“She Chooses the Shriek, IChoose the Pain”
Regine—in Memoriam
“A rather diminutive, white-haired old lady with the friendliest of expressions opens the door for me the first time I ring the doorbell at the corner house at Nørrebrogade and Sortedamsdossering. She is dressed in a black silk dress and wears a fringed cap. Just about a year ago she was left the widow of Privy Councillor Schlegel, a highly respected civil servant, who was most recently prefect in Copenhagen and formerly governor of the Danish West Indies. The councillor has left a very large library—a sort of universal library including all sorts of books—the type of library established before this era of specialized knowledge. Mrs. Schlegel’s agent has asked me to organize and catalog this library before it was sent to auction. That is why I am here.”
The year was 1896. It was late in the summer, and the guest to whom the widow Regine Schlegel opened her door was the librarian Julius Clausen, who was to create a catalog of the more than seven thousand books that had belonged to her late husband, including six or seven of Søren Kierkegaard’s best-known works. It was a time-consuming task, so for a period of time Clausen was a regular guest. Around nine o’clock in the evening, when he was about finished with cataloging the day’s books, Mrs. Schlegel usually came in and offered some refreshments. She still had a store of guava rum from her years in the West Indies, and she mixed it with ice water and served it to the young librarian. “You must be tired now. You could certainly use a little something cool to drink,” she would say, and it was exactly what Clausen needed. “And so we sat there in the large rooms, warm from the summer heat, while the cool of the evening fell and the conversation began. I, of course, knew who she was, but naturally did not presume to make any allusions. But the old lady was less reticent. It always began with Schlegel, whose excellent qualities she praised to the skies, but it always ended with—Kierkegaard.” The spry and well-preserved widow in her mid-seventies had long since come to see herself both as Privy Councillor Schlegel’s spouse and as Kierkegaard’s fiancée—and she clearly assumed this latter role more and more as the years passed. Julius Clausen wrote diplomatically of Mrs. Schlegel’s division between her husband and the sweetheart of her youth: “I cannot say [whether this] played a role in Schlegel’s seeking a post in the West Indies. His wife said nothing about that.”
Others had also sought out Mrs. Schlegel in the period just after her husband’s death. Almost simultaneously with the condolence letters came direct requests for permission to speak with the important widow regarding the curious romance of her youth. At first she was a bit reserved, but as the only survivor of the three people involved, she also felt obligated to speak. One of those granted an interview was Robert Neiiendam, an actor and historian of the theater, who describes her as a “small, amiable, and very attractive lady with kind eyes, which must once have been quite lively.” Her diction was precise and her manner was tactful, bearing the stamp of many years in diplomatic circles, so when Neiiendam one day asked whether a picture of Kierkegaard in a volume of literary history resembled him, he naturally received a diplomatic reply: “Both yes and no,” she answered. “Kierkegaard’s external appearance was easy to caricature, and people exploited that.” It seemed to Neiiendam that Kierkegaard had always been portrayed as quite stiff-backed, but to this Mrs. Schlegel merely replied: “Yes, he was somewhat high-shouldered and his head tilted forward a bit, probably from all that reading and writing at his desk.”
A year after her husband died Mrs. Schlegel moved to a house on Alhambravej in Frederiksberg, where she lived with her brother Oluf Christian, eight years her senior, who for a time had served as receiver of customs at Saint Croix. In 1898 she contacted the librarian Raphael Meyer with an offer to recount what “an old lady” (as she put it) had to report. In the winter of 1898-99 and throughout the following spring Meyer called on her in her home every week and immediately thereafter wrote down the contents of their conversations. After her death in 1904, Meyer cast his notes into book form and oversaw their publication as Kierkegaardian Papers: The Engagement; Published on Behalf of Mrs. Regine Schlegel. She was, Meyer tells us, extremely pleased at the growing interest, both in Denmark and now abroad, that was directed toward her former fiancé—even if, in her opinion, the French would never be able to understand him! Nor could she acquiesce in the skepticism with which the Danish clergy viewed Kierkegaard. Indeed, on one occasion, when she had discovered by chance that a Copenhagen ecclesiastic was ignorant of Kierkegaard, she had clenched her little fist and put him in his place: “That is unacceptable in an educated man in the country where Kierkegaard was born and worked, and especially so in a pastor of the Danish People’s Church.” She was certain that after this the neglectful pastor got busy on his reading.
Mrs. Schlegel was loyal and lovable to the last, happy to have been taken into history. Therefore, the question of how things actually went during the thirteen months it took the engagement to unravel was something she took with her to her grave. Or perhaps she had told what she had to tell. Seen through her eyes, perhaps there actually was nothing more. In any case, none of the frequent visitors and diligent note takers—neither Mssrs. Meyer and Neiiendam, nor Hanne Mourier, not to mention Henriette Lund—seem to have elicited the mystery from this mysterious widow. Despite the fact that, according to Julius Clausen, she eventually stopped speaking “of Schlegel, but only of Kierkegaard,” she contributed no new chapters to the story.
And then senility swallowed up the last remnants. “Aren’t you the one I gave that ring to, the one I got from Søren?” an aging, somewhat disoriented Regine asked Julius Clausen one day. He was compelled to reply, “Unfortunately not.”
Miss O.
