I must divorce!

Norwegians​ make a fuss about first books. The newspapers publish round-ups of the year’s literary debutants, who are invited to writers’ workshops organised specially for them. In 1983, two young authors met at one such workshop in Sweden. The first was a 23-year-old man whose Raudt, svart (‘Red, Black’) was being promoted as a ‘bleak and intense first novel’, the coverage accompanied by a close-up photo of the writer puffing on a cigarette. In interviews he described himself as an uncompromising modernist who despised popular literature: ‘I prefer to read Sophocles.’ The other was a 24-year-old woman, eight months pregnant with her third child. She had written a children’s book called Pelle-Ragnar i den gule gården (‘Pelle-Ragnar in the Yellow Apartment Building’), described by one journalist as a ‘joyous book about a happy Norwegian family living in an old apartment building in Copenhagen’. Showing her smiling in long or medium shot, the newspapers described her as an energetic mother of two who had somehow found the time to pass her university exams and write books. The writers were Jon Fosse and Vigdis Hjorth, and their respective media profiles were now set. His books were serious, hers were not.

We know how it turned out for Fosse. Hjorth’s road to literary prestige has been long and winding. The initial image of her as an industrious young mother who wrote excellent children’s books was reinforced by her second book, Jørgen + Anne er sant (‘Jørgen + Anne Is True’), a story of a love-struck ten-year-old. When, a few years later, she began to write fiction for adults, the press reinvented her as a hypersexualised wild thing, prone to acting out under the influence of alcohol. In 1986, Dagbladet ran an interview with her under the title ‘Writing Is Erotic’. Half the page was taken up with a photograph of Hjorth lying on the grass in an Oslo park. The angle of the shot foregrounded her bare thighs. The next day, Dagbladet carried Hjorth’s protest, buried on the same page as the sex ads. For years afterwards, she would receive lubricious phone calls from strangers asking: ‘Are you writing right now?’

Fosse’s naked thighs have never been displayed in the Norwegian press. His novels of the 1980s were respectfully reviewed as the expression of a young man’s high modernist ambitions. Hjorth herself once pointed out that the newspapers give young male writers a small photograph and a long text, while young women get a huge picture and a much shorter write-up. At times she played along. She became a much sought-after speaker, known for her self-ironising and performative talks, which did nothing to undermine her image as a sexy and somewhat ditzy party girl. But critics mistook the persona for the writer, and paid little attention to her actual texts. The reception of her 1992 novel Fransk åpning (‘French Opening’) illustrates the point. The novel, as I see it, is about a young woman’s depression and alienation, expressed in part through a soulless, distant sexual relationship. Hjorth called it a ‘book about pain, a serious book’, but most reviewers weren’t inclined to take it seriously. Instead, they complained that it was insufficiently erotic: ‘Participating in Vigdis Hjorth’s erotic universe inspires more fatigue than excitement,’ one critic wrote.

Addressing the issue head on, in 1999 Hjorth published a collection of essays called En erotisk forfatters bekjennelser (‘Confessions of an Erotic Writer’). The first section, which deals with her experience of being a woman writer in Norway, is titled, with obvious irony: ‘How I became an erotic writer – and how I stopped being one.’ To the extent that she played up to her media portrayals, Hjorth may have been responding to the postmodern trends of the 1980s and 1990s: play, irony, subversive mimicry of the things one is trying to undermine. I also suspect that she performed in order to hide her vulnerability. She seems, to quote her brilliant 2013 essay on Kierkegaard, to have been stuck in the ‘aesthetic stage of life’, bound to a somewhat calculating and alienated existence in which everything becomes performance.

In 2001, Hjorth published Om bare (If Only), now considered a modern classic. Since then she has published twelve more novels, four of which have been translated into English by Charlotte Barslund: Long Live the Post Horn! (2012), A House in Norway (2015), Will and Testament (2016) and Is Mother Dead? (2020). In 2006, a jury asked to choose the 25 best Norwegian novels from the last 25 years included If Only on the list. In the 1990s, the idea of putting a book by Hjorth on such a list would have been unthinkable. Her ascent had begun.

If Only is the story of the 30-year-old playwright Ida Heier’s self-destructive love affair with Arnold Busk, a 39-year-old professor of German literature. Both are married with children, but when she met Arnold, Ida was already contemplating divorce. At a seminar, Ida invites Arnold up to her room, and from then on she is hooked. But she lives in Oslo, he in Trondheim, and Arnold isn’t interested in breaking up his marriage. For several years, Ida pines away, surviving on a few meetings a year. It’s possible to read the novel as Ida’s account of the consequences of something she rather obliquely calls her ‘injury’: her acting out, her lack of boundaries, her sense of shame, her erotic and emotional dependence on a man unconsciously picked because he is unavailable, self-obsessed, incapable of love, a man who is sure to torment her, and who will never change. As he tells her when they first meet, ‘Don’t fall in love with me, you’ll suffer … I’m cursed. I have to torture every woman who falls in love with me. Do you understand? I torment them.’ As if to drive the point home, he insists: ‘Being cursed means you can’t change … I’m cursed, I tell you, I can’t stop.’ But if we focus on the ‘injury’, as if it were a given, we miss the fact that the book shows us, rather, the way Ida, through the years with Arnold, comes to understand and face her past. If Only is about a horrendous relationship, but it’s also about a woman’s slow process of self-discovery.

