Reading Binge
Storm and Stress?
Kierkegaard’s Faustian period was very costly, both existentially and financially. During these years, the fellow who had been called “Søren Sock” by his schoolmates emerged from his woolly cocoon and developed into a foppish dandy, tailor-made, as it were, for the late romantic age. Living on credit and borrowing money in a manner completely foreign to the Moravian frugality of his family home, Kierkegaard acquired amazingly extravagant habits. He spent large sums on the theater, on purchasing volumes of philosophy and literature, at cafés, and on chic coats—the coat the color of red cabbage was replaced by a lemon-yellow one. He spent lavishly on hats, on carriage rides, on food and wine, and on boxes (or to use the sobering term of the time, “caskets”) of cigars with brand names like Las tres Coronas and La Paloma, along with the appropriately sized pocket carrying cases. Every month he consumed five hundred grams of pipe tobacco of the Venezuelan variety called Varinas, a pure, unblended, top-quality product that was sold in rolls of six, stacked in woven baskets of rushes. There are also bills for walking sticks, silk scarves, gloves, and other necessities of life, including a good many bottles of eau de cologne. In the latter part of October 1836 a certain Mr. Sager had to advance the profligate student a week’s loan of sixty rixdollars, and at the end of the year the governing council of the Student Association declared that Kierkegaard was now four months in arrears on his dues and that consequently he would be denied access to the association’s facilities unless he paid the amount due immediately. As time went by, doubts grew concerning the creditworthiness of the free-spending man-about-town, and borrowing money became an embarrassing business. In June 1836, for example, his journal reported ashamedly on “my situation, when I was borrowing money from Rask, and Monrad showed up”: Kierkegaard had had the misfortune of finding himself in the presence of two of his creditors at the same time. On September 5, 1837, the theological student had to humble himself and ask his father for help. In 1836 alone he had run up a debt of 1,262 rixdollars, of which 381 were owed the bookseller Reitzel on Købmagergade; 280 were owed the tailor Künitzer on Vimmelskaftet; 235 to various tearooms and cafés; and 44 to M. C. Freys, a tobacconist on Østergade; plus various lesser sums. Surely old age was not the only cause of the tremor in his father’s handwriting when the old man wrote “Søren” on the cover of the little notebook which for the next year would serve as the account book as Kierkegaard paid off his debt. Plainly, the old man had been shaken by what anyone could see: The 1,262 rixdollars that his son had squandered in town were more than the annual salary of a university professor!
There were certainly plenty of temptations. In those days Strøget was called “the Route,” and it was here that people went to see and be seen, to greet friends with great hilarity while making a show of avoiding encounters with one’s enemies. The old hostelries and eating places had been modernized along the lines of foreign models. They were now called Conditorier [Danish: “confectioneries” or “tearooms”] and bore such exotic names as Apitz, Capozzi, Capritz, Ferrini, Lardelli, Monigatti, Pedrin, and Sechi. One of the most successful of these immigrants was Josty, who in 1817 had opened his Swiss tearoom at 53 Østergade, followed in 1824 by a branch in Frederiksberg Gardens, which survives to this day. Upon entering Østergade one encountered Gianelli’s tearoom, with its tall windows. Pleisch’s tearoom was on Amagertorv with a view of Højbro. Mini’s was located on Kongens Nytorv at the corner of Lille Kongensgade, at the site of the present-day Café à Porta. Mini’s was the finest café in town, “a coffeehouse for aristocratic people, furnished in the French or Italian manner, where every respectable or well-dressed person could get tea, coffee, cocoa, and very fine liquors at any hour of the day.” In the evenings, if a man wanted to go out for a game of skittles, billiards, and have a smoke, all he had to do was to go over to Knirsch’s Hotel, at the site of the present-day Hotel d’Angleterre.
Even though the mass of bills and receipts informs us, like so many tattletales, about the behavior of young Kierkegaard, not every expenditure, of course, leaves a paper trail. No receipts are issued at the seamiest places, and the ever-receptive young ladies down in Peder Madsen’s Alley, which in those days connected with “the Route,” were in no way concerned with paperwork; their services were rendered in kind, payment was in cash, and that was that. There were still other places one could visit if one was in an unsavory state of mind. There were Store Brøndstræde and Lille Brøndstræde, and there was Ulkegade, where the ladies of the night haunted the end of the street nearest Lille Kongensgade. Sailors, naughty university students, and matrimonially dissatisfied middle-class gentlemen visited these shadowy districts, but even King Frederick VI was acquainted with these amusements, and on Sunday afternoons, after arriving in an open carriage, he would spend several intense hours with his mistress, the Countess Dannemand, while his lawfully wedded wife and the people of Copenhagen agreed to look the other way.
Out by Langebro, at the prison in the Blue Tower, where men and women were imprisoned together, things could get somewhat rowdy, however. There was not much oversight by the guards, and the talented murderer Ole Kollerød provided a breathless portrait of the situation in that phallic tower: “Yeah, the menfolk went out in the hallways and opened up the door to the ladies’ prison, and then they lay down and whored away with them, so that they was like to whore themselves and the girls to death. Yeah, the girls who wouldn’t let themselves be used, them they just took by force, with no back talk. Yeah, there was a housepainter’s wife in there, and they used her so much that when I was layin’ in my bed I could hear her; I could hear how she gave in to the guy who was using her. Yeah, it was probably with her consent because it was Brunn, the great horse thief, who was using her. But enough of that.”
Enough of that, indeed. Whether, and if so, how often and with what result Kierkegaard paid visits to the ladies down in Peder Madsen’s Alley is shrouded in the shadows of history. The actual basis for reconstructing such events is embarrassingly scanty and consists essentially of a few torn and tattered journal entries, of which the first, apparently from June 1836, reads in its entirety: “Strange anxiety—every time I woke up in the morning after having had too much to drink, it was finally fulfilled.” One notices the odd formulation about an anxiety being fulfilled and one asks oneself whether it perhaps describes a joy mixed with fear in connection with having finally lost his virtue. No one knows. There is a fragmentary journal entry from the same year, dated November 8: “My God, my God […],” followed by the no less fragmentary: “The bestial sniggering […].” The square brackets were inserted by H. P. Barfod, the editor of Kierkegaard’s papers, who used the introductory words of these entries as headwords in his index of the papers, but unfortunately he then lost the original manuscripts.
If Kierkegaard’s journal entries had been too revelatory, and if Barfod had intended to secure him a respectable posthumous reputation by making the entries disappear, he achieved precisely the opposite, however. A fragment is the perfect invitation for attempts to reconstruct the missing material in its supposedly original form, and over the years a small army of imaginative researchers has ventured far out onto the thin ice of guesswork in order to present the world with the most provocative sorts of theories. The bestial sniggering has been assigned to a bordello, where Kierkegaard, dead drunk, was unable—as they say in polite language—to præstere præstanda [Danish/Latin: “to do the deed”] and was therefore compelled to tuck his tail ashamedly between his legs and leave. Other theorists, on the other hand, believe that Kierkegaard had managed to do the deed, but that in so doing he had contracted syphilis or some other unpleasantness, not excluding having, against his wishes, fathered a child. Still other researchers take a firm grasp on the very root of the matter, speculating on the size and shape of Kierkegaard’s generative organ, including the possibility that he might have been equipped with a curved penis, whose vaginal maneuverability would in all probability have been somewhat limited.
