Postscript: Kierkegaard
“Big Enough to Be a Major City”
“Some of my countrymen probably think that Copenhagen is a boring town and a small town. To me, on the contrary—refreshed as it is by the sea on which it is situated, and unable, even in winter, to abandon its memory of beech forests—it is the most favorable habitat I could wish for. Big enough to be a major city, small enough that there is no market price on human beings.”
Thus does Stages on Life’s Way express an infatuation with Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen, which according to the census of 1845 had 126,787 inhabitants. The small, compact, fortified city was encircled by high ramparts that dropped off steeply into broad moats, and all traffic in and out of the town had to pass through one of the four narrow gates: Østerport, Nørreport, Vesterport, and Amagerport, which were locked securely every night, after which the keys were brought over to King Frederick VI at Amalienborg Castle—a practice that continued as late as 1808. The Nørreport entrance was left sligtly ajar, however, so that night owls could slip into town—after paying the required fee of two shillings. On market days—Wednesdays and Saturdays—the peasants waited in long queues to come in with their wares: flour, grain, potatoes, butter, milk, meat, chickens, sheep, fruit, distilled spirits, hay, hides, and whatever else the city might need. People wishing to enter the city had to pay a toll and submit their wagons to the inspection of “bag peerers,” who always found more than the peasants wanted them to and were therefore hated about as much as was the little police force that reigned within the ramparts; there were eighty-five policemen in 1840. Punishment by branding had been abolished that year, so the city now had to make do with public flogging, in which people were bound to a post and lashed as many times as they deserved. The city’s 188 watchmen, on the other hand, were much more popular. It was their responsibility to sound the alarm in the event of fire, to call out the hour, and as late as 1863, to sing the requisite watchman’s verse every hour on the hour all night long. Lastly, they had the job of lighting the city’s streetlamps, which attempted to dispel the dense darkness in the streets—but even so, the lamps were only to be lit on those days when, according to the almanac, the moon would not be shining!
It was in this city that the Danish Golden Age developed a sort of intellectual greenhouse effect. Anyone and everyone was there, the major and the minor figures rubbing shoulders with one another—though all of them were quite small in the physical sense, inasmuch as the average height for adult males during this period was five feet, four inches! Viewed with modern eyes the city was practically populated by dwarves, so when Grundtvig (who himself towered to the perilous height of five feet, seven and one-half inches) spoke of giants in the form of dwarves, he was being more than merely witty.
The great fire of the summer of 1795 had burnt 950 of the capital’s houses to the ground; thereafter came the merciless attack of 1807, when the English sent fourteen thousand firebombs over Copenhagen’s ramparts and into the city. As time passed and the the burnt-out sites were built on once again, the city was resurrected in fine neoclassical fashion. The tautness and discipline of C. F. Hansen’s monumental buildings—the combined city hall and courthouse, the Metropolitan School, the Castle Church, Christiansborg Castle, and the Church of Our Lady—was also replicated on the facades of private houses, whose plane surfaces were painted in limestone and sandstone hues, thus presenting quite a different appearance than the older houses, with their projecting facades, gothic decoration, sinuous columns, and flamboyant pilasters. Now, a narrow horizontal band of ornamentation between the banks of windows for each story, a distinguished-looking door frame, and perhaps a triangular gable with a couple of decorative details near the top were sufficient. Access for fire-fighting equipment was improved by widening the streets and mandating that buildings constructed at intersections have their corners set back and cut off on forty-five-degree angles, thus converting potential bottlenecks into mini-plazas. Dress became simpler as well. Men would wear narrow trousers and tall boots, a brightly colored vest of silk or velvet, a jacket in blue or brown with shiny buttons, a silk scarf, and a black or gray silk tophat. Mustaches were no longer the sole province of the military, and older men might take snuff, while those who were younger preferred to smoke cigars when they were out and a pipe while at home among their books. As late as the 1840s women’s clothing also remained unaffected and appealing; it was only in the mid-1850s that the situation got out of hand and crinolines began to assert their hegemony.
The Royal Theater on Kongens Nytorv was the hub of the Copenhagen cultural universe. After its many remodelings the building was not a pretty sight, but inside it was even worse: It was a maze of doors, narrow stairways, and odd passageways where the guests were supposed to hang their coats. The seats were narrow wooden benches covered with leather or coarse fabric, and if one went up to the box seats one had to make do without a seatback. The equipment and machinery were antiquated, and the lighting, provided by oil lamps, left a great deal to be desired. J. M. Thiele, who had studied many theaters in his travels abroad, was terrified when he took a look backstage at the Royal Theater: “Everything could be found in the space between the two levels—rickety wooden frames, linen, greasy ropes and paper—positioned dangerously close to lamps and flames. The loft over the stage was filled with a mass of hanging curtains, and this space continued without any dividing wall into a room that extended over the public area of the theater and was filled with hundreds of rolled-up linen curtains—fuel which, in the event of an accident, would be some of the first material that would cascade down mercilessly in a crushing, consuming conflagration.” Oddly enough, unlike so many other buildings, the theater refused to burn down, and it was not until 1870 that the old building was finally demolished. But it was here that poets like Oehlenschläger and Heiberg celebrated their triumphs; this was where Bournonville danced and choreographed his ballets. And this was where Kierkegaard was a spectator.
After the disastrous consequences of the Napoleonic wars and an economic downturn that lasted into the late 1830s, the situation improved in the 1840s, and this provided the population with the wherewithal to seek amusements. Enjoying the royal patronage of Christian VIII, a young lieutenant in the Life Guards named Georg Carstensen became the capital’s maître de plaisir. The choice was no accident, for as editor of a couple of diverting weekly journals Carstensen had previously arranged festivities for his subscribers. One year, he invited them to tour Rosenborg Gardens, all brilliantly illuminated. The following year he arranged a successful New Year’s party at the indoor riding ring at Christiansborg Castle, which was decorated in oriental style and illuminated with four thousand candles for the occasion, which lasted for three days. Subscribers were granted free admission, while others had to part with a rixdollar, but the press was impressed and the public was therefore doubly enthusiastic. Carstensen enjoyed his absolutely greatest success, however, when he received permission in 1842 to found a “tivoli,” which opened for the first time on August 15, 1843. “The harvest might be a disaster,” one could read in Fædrelandet a couple of weeks later, “cattle disease might break out, the Sound dues might be lost, Slesvig and Holstein might break away, and Jutland might be submerged in a flood, but all the while the people of Copenhagen would be interested in only one thing, and that would be—Tivoli.” Nor did people miss the symbolic significance of the fact that the new amusement establishment had been situated within what had been a strictly off-limits defense fortification; now it was opening up to scenes of abandon for which Copenhageners had longed for decades. Out of regard for Tivoli revelers, the gate at Vesterport would now remain open until late at night. These were the months when Kierkegaard was finishing up the manuscript of Fear and Trembling and was about to begin his preliminary work on The Concept of Anxiety.
If one longed for some peace and quiet after a visit to Tivoli, one could stroll out to Frederiksberg, an idyllic rural spot with a couple of thousand inhabitants. At Frederiksberg Gardens the greatest attraction was the royal castle high up on Valby Hill. Until 1839 this was where the patriarchal Frederick VI spent the entire summer portion of the year, and the great popular entertainment of a Sunday afternoon was to see His Majesty clad in an admiral’s uniform, sailing with his family in a barge, a sort of broadbeamed gondola, which he steered through the gardens’ artfully designed canal system for an hour or so, after which he landed on an island that had a Chinese teahouse, where oboists played with such delicacy in the summer sunshine that it seemed like a fairy tale. Afterwards, the better-off bourgeoisie would enjoy coffee in the cozy establishments on Allégade and Pileallé. Kierkegaard loved the gardens; he often sat there absorbed in his cigar and in the sight of the serving girls, whom he sketched masterfully in a lengthy passage in “The Seducer’s Diary,” where the girls from Nyboder take top honors because they are “buxom, voluptuous, fine-complexioned, merry, cheerful, sprightly, talkative, a bit coquettish, and above all, bareheaded,” wearing, at most, something as endearing as a “saucy little cap.”
By contrast, Christianshavn, the part of the city that lay between the rest of Copenhagen and Amager, was quite un-idyllic, almost downright unpleasant. Christianshavn had been founded in the early 1600s by Christian IV, who had it modeled on Dutch cities, with canals and streets forming a rectilinear grid. After the loss of the Danish naval and merchant fleets, the position of Christianshavn had greatly deteriorated because the neighborhood had lost its old mainstays of shipbuilding and the provisioning and outfitting of vessels. It is true that the population of this part of town grew during the 1840s, but only because there were plenty of poor people who migrated to the area for its low rents. During his peregrinations Kierkegaard sensed the special atmosphere that lay over this thickly populated and dismal part of town with its empty warehouses. It was another world: “Langebro [Danish: ‘long bridge’] has its name from its length. It is indeed long for a bridge, but as a road the length of the bridge is not very considerable, as one easily learns by walking its length. Then, when one stands on the other side, in Christianshavn, it again seems that the bridge must nonetheless be long, because one seems to be far, very far away from Copenhagen.”
“I Came Close to Dancing with Them”
Kierkegaard was a Copenhagener with a capital C, and he knew the city like the palm of his hand, or perhaps even better. True, when he was in Berlin, he found it “salutary” not to be eternally “sneaking around in the nooks and crannies of a familar city, where one always knows the way out,” but it was not long before he longed to return to the nooks and crannies of Copenhagen. Surviving bills from the shoemaker Sølverborg attest in plain arithmetic to the fact that Kierkegaard literally ground his way around town. He used a special sort of boots with inlaid soles of cork, surely to minimize wear and tear on his weak legs, but these cork soles were also entirely appropriate for this self-styled “police spy,” who could creep soundlessly about his city on cushioned feet. They were expensive. The boots cost eight rixdollars, and in the month of October 1849 alone he had them resoled and reheeled no fewer than five times.
And not many people have included Copenhagen’s streets, lanes, and alleys in their writings as did Kierkegaard: Practically every one of them is there—the entire alphabet of them, from Amagerbro to Østerport—and they are put to very careful use. For example, when Kierkegaard has a man settle in Pistolstræde [Danish: “Pistol Lane”] “so as to have solitude in which to invent a new religion,” his Copenhagen readers are immediately made aware that it must be a pretty sorry religion. There were narrow lanes where the houses facing the lane were typically inhabited by the hardworking petty bourgeoisie, while the side and rear buildings housed incredible poverty; of these lanes, it is Badestuestrædet [Danish: “Bathhouse Lane”] that Kierkegaard mentions most frequently. It was in this lane that he imagined the fate of a fantastic female figure, the course of whose life formed the following sad parabola: “formerly empress over the extensive commonlands of love and titular queen of all the exaggerations of foolery, now Mrs. Petersen at the corner of Bathhouse Lane.”
A few loose scraps of paper from 1842 contain sketches for “Pages from a Street Inspector’s Diary,” including such pieces as “The Tale of the Rat Who Became a Misanthrope,” and “The Story of a Gutter Plank” (which was projected as a grandiose drama, since we can read the word “deluge” as a sort of stage direction). The following year Kierkegaard had the idea of depicting his city under the title “Cross Sections” or “From Every Angle,” which was to be a “somber sketch of life in Copenhagen as it is at various hours of the day”: “nine o’clock, little children go to school; ten o’clock, the maidservants; one o’clock, the fashionable world.” The idea was that “life takes on different colors at different times, just as water is colored by various schools of fishes.” Kierkegaard was not in doubt as to the genre: “It should begin with a lyric to my beloved capital city and place of residence, Copenhagen.”
When the German guidebook writer Hermann Achenbach visited Copenhagen in 1836, he was especially offended by the “revolting screeching” of the women who hawked fruits and vegetables in the street, who were guilty of “such a disgusting violation of every sort of harmony that only a Dane could get used to it.” Fortunately Kierkegaard was one such Dane, so that he not only got used to the noise but actually enjoyed it, and with his well-attuned ear he noted the manner in which the women from Valby gathered around the fountain on Gammeltorv and offered their poultry and fresh eggs for sale; how the shrimp mongers of Gammel Strand shouted themselves hoarse with their seafood; and how the women from Amager stood on Højbro Plads loudly offering their watercress. One day, as he sat absorbed in his own thoughts, he was suddenly summoned back to reality by the cries of a woman hawking cherries for six shillings; it wasn’t so much the cries as the familiarity of the voice, which put him in mind of an earlier time, a “memory of my earliest childhood; except that in recent years she has changed a bit—her mouth has become somewhat crooked, which has some effect on her pronunciation of the word ‘shilling.’ ” At other times there was a festive, Sunday mood, which could suddenly come so marvelously into focus that it had to be written down: “The sun is shining into my room so beautifully and in such a lively fashion. The window in the next room is open. In the street everything is quiet. It is Sunday afternoon. I distinctly hear a lark warbling outside a window in one of the neighboring courtyards, outside the window where the pretty girl lives. Far away, on a distant street, I hear a man hawking his shrimp. The air is so warm, and yet the entire city seems dead.”
Kierkegaard made the language of the city his own, bequeathing it as well to posterity: “When one hears a maidservant in conversation with another maidservant, one suddenly gains an insight into something concerning which one has vainly sought enlightenment in books. A turn of phrase that one has vainly attempted to torture out of one’s own brain or sought after in dictionaries (even in the dictionary of the Scientific Society) is heard in passing, uttered by a common soldier who has no idea how wealthy he is.” One January day in 1846 he heard a cabman say with reference to one of his colleagues, who had thundered past, quite drunk and much too fast, that the fellow “had had the sort of thing that leads a person to the gutter.” Kierkegaard’s journals from various periods are filled with these phenomenological discoveries—the sounds, the light, the life out there in the streets—but it was most exquisite when chance and a sort of artistic necessity would encounter each other in his immediate presence, producing a situation, as happened, for example, one evening in 1845: “Curiously enough, I went out of Vesterport this evening: It was dark. I passed a couple of boys in one of the narrow alleys. I scarcely took note of them and had passed them by when I heard one of them telling the other a story: ‘Then they came to an old fortune-teller lady….’ This summer the same thing happened to me in the evening twilight out by Peblinge Lake. There were two little girls, and the one said, ‘Then he saw an old castle in the distance.’ I think that the greatest poet could scarcely produce an effect like these stirring echoes of the fairy tale—about the old castle in the distance, about what happened next, or that they walked a long way until, et cetera.”
A stone’s throw from Peblinge Lake was Lovers’ Lane, the path that ran alongside all three lakes on the side nearest the city, though connoisseurs subdivided it, calling the part next to Sortedam Lake “Marriage Lane,” the part alongside of Peblinge Lake “Lovers’ Lane,” and that alongside Sankt Jørgens Lake “Friendship Lane.” In “The Seducer’s Diary” it was along this latter section of the path that Kierkegaard had Cordelia stroll one spring evening, suspecting nothing but all the while being spied on by her fate. When Kierkegaard wandered along Lovers’ Lane early one morning, he encountered a “curious procession”: Some young girls were dancing with one another as they approached him. It was probably just a couple of silly young ladies, “flirts,” he at first thought, but when he came closer he could see that there were two young men behind them, playing flutes. “So there is still poetry of that sort in the world,” he wrote in his journal, quite delighted, but then added—with such emotion that it almost pains the reader—“I came close to dancing with them.”
Kierkegaard saw what other people overlooked; he magnified details that are usually viewed with indifference. But his gaze did not merely lose itself in the situation: What was seen was most often accompanied by a reflection on the symbolic dimension of the situation; he had an allegorical eye. “The contradiction: The coachman on the pauper’s hearse, whose solitary horse he had only half covered with the horse blanket, the better to whip it…. the profundity of death.” Or a while later: “It is a peculiarly pitiful sight to see a poor old nag standing in harness before a wagon, with the nosebag on but still unable to eat. Or when an unfortunate horse like this has got its nosebag on wrong, cannot manage to eat, and no one thinks of helping it.” Kierkegaard, however, did think about helping the horse, but in the end refrained from doing anything, just like the time he had refrained from joining the dance.
At other times, for all its tragic qualities, the situation was comical, as one day in 1840, when the well-off Kierkegaard took a walk on Grønningen and encountered a suspect-looking character from the Poorhouse (the workhouse for convicts and the destitute): “Today a fellow from the Poorhouse came up to me out by Grønningen and handed me a letter he asked me to read. It began as follows: ‘I fall upon my knees before you in the most profound humility, et cetera.’ Involuntarily I looked up from the paper to see whether he was doing so, but he wasn’t. Would it have been more comical if he had done so? Does the comic consist in this contradiction between a convention of speech and reality?”
Once in a while it was not reality that provided his gaze with poetic material; rather, it was his gaze that inspected reality in order to test out an artistic principle: “It might be interesting to employ examples in order to investigate what is meant by eternal images, in both the aesthetic and the artistic senses, specifying the fundamental relationships of mood that must obtain between the various individual component parts of an image in order for it to cohere as an eternal image.—A boat off Kallebro Strand, a boat with one man on board, standing all the way back in the stern, spearing eels, thus lifting the other end of the boat up in the air—finely nuanced grey weather: This is an eternal image…. Esrom Lake calls for a sailboat, but with ladies on board.” In other cases we get a mere glimpse of a world that slips into the journal on a gentle breeze: “The splendidly dressed lady who on Sunday afternoon was sailing about in the canal in one of Eskildsen’s boats, alone.” Kierkegaard was practically bewitched by these situations that capture eternity in a photographic instant, and that, happily, almost always include a woman: “This is another eternal image (cf. a passage somewhere in the middle of Journal NB 4)—shrubbery forms the far boundary of a park, a brook runs through it—it is morning, a young lady in a housedress strolls alone / There will be a view by the Poorhouse Brook which expresses this completely.”
“People Bath”
From his childhood on, Kierkegaard took pleasure in walking, and he loved to disappear into the crowd or wend his way through unfamiliar streets with no particular goal in mind. In mid-July 1837 he ironized about the bourgeois philistines whose “morality is a brief summary of various police ordinances” and who have never “felt homesickness for something unknown and far away, never felt the profundity of being nothing whatever, of strolling out of Nørreport with four shillings in one’s pocket and a slender walking stick in one’s hand.”
