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Vigdis Hjörth: Om bare (If Only)

When we think of love stories, we probably tend to think of romantic stories like Pride and Prejudicewhere, after various trials and tribulations, the happy couple finally get together and live happily ever after. Of course there are miserable love stories such as Anna Karenina and love stories where the couple just rub along and then the love stories where the couple seem intent on destroying one another as in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This one is very much in the latter category. There are marriages where the couple cannot live together but cannot live apart. While this is, to a certain extent, in that category, it is, as we shall see, much more.

Our heroine is Ida Heier. She married in her twenties and she and her busband are seemingly happy. The couple have a son and a daughter. She is a playwright and edits a magazine on the subject. In the modern world writers do not just write and she and the other writers we come across seem to spend a fair amount of time at seminars, conferences and the like where they have learned discussions, get drunk and sleep together. There is a lot of bed-hopping in this book.

At the start of the book there seems to be a pointless seminar because a young, male dramatist has attacked more senior ones and the seniors have responded. The young dramatist withdraws his attack. It is here that Ida meets Arnold Bush, a professor of German, specialising in Brecht. Inevitably they go to bed together. He is also married (second marriage) with a son. Aren’t you married?’ he says.
‘Yes.’
‘Me too.’
‘I thought you were gay,’ she says.

He is ten years only. She does not have a guilty conscience as she has done this before. She is heading for a divorce, she has known it for a long time.

And so this often long-distance, often tempestuous, often on-and-off relationship starts. She has never felt like this before, she is in love. Can’t you see that I’m completely transformed? Can’t you see that I’m in love? She is very soon obsessed. They meet. They have sex, He says he cannot handle another break-up while she tells him she is heading for a divorce. She phones. He oes not answer. He phones back. She does not pick up. Later in their story, one time when she was angry, upset, as she often was during the first year they knew each other, she told him to throw away her letters to him. They meet at conferences, seminars and during business trips. They argue, they fight. He disappears for a while.

Has he got someone else? Her sister is a student at Trondheim University where he teaches . She asks the sister to spy on him. He was seen with a female student but then the sister declines to continue spying.

Don’t fall in love with me, you’ll suffer.’
‘I want to suffer!’
‘You don’t know me. I can be bad.’
‘I’m not scared!’

Ida tells her husband and wants a divorce. Her son threatens to kill himself if they divorce. But they do divorce. Arnold seems to disappear. They hardly see each other. She has moved. However her now ex-husband has a Danish girlfriend. She is alone. Well almost. There are flings. She drinks. She gets drunk. She kisses other men. She sleeps with other men. Afterwards she feels remorse and shame. There is Trond who just happened to work for Arnold’s publishers.

She has psychoanalysis. After two and a half years of psychoanalysis, Ida Heier is still in love with Arnold Bush, and not with her psychoanalyst. She does not forget him. They meet at a seminar and he avoids her. She sees him on a plane and reuses to sit next to him. She writes a play called Old Ophelia, about a woman who is driven mad by love. But she makes sure it has a happy ending.

And then, somehow, they get back together. He separates from his wife though he does say that if he does divorce her, there is no guarantee that he will marry Ida. But they do seem to be back together on a more permanent footing. He even meets her children. The dramas, the scenes, the quarrels and the sweet reconciliations. Howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccuping sobs and passionate lovemaking. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds. All dregs whisked to the surface, shame meets shame and makes love more passionate.
Of course it is not plain sailing. He cries a lot and has huge tantrums, smashing things up. The dramas, the scenes, the quarrels and the sweet reconciliations. Howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccupping sobs and passionate lovemaking. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds. All dregs whisked to the surface, shame meets shame and makes love more passionate.

His ex-wife wants sole custody of their son and he breaks down – again – because of that. But they decide to write a play together, mocking their community and, not surprisingly, that does not go well, either. His finances are a mess, disaster is looming, he is still arguing with Kjersti about custody arrangements for their son, she is threatening to take him to court, Ida’s children hate him, everything is miserable, he feels miserable, what is she going to do? Leave him. Let him suffer the consequences. She wonders why she is still with him, but she cannot imagine being without him.

There are apparently readers who talk to the characters in the books they read, giving them advice and telling what they should do and not do. I am not normally one of that sort of reader but I must a admit that I was tempted in this book. Why would she stay with a man who is highly emotional and neurotic, violent, mainly against things but also against her, narcissistic, drinks too much and behaves badly when he does, serially unfaithful and not even good-looking, described as short, balding and wearing glasses? There are surely better men in Norway, even in fictional Norway. Indeed her (ex-)husband and Trond, her brief boyfriend, seem much nicer and go on to have successful relationship with other women. But. as we know, people, both in real life and in fiction, all too often make the wrong choices.

Publishing history

First published in 2001 by Cappelen Damm
First published in English in 2024 by Verso
Translated by Charlotte Barslund