If we stick to the source materials, however, the bordello story turns out to have little meat on its bones. First of all, it was not particularly unusual for Barfod to mislay journal entries. As noted earlier, this happened quite frequently, so the disappearance of the journal entries in question is probably better accounted for by ordinary slovenliness than by any concern for Kierkegaard’s posthumous reputation. Second, in his index Barfod used a clear bracket mark to group the entry about bestial sniggering with the two succeeding entries—both of which had to do with scenes from a Danish version of Don Juan—and, to emphasize the connection between the three entries, Barfod wrote “Don Juan” outside his bracket. And as a third and final bit of evidence we ought to note that in the introduction to his index, Barfod wrote that he had used double underlining for everything “that could be said in the least way to touch upon or even hint at the more personal aspects of the life of the deceased or at his biography in the narrower sense of the term.” The journal entries in question were not double underlined. The textual basis for hypotheses about doing deeds, bent instruments, and other such seems to be lacking.
It would furthermore have been very unlike Kierkegaard to have discoursed in his journals about a night at a bordello. Not only in his youth, but throughout his entire life, Kierkegaard was very buttoned up with respect to his sexual proclivities. Unlike Hans Christian Andersen, Kierkegaard would never have dreamed of burdening posterity with journal entries about his sore testicles, nor would he ever have marked his calendar with an X for every day he masturbated. Even less would Kierkegaard have imitated Strindberg, who would carefully measure his erect member with a ruler and then consult his physician about whether his six and one-quarter inches was above or below average. The closest we get to these delicate subjects is a journal entry from 1843 in which Kierkegaard confessed that the only person with whom he “had ever had a lewd conversation” was a seventy-fouryear-old “captain from the China trade,” who was a regular at Mini’s café, where he would sit and brag about all the wenches he had bedded, over the years, all the way from Manila to London. He would give them a “glass of grog,” because they liked it. Kierkegaard did not really believe him “because he has a sort of wholesomeness that testifies in his favor,” and his “words were therefore more humorous than lewd.” It is equally unclear whether there was any lewd talk in April 1836, when Kierkegaard had a conversation with Jørgen Jørgensen, a police officer, whose drunkenness was clearly visible “at the corners of his mouth”: Across a sea of empty bottles, Jørgensen had made the bitter, sentimental declaration that one spends half of one’s life “living it, and the other half repenting it.” We get the sense that the young theological student was more an observer than a participant and that he himself did not have much to repent. We suspect that while his father sat and repented the sins of his youth, which he bitterly regretted, the son, for his part, sat and regretted that he had not done anything whatsoever worth repenting. Nor, for that matter, did the Danish Golden Age (which handed out gold medals to the greatest tattletales) produce one single witness who mentioned the least bit that could even hint that Kierkegaard was debauched.
The naked truth seems to be that even though in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard has Vigilius Haufniensis provide us with a detailed examination of the relationship between sexuality and history, Kierkegaard himself remained silent about the role sexuality played in his own history. Occasionally, however, goaded on by the exhibitionism that often conceals itself deep within modesty, Kierkegaard did yield to the temptation to insert little keyholes in his texts, both published and unpublished, through which the reader can peek and draw his or her own conclusions. Most often Kierkegaard introduced such visions with a hypothetical “were it the case that,” or “if,” or “let us assume,” and then shifted into the third person in order to augment further the distance from himself. Or he could encrypt his text and insert a code, as is the case with a lengthy journal entry from 1837 in which Kierkegaard looks back on an episode that had made a great impression on him: During his youthful infatuation with “the master thief,” he had come to grief after mentioning in his father’s presence that such a thief indeed wasted his powers, but that he “could certainly turn himself around.” To this his father replied “with great seriousness” that there were “crimes against which one could struggle only with the continuing help of God.” His father also took the opportunity to wag his finger in moral admonition, and the son was quick to understand the signal: “I rushed to my room and looked at myself in the mirror (cf. Schlegel, Collected Works, vol. 7, bottom of p. 15).”
Embedded within the parentheses in the journal entry just cited is a code, namely, a strikingly precise reference to the seventh volume of Friedrich Schlegel’s collected works. The reference is to a fairy-tale novel, dating from 1825, about Merlin the magician, who had become infatuated with a lovely maiden and had awakened her sexual desire. On the page to which Kierkegaard refers (the bottom of page 15), she had just taken off her clothing and was standing in front of a mirror, delighting in the sight of her young, naked form; and all the while the thought of Merlin’s temptations caused her desire to grow to the point that she finally became convinced that without the enjoyment of a man—“ohne den Genuss eines Mannes”—she would be utterly lost.
What the maiden did next Schlegel does not say, but it is clear that in a similar situation Kierkegaard’s reaction to his father’s admonition was to take matters into his own hands. Indeed, he hurried to his room to look at himself in the mirror because it was believed that masturbation revealed itself with a pallor and with lusterless eyes surrounded by dark circles. Masturbation was generally believed to be accompanied by a host of frightful symptoms. In section 124 of his Handbook for Therapy under the heading “Spermatorrhoea,” Oluf Lundt Bang, the Kierkegaard family physician, asserted authoritatively that masturbation could cause hypochondria, paralysis, impotence, headache, hair loss, fatigue, lethargy, weight loss, weak vision, dizziness, melancholia, and, in extreme cases, suicide. In addition to “lascivious talk and reading,” Bang explained, “the desire to masturbate” can stem from “currying favor with ladies; from idleness (which provides plenty of latitude for fantasy and is most often associated with overmuch lying awake in a warm bed); from spicy food and beverages; and from tight-fitting clothing which stimulates the sexual organs.” The inclination to masturbate—which must not be confused with “satyriasis, the unquenchable desire for sexual intercourse, which is a mental illness”—typically reveals itself by “a lethargic expression, a glowering look, dark rings under the eyes, a desire to be alone, and the refusal to participate in childhood play.” As soon as the physician has come to “certainty about the sin,” he ought to order “the masturbator” to avoid all “psychic or physical contact with the opposite sex.” Indeed, it is in fact “dangerous to counsel the masturbator to have contact with ladies; it is only helpful in the beginning.” Instead, Bang recommended “rising early in the morning, sometimes at night, whenever an erection is felt; strenuous and tiring labor in the open air; in the summer, bathing in cold water at the beach; in the winter, cold showers.” One must also be sure that clothing is not “too warm or too tightfitting,” and one must absolutely avoid “sleeping on one’s back.” If this latter cannot be “accomplished by the use of will power, it can be accomplished by employing artificial means, for example, a belt that has something hard or pointed on the portion which crosses the back, thereby making lying on the back uncomfortable; the member and the testicles must be immersed in cold water for several minutes, three or four times a day.” Assuming he doesn’t already have one, this gives a person every possibility of acquiring an unsound mind in a reasonably sound body.
