CORRESPONDENCE
IBSEN AND KIERKEGAARD
Sms:
A writer who deals professionally
with other subjects will naturally hesi–
tate to step upon ground occupied by
literary critics, especially if the critic's
name is Mary McCarthy. Yet her re–
flections upon Ibsen in the Winter
1956
issue of PR prompt some cursory
observations on the part of a London
theater-goer who has recently attended
a performance of
The Wild Duck.
It
would seem that this play is performed
very differently in London and in New
York, for I find it difficult to recon–
cile the Gregers Werle of the current
London production with Miss Mc–
Carthy's "ugly man in a countrified
gray suit" who "has been a radical
before the opening of the play."
Our
Gregers is a handsome and poetic
young man who looks and talks rather
like Soren Kierkegaard in his younger
days-admittedly dangerous in his neu–
rotic perfectionism, but also marked
by a certain youthful innocence. He is,
after all, very much the rebellious son
throughout the play, and his immature
behavior in the Ekdal household is en–
tirely in character.
There seems no reason to doubt that
Ibsen was familiar with Kierkegaard's
writings, disapproved of their tenor,
and was confronted with a public al–
ready
au courant
of what has latterly
become an intellectual fashion in the
West. (In Germany the process had
already started before
1914;
in Scan-'
dinavia it was impossible to be ignor–
ant of Kierkegaard.) In England, where
the fashion currently rages in a par–
ticularly aggravating form, even the
layman such as myself cannot help be–
ing aware that the kind of moral
fanaticism which Ibsen subjected to
criticisiil in
The
Wild Duck
is resarded
287
as an enviable quality by numbers of
earnest young people who support the
current religious revival at the
uni–
versities. It may be due to this at–
mosphere that the Gregers of the pres–
ent production is so unmistakably
Kierkegaardian in appearance and
tone as to have come as a shock to
some spectators with Christian-existen–
tialist leanings. At least one of them,
a lady who practices philosophy as a
profession, was induced, albeit some–
what reluctantly, to accept the above
interpretation of Ibsen's intention in
the play as correct; although I am
bound to admit that she demurred to
the further suggestion that Kierke–
gaard was a dubious advertisement for
the faith, being in every way a lesser
man than the poor benighted clerics
whom he denounced in print for com–
promising with reality. But however
that may be, can one doubt that Ib–
sen's intention was to pillory the kind
of attitude which one encounters in
Kierkegaard's writings? Incidentally, I
should have thought Reiling was about
the only sane person in the play, and
quite clearly a representative of Ibsen's
own mature outlook.
Having ventured thus far on ground
normally beyond my chosen province,
I will merely add that Mr. Irving
Howe's remarks on the subject of Or–
well (with whom I was very briefly
acquainted) seem to me to be not only
very a propos, but also to suggest an
answer to some of the questions indi–
rectly raised by Miss McCarthy: Or–
well's radical common sense, or com–
monsensible radicalism, is momentarily
unfashionable for precisely the reasons
that induce young people to attend
revivalist meetings and seek inspiration
in various forms of moral fanaticism
and anti-humanism.
London
SIRS:
G.
L.
Arnold
Yes, Ibsen was familiar with Kierke–
gaard1 and is supposed to have repre-
