchgoing was an indication of petit- bourgeois convention. Or a distancing from his social-climbing, party-loving wife.

Jens' books are crawling with references to the Bible. He used the whole material of Biblical imagery, both poetically and as an expression of perception. I won't call him a distinctively religious writer. On the other hand the desire to be one is strongly present in his books. A will to religiousness. A will in him to see life and experience life in the light of another, deeper dimension. Surely inborn in him, as a call; but also a revolt against the superficial milieu he grew up in.

"What's central is not outer reality, that's not what can make life bearable; it's the receptivity of soul one had as a child, and that alone, which can save the pieces. If one only had inner resilience and life, then without doubt existence would become fantastic and rich again. — And if you pay the toll which is demanded, promise not to look back, but to direct your gaze forward and without prejudice take up what you finds; then you will encounter undreamed-of splendors and win property which literally is not consumed by rust and moths, you will have experiences which never fade. But first and foremost you will discover that you do nothing in vain and that everything in life is chock full of meaning. — Spiritual life is not a luxury."

That's how he was as a person, too. Despite his famous diatribes against religious hypocrisy, against abuse of power in religion's name, against the thunder god from Sinai and the stone tablet's commandments—it was no use coming to him with atheism of the clever sort.

As far as I can see the will to religiousness was his way of breaking with his bourgeois background, his first and most important steps on the way to his later writings of social criticism. Religiosity in a broad sense. He must have felt that this "religiousness" contained more dynamite against the existing order than the more obvious cultural radicalism, not to mention totalitarian ideologies.

"There are people who overcome their loneliness and their mortal dread by joining collective movements, communism, nazism... and there are others who have different roads to walk, alone. I've never been able to join anything."

It's fortunate, perhaps, that he grew up in an areligious home. A religious outlook is something you must choose yourself. Jens's development as a writer would have been different if he had grown up in southern Norwegian pietism, with psalter and Christian shipping companies. With his temperament and gifts we would have then got an antireligious cultural radical, and the rebellion would have quickly burnt itself out. Jens Bjørneboe was lucky here. He started with an original twist, and over the years just grew more and more rebellious.

The above is so important that it deserves to be restated in slightly different words. He saw early that there is a greater potential for rebellion in a life of free perception, in a religious-spiritual seeking—greater than in, let us say, leftist political class thinking. I think it was Jens' conviction that a free spiritual seeking stood for the only real opposition to the milieu he came from.

When later in his writing career he mounted a frontal attack on Power, on the authorities, that was a result of this unique combination of radical antibourgeois-ness and "spirituality" (to use a very poor word). Those who think that his social criticism is due to a break with the spiritual person, with the poet and aesthete Jens Bjørneboe, are mistaken.... To the end he remained a metaphysician and a rebel . . . the one did not exclude the other, but they presupposed each other. Therefore he was poorly received among the rebels in the 60s and 70s, who demanded a renunciation of "bourgeois spiritual life and individualism." On the other hand Jens outlived them all, as a rebel.

His engagement, his attack on the authorities came from within. It was a rebellion which did not exclude all subjective need for a cognitive life, every kind of search for answers to ultimate questions. In Jens Bjørneboe, even when he is at his most rabid in his battle against the authorities, the reader—and especially the young reader—can find answers, or attempts at answers, to such questions. He appeals both to the fighters at the barricades and to the knights of the private chamber. He appeals to those who believe that rebellious spirit and subjective seeking are one.

Young people read Jens Bjørneboe because they have understood that today societal engagement and metaphysics belong together . . . the problems which are now piling up outside us bear the stamp of something metaphysical. And to solve them barricades alone are not sufficient, we need also to concentrate on the ultimate questions of existence. Why do we live, what is the meaning, where are we going? Will the earth abide? Will humanity survive?

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