Kierkegaard frequently concerned himself with sin as an act that is carried out again and again in concealment—“sin is committed in secret”—and that continues to be repeated despite the protests of the higher and better self. As he wrote in 1835: “When a person rejoices at having triumphed over the power of temptation, almost at that very moment, right after the most complete of victories, some apparently insignificant external event may occur that hurls him like Sisyphus from the top of the cliff.” Matters were not made any better by the fact that there appeared to be a masturbatory gene in the family: In the days when Michael Kierkegaard had thought of retiring from his business enterprise, his first thought had been to turn it over to his brother, Peder Pedersen Kierkegaard. But Peder was sick, and in 1786 he had had to spend several months in Frederik’s Hospital, where he was diagnosed as “deranged.” His illness could not be described precisely, however; in his medical record Peder’s psychic disturbances were linked to constipation, but at length it was stated that his illness stemmed from masturbation. Søren Aabye later related that on one occasion, when Uncle Peder was visiting in Copenhagen, he wore three overcoats despite the fact that it was a broiling hot summer day. According to Peter Munthe Bruun, Kierkegaard’s father had once said: “When I can’t sleep, I lie down and talk with my boys, and there are no better conversations here in Copenhagen.” We would like to believe the old man, but we also ask ourselves whether perhaps the story of Peder and the three overcoats might not have been one of the nocturnal lectures with which merchant Kierkegaard impressed upon his two half-grown boys the necessity of taking timely action to keep desire in check.
Of course, in grouping masturbation with the “crimes against which one could struggle only with the continuing help of God,” Kierkegaard’s father contributed to a quite drastic warping of his son’s sex life, but he also helped focus Søren Aabye’s interest in the various forms and displacements of the sexual instinct. Thus, to his journal entry about the young woman with the moist desires Kierkegaard appended a reflection about the sense of inevitability that accompanies sexual desire when it enters the subconscious. “Everything that is to happen tends to be preceded by a certain premonition,” he wrote, “but just as this can have a deterrent effect, it can also be a temptation because a person can get the notion that he is predestined, as it were; it is as if he can see himself as having been transported via a certain logic to some conclusion, but as having no influence whatever over this logic.” Kierkegaard had experienced how sexual forces could suddenly express themselves in spite of the norms and the barriers from which the clear light of consciousness takes its cues, and he used a theological term to explain the situation: “predestined, as it were.” At the same time, Kierkegaard was aware that a prohibition could call forth precisely what it wished to hinder because it gives form and focus to the objects of desire that are otherwise so obscure. “Therefore one must be very careful with children. One must never assume the worst, or by a premature suspicion or a chance remark … summon up an anguished consciousness in which innocent but weak souls could easily be tempted to believe themselves guilty, to despair, and thus to take the first step towards the destination that had been foreshadowed by the anxiety-laden premonition…. In this respect as well, it may be said: ‘Woe to him by whom temptation comes.’ ”
This journal entry is from 1837, when Kierkegaard was only twenty-four. Nonetheless he had already seen through his father’s flagrant error and had quite understandably turned a deaf ear when the paterfamilias would inform his son at regular intervals “that it was a good thing for a person to have ‘such an elderly, venerable confessor in whom he could really confide.’ ” The son did not feel the least bit tempted to confess, all the less so because the father had already put a fateful mark upon the son’s desire, reversing what is natural and unnatural, and to this extent had sexually molested his child. “If a child were told,” Kierkegaard wrote in 1845, “that it was a sin to break one’s leg, what anxiety the child would live in, and how much more often he would probably break it; he would even view almost breaking one’s leg as a sin…. As in the case, for example, of a man who had been very debauched and who, precisely in order to deter his son from the same behavior, came to view the sexual instinct itself as a sin—forgetting that there was a difference between himself and the child.”
By connecting his father with the prohibition and the prohibition with the desire, Kierkegaard laid bare the components of a logic of the libido that would later play such a decisive role in his analyses of inherited sin [Danish: Arvesynden, literally “inherited sin” but often translated as “original sin”] in The Concept of Anxiety, where he would also make use of his earlier journal entry about the “premonition” that precedes the inevitability with which the instinct emerges: “The logic of sin moves onward; it drags the individual along like a woman whom an executioner drags by the hair while she shrieks in despair. Anxiety comes first; it discovers the logic before it arrives, just as one can sense in one’s bones that a storm is approaching. It comes closer; the individual trembles like a horse that stops and neighs at the spot where it once had shied. Sin conquers.” The use of metaphors here makes it abundantly clear how the individual is “predestined, as it were,” allowing herself to be dragged against her will to the scaffold where what she fears will take place. Throughout Kierkegaard’s writings there are many of these high-intensity sketches of the individual’s heroic battle against temptation—with temptation usually the victor, thus consigning the individual to sin; one such depiction can be found in The Sickness unto Death: “If a person who has been addicted to one sin or other, but who has successfully resisted temptation for a long time—if he has a relapse and succumbs once again to temptation, the dejection that then ensues is by no means always sorrow over the sin. It can be many other things as well. Indeed, it can be resentment at Governance, as if Governance had caused him to succumb to temptation, as if, in view of the fact that he had successfully resisted temptation for so long, Governance ought not to be so hard on him.” Although these lines in principle could be about everything other than a failed attempt to resist sexual “temptation,” it is hard to escape the impression that the primary occasion and principal background for this text is precisely this “temptation.” “The sexual as such is not the sinful,” The Concept of Anxiety repeats again and again, almost like a mantra, but when we read this we must ask ourselves whether the author really means what he has written or whether he perhaps seems more credible when he informs us that “the prohibition awakens the desire.”
There are, however, also passages that depict the joys of sublimation. In the work For Self-Examination from 1851, Kierkegaard concerns himself with a person’s frequently incorrigible forgetfulness concerning his own promises of reform, and he gives the following example as an illustration: “Imagine a person who has been and who remains addicted to a passion. Then comes a moment—and such moments come for everyone, perhaps many times, alas, perhaps many times in vain!—then comes a moment when he has come to a halt, as it were. A resolution of improvement awakens. Imagine, then, that he said to himself one morning (let us suppose him to be a gambler, for example), ‘I vow solemnly and sacredly that I will never again have anything to do with gambling, never again—tonight will be the last time.’ Oh, my friend, he is lost! I would sooner venture to maintain the opposite position, however strange it might sound: that if there were a gambler who said to himself at such a moment, ‘All right, you will be allowed to gamble every single day for the rest of your life, but tonight you must refrain from it’—that if he did this, my friend, he would surely be saved! Because the resolution that the first gambler made was a trick played on him by desire; the resolution made by the second gambler tricks desire; the one is tricked by desire, the other tricks desire…. Because if it is compelled to wait, desire loses the desire.” What is noteworthy here is not only that Kierkegaard has managed to portray sublimation in a manner so grounded in experience; it is also striking that this sketch is placed right in the middle of an edifying discourse whose title, For Self-Examination, thus might be said to be well-chosen in a more than theological sense!
