Ibsen's genius

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Interview with Robert Bly,

by Øivind H. Solheim

ØS: I noticed that somewhere you say that the realistic plays show Ibsen’s talent, but Peer Gynt shows his genius.
RB: There is a range of it, you know, the joy of the whole thing. – Geniuses are known to be very playful, and that doesn’t come too much out in the plays in the living room.
This is the last play where he I rejoicing in his own genius before he goes and does the plays that they want from him. This is Ibsen’s masterpiece, yes I think so, then it was a great joy for me to do it.

It was commissioned 20 years ago by a producer in New York, then he ran out of money – and the first act is remained there. Mark Rylance heard about it- he ran the Globe theatre for 20 years, he wrote to the Guthrie’s and said: I want to commission this to Robert Bly, and I’ll come over and play the lead, they said: Oh wah! We’ll do it!

ØS: 20 years ago you did the first act. – Had you been taken by Peer Gynt also before that
before the Men's Gatherings? I can see many parallels between Peer Gynt and the Men’s Mouvement.
RB: That didn’t happen to me. I didn’t have in mind people that were joyful like Peer Gynt. I had in mind all sorts of men who were depressed, lonely and in bad shape. So those are the ones that I try to help with Iron John. And I told them – well going up there, it could be called in six stages. And people, men could come to me and say to me, well I am stuck in the second stage for 30 years. So that’s the kind of work we did at that time. I still do something. I was as surprised as anyone when I realized.

The Sibling Society

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Interview with Robert Bly, 18 February 2008

ØS: -The word sibling -.
RB: -Yes, that means there’s no father. We are all brothers and sisters. That’s a kind of society in which everyone is equal, they are all watching television at night, and no one really honours their father, doesn’t really honour the mother. They ignore their grand-fathers and their grand-mothers. That is the Sibling Society.
ØS: -And how long has this been like this?
RB: -Oh I don’t know – 50 years probably.
ØS: Why has it come like that?
RB: Because we want to be children. We don’t wanna be adults.
ØS: How come?
RB: It’s too much work to be an adult, and we don’t want any standards, we don’t want any one to say: You’re acting childishly. We wanna everyone to act childishly. And then we all feel at home. So it could also be called the father killing society.
ØS: You say somewhere that women have found their place or have raised their autority in the women’s movement. What do you think about the women’s movement. - Have they been your adversaries?
RB: Oh, there were some at the beginning. They were mad at me because I did a lot of writing about women’s things for a long while, and they said, now he’s abandoning us, now he’s writing about men, so he must be one of those men who just wants power over women. But then – once in a while – I would have meetings, there would be like three to four hundred men. And one time I looked up and there was a woman – no question there was a woman disguised as a man. And she had been sent as a spy by the women’s movement to see what I was doing.
ØS: So you didn’t have women to come to these gatherings?
RB: No, because in the first place men don’t have a chance to talk together with each other. And there is no place it could take place. So I set up a place
So then 80 could come and say anything they wanted to. Most of them spoke about missing their father. And then the women said:
- Don’t you miss your mother?
- Well, that’s not the point, I miss my father!
So that would be a groupe of men with invisible fathers. And occasionally a father would bring his son, or a son would bring his father. So there wasn’t anything anti-female in it. So they began to figure that out.
Well because men don’t have a chance to talk together with each other.
The women often give their daughters more responsibilities than the men would give their sons, and I don’t know the reason for that. I guess men feel there’s a danger they won’t be loved, so they try to be soft with their sons. So that’s kind of difficult situation. Hard on the boys.

Going home again

After 13 wonderful days where I was hosted by Barbara and Jarrett I now return home in just a few hours. The last trip we made together was not the least – and it was a long trip! Some 1260 miles in all, that is something!

Early on Saturday 23 February we started, Barbara, Jarrett and I. I had asked them if they really wanted to go this far, but the word “no” seemed to be quite absent in their language. If the weather conditions were not too bad, they said.