Regine Schlegel’s depiction of Kierkegaard’s courtship does not in fact differ essentially from Kierkegaard’s own version, except that his is better, which is why he will be permitted to recount it here. The account comes from a lengthy journal entry, or rather a whole little series of entries, which he jotted down on August 24, 1849, and titled “My Relation to ‘Her.’ ” Despite the fact that the main entry was provided with stage directions designating it as “somewhat poetic,” it adheres to events in such a matter-of-fact reporting style, almost like a series of telegrams, that the term “poetic” can hardly mean that the facts have been altered poetically, but more likely that portions of the truth have been omitted, passed over in silence, repressed. Or perhaps the account is indeed so close to the truth that Kierkegaard was afraid of having revealed too much that was private and therefore encrypted the text by labeling it deceptively as “somewhat poetic.” However all that may be: “The 8th of September I left home with the firm intention of deciding the entire matter. We met in the street just outside their house. She said that there was no one home. I was foolhardy enough to understand these words as the invitation I needed. I went into the house with her. We stood alone in the parlor. She was a bit uneasy. I asked her to play a little for me on the piano, as she usually did. She did so, but it didn’t help me. Then I suddenly took the music book, closed it, not without a certain vehemence, tossed it off the piano and said, ‘Oh, what do I care about music? It’s you I’m looking for, you I’ve been seeking for two years.’ She remained silent.” Regine remained silent, even “essentially silent,” which perhaps is not difficult to understand. And Kierkegaard did not have anything more to say about it either. So, after having tossed the music book about in the above-mentioned manner, he left the room in great haste and in “frightful anxiety” and immediately went to see Regine’s father, who was apparently just as dumbfounded by the commotion as the young pianist had been. Kierkegaard presented his case to him. This gave rise to additional silence: “The father said neither yes nor no, but was nonetheless quite willing, as I could easily understand…. I did not say one single word to charm her—she said yes.”
With this begins one the great love stories of world literature. Søren and Regine inscribe themselves in the series of unhappy lovers—Pyramus and Thisbe, Dante and Beatrice, Abelard and Heloïse, Petrarch and Laura, Romeo and Juliet, Werther and Lotte—who are together in eternity because they never could be together in earthly life. The situation up there in the apartment around the piano that Tuesday afternoon reveals in itself how little the two actually knew one another. Later on, Regine supposedly confided to Sibbern that “the first times she saw him, she felt for him a sort of respect mixed with dread.”
All that we know of Regine prior to her fateful encounter with Søren Aabye adds up to only the most elementary sort of information: She was born January 23, 1822, and like Søren Aabye was the last in a flock of seven children. Ahead of Regine came Marie, Olivia, Oluf Christian, Jonas Christian, Cornelia, and little Regner, who, however, died shortly after birth. Regine’s father, Terkild Olsen, was Councillor of State and director of an office in the Finance Ministry; her mother was named Regine Frederikke. Her family lived in 66 Børsgade, one in a row of three double-gabled houses dubbed “The Six Sisters.” The Olsens passed the time by reading the poets and authors of the day, edifying writings, a bit of embroidery; later on, Regine also took up painting miniatures. On Sundays they went to Holmens Church, just opposite the Olsens’ home, but they also attended the meetings of the Moravian Congregation of Brethren, which were frequented by the Kierkegaard family as well. Neither these meetings nor Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, which Regine claimed to have studied quite assiduously, left long-lasting traces on her cheerful personality, however. She was just a lovely girl of the upper bourgeoisie who wanted to be happy, like everybody.
The first time that Søren Aabye saw the girl who was now his fiancée was on a spring day in 1837 out in Frederiksberg where he was visiting his friend, the theologian Peter Rørdam, who still resided at the home of his mother, Cathrine Georgia, widow of the late Dean Thomas Schatt Rørdam, who in addition to his sons Peter and Hans had left three comely and marriageable daughters, Elisabeth, Emma, and Bolette. So for a young man, this was not a bad place to pay a visit. That day in May the family also had another caller, a fourteen-year-old friend, Regine by name, who later recalled how Søren Aabye had suddenly turned up and made “a very strong impression,” by speaking “unceasingly”—indeed, “his speech practically poured forth and was highly captivating.”
The visit also made an impression on Kierkegaard, but of a quite different sort, and the evening of that same day he wrote in his journal: “Again today (May 8) I tried to forget myself, though not with noise and commotion—that surrogate does no good—but by walking out to Rørdams and talking with Bolette and (if possible) leaving at home the devil of wit, that angel with the flaming sword who stations himself—as I deserve—between me and every innocent girl’s heart. Then you overtook me—thank you, God, for not letting me immediately go mad; never have I had so much anxiety about going mad. Thank you for again inclining your ear to hear me.” Kierkegaard subsequently deleted the words “to Rørdams and talking with Bolette,” which, however, H. P. Barfod nowhere tells us in his edition, so when Regine read these desperate lines in 1869 she believed that they expressed Kierkegaard’s first fascination with her. But in this, Regine was mistaken. The goal of Kierkegaard’s walk to Frederiksberg was in fact the youngest daughter of the house, twenty-two-year-old Bolette, “a very pretty and sensible girl,” as Kierkegaard’s brother Peter called her in a letter of February 23, 1836. Much later Kierkegaard also admitted that he and Bolette had made an “impression” on one another, which was why he felt a certain “responsibility” for her “albeit in all innocence and purely intellectually,” as he wrote in retrospect in 1849. An undated journal entry from 1837 makes it clear, however, that the fascination and the conflicting feelings associated with the girl from Frederiksberg persisted for quite some time: “The same scene again today. Nonetheless I did get out to the Rørdams. Dear God, why should this tendency awaken just now? Oh, how I feel that I am alone—Oh, a curse upon that proud satisfaction in standing alone—Everyone will have contempt for me now—Oh, but you, my God, take not your hand from me, let me live and better my ways.”