Whether (and if so, to what extent) Kierkegaard himself managed to trick desire so that it lost the desire to be desire remains an open question, but the theory advanced by a well-known scholar that he “suffered under the self-communion of masturbation” for most of his life remains only an assertion. And despite scattered reports of relapses into sins of the past, Kierkegaard’s writings can—also—be viewed as one great process of sublimation in which instincts were embodied in one work after the other. In this respect Kierkegaard was not notably different from many others of his day: They, too, drove themselves to productivity; they, too, forced desire to take on forms of expression other than immediacy, thereby creating the sublime art of the Danish Golden Age; and they, too, suffered periodically from all the many psychosomatic illnesses to which thwarted desire can give rise.
Thus, Peter Christian’s diaries teem with comments on irritability, restlessness, anxiety, dizziness, impure thoughts, nerve fever, as well as strange, disturbing dreams that he describes only telegraphically. Entirely characteristic of Peter Christian’s conflict between erotic energy and harsh self-discipline, between inclination and duty, is a diary entry from October 16, 1835, in which he complained that he had been unable to bring himself to take Holy Communion with his father, despite having solemnly promised his father that he would do so—and then immediately afterward Peter Christian wrote: “Shower every other day.”
Maria
Some months later Peter Christian could begin a reduction in the frequency of these cooling-off periods. To the surprise of many people—not least himself—he suddenly found himself wanting to get married. His choice fell upon Elise Marie, a warm and lively young woman who was the daughter of the late Bishop P. O. Boisen and his wife Anna Boisen (née Nannestad, usually called “Nanna”). After several discussions with his father in the course of the spring, Peter Christian finally obtained the requisite approval of his relationship with Elise Marie (or “Maria,” as he called her) and a pledge of economic support, and on June 5, 1836, they announced their engagement.
A bright and as yet unwritten page was thus appended to the gloomy tale of the male trio that constituted the surviving members of the Kierkegaard household. Many wretched years later Peter Christian would recall Maria as the person who had “caused a gentle dawn to shine upon our aged father,” and, he added, “Søren was surely touched not a little by this.” Maria quite literally brought an entirely new tone to the household: She could play the piano and sing as she played. Peter Christian’s account book reveals that at Christmas he spent an entire rixdollar on “fifteen ballads by Ingemann.”
Nonetheless, Peter Christian was not the type of person to transform his life completely overnight just because he had fallen in love. When Maria and her family went to Jutland for their summer vacation, Peter Christian was so lost in his work that he scarcely had time to reply to her emotionladen letters. But one night, her mother Nanna crept out of bed and went downstairs to write Peter Christian a letter in which she pleaded with him to pay Maria at least a brief little visit. The letter ends: “Take care of yourself and come soon to your Maria, who is full of longing.” Not even Peter Christian could resist such a request, and in early July he packed up his suitcase and departed for a belated summer vacation. The pages of his diary for the subsequent period are more or less blank, and this is usually a sign of happiness.
Soon he was back in Copenhagen, however, and resumed his worrying and his preoccupation with himself. The heat in the city was stifling, he could get no work done, and when he finally recovered a bit of his work rhythm he had to spend the entire month of September helping Pastor Georg Holger Waage improve the amateurish Latin in which the pastor had written his dissertation on the descent into the kingdom of the dead. But on October 21, 1836, Peter Christian and Maria went at last to Holmens Church, where this very same Pastor Waage, of all people, invoking the whole of his authority, declared them proper married people. Once the couple had installed themselves on the ground floor of the family home on Nytorv, Peter’s diary entry betrayed his sense of impatience: “The three days following [the wedding] were spent on receiving visitors who wanted to convey their congratulations, and several more days were spent finishing the process of moving in, arranging books, etc.” Now came the time to practice the art of being a family man, but Peter Christian preferred not to. During the spring of 1837, when there had been a big commotion in connection with a visit from his mother-in-law and her entourage, Peter Christian made this depressed entry in his diary: “Naturally, a bit of disturbance in my work and in my domestic arrangements was unavoidable, but so far I have got off better than I had expected.” In May, “extensive reparations” were an additional source of disturbance to the entire Kierkegaard family, including the youngest and oldest members, both of whom lived on the second floor.
About the time of the wedding, a party had been arranged at the home of the merchant Kierkegaard’s cousin, M. A. Kierkegaard, a wholesaler who resided in a large apartment at 45 Købmagergade. Hans Brøchner was a resident theological student at Regensen College in 1836; in later years he would take up lodgings with this same M. A. Kierkegaard, but at the time the seventeen-year-old Brøchner was still only a curious explorer in this world, and therefore very observant. Years afterwards Brøchner would recall that evening’s party: “I saw Søren Kierkegaard there without knowing what he was; I had only been told that he was Dr. Kierkegaard’s brother. He spoke very little that evening; he primarily played the role of observer. My only definite impression was of his appearance, which I found almost comical. He was then twenty-three years old; he had something quite irregular in his entire form and had a strange coiffure. His hair rose almost six inches above his forehead into a tousled crest that gave him a strange, bewildered look. Without quite knowing how, I got the impression that he was a shop assistant—perhaps because the family were merchants—and I immediately added to this, from my impression of his strange appearance, that he must work in a dry goods shop. Later on I have often laughed heartily at my perspicacity.”
For the rest of 1836, Peter Christian was very busy with a great many teaching responsibilities. On New Year’s Eve young Mrs. Kierkegaard wrote to her beloved Nanna that Christmas in her new surroundings had “passed in great quiet and solitude” and that Christmas Eve itself had been spent with her father-in-law. “The day after Christmas we took communion. That was at nine o’clock in the morning, and the weather was terribly cold and windy. It was three hours before we got home, though God helped us here again, inasmuch as no one caught cold.” Yet perhaps the church had been too cold after all, because Maria started the new year with an influenza that kept her housebound until the beginning of February. She passed the time by writing letters to her mother about her distracted husband who had so many tutorials and lectures at the university that she was often alone for the entire day. He had by no means forgotten her: As she pointed out, he had given her a night lamp, a footstool, and a volume of romances. “Marie indeed liked to get out a bit and let her light shine among other people,” her sister-in-law Eline Boisen explained, but alas, she continued, her husband “preferred that she sing for him alone—even though he had no sense whatever either for singing or for music.”