Kierkegaard’s form was easily recognizable with its “high shoulders, the restless, somewhat hopping gait,” as Arthur Abrahams described him in lively memoirs, which also mention “the little, thin cane with which he flicked off the tips of the plants and blades of grass along the edge of the path” when he got excited during his walks along the lakes. “It always pleased me to speak with him,” Eline Boisen wrote, “but it did annoy me to be the focus of attention, and that was what one was when one walked with him, because he fenced so strangely with his walking stick and very often would stand still in the street, gesticulating and then laughing quite loudly.” Later, the bamboo walking stick was was replaced by “the inevitable umbrella,” as Tycho Spang called this accessory which further contributed to Kierkegaard’s unique presence on the street and which Kierkegaard made the object of a cheerful fetishism in a note dating from 1840, jotted on a little scrap of paper. “My Umbrella, My Friendship,” he titled his note, which reports on the following incident: “It was a frightful storm. I stood alone, abandoned by everyone, alone on Kongens Nytorv. Then my umbrella, too, turned on me. I could not decide whether or not to toss it away on account of its unfaithfulness and become a misanthrope. It had become so dear to me that I would always take it along when I went for a walk, rain or shine. Indeed, in order to demonstrate to it that I do not love it merely for its usefulness, I sometimes walk up and down the floor of my parlor, pretend that I am outdoors, supporting myself upon it; I open it up, lean my chin on the handle, bring it up to my lips, et cetera.” According to the catalog prepared for the auction of Kierkegaard’s effects after his death, he had owned three umbrellas: “one green silk umbrella,” “one black silk umbrella,” plus “one small ditto.”
Kierkegaard’s geographical range—with Sædding as the westernmost point, Viborg as the northernmost, and Berlin serving as both the easternmost and southernmost—was oddly disproportionate to his present global status, but since intellect and wanderlust are disparate qualities, Kierkegaard had no difficulty in making Copenhagen his world. “In general, the streets of Copenhagen were for him one large reception room, where he moved about all the time and spoke to everyone he wished to,” wrote Henriette Lund, and on this point she is backed up by this delightful journal entry by Kierkegaard himself: “I regard the whole of Copenhagen as one great social gathering. But on one day I regard myself as the host who goes around conversing with all the many cherished guests whom I have invited; on another day I assume that some important man has given the party and that I am a guest. I dress differently, greet people differently, et cetera, all according to the varying circumstances.”
Although this last detail concerning his choice of clothing should probably be ascribed to an excessive enthusiasm for fiction, the recollections of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries are bursting with sketches taken from the street. Thus in 1844 Kierkegaard wrote that even though “[I speak] every day with about fifty people of all ages, I nonetheless feel obligated to be able to recall immediately what each person I speak with had said the last time we spoke together and the time before that. Similarly, every person who is the object of my attention—his words, the tendency of his thoughts—instantly becomes vividly present to me as soon as I see him, even if it has been a long while since I last saw him.” Naturally, it is impossible to verify the numerical accuracy of this assertion, but even if we (yet again) discount every mythologizing attempt to improve on reality, Kierkegaard the street philosopher remains a historical reality. Frederik Nielsen, a pastor from Funen, provided us with this refreshing description of the renowned author of the pseudonyms: “It was still in the period of pseudonyms, although everyone knew who the author was, and the thin little man, whom you could meet one moment at Østerport and the next on the entirely opposite side of town, apparently a carefree peripatetic, was recognized by everyone.”
And there seems to have been no end to the number of people who strolled with their subsequently-so-famous countryman. Indeed, Peter Christian Zahle assures us that the majority of “Copenhagen’s eminent figures” walked “arm in arm” with the magister: “Statesmen, actors, philosophers, poets, old and young—in brief, the most various sorts of people—can pride themselves on having known Søren Kierkegaard.” One of these notables was the famous choreographer August Bournonville, who related that he had “often had the pleasure of walking with him and of refreshing myself from his inexhaustible font of wit and perspicacity.” Bournonville had never got around to reading On the Concept of Irony, but in the course of their strolls he learned a bit of what he missed: “I learned this much: that irony is not synonymous with ridicule, mockery, or bitterness, but is on the contrary an important element in our spiritual existence.” Indeed, Bournonville now believed he had come to the understanding that irony is “the smile through the tears, which prevents us from becoming lachrymose.” Kierkegaard also went on long walks with the actor Christen Rosenkilde, whose daughter Julie would recall how the two incongruous figures—“Father in his large greatcoat” and “Kierkegaard, limping along with his short trouser legs and swinging his little cane”—one day indulged their common glee in experimentation: “Father went up to a poor woman and gave her a five-rixdollar bill, whereupon he and Kierkegaard delighted in her surprise; and there was the time they found a two-rixdollar coin and gave it to a scoundrel, politely saying, ‘Wouldn’t you be good enough to turn this in if you should by chance go past a police station?’ ”
Not every person with whom Kierkegaard took walks left a written record of it. One of the more prominent members of this silent group is the poet, physician, and amorist Emil Aarestrup, who made his home in Nysted on the island of Lolland but who loved to come to Copenhagen and, among other things, go for a stroll. It is not known how the two men became acquainted—Kierkegaard never writes a single word about Aarestrup—but their relationship dates from at least the mid-1840s, when Aarestrup asked one of his friends to convey his greetings to Grundtvig and Kierkegaard if he runs into them “and has nothing better to say.” At one point in 1848, Aarestrup journeyed home to Nysted and was in high spirits thanks to kisses from a pair of ladies and to “the long walk with Søren Kierkegaard.” And in 1852, when he was planning a trip to the capital, Aarestrup promised Pastor Andreas Krogh that he would certainly convey his greetings to Kierkegaard when he meets the magister “on the last day, as is my custom.” On their walks together, the rotund Aarestrup and the linear Kierkegaard looked like an ambulatory number “10,” but the two very heterogeneous men, hypersensitive as they both were, profoundly self-conscious and uncompromising loners, surely enjoyed each other’s company. Aarestrup speaks of Kierkegaard as one of his “favorite authors” and, like him, Aarestrup was truly tired of Hans Christian Andersen’s “infinity of sentimental confectioner’s sugar.” Kierkegaard must certainly have been attracted by the Renaissance man Aarestrup’s voracious lust for life and his intrepid participation in the life of the city. According to the poet Christian Winther, after Poul Martin Møller died, Aarestrup was the best person with whom one could discuss aesthetic matters.
At one point in his On the Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard called Socrates a “virtuoso of the casual encounter” on the streets and alleys of Athens, where he always “spoke with equal facility to hide tanners, tailors, Sophists, statesmen, and poets, with young and old, spoke with them equally well about everything.” In a journal entry from the beginning of 1850 Kierkegaard made this retrospective comment: “In order to endure intellectual exertions such as mine, I needed diversion, the diversion of casual encounters in the streets and alleys.” For all their physical dissimilarities, the likeness between the two peripatetics was unmistakable—Kierkegaard was a Copenhagen Socrates and Socrates was an Athenian Kierkegaard—but his virtuosity in “casual encounters” was not only philosophically or psychologically motivated, it also stemmed from a fundamental need for contact, both communicative and physical. Kierkegaard quite simply needed his daily “people bath,” as he called it. According to Vilhelm Birkedal, it was “his custom with everyone” to take his companion by the arm, lending the walk an intimacy that was noted by many of his contemporaries and that unquestionably helps to dispel the image of Kierkegaard held by later generations, according to which he was a perennially introverted person, terrified of physical contact.
The intimacy that Kierkegaard’s arm invited was interpreted by others as a mere tactical ploy. Thus Birkedal wrote that he sensed that Kierkegaard “only wanted to pump me and experiment with me psychologically.” This suspicion was not allayed when Birkedal heard what had happened to a man who had stood at the railing next to the customs house, staring down at the water. Kierkegaard also stood there, edging closer and closer, surmising that the man was of a mind to jump into the water and take his life. “The experimenting psychologist wanted to read the man’s face in order to see how the idea of suicide expressed itself there—to see how a person looked at such a decisive moment. Noticing this, the stranger, who had never contemplated doing anything of the sort, grew tired of being the object of that investigative gaze and suddenly turned and asked: ‘Mr. Magister! What did you mean when you wrote that it’s a blessing to have corns?’ ‘I’ll tell you,’ answered Kierkegaard, while he took the man by the arm and walked with him through the streets of the city, lecturing and gesticulating.” And the business about the corns did need some explaining: In one of the “Diapsalmata” included in Either/Or, Kierkegaard had written, “To be a perfectly complete human being is indeed the highest thing. Now I have acquired corns, and that is always something”—thereby proclaiming, in rather silly fashion, that viewed logically, the concept of “completeness” implied that one must have everything, including corns on one’s feet.
Hans Brøchner also walked frequently arm in arm with Kierkegaard and could report about how the vigilant Copenhagener carried out his psychological studies: “His smile and his look were indescribably expressive. He had his own way of giving a greeting at a distance with just a glance. It was only a small movement of the eye, and yet it expressed so much. There could be something infinitely gentle and loving in his eye, but also something stimulating and exasperating. With just a glance at a passerby he could irresistibly ‘establish a rapport’ with him, as he expressed it. The person who received the look became attracted or repelled, embarrassed, uncertain, or exasperated. I have walked the whole length of a street with him while he explained how it was possible to carry out psychological studies by establishing such rapport with passersby. And while he expanded on the theory he realized it in practice with nearly everyone we met. There was no one upon whom his gaze did not make a visible impression. On the same occasion he surprised me with the ease with which he struck up conversations with so many people. In a few remarks he took up the thread from an earlier conversation and carried it a step further, to a point where it could be continued again at another opportunity.”
Kierkegaard’s psychological interrogations and his continual experimentation were not the only sources of the eccentric pace of his walks; the magister’s mercurial and crablike gait could also play a role. Brøchner remembered: “Because of the irregularity of his movements, which must have been related to his lopsidedness, it was never possible to keep in a straight line while walking with him; one was always being pushed, by turns, either in towards the houses and the cellar stairwells, or out towards the gutters. When, in addition, he also gestured with his arms and his rattan cane, it became even more of an obstacle course. Once in a while, it was necessary to take the opportunity to switch round to his other side in order to gain sufficient space.” This was a mind that had gone out for a walk, a dialectical mind, hence the unending zigzagging on the sidewalk. And thus as well, perhaps, there might be a sudden diagonal movement to the other side of the street, the shady side, because the genius was bothered by too much light. In his long list of Kierkegaard’s idiosyncasies Levin thus notes: “Since he avoided the sun, he always walked in the shade, and just as with trolls, it was impossible to get him to walk through a sunny patch. He had a falling out with Pastor Spang just because he [Kierkegaard] wanted to turn back when a ray of sunshine fell across the road—and he did so, saying, ‘But I don’t want to bother anyone. Go ahead, do just as you please.’ ”
In Copenhagen, walking, promenading, strolling, or merely drifting along had become fashionable and so widespread that it had been necessary to impose systematic regulations on pedestrian traffic and to promulgate legal ordinances defining which pedestrians had the right-of-way on the sidewalk. (According to the police ordinance of 1810, the pedestrian who had the gutter on his right-hand side had the right-of-way.) Kierkegaard walked and walked, sometimes beyond all boundaries. “No matter what, do not lose the joy of walking,” he wrote to Henriette Kierkegaard in 1847. “I walk my way to health and away from every illness every day. I have walked my way to my best ideas, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it…. If a person just continues to walk like this, things will surely go well.” And perhaps they did, but in his haste Kierkegaard had forgotten that his sister-in-law was bedridden for long periods and might therefore have difficulty following his well-meaning advice. And there were also other occasions on which things went a bit too briskly. Julie Thomsen, who in 1845 had been left a widow with five small children, received this letter from him in 1848: “Dear Julie! It is alas quite clear that we treated your little son unfairly today, that it was we who walked too briskly, and we—or I—bear the blame for his beginning to cry, which, from a child’s point of view, he was quite justified in doing. This is why I am writing this and am sending the parcel that accompanies this.” The letter goes on to include a lively retelling of one of the Grimms’ fairy tales, while the “little parcel” that accompanied the letter was intended as a sort of compensation: “So convey my greetings to the little fellow, and give him the accompanying box of toys from the strange man who walked so briskly with him today.” Signed: “Your entirely devoted / Cousin S.K.”
It was scarcely an exaggeration for Kierkegaard to say that he walked his way to his “best ideas,” for what he wrote he wrote currente calamo, that is, as quickly as the pen could move, which was only possible, he explained, because he “put everything into final form while walking.” His walks were therefore carefully calibrated to match his volume of ideas, and to F. L. Liebenberg’s audible amazement Kierkegaard could suddenly interrupt their conversation, almost in midsentence, with the words: “Now I must go home and write…. I work during certain definite hours every day.” Dumbfounded, Liebenberg asked, “But can you always be ready at a particular hour?” whereupon Kierkegaard replied, “If I am not when I sit down, it comes quite soon.” After which Kierkegaard tipped his hat, wished Liebenberg good day, and went home where, according to A. F. Schiødte, it was not unusual for him to have scarcely come in the door before going directly to his writing desk, “where he would stand for a long time with his hat and his cane or umbrella and write.”
When he was at home Kierkegaard was just as inaccessible as he was forthcoming when he went out. Tycho Spang relates that Kierkegaard “lived in a large, elegant apartment with a series of furnished rooms which in winter were heated and illuminated, and in which he did a good deal of pacing back and forth. As best I can remember, in each room there was ink, pen, and paper, which he used during his wanderings to fix an idea with a few quick words or a symbol.” Spang continues: “He had a difficult time putting up with visitors, and his servant had to deny that he was home to everyone except a very few individuals.” The Norwegian author and feminist Camilla Collett wished to call upon the literary muckety-mucks of Copenhagen, but had been turned away by both Christian Winther and Hans Christian Andersen. When she tried to visit Kierkegaard at his place one day, his servant was compelled to disappoint her by informing her that the magister was not at home. When she came down to the street she glanced up at the apartment in disappointment and saw Kierkegaard standing at the window; their eyes met, and in their mutual surprise they nodded briefly and utterly spontaneously to one another. Otto Zinck had a different but no less bizarre experience when he went past Kierkegaard’s lavishly illuminated apartment in Nørregade one evening and decided to stop by for an instant. Kierkegaard was dressed up as if for a dinner party, so Zinck began to make his exit but was asked to stay and chat for a while: “When I asked if he expected others, he answered, ‘No, I never have parties, but once in a while it occurs to me to pretend that I am having one, so I walk to and fro through the rooms, mentally entertaining my imagined guests.’ I found this explanation rather peculiar, but I endured an hour with him; he was very charming and sometimes uncontrollably amusing.” To have to “endure” a person who was both “very charming” and at times “uncontrollably amusing,” might sound like a self-contradiction, but it is probably a perfect description of the rather strenuous asymmetry associated with being in Kierkegaard’s presence. Otto Zinck was himself an actor, but here he had apparently met his match.
As is clear from an unutilized appendix to The Point of View for My Work as an Author, however, Kierkegaard’s disciplined method of working at home also had its unique vulnerabilities: “If, after a walk, which is when I meditate and gather ideas, I turned to go back home, every word ready to be written down, overwhelmed with ideas and in a certain sense so weak that I could scarcely walk, … if then, some poor person along the way had addressed me, and if in my excitement over my ideas I had not had time to talk with him, then when I reached home it would be as though everything had disappeared, and I would sink into the most frightful spiritual scruples at the thought that what I had done to that person, God could do to me. If, on the other hand, I took the time to talk with the poor person and listen to him, this never happened to me, and everything would be ready when I reached home.”
Here, the concern for the poor is saturated with so much pathos that a certain dissonance is unavoidable, but Kierkegaard’s concern for the common man was extraordinary and unfeigned, and it attests to the breadth and range of his practice of Christianity. In a journal entry from 1849, by which time his relationship to the city and to other people had become seriously warped in many respects, he explained himself quite undemonstratively: “I wanted to live with the simple man. It was indescribably satisfying to me to be friendly and kind and attentive and sympathetic to precisely that social class which is all too neglected in the so-called Christian state. What I could accomplish was in many ways insignificant, but it could nonetheless be of some significance to this sort of people. Let me give an example, and I have scores of them. An oldish-looking woman from Amager sits in the arcade selling fruit. She has an elderly mother whom I have occasionally helped out a little. When I greet her, I have not really done anything. Nevertheless it pleased her, it cheered her up, that every morning a person whom she might regard as fortunate in life came by and never forgot to say ‘Good morning’ and occasionally also to exchange a few words with her…. How heartening it is in so many ways for the class of people who must otherwise stand and wait in anterooms, who are hardly permitted to say a single word—how heartening it is that there is one person whom they always see on the street, a person whom they can approach and talk with freely.”
People beyond the ramparts of the city might also benefit from Kierkegaard’s unaffected presence. Thus H. C. Rosted recounts how for a number of years the magister was a frequent guest at the Mail Coach Inn in Hørsholm in northern Zealand, where his carriage would come sweeping in so that he could spend the day in the romantic surroundings: “Often he stood out in the cow barn and chatted with the herdsman, and sometimes he could be seen sitting out by the road with an old stone breaker. He especially talked with the stone breaker a good deal, and when the latter met people from the inn he would always ask, ‘When is the Magister coming?’—and he liked to add that the Magister was such a fine man to talk with.”
The free and easy atmosphere at the Mail Coach Inn was particularly attributable to the lady of the house, Miss Reinhard, who was in charge of food service and had the splendid first name Regine! It was said that she had an “extraordinarily high” opinion of Kierkegaard, and in fact the family would sometimes tease her, calling Kierkegaard her “flame.” The feelings may have been reciprocated to a certain extent because for this second Regine, Kierkegaard “always [brought along] a copy of the writings he published.” And unlike the first Regine, the second Regine had the requisite religious foundation. At one point in 1855, when one of the younger family members caught her sitting and reading an issue of The Moment and asked her if she could really understand what she was reading, she answered indignantly: “Do I understand it? Yes, you can believe I understand every word.” And Regine also knew how to prepare a veal cutlet so that it tasted divine and remembered to have on hand the correct Rhine wine—liebfraumilch (which Kierkegaard loved especially because of its name). And, finally, she knew that she was to serve the dozen boiled prunes that the brilliant guest’s sluggish stomach required.
“Yes, of Course, I Am an Aristocrat—”
The city is a metaphor for Kierkegaard’s work as an author—changeable and disquieting—and it could take almost no time to move from the lightfilled, elegantly beveled neoclassical plazas to the cacophony of the dark alleys. So when Kierkegaard moved about in the streets of Copenhagen, his strutting was connected with his writing, he was everywhere and nowhere, walking this way and that, conversing intimately with everyone, but at the same time distant and alien. Or in Georg Brandes’s precise and paradoxical formulation, he was “the self-enclosed man whom everyone knew.”