In truth, Arnold excels at the game of push and pull. As soon as Ida gets too close, he drives her away. But when she tries to move on – for example, by taking up with a nice, available man – he becomes hysterical and reels her back in. When she travels to China with colleagues he grows wild with jealousy, though he himself regularly sleeps with his students.

Ida and Arnold meet at weekends in various European cities. A three-week stay at the Norwegian Institute in Athens doesn’t go well:

Something happens for the first time there, later it will happen frequently and eventually she gets so used to it that she forgets that two people can have more than one nice week together. The dramas, the scenes, the quarrels and the sweet reconciliations. Howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccupping sobs and passionate sex. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds. All dregs whisked to the surface, shame meets shame and makes love more passionate.

Arnold excels at tormenting Ida, accusing her of ever new transgressions, taking revenge on Ida’s real or imagined transgressions by sleeping with other women. She comforts him because she sees his pain, but he never sees hers. Exploiting her lack of boundaries, he persuades her to go with him to sex clubs in Berlin and Copenhagen. They begin having threesomes. A hotel in Copenhagen asks them to move on after a day of so much howling and screaming and loud, drunken sex that neighbours down the street complain. There is an excruciating scene in which Arnold gatecrashes a wedding in Denmark, furious at not having been invited, boasting of his own achievements, only to be cuttingly dismissed by the best man.

Eventually Ida breaks it off. She weeps, mourns, suffers. Arnold leaves messages on her answering machine, telling her that she’s just a poor imitation of Tove Ditlevsen, whose terrible marriage and drug addiction led her to suicide. (Ditlevsen is one of Hjorth’s favourite writers.) Ditlevsen should have left Victor Andreasen much sooner, Ida thinks: then she might not have killed herself. To numb the pain of separation, she sleeps with men whose names she doesn’t remember, drinks too much and ends up in hospital. She survives, and begins to write.

Women who write​ about women drinking and writing and sleeping around have until recently been dismissed as less serious, less ‘universal’, than men who write about men drinking and writing and sleeping around. For years, Annie Ernaux wasn’t considered a major French writer because she wrote about her own experiences as a woman. It remains more difficult than it should be to get critics to acknowledge that women’s experiences, too, can say something about the human condition.

When I first read If Only, in 2001, I felt that Ernaux’s novel of erotic passion, Passion simple (1991), had found its Norwegian counterpart. Hjorth’s novel even alludes to Ernaux’s: it can’t be a coincidence that Ida writes a radio play called A Little Passion, about a woman driven almost to madness by wild desire. Both novels consider the effects of intense heterosexual desire on an intelligent, self-reflective woman. In both, the heroines grow superstitious. They read horoscopes and visit fortune tellers. They wait for a phone call, a letter, a sign. They travel abroad – from Paris to Copenhagen, from Oslo to New York – just to send a postcard. They know that they are behaving like a cliché. They are slightly embarrassed about it, but not very, because they know they have no choice: passionate action always seems irresistible, necessary, fated.

‘Passion’ and ‘passive’ share the same root in passio, ‘suffering’. To be overcome by passion is to be turned into something passive, the plaything of forces larger than oneself. Racine’s Phaedra describes her desire tearing at her insides like a wild animal: ‘C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée.’ Ibsen’s Rebecca compares her passion for Rosmer to a force of nature: ‘Then a wild, uncontrollable desire swept over me … It came over me like a gale at sea, like one of those winter storms we have up in the north. It seizes you – carries you with it – however far it goes. There’s no resisting it.’ Phaedra takes poison. Rebecca hurls herself into a waterfall. Anna Karenina throws herself under a train. But heroines in novels no longer die for love. Ernaux’s heroine survives the ‘time of passion’ and goes on to master the ‘time of writing’. Ida’s play isn’t a tragedy – ‘She makes sure it ends well, that [her heroine] survives him’ – and Hjorth ensures that Ida, too, will survive her passion: after all, she, too, is a writer.

