Chapter 37With Björnson at AulestadBEI BJÖRNSON IN AULESTAD
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
In Faaberg their carriage was already waiting for me, and at Aulestad, before the door of the manor house, they both stood, tall, stately, smiling — and I flew to their hearts, Björnstjerne Björnson1 and his faithful wife Caroline.
Ten days I stayed here; those were once again hours that are worth the living.
Half a year later he celebrated his seventieth birthday2. And not yet two years after that he was dead! — —
None of us would have let ourselves dream of that then. He seemed to have a constitution — as if for eternity. And how mentally fresh and creative he was. — Yes, they were days that left deep tracks! The whole house, with its lovely view into the green Gudbrandsdal, was full of visitors. But I soon had it worked out that if I wanted the old man to myself, I had to get up early. And so the two of us sat every morning at six o'clock sharp quite alone over breakfast, with a relish of “Gammel Dost,” his favourite cheese.
How dear he and Frau Caroline were to me, how warm I felt with these wonder-people! Again and again we spoke of the Roman times and of my dead one. He had no better, truer friend than Björnson. Really I meant to stay only three days, but let myself be talked, from day to day, into one extension after another, until on the eleventh I tore myself away with a bleeding heart. —
From seven in the morning the poet worked strenuously and might, of course, not be disturbed. He was just then writing at a book “Multicolor3” and spoke very searchingly about it: how the least part of what is in a human being is merely black or white, but every soul is made up of a thousand tones and shadings. The whole of life is “Multicolor.” Of that I can sing a song. — At one o'clock came the family gathering on the flower-decked balcony, where one chatted standing and drank chocolate. Then till three o'clock Björnson read his many newspapers, in the little greenhouse, no less. The ones he had gone through flew to the floor and soon heaped themselves up before him like a little hill. I asked him to allow me, during this newspaper siesta, to sketch him. At first he refused me flatly, and I was very sad about it. Then at last he consented. Those were hours rich in content for me — it is also the last time before his death that he sat for an artist. The sketch came out very like, and to this day I have not been able to part with it.
Then I painted the music room as well, infinitely finely graded in tone. Tuned in pale rose and green. The whole house was like a museum; downright masterly pictures, drawings and sculptures had accumulated over the years from the hands of artist friends.
For the revered, beloved master I painted laurel garlands, as a surprise, on the door of his study, a large, light corner room with a beautiful view into the green foothills of the Gudbrandsdal. That gave him much joy. — At three o'clock was dinner, to which guests from outside often came as well. Afterwards Björnson worked again; later he took a walk with Frau Caroline. The evening was once more given over to sociability.
Björnson's son Erling4 farmed the estate of Aulestad. He had a house of his own, likewise crammed full of works of art, and a charming little daughter. From his wife, a rich farmer's daughter, he was divorced on account of her drunkenness. Frau Caroline told me many harrowing details. Erling had just returned from a journey to America, where he had given his countrymen political speeches about King Haakon and about Norwegian independence, and had reaped many triumphs.
It was an interesting circle. I also heard much about the daughter, Frau Dagny Langen, who, separated from her husband, the Munich publisher Albert Langen5, was bringing out in Paris a very well-going caricature journal for women. In Rome, in her day, she had been quite young and strikingly beautiful, and had got herself engaged and disengaged there a few times. How erratic human destinies are.
At last, then, I tore myself away. The parting came very hard to me. I had settled so completely into Björnson's particular way of being, had also considerably widened and deepened my knowledge of his works — they had been golden days, worth the living.
Via Lillehammer, with its interesting collections of rural houses gathered by a doctor there, I now travelled on to Kristiania.
Ibsen had died not long since. His grave touched me with deep melancholy. I visited Frau Ibsen6 too. She was living now in the closest communion with her dead husband, and told me that she conversed with him daily for hours at a time, and that his voice always rang out quite loud and clear from the next room. And then she told me how infinitely happy she had been with him, and what a harmonious marriage she had always led. With the poet of Hjalmar Ekdal and of Gregers Werle, the fighter against the life-lie! — A shiver ran over me. — We too spoke much of a shared past in Munich, Rome, Gossensass. — —
The Holmenkollen sanatorium pleased me greatly, as did the whole of Kristiania, the folk museum and the galleries. I also visited Björn Björnson, Björnstjerne's eldest son, who was director of the theatre, and saw a very good performance of “Peer Gynt” and of “Gengangere” (Ghosts), in which Halfedan Christensen was a harrowing Oswald.
