Last year I visited the house of the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson on the outskirts of Lillehammer. I’d never heard of Bjørnson before, but I was told he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903. Norwegians I asked remember him only for an assortment of peasant novels, the national anthem, and the “jump Karolina, jump” story.
Being a political agitator, Bjørnson frequently made trips away from home, and it was before one of these journeys that his wife Karolina threatened, “If you’re unfaithful again, I will jump off this porch.” On his return from the capital Christiana, riding up in his carriage, Bjørnson — a man of large girth and appetite — supposedly greeted her with, “ Hoppe Karolina, hoppe ” (Jump Karolina, jump).
Original frenemies
During the course of a writer’s life it is considered somewhat unfashionable to make connections between the work and the life. Writers are complicit in this enterprise, pretending that the work exists in a separate sphere, apart from the tedious goings-on of marriage, children, friendships and finances. After a writer’s death however, we go to the letters and journals and houses, in order to find secret passageways that might help us understand the work better. Sometimes, as is the case with Bjørnson, the work might have lost relevance, but the life still shines on.
In Bjørnson’s study I came across a sketch of his daughter’s wedding to the playwright Henrik Ibsen’s only son. Ibsen is conspicuously absent from the gathering. The guide could only say he was feeling poorly, so he could not attend the marriage. A Norwegian in our midst harangued her for more information. The wives of Ibsen and Bjørnson were childhood friends, were they not? So, how could he give the, honey I have a headache excuse?
And hadn’t Bjørnson helped fund Ibsen’s travels to Italy, where he wrote his most enduring plays? Why not just say they hated each other’s guts? The guide tried to distract us by pointing out the finer aspects of Norwegian neo-classical architecture.
Literary rivalries, particularly male literary rivalries, are fascinating because of the gargantuan egos involved. Tolstoy’s was of such manic proportions he spent three years reading everything by Shakespeare in order to write an essay about how bad he was. What’s a 300-year divide when it comes to competition? Dostoevsky was such a talent that Tolstoy refused to meet him, while Fyodor, no pea-ego himself, admitted to liking Lev’s early work but didn’t think he’d write much else.
But it is with Turgenev that Tolstoy found his real match. They were the original frenemies. Despite getting on each other’s nerves spectacularly (there was a choking match at one point, and the threat of a duel), they made trips abroad together, visited the churches of Dijon and the castle of Fontainebleau, sat at Parisian cafés and played chess.
In his biography of Tolstoy, A.N. Wilson writes how the animosity between the two was stronger than hate, something enforced by a mysterious jealousy which is as strong as sex. Turgenev was older and more cosmopolitan. His radicalism and liberal ideas irritated Tolstoy, who found it strange that Turgenev wanted to emancipate his serfs — a bandwagon Tolstoy would jump on much later. Mainly though, he was irritated because of the slobbering Turgenev directed towards his sister Marya (who was a married woman, unhappily so, but still).
Turgenev in turn called Tolstoy a “troglodyte,” because he seemed to derive all his jouissance from the riffraff. He did support his work though, which was not reciprocated. In 1861, after a dinner party at Turgenev’s estate, Tolstoy was handed the cherished manuscript of Fathers and Children, and left in the drawing room alone. When Turgenev returned to see what effect the novel was having on young Lev, he found him stretched out on the sofa, asleep. For 17 seventeen years they did not speak to each other, but before Turgenev’s death, he wrote to Tolstoy, begging him to return to literature and to leave off with all ‘The Kingdom of God is Within Us’ rut he’d fallen into.
The biography of one great writer can sometimes lead to another. Tolstoy, I learned, kept a portrait of Charles Dickens in his study, and would read a novel by Dickens before embarking on any new work. I immediately turned to Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens to see whether he returned the favour. He did not. These two stalwarts never met, but they were contemporaries, lionised and universally adored.
Dirty word
Both men wrote sprawling, complex novels meted out in instalments to a readership of thousands. Both married daughters of friends and had a miserable time of it. At their worst, they could be horribly moralising and self-righteous. At their best, despite completely different upbringings (Little Lord Lyovochka versus boot black Charlie), they had terrific understanding of the lives of the poor. Most importantly though, both men used every aspect of their personal experience as fuel for their fiction.
So why is autobiographical such a dirty word? When some of the greatest writers have used the mud and blood of their experiences to write stories that remain beloved, why is there still this cringe factor to a process that seems as natural as gravity?
To examine a writer’s existence and work together is to see the rocky thing a life is. Biography isn’t just about social context, laws, alliances, scandals. It’s also the mundane. How did a man support 10 children, run a magazine, put on plays, find a house to rent, and write a bestselling novel that would survive the centuries? (Hint: long-suffering wives, mostly.)
Fiction doesn’t spring from ether. If Tolstoy had not served at Sebastopol we might not have had War and Peace. Great Expectations might not have been written if Dickens had not been hot on the heels of a girl called Nelly.We need not always look for the writer’s life in their work because fiction is a different kind of universe — an amalgamation of memory, imagination, desire and horror. But it would be disingenuous to insist that the two are divided continents.
Knowing that Dickens was oppressed by his many sons, believing they’d all inherited the “imbecility” of his in-laws, doesn’t diminish David Copperfield . Knowing that Tolstoy made his fiancé read all his notebooks — a catalogue of sexual adventures and anxiety that would have given even Freud a headache, does not dent the experience of Anna Karenina. As a reader, we don’t need to know which part was true, and which part was made up, because the entire project of fiction is to arrive at a truth that is more truthful than life. Even old Bjørnson telling Karolina to hoppe — doesn’t matter if it’s legend or fact. None of it is unrelated to the work. Some times it is the work itself.
The writer’s latest book is a collection of poems , Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods.