Close to the first anniversary of that unforgettable summer in Jutland, Peter Christian’s diary reports: “On the first [of July 1837] Marie had to take to bed.” The evening before, the couple had been out for a walk on the city ramparts, but as they entered town via the Royal Gardens and were about to cut over to Nytorv they were surprised by a violent shower. Maria was drenched and had to stay in bed for the next couple of days. There was talk of calling Nutzhorn, the family physician, but Peter Christian and Nanna, who was on a little summer visit, agreed that Maria was most likely merely suffering from “too much pampering.”
Maria’s father-in-law took a completely different view of the situation, and without informing Peter Christian he contacted Bayer, the family attorney. On the morning of July 5, at Bayer’s suggestion the couple signed wills in which they designated one another as their sole heirs. Recalling his father’s financial coolheadedness, an appalled Peter Christian later noted: “Would that it had never happened.” The next day was his thirty-second birthday, and a febrile Maria made him a present of Grundtvig’s Lays, which she had purchased long in advance. Late in the afternoon a “gastric fever” turned into a “nerve typhus with violent convulsive episodes” that continued the next couple of days. They sent for the physician, who saw no reason for concern, but soon Maria lay there unconscious, shaking with chest convulsions. At night, delirious with fever, she sang at the top of her voice, and the songs were so eerie and “terrifyingly lovely” that people would sometimes stand quietly out on Gammeltorv, listening, while others in the stairwell made plans to “write down this strange music.” At about four o’clock one morning she suddenly came to consciousness and asked after her husband and her mother, saying: “Now the ice has broken. Now I must go into the Kingdom of God.”
Peter Christian heard this from the night attendant. During the past week he himself had been spending the night in a room over on Vestergade, while Maria’s two brothers, Lars and Peter, had slept in his room. “Unfortunately”—that is the word that introduces the account in his diary where he explains this arrangement, which he attempted to justify with reference to external, practical circumstances, while in reality it had been occasioned by his fear of coming too close to Maria. When he came in to pay her a rather short visit on July 13, she begged “so imploringly” for a kiss, just a single kiss, and—as he writes with a revealing reserve—this was something he could not “neglect to do.”
Neglect to do! The kiss was their last in this life. Maria died on the morning of July 18 and was buried four days later in Assistens Cemetery in a family plot that was becoming more and more packed with young dead.
A week later, on Tuesday, July 25, the Adresseavisen carried, under the heading “Deaths,” the following message: “Tuesday, the 18th of this month, with a gentle and peaceful death after eighteen days’ suffering from typhus, God called from this life my beloved wife, Elise Maria, née Boisen, in the thirty-second year of her life and the first year of our marriage…. P. Chr. Kierkegaard.”
Bringing Gloom to Rented Rooms
“It is the path we all must take, over the Bridge of Sighs into Eternity.” This sentence stands as one of the first entries in Søren Aabye’s journal for 1837. Shortly after Maria’s burial he repeated the words on a little slip of paper. Death had called at his innermost family circle for the seventh time, and he himself had not yet turned twenty-five, so it was not strange that he felt like “a galley slave chained to death; every time life stirs, the chain rattles and death makes everything wither away—and it happens every moment.”
As with the earlier deaths, he was indignant at the shallowness of the relatives who came around with their condolences like “automatons in motion,” reeling off pious phrases. The day after Maria’s death he wrote full of woe: “ ‘One should love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ the bourgeois philistines say, and what these well-brought-up children, now useful citizens of the state, mean is … for one thing, that when a person is asked for a candle snuffer, even if he is sitting far from the person who asks him, he should say ‘certainly’ and then get up ‘with great pleasure’ in order to give it to him; and for another thing, they mean that a person should remember to make all the appropriate condolence visits. But they have never felt what it means for the whole world to turn its back on them, because the entire school of herring of which they are a part—a group which always makes the rounds—would naturally never permit such a situation to arise.”
The situation was unbearable, and immediately after Maria’s burial Søren Aabye had to escape to Hillerød for a couple of days. Peter Christian himself finally got away to Søllerød at the beginning of August, but the vacation did not last long before his father ordered him back to town, where everything was the way it used to be, only worse: “Lately Søren has been depressed perhaps more than ever by brooding, most likely over his health, but it makes him unhappy and unfit, and it is close to making him mad. To judge from these last days, when things really began to go wrong, the pleasure trip he took on the very day of the burial did not benefit him at all.” Nor did Peter Christian derive any particular benefit from his own vacation, and on October 3 his father wrote to his sister Else about Peter Christian’s condition after the loss of Maria: “His sorrow over this death is indescribable and has a disturbing effect on his health, which was weak beforehand.” He could not even bring himself to have her name put on the gravestone out there at the cemetery, even though his mother-in-law Nanna repeatedly pleaded with him to do so: “I merely wish that one way or another her name could be placed on it just like the others who have been interred there.”
The three men were once again left to one another’s company and soon resumed their accustomed roles in the exhausting triangular drama. We can get a glimpse of their situation by inspecting the surviving records of their participation in Holy Communion. The sexton of each church was supposed to record the names of every communicant in these registers, thereby leaving specific records of the piety—or lack of same—of the lives of persons long since deceased. “Merchant Kirkkegaard with wife, daughter, and 3 sons of whom Søren Aabye (conf.),” the sexton at the Church of Our Lady had thus written years earlier, on Friday, April 25, 1828, when Søren Aabye, who had been confirmed the previous Sunday, took communion for the first time. That was as it was supposed to be. Like his father, he chose Fridays as his communion day, and between 1828 and 1836 the two men took communion together on a total of eighteen occasions. Taking communion together strengthens a mutual connection, but it also presupposes a mutual toleration that the two sons at times found difficult to summon forth. Thus on occasion Peter Christian’s name was added to the communion register under the line that would normally indicate the total number of communicants; he had added his name to the list of prospective communicants at the last minute, after an exhausting spiritual struggle: “Nevertheless, praise God, on the 16th I did take communion with my father, after I had tried to make my peace with Søren, with whom I have recently got along reasonably well, inasmuch as we have each kept to ourselves. I have also got along reasonably well with Father, who often enough must endure my depressed and irritable humor, which this month has been intensified by illness.” That day, January 16, 1835, Søren Aabye and Peter Christian took communion together for the last time ever.
Søren Aabye had in fact finally had enough of it all. Enough of that housebound, depressive old man, who coughed and hawked and had to leave the room at regular intervals in order to vomit when the emetics (which had been prescribed by the physician as a remedy for his increasing colic) noisily took effect. And he had had enough of his father’s endless prowling around the empty rooms, listening, eavesdropping, and hatching little intrigues with Peter Christian, Goody-goody Peter, Pusillanimous Peter, that conscientious and self-sacrificing person, who, however, was fundamentally a complete neurotic and unfit for life, and who since Maria’s death actually had something to be self-pitying about. And he had had enough of the questions no one really dared to ask, nor perhaps could answer. What did Maria die of? Why didn’t Peter Christian want to kiss her? And why couldn’t Peter Christian pull himself together and have a memorial tablet placed on Maria’s grave out at the cemetery? Was it because he thought that he himself would soon be out there, too? Had God pronounced a curse upon the house of Kierkegaard? Or were the countless deaths perhaps due to an infectious disease that leapt from body to body if one surrendered to life and to sensuality and forgot the great prohibition?