This was a journal entry that Kierkegaard did not want posterity to know about, so he attempted to make it illegible by repeatedly crossing it out. The next time the name Rørdam figures in his journal is on Sunday, July 9, 1837, when on the way back to town Kierkegaard stopped in Frederiksberg Gardens and with an allegorical, almost prophetic self-understanding jotted down the following: “I am standing like a solitary spruce, egoistically self-enclosed and pointing toward what is higher, casting no shadow, and only the wood dove builds its nest in my branches.—Sunday, July 9, in Frederiksberg Gardens, after calling at the Rørdams.”
What happened in the time from then up to September 8, 1840—when Regine, on her way home from a piano lesson, was intercepted by the young theologian who came up to her and proposed—remains obscure, and in his 1849 journal entry Kierkegaard depicted the period prior to the engagement with these brief sentences: “Even before my father died I had decided on her. He died. I studied for the examinations. During that entire time I let her existence entwine itself around mine…. In the summer of ‘40 I took my theological examinations. Then without further ado paid a visit to the house. I traveled to Jutland and perhaps even then had begun a bit of fishing, for example by lending them books during my absence and by encouraging them to read a particular passage in a particular book.—In August I returned. Strictly speaking, the period from August 9 into September can be called the time during which I approached her.”
It is also a part of the story that, at the same time Kierkegaard was infatuated with Bolette, Regine was particularly taken with her private tutor, the handsome and proper Frederik Johan Schlegel, who naturally was by no means blind to Regine’s charms. Many people thought that an engagement of the two must be just around the corner, but instead there was this Kierkegaard. “You could have talked about Fritz Schlegel until Doomsday—it would not have helped you at all, because I wanted you!” he asserted when Regine attempted to explain the matter to him.
For his part, however, Kierkegaard felt not the least bit tempted to inform Regine that they had a mutual friend in Bolette.
From the Papers of One Already Dead
The story of the engagement is best followed in the letters that Søren Aabye sent to Regine via a messenger or a servant during the period from September 1840 until October 1841. There are thirty-one letters in all, though five of these are only little notes that indicated the time or place for a meeting or that accompanied a gift: flowers; perfume (Regine loved Extrait double de Muguet” [French: “double-strength essence of lily of the valley”]; a music stand; a handkerchief; the New Testament; and, for Regine’s nineteenth birthday, a pair of candelabra plus something as recherché as a “paint set.” The letters begin “My Regine!” and most frequently conclude “Your S. K.,” which alternated with “Yours forever, S. K.” and—toward the end of the relationship—with “Your K.” The few letters that Regine wrote were returned to her early in 1856 by the executors of Kierkegaard’s estate, and she burned them, so we will have to make do with half of their correspondence.
On only three occasions did Kierkegaard put the date and the year on his letters. In one letter he remarked, not uncharacteristically, that “this letter has no date, nor should it have one, since its essential contents are the consciousness of a feeling.” But various clues—references to seasons of the year and to birthdays; the sending of newly published books; plus, of course, the waning of erotic intensity—make it possible to place nearly a third of the letters in their original sequence. For the remainder we must rely on other criteria and indicators. In these cases we receive the unexpected assistance of Wednesday, because the dated and easily datable letters were written on that day in commemoration of an encounter in the outlying village of Lyngby in July 1840, “when I approached you for the second time in my life.”
As we read our way through the little stack of letters a curious doubleness begins to emerge. From the standpoint of language, these letters are some of the most splendid achievements Kierkegaard had managed thus far. His pen no longer stands still, bleeding ink onto the paper. The creaking Latin syntax, which until then had forced his language into lackluster constructions, is here replaced by an enchanting suppleness that makes the lines take wing. Displaying delicacy and rhythm, the letters bring inspired adoration to their subject matter, drawing on images and metaphors and poetic allusions to writers such as Johannes Ewald, Jens Baggesen, Adam Oehlenschläger, Christian Winther, and Poul Martin Møller. These letters are not ordinary communication; they are art.
And in this consists the triumph and the tragedy. For by virtue of their indisputably aesthetic qualities, the letters make it clear that their author was to become not a husband but a writer. So they were actually farewell letters, grandiose exercises in the art of indirect communication: With enormous discretion and employing the entire panoply of the most nuanced shades of language, they try to make Regine realize that the person who sings her praises in letter after letter has long since disappeared from her life because he has lost himself in recollection of her and is thus utterly unsuited for married life. Indeed, recollection, from which fantasy draws its life, is also the source of the death that divides the lovers. In looking back upon events, Kierkegaard claimed that the very next day after Regine had said “Yes,” he had already realized that he had “made a mistake.” This is corroborated by Regine’s account of having “met him in the arched passageway of the palace riding ring shortly after the engagement,” where it was as if he had been “completely transformed—absent and cold!”
Nonetheless (or rather, precisely for this reason) as early as his very first letter, dated September 16, he tied Regine quite literally to writing, which of course is the medium of recollection par excellence.