Martensen did not grasp this and took offense. Heiberg wondered at it and looked the other way. But for Kierkegaard, the body, in all its capricious lopsidedness, was a vital, communicative point. The man emerged from behind the works, thereby surrendering any claim to the authority people would unconsciously have granted him had he never shown himself on the street: “An author who is essentially educated by Socrates and the Greeks, who grasps the ironic and begins an enormous undertaking as a writer—he is quite specifically opposed to becoming an authority, and to that end he rightly sees that by continually walking in the streets he must necessarily undermine the impression he makes.”
This renunciation of power was connected to the mode of indirect communication in which the works had been created, and Kierkegaard claimed that he had been ideologically committed to this powerlessness starting as early as the publication of Either/Or. Two years before his death, when he took stock of his accomplishments, he gave special thanks to all the useful “gossipmongers” without whom his intrigue-filled maneuvers would never have succeeded: “If I wanted to tell about it, an entire book could be written on how inventive I have been in order to deceive people about my existence. When I was proofreading Either/Or and writing the edifying discourses, I had practically no time to go walking in the street. During that period I employed another method. Every evening, after I left home exhausted and had eaten at Mini’s, I spent ten minutes at the theater—not one minute more. Since I was known by everyone, I assumed that there would certainly be enough gossipmongers in the theater who would then say, ‘He’s at the theater every single evening, he doesn’t do anything else.’ Oh, you beloved gossipmongers, how I thank you. Without you I could never have achieved what I wanted…. So there was a blessed concord in my soul about using this means to undermine the impression people had of me.” But which “me,” by the way?
As the years passed, what had begun as a carefree stroll out of Nørreport “with four shillings in his pocket and a slender walking stick in his hand” thus became a demonstrative act with which Kierkegaard opposed the snobbish aloofness from the concrete and ordinary world he noted among the intellectuals of his day: “Yes, of course, I am an aristocrat (and so is everyone who is truly conscious of willing the Good, because they are always few in number), but I want to stand right on the street, in the midst of the people, where there is danger and opposition. I do not want (à la Martensen, Heiberg, et cetera) to live in cowardly and prissy fashion at an aristocratic remove, in select circles protected by an illusion (that the masses seldom see them and therefore imagine them to be Somebody).”
Kierkegaard chose as his exemplars Socrates and Christ, both of whom withdrew from established institutions and took to the streets. Socrates had his Sophists to battle against, Christ took aim at the Pharisees—and Kierkegaard thus had Martensen and Heiberg, in whom equal portions of sophism and pharisaism had fused into a fussy refinement. It cannot be denied that a certain self-assertion gradually crept into this gesture, with Kierkegaard emphasizing the unselfishness of his peripatetic praxis, his wandering activism, but he did remain true to his principle, right up to the end: “Quite literally to make ordinary daily life into one’s stage, to go out and teach in the streets.”
And this was exactly what constituted his aristocratic radicalism.
“I Think Grundtvig Is Nonsense”
At the age of thirty-seven Peter Christian had been appointed parish pastor for Pedersborg and Kindertofte, near Sorø in south-central Zealand. Two months later, on November 11, 1842, he was ordained by Bishop Mynster in the Church of Our Lady. So at last this doctor of theology—who was so brilliantly gifted but, from the bishop’s point of view, so difficult to deal with—had been placed at an appropriate remove from Copenhagen circles.
But scarcely had Peter Christian, Henriette, and little Poul got themselves more or less installed in their new surroundings when the government issued a “Proclamation Concerning the Baptist Sect in Denmark,” dated December 27, 1842, by which the pastors of the State Church were obliged to perform compulsory baptisms of the children of Baptist parents. Forced baptism of this sort was totally incompatible with Peter Christian’s theological principles, so shortly thereafter, when a farm owner came to him bearing a ten-month-old child of Baptist parents and demanded that it be baptised in accordance with the proclamation, Peter Christian was compelled to refuse to carry out the duties of his office. In this he was in complete agreement with Grundtvig, who had published a little pamphlet entitled On Religious Persecution in which he dissociated himself in the strongest terms from any governmental interference in religious matters. For Grundtvig it was indisputable that “the State Church prostitutes its baptism by foisting it upon the Baptists, giving them express permission to wash it off when they please.” Thus Peter Christian had to stand by his refusal in order that Mynster and his officials would understand that “in wanting to go through with this sort of compulsory baptism, it is by no means the pastor of Pedersborg on whom they are being tough, but rather they are defying Our Lord Christ, the history of the Church, and sound reason.”
As the supreme representative of the State Church, Bishop Mynster neither could nor would accept Peter Christian’s decision, and the bishop therefore requested him to reconsider the situation carefully. Peter Christian did not find it advisable to act against his conscience, however, so Mynster had to find another pastor to baptise the child. But the principle at stake had now become critical, and after a number of shocking episodes in which women abducted their little baptismal babies just as the State Church had readied its entire ritual, Peter Christian received an ultimatum from the government on February 16, 1845, to the effect that if he did not begin carrying out compulsory baptisms within fourteen days he would be summarily dismissed.
A few days before these threatening words reached Peter Christian, his younger brother in the city had heard rumors, and on February 10 he sent off a letter several pages long in which he fidgeted dialectically between his allegiance to Mynster in principle and his personal sympathy for Peter Christian: “I support both of you, as always, and it could be wished that you had never collided with each other.” Peter Christian was quite understandably rather puzzled and in another letter asked for further clarification. Søren Aabye burned this letter shortly after receiving it, but from his response we learn that in his opinion Peter Christian ought to stand his ground because “in the end, the Bishop will not prevail.” The bishop did not prevail and had to approve more lenient regulations with respect to the matter.
The situation had been quite painful for the two brothers, for even though blood is thicker than water, Peter Christian was a Grundtvigian and Søren Aabye was more or less of the opposite observance; he was Mynster’s man, for Mynster had been his father’s pastor. And indeed, on February 9, 1845—that is, the day before his dialectical epistle to Peter Christian—he had heard Mynster preach in the Palace Church and had found it “excellent.” Thereafter he went home and worked on the manuscript of his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Grundtvig is subjected to phenomenally parodic treatment that drew on (and expanded on) many of the unflattering comments and reflections that had been accumulating in the journals for years.
From the point of view of intellectual history it is striking that the two men who together have had the most vital significance for modern Danish theology and ecclesiastical life—Kierkegaard and Grundtvig—individually had views about as different from each other on every issue as was humanly possible. Naturally there are well-known similarities: Both were critical of theological rationalism and of the speculative philosophy of one or another German vintage; both had advanced pedagogical views relative to their times, understanding that the truth is always dialogical and is not a disembodied, monological abstraction; both opposed their times’ easygoing mixture of bourgeois virtues, spiritual humanism, and romantic sensitivity; both bound themselves—if in very different fashion—to the common man, the people; both knew that man is not (in Grundtvig’s words) a “sausage endowed with reason” but rather (in Kierkegaard’s words) “passion”; and both came to be in an increasingly strained relationship with the State Church and its representatives, the Copenhagen cliques, not least Mynster and company. But here the similarities stop, and the rest was astonishment, distaste, and ridicule.
Now making fun of Grundtvig was not Kierkegaard’s invention, but was a popular pastime among the clever heads of the day. As early as 1817, Heiberg had published a New ABC Book: An Hour’s Instruction to Honor, Serve, and Amuse Young Grundtvig. A Pedagogical Attempt; it was cordially nasty and adroitly executed. And the following year Poul Martin Møller continued in the same vein with his Attempt at a Letter from Heaven in Grundtvig’s New Historical Tone, in which he grandly imitated Grundtvigian bombast, at one point famously letting Grundtvig proclaim, “I and Our Lord have decided.” Kierkegaard holds undisputed first place in the discipline of Grundtvig abuse, however, and the circumstance that he had known Grundtvig personally since his days at secondary school and continued to have conversations with him certainly did not hamper the pace of his audacity. Thus the massive, calm, pastoral figure and the nimble, dialectically agitated magister were said to have strolled Østergade together, and when they reached the gate they both raised their hats—indeed, according to one eyewitness, Kierkegaard did so “with great deference.” In addition to his personal acquaintance, however, Kierkegaard also had a rather fine selection of Grundtvig’s works in his library, ten titles in all, taken from the entire gamut of Grundtvig’s genres—though not including his polemical pieces—ranging in time from 1808 to 1850. Kierkegaard’s reading was hardly exhaustive; it was surely biased and sporadic as was his wont, though it was not completely superficial, as is clear, for example, from the following perfectly executed pastiche that was originally a part of the manuscript of Stages on Life’s Way but was omitted from from the final version: “Let the theme be the Word of the Church. We go back several centuries. We grope about in the medieval darkness. Papal power oppresses the conscience with the intolerable yoke of Rome … until Martin Luther, the man of the Word, visibly demonstrated the profundity of the darkness in which the papists were fumbling and won the decisive battle at the church door in Wittenberg where he silenced the learned tongue lashers and distorters of the Word. But then the darkness descended again for three centuries until the matchless discovery here in Scandinavia, when, in spite of the German schoolmasters, the Living Word was liberated and given its due as the mother tongue in Denmark’s loveliest field and meadow, and the mouth of the people and the tongue of the people shall not be bound, but all will speak in the Spirit when the Golden Age arrives, the matchless future, which the seer glimpses with his eagle eye and proclaims upon the mouth harp; when the Living Word, the Word of the Church, the Word of God as it was in the beginning, resounds in the meadow of Denmark. So shall it be, Amen, yes, in all eternity, Amen.” Grundtvig could write his Short Synopsis of World History as a Whole, but Kierkegaard, who here reveals his perfect pitch and his great talent for imitation, could do it even more succinctly. It takes him only three sentences, and that’s that for world history!
The “matchless discovery” situated in the midst of this verbal torrent has since entered history as the standard term for the epoch-making realization at which Grundtvig arrived in 1825 when, after decades of internal theological struggle, he saw that God’s word to man is not to be sought primarily in the biblical scriptures, which have always been vulnerable to the most various sorts of interpretation, but in “the Living Word,” that is, in the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer that together with baptism and communion (the mysteries of initiation and of fellowship) constitute the unshakable foundation of the Church. Grundtvig developed this insight in a polemic against the rationalist H. N. Clausen, whom he not only made into the spokesman for the worst sort of “exegetical popery” but also criticized so savagely that Clausen sued him for libel, which resulted in Grundtvig having to pay a fine of one hundred rixdollars and submit to lifelong advance censorship of his writings. But even though Grundtvig’s “ecclesiastical view” was already quite radical, Peter Christian Kierkegaard nonetheless went one step further and formulated the theory that during the forty days between his resurrection and his ascension into Heaven, Christ supposedly imparted the Apostles’ Creed (“the little Word from the Lord’s own mouth”) to his apostles.
It never seriously bothered Grundtvig that quite a few historical circumstances speak against his discovery, indeed they cry out against it. And when Kierkegaard called it “matchless,” it was only because it wasn’t: It seemed to him rather to be “the abracadabra of the Living Word” or, if not that, then a “neo-Platonic, Gnostic jumble.” With malicious impertinence the Postscript makes Grundtvig’s discovery the object of an investigation designed to define its “category”—aesthetic, ethical-psychological, dogmatic—which predictably enough does nothing to clarify the situation. Grundtvig is and remains undialectical, and for lack of anything better has chosen to make “the profundity of profound thought … obvious by furrowing his brow, yodeling with his voice, lifting his forehead, staring straight ahead, and hitting the low-F note in the bass register.”
A frequently recurring point in Kierkegaard’s critique is Grundtvig’s remarkably modest level of self-reflection: “An idea seizes him. He is astonished, moved. He wants to bless all of humanity with his matchless discovery. On the other hand, he lacks the dialectical mobility to inspect reflectively what he has discovered, to see whether it is something great or something vacuous.” When it was a matter of being able to ascend into the dialectical ether, where the problems really become crystalline, it was nearly as if Grundtvig had been equipped with a “hat of lead,” which was why the result of his strenuous perspiration usually ended up with “a very modest la-di-da, la-di-da, la-di-da, whoops!” Kierkegaard’s criticisms were also twined together with idiosyncratic feelings that revealed profound differences of temperament. Thus he was irritated by Grundtvig’s knack for always being where the action was and his peculiar inversion of normal chronology: “In his younger days he represented old, old-fashioned, ancient, primal-primeval Christianity; now, in his old age he is decked out as a fashionable fellow.” Similarly, Grundtvig seemed to have been equipped with an attitudinally relativistic ability to accommodate himself to every situation: “At one point he has the apostolic, saintly glow in his transfigured face; at another point he is unrecognizable in Old Norse shagginess; always a noisy individual, godly, worldly, Old Norse, Christian, high priest, Holger the Dane; at one point exulting, at another weeping, always prophetic.” Other sorts of mockery also found their way into the journals where, amid much other bluster and grotesquery, Grundtvig is termed a “world-historical rowdy,” a “bellowing blacksmith,” a “hearty, yodeling fellow,” and an “Ale-Norse warrior.” In brief, “I think Grundtvig is nonsense.”
Nor did Grundtvig receive particularly high marks for the artistic impression he made. His style, which was visible as soon as one looked at his printed pages, was particularly irritating. When an author stretches out the s p a c i n g of letters in a word (or italicizes, as one does nowadays), Kierkegaard explains pedagogically, it is in order to “help the reader better understand the development of the exposition or in order to emphasize an individual word,” but “the idea of stretching the spacing is precisely a relative one.” For Grundtvig, on the other hand, everything is absolute, and he “stretches out the spacing absolutely, so that it comes to the point that it is the words which have not had their spacing stretched which are remarkable.” Things get no better when one attempts to understand what Grundtvig has in fact written: “His style, especially in his later pieces, does not occasionally include an arousing allusion to Nordic mythology; no, it has become gibberish in which elves, and trolls, and the Mill of Dalby, and the secondhand inventory of a worn-out poetic phraseology, and God knows what else turn up. You have to read him with a dictionary or be prepared to be unable to understand him, since he lards his style with this furniture just as sea captains lard their speech with nautical terminology.” Or, to repeat the distaste in the abbreviated form of exclamation: “Ooh, ayy, oyy, ohh! Matchless! Hoo hay! See! See! Moses! Moses!”
Although Kierkegaard’s sarcastic attitude toward Grundtvig’s heartiness became increasingly heartless as the years passed, he clearly had respect for the Nordic giant’s legendary learning, the weightiness of his personality, and his indefatigable, titanic energy. “Grundtvig is a pure genius or, if you will, sheer genius—it doesn’t matter which word is used,” Kierkegaard noted, expressing a sharp-tongued little reservation apparently occasioned by the use of the word “genius.” Because otherwise Kierkegaard never used the term about any living person—except with reference to himself. And then he went on to subject Grundtvig to a psychological analysis that helps correct the widely held view of the man as the very essence of Danish popular culture: “Every nature has a need for its opposite—produces it itself—and quite often imagines that it is itself that opposite. Thus Grundtvig is a powerful nature—power, toughness, doggedness, and the like. That is characteristic of him. And precisely for that reason he loves to speak of warmth and cordiality and the like. It is a necessary emanation.” There is certainly a lot to be said for this supposition of a hidden connection between toughness and cordiality in Grundtvig, and it surely corresponds to Kierkegaard’s own oddly paradoxical situation: his continuing emphasis on the necessity of choice and his own ineluctable fickleness. Despite his notorious distaste for the multitude and the masses, Kierkegaard was in practice more attuned to the people than was Grundtvig (who sat and wrote about the importance of the people and therefore did not want to be disturbed—by the people). This is attested to by a number of sources, including the Rudelbach sisters, who wrote with some indignation that “Grundtvig is just not suited to talk to simple people. They are unable to come to him in confidence or with an open heart. Of course, the reason for this is that Grundtvig has always maintained a limited network of acquaintances, which was what suited him, and has otherwise buried himself in his books and research. Now, when these ordinary people come to him, he treats them quite curtly and repels them, or is at any rate inaccessible to them.”
Viewed from Kierkegaard’s perspective, Grundtvig’s reclusiveness was his necessary protection from the Grundtvigians, who failed to gain psychological access to the hard man behind all the cordiality and therefore ended up as “sheer drivel-heads.” This driveling included, first and foremost, their disastrous propensity to replace the paradox and the offense of the Incarnation with “the miraculous-delightful, the delightful, the matchlessly delightful and profound, et cetera, in short, with straightforward categories.” But the driveling was also attributable to their bestial cultivation of procreation and family life, by which they reproduced “Jewish values.” And they also gathered into “parties,” entertaining one another in the “free language of universal genius incarnate.” This doesn’t sound very nice, and it wasn’t: “Anyone who knows something of the fuss the Grundtvigians make about Life and the Living, as well as the nuisance they cause with these expressions will easily see that the secret of the whole thing is to attain to a childishness typical of southern climes.” They supplemented this infantilism with their “nonsense about nationality,” which in Kierkegaard’s view was a “regression to paganism,” because Christianity had “wanted to abolish paganism’s deification of nationalities!”
Kierkegaard dismissed the Grundtvigians’ nationalist-romantic preoccupation with Nordicism as “twaddle,” and he was tiresomely untiring in his mockery of Grundtvigian yodeling and the “furrowed brows, wrinkled forehead, Norwegian accent, the rolling of the R, and all the other Grundtvigian affectations.” And the remark about the Norwegian accent was not merely a polemical add-on. Michael Rosing, a director at the Royal Theater, was a Norwegian and did what he could to Norwegianize the language used on the stage. This was well-received by the Grundtvigians, whose linguistic archetype was of course Old Norse, but it was not possible to get the nation to speak Old Norse, so they contented themselves with something that might remind one of Old Norse, namely Norwegian. And when on several occasions Kierkegaard called them “open-shirted,” this, too, was not merely abusive language. For Grundtvigians in fact liked to dispense with neckties, thereby giving evidence of their Old Norse manliness!