Then I travelled via Trollhätta (which actually disappointed me) and Lake Mälaren, the lake tour in three days, to Stockholm. There I found the open-air museum of Skansen far grander still than the one in Kristiania. The museums impressed me too. Drottningholm Palace, the baths of Saltsjoebaden. What changing pictures!
On a Russian ship it then went through the skerries to Helsingfors, the capital of Finland. I had only a few hours for seeing the beautiful, modern city in its most glorious situation and rich adornment of gardens. Late in the evening my ship sailed on towards Petersburg.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Björnstjerne Björnson — The Norwegian national poet (1832–1910): playwright, novelist, orator, Nobel laureate of 1903, author of the words of Norway's national anthem. Aulestad, his farm in Gausdal, was the closest thing young Norway had to a national court. (Björnstjerne Björnson)
- ↑seventieth birthday — Memory has bent both numbers. Half a year after this August 1907 visit came his seventy-fifth birthday, 8 December 1907, celebrated across Scandinavia; the seventieth lay back in 1902. And he died in Paris on 26 April 1910 — nearly two and a half years after that birthday, not "not yet two." The errors pull the same way: they shrink the distance between the radiant visit and the death, which is how the visit evidently felt in 1917. The chapter's date, at least, is firm — it follows straight from the Norway journey begun at the beginning of August 1907.
- ↑Multicolor — No book of this name is among Björnson's works — nothing with the title appeared before his death in April 1910, and the project seems to survive chiefly in accounts like this one. The doctrine, though, is pure late Björnson: no soul merely black or white, every one a thousand tones and shadings. And the aside she attaches — "Of that I can sing a song" — is the memoirist quietly claiming the doctrine for her own much-judged, multicoloured life. Whether the sitter of the newspaper siesta really was the last artist Björnson posed for is her claim, unverifiable; the sketch itself, still in her keeping when she wrote, is one more untraced work for the catalogue.
- ↑Erling — Erling Björnson (1868–1959), the poet's second son, farmer of Aulestad. The American speaking tour rode the wave of 1905, when Norway dissolved the union with Sweden — his father's great cause — and elected Haakon VII its king. Erling's later road is the family's darkest chapter, and one his father did not live to see: in old age he joined Quisling's Nasjonal Samling and lent the national poet's name to the party of collaboration during the German occupation. In 1907 all of that is unimaginable; he is the returning hero of the emigrant lecture halls, fresh from his American triumphs.
- ↑Albert Langen — Founder of the satirical weekly Simplicissimus, and Björnson's son-in-law since 1896 — he had married Dagny Björnson at twenty. He would die in 1909, months before Björnson himself. Langen knew Paris exile at first hand: after Simplicissimus printed a lèse-majesté poem against Wilhelm II in 1898 he ran his Munich publishing house from Paris for five years to escape prosecution. The young and beautiful Dagny of the Roman engagements is the same Rome of the early 1890s in which Preuschen and Telmann kept house — another face from "the Roman times." The word here translated "caricature journal for women" is a conjecture: the 1926 printing garbles it (Frauenkarikaturjisojblatt), and Frauenkarikaturenblatt is the likeliest reading. (Albert Langen)
- ↑Frau Ibsen — Suzannah Ibsen, née Thoresen (1836–1914). The widow of the great stripper-away of illusions keeping her husband alive by one — daily conversations with a voice from the next room — is exactly the frisson Preuschen means. Hjalmar Ekdal and Gregers Werle are the two poles of Ibsen's The Wild Duck (1884): Hjalmar lives contentedly inside a comfortable illusion, and Gregers destroys him by tearing it away. The play's word for the illusion a life is built on — Lebenslüge, the life-lie — had entered German as a catchword, and Preuschen deploys it with precision: the séance parlour is a life-lie kept by the very household that taught Europe the term. What she does not say is that the Ibsens' marriage was harder than the widow's telling — which is rather her point. The "shared past" is real: Munich and Rome in the 1880s–90s, and Gossensass on the Brenner, Ibsen's regular summer resort.