My Regine!
To
Our own little Regine
A line like this under the word serves to alert the typesetter that he must space out the word indicated. To space out means to pull the words apart from one another. Therefore, when I space out the words written above, I believe that I would have to pull them s o f a r a p a r t that a typesetter would probably lose patience because it is likely that he would never get to set anything more in his life.
Your S. K.
Not only was Regine spaced out to such an extent that she has been able to extend beyond time and space and into the history of world literature, she has also had a sort of official status from the very start. She is spoken of as “our own little Regine,” and has thus been lifted out of the more intimate space in which lovers usually converse. Regine belongs to us, to posterity, to the reader.
The following week, on Wednesday, September 23, Kierkegaard continued to carry out ambivalent maneuvers with his pen. He sent a homemade ink drawing depicting a little man with an enormous telescope, standing on Knippels Bridge, from which he stares to the right in the direction of the words “Tre Kroner”—the military battery out in Copenhagen harbor. The letter begins: “My Regine! This is Knippels Bridge. The figure with the telescope is me. You know that figures in landscapes usually appear a bit odd; you may therefore take comfort in the thought that I do not look at all that ugly and that every artistic impression, even a caricature, always contains something of the ideal.” So far so good; then comes a symbolic hint about the future. The writer of the letter claims that his ink drawing has been judged by several “art critics” who were surprised that he had completely omitted the surroundings. He explains that some believed that this omission was owing to the artist’s weakness in depicting perspective, while others inclined toward what he implies is the more likely theory, namely, that the absence of surroundings may be an “allusion to a folktale about a person who had so lost himself in enjoying the view from Knippels Bridge that in the end he could see nothing but the image produced by his own soul, something he could have seen just as well in a darkened room.”
There is, of course, no such folk tale. Kierkegaard is merely creating a fiction. The fiction is bleak, however, because it informs Regine that she is about to disappear from his sight. True, he does stand there on Knippels Bridge staring into his telescope, but in reality he is looking at a self-created image in his soul, woman as ideal, perhaps as myth, but in any case not the eighteen-year-old Regine Olsen of flesh and blood and desire. This is borne out by Kierkegaard’s comments on the unique construction of the telescope: “The outermost glass is in fact a mirror, so that when you train it on Trekroner and stand on the left side of the bridge at an angle of 35o toward Copenhagen, you see something quite different from what is seen by all the other people by whom you are surrounded…. Only in the proper hands and for the proper eye is it a divine telegraph; for everyone else it is a useless bit of furniture.” The telescope is thus a sort of periscope that uses an angled mirror to reflect reality into its own darkened interior in order to satisfy the curious eye with images no one else can see: The Regine of reality has been replaced by the “Regine” of reflection. And in every essential respect it is to this latter person that the letters are addressed—and not to the “Miss R. Olsen,” whose name appears so prosaically on the outside of the envelopes.
By the same token, the letter writer’s proper element is not the immediate future, but eternity. His epistles are characterized by studies of light and atmosphere and by meditations on eternity and the moment, on presence and recollection; they lose themselves in the lyrical appreciation of nature, in the change of seasons, just as they can suddenly plunge all the way back to Greek myths or dwell on Regine in a particular situation, preferably at a window that opens onto a romantic vista. “It is in the late summer, toward evening.—The little window is open. The moon is swelling; it outdoes itself in radiance in order to obscure its reflection in the sea, which seems to outshine it, almost audible in its splendor. It flushes in indignation, conceals itself in the clouds; the sea trembles.—You are sitting on the sofa, your thoughts floating far from you, your eyes fixed upon nothing. Only when they reach the infinity of the enormous sky do the infinite thoughts fade away. Everything in between has vanished. It is as if you were sailing in the air. And you summon together your fugitive thoughts, which show you an object. And if a sigh had propulsive force, if a person were so light, so ethereal, that the compressed air released in a sigh could send him off—the deeper the sigh, the quicker—then you would surely be here with me in an instant.”
It is almost a scenario taken right out of Chagall: The sigh is the propulsive force that sends the ethereal lovers toward one another in a gentle arc, up into the bluish airy space above the roofs of the city—full of romantic excitement, but utterly lacking in concreteness. This distance from the world and from everyday life was repeated in a letter of December 9, though now in the opposite direction: In a drawing (now lost) Regine depicted herself in the undersea home that her lover had imagined for her and that he had described with these lines: “There are many small but cozy rooms down there, where one can sit safely while the sea storms outside. In some of them one can also hear the distant clamor of the world, not troublingly noisy but quietly fading away, fundamentally irrelevant to the inhabitants of these chambers.”
The manner in which Regine reacted to this insistent isolation from the world is reflected indirectly in four short lines from her hand; they contain a touching, feminine protest against the existence—now above the earth, now under the sea—to which she had been consigned: With his Wednesday letter of November 4, Kierkegaard had included a color picture of an oriental landscape with unmistakably erotic symbolism in the form of towers, open gates, and a soaring minaret in the background. In the foreground a young man is sitting on a bench with a stringed instrument, probably a lute, in his lap, while a smiling, bare-armed woman extends a rose toward him from an open window, the curtains of which flutter invitingly over his head. It is all very daring; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, is not. On the contrary, his commentary on the picture causes every erotic possibility to evaporate in a cloud of dialectics: “She holds a flower in her hand. Is it she who extends the flower toward him? Or has she received it from him? Is she giving it back to him in order to receive it once again? No one knows but the two of them. The wide world is behind him. He has turned his back on it. A stillness reigns everywhere, as in eternity, to which such moments belong. Perhaps he sat like this for centuries; perhaps the happy moment was only very brief and yet long enough for an eternity.” And so on and so forth. On the reverse side of the picture Kierkegaard had written a little verse in German from The Boy’s Magic Horn, also quite chaste, but then, right under the German verse, come the only lines Regine has left posterity from the period of her engagement to Kierkegaard:
And if my arm so pleases you
With solace and with peace,
Fair Merman, then hurry! Come and take
Both my arms, take two!