There were also great expectations among the Grundtvigians on June 23, 1845, when Swedish and Norwegian university students arrived in Copenhagen to participate in a Scandinavian student rally. The next evening they celebrated in the riding school of Christiansborg Palace, where Archdeacon Tryde spoke, and the following day the festivities of the Scandinavian Society continued in the Deer Park with singing and with no fewer than two addresses by Grundtvig. Kierkegaard read about the merriment in Fædrelandet, which carried evocative sketches both of the dinner at the riding school and of the festivities at the Deer Park. It was in thinking of the latter event that he found the greatest inspiration: “At the conclusion, an apotheosis. Grundtvig appears in the surrounding woods on a elevated location, supported by Barfoed and Povelsen. A great cloak is draped around him in artistic fashion. He has a staff in his hand. His face is concealed by a mask in which there is a single eye (the profound eye for world history). A long, mossy beard with birds’ nests in it (he is so old—about 1,000 years). With a hollow voice that is melodramatically accompanied by several blasts on a conch shell (as if calling to village meetings). He speaks dithyrambically. When he is finished speaking (that is, when the festival committee says ‘Enough,’ for otherwise he would never be finished) a bell is rung, a cord is pulled, the beard falls off, as does the enormous cloak. We see a slender young person with wings: It is Grundtvig as the Spirit of the Scandinavian Idea.”
Kierkegaard in Church
While the Scandinavian brothers and sisters were sprawled on the grass out at the Deer Park, Kierkegaard was in the Church of Our Lady in order—yet again—to hear Mynster preach. When he returned home he wrote his grotesque “apotheosis” about Grundtvig, and then he appended the following: “Oddly enough, Bishop Mynster preached that same Sunday. There was no one in the church, and yet, as when a great congregation inspires him to a splendid sermon, the empty church inspired him as well. When he was finished he gazed straight ahead in silence, and if there is a transfiguration when the dead go in behind the veil, then he was transfigured in that manner—and in the manner of a deceased person.” It was here that Kierkegaard belonged. Alone in the cool twilight of the church, together with a deceased person, transfigured as was his own father.
The son always remembered his father on the anniversary of his death, August 9, which became a sort of day of rest in Kierkegaard’s life, surrounded with a particular sort of ritual—thus in the manuscript of Three Edifying Discourses from 1843 the preface is dated “August 9th.” On the first anniversary of his father’s death Kierkegaard went to take communion at the Church of Our Lady, but the reverential atmosphere dissipated when several people, tourists perhaps, came plodding into the church right in the middle of the distribution of the sacrament in order to admire Bertel Thorvaldsen’s statues.
At other times he merely walked out to the grave at Assistens Cemetery and stood there lost in his own thoughts. Early in the evening on June 10, 1845, Kierkegaard noted an absurd incident in his journal: “Today I wanted to walk out to Father’s grave. I had an unusual need to do so; I was unusually withdrawn into myself. It happened that just as I reached the turn at the entrance, a woman came running, with her hat and shawl and parasol, a rather silly woman. The sweat was pouring from her and she spoke to an old lady who was walking a couple of steps away of me with a basket on her arm: ‘Where were you? We have now been waiting half an hour.’ (Thereafter the conversation continued, but in such a manner that she ran about busily like a dog, first ahead, then a step behind.) ‘We have waited half an hour. My sister is ready to cry. The hearse has already arrived. And the whole cortege, and the trumpeters have arrived, et cetera.’ What low comedy! The sister who was about to cry was on the verge of tears because the trumpeters had come while the lady with the basket had not.—I walked on another path, and fortunately they did not have to come in the vicinity of Father’s grave. It is really quite odd how it is precisely the most serious of moods into which the comic insinuates itself.” Kierkegaard was indignant at the lack of respect for the seriousness of the place, but down along the margin of the entry he nonetheless added: “This could be reworked in an ironic tone with the title ‘Tears at a Grave.’ ” Nothing is so bad that it isn’t good for something—if only one knows how to exploit chance events in artistic fashion.
Fortunately, silly misses with hats and parasols were fairly uncommon, and Kierkegaard liked to visit the cemetery and walk among the weathered monuments and overturned columns, gazing at the moss-covered gravestones whose silence was so eloquent. “Out there,” he wrote in a journal entry from May 1844, “everything preaches a sermon. For just as Nature proclaims God, so does every grave preach. There is a grave monument that depicts the bust of a young girl. She must certainly have been lovely, but now the stone has fallen down and the grave is surrounded with nettles. She seems to have had no family.—Another grave conceals a soldier whose helmet and sword lie upon his sepulcher; on the base it is written that his memory will never be forgotten. But alas, the gate of the railing has already come off its hinges. One is tempted to take his sword and defend him—he himself can no longer do so. And the mourners believed that his memory would never be forgotten.”
It was also possible to be edified within the city itself, for in 1840 the capital’s churches, chapels, foundations, hospitals, and penal institutions employed a total of thirty pastors, chaplains, and catechizers. In addition there were five German pastors and one French pastor. In accordance with his wishes, their superior, Bishop Mynster, preached twelve or fourteen times a year, almost always including the Christmas vespers service, and Kierkegaard rarely missed the occasion. He did, however, hear others preach, for example, the amiable and honorable E. C. Tryde, who had been archdeacon at the Church of Our Lady since 1838, serving as Kierkegaard’s confessor from January 1839 until April 1842. Tryde was of Mynster’s tendency in church matters, but his theology was more speculative and he also had friendly relations with Grundtvig.
At other times Kierkegaard went to the Christiansborg Palace Church to hear Just Paulli, whose friendship with H. L. Martensen extended all the way back to their schooldays, and who had married Mynster’s eldest daughter in 1841. Mynster, Martensen, and Paulli were thus a powerful theological triumvirate. Paulli was the most liberal of the three, and like Tryde he had some sympathy for the Grundtvigians and for their demand for more liberal ecclesiastical arrangements. As time passed Kierkegaard became increasingly critical of Paulli as a preacher: “What is that? Gibberish. He himself is evidently the victim of an illusion…. Oh, madness,” he noted indignantly on June 8, 1851, after having heard Paulli preach on “The Joy in the Holy Spirit.” Nonetheless he later made another effort, but Paulli did not impress him that time, either—indeed, Kierkegaard thought, for all the good it would do, Paulli could have stood there and preached for “170,000 years” without producing anything other than “a bit of lyric poetry.” For his part, Paulli viewed pastoral care as the most important part of his work and therefore was frequently in contact with quite ordinary people who were in spiritual and material need. During the cholera epidemic of 1853, when just about everyone who possibly could fled Copenhagen, Paulli remained at his post and did a noteworthy job.
Kierkegaard also attended Trinity Church, where W. H. Rothe had an appointment, though his journals contain no comments on Rothe or on E. V. Kolthoff, who had been appointed to Holy Spirit Church in 1845. On the other hand, on a number of occasions he attended the Church of Our Savior in Christianshavn and heard H. P. Kofoed-Hansen preach. As a young teacher in Odense, Kofoed-Hansen, who was about the same age as Kierkegaard, had been affected by Kierkegaard’s writings and had written one of the few reviews of Either/Or with which Kierkegaard was satisfied. The two men spoke together now and then, on one occasion about the sin against the Holy Spirit, on another about the Tower of Babel, which God had broken up, just as Kierkegaard said he wanted to break up the masses and the public. The best time, however, was September 8, 1850, when Kofoed-Hansen not only preached on Kierkegaard’s “beloved Gospel”—that no one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24–34)—but also had chosen Kierkegaard’s favorite hymn, Poul Gerhardt’s “Commit Whatever Grieves Thee.” “How festive,” Kierkegaard exclaimed in his journal, thinking of the happy coincidence—for September 8, 1850, was of course the tenth anniversary of his engagement to Regine!
Another pastor appointed to the Church of Our Savior was Carl Holger Visby, who also served as prison pastor at the Copenhagen city jail, at the prison called the Blue Tower, and at the House of Punishment, Rasping, and Betterment. Visby was unquestionably the most socially engaged pastor of the day. He was responsible for organizing countless educational and philanthropic projects, including a school for criminals and an educational institution for neglected boys, and he held a great many positions of trust, including service as chairman of the Christianshavn Association for the Provision of Meals and as educational director for the Institute for the Blind. He was an energetic contributor to public debate and was frequently in conflict with ecclesiastical and civil authorities. He was also responsible for a wide-ranging literary output, ranging from articles about the military’s “Supply of Material Needs” to a little essay “On the Cultivation of Potted Plants.” But Visby’s primary concern was with the improvement of conditions in Danish prisons, an issue that in the spring of 1845 became the subject of a rather heated debate with J.M.F.H. Stilling, the newly appointed prison pastor. Kierkegaard followed the battle in the pages of Fædrelandet and drafted a lengthy (though never published) newspaper article in which he took Visby’s more liberal side and expressed regret at Visby’s terribly skimpy salary (three hundred rixdollars) and terrible working conditions, which sometimes required him to preach three times on the same Sunday. In this connection Kierkegaard touched upon Visby’s qualities as a preacher and his capacity for psychological empathy: “This is not the place where I want to express my thanks for what I as a listener owe the wonderfully talented Pastor Visby. On the other hand, I believe that things I have often thought about—his originality as a speaker, his presence of mind, his success in saying just the right thing, his seasoned knowledge of mental states, the unpretentiousness with which he possesses all of these qualities—are exactly what is needed in a penal institution…. Of all the pastors in Copenhagen, it is perhaps Visby who is the quickest and cleverest in this respect. And within the walls of the prison in Christianshavn, Visby is also remembered; even the most hardened criminals remember at least one thing, that Visby managed to make an impression.” When H. P. Holst, a friend of Kierkegaard’s from the days of their youth, encountered Kierkegaard one Sunday morning with a hymnal in his hand and asked him which pastor he preferred, the immediate response was: “Visby, and I will tell you why. When one of the other pastors has written his sermon counting on sunshine, he will talk about sunshine, even if it pours rain, but when Visby preaches, and a ray of sunshine comes into the church, he grasps that ray and speaks about it at such length, and so beautifully and edifyingly, that you leave with a ray of sunshine in your heart. He is the only improviser of them all.” Kierkegaard continued to hear Visby preach in the ensuing years and often took joy over felicitous remarks in his sermons but—like most pastors, in Kierkegaard’s view—Visby got worse and worse as time passed. Thus on New Year’s Day 1849, Visby preached “complete nonsense,” just as toward the end of September the same year he served up a “really maundering burial piece on the Gospel story about the widow’s son in Nain.”
P. J. Spang held an appointment at Holy Spirit Church. In the early 1840s Kierkegaard often went on long evening walks with him, and he knew Spang well enough to be able to write him from Berlin, recounting entertaining news about that city’s terrible shortage of public toilets. Kierkegaard was a guest in the Spang home, and Spang’s son Tycho remembered that “with his quite remarkable and unusual talent for talking to people of every age and from every walk of life, he was always a lively participant in conversation.” Kierkegaard could joke and laugh heartily with the children of the house, prepare food with Tycho’s sister, and in general be so cheerful and merry that one “could be tempted to think that he was a very happy person with easygoing, hilarious spirits…. We all liked him, and an old aunt often said to us, ‘My, but isn’t that Søren Kierkegaard a truly nice person!’ ” After P. J. Spang’s premature death in 1846, his widow was virtually inconsolable (despite her elegant name, Christiane Philippine), but Kierkegaard called on her frequently and managed to “speak comforting words to her.” He also considered dedicating a “little book” to Spang, but never acted on the idea, and in a subsequent retrospective consideration of Spang he maintained that in later years Spang had been much too preoccupied with the figure he cut while in the pulpit.
This had been the case on Sunday, May 12, 1844, when Spang stood and “gesticulated all over the place” with “aplomb and unctuousness.” Kierkegaard soon had enough of this self-satisfied parson, but then he observed a serving maid sitting directly below the pulpit: “She had sung the hymn quite serenely, but as soon as the sermon started she commenced to weep. Now, it is extraordinarily difficult to come to the point of weeping over Spang, and in particular it was absolutely impossible to weep over the beginning of that sermon; from this I conclude that she had come to church in order to weep. It was terrible: In the pulpit there were all these pretentious airs and gestures; directly beneath it was a serving maid who heard not a word of what he was saying—or only occasionally caught a word of it—and who regarded God’s house not as a house of prayer but as a house of weeping, where she could have herself a real weep for all the many indignities she had suffered since she had last been there…. Serving maids are my favorite sort of people, both in church and in Frederiksberg.”
It is typical of Kierkegaard’s taut and fine-tuned sensibilities that the pathos-ridden pastor way up in the pulpit was displaced by a weeping serving maid who increased in importance from his perspective, becoming the central figure in that holy place, that morning’s unspeaking edification. Something similar, though in an uncomplicated sense much cheerier, took place several weeks later, when Kierkegaard’s attention again wandered from the regular routine of the religious service and fastened upon a peripheral situation: “The young mother (pretty, fine posture, a velvet shawl, stepping briskly) with her little son. She was completely unperturbed by the boy’s little pranks, but continued with the ordained prayer, followed along in the hymnal during the communion…. Alas! In general parents tend to be so busy getting the children to sit still, as if this was why they were in church. How beautiful it was to see her choose the one thing needful, and how beautifully she negotiated the difficulty. I gave thanks—purely aesthetically—to all the good spirits for letting everything take place so quietly, and I will not soon forget that beautiful scene.” And he did not forget that scene, for he inserted the little incident in Stages on Life’s Way, simply adding a bit more detail, which was no improvement on the original sketch.
Kierkegaard understood how to let himself be edified by the edifying materials that were ready at hand, a weeping serving maid or the young mother of a little prankster, but if a bad sermon did not depress him more than it did, it was because Kierkegaard’s theological center of gravity was located in a completely different place: “For me, it is hymn singing that is unquestionably of greatest importance during the religious service. I require that a good hymn have quite simple and, to a certain extent, unimportant words … and then one of those heartfelt melodies.” In Kierkegaard’s opinion, Kingo’s hymns, which he knew “by heart,” were not at all suited for singing; they were too violently lyrical for that, and a person ought instead read them at home for “his edification.” Kierkegaard did, however, find singable and dazzling hymns in The Authorized Church Hymnal, and he emphasized the inner feeling that emerges from a hymn like “Heartfelt Do I Now Long For”: “Just as I will never in all eternity tire of looking at the gray autumn sky when all the soft colors alternate with one another in the finest pattern, so will it never be possible for me to tire of repeating the quiet motions of such a melody.”
This is where the distance between the penitential solitude of the soul and babble-happy superficial comradery of the Grundtvigians becomes quite palpable: “Grundtvig knows nothing of the deeper, heartfelt pain that has reconciled itself with God in quiet sadness, and it is precisely this which constitutes the genuine tone of a hymn…. Grundtvig is, was, and will remain a noisemaker. Even in eternity I will find him unpleasant. It is not as if Grundtvig had not undergone anything, of course he has, but always noisily. Then he is stopped on his way by something or other, and he makes a scene like a railroad train that has a collision.” It is here that Kierkegaard calls Grundtvig a “yodeling fellow” and a “bellowing blacksmith,” who as a writer of hymns is only “available for service outside his party if the public will pay the bill for having him shaved.”
Grundtvig was not the only threat to the inner peace of the individual churchgoer. When church personnel passed around the collection plates during the sermon it was similarly destructive of the general devotional atmosphere. On some Sundays no fewer than seven separate wandering collection plates made their way around the church, snapping up small coins from the churchgoers in support of the fire department, of the bread and wine for communion, the choir school, the chaplain, the poor, the deaf and dumb, the lying-in hospital, Helsingør Hospital, Møn Prison, and countless other noble causes. Everyone was irritated by this, including Kierkegaard, who included a brief, ironical mention of the situation in Works of Love, but because of economic considerations Bishop Mynster ignored a number of petitions from the city council (who wanted to see the practice abolished, or at least consigned to some time other than right in the middle of the pastor’s sermon) and continued to permit the collection plates to circulate. In other respects, however, there was no overwhelming interest in church affairs. Attendance at services was modest and holy days were not observed. On Sundays, merchants put a board or a shutter over the window panes in the doors to their shops, which meant they were “shuttered” and in compliance with the law—and they went right on doing business.
Finally, among the many good reasons not to go to church was the bone-chilling cold that characterized the winter season and made piety a dangerous business. Thus in 1841, no fewer than eighteen pastors in Copenhagen asked to have their churches heated, but a proposed trial arrangement for Holy Spirit Church, in which six tiled stoves would have been installed—and which a watchmaker named Jürgensen was willing to pay for—was opposed by experts from the Polytechnic College who feared the effect of localized heat and were also concerned about the “filth” that the stoves would inevitably generate. It was proposed that heating be installed under the floor instead, but this would cost astronomical sums and therefore nothing ever came of it.
And so people continued to freeze. Or they found something warmer to do on a Sunday morning.
“People Think I’m a Hack Writer”
A writer is never better than his most recent book, and Kierkegaard struggled to surpass himself every time. “I never forget the anxiety I myself felt, that I might be unable to equal what I had previously achieved,” he wrote with desperate sincerity, referring to Stages on Life’s Way, which had been published on April 30, 1845, one day after the publication of Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. He was also concerned about how the book would be received by the reading public: “Much of what is said in ‘In vino veritas’ will perhaps seem frightfully sensual. I can already hear the cries of indignation.” But there was no outcry, and June was more than a week old when Kierkegaard quietly noted the reason: “Stages does not have as many readers as Either/Or and attracts virtually no attention. This is excellent. In this way I shake off the gawking mob that insists on being present whenever it thinks there is a disturbance.” A deficit in the material world became a surplus in the world of the spirit.
The two books were reviewed in Berlingske Tidende on May 6 by a certain “n,” who presented their author, who had just turned thirty-one, with a slightly delayed birthday present: “If one dares to believe the rumor—which is surely correct—according to which Mag. Kierkegaard is the author of Either/Or and the series of works that obviously stem from the same hand, one might think that he possesses a magic wand with which he can instantaneously conjure up his writings, given the almost incredible productivity his literary output has shown in recent years.” Reviewer “n” displays completely unfeigned admiration for Kierkegaard’s almost supernatural abilities, which are all the more impressive since “each one of these works is exceptional in the profundity of its reasoning, pursuing its subject in the most minute detail, all the while displaying unusual beauty and elegance in its language, and in particular displaying such linguistic suppleness that there is no living Danish writer who can be compared with the author.”
Kierkegaard reacted to these superlatives three days later by having an article titled “A Declaration and a Bit More” published in Fædrelandet. In it he protested against n’s thoughtless and confusing way of placing him “in very close association to the authorship of a number of pseudonymous books,” of which he was absolutely not the author—a point that he makes with such dialectical skill, with such Kierkegaardian style, that everyone could see that it was in fact Kierkegaard! He would very much like to be praised, of course—“Oh, yes!,” he writes—but not by a nobody like n, who disappears “like a sneeze.” If he is to be reviewed, he asks that it be by one of the genuine authorities—Heiberg, Madvig, or Mynster—a trio his “declaration” labels, respectively, as “the legitimate ruler of Danish literature,” “a man of learning of European stature,” and “that authoritative, right reverend firm Kts.” And as far as is known, n never again dared to say anything nice about Kierkegaard, whose judgment on his journalistic outlet was harsh and merciless: “When it comes to literary criticism, the Berlingske Tidende can … best be compared with the paper in which a sandwich is wrapped; you read it while you eat—indeed, I have even seen a man wipe himself with the newspaper for want of a napkin.”