Søren Aabye wanted out, and his journal speaks its own clear language: “I will turn away from those who merely lay in wait in order to learn that one has transgressed in one way or another—and turn toward Him who rejoices more over one sinner who repents than over the ninety-nine wise ones who have no need of repentance.” Thus, on July 28, when he wrote in his father’s account book, acknowledging the receipt of twenty rixdollars, he appended the following, not exactly cordial sentence: “On the first day of this coming September 1837, when I move out of my father’s house and cease to be a part of his household, he has promised me, until further notice, five hundred rixdollars per year for my maintenance.” One gets the impression that this had not come about entirely unproblematically. Later, Peter Christian would confide to Vilhelm Birkedal how “Søren had often had heated clashes with the father, and that, on Søren’s side, the relationship between the two of them was far from being so full of pious devotion as one might believe if one judges from the way he speaks of his father in his writings.” Only the sentimental can doubt the veracity of this statement.
On September 1, 1837, Søren Aabye brought his few possessions and his many books to an apartment at number 7 Løvstræde. As a part of his economic arrangement he had agreed to teach Latin at the Borgerdyd School, where he was responsible for instructing the next-to-the-highest classes. It is not known how long he continued in this, his first and only real job, but for the better part of a year his journals regularly contain entries about grammatical relationships in which the despondent Latin teacher apparently recognized his own situation—for example, this entry from October 7: “Unfortunately my life is all too subjunctive. Would to God I had some indicative strength.” And this indicative strength kept him waiting. True, he did attend Martensen’s series of lectures on “Prolegomena to Speculative Dogmatics,” but only from November 15 until December 23, after which he no longer felt like continuing. In general, he was listless: “I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like walking, it is strenuous. I don’t feel like lying down, because then I would either remain lying down for a long time, and I don’t feel like doing that, or I would get right up again, and I don’t feel like doing that either. I don’t feel like going riding, it involves motion that is too strenuous for my apathy. I just want to go for a drive in a carriage and let a great many objects glide by while I experience a steady, comfortable, rocking motion, pausing at each beautiful spot merely in order to feel my own lassitude. My ideas and impulses are as fruitless as the lust of a eunuch. In vain do I seek something that might stimulate me. Not even the pithy language of the Middle Ages is capable of dispelling the emptiness by which I am dominated…. [I]n brief, I don’t even feel like writing what I have just written, nor do I feel like erasing it.”
This same indolent state continued for the rest of the year, and his journal entries dwindled. On the same day that he complained about his lack of indicative strength, he wrote of a possible explanation of this stagnation: “How frightful it is when all history is displaced by morbid rumination upon one’s own wretched history!” Just before Christmas 1837 he was so listless that the only evidence of his earthly existence is loose slips and scraps of paper. On one such scrap of paper he confessed: “I think that if I ever become a serious Christian someday, what I will be most ashamed of will be that I had not become one sooner, that I had wanted to try everything else first.” This is one of the confessions that Søren Aabye—after he had become a “serious Christian”—permitted to emerge from his official and rather monolithic version of: Søren Kierkegaard.
It is not known how long the young theological student continued to reside at Løvstræde. In a journal entry dated April 1, 1838, he writes: “I sat with little Carl on my lap and told him that in the new apartment where I intended to move there was an old sofa I was really looking forward to.” So, Kierkegaard had plans of changing his place of residence. Carl was Carl Ferdinand Lund, his eight-year-old nephew. This much is certain. But we never hear anything more about the new address and the old sofa, presumably because Kierkegaard changed his mind at the last moment.
“Dear Emil!! You, My Friend, the Only One”
It was during these years of drift that the acquaintance with Emil Boesen developed into a genuine friendship. Boesen came from a cultivated home and was the son of Councillor of Justice Johannes Boesen, who attended the Moravian Congregation of Brethren, which was where the boys, close in age, had first become acquainted with one another. After private tutoring Emil entered the university in 1829, and following the usual period of study he earned his theological degree in 1834. Boesen continued to live in his father’s house on Philosopher’s Alley, up in a garret apartment where he would stand in the gloaming and gaze dreamily out the window and over the ramparts, occasionally discerning the contours of the blue mountains of poetry. Like Søren Aabye he nurtured dreams of literary fame, studying the talented Heiberg and the beloved Poul Martin Møller, whose spirited vocabulary (“would that our souls might have truly ruddy cheeks”) could be found here and there in Boesen’s letters. Boesen also tried to adopt Møller’s talent for the “random thought” that dealt so deftly and accurately with life’s philosophical problems: “It is no great accomplishment for the least little puddle to become so clear that one can see the sediment at the bottom, but our souls, however, ought to be more like the deep ocean.” There are certain obligations incumbent upon those who live in Philosopher’s Alley!
Throughout his life, Søren Aabye viewed Emil as his true friend, but it can be difficult to get a sense of the essence of their friendship because it left no paper trail, so to speak. During their youth, they had only to walk a few hundred yards to be in one another’s company, and there was thus no need to write letters—a loss for posterity. And indeed, the only surviving letters from Emil to Søren Aabye, three in all, date from the 1850s, by which time, for a number of reasons, the intimacy of their relationship had decreased significantly. “Generally, he did not write letters, or at any rate only little notes whose contents were carefully considered. The style seemed easy, but it had been carefully scrutinized, and he could usually remember them for a long time,” Boesen recalled. He could also recollect how his friend usually burned letters as soon as he had read them: “And when he destroyed them he was shaken to the core.” We can almost see him doing this.
Emil did not burn his letters. On the contrary, he did posterity the favor of preserving them. In addition to a good many brief notes from Søren Aabye to Emil, eighteen real letters have also been preserved, of which the earliest, dated July 17, 1838, is four pages long. It begins with such emotion that it is on the verge of collapsing into literary mannerism, but there can be no doubt about the devotion, the genuineness of the feelings, expressed in the letter: “Dear Emil!! You, my friend, the only one, through whose intercessions I have endured a world that seemed to me unbearable in so many ways; the only one who remained when I permitted doubt and suspicion, like an onrushing storm, to wash away and destroy everything else.” Emil did more than lend a patient ear to his friend’s lengthy monologues: Apparently his “intercessions,” which had been as admonitory as they were edifying, had also managed to wrench his friend free of a thoroughgoing pessimism which wanted to break with the world. Nonetheless, a deep yearning, not for eros but for logos, was still raging restlessly within Søren Aabye, who wanted to give vent to his passions in words: “What I need is a voice that is as penetrating as the gaze of a Lynceus, as terrifying as the groan of giants, as pervasive as a sound of nature, ranging from the deepest bass to the most evanescent chest tones, which can be modulated from the softest, most divine whisper to raging, volcanic energy. This is what I need in order to breathe, in order to give voice to what is on my mind, in order to make the bowels both of rage and of sympathy tremble…. My speech is not suited to this. It is uncircumcised, unevangelical; it is as nocturnally hoarse as the screech of a gull, or it fades away like a blessing on the lips of a mute.” Rarely has impoverishment of language been expressed with such linguistic richness, and this entry is ancestrally related to one of the “Diapsalmata” that would subsequently appear in the first part of Either/Or and that Kierkegaard would attribute to the pen of the Aesthete A.