Hjorth and Ernaux are now considered pioneers of autofiction. But unlike, say, Karl Ove Knausgård, Hjorth gives her characters fictional names and has never claimed that every event in her novels happened to her. Nevertheless, the parallels are obvious. When If Only came out in Norway, a journalist from Dagbladet asked Arild Linneberg, a well-known professor of literature at the University of Bergen, what he thought about it. He wisely replied that he was looking forward to reading it. Although their relationship was public knowledge, Hjorth denied that the book was about her and Linneberg. In 1995, they had published a book called, after Freud, Ubehaget i kulturen (‘Culture and Its Discontents’), a satirical novel about Norway’s cultural scene which had alienated quite a few of their friends. In If Only, Ida and Arnold publish a similar book. Linneberg translated Adorno; Busk translates Brecht. In more recent interviews, Hjorth has sometimes admitted that Busk was based on Linneberg.

Last year, Linneberg published a ‘counter-novel’ to If Only, called Bare om Arnold Busk (‘Only about Arnold Busk’), about Busk’s love affair with a writer called Vilde Winther (a deliberate allusion to Virginia Woolf). Linneberg’s novel, which – unsurprisingly – is rather more sympathetic to its hero, presents Vilde/Ida as an admirable but neurotic, unpredictable creature, whom the narrator can neither control nor fully understand. Hjorth magnanimously helped to promote the book. This wasn’t the first time that Hjorth’s work had inspired a response of this sort. After the publication of Will and Testament, in which a young woman tries to convince her family of her childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father, Hjorth’s sister, Helga, published a novel intended to show the family’s side of the story. In Fri vilje (‘Free Will’), the sister who accuses their father of incest is a histrionic prima donna who invents things to make herself appear interesting. But this wouldn’t have surprised Ida Heier in If Only, since her family also explains her behaviour as a form of extreme and destructive narcissism: ‘She had gone mad and sought to infect them with her madness. She had fallen ill and wanted them to be ill too. She had destroyed her own life and wanted to destroy theirs too, wanted to ruin them because she was ruined … And now she has got it into her head that it all goes back to her childhood.’ To judge by the examples of Fri vilje and Bare am Arnold Busk, a counter-novel settles the question as to whether the original novel was autofiction or not. Far from undermining the original, the counter-novel confirms the original’s basis in reality. And, of course, the pairing demonstrates the difference between pedestrian and superior writing.

Translators and foreign-language publishers are not immune to the way an author is portrayed in their home country. Translators may be more exacting, more accurate, in their translations if what they have in their hands is a ‘literary’ novel, and the book will be promoted to a different audience. In her English version of If Only, Barslund, a translator I usually admire, tends to sacrifice conceptual accuracy to colloquial fluency. The effect is to mask the seriousness of the existential issues at stake. (I have amended her translation in some of the quotations here to bring out the philosophical resonances of the original.)

In Norwegian, Ida makes reference to her ‘difficulty’ (det vanskelige) and to her ‘injury’ (skaden). She also speaks of being ‘destroyed’ (ødelagt) by something in her childhood. The nature of her difficulty is never spelled out. The reader understands that it is something she is either not willing or not (yet) able to talk about. Barslund’s translation is more heavy-handed. Perhaps her choices were influenced by Will and Testament, in which it is clear that the heroine has been sexually abused by her father. But If Only was written fifteen years before Will and Testament, and in this novel the heroine’s relationship to her ‘injury’ is more tentative and oblique. In one passage, Ida tells Arnold that he only talks about himself and never shows real interest in her. This is Barslund’s translation, with my italics:

That he never asks her a single question which doesn’t involve him. About the trauma she struggles with.

He has never asked: ‘Do you sometimes feel all alone in the world?’

He has never asked: ‘How come you see so little of your family?’

He has never asked: ‘Please will you tell me what happened, your childhood trauma.’

Here’s my clunkily literal translation:

That he never asks her about anything that doesn’t involve him. About what might be, what is, difficult [vanskelig] for her, now.

Do you sometimes feel alone in the world? he has never asked.

Isn’t it painful that you so rarely see your family? he has never asked, or

Do you want to tell me about what has happened, the thing that’s so difficult [det vanskelige].

Hjorth’s text is more fragmented and less articulate than Barslund’s translation; it alludes to something crucial but unspoken, and possibly unspeakable, in Ida’s life.

In​ 1990, Hjorth experienced an existential crisis. She turned to Kierkegaard, whose work she had felt attracted to since she first read him as a student. On a flight to New York, she picked up Johannes Sløk’s classic book on him:

I sat on the plane in transatlantic darkness among the sleeping and read about the bourgeois who unthinkingly fulfils society’s demands, an unconscious pawn functioning according to the demands of the machinery, and I understood in despair: ‘I am a bourgeois married to a bourgeois, I have given birth to three bourgeois children, I must divorce!’