Regine, too, could cite verse. And more than that, this little passage from Johannes Ewald’s romance The Fishermen demonstrates that she could cite precisely and, indeed, with erotic emphasis. She would not be put off, she would not be satisfied with brilliantly written letters; she wanted to be out there atop the seventy thousand restless fathoms, embraced by her merman. It is not surprising that Joan of Arc was her heroine.
Kierkegaard pulled in the opposite direction, and during the early part of their engagement he tried to cool down her amorous passions by reading her a sermon from Mynster every week. But as has happened before in history—remember Abelard and Heloïse—erotic passion had deep roots within the religious, which resulted in violent agitation: “The greatest possible misunderstanding between one person and another with respect to the religious is in the case of a man and a woman, when the man, wanting to impart religion to her, … becomes the object of her romantic love.” This was an instance of exactly this sort of object displacement, and in one of the undatable letters Kierkegaard explained why, earlier that same day, he had been compelled to have some firm and serious words with Regine. He asked her to understand that it was not his wish that “you should think for a moment that at such times I feel that I am better than you; and in order to demonstrate to you that I castigate myself in the same way, as a remembrance of this morning I am sending you a copy of the New Testament.” Behind this authority-laden admonition we get the clear sense that, earlier that day, Regine had been too erotically straightforward and that her fiancé was now pointing out quite firmly how inappropriate this had been.
On Wednesday, November 11, Regine sat and waited for a letter that never arrived. Their amorous Wednesday ritual, which had lasted two months, was interrupted. She usually invited her fiancé to dinner with her parents on that evening, but this time he had taken a coach up to Fredensborg in northern Zealand, and he did not roll up to her place until eight o’clock, which was much too late and quite embarrassing. A contemplative journal entry makes clear what his state of mind had been in that coach, rumbling back to town in the twilight: “On the floor of the coach, which was empty, lay six or seven oat kernels. They danced about from the vibrations and formed the strangest patterns. I lost myself in watching them.”
Nor was there a letter to Regine the following Wednesday, but Kierkegaard’s servant turned up and delivered a package containing Carl Bernhard’s newly published novel, Old Memories. The following week, Wednesday, November 25, Kierkegaard pointed out to Regine that the choice of the book title had been anything but accidental, and there was a sudden drop in the romantic temperature of the letters: “My Regine! / Perhaps, along with ‘old memories,’ you had expected that you would also receive a future memory in the form of a letter. It didn’t turn out that way, so therefore accept these lines, which—who knows?—perhaps may soon represent a bygone time.” This sounds just exactly as ominous as it was. Kierkegaard continued, with brusque sarcasm: “It is lovely that you expect letters from me, especially when this expectation is not a fierce unrest that must be calmed down, but is a still and holy longing…. Freedom is love’s element. And I am convinced that you respect me too much to wish to see in me a diligent lord-in-waiting who carries out love’s bureaucratic responsibilities with the conscientiousness of an accountant, or to want me to compete for a medal for perseverance in Chinese handicrafts. And I am convinced that when a letter does not arrive, my Regine is too poetic to see in this a lack of ‘due diligence,’ to use the official expression; that even if a letter were never to arrive, she is too poetic to long to return to the fleshpots of Egypt or to wish to be continually surrounded by the amorous churnings of a sentimental lover.” There was really no danger with respect to that last bit, the part about the sentimental lover. After the letter’s somewhat dubious “Your S. K.” there was a short postscript: “At this moment I am walking past your window. If I look at my watch, it means that I have seen you. If I do not look at my watch, I haven’t seen you.”
The actual circumstances behind this cryptic postscript can be more or less reconstructed: Accompanied by his servant, who was supposed to deliver the letter, Kierkegaard had walked from his apartment on 38 Nørregade, across the plaza opposite the Church of Our Lady, presumably along Strøget, then across Højbro Plads, and down to 66 Børsgade. He had carefully calculated the interval between the point when his servant would deliver the letter and the moment when Regine would read the last sentence. If he then saw her in the window, he would signal by taking out his watch; if not, it—his watch—would remain symbolically in his pocket. With its minutely detailed staging, this episode could just as easily have been set in “The Seducer’s Diary” as in 66 Børsgade.
Just before Christmas, Kierkegaard’s letters took on a more conciliatory tone. He wanted to convey to Regine that the painful episodes and the absent letters in November had been intended as a test of her faithfulness. “I will test thee no longer, now I know thy heart,” he wrote on Wednesday, December 16, quoting Christian Winther. A lengthy New Year’s letter, which arrived Wednesday, December 30, is loving, concrete, and uncomplicated. Kierkegaard recalled the Wednesday in Lyngby a little more than a year earlier: “I felt so indescribably light. I drove to Lyngby, not as I usually do, dark and dispirited, slumped in a corner of the coach. I sat in the middle of the seat, unusually erect; my head was not bowed down, but, happy and full of confidence, I looked about. I was so infinitely happy to meet everyone I encountered.” And the letter ends with a sort of submission: “I came, I saw, she conquered.”