Well it was a very nice trip. We started early, at 04.00 Saturday morning. Jarret and Barbara drove each their turn, I sat in behind reading my students’ copies that I have to correct and send feedback be e-mail before returning home. About seven o’ clock I think it was, daylight had begun to come, so I started taking pictures of the rising sun.

It was very special to leave from home at minus 20 degrees Celsius, and then se the temperature going down and down, like last week when we went south to Kansas in minus 30 degrees Celsius when it was at the coldest. On this trip I think it stopped at minus 25 degrees Celsius maybe, somewhere before Fargo, a town situated at the Minnesota and North Dakota border.

From Fargo we went west on Interstate 94, at 75 Mph. I took pictures of snow crystal covered trees and of whatever I could see of interesting things. After some hours we arrived at Bismarck, a bigger city on the North Dakota prairie, and after Bismarck we entered gradually "the Banana Belt". We noticed it in the way that the snow and the strong cold disappeared, the fields were naked and the cattle were out on the prairie. It was like going from winter to spring. I Dickinson we could feel the spring in the air. We drove up to the Contex Energy Company’s buildings, met with Jeff and settled what was to be settled with him. He gave us a map and explained to us how to find the land where the minerals are.
Just after Dickinson the first oil well showed up. Some of them were moving slowly, pumping up the oil from the deep. Others were standing there without moving, like silent witnesses of oil hopes that did not turn out the be fulfilled. The trucks we met were almost all carrying oil. By the oil wells there are three or four tanks where they collect the oil. At a small town called Belfield we turned north on highway US85. We would have to look out for a certain milestone # in order to find the land we were looking for. And we found it. Along the highway there were flat fields, a small creek and a small wood. A road starts east from the highway, it follows the north border of section 19. We stop the car and go out. Looking over the prairie, taking pictures of what we see. –So here Sivert Kambestad had his farm during the first half of the last century. We can see a house built during the last decades, a car is parked outside. A ittle further we can see an older house, and a silo and a few horses. There is no one we can ask, which by the way would not be useful after all. What is funny by this thing is that the land that we see is not interesting for us. It is what we do not see, what is under the surface, that interests us; the minerals.

Peer Gynt – a Mother’s Boy

An interview with Robert Bly
By Øivind H. Solheim

ØHS: Robert, I would like you to talk about this notion of a Mother’s boy in connection with Peer Gynt.

RB: Well, one of the best things Jung did, was to put a lot of emphasis on what happens in a culture when the father has very little influence, and that is more and more true in the United States. Thousands and thousands of boys are being raised entirely by their mothers. So Ibsen somehow sensed that a long time ago. What he says here is that when you are raised by your mother she will let you get away with far too much because she is charmed by you. Another thing that will happen is that strangely enough you spend your life abusing women. Now abusing them takes many forms, I don’t mean physical abuse. Peer Gynt has one love affair after another and pays absolutely no attention to what he has done in those women’s lives. As if his mother already has him, so how can he get married again?

That’s one implication. And another is that the mother puts far too much emphasis on his personality, his individuality, his talent, etc. And the father is the one who is more likely to say: -That doesn’t give you the right to be mean! You’ve got to still earn your living or whatever those things are. That is the father’s voice. That’s coming in less and less.

It is amazing to see - we don’t have an American play yet that has done as much with a mother’s son as he does. So there is something about the play that is amazingly brilliant, and my joy when translating it was to see what I could bring up.

Basicly it says something like this: You go ahead and be a mother’s boy and do it all the way and you will end up, in the middle age, in an insane’s asylum in Cairo. The prediction is not good, that is the beginning of his coming back. And then as you know, in the last act he is coming back to Norway, and he visits some of the places where he was earlier. And some people believe that he is already dead, and this is like a dead man visiting places where he used to be as a boy.

The amount of modernity in the play is surprising. When I was translating it, I put in a note to the directors: -Your biggest problem is going to be the last scene, in which Solveig comes in and he puts his head in her lap, and she says: I have been waiting for you, you know. Many of the women that I met afterwards, especially the feminists, were furious at this scene.

ØHS: Why?