Just under a week later, on May 13, 1845, the author who had been so outrageously and fulsomely praised sailed away on the steamship Geiser. He traveled via Stettin on his third and next-to-last visit to Berlin. One of his fellow passengers was a former pharmacist, Lauritz Hagen, who was silent and withdrawn. The next day Kierkegaard was in Berlin, where he sat in his hotel room registering in his journals the artistic possibilities of his journey: “The only usable figure on board the steamship was a young lad … wearing a velvet cap that was held on by a kerchief, a striped tunic over a coat, a walking stick hanging by a cord from one of the buttons. Ingenuous, open, on a journey, attentive to everything, naive, bashful, and yet dauntless. By combining him with a melancholy traveler (such as Mr. Hagen) a mournful effect could be produced.”
On May 19 and 20, while Kierkegaard was in Berlin (where he once again failed to make himself at home) Fædrelandet published a piece by a certain “A,” titled “A Cursory Observation concerning a Detail in Don Giovanni,” which Kierkegaard had written on the occasion of the revival of Mozart’s immortal opera, which was performed at the Royal Theater five times between February and May 1845. No one was permitted to forget about Kierkegaard simply because he was not seen on the streets! He arrived back in Copenhagen harbor on May 24 (once again on the Geiser), and five days later Philipsen published Eighteen Edifying Discourses, with six sections consisting of 52, 62, 84, 59, 70, and 111 pages, respectively. Even though the volume was a compilation of previously published discourses, it was quite understandable that n might assume that Kierkegaard was in possession of a “magic wand.”
It was also quite understandable that others grew envious and soon arrived at a consensus to the effect that Kierkegaard had certainly been rather hasty with all his productivity—and was thus merely a hack. “They think I’m a hack writer. Sure, take this here, for example,” he wrote in indignation shortly after the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which appeared on February 27, 1846. “I am completely convinced that there is no other Danish author who treats even the most insignificant word with the extraordinary care that I exhibit.” Not only did he himself rewrite his own works at least two times—indeed, some portions even three or four times—but there were also the “meditations” when he took walks, which were so conducive to his productivity that when he arrived home, he often had the work finished, in fact he had even “committed its stylistic form to memory.”
Kierkegaard’s indignation at the accusation of being a “hack” is understandable, and the charge is so erroneous that it is easy to forgive him for his self-congratulatory documentation of the unreasonableness of the charges. “Thus, there were times,” he writes, with extravagant self-consciousness, “when I could sit for hours, enamored with the sound of language—when, of course, it resonates with the pregnancy of thought. Thus I could sit for hours at a time, ah, like a flautist who entertains himself with his flute. Most of what I have written has been spoken aloud many, many times, often perhaps scores of times; it was heard before it was written down. I have lived and enjoyed and experienced so much in the evolution of these thoughts and their quest for form that the structure of my sentences could be called my world of memories.” And earlier, in one of the letters he wrote to Boesen from Berlin, Kierkegaard had noted that he had “written another large portion of Either/Or,” but that it had not “gone so quickly” because it was “a purely poetic production that makes quite particular demands that one be in the proper mood.”
For the most part he was indeed in the proper mood. Who else could move so easily from the charming to the demonic, from sentimentality to a cynical snort? Who else could manage an everyday conversational tone even when dealing with the subtlest abstractions? Who else could situate platitudes or uproarious comedy just a line and a half after the most recondite profundities? Or withdraw, become diffuse, vague, and incomprehensible—and then in the next instant snap his fingers with a seductive stylistic fillip, inspire his pen, and become so intensely captivating that the reader simply loses track of himself? In sum, what Danish writer had ever produced anything so fertile and prodigious? And then they call it “hack writing”!
His pride deeply wounded, in 1847 Kierkegaard went to extremes to compose an entire series of entries about the originality he has expressed via his punctuation. Here he explains that with respect to spelling he submits “unconditionally to authority (Molbech),” and mentions Christian Molbech’s Danish Dictionary, which he would never dream of “wishing to correct, because I know that I lack expertise in this area.” With respect to punctuation, on the other hand, he is equally unyielding and serves as his own authority: “The whole of my makeup as a dialectician with an unusual rhetorical sense, all my quiet conversations in the company of my thoughts, my practice of reading aloud—all this necessarily makes me first-rate in this respect.” For it is in fact an artistic feat to be able to transfer to the written page the cadences of speech, the pauses, the breathing; it is an expressive act that must capture something fleeting while it is on the wing. Kierkegaard explains: “It is especially with respect to rhetoric that my punctuation deviates from the norm, because it is quite advanced. I am particularly preoccupied with the architectonic-dialectical aspect, which is simultaneously clear to the eye in the proportions of the sentences, and to the voice, when one reads them aloud, as rhythm—and I always have in mind a reader who reads aloud.” For this same reason he restricted his “use of the comma,” which put him in “constant conflict with the typesetters, who in their well-meaning way insert commas everywhere, thereby disturbing my sense of rhythm.” Kierkegaard also had his own way of using the period: “In my opinion, most Danish stylists use the period altogether incorrectly. They dissolve their discourse into nothing but short, choppy sentences, but this has the result of depriving the logical element of the respect that is its due.” He wanted to see similar respect paid to the question mark, which most writers did not treat with the requisite restraint: “In general the question mark is misused in a foolish manner, by being employed in abstract fashion whenever there is an interrogative clause. I often use semicolons and conclude with an omnibus question mark.”
No wonder Kierkegaard was not always welcome at the print shop, where the young fellows who set the type were surely irritated when he would suddenly decide to change his customary practice, as evinced in the entry entitled “My Punctuation from Now On,” which contains instructive guidelines for changes in his use of the colon and the quotation mark. But he himself viewed these difficulties as worth the trouble: “I would confidently submit to a test in which an actor or an orator who is accustomed to modulating his voice would try reading a short selection from my discourses, and I am convinced that he will admit that much of what he would otherwise have to decide for himself, much of what is usually explained in stage instructions hinted at by the author, he will here find indicated by means of the punctuation.” One feels a quiet shudder when one thinks of how later generations—motivated in equal measure by concern about the level of sales and concern about the level of reading difficulty—have modernized Kierkegaard’s texts, inserting commas and periods wherever somebody decided it was necessary.
Kierkegaard says that his merit is “the cultivation of lyrical prose”; indeed, in his writings he has been able “to produce a greater lyrical effect” than poets have been able to do with their verse. This is a grandiose and unverifiable assertion, but if his prose cannot be directly classified as lyrical, it at any rate possesses many of the earmarks of the lyrical, including this fundamental property: It cannot be summarized, only quoted. When one begins summarizing Kierkegaard’s writings (try to summarize Repetition) one quickly learns that its essence disappears because it is intimately connected with the fine ether of the rhetoric, and in a summary it therefore evaporates. Of course this does not mean that the writings are merely foolery, devoid of philosophical and theological seriousness, but they are undeniably a long way from Hegel, whose monstrous “System” and totalitarian tendencies Kierkegaard—not surprisingly—early on learned to treat with breathtaking impertinence. He preferred his own breezy scholarliness, a sort of intellectual anti-intellectualism, whose parodic pressure forced concepts into tears and tatters. If it is characteristic of Hegel that he situates himself at such a lofty level of abstraction that readers are compelled to seek relief in the realm of fantasy and analogy, the opposite is the case with Kierkegaard: Scarcely has one been admitted for complicated dialectical surgery than one finds that one has been sent off on a recreational furlough in a piece of writing that is expressively effusive, full of color, strangely illuminated from within. There was of course an element of seductiveness in this, and Kierkegaard was quite aware of it, although, seductive as he was in a higher sense of the word, he preferred to use the term “deception”—a term by which one of course must not permit oneself to be seduced. In 1845 he insisted, not without reason, that with the example of Aristotle’s rhetoric in mind “a new discipline ought to be introduced, Christian eloquence.” He contemplated assigning the project to Johannes de silentio.
In a conversation with Hans Brøchner during a stroll around one of the lakes on the outskirts of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard asserted that recent decades had witnessed “an almost abnormal wealth in the development of poetry,” but that the country had “lacked a prose with the stamp of art.” After a pause—and surely without the least hesitation—he added, “I have filled this gap.”
This was immodest and entirely un-Danish, but it was true nonetheless, and in compensation Kierkegaard did a sort of penance for his un-Danish behavior by writing what is not only the loveliest but also the most untranslatable homage to the Danish language ever written. It can be found buried deep inside the “Epistle to the Reader,” in which Frater Taciturnus comes to a sort of conclusion of “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” “Frater Taciturnus” means “the laconic brother,” but the name does not correspond to reality, for his “Epistle to the Reader” is quite voluminous and makes great demands on the reader’s patience. So in his “Concluding Words” it is quite in order when Frater Taciturnus suddenly exclaims: “My dear reader—but to whom am I speaking? Perhaps no one is still here.” Since this does not seem to be the case, he makes use of the opportunity to write as follows: “I feel fortunate to be bound to my mother tongue, bound as perhaps only few are, bound as Adam was to Eve because there was no other woman, bound because it has been impossible for me to learn any other language and therefore impossible for me to be tempted into proud and snobbish condescension with respect to my native tongue. But it has also been a joy to be bound to a mother tongue that is so fertile in its inner originality when it expands the soul, and whose sweet sounds resound so voluptuously in the ear; a mother tongue that does not rasp, panting for breath, when it encounters a difficult thought—and perhaps the reason some believe that it cannot express the thought is that it makes the difficulty easy by articulating it; a mother tongue that does not gasp and sound strained when confronted with the inexpressible, but busies itself with it in jest and in earnest until it is expressed; a language that does not discover far off what is nearby, or seek in the depths for what is ready at hand—because in its happy relationship with its task it bustles about like an elf and brings it forth like a child who comes up with the perfect words without really knowing it; a language that is vehement and turbulent whenever the right lover knows how, in manly fashion, to incite its feminine passion; a language that is sure of itself and triumphant in intellectual battle whenever the proper sort of master knows how to lead the way; that is as supple as a wrestler whenever the proper sort of thinker refuses to let go of it—and refuses to let go of the idea; a language that is not impoverished, even if it might seem to be so at one or another point, but has been jilted like a humble, modest sweetheart who is indeed of the highest worth and who above all is not shabby; a language that is not lacking in expressions for what is great, for what is crucial, for what is prominent, yet has a lovely, winsome, delicious propensity for the connecting thought, the subordinate concept, the adjective, and the chitchat of moods, and the hum of transitions, and the inwardness of inflection, and the secret luxuriance of comfortable seclusion; a language that understands jest fully as well as earnestness; a mother tongue that captivates its children with a chain that ‘is easy to bear, yes, but hard to break!’ ”
Stages on Life’s Way
Quite a few years ago a man of letters sent some books to Hilarius Bookbinder, who was to see after having them bound. The bookbindery was busy, however, so the books lay around for a rather long time, so long, in fact, that the man of letters died in the meanwhile and the still-unbound books became the property of his heirs, who lived abroad. Some time after this Hilarius Bookbinder discovered a package containing several manuscripts; he wrapped them in colored paper and stored them in an appropriate place in the bindery. Toward the end of the year, when he was whiling away the long winter evenings, the manuscripts re-emerged. Hilarius Bookbinder was an ordinary fellow and he did not understand much of the whole business, but since the handwriting was so elegant he had his children copy off a page now and then, so that they could “get some practice in penmanship.” One day the manuscripts caught the eye of a philosophically inclined schoolteacher who was giving a bit of private instruction to Hilarius Bookbinder’s youngest son. In his view there was money to be made in publishing them, because they in fact consisted of several books, authored by several writers—indeed, he assumed, there had probably existed a “brotherhood, a society, an association,” whose chairman had been the late man of letters. Hilarius Bookbinder did not really know what to think of all this, but he approved of the suggestion and published these papers, which appeared to be of such importance.
The schoolteacher was right. The papers consisted of several books stemming from different authors. The first manuscript contains “In vino veritas,” an account of a nocturnal drinking bout during which woman is alternately elevated and denigrated. Here the reader who is familiar with Kierkegaard’s works can recognize figures such as Johannes the Seducer, Victor Eremita, Constantin Constantius, and the Young Man, but we can also encounter the Fashion Designer, whose discourse came close to driving both Kierkegaard and Levin to distraction. When the drinking bout was over and the guests departed into the night, they came upon a little country estate that had an arbor. From within the arbor Victor Eremita could hear voices, not loud with passion, but speaking in hushed tones. He peered cautiously inside, took a step back, and exclaimed with the joy of recognition, “Oh, my God! It’s Judge William and his wife.” The two, the gentleman and the lady, were drinking tea and conversing with one another in a proper married fashion about the continuing validity of marriage, but when the judge finished smoking his cigar the conversation was over and, arm in arm, they left the scene of their nocturnal conversation to retire for the night. Victor Eremita followed them stealthily, sprang through a window, and emerged again, bearing a “manuscript by His Honor the Judge.” And it did not take him long to decide that “If I have published his other manuscripts, it is no more than my duty to publish this one as well.” His delight was short-lived, however, for just as he was about to put the manuscript in his pocket, it was filched, quite without his noticing it, by one William Afham [Danish, literally: “of him”]. Who he is, this William Afham, no one knows, but it was he who, duly assisted by Hilarius Bookbinder, guided the stolen manuscript into print—and to this extent it was indeed “of him.” The manuscript is titled “Several Things about Marriage in Response to Objections,” and it constitutes a mature counterweight to the drinking companions’ shameless treatment of the female sex and their covert insinuations concerning same. We must assume that it is not very likely that this piece, any more than Judge William’s previous essays, will convince very many people of the joys of marriage, even though this time William appears to be in somewhat better form than in his earlier writings—though at one point he does admit that even after eight (!) years of marriage he himself “still does not know definitely, in a critical sense, what my wife looks like.” In fact, he admits quite lovably that “indeed, even today” he does not know whether his wife is “slim” or “buxom.” Perhaps the judge should investigate the matter the next time he is in the arbor with his wife.
So much for the titles of the manuscripts that constitute the first part of Stages on Life’s Way. The second part consists of “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’” subtitled “A Story of Suffering. Psychological Experiment by Frater Taciturnus.” In the preface to the book, Frater Taciturnus recounts how the manuscript had come into his possession: He had gone to Søborg Lake in northern Zealand with a naturalist who wanted to conduct “observations of marine plants.” He had boarded a skiff, gone down a narrow channel, and come out into the middle of the lake. The scene calls to mind the virtually identical description of Kierkegaard’s 1835 expedition with Pastor Lyngbye. While the naturalist immersed himself in his marine plants, Frater Taciturnus lowered a telescopic sort of instrument to the bottom of the lake, where it soon became lodged almost inextricably fast: “I pulled, and a bubble ascended from the depths. It lingered for a moment, then burst, and then came success. I had quite a strange feeling in my breast, though I didn’t have the least dream of what my find might be. When I think of it now, now that I know the whole business, I understand it, I understand that it was a sigh from below, a sigh de profundis [Latin: ‘from the depths’], a sigh because I had wrested from the waters their deposit.” When the submersible instrument came back into the little boat it was accompanied by a mahogany case wrapped in oilcloth and secured with a number of seals. The case was locked, and when Frater Taciturnus finally opened it, the key was inside—“that which is self-enclosed is always introverted like this.” In addition to an “especially carefully and elegantly written booklet of very fine stationery,” the case contained jewelry and precious stones, a plain gold ring with an engraved date, a necklace consisting of a diamond cross fastened to a light blue silk ribbon, plus a “fragment of a poster advertising a comic play, a page torn from the New Testament, each in its own neat vellum envelope, a withered rose in a silver-gilt locket, and other similar things” that obviously were of sentimental value to their owner, but in themselves were totally worthless. Nonetheless, Frater Taciturnus tried to locate “the person who is the owner of a case found in Søborg Lake in the summer of ’44,” who could contact him “through Reitzel’s Bookshop.” When there was no response he decided to publish the manuscript he had found. With the assistance of a table calculated by “Mr. Bonfils, M.A.” he was able to determine that the year in which the story of the engagement had taken place must have been 1751. In his preface he requests, in conclusion, that the book not be made “the subject of any critical mention.”
This mystification concerning the circumstances of publication might resemble the maneuvers Victor Eremita had carried out in the preface to Either/Or in his effort to forge compositional unity out of Kierkegaard’s quite heterogeneous writings. Kierkegaard had also considered publishing “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” separately and gave the manuscript its own pagination. It had its origins in an unfinished draft of a story that he had earlier considered inserting in Either/Or. Similarly, “In vino veritas” and “Several Things about Marriage in Response to Objections” were to have been published in a separate volume entitled The Wrong Side and the Right Side. Kierkegaard also wrote a preface to this work as well. But quite late in the process, almost at the last moment, he put the two books together, after which he had to invent Hilarius Bookbinder, so that he could counterfeit a firm connection among the individual pieces.
The Inserted Passages
“ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” recounts the story of an engagement that just might be Kierkegaard’s own. The story is parceled out into a series of diary entries by a young writer named Quidam, who became engaged to a cheerful woman, Quaedam, but who shortly thereafter realized that they did not understand each other: He was full of melancholia and fantasies, and she was the opposite. The engagement lasted seven dissimulation-filled months, but the real problems arose only after the relationship was over. There are a multitude of these problems, but Kierkegaard provides a brief summary of them in a terse stage direction: “The girl became far greater to him after he left her.” In her absence not only did she become a sort of obsession, but Quidam was also haunted by unending musings concerning the guilt which he has (perhaps) incurred, first by getting involved with the girl, then by leaving her. In its theme “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” is thus a repetition of Repetition but with greater range in its oscillations and is furthermore completely nonparodic. In keeping with this, Quidam is a more tightly drawn figure than the Young Man ever was, far more intense and noticeably deeper.