We can glimpse something of the doings of the two friends during this period by examining Emil’s letters to his cousin Martin Hammerich, who had been the first person in the 357-year history of the University of Copenhagen to have been permitted to defend his dissertation for the magister degree (on the Norse myth of Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods) in Danish, and who was now in Bonn studying Sanskrit with A. W. Schlegel. Emil wrote Martin very diligently, and on August 20, 1836, he could report: “Søren Kierkegaard’s scholarly interests are still coursing through him, half terrified of one another because none of them has sufficient mastery over the others; and even if he were to adopt a firmer stance, he still has no notion—except perhaps a very abstract one—of why it is that he has come into the world. Therefore his life is bound to be somewhat disjointed.” Presumably it is in this shared sense of doubt and irresolution that we are to find the common ground inhabited by these two friends, for Emil’s life was not particularly coherent, either: “Almost every day, opposed ideas poison one another in my head, which is sick with reflection,” Boesen complained in Kierkegaardian style. And not without reason had the two friends taken as their motto a couple of lines from Oehlenschläger’s “Midsummer Eve’s Play”: “See, time comes and time goes; there is a church in the distance.”
The church was a distant possibility, but for the time being Søren Aabye did not count himself as much “more than a listener.” Emil was in the same situation but he had already earned his theological degree, and in one sense the distant church was a possibility that was quite concrete and ready at hand: He was considering (“just now I am really haunted by the idea”) of seeking appointment as a pastor at Zion Church in Tranquebar [Tarangambadi], India, but he was tempted neither by the annual salary of “six hundred Madras rupees” nor by the missionary position associated with the call; rather, Boesen had a great yearning to travel to foreign places. Subsequently he also entertained the notion of traveling to South America as a ship’s pastor on the frigate Rota. Instead, however, he chose almost the exact opposite of such fabulous temptations to see the world, dedicating himself to his “lovely, little crooked congregation out on Strandvejen,” a privately funded home for crippled girls, where he did some teaching in addition to preaching every other Sunday and holiday. The tenderness with which he regarded these invalid misses was typical of him, and he wrote to his cousin Martin that a “pretty head can very well sit on a bent body.” Indeed, he had had the good fortune to have “fallen a little bit in love” with one of the young ladies. Six months later, however, he was fascinated with a young lady out in Christianshavn, but she was watched over by an ill and grumpy aunt, who lay in a shadowy side room, groaning inarticulately and following Boesen’s every movement with her bleary eyes. One day, however, he put on his “silk vest” and set out with firm resolve, but his courage failed him nonetheless, and he once again found himself up in the attic of his father’s house, all alone with his erotic daydreams.
It was also up in that garret that Boesen worked on various short stories, all of which caused him difficulty and would not really go where their author wanted them to. In a letter of June 3, 1837, he confided to Martin that he was “working on an anonymous short story,” but that it never seemed ready to be ended. And to judge from the sketch he gave to Martin, it was the figures Boesen was working with rather than the piece’s literary qualities which were more striking. Within the framework of a symbolic tale we see a “hermit,” who sits and ponders in his hut “night and day, seven days a week” while his two lovely daughters leap from rock to rock, gathering strawberries. The hermit immediately leads one to think ahead to Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Victor Eremita, “the victorious solitary,” but when one learns the names of the two daughters one has to ask oneself whether Boesen might not have been a supplier of literary raw material to Kierkegaard’s later corporate enterprise, because “the one was called Anxiety and the other was called Trembling.” Or might it have been just the reverse—that Kierkegaard had supplied Boesen with the inspiring motifs upon which Boesen continued to embroider?
No one knows. Nor does anyone know what else the two friends did together, for we search in vain for evidence of excursions, visits to the theater, nocturnal high jinks in shady locales, or whatever else, for better or worse, is a part of being young. There is not even any evidence of a joint trip to the Royal Theater, concerning which there is plenty of information in other respects. Søren Aabye was practically a fixture at the theater whenever Mozart’s Don Giovanni was on the playbill; indeed, according to H. P. Holst, “he never missed a performance of Don Giovanni.” Søren Aabye could not, however, top the experienced Don Giovannist with whom he fell into conversation at the theater in mid-November 1836, who “had been seeing Don Giovanni for thirty years.” The pronouncement might sound like an empty boast but it might well have been rather close to the truth, for Don Giovanni was performed at the Royal Theater for the first time on May 5, 1807, precisely six years before Søren Aabye came into the world, and from 1829 until 1839 it was performed twenty-eight times, with five of these performances between 1835 and 1838. Although other works by Mozart competed for Kierkegaard’s attention—he heard The Magic Flute for the first time on January 26, 1837—it was Don Giovanni that really captured his imagination, and from the mid-1830s until the completion of Either/Or the journals teem with entries concerning the great seducer.
But Kierkegaard was far from alone in his passion. The times were composed in the key of Mozart, and the young university student was merely in tune with the times. In a journal entry dated June 10, 1836—when he wrote of a pharmacist who ground his medicine, of a girl scrubbing in the courtyard, where there was also a stableboy grooming his horse and cleaning his currycomb by knocking it on the stones—it was not a mere accident that the itinerant musician who played his reed flute in a nearby courtyard “was piping the minuet from Don Giovanni.” It was a summer’s day in Copenhagen, rather late in the morning, everything so eternally simple, “and I felt so fine.”
In a report from 1839, on the other hand, the situation was quite disharmonious: “In some respects I can say of Don Giovanni what Elvira says to him: ‘You are the murderer of my happiness.’ For truly, this is the play which has seized hold of me so diabolically that I can never again forget it—it was this play that drove me, like Elvira, out of the quiet night of the cloister.” And this was the play that Kierkegaard would subject to an intellectual-historical analysis in the first part of Either/Or, endowing it with a dramatic and psychological depth that neither Mozart nor the librettist da Ponte would have granted their own work. In his analysis Kierkegaard imitated the music with such linguistic genius that Don Giovanni himself looms over us, emerging from the rhetoric: “Hear his life begin. As the lightning uncoils from the darkness of the thundercloud, he bursts forth from the depths of seriousness, faster than the speed of lightning, less steady yet just as sure. Hear how he plunges into the multiplicity of life, how he dashes himself against its solid barriers. Hear the lightly dancing violin notes. Hear the intimation of joy. Hear the jubilation of pleasure. Hear the festive bliss of enjoyment. Hear his wild flight. He surpasses himself, always faster, never stopping. Hear the unbridled desire of passion; hear the sighing of love; hear the whisper of temptation; hear the maelstrom of seduction; hear the stillness of the moment: Hear, hear, hear, Mozart’s Don Giovanni!”