Kierkegaard had plenty to keep him busy in the new year. In the middle of November 1840 he had enrolled in the pastoral seminary, where he was supposed to prepare sermons and participate in judging the sermons of his fellow seminarians. In Holmens Church, on Tuesday, January 12, 1841, he preached his first sermon ever. The text was a passage from the letter to the Philippians (1:19-25) in which Paul speaks of being split between the earthly and the heavenly: For Paul, Christ is life, so in reality to die is a gain. Those who judged Kierkegaard found that the sermon was “very well memorized,” that his voice was “clear,” his tone “dignified and powerful,” and that the contents bore the stamp of “much thoughtfulness and keen logic,” but, they objected, “it was rather difficult and on a level that was probably much too lofty for the average person.” While he was participating in the various exercises at the pastoral seminary, Kierkegaard also began making his preparations to write his dissertation for the magister degree, which he completed during the winter of 1840-41 and (since the pastoral seminary recessed for the month of April) the early spring of 1841. The work stole time from Regine, who may have complained that her fiancé was using magister dissertations and pastoral seminaries as pretexts to avoid seeing her. As an odd sort of proof of how incredibly busy he was, as a present for Regine’s nineteenth birthday Kierkegaard sent her a manuscript he had prepared in connection with an exercise at the pastoral seminary. And on March 9, when he had finished writing up his assessment of a sermon by one of his fellow students, he wrote to Regine that it was certainly not “because I have the pen in my hand that I am, as it were, taking the occasion to write you on occasion,” something for which she had apparently criticized him, probably with justice.
Regine had had to pass the time some other way and set a good example, so when her fiancé turned twenty-eight he received a pearl-embroidered letter case made by nimble-fingered Regine’s own hands. Kierkegaard thanked her for the letter case the very same day, and with his thank-you he enclosed a rose, but not just any rose: “Enclosed I am sending you a rose. Unlike your gift, in my hands it did not develop in all its splendor. But it has withered in my hands. Unlike you, I have not been a happy witness to how it all developed. I have been a sad witness to its gradual fading away. I have seen it suffer. It lost its scent; its head lost its luster; its leaves drooped in their struggle with death; its blush faded away; its fresh stem dried out. It forgot its glory and thought itself forgotten, and it did not know that you preserved the remembrance of it. It did not know that I constantly remember it. It did not know that the two of us together preserved its memory.”
The symbolism in the letter and the subsequent gap in their correspondence tells its own dispiriting tale, and on Wednesday, August 11, Kierkegaard returned his engagement ring, accompanied by a letter of farewell—which he found in other respects to be such a literary success that it was subsequently incorporated word-for-word in the “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” section of Stages on Life’s Way. The original letter has been lost, but in the book it reads: “So as not to have to rehearse yet again something which must, in the end, be done; something which, when it has been done, will surely give the strength that is needed; let it be done, then. Above all, forget the person who writes this; forgive a person who, whatever he might have been capable of, was incapable of making a girl happy. In the Orient, to send a silk cord was a death sentence for the recipient; here, to send a ring will likely be a death sentence for the person who sends it.”
When Regine read these lines she was beside herself and immediately ran over to Kierkegaard’s place on Nørregade. He was not at home, however, so she went into his room and left what Kierkegaard described as a “note of utter despair” in which she pleaded with him for “the sake of Jesus Christ and the memory of my late father, not to leave her.” Regine certainly knew where her beloved was most sensitive. “So,” Kierkegaard continued, “there was nothing else for me to do but to venture to the uttermost, to support her, if possible, by means of a deception, to do everything to repel her from me in order to rekindle her pride.”
Thus began “the time of terrors,” the phase during which Kierkegaard, according to his own account, was compelled to appear as an “arch-villain” in order to break off the connection, behavior which he himself viewed as “exquisite gallantry.” Sibbern would recall: “When he wanted to break off with her—but by compelling her to break off with him—he behaved in such a way that Miss O. said he had mistreated her soul. She used that expression, and she felt deep indignation about it.” Nonetheless the villainous strategy seems to have been effective, because many years later Regine declared that it was she who had broken off the engagement. Sibbern tried to console Regine by pointing out that it had been well that she “had not become Kierkegaard’s … because Kierkegaard’s spirit was continually preoccupied with itself, and the man was confined in self-reflection,” so that he either would have “tormented her with jealousy” or would have lived with her as “if he were totally unconcerned with her.” Later on, this same Sibbern refused to say anything about why the relationship had been broken off, though he claimed that he could have related “things that perhaps only a very few people, besides myself, know; but I dare not entrust the most important of these things to paper.” Here, to put it mildly, Sibbern was being quite irritating. Eline Boisen, on the other hand, spoke her mind plainly. Displaying the touching solidarity of sisterhood, Boisen wrote: “Perhaps she was not intelligent enough for him, and perhaps she had wanted to assist his heart in clipping a bit off the wings of his high-flown ambition. But she had to yield to the sin that dominated him. Or perhaps it wasn’t a sin to exploit all her struggles, all the sorrow and the tears he extorted from her, as a setting with which to make his conceited little self noteworthy and interesting? How can such conduct be in the service of the Gospel?”