The diary does not describe a linear development but soon comes to move in circles. And all of a sudden it rotates so rapidly around its own, unknown center that it begins to burrow beneath the whole of empirical reality, disappearing soundlessly into emptiness and meaninglessness. It makes for unbearable reading. Quidam’s torments are almost enough to take away the reader’s life, nothing less, but it is precisely in this that the work’s redemptive gesture consists! It is the book’s sophisticated intention that we—the readers—are to witness the monomaniacal writer’s mental breakdown and thus see through his self-absorption as a demonic state that points directly toward death and dissolution. In brief, it is the diary’s intention that the reader diagnose Quidam’s conflict and dissociate himself from it. And indeed on numerous occasions Frater Taciturnus has been “tempted to abandon him [Quidam] and lose all patience.” Not unreasonably he assumes that the reader has also been inclined to do something similar. In fact, he actually believes that of the book’s “few readers, two-thirds of them will give up halfway through, which can also be expressed by saying that they will stop reading and throw the book away out of boredom.”
In saying this, however, Frater Taciturnus does not want us to go so far as to reject the conflict itself. For at its most profound, the conflict is connected to the religious sphere, which is not “something for stupid people and unshaven striplings” but is “the most difficult thing of all.” Frater Taciturnus would like to back this assertion up, and this is why he (like Constantin Constantius in Repetition) appends to Quidam’s diary an “Epistle to the Reader” consisting of six lengthy paragraphs. In this epistle he does not simply repeat the transfiguring gesture with which Constantin Constantius revealed himself as the creator of the Young Man. He also reveals with scenographic expertise the manner in which he, Frater Taciturnus, has experimented with Quidam and Quaedam in accordance with quite specific psychological parameters: “I have placed together two heterogeneous individuals, one male and one female. Him I have kept within the power of the spirit and have related him to the religious. Her I have kept within aesthetic categories. There can certainly be a good deal of misunderstanding as soon as I posit a point of unity, namely this, that they are united in loving each other…. If I remove the passion, the whole thing becomes an ironic situation characterized by Greek cheerfulness. If I posit passion, then the situation is essentially tragic…. What is tragic is that the two lovers do not understand each other. What is comic is that the two, who do not understand each other, love each other.”
Here Kierkegaard, of all people, is himself doing what is so often and so properly feared with respect to biographical presentations of Kierkegaard: He is being a little free with the facts, and furthermore, in so doing he tempts his readers to poetize even further. Indeed, the points of contact between Quidam’s and Kierkegaard’s erotic conflicts are quite clear, and at times the parallels strike us with painful directness—as when Quidam cites word for word the parting letter Kierkegaard wrote to Regine when he returned his ring on August 11, 1841, thereby formally terminating their relationship. Or when Quidam poetizes the events of the Easter Sunday when Regine nodded to Kierkegaard at an evening service at the Church of Our Lady, here moved to Trinity Church and imbued with a heavy-handed theatricality that dispels the emphatic electricity that marks the account in the journals.
Here, as elsewhere, Regine was subjected to radical poetic recycling, so it is psychologically quite understandable that Kierkegaard could think that at some point she might perhaps make use of him in the same manner. At one point in the draft of Stages on Life’s Way Kierkegaard made a marginal notation: “the anonymous novella about which I was mistaken.” This comment most probably alludes to the novella Excerpts from a Young Girl’s Diary and Correspondence, which was advertised in the December 20, 1842, issue of Berlingske Tidende as having been “published today.” The context in which the comment was made makes it clear that Kierkegaard had thought that Regine was the author, which to his relief (alas!) she was not.
The autobiographical thread that runs through “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” bypasses Regine, however, and continues further and deeper into six independent sections that are inserted among Quidam’s diary entries, each one dated the fifth of the month, starting in January, ending in June. Even though the pieces vary in theme, on closer inspection they can be seen to be intimately connected in more than one sense because all six dramatize episodes in a tale about a person who had once abandoned himself to his sensual desires and who is now marked by the consequences of his fall, morally as well as physically. If we rearrange the sequence in which the various pieces appear, gradually we see the emergence, in strangely coded fashion, of a harrowing confession concerning incidents in an increasingly distant but always inescapable past.
In all six pieces the spying eye or the inquisitorial gaze plays a noteworthy role: A person looks at someone without himself being seen, or at least without knowing whether he has been seen. Or a person looks at himself by looking at the other. Thus the first and probably the best-known of the inserted pieces, “Quiet Despair,” deals with reciprocal mirroring. As the first draft of this section has it: “There were a father and a son. Both were very gifted intellectually. Both were witty, especially the father. Certainly everyone who knew their home and who paid a visit there found it very entertaining. In general they only debated between themselves, and they entertained each other as two good minds, without being father and son. On one rare occasion, when the father looked at the son and saw that he was very troubled, he stood quietly before him and said, ‘Poor child, you live in quiet despair.’ … Beyond this they never spoke of the matter. But the father and the son were two of the most melancholic people who ever lived in the memory of man…. And the father believed that he had caused the son’s melancholia, and the son believed that he had caused the father’s melancholia. Therefore they never spoke of it with each other.” In the final version Kierkegaard added: “A son is just like a mirror in which the father sees himself, and for the son the father is in turn a mirror in which he sees himself in the future.”
With this piece, the figure of the father is introduced in its full dimensions. And even though no one can guarantee the portrait’s biographical origin, it would take something close to violent intervention to induce a reader to think otherwise. Similar themes are pursued further in the fourth of the inserted pieces, “A Possibility,” which at twelve pages is the longest of them. It is about a bookkeeper in Christianshavn who is known by everyone for the regularity with which he walks up and down the same section of sidewalk every morning between eleven and twelve o’clock. Even though he is supposedly mad, he is very well liked, among other reasons because he spends his fortune on charitable works, especially for children. At an early age the bookkeeper had become an apprentice to one of the wealthiest merchants in the city, who valued his quiet, punctual character and the diligence he always exhibited. He devoted his scanty free time to reading, to the acquisition of foreign languages, and to developing his unusual talent for drawing. As the years passed he became more and more detached from the world, something he himself hardly noticed, even if he occasionally had the painful sense that his youth had passed him by without his ever having had the joy of being young. Then he became acquainted with a couple of shop clerks who were men of the world. Although they made fun of his awkwardness, they took pleasure in his company and invited him to come along on little outings and trips to the theater. One picnic concluded with an unusually splendid dinner, but since the bashful bookkeeper was unaccustomed to liquid refreshments, he became quite another person, so wild and unbalanced that he offered no resistance when he was led to a bordello, “one of the places where, strangely enough, one pays money for a woman’s contemptibleness.” The next day the bookkeeper woke up depressed and dissatisfied. Unable to remember what had happened, he isolated himself still further, but then suddenly became sick, sick unto death. While he lay there at death’s door, the bordello episode emerged from the fogs of his fever, taking on the form of a frightening possibility, “and this possibility was that another being owed its life to him.” He could not determine whether his anxiety was a consequence of the illness, a febrile fantasy, or whether the sickness had facilitated the emergence of a repressed “memory of actual events.” He survived, however. But shortly thereafter the head of the mercantile firm died, and the bookkeeper inherited his enormous fortune. This made it possible for him to devote himself to his studies, whose peculiar character was reflected in the sizable library he accumulated as the years passed. The library consisted of works on physiology, profusely illustrated: “He had the costliest engravings as well as entire series of his own original drawings. There were faces depicted as portraits…. There were faces depicted in accordance with mathematical proportions…. There were faces constructed in accordance with physiological observations, and these in turn were compared with other faces that were sketched in accordance with hypotheses. In particular it was family likeness and the consequences of the relations of generations with which he concerned himself physiologically, physiognomically, and pathologically.”
We do not have to do much more than scratch the surface of the portrait of this bookkeeper before Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard emerges as a young man. He, too, was frugal, meticulous, and punctual, thus just the sort of character who appealed to his well-to-do uncle Niels Andersen Seding, who rewarded him by making him the sole heir of his “great fortune.” Here, as in other cases, it is hardly worth the trouble to determine exactly where historical reality ends and poetic license begins, but in Kierkegaard’s first sketch of the tale the most important details are the following: “Once, in his early youth, a person in an unbalanced state of mind permitted himself to be carried away so far as to pay a visit to a prostitute. The whole matter is forgotten. Now he wants to marry. Then anxiety awakens. The possibility that he could be a father, that somewhere in the world there might live a being who owed its life to him, torments him day and night. He cannot tell anyone about it. He himself does not have real certainty of the facts.”
The fateful visit to the bordello is thus the kernel of the tale around which Kierkegaard adds his fictive layers. The fear about the consequences of the visit was not, however, a fear about possible offspring—that is a poetic diversionary tactic. It was rather a fear about having contracted a contagious disease, and this was why the anxiety stirs only at the point when the person wants to marry, thus risking further transmission of the infection. The preoccupation with the faces of children was thus genuine enough, but the motive behind it is reversed, so to speak. Thus, where the bookkeeper studied children’s faces to see if he could recognize his own features in theirs and ascertain whether he was the father, Michael Kierkegaard studied the faces of his own children to see whether they were marked for death as he was. In short, he was looking not for signs of resemblance but for signs of sickness.
The origin of this fear is revealed in the second piece, “A Leper’s Self-Observation,” which also has the “gaze” built into its title. The piece is about Simon the leper, a figure from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus is a guest in his home in Bethany and a woman anoints Jesus with the most precious of oils [Matthew 26:6]. In a manner typical of Kierkegaard’s use of scriptural passages, however, he lifts Simon the leper out of his original context and places him among the graves out in the wilderness, where we encounter him sleeping on a stone, far from humanity. Then he awakens, gets to his feet, and cries into the empty wilderness: “Simon!—Yes!—Simon!—Yes, who is calling?—Where are you, Simon?—Here.—With whom are you speaking?—With myself.—Is it with yourself? How disgusting you are, with your skin eruptions, a plague on everything alive! Keep away from me, you abomination! Flee out among the graves!” After a long, excruciating monologue, which almost seems to congeal into a suppurating verbal sore, stinking of self-contempt, Simon the leper sits down again and asks for Manasseh: Manasseh! Manasseh! But Manasseh is gone. Manasseh was actually an Old Testament figure, an idolater king of Judah depicted in 2 Kings 21:1–18, but as with Simon the leper Kierkegaard tears Manesseh out of his biblical context. “So, he has gone off to the city, then. Yes, I know it. I have concocted a salve that causes all skin eruptions to turn inward, so that no one can see them, and the priest will have to pronounce us healthy. I taught him how to use it, and I told him that the sickness does not end because of this, that it turns it inward, and that a person’s breath can infect another person and cause him to become visibly leprous. Then he shouted with joy. He hates life; he execrates human beings; he wants to avenge himself; he hurries off to the city; he breathes poison on all of them. Manasseh, Manasseh, why did you make room for the Devil in your soul? Was it not enough that your body was leprous?”
A demonic and alarming allegory takes form deep within this dark tale, a reconstruction of a crippling relationship to one’s father: The initial letters of Simon and Manasseh correspond to the initial letters of Søren and Michael, but they have been reversed so that Manasseh is Søren and Simon is Michael. The father is a leper, and leprosy is a metaphor for syphilis. And the salve he uses to combat the infection is not a poetic invention but existed in the real world as a mercury salve, known as “the gray ointment,” which physicians believed to be effective in treating syphilis. The curative effects of the mercury salve treatment were only visible after fifteen or twenty years, however. If the treatment was ended too early, the contagious material circulated within the organism and could pass through the cerebral membrane, causing cerebral paralysis, the most striking symptom of which was so-called megalomania. If the infection went into the spinal marrow, on the other hand, it led to the shaking palsy. Both leprosy and syphilis, which are characterized by the sores and nodules that accompany them as well as by varying degrees of bone loss, typically of the nasal bone, end in death, but as a rule decades pass before this takes place.
Michael Kierkegaard had none of these symptoms, but he may have feared he was living with a syphilitic infection in his body. Might this explain why he waited so long to marry? Did he want to be certain that he was healthy? When Kirstine, his first and most beloved wife, died, he married Ane, who became the mother of his seven children, five of whom died before they reached the age of thirty-four. For a man with an “all-powerful, but melancholic imagination,” these deaths must inevitably have seemed the punishment he deserved—and he deserved it because he had once ascended a little hill out on the heaths of Jutland and cursed God. The doctors were wrong, he was not healthy but had infected both his wife and his children. God had not forgotten his blasphemy; He had merely taken His sweet time, His infinitely sweet time.
It is a repellent thought, a crazy fantasy, but as the inserted tale has it: “It would not have done any good if anyone had wanted to help him.” We may assume that young Søren Aabye knew aspects of his father’s past and that he had heard about his cursing the Lord out on the heath. In that case he would surely have done what he could to reassure the old man that the deaths in the family were attributable to natural causes: that Søren Michael had died of a brain hemorrhage, Maren Kirstine of convulsions, Nicoline Christine and Petrea Severine of complications from childbirth, Niels Andreas of tuberculosis; that his first wife had died of pneumonia, his second of typhus. The theological student would have been able to cite all this as evidence for why the deaths were not the work of a vengeful God who demanded repayment for a childhood transgression of so long, long ago. Superstition, phantasms, melancholy self-torture! But it did no good, and at one point in January 1836 the journal reports: “Truly, it is often sad and depressing when one wants to accomplish something in this life by means of words, and yet in the end sees that one has accomplished nothing and that the person concerned stubbornly sticks to his views.” The son had apparently made another attempt at well-intentioned demythologization: He had explained, comforted, reassured, made light of the whole business. But then one day the father, his pride irritated at all this youthful naïveté, told his son that he only knew half the truth: The curse was connected to a sin of quite a different order, that in his youth he had been like a wild animal and had contracted an infectious disease, a syphilitic punishment. The Lord understood how to avenge Himself so diabolically that He let the sinner himself be the cause of the disappearance of his family, whereupon he, now a broken old man, a grand figure dressed in purple, was to remain behind as a “memorial cross on the grave of all his own hopes.”
This new causal explanation made the youngest son shiver. Not only did he see himself theologically disarmed at one blow, he was also drawn into the still unconcluded story of a sickness whose inevitability was demonstrated most convincingly by the deaths of his five siblings. Perhaps the sickness had entered his own bloodstream, so that he, too, was ill and had possibly infected others, something his father could have prevented if he had not remained silent about what he knew, if he had revealed the truth about the terrible disease in a timely fashion.
In the parable of Simon the leper and Manasseh are we confronted with the origin of the great earthquake? Was Maria’s death doubly unbearable because it convinced the three Kierkegaard men that the disease retained its strength undiminished? Was Peter’s peculiar conduct with regard to her illness owing to a profound fear of having infected his wife with the family’s fatal seed? Was this perhaps the reason that, in accordance with a sort of crazy logic, he did not dare to kiss her? Or did he really know nothing? Was he simply ensconced in his belief in the sentimental tale about his father having cursed God out there on the little hill in Jutland? Or is the parable of Simon the leper and Manasseh just a skillfully poetized obsession, merely neurotic art with no basis in reality?
This latter can hardly be the case. Because the following lines, taken from a journal entry of mid-May 1843, make it virtually certain that the piece is closely connected to Kierkegaard’s own person: “Whatever dark thoughts and black passions still reside within me I will try to get rid of in a written piece that will be entitled ‘A Leper’s Self-Observation.’ ” Writing is where Kierkegaard reworked or simply “got rid of” traumatic experiences. This is the most explicit expression of the fact that Kierkegaard—as well as others—employed writing for therapeutic purposes. Mere conjecture about the scourge of an invisible sickness must have summoned forth a permanent state of anxiety, and the detailed analysis of original sin [Danish: Arvesynd, “inherited sin”] in The Concept of Anxiety was thus more than just an academic exercise. “What the Scriptures teach,” we read in that work, “that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation is proclaimed loudly enough by life. It is of no use to want to talk oneself out of this horror by explaining that this assertion was a Jewish doctrine.”
The most horrifying part was not included in The Concept of Anxiety, however. Rather, it cowered shamefully in the last of the nine little, colorful school notebooks used for drafts, and the white label affixed to its shiny black paper cover cryptically states “Vocalizations for On the Concept of Anxiety.” In the Semitic languages, a vocalization is the addition of vowels to the consonants, which makes the letters pronounceable and gives the words meaning. So with his “Vocalizations” Kierkegaard wished to clarify the meaning of The Concept of Anxiety, perhaps to reveal a text behind the text. Thus as a sort of motto he wrote on the outside of the booklet with a coarse pencil “loquere ut videam te,” which translates roughly as “speak, that I may see you.”
In this notebook we find seven undated entries, some of which were written during the editing of the draft, while others were jotted down during the course of making the fair copy. The first of these entries is titled “Examples of the Consequences of the Relations of Generations,” which treats figures such as Høgne, a misshapen being whose mother had given birth to him after having had sexual relations with a troll; Robert le Diable, who was fascinated by his own unfathomable evil; and Merlin the Magician, who awakened sexual desire in an innocent girl. In addition there are references to “some of Shakespeare’s characters,” though none are mentioned by name, and finally to “Cenci by P. B. Shelley,” by which Kierkegaard refers to Shelley’s piece about Beatrice Cenci, who killed her father because he had raped her. No sooner do we leave this chamber of horrors than we plunge into the following catalog of vices: “the addiction of drunkard parents passed on to the child / addiction to thievery / unnatural vices / melancholia / madness that makes its appearance at a certain age.” If we look further down the yellowish-gray pages of the notebook we come to the fifth vocalization, which just might capture the specific situation in which some of the entries in this catalog of vices manifest themselves: “a relationship between father and son in which the son covertly discovers the root of it all, though he dares not know it. The father is an impressive man, God-fearing and strict. Only on one occasion, when drunk, did he let fall a few words that hinted at the most frightful things. Otherwise the son learns nothing more and never dares to ask his father or anyone else.”
