Esther Greenleaf Mürer:
©1998, 1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.Author's note: This is a revision and expansion of an essay which I wrote for this site last year. In this new version I have tried to show how Bjørneboe's view of Ernest Hemingway—expressed particularly in his 1955 essay Hemingway and the Beasts and in two short essays on Hemingway and Brecht—illuminate themes in his two major works from 1966, Moment of Freedom and The Bird Lovers,— and in the early comic novel which foreshadowed them both, Winter in Bellapalma.
Italy and Germany are the two cultures which most strongly impart a cosmopolitan flavor to Jens Bjørneboe's writing. Both crop up in his poetry, novels, essays and plays. For Bjørneboe they have a polarity which finds its strongest expression in his two pivotal works from 1966, Moment of Freedom and The Bird-Lovers.
Bjørneboe's knowledge and love of German culture was deep but—because learning about Nazi atrocities at a vulnerable age had shocked him into his first awareness of human evil—intensely ambivalent. On the other hand, Italy stood for healing, in myriad ways which are detailed in his most complex work, Moment of Freedom. Leif Longum comments that, while Italy and its culture likewise play an important part in Bjørneboe's writings,
this relationship is a happy one, free of the ambivalence he felt towards everything German. He hardly ever mentions Fascism, for instance, a surprising fact in view of his preoccupation with German Nazism and all it stands for. It is as if Fascism was just an unfortunate accident, unrelated to its Italian background. (1)
Among Bjørneboe's first published writings were a series of travel essays written in 1950 for the Oslo newspaper Aftenposten—which often included drawings by the author, such as a trattoria in Florence. Since Bjørneboe at that time had recently made the transition from painting to writing, it is no surprise that Italy and its art loom large in his early poetry, with poems on Cimabue, Donatello, Michelangelo, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the San Callisto catacomb, and more.
When a multi-pronged crisis plunged him into a severe depression in 1957 it was to Italy he fled, remaining for a year and a half. The comic novel Winter in Bellapalma, published in 1958, dates from this period. It is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Hemingway (Bjørneboe had published the essay Hemingway and the Beasts three years earlier), and uncharacteristically lighthearted for Bjørneboe. So different was it from the novels of social criticism for which he had become known that it was all but ignored in Norway at the time, and still tends to get short shrift in discussions of his work.
And yet it prefigures his later writings in important ways. The middle section of Moment of Freedom, “The Praiano Papers”, is based on material written at around the same time—nearly a decade earlier than the rest of the novel.
In the interim between Winter in Bellapalma and the two works from 1966 Bjørneboe discovered Brecht. In a 1964 essay, “Ernest Hemingway and Bertolt Brecht” (a juxtaposition, perhaps, that only Bjørneboe would make), he quotes Brecht's line, “Those who laugh have simply not yet gotten the dreadful news.” He continues:
In Hemingway and Brecht, this knowledge of the “news” is obviously inborn, and forms the point of departure for the work of both as writers; their common problem is thereby given from the first syllable: How shall one manage to live in this world at all? (2)
It appears that Winter in Bellapalma was a spinoff of the battle with depression recorded in “The Praiano Papers.” Bjørneboe was discovering “Florentine laughter” as a tool for his own his survival:
... this laughter is the reason why the Tuscans invented science and the clear Tuscan drawing in their cool paintings; laughter means distance. Conversely: where laughter is absent, madness begins ...the moment one takes the world with complete seriousness one is potentially insane. The whole art of learning to live means holding fast to laughter; without laughter the world is a torture chamber, a dark place where dark things will happen to us, a horror show filled with bloody deeds of violence. (3)
While Bjørneboe's early novels are not devoid of surrealistic humor, he had not yet learned to integrate “Florentine laughter” with other elements in the way that is characteristic of his later work. The comedy of Winter in Bellapalma and the despair of “The Praiano Papers“ were kept in separate compartments, as it were.
Bellapalma bears a strong resemblance to the pretty whitewashed tourist and fishing town toward the end of “The Praiano Papers.” The cosmopolitan, alcoholic narrator first appears here, but in comic mode. The novel's affectionate lampooning of the Italian style of invective could be seen as a preliminary exercise for his tongue-in-cheek use of invective in his later books. The climactic showdown between the macho fisherman Tomaso and the gay ballet dancer Martin brings to mind the description of the bullfight in Moment of Freedom, in which “the bullfighter has danced the bull into impotence.” (4)
But it is The Bird-Lovers which Winter in Bellapalma prefigures most strongly. Central to both is the theme of the impact of tourism and easy money on the fabric of the community.