Hjorth quotes Sløk almost verbatim: he writes that the ‘bourgeois’ (spidsborgeren, or, in the English translation, ‘philistine’) is a cog in a machine. To be a ‘bourgeois’ is to be someone who lives in an illusion. Although he, like everyone else, is a product of external determinants – genetics, family status, historical circumstances – the bourgeois believes that he is free, that when he fulfils society’s expectations by getting married, having a family, seeking worldly success and so on, he is making his own choices. In a life crisis, the bourgeois may wake up to the emptiness of his illusions. This leads to despair. If he is willing to reflect on his situation, he will eventually encounter the ‘ethical demand’ and begin what Kierkegaard calls virkeliggjørelse – the act of becoming real, or making oneself real. To be free, we have to choose ourselves, choose to live in truth, take responsibility for our own lives. This is Hjorth’s project, and Ida Heier’s too.

The novel is mostly written in the third person, from Ida’s point of view, but it begins and ends with a brief passage in the first person, with the older Ida looking back at the unhappy young woman she once was. ‘A long, long time ago when I was nineteen, I was at a railway station in another country. I felt so alone, so wretched. I remember asking myself: What’s going to happen to me? What am I going to do, where will I be twenty years from now?’ The older self sees a girl wracked by shame. Now, she tells us, things are different: ‘I am not ashamed, I take it seriously, now that I know the secret of that unhappy girl.’ Right at the start, then, If Only announces one of its major themes: that our heroine has not been able to examine, let alone trust, her own experience. ‘Back then I felt ashamed … I collapsed under the weight of my own pain. Poor, poor girl. Why wasn’t I with you back then? Why couldn’t I go to you, sit down next to you, hug you and console you? I, your realisation, was many years away.’ The term I have translated as ‘your realisation’ is Kierkegaard’s virkeliggjørelse, the process of becoming free by choosing one’s own life. (Barslund opts for ‘your mature self’.) By insisting on the existential dimensions of If Only, I don’t mean to imply that it reads like a philosophical essay. I mean, rather, that Hjorth has read Kierkegaard so closely and for so long that her worldview has naturally merged with his. (Two of her novels have Kierkegaardian titles: ‘Long live the Post Horn!’ is a line from Kierkegaard’s Repetition of 1843, and Repetition is the title of Hjorth’s as yet untranslated novel of 2023.)

If Hjorth instinctively thinks like a Kierkegaardian existentialist, so does Ida. Her accounts of ordinary situations often turn into ethical inquiries. Ida met her husband when she was nineteen. Early on, he asked her if she could ski slalom. She lied and said she could, though she could only do cross-country. That one lie forced her constantly to invent excuses for not going to the mountains with this man. For years she lived in fear of being found out: ‘How we lie and thus end up living in untruth … how we fear revelation, disaster.’ Longing for Kierkegaardian freedom, for a life in truth, Ida ended up doing the opposite.

This passage leads to a scene in which Ida does the same thing with Arnold. They are drinking in a London pub and Arnold is boasting of his own brilliance, as he often does. He tells her that he received the highest ever mark for the preparatory exam in philosophy (an exam all Norwegian students must pass in their first term at university). Ida spontaneously replies that she got the same mark. But she didn’t. She can tell that he is ‘a little disappointed … and wrong-footed that he can’t impress in the way he normally does and is accustomed to and had expected to’. The lie feels true to Ida: she knows she isn’t intellectually inferior to Arnold. But she also knows his vanity can only bear so much: ‘But softly, softly! Baby steps, don’t hurt him, don’t threaten him.’

The next morning, she regrets the lie, but not her conviction that he is not her intellectual superior. The trouble is that if he discovers she was lying he will look superior. She spends the day obsessing about why she behaves like this: ‘She destroys, she self-sabotages, she doesn’t want to be happy. Live in truth this time, that had been her resolve, that was the very project. Truth, love, honesty, no pretence, that was her project and where is she now after just six days in London?’ In Norwegian, Hjorth writes prosjektet (‘the project’) twice. Barslund does away with both the word and the repetition, translating the first as ‘what it was all about’ and the second as ‘her ambition’. But ‘project’ is the existentialist term, and Ida’s project – to live in truth – is an expression of her commitment to ethical seriousness, a commitment undermined, time and time again, by the consequences of her injury. In this case, however, she rises to Kierkegaard’s challenge, and hands Arnold her written confession.

At the end of the novel, the narrator joins her younger self at the railway station, twenty years too late. Finally she sits down to ‘unwrap it … to look at it’. I take it that she finally faces her injury, which she describes both as a deep wound and as a burden she is doomed to carry. But she also faces the reality of her affair with Arnold, a relationship caused and upheld by the injury. The scene shows us the older Ida doing something the younger couldn’t: she chooses herself as the wounded person she is.