RB: Because she has waisted her whole life so he could put his head in her lap. But that’s not what the play says. The play says: Peer Gynt did not know to whom he should give his life. Solveig gave her life to God. She’s the more correct, or she is the more deep, so it ends with him in a way kind of ashamedly, putting his head in her lap.

ØHS: She is at the same time his mother and his wife?

RB: Yes. But it is also a moment there that is very important, that is the conclusion to that whole thing. It could be the only moment of modesty that he has had in the whole play. One moment at the end in which he puts his head into the lap like a boy and a mother, but also it is an honouring of the woman.

Peer Gynt at the Guthrie's

As we drove along the Minnesota roads from Waconia this morning, we saw a wolf in a snowy field close to the road. -Is it really possible? I thought. In Norway there is panic whenever somebody has seen a wolf, and the farmers then go out from their houses with murder in their eyes and a shotgun in their hands.


Sure there was no wolf where we were going - or was it? Together with Barbara and Jarrett today I was at the matinee presenting Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt at the Guthrie's Teater. There was also a Post-Play Discussion this Sunday, which we attended after the end of the play. Barbara and Jarrett had got really good seats for us, so we had an excellent position watching the play.

More photos from the play

Peer Gynt – golden moments at the Guthrie's
By Øivind H. Solheim

On Sunday 17th February I had the pleasure to go to a matinee at the Guthrie's Teater, Minneapolis, watching the Norwegian giant Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt. The play is a completely new translation and adaption by the Minnesota poet of Norwegian stock, Robert Bly.

The start of the play was for me a totally new way of introducing the character and the action: Friends of the 50 year old Peer Gynt had prepared a surprise party for him, in the framework of our contemporary Minnesota/Norway reality. In the middle of this event we are flashed back to the play's original settings, the rural Norwegian society of the mid 1860-ies. The original play then could begin:
Mother Aase: Peer, you are a liar!
Peer: Who says!

Mark Rylance as Peer Gynt makes a wonderful appearance. In the opening scenes he displays Peer’s complex and yet simple character, the young boy who is kind of an outsider in the small rural community because of his background and his way of facing the challenges of life. His father was a drinker, and in order to compensate for what the boy did not get from his family, his mother Åse told him all kinds of fairy tales, and this was his kind of refuge and flight from the grey every day life. Mark Rylance shows through his interpretation how Peer is torn between the desire of being part of the community, and his desire to accomplish great deeds that will place him above his companions and lift him up to some kind of hero status. At one moment Peer has the strength to say “no” to the drinks offered by the other boys, but a few moments later it is too difficult to resist. He gets drunk and once again, he behaves like the others are used to seeing him. He betrays himself.

What I loved in this part of the play was Mark Rylance’s art of communicating to me the vulnerability of the young Peer Gynt. Peer in these scenes is a boy I can feel pity for and be fond of, hoping that his good sides will win over the bad ones (although I know what comes later in the play).

When we meet Peer again at the end of the play, Mark Rylance displays for us an old and disillusioned man who realizes that something has gone terribly wrong in his life: he has made the bad choices all over, and he has failed to be true to himself. For me watching Mark Rylance’s ageing Peer at the end of the play was a touching experience, especially when thinking of this character in the perspective of translator and adaptor Robert Bly and his Men’s movement. It is not suprising that Peer Gynt is of great interest to Robert Bly. For who is then Peer Gynt? A young boy – a Mother’s boy in Robert Bly’s terms – a boy having been neglected by his father throughout his childhood and teenage years, a man who misses the transition from being a boy to becoming a mature man and a father. In a television interview Robert Bly mentions this Mother’s boy aspect of Peer Gynt, and also referring to himself as having been a Mother’s boy. That close relation of Robert Bly to growing up with problems similar to those of Peer Gynt may certainly have been an important element in Robert Bly’s interest and motivation for translating and adapting Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. And I hurry to say: Thank you for that, because this relationship Peer Gynt – Robert Bly makes the masterpiece of Peer Gynt talk directly to our hearts today in this new translation and adoption.