Reading Binge
In the mid-1830s Kierkegaard engaged in a period of bingeing or boozing that led him far afield both from the demands of the theological discipline and from the straight and narrow path of virtue. This is the generally received account of the situation, and it is not a fabrication from whole cloth. First and foremost, however, the above-mentioned bingeing period was a time of intensive reading during which Kierkegaard amassed the enormous fund of literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge on which he would subsequently draw so generously and unblushingly in his writings. Among the bills from 1836 that caused his father’s hands to tremble, the largest balance was for books from Reitzel’s Bookshop, which his intellectually inexhaustible son visited several times a week every month of the year except August, so that as time went on his collection of books became quite considerable. Of course it could not stand comparison with the library of the jurist J.L.A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge, which included ten thousand volumes, or that of the church historian A. G. Rudelbach, which had twenty thousand volumes, much less compete with the forty thousand volumes owned by the historian C. F. Wegener, whose cultivation of the pleasures of bibliophilia had compelled him to live on beef broth and codfish tails. At its maximum extent Kierkegaard’s library apparently consisted of a couple thousand volumes, but even as early as 1837, when Hans Brøchner visited him at his home on Løvstræde to borrow a book by the German romantic author Eichendorff, Kierkegaard’s book collection was sufficiently extensive to take Brøchner’s breath away.
Thus Kierkegaard had been infected by a bookworm at an early age, and he was vulnerable to the temptation of books of which he strictly speaking had no need: “As a result of a strange compulsion I have purchased many books that I have left standing on the shelf.” And on February 7, 1839, he made the pleasurably penitential confession that in his view Anton Günther’s work Die Juste-Milieu in der deutschen Philosophie gegenwärtiger Zeit [German: “The Happy Medium in Contemporary German Philosophy”] has “such an excellent title that I have been so infatuated and preoccupied with it that I will probably never read the book.” He did, however, manage to read many of the books, and in fact, as we can see, he read them quite carefully. On occasion he would bend over a good bit of the corner of a page, sometimes at the top of the page, sometimes at the bottom, and he developed a complex system of notation employing various symbols, “N.B.” [Latin: nota bene, “take careful note”] marks, and other indicators. Similarly, he alternated between blue, red, and black ink, varied the size of his handwriting, or suddenly switched to pencil whenever and wherever he wanted to leave a mark in the margin. He did this “meticulously.” Kierkegaard had a pronounced sense for the aesthetic aspects of books. Since a bookseller rarely sold books already bound, Kierkegaard liked to have his books bound in half-calf or in half- or full-shirting, sometimes in glazed paper. But the more flamboyant volumes were the exceptions. The decoration on the spines of the volumes bound in shirting was limited to the title and several horizontal gold lines. It was a restrained sort of elegance.
Kierkegaard’s collection of books was dominated by contemporary works, with only fifty or so volumes from before 1750 and a bit more than a hundred from the period 1750–1800. Close to half the collection consisted of theological and devotional literature. In addition to this, the collection contained the principal works of classical literature, either in Greek or Latin or in translation, usually German. Most of the major European authors were also available in German translation, ranging from Dante’s Divine Comedy and Petrarch’s Italian Poetry to Shakespeare’s Dramatic Works, Pascal’s Pensées, and Byron’s Collected Works. Hegel, Goethe, and German romantics such as Schlegel, Jean Paul, Novalis, Tieck, Hoffmann, and Heine were generously represented. The selection of modern literature was quite varied, though Danish authors were reasonably well represented, while Swedish literature was represented by Bellman, period. In addition to a varied collection of bibliographical and other reference works, Kierkegaard’s library contained a great many volumes of folk tales, legends, and songs from different countries, naturally including such classics as the Thousand and One Nights and the Grimm brothers’ Irish Fairy Tales, but also Svend Grundtvig’s Three Hundred Selected and Jolly New Stories, or Jokes and Seriousness: Very Useful and Good Pastimes, plus the anonymously authored puzzle and joke book entitled, Strange Questions, Fun to Listen to and Read, Plus One of Aesop’s Fables and the City and Country Mouse. “When I am tired of everything and ‘full of days,’ ” we read in Kierkegaard’s journal for December 26, 1837, “fairy tales are always a rejuvenating bath that proves beneficial to me. There all earthly, all finite cares vanish, and joy—indeed even sorrow itself—is infinite.”
In any attempt to isolate and identify the material conditions for the genesis of his genius, charting Kierkegaard’s reading during the greedy years of his youth is an obvious point of departure, but the attempt is beset with at least two considerable difficulties. For one thing, as is well known, he read considerably more books than he had in his library, and not only as a young man, but throughout his entire life, he regularly visited the Athenæum Reading Society as well as the libraries of the Student Association and the University of Copenhagen. And he was no less notorious for having got rid of books over the years, either because he no longer had need of them or because they might have been burdensome to the proper sort of posthumous reputation he strove more and more systematically to guarantee himself. If we compare the auction catalog of his library with the surviving bills from booksellers, we soon learn that the catalog reflects a reduced collection: From the year 1836 alone, of the forty-two titles that appear on the bills, only sixteen are included in the auction catalog. Blicher’s poetry appears on the bills from 1836, but is not in the catalog, nor is Holberg’s Peder Paars or Heine’s Tragedies. For another thing, Kierkegaard’s reading was unusually varied and disconnected. He read zigzag style, surfing and zapping from one point to another, and he honestly confessed his selective tendencies. “When I read a book,” he wrote in an entry from January 13, 1838, “it is not so much the book itself which pleases me as the infinite possibilities that must have existed at every point, the complex story, rooted in the author’s individual personality, in his studies, et cetera.” Kierkegaard was an active reader who was not satisfied with opening a book, but stepped into the book himself, with his entire personality, so to speak, in order to involve himself totally with the work. Even texts ingested in quite small doses were enough to set up powerful oscillations within his productive fantasy, and this helped confirm his own “thesis,” put forward in March 1837, to the effect that “great geniuses” cannot really read a book, because “when they read they always develop themselves more than they understand the author.”
And so did Kierkegaard: He developed himself as he read. Regardless of whether he held in his hands the most sublime poetry or sheer cock-and-bull stories, serious literature or trash, scholarly works or nonsense, he developed himself—as an author. He managed to assemble a remarkably miscellaneous library in his head, up front in his consciousness, out near his temporal lobes, from which his fabulous memory could conjure forth the most varied assortment of works, juxtaposing them with lightning swiftness. The talent for imitation, the perfect pitch, the ability to seize hold of details—all these contributed to make Kierkegaard into Kierkegaard, there can be no doubt of that.
At the same time, however, we are therefore entitled to have our doubts about how Kierkegaardian Kierkegaard really was.