Kierkegaard elaborated this brief sketch in the third of the pieces inserted into Quidam’s diary, titled “Solomon’s Dream,” which makes free poetic use of the Old Testament tale from 1 Kings 3:5–15, in which the Lord reveals Himself to King Solomon in a dream, promising him a discerning heart so that, like his father David, Solomon would be able to see the difference between good and evil. Kierkegaard inserts his own dramatic foil into this pious tale, endowing the relationship of the young Solomon and the aged David with a peculiar horror. The theme is shame and is sounded in the very first lines: “If there is any such thing as the torment of sympathy, it is to have to be ashamed of one’s father, ashamed of the person one loves most and to whom one owes the most—to be compelled to approach him with one’s back turned, one’s face averted, in order not to see his disgrace.” This is followed by a nocturnal scene in which Solomon is awakened by sounds coming from within his father’s bedchamber: “He is gripped by terror. He fears it is a knave who wants to murder David. He approaches stealthily. He sees David broken in spirit. He hears the cry of despair from the penitent’s soul. Faint, he returns to his bed. He dozes but he does not rest. He dreams. He dreams that David is an ungodly man, rejected by God, that royal majesty is God’s anger with him, that he must wear the purple as a punishment, that he is condemned to reign, condemned to hear the praise of the people, while the righteousness of the Lord secretly and in concealment passes judgment upon the guilty man. And the dream intimates that God is not the God of the pious but of the ungodly, that one must be ungodly in order to be God’s elect. And the terror of the dream is this contradiction. As David lay upon the earth broken in spirit, Solomon arose from his bed. But his mind had been broken. He was seized with terror when he thought what it means to be God’s elect. He suspected that the confidential relationship the righteous have with God, the uprightness of the pure man before the Lord, was not the explanation, but that the secret which explained everything was hidden guilt. And Solomon became wise, but he did not become a hero. And he became a thinker, but he did not become a man of prayer. And he became a preacher, but he did not become a believer. And he could help many people, but he could not help himself. And he became sensual, but not penitent. And he was broken, but was not raised up, for the strength of the young man’s will had been taxed beyond its powers. And he staggered through life, buffeted about by life, strong, supernaturally strong.”
Precisely because Kierkegaard the writer was as artistic as the person of the same name was chaste, the concrete contents of the father’s confession retreat into self-created obscurity as the tale unwinds. What remains, however, is the fact that the son had suddenly attained an insight into the father’s dual nature, more or less unintentionally coming to experience the sickening, hidden side of piety: the lies, the injuries, the pain of hypocrisy, the impotence of repentance, things eternally unforgivable, the pact with the Devil in the old man’s heart, which not even the most contrite piety could manage to conceal. No less villainous, however, is the portrait of the son, Søren Solomon, who after that night lost his humanity, becoming a piece of intellectual anti-nature, a monstrous brain grotesquely installed in a Copenhagen centaur, an inhuman colossus, a horrid hybrid of mutually destructive opposites: a man of wisdom who was lacking in courage, a thinker but not a man of prayer, a preacher without faith, an unrepentant voluptuary, mortally wounded in the fundament of his being.
With its dreadful power, “Solomon’s Dream” seems both to be situated at an enormous distance from the modest and frugal home of the hosier and to invite a biographical interpretation of the relationships in that home. Wanting to draw conclusions directly from the individual episodes in the story is thus just as naive as wanting to ignore every connection. The dynamic center of the story is the traumatic experience that assumes an allegorical form because the pain that would be associated with a direct presentation of the nocturnal scene would be unbearable. Profoundly reserved on this matter, Kierkegaard gives his presentation—already an allegory—a dreamlike character at the very point that judgment is about to be pronounced upon the depraved father. At the same time, the allegory invites us to demystify the material so that we can penetrate to the reality behind the words, to the actual happenings of that night, to the father’s despairing cry. To what extent do these sounds of the night have a merely allegorical character? Is it perhaps the sounds that are really the most essential detail in the story? Were those sounds perhaps more bestial than penitent? Did the son, perhaps, one night catch his father in the act of blasphemous self-pollution against which he himself had warned the son? “A broken-down lecher, an old man who scarcely has sensual power …,” reads a savage journal entry from 1854 in which the son reflects with disgust on the carnal lust for reproduction—a lust that refused to die—which had brought him into existence. Or is this too heavy-handed an interpretation? Is it more reasonable to assume that the father, who for many years shared a bedchamber with his two sons, mumbled out a few fragments of a macabre tale in his sleep, fragments which the youngest of his insomniac sons poetically developed in demonic fashion? We do not know, but both sons subsequently had a fear of talking in their sleep, and in 1826, when Peter Christian had recovered from his bout with typhus, he wrote in his diary, “God spared me from what I feared more than death—from delirium.”
The last of the pieces inserted into Quidam’s diary was dated June 5 and titled “Nebuchadnezzar.” It contains Kierkegaard’s retelling, divided up biblical-style into verses, of the fourth chapter of the book of Daniel, which recounts the story of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar who first dreamed—and then came to experience in his actual life—that he had the heart of an animal instead of that of a human being. He was therefore compelled to live among the beasts of the field and to eat grass as they did, while his “body was wet with the dew of the heavens and his hair became as long as the feathers of eagles and his nails like the claws of birds” (Daniel 4:33).
The next-to-last of the inserted pieces also combines wisdom and wildness. It is titled “The Reading Lesson,” and it tells of Periander, the son of Cypselus, tyrant over Corinth. Periander was noteworthy for his gentleness and his justice toward the poor; his wisdom was legendary. “Daring were his undertakings, and this was his motto: Diligence accomplishes everything.” Thus was Periander. But this was not the whole truth because just “beneath his gentleness smoldered the fire of passion, and right up to the final moment, words of wisdom concealed the madness of his actions…. Periander was transformed. He did not become another person, but he became two who could not be contained within a single person: the wise man and the tyrant, which is to say he became an inhuman monster.” For these reasons posterity linked Periander’s name to this saying, that he “always spoke as a wise man and always acted as a madman.” Periander did not merely have a sexual relationship with his own mother, Cratia; in a fit of jealousy he also kicked to death his own pregnant wife, Lysida, whom he called Melissa. The two motherless sons, Cypselus and Lycophron, then fled to their maternal grandfather, Procles, who one day told them who it was who had murdered their mother. Cypselus resigned himself to the situation, but Lycophron chose to show his contempt for his father by remaining silent: “Upon his return home to the house of his fathers he never deigned to speak to his father. Then Periander became embittered and drove him away, and finally by prying at Cypselus with many questions, he learned what Lycophron was concealing with his silence. Then his wrath pursued the one he had driven away, and no one was to harbor him.” Only when Periander had become “an old man” did he seek out Lycophron, who had sought refuge on Corcyra. The two, father and son, then ended up “dividing up the estate between themselves, not as father and son divide an estate in love, but as deadly enemies divide things: They decided to exchange places of residence. Periander would live on Corcyra, and Lycophron was to be the ruler of Corinth.”
The relationship between the two brothers, Lycophron and Cypselus, reflects the asymmetry that characterized the relationship between Søren Aabye and Peter Christian. The older brother was obedient and peaceable, while the younger refused to yield to the father and transformed himself into an unspeaking monolith. Exile from one’s homeland is a metaphor for repudiation, while the exchange of places of residence is an indication of a shared fate, a connection that exists despite everything.
Kierkegaard’s knowledge of Periander came from two of his favorite classical Greek authors, Herodotus and Diogenes Laertius. Kierkegaard read Herodotus in Friedrich Lange’s German translation, The Histories of Herodotus, while Diogenes Laertius’ work had been translated into Danish by Børge Riisbrigh, who entitled it Diogenes Laertius’ Philosophical History; or, The Lives, Opinions, and Clever Sayings of Renowned Philosophers, in Ten Books. Both translations appeared in Berlin and Copenhagen, respectively, in 1812, the year in which Kierkegaard had been conceived. If Kierkegaard’s account of Periander is compared with the classical originals, Diogenes Laertius and Herodotus, it is striking how closely he follows them, sometimes citing the translations word for word or providing his own translations, which of course take on the Kierkegaardian flavor, the birthmark of his style. Nonetheless, the piece is primarily a compact paraphrase; it is as if Kierkegaard had composed his manuscript with his volume of Diogenes Laertius open on his left-hand side and Herodotus on his right. If we ignore a few words of wisdom taken from the French archbishop Fénelon and worked into the piece, it contains nothing of importance that is not also found in one of the original classical texts. This might look like literary forgery, but the explanation lies ready at hand: In the story of Periander, Kierkegaard recognized his own story and had the strange realization that it was not he who was to interpret the text, but the reverse, it was the text that was to interpret him. Thus he dated the text May 5, his birthday. He wanted to emphasize that it was as if he had been born—archetypically and unbidden—as a part of the story.
Against the background of Quidam’s misery-filled love life, the six inserted pieces, individually and collectively, tell us that the crisis must be traced back to the father, who because of his guilt ruined the son’s innocence, thereby depriving him of the immediacy that is the precondition of natural love. Even the title “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” is thus split between two characters, a father who was guilty and a son who was not.
“In a novella titled ‘The Mysterious Family,’ ” an 1843 journal entry reads, “I could perhaps reproduce the tragedy of my childhood: the terrifying, secret explanation of the religious that was granted me in a fearful intimation, which the powers of my imagination then hammered into shape—my offense at the religious. It would begin in a thoroughly patriarchal-idyllic fashion, so that no one would suspect anything before that word suddenly resounded, providing a terrifying explanation of everything.” Kierkegaard never wrote such a novella. Instead, he wrote the six inserted pieces, arranged them within the story of Quidam’s engagement, had Frater Taciturnus put his name on the work, sank the whole business to the bottom of Søborg Lake, and finally, had Hilarius Bookbinder assume the task of publishing it.
From a psychological point of view, this systematic distancing of himself from his own story might seem like an act of repression, but it was the opposite, it was the dispelling of the trauma, a way of “getting rid” of it. “The demonic is the self-enclosed,” we read in The Concept of Anxiety, where Vigilius Haufniensis lays out the guidelines for the therapeutic activity Kierkegaard practiced with his writing: “The demonic does not enclose itself with something, but it encloses itself within itself…. In everyday speech there is a very apt expression. It is said of a person that ‘He won’t come out with it.’ The self-enclosed person is precisely the mute person: Language, the word, is precisely what saves; it is what saves from the empty abstraction of self-enclosure.”
Thus transposed into language, in “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” the conflicts gradually became superseded stages on Kierkegaard’s way to himself, re-presented indeed in all their pain, though with the pathos of distance that liberates the trauma from the merely private sphere and lets it be reborn as art.
Writing Samples
Even though Stages on Life’s Way had been written with equal portions of blood and ink, the book was nonetheless consigned to the ordinary mechanisms of the marketplace, and consequently something had to be done to direct attention to its existence. This took the form of a little announcement on April 30, 1845, in issue number 99 of Information from Copenhagen’s Only Royally Licensed Advertising Office (which, thank goodness, was known in everyday speech simply as Adresseavisen). In Kierkegaard’s day this was the city’s most widely read newspaper for advertisements—the press run was a bit over seven thousand—and the paper came out six days a week with announcements of every sort: the departure and arrival times of ships, memorial poems, and sometimes news articles, literary pieces, political articles, obituaries, and so on. A couple of years previously, on April 10, 1843, Kierkegaard had been studying the notices in Adresseavisen and had suddenly come upon this: “Because of a change in plans, ten and one-half yards of bombazine cloth is for sale.” “God knows,” he asked in himself in his journal, “what the first plan was,” after which he noted that it could be a “good bit of dialogue” for a young woman who “had been deceived during the crucial days prior to a wedding, to place an advertisement to the effect that ten and one-half yards of bombazine cloth, et cetera, that had been intended for a bridal gown.” This bit of dialogue was never placed in a woman’s mouth, but shortly thereafter it snuck into Repetition, where it was embedded in one of the Young Man’s furious monologues. In November 1846, Kierkegaard again immersed himself in Adresseavisen, to which he wrote the following emphatic ode: “O, thou great arena for the greatest expectations—O, thou spacious grave for disappointed hopes—Adresseavisen. It merely gives the appearance of being a peaceful newspaper. Alas, within, what struggle, what adversity! Each advertiser tries to press forward in more striking fashion than the others. Even the letters of the alphabet are drawn into the fray…. Over there a merchant staggers under the colossal weight of the advertisement’s enormous letters, and one reads what is written beneath in smaller type: ‘in Halmstræde, at the fourth place on the left from Østergade, in the low-ceilinged room….’ ‘In the low-ceilinged room’—these words take on a poignant significance; moved (and one is moved), one thinks of the unfortunate merchant in the low-ceilinged room. He may be buried alive, because it is clear that it is the weight of the advertisement that is crushing the room.”
Kierkegaard was fascinated by the advertising competition that revealed itself even in the typography, “when one advertiser tries to trample the others underfoot with the help of gigantic alphabet letters!” Kierkegaard also entertained the notion of a similarly boisterous publication: “N.B. Just as with Nicolaus Notabene’s Prefaces, I must again publish a little polemical piece. I think it could be titled ‘Models’ or ‘Samples of Various Sorts of Writing.’ ”
The contemplated work was never presented to the reading public, but the years 1844 through 1847 saw the production of a great many studies for such a work, bearing the collective title Writing Samples and, like Prefaces, the sketches satirize the hack writers of the day and the economic considerations that governed the book market and feverishly confused sales figures with quality. If we weld the many sketches into a whole, we encounter the reasonably focused visage of an “apprentice author” whose first name was to have been “Willibald” or “Alexander” or “Alexius” or “Theodore” or simply “Holger,” with the last name “Rosenpind,” subsequently altered to “Rosenblad.” In the end, however, the character was called “A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope.”
Concealed behind the tomfoolery there is a serious and ideologically based disapproval of the rampant culture industry and the globalization of gossip-column journalism. In other words, what is under fire is the triumph of superficiality, and A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope is therefore interested not least in the external appearance of the book, which ideally should be comparable to Heiberg’s showy publications: “N.B. The book should be decked out with all possible elegance: a border decoration around every page (as in Urania); every section should have its own typeface; decorative and eyecatching initial letters…. Some letters in red type (as in old books), others in green or blue, et cetera.” The result is a success and is immediately reviewed by the critics: “A book has recently come off the presses that would even create a sensation in Paris. The cover looks like this. There is a genuine gilt garland along the edge, and in each corner there is a gold-tooled emblem, something like that on a lady’s handkerchief. In the center there is an incredibly expensive bouquet in the same style as those on genuine Persian shawls. The bouquet is encircled by the title, printed with a matte finish…. It would be too much to go into the details of this remarkable piece of writing or to go through it page by page; we will therefore only direct attention to the absolutely peerless ‘A’ with which page 17 begins.”
A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope knows very well that a pretty exterior cannot do the job by itself, so he hurls himself into a hectic advertising campaign directed at potentially interested subscribers. When fifty such subscribers have signed up, he will offer them a free “shave” and will devote certain hours of every day to “brushing off clothes, running errands, and other personal services,” also including “boot polishing.” And as soon as signs of “improvement and conversion” are detected among his readers, the editors will reward them by “delivering one-third more per day of the lewd novel we are already delivering.” If having moral standards is a good thing, having a double moral standard is twice as good. In addition, A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope can guarantee his politically correct readers in writing that he will “keep watch with the greatest of seriousness over the mode of dress here in the city … and will emphatically protest if anyone, by varying a bow or a button, or by the lack of a button on her frock, is deemed to have failed to demonstrate proper respect.” Similarly, he will “produce a list each week showing how many courses of food every family serves at their ordinary dinners and how often every family hosts a dinner party.” This will surely induce people to subscribe, and when there are two thousand on the list of subscribers, “there will be a Christmas tree with proper prizes for the subscribers as well as for their wives and children.” When there are three thousand subscribers, there will be a “New Year’s present” for the adults and “pfeffernüsse” for the children. What will happen when even more thousands sign up remains unclear, but if “the number of subscribers should reach twenty thousand, then I intend to purchase Tivoli so that from then on admission to Tivoli would be solely and absolutely exclusively limited to my subscribers.” Marketing is a good thing and the optimist A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope is no stranger to it; he knows a ploy that works well: “If you merely say that you have many subscribers and continue to say it, you get many subscribers…. And thus if it says in the newspaper every blessed day that I have one thousand subscribers, I will get one thousand subscribers.” Of course, it is a tough business and the competition is keen, but if one merely makes use of untraditional methods, success is within reach. Thus he praises the advertiser who came up with the shrewd idea of having “his advertisement printed on paper which is ‘solely, only, and exclusively manufactured for’ and destined to be read on the toilet.”
As for the contents, they are of course intellectually undemanding. There has simply never been any market for intellect or spirit: People prefer hot air. Listed on the payroll as a permanent employee and provider of a “regular column in the magazine” is a certain “von Hearsay” who knows all there is to know about “the transmission of sound” through “the medium called the crowd,” which causes sound to be transmitted in so sophisticated a fashion that when one says one thing it turns into something entirely different. The journal will also have room for small announcements and classified advertisements with news of recently published books. For example, one can purchase an “Ecclesiastical Phrase Book or a Handbook for Pastors, Containing 500 Platitudes, Alphabetically Arranged by Esais Beachsand, former Sexton,” while a man employed as an “alehouse keeper” has taken it upon himself to judge “Professor Madvig’s Latin Grammar from a Communistic Point of View.” In order that readers not get tired out from too much high culture, there is a column titled “Criticism and Taste” where the journal’s own reporter provides animated reportage on yesterday’s execution of two murderers out on Amager, where “a sizable, respectable, and cultivated audience” turned out: “Even though the weather was by no means favorable, the happiest and most dutiful mood was everywhere in evidence. That worthy artiste, Mr. Madsen, Copenhagen Executioner, managed his demanding task with unusual virtuosity and bravura.” Indeed, the public was so delighted with the beheadings that they wanted an encore, a request that Executioner Madsen, however, was unable to satisfy. Nor is there any neglect of the theater, specifically the Italian opera, concerning which the following could be reported: “In the parquet there were ninetythree persons and five children; thirty-five of these were of the male sex and fifty-eight of the female sex. In the parterre there were sixty persons, none of the female sex. In the loges there were two hundred thirty persons, who were distributed as follows. (To be continued)” Other sections make for less demanding reading. Thus “The Battle on the Common between the Crows and the Gulls” is very quickly read, since A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope never got further than the headline. There is an unusual liveliness in “The Pastime of Battling the Wind,” in which an experienced master generously dispenses useful tips: “I have for this purpose a large umbrella with a strong shank. Now I will go out to one of the stormiest places, open the umbrella, and hold it in front of me, into the wind, just as with bayonet fighting against cavalry. The grips are the following: The one hand grasps the handle, the thumb of the other hand is on the upper spring so that I can fool the wind, if it gets too strong, by collapsing the umbrella.—Now we will do battle. This pastime is also an extremely beneficial form of exercise because one must make the most unusual leaps.”