Among Kierkegaard’s various deliberately misleading missives, there is one letter (from late September or early October) that seems unspeakably malignant: A box containing a bottle of Extrait double de Muguet was accompanied by these words: “Perhaps you remember that about a year ago I sent you a bottle of this perfume.” After a short meditation on the blessings of recollection he focused again on the bottle and in particular on the manner in which it had been carefully packaged: “So I am sending you a bottle of it with a great many leafy wrappings. But these leaves are not the sort that one tears away in a hurry or throws away in annoyance in order to get to the contents. On the contrary, it is precisely these leaves that make one happy, and I see with how much care and solicitude you will unfold each separate leaf, thereby remembering that I remember you, my Regine, and you yourself will remember / Your / S.K.”
And what sort of “leafy wrappings” were they which served as packing paper, and which apparently were of such a nature that Regine would have unfolded them carefully, one by one, all the while remembering or reexperiencing everything? Yes, indeed, the “leafy wrappings” with which Regine had her hands full until she reached the fine little perfume bottle deep within were—her own letters! What else could such “leafy wrappings” have been? Neither the season of the year nor the temperature of the love affair permitted roses.
But Regine would not let go. “She fought like a lioness,” and was so set on remaining with Kierkegaard that in her agony she offered to settle for living in a little cupboard, and with this in mind Kierkegaard later had a cabinetmaker produce a fine mahogany cabinet—without shelves! “Everything is carefully preserved in there,” as Kierkegaard explained, “everything that reminds me of her and that could remind her of me. There is also a copy of each of the pseudonymous writings for her; on each occasion there were only two copies produced in vellum, one for her and one for me.”
On October 11, 1841, two months after his letter breaking off the engagement, Kierkegaard again broke the engagement, this time verbally: “She was in despair. For the first time in my life I scolded. It was the only thing to do.” He went directly from 66 Børsgade to the Royal Theater because he wanted to speak to Emil Boesen. “(This was the basis for the story that was told around town at the time, to the effect that I supposedly took out my watch and said to the family that if they had anything more to say, they had better hurry because I had to be at the theater.)” When the act was over and Kierkegaard left his seat in an upper box, Regine’s father, Terkild Olsen, showed up from the lower boxes, went over to Kierkegaard and asked to talk with him, whereupon the two men walked back to 66 Børsgade together. “He said: It will be the death of her; she is in total despair. I said: I will try to calm her down, but the matter is settled. He said: I am a proud man; this is hard, but I beg you not to break off your engagement to her. He was truly grand; I was shaken by him. But I stood my ground. I dined with the family that evening. Spoke with her when I left.” The next morning Kierkegaard received a letter from Terkild Olsen, who said that Regine had not slept at all the previous night and asked Kierkegaard to come and visit her. Kierkegaard did so: “I went there and made her see reason. She asked me, ‘Will you never marry?’ I answered: ‘Well, yes, in ten years, when I have begun to simmer down and I need a lusty young miss to rejuvenate me.’ Necessary cruelty. Then she said: ‘Forgive me for what I have done to you.’ I replied: ‘It is really I who ought to ask for that.’ She said: ‘Promise to think of me.’ I did so. She said: ‘Kiss me.’ I did so, but without passion. Merciful God…. Then we separated…. I spent the nights crying in my bed. But by day I was my usual self, wittier and more flippant than ever; it was necessary.” When Peter Christian said that he would try to explain to the Olsen family that his younger brother was not the “villain” he seemed to be, the younger brother promptly protested: “I said: Do that, and I’ll put a bullet through your head. The best proof of how deeply the matter engaged me.”
In the margin, opposite the point in the journal entry where he had written “Merciful God,” Kierkegaard added that Regine had had the custom of carrying in her “bosom” a “little note on which were some words from me.” What those words were no one knows, for Regine drew out the note, slowly tore it into tiny pieces, and, staring straight ahead, she said quietly: “So you have played a terrible game with me.” This little gesture was a decisive act: Regine freed herself from the writing; she had given up being a Regine of words on paper and had returned to reality. She herself recalled that at their final parting she had said: “Now I can bear it no longer; kiss me one last time and then have your freedom!”
In his journal for October 1841, Peter Christian wrote: “On the 10th (?), after a long period of struggle and dejection, Søren broke off his connection with Miss Olsen (Regina).” The question mark was appropriate because the break in fact took place the next day, Monday, October 11. Afterward, the younger brother—who otherwise tended to associate certain dates with specific rituals—was similarly unable to recall the date, and many years later he made use of old newspapers and journal entries in an attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events that had led up to the break.
The broken engagement was soon known in town and people began talking. It was rumored that one evening Kierkegaard had invited Regine to the theater to see Don Giovanni, but that as soon as the orchestra had finished playing the overture, Kierkegaard had stood up and said: “Now we are leaving. You have had the best, the expectation of pleasure!” Many years later, when Julius Clausen gingerly reported this tale to Regine, she said: “Yes, I remember that evening well; but it was after the first act, and we left because he had a bad headache.” Henrik Hertz joined the chorus of the scandalized and told the following story about “the young, lovely Miss Olsen,” whom Kierkegaard “practically tortured to death with his peculiarities”: “One day he fetched her in a landau for a ride in the country, about which she was indescribably happy. But at the circle in Vesterbro he turned around and drove her home again, so that she could become accustomed to denying herself pleasures. He should have been beaten on his a——for that.”
