Jens Bjørneboe

Biography

In 1967 Bjørneboe was tried over a novel that, by his own account, he had written in a few days. “Without a Stitch” was published without the author’s name, but a journalist from the newspaper Dagbladet soon identified him. The court of first instance and the Supreme Court both found the novel pornographic, and at the trial the writer, by report, was mocking and scrupulously polite. He said later that the publicity from the case had been good for sales: with the proceeds he bought a small house in Billingstad, near Asker.

He was born on 9 October 1920 in Kristiansand; by other accounts, on 3 October. His father, Ingvald Bjørneboe, was a shipowner, Belgian consul and politician for the Conservative Party (Høyre); the family, who had come from Germany in the seventeenth century, produced many naval officers, and Jens himself went to sea several times. His childhood, by his own account, was unhappy. After a severe bout of pneumonia he lay in bed for several years, began drinking at twelve, and at fourteen, by some accounts at thirteen, attempted suicide. He was eventually expelled from the Kristiansand secondary school. Years later he explained this by an essay about Alexander the Great, while biographers put it down to a court sentence.

His father died in 1938. His mother took him on a tour of Europe. In 1940 he passed his school-leaving examinations as an external candidate and entered the State School of Arts and Crafts in Oslo to become a painter, and at about that time joined the circle of anthroposophists in the capital, which included his cousin, the poet André Bjerke. In 1943 he went to Sweden with Karl Brodersen to escape German forced labour. In Stockholm he met the photographer and anthroposophist Louise Charlotte (Lisel) Funk, whom he married; in 1945 they returned to Oslo. That year he also travelled to bombed-out Berlin. His first exhibitions of paintings took place in 1946 in Oslo and Kristiansand.

Painting, it seems, was not enough for him. He decided to become a writer.

His first novel, “Before the Cock Crows”, was written in 1946 and published in 1952; it tells of medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. The collection “Poems” (1951) was a success; Rilke was his chief model in poetry. In 1952, together with other supporters of Riksmål (the conservative form of written Norwegian), he left the Norwegian Authors’ Union and joined the newly founded Authors’ Association of 1952.

From 1950 Bjørneboe taught woodwork and other subjects for seven years at a Waldorf (Steiner) school in Oslo. The experience lay behind the novel “Jonas” (1955), about a dyslexic boy whom the ordinary school does not understand. The book provoked one of the loudest public debates of the 1950s, sold in huge print runs and was translated into other languages. Teaching was hard on him: low pay, work around the clock, and more and more drink.

In 1957 he left Norway and spent much time in Italy, where he wrote “Winter in Bellapalma” (1958). The novel “Under a Harsher Sky” (1957) attacked the postwar trials of collaborators. After his return in 1959 Bjørneboe served a sentence for drunk driving. His impressions of prison went into the novel “The Evil Shepherd” (1960), and from it he wrote the play “Many Happy Returns” (1965). In 1961, after his divorce from Lisel, Bjørneboe married the actress Tone Tveteraas, and they had three daughters; the family lived in Enebakk, where he wrote “The Dream and the Wheel” (1964), about the writer Ragnhild Jølsen.

In the 1960s he drew close to anarchism and attacked the police, the courts and sexual morality. The essay collection “Police and Anarchy” (1972) secured his place among the country’s leading anarchist thinkers. In the theatre Brecht was closer to him than Ibsen: “The Bird Lovers” (1966), “Semmelweis” (1968) and “Amputation” (1970) are built on a deliberate breaking of stage illusion. The play “The Torgersen Case” (1973) draws on a real criminal case; Bjørneboe believed that Fredrik Fasting Torgersen, who had been convicted of murder, was innocent.

His main work is considered to be the trilogy “The History of Bestiality”: “Moment of Freedom” (1966), “Powderhouse” (1969) and “The Silence” (1973, written in Morocco). He worked on it for about twenty-five years. For “The Silence” he received the Norwegian Critics’ Association prize in 1973. His last novel, “The Sharks” (1974), a sea story about a shipwreck at the turn of 1899 and 1900, is often called critics’ choice as his most cohesive work. It seems to me that the same intonation can be heard in it as in “Jonas”, written almost twenty years earlier.

In 1974 Bjørneboe bought from a friend, the singer Ole Paus, the house Eikvold on the island of Veierland, in order to get away from Oslo, which he called “the City of Python”. He died there on 9 May 1976. A few days later a record came out, made shortly before his death, on which he reads his own poems to jazz music.