Ibsen’s play has enough text in it for a six hour session on stage, and that volume is certainly one of the major challenges for any adaptor and producer who have the courage to bring Peer Gynt to the stage. In this perspective Robert Bly and the producer have made an outstanding work, carefully selecting scenes and dialogues, and thus cutting the play down to the more practical three hour format.

I felt the dialogue was easy to follow and that it went in an excellent pair with the visual presentation of the play. The play is originally, from Ibsen’s hand, all written as a poem with rhymes. Robert Bly was asked some twenty years ago to translate Peer Gynt for a New York theatre, and he had then translated the first part of it into a version without rhymes when the producer got financial problems and he had to stop. It is interesting – and also a great luck – that Robert Bly has chosen to make this new translation (the last parts of it, that he did not translate some 20 years ago) with rhymes. Bly’s rhymes give an additional value to the presentation of the play, often bringing the laughter forth in the audience. To me the rhymes all come naturally, they are an important and natural part of the play’s character.

In this new translation also the audience, as I experienced it, came pretty close to the play’s original character because of the Norwegian connections of translator Robert Bly. For me personally it was a very special moment when I heard actor Mark Rylance evocating Peer’s excitement and moment of reflection as he as an old man returns to Norway, leaning on the ship’s rail, looking landward, describes the Hallingskarv Mountain and the Folgefonn Glacier. Myself being from that part of Norway, and knowing of Robert Bly’s roots from that same area, this was for me a golden moment. Just like the rest of the play!

18 February 2008

Kansas State University - then back north again, to Waconia

In In Manhattan, Kansas we met Carrie, the family's architect student, on of the 27 thousand in this town of some 27 thousand inhabitants, students not counted. She showed us the college, that to me seemed very modern and friendly. The College of Architecture, Planning and Design even had a Norwegian project, Vikevåg, realizing the planning process for a community renewal, as I could understand. At the College of Agricuture we could taste their own production of excellent ice cream.

We had a nice trip back again under a blue sky and bright sunshine. First we passed through Kansas City, that is situated partly in Kansas, but mainly in Missouri. As we drove through that city I remarqued the typical architecture, especially the many beautiful small houses along the road.

As we left Kansas City and went across the countryside, we could see eagles and hawks, and we remarqued that the landscape was changing from the poorer soil of Kansas and Missouri, where snow no longer was lying on the ground, to the richer soils of Iowa and Minnesota. Here the winter still had it's cold hands on the white farmlands.

Again I had to think of my great grandfather, Oddmund Kambestad and his wife, my great grandmother, Ragna Kambestad. While we were driving north through Iowa again I looked at the map and I thought that there must be someone in the family who knows something about where in Iowa that farm was, someone who knows in what county og township they had their farm.

From Minnesota through the states of Iowa, Missouri and Kansas

We got up early this Friday morning and drove for a 9 hours trip southwards to Manhattan, Kansas. We drove through the states of Iowa, Missouri and Kansas.

When passing through the state of Iowa I was thinking of my ancestors, my great grand-father Oddmund Kambestad and his wife, my great grand-mother Ragna Kambestad. They emigrated from Norway to America in1886. They married over there, bought a farm in Iowa and got their four children when living at that farm (Sivert, born 1891, Edvin (1893), Sigrid (1895), and Hanna (1897). After the birth of Hanna, Ragna got ill. She suffered from tuberculosis, and the family sold the farm and returned to Kambestad, Norway, where Ragna Kambestad died in 1899, 32 years old.

When driving through Iowa I was thinking of how fun it would be if I could find the farm where my grand-mother was born and lived her first five-six years. She has told her daughter that the railway passed near the farm, and that they could hear the trains passing by. As this is the only information I have on the geographical situation of the farm, it is of course impossible for me to find it during this stay. I guess I would need a longer stay and much help from immigration organisations and immigrants’ registries if I should have the possibility to find the farm. The one important information I am missing in order to make progress, is in which township in Iowa Oddmund and Ragna Kambestad had their farm.