The plot of Winter in Bellapalma revolves around the fishermen's demand that the town resources be diverted from building more tourist amenities to constructing a breakwater—which would improve the fishing but destroy the beach, and hence the tourist trade. Since the area has been fished out and the nearest fishing grounds destroyed with dynamite, this plan is unrealistic. Here again we see an inversion of Hemingway: The fishermen's revolution loses momentum when they realize that they would have give up their present easy life to go far out to sea in all kinds of weather. By contrast, Bjørneboe's essay on Hemingway concludes a discussion of The Old Man and the Sea with this comment on its author:
No one has been further out to sea. No one has caught a bigger fish. And no one has brought less home with him. (5)
The burlesque of Winter in Bellapalma is replaced by savage satire in The Bird Lovers. Bellapalma has already become a tourist town, and it is made clear that there is no way back to the status quo ante. In The Bird-Lovers the question is whether the tourist entrepreneurs can be prevented from taking over in the first place. The deal depends on the natives' willingness to sacrifice a favorite traditional pastime—hunting and cooking songbirds—in favor of creating a bird sanctuary.
Of Hemingway's hunting, Bjørneboe writes:
... it is evident that as a rule Hemingway's sympathy is partly, and sometimes completely, on the side of the game or the bull; he identifies sometimes with the man, sometimes with the beast, but most often with both. This gives the whole an inner and distinctive ambiguity, which I've found in no other descriptions of beast and man; they have life and death in common, and they meet there.(6)
In The Bird Lovers the Italians' identification with the songbirds is brought out in a surrealistic scene in which three of the characters are discussing methods of capital punishment and three others are discussing methods of cooking songbirds:
CARUSO: We will have a real dinner today!
CAVALLI: The electric chair is the worst in America ...
ROSA: So delicious.
CAVALLI: In America they also use the gas chamber.
ROSA: ... with white beans.
MARCO: The electric chair isn't so bad. You pass out at once and...
PICCOLINO: Smothered in oil and lemon and garlic. Delicious small birds.
FIDELE: They jump and squirm in the chair for quite a while and it smells like burnt flesh in the room.
PICCOLINO: Do you roast them on a spit, Rosa? (7)
The tourist entrepreneurs, meanwhile, turn out to be former Nazis who once occupied the village. For all their sentimental talk about “our feathered friends,” the birds they identify with—as shown on their posters, and in the Song of the Bird Lovers—are predators:
Birds are sweet and kind, but man is mean and full of hate.
Anyone who kills a bird will earn a tragic fate!
Buzzard, kite and vulture's kin,
Eagle, hawk, and peregrine! (8)
The natives' desire for revenge on their former oppressors further complicates the plot, but it does not follow the expected trajectory. The excerpt from Winter in Bellapalma, The Town Fathers Quell a Revolution, invites comparison with The Bird-Lovers' final scene. The role played by the town priest, Father Leone, in resolving the conflict in favor of “progress” is a clear prototype of Father Piccolino's role as defense advocate for the Nazi war criminals in The Bird-Lovers.
Bjørneboe wrote in his 1971 essay “Literature and reality”:
... we live in a world which is characterized not by problems, but by dilemmas—problems which can't be solved. If literature brings solutions, if it brings answers, then it lies. With its reality-content it can only contribute to posing the questions more sharply and clearly and drastically than before. (9)
The question posed in Winter in Bellapalma—and still more sharply, clearly and drastically in The Bird-Lovers—is whether any other values, idealistic or otherwise, can stand up against economic greed. The biting pessimism and the mock-exultation with which The Bird-Lovers ends should not obscure the empirical spirit in which Bjørneboe continually struggled to write.
1. Leif Longum, “Jens Bjørneboe and the Laughter of Tuscany.” In I rapporti tra Italia e Europa del nord nella letteratura e nell'arte. Giornate scandinavie 3-5 maggio 1989, ed. Randi Langen Moen (Bologna, Universita di Bologna, 1992), 129. Back
2. Jens Bjørneboe, “Ernest Hemingway og Bertolt Brecht.” Om Brecht (Oslo: Pax, 1978). Samlede Essays: Teater (Oslo: Pax, 1996), 329-30. Back
3. Jens Bjørneboe, Moment of Freedom (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1999), 113. Back
4. ibid, 21-22. This description obviously owes much to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon, which is discussed at length in “Hemingway and the Beasts.” I have not found any other references in Bjørneboe's writings to suggest that he spent time in Spain, or had much command of Spanish. Back
5. Jens Bjørneboe, “Hemingway og dyrene,” Politi og anarki (Oslo: Pax, 1972). Samlede Essays: Kultur II (Oslo: Pax, 1996), 14. Back
6. ibid, Back
7. Jens Bjørneboe, The Bird Lovers. Tr. Frederick Wasser (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994), 36-37. Back
8. ibid, 62. This quote is from an unpublished translation by Timothy H. Schiff. Back
9. Jens Bjørneboe, “Litteratur og virkelighet.” Politi og Anarki (Oslo: Pax, 1972). Samlede Essays: Kultur I (Oslo: Pax, 1996) Back