Displaying the foolish zeal of the tabloid press, the journal also attends gatherings of the famous. And the not-so-famous, for example, the journal provides a detailed summary of a dinner party given by an association of night watchmen. They meet in broad daylight and thus have to close the shutters and place lighted candles on the tables so as to have it look like a proper evening dinner party. No less irrelevant is what can be read under the heading “News Bulletins” concerning what happened to a wholesaler named Marcussen in Badstuestræde: “At the dinner table, however, there was an accident in which the wholesaler came to spill a gravy bowl on himself and on the lady sitting next to him at table. It happened like this. At the very moment that the servant held out the gravy bowl, the wholesaler wished to stand up and offer a toast. With a movement of his arm he struck the servant and the gravy bowl. This is the historical truth. We are well aware that there is in circulation a rumor that recounts the story differently, according to which it was supposedly the lady who struck the servant with a movement of her head. But this is only a rumor and has no official status. The name of the lady has not yet been brought to our attention. Some name Miss Lindvad, others say that it was Gusta Jobbe. As soon as we learn who it was, we will report it immediately, for the name is of immense importance, since of course for the next eight days nothing else will be spoken of in all of Copenhagen, and thus in all of Denmark.”
Exit Heiberg
Reasonable people can disagree about whether and, if so, to what extent Kierkegaard was intensifying or dissipating his gifts as a writer by working on something as trivial as Writing Samples at the same time that he was writing Stages on Life’s Way, but in any event A.B.C.D.E.F. Goodhope and company never made it off the drawing board. And even though the bile elicited by Heiberg, with which Prefaces was positively awash, also dripped on the pages of Writing Samples (where Heiberg’s astronomical interests are treated with particular irony, and readers are provided with a copy of a receipt for a newly purchased telescope), Kierkegaard knew very well that Heiberg did not take note of that sort of frivolity—indeed, he took no notice whatever.
Heiberg’s dignified invulnerability was unbearable. Even as late as August 1851, Kierkegaard wrote to Heiberg, informing him that he was standing by his “original decision, that you are to have a copy of everything I produce.” Alluding to “what you [Heiberg] once mentioned in a conversation, that I shower you with books,” Kierkegaard nonetheless affably expressed the hope that Heiberg would still be able to “survive these continual showers,” and we may thus fairly conclude that at least as late as 1851 Kierkegaard was still sending Heiberg copies of his writings. The only surviving copies of Kierkegaard’s writings containing dedications to Heiberg that are known today are Three Edifying Discourses and Four Edifying Discourses, both from 1843, Concluding Unscientific Postscript from 1846, Works of Love from 1847, Christian Discourses from 1848, The Sickness unto Death from 1849, plus The High Priest—The Tax Collector—The Woman Who Was a Sinner: Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, also from 1849. Not one single thank-you note for these “showerings” has been preserved from Heiberg’s hand.
There was a single exception, however, because Kierkegaard had thought of a cunning maneuver. On March 29, 1846, he sent off a package containing Concluding Unscientific Postscript plus two copies of A Literary Review, which contained Kierkegaard’s enthusiastic analysis of Mrs. Gyllembourg’s novella Two Ages. The mother and the son were each to have a copy of Kierkegaard’s review. But since Mrs. Gyllembourg wrote anonymously, she was compelled to rely on her son to express her thanks for the gift, and thus Kierkegaard finally received a letter from Heiberg! It arrived promptly three days later, on April 2, and in it Heiberg expressed his thanks for the package which, he believed, was evidence of Kierkegaard’s “kindness.” He considered A Literary Review to be thorough and penetrating and praised Kierkegaard highly for the “noble self-denial” with which he subordinated himself to his subject matter. Heiberg was much more circumspect concerning the Postscript, declaring that it would be too long-winded “if in a note like this I were to set forth the observations and objections I made during my reading,” but he expressed the hope that at some point the possibility of providing “a more detailed explication” would present itself.
Heiberg never did provide the explication. And the book, whose 494 pages demand more than three days’ reading, most likely found some unobtrusive resting place in Heiberg’s enormous library—or at least we may hope that it did. On page 135 Heiberg would have been able to see his conversion to Hegelianism held up to ridicule and to see himself caricatured in the person of a certain Dr. Stagleap, who is the subject of a rather ambivalent testimonial: “According to his own extremely well-written account, thanks to a miracle at Streit’s Hotel in Hamburg, … on Easter morning, he became an adherent of Hegelian philosophy—of the philosophy that supposes that there are no miracles…. The whole business remains infinitely puzzling, even if one assumes that Easter fell very early that year, say on April first, so that in addition to becoming an Hegelian the doctor also became an April fool.” Heiberg in fact received the Postscript on March 29, that is, just a couple of days prior to the day reserved for April fools, a coincidence that can only be chalked up to the malicious kindness of fate.
Being ignored by Heiberg also provoked Kierkegaard into productivity, however. For no matter how much Heiberg’s silence wounded Kierkegaard’s vanity, at the same time it freed him from any further obligations to the literary authorities of the day, to elitist aesthetic notions of decorum, in sum, to the cultural paradigm that the pampered connoisseurs of the period wished respected. Thus it is symptomatic that the word “cultivation” [Danish: Dannelse, used in the sense in which German uses the term Bildung] occurs relatively infrequently—but always in a positive sense—in Kierkegaard’s writing before Heiberg’s review of Either/Or, while after Heiberg’s review the word occurs extremely frequently, and nearly always in a negative sense. The everyday hero in the second part of Either/Or, Judge William [Danish: Wilhelm]—and it is scarcely an accident that he shares his name with the principal character in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, the bildungsroman par excellence—is replaced by marginal figures, by exceptions like Abraham and Job, who are so tenebrous, discontinuous, and conflict-ridden, that their lives come to depend on external intervention and thus, if they are able to succeed at all, can do so only by virtue of the absurd. Kierkegaard does not write bildungsromans but anti-bildungsromans, novels that tell not of the integration but of the disintegration of the self.
This tendency was already visible in Fear and Trembling, which with its theme—Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac—as well as with the related question concerning the teleological suspension of the ethical, constituted an almost aggressive violation of the definition of the bildungsroman. “What is cultivation, then?” Johannes de silentio asks. And he has the answer ready at hand: “I should have thought it was the course through which the individual runs in order to catch up with himself; and the person who will not run through that course is helped very little, even if he is born in the most enlightened age.” Thus, to be cultivated is not to adopt or ingest the norms and values of one’s culture (the “universal” of Judge William); it is to catch up with oneself, that is, to begin anew with oneself, which in turn means to reflect on one’s own existential primitivity, one’s precultural givenness, one’s passion. Kierkegaard thus dismantled the intellectual matrix embedded in the concept of cultivation, shifting the focus from grasping things intellectually to being gripped emotionally, and in doing so he quite deliberately placed nature ahead of culture. “A maidservant who is essentially in love is essentially cultivated; a common man who has essentially and passionately made a resolute decision is essentially cultivated,” he wrote in A Literary Review, a view which, incidentally, was unlikely to have been greeted with approval in the salons where Heiberg ruled.
Kierkegaard could afford to be indifferent about the absence of recognition from Heiberg’s quarter, however. In just over four years he had become a literature within literature, and if the present day was against him, he had the future on his side, not least because of his critique of cultivation, a critique the Heibergians could not stand. “My claim to literary fame,” he wrote in the spring of 1846, “is that I always set forth in their entirety the decisive determinants of the existential sphere with such dialectical acuteness and with such primitivity, which as far as I know has not been done in any other literature, nor have I had any works [on the subject] from which I could seek guidance.” Here, with great perspicacity, Kierkegaard emphasized that he was the thinker of primitivity. His thinking was elemental and basal; it did not owe its existence to the circumlocutions of philosophy or to literary pilferage, but had been hauled up from the most profound depths within the thinker himself. In this way the thinker of primitivity differentiated himself decisively from “Prof. Heiberg and his consorts,” who merely tarted themselves up with borrowed philosophical finery, and among whom one seldom or never encountered “one single primitive thought.” It was not without reason that in his little satirical poem Kierkegaard had chosen to call Heiberg “a phony fellow,” that is, an artificial character, airily formed by culture and torn loose from his moorings in nature.
Primitivity was not just Kierkegaard’s private property, because indeed everyone ought to “have his primitive impression of existence—in order to be a human being.” And what is true of the individual is true of the age, for “just as the fundamental failing of the modern age is that it makes everything objective, so is it also the fundamental misfortune of the modern age that it lacks primitivity.” “The more primitive sort of thought” had become marginalized in part because it did not offer showy philosophical subject matter, but instead doggedly preferred “to remain engaged with certain fundamental questions,” and in part because this sort of thinking becomes exceptionally dangerous when carried out under the banner of theology. “Human beings are perfectible,” Kierkegaard wrote sarcastically, “one can as easily get them to do one thing as another, just as easily get them to fast as to live in worldly enjoyment—only one thing is important to them, that they are just like the others…. Yet what God wants is neither the one thing nor the other, but primitivity.” A primitive relation to God is a relationship in which one relates oneself unconditionally to the unconditioned, but in so doing one inevitably comes into profound conflict with prevailing social and ethical norms. Because “when an individual, in accordance with the New Testament, relates himself primitively to God like this and understands it in his own way, then, unless he lets go of it, he will have a collision.”
Kierkegaard’s critique of cultivation, which began as a critique of the Heiberg dynasty but gradually developed into a broader diagnosis of the conventionalism of the culture of cultivation—where cultivation becomes merely higher-order bourgeois philistinism—has here been transformed into a theological torpedo that was guaranteed to collide with the monuments and shrines of cultural Protestantism. A Christianity from which “the terror has been removed” is in fact no Christianity at all, but has become mere civic virtue and other forms of philistinism. It is thus quite ludicrous—as Climacus explains in his Postscript—“to see people, who are Christians solely by virtue of their baptismal certificates, behave à la Christians on ceremonial occasions. Because the most ludicrous thing which Christianity can ever become is to be what in the trivial sense is called ‘customary practice.’ To be persecuted, abominated, scorned, mocked, or to be blessed and praised—this is appropriate for the greatest of all powers. But to become a mild-mannered custom, good taste, and the like is its absolute opposite.” Or, in its most abbreviated form: “The more cultivation and knowledge, the more difficult it is to become a Christian.”
Postscript: Kierkegaard
With this emphatic statement, Kierkegaard intended to bid his cultivated age an anxiety-laden adieu. The official leave-taking of his authorial career took place on February 27, 1846, with the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. A Mimical-pathetical-dialectical Compilation. An Existential Contribution by Johannes Climacus. In this work Climacus presents his reader with a grandiose, panoramic view of everything that had been produced from Either/Or up to and including Stages on Life’s Way. Climacus calls his investigation “A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature,” presenting it indignantly as the unmasking of literary fraud: For years, a person unknown to Climacus, a certain Magister Kierkegaard, as well as a number of pseudonymous authors have been publishing exactly those works that Climacus himself had been of a mind to write—he had succeeded only in finishing Philosophical Fragments. This gives Climacus a great opportunity to provide commentaries on all these writings, the interrelatedness of which he gauges in such detail that he comes close to creating a pseudonymous counterpart to the Hegelian system he so frequently denounces.
Yet right here in the Postscript there was also “A First and Final Explanation” signed by S. Kierkegaard, who acknowledged his pseudonymous productions. In his acknowledgment, however, he pointed out that the use of “pseudonymity or polynymity has not had an accidental basis in my person …, but was essentially grounded in the productivity itself. For the sake of dialogue lines and for the sake of depicting the psychologically varied differences among the individuals, the productions had a poetic need for uninhibited expressions of good and evil, brokenheartedness and exultation, despair and overconfidence, suffering and jubilation, et cetera, limited only by the psychological consistency of the idea [being depicted]—something that no factual and actual person, living within the moral boundaries of actuality dares to, or could wish to, permit himself. What has been written, then, is certainly my own, but only insofar as I have made lines audible by putting into the mouth of the poetically actual individual who is producing them, the words that express his life view. Because my situation is even more remote than that of a poet, who poetically creates characters and yet in the preface is himself the author. Impersonally—or personally, in the third person—I am in fact a theatrical prompter who has poetically produced authors whose prefaces, indeed whose names, are in turn their own productions. Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not one single word by me. I have no opinion about them except as a third party, no knowledge of what they mean except as a reader…. My wish, my prayer is therefore that if it should occur to anyone to want to cite a particular passage from the books, he would do me the favor of citing the name of the respective pseudonymous author, not mine—that is, that he would sort things out between us in such a manner that the utterance, in feminine fashion, belongs to the pseudonym, and the responsibility, legally, to me.” Thus there is practically no connection between the various pseudonymous authors and Kierkegaard himself, “while, on the other hand, I am quite definitely and straightforwardly the author of the edifying discourses, for example, and of every word they contain.”
To read these lines—which thus bring his authorial activity to an end—is to feel oneself transported back to the prologues with which Victor Eremita or Hilarius Bookbinder (or whoever) introduced their fictional narratives. And, indeed, the thoroughness with which Kierkegaard carries through his renunciation engenders suspicion regarding the trustworthiness of his statements and lends support to the conjecture that precisely by having published his writings pseudonymously Kierkegaard was able to allow himself to write about what was extraordinarily private. What we are denied access to in his journals—because there he is writing in his own name—is presented much more directly in the pseudonymous writings. As has been suggested, Kierkegaard’s indignant reaction to critical reviews was due not merely to wounded vanity but also to the fact that his writings have, among other things, a self-revelatory character. He wrote at incredibly close range about what concerned him most intimately, and in so doing he also emptied himself. Displaying a refreshing honesty, in 1847 he wrote: “For many years my melancholia has had the effect of preventing me from being able to say ‘thou’ to myself in the deepest sense. An entire world of fantasy lay between my melancholia and my ‘thou.’ This is what I have to some extent emptied into the pseudonyms.”
From now on there were, so to speak, no longer any productive crises about which he could write, and Kierkegaard had already had to repeat himself a couple of times: Writing Samples repeated Prefaces, and the theme of Stages on Life’s Way repeated that of Repetition while its structure was like that of Either/Or—though perhaps not quite as successful. Another of the “motifs” that Kierkegaard had plans to develop consisted of a sort of intensification of the aesthetic: “The sequel to ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ must be in the realm of the piquant, his relationship to a young married woman.” Kierkegaard in fact sketched a sort of title page: “The Seducer’s Diary / No. 2 / An Essay in the Demonic / by / Johannes Mephistopheles.” But soon afterward, the theme presented itself from an entirely new angle: “I might like to write a counterpart to ‘The Seducer’s Diary.’ It would have a female character: ‘The Courtesan’s Diary.’ It would be worth the trouble to depict such a figure.” It certainly would have been, but Kierkegaard knew very well that he had used up his erotic quota, and he thus made this emphatic note in the margin: “N.B. That is what the age wants, to swoon before what is vile and then to imagine that it is superior. It won’t get that from me.”
Kierkegaard had to look around for new material, await an impulse. And he received both in abundance from an entirely unexpected quarter.
10. On the right, nicely illuminated and with the Stock Exchange building forming a picturesque background, can be seen “the Six Sisters,” as the six uniform bourgeois dwellings along the canal were called. This was where Miss Regine Olsen lived with her parents and her siblings. In 1866, the canal, which had been known as the Stock Exchange Moat, was filled in and replaced by present-day Slotsholmsgade.
11. Niels Christian Kierkegaard’s other drawing of his cousin Søren Aabye was done around 1840. The face, which descends from quite broad cheekbones, narrowing to a point, was also characteristic of Kierkegaard’s father and his favorite sister Petrea. His eyes seem to stare forever, while his lips have lively lines. Niels Christian Kierkegaard subsequently reported that both of his sketches were “very incomplete” because Søren Aabye “tricked me by not showing up at all—after having sat for me on two occasions.”
12. Regine Olsen. Bearing all the attributes of the romantic ideal of woman, she truly is enchantingly lovely as she sits here, a girl of eighteen summers, in Emil Bærentzen’s chaste but intimate rendering from 1840. That same year she became engaged to Kierkegaard, who was ten years older than she was, thereby unknowingly securing herself a sort of literary immortality. A year and a half after her misalliance with Kierkegaard, she became engaged to Fritz Schlegel, who was a diplomat both by profession and by temperament, and was thus well-suited to be a husband.
13. Kultorvet, viewed from the corner of Pustervig in the direction of Nørreport. In 1843 Kierkegaard had plans of “describing various neighborhoods of the city that are enveloped in a poetic atmosphere, so to speak—Kultorvet, for example.” A couple of years earlier he had shared an apartment in the building at 11 Kultorvet with a university student from southern Jutland. Today a café called Klaptræet occupies the place. Behind the second building on the right can been seen Rosenborggade; in the years 1848–50, Kierkegaard lived at the other end of this street.
14. Johan Ludvig Heiberg. In literary and aesthetic matters, Heiberg had more or less the same sort of authority that Mynster had in theological and ecclesiastical affairs. In younger days Kierkegaard was a caller at the Heiberg home in Christianshavn, a guest of the celebrated and powerful Heiberg couple. Kierkegaard soon acquired the witty and elegant tone of the Heiberg circle and was almost beside himself with delight when someone erroneously attributed to Heiberg one of the articles he had published anonymously. But when Heiberg, reviewing Either/Or, called it a “monster of a book,” and then was similarly ungracious in his treatment of Repetition, Kierkegaard changed direction and made the Heibergian position—including Hegel and Goethe—the object of his hatred.
15. Hans Christian Andersen. “He is too big and too odd. And therefore he must be pushed around,” he wrote in the fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling.” And he was pushed around by a number of people, including the odd Kierkegaard, who took him to task in From the Papers of One Still Living, from 1838, his very first book, which was marked by a stilted style and by mile-long sentences. And it was said that Kierkegaard and Andersen were the only people who had bothered to read the entire book. While they were alive, these two men, who would later make Danish letters world-famous and who are often mentioned in the same breath, preferred to avoid each other’s company—most likely because they reflected each other’s weaknesses.
16. The Royal Theater on Kongens Nytorv was built by Nicolai Eigtved in 1748, but it was subsequently rebuilt and expanded so many times that it came to resemble a collapsed elephant. But it was here that Oehlenschläger, Heiberg, and Bournonville celebrated their triumphs—with Kierkegaard as the breathless spectator. Ironically enough, unlike so many other buildings, the theater refused to burn down, and it was not torn down until 1874.
17. Israel Levin. “At times I spent up to eight hours a day with him. Once I ate at his house every day for five weeks,” Israel Levin reported in his retrospective account of the period when Stages on Life’s Way was written. Levin was a literary scholar, a writer, a translator, a publisher, a quarrelsome person, a drinker, a misogynist, and a great deal more—including Kierkegaard’s secretary. At his death, his effects included a collection of 150,000 cards, the beginnings of a dictionary; this became an essential part of the twenty-six-volume Dictionary of the Danish Language.