Of course the Olsen family was also greatly dismayed. Regine’s brother, Jonas Christian, who received his theological degree in 1842, wrote a letter (now lost) in which he declared his flaming hatred for Kierkegaard, who, with fabulous arrogance, remarked in his journal: “If my good Jonas Olsen were really capable, as he wrote in his memorable note, of hating as no one has ever hated before, I should count myself fortunate to be his contemporary, fortunate to be the object of such hatred.” Regine’s sister Cornelia reacted in much finer fashion, putting into words what many other people have surely come to sense in later years: “I do not understand Magister Kierkegaard, but I nonetheless believe that he is a good person!” The understanding—was it perhaps a genuine attraction?—between the two was apparently mutual, because in 1844 Kierkegaard noted: “Under the category of private studies, and to be kept as delicate as possible, I would like to depict a female figure who was great by virtue of her lovably modest and bashful resignation (for example, a somewhat idealized Cornelia Olsen, the most excellent female figure I have known and the only one who has compelled my admiration). She would have the experience of seeing her sister marry the person whom she herself loved.”
Kierkegaard never depicted such a figure—a lovably modest and bashful woman—but in “The Seducer’s Diary,” with the change of but one consonant, Cornelia was resurrected as Cordelia, who is one of the loveliest and most intense female figures, not merely in Kierkegaard’s gallery of characters but in the entire literature of the Danish Golden Age.
“She Chooses the Shriek, IChoose the Pain”
At one point in that diary, Johannes the Seducer notes, with characteristically lecherous elegance, that it is an art to poetize oneself into a girl, but that it is a masterpiece to poetize oneself out again. Kierkegaard knew the art, but the masterpiece was more difficult. He could never distance Regine sufficiently to free her from her calamitous fate; she continued to be what she was—sensually heaven-sent, delightfully terrifying, dizzyingly forbidden—because her very nature caused warm springs to gush so seductively that Kierkegaard could not but let himself be carried along in the current—on paper.
This story (which could indeed have ended in happily banal fashion) is thus not merely about two people who for intellectual and psychological reasons were destined to pass each other like ships in the night. Rather, it became a grand drama about the extremes in the intellectual history of the West: immediacy and reflection, sensuous desire and self-control, presence and absence. And even though Regine is not named one single time in the whole of Kierkegaard’s published works, she is intertwined with it like an erotic arabesque, full of longing, sometimes confronting the reader when one least expects it. This is the case, for example, at one point in Philosophical Fragments: “The source of the unhappiness is not that the lovers cannot have one another, but that they cannot understand one another.” And they could not understand one another, not at all: She was too immediately passionate and he was too passionately reflective. As one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms would subsequently remark in Stages on Life’s Way, “She chooses the shriek, I choose the pain.”
The notion that pure love can overcome every obstacle to communication certainly reflects a rather naive optimism, but we cannot deny that Kierkegaard takes a quite modern position in basing the relation between the sexes on their mutual understanding of one another. And in putting forth this requirement he is, indeed, quite uncompromising, because this sort of understanding is in turn the basis for the intimate trust that is the soul of marriage. “Marriage is impossible without intimate trust,” it is stated categorically in one of the drafts of Either/Or. In a subsequent note (which, however, was crossed out) he explained that entering into a marriage is not like the situation in which “everything is sold in the condition ‘as is’ at the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer”; no, in this case what matters is “being honest about the past.” And then he continues in the first-person singular: “Had I not honored her, as my future wife, more than I honored myself; had I not been more zealous for her honor than for my own; then I would have held my tongue and fulfilled her wish and mine, and would have permitted myself to marry her. There are so many marriages which conceal little tales. I did not want this to be the case with me, for then she would have become my concubine. I would rather have murdered her.”
This entry, which recurs in a jumble of variants, is typical of the way in which Kierkegaard explained the conflict to himself as time went by: His father, as the enforcer of the law, is contrasted sharply with Regine, whose sensuality itself is a painful reminder of his father’s frightful flaw, his sexual fall. Piety toward his father and love for Regine became so incompatible that Kierkegaard had to turn to a metaphysical explanation in order to avoid being torn in two: “It sometimes happens that a child while still in the cradle is engaged to the person who will one day become his wife or her husband. I was engaged [Danish: for-lovet, “already promised”], in the religious sense, as a very young child. Alas, I have paid dearly because I once misunderstood my life and forgot—that I was engaged!”
Kierkegaard was already wedded to God. The image approaches blasphemy and, indeed, does not do much to cover up the human sense of powerlessness out of which it grew. As a visible reminder of his fatal misunderstanding, Kierkegaard had his engagement ring reconstructed so that the stones formed a cross. For her part, Regine reacted in more straightforward fashion: Her hair very soon turned gray.
“To her and to my late father,” Kierkegaard wrote in 1849, “will all the books be dedicated: my teachers, an old man’s noble wisdom and a woman’s lovable lack of understanding.” In the year of his death he turned back to these words, making them even more beautiful. Thus, under the heading “My Foundations,” he named “the two people whom I love most, to whom I owe whatever I have become as an author: an old man—the errors of his melancholy love; a very young girl, almost a mere child—the lovable tears of her misunderstanding.”