From the Papers of One Still Living
“There Is an Indescribable Joy”
Toward the end of 1837 Kierkegaard sat reading one of the folk songs with which he relaxed. He was strangely withdrawn into himself, feeling almost like an ancient ruin. It was a quietly touching song about a girl who sat waiting for her sweetheart on a Saturday evening, weeping “so bitterly.” Suddenly a scene opened before his eyes, he saw the Jutland heath, its unspeakable solitude, and a solitary lark way up in the air: “Then one generation after another rose before me, and all the girls sang for me, and wept so bitterly, and sank into their graves again. And I myself wept with them.”
Fourteen days later, when he paid off the final 26 rixdollars of his enormous debt of 1,262 rixdollars, Kierkegaard wrote in his father’s account book: “And since father has helped me out of this embarrassment I hereby attest to my thankfulness to him.” That word, “embarrassment,” practically cries out to the heavens, for if there was any way in which his father had helped him, it had been to help him not out of, but into every sort of “embarrassment.” Nor, for that matter, is one exactly overwhelmed by the authenticity of the gratitude expressed in the latter part of the sentence. For the next three months there are only very brief journal entries, written on loose sheets of paper. There are just short of twenty such entries for January, eight for February, plus five without dates, so a person reading the journal jumps almost directly from December 30, 1837, to a point in mid-April 1838: “April. Once again a long time has passed in which I have not been able to pull myself together to do the least thing. Now I must make another little attempt. Poul Møller is dead.” Kierkegaard was probably as close to depression as he had ever been, and in February, Peter Christian realized how bad things were: “Søren has recently become more and more sickly, vacillating, and dejected. And my conversations with him, which I generally have to initiate, do not produce any perceptible difference.” Several weeks later, however, Peter Christian wrote in a more hopeful vein: “Søren, praise God, is now beginning to come closer, not only to individual Christians (Lindberg, for example) but also to Christianity.” In her memoirs, Lindberg’s daughter Elise reports that Kierkegaard, together with a number of young followers of Grundtvig—the brothers Johannes Ferdinand and Peter Andreas Fenger, the brothers Martin and Frederik Hammerich, and Peter Rørdam—would regularly call upon her father. But this fraternization does not seem to have had any further beneficial consequences. On Friday, December 16, 1836, Søren Aabye had taken communion for the last time ever with his father, who had had his eightieth birthday four days earlier. The communion register reports: “Mr. Kierkegaard, Merchant, and one son, S.A.” But during the entire year 1837 and the first half of 1838 Søren Aabye did not take communion, and the communion register of the Church of Our Lady records only “Mr. Kierkegaard, Merchant” and no one else. Nor was the father accompanied to communion by Peter Christian, because since Maria’s death Peter Christian had not taken communion at all.
The aged merchant had therefore had to go to communion alone, and on his journey to and from church he could wistfully remember the days when his family had gone to confession and communion together, as they had on Nicoline Christine’s wedding day, Friday, September 24, 1824. In 1838, when G. H. Waage, who had been the family’s confessor for ten years, was named director of Sorø Academy and the family was thus compelled to choose a new confessor, the breach became unmistakably clear: The senior Kierkegaard chose A.N.C. Smith, first curate at the Church of Our Lady; Peter Christian made the same choice, though only after some hesitation and apparently without knowledge of what his father had chosen; on the other hand, Søren Aabye, who had turned twenty-five on May 5, 1838 and was therefore legally an adult, chose E. V. Kolthoff, the secondranking curate at the Church of Our Lady. On June 6, 1838, when Søren Aabye took communion by himself for the first time in his life, the sexton listed a certain “Cand. Philosophiæ [university student] Kierkegaard” in the communion register, thereby leaving a record of the breach. And the rift did not heal. In mid-April the father again had to take communion alone, and his youngest son’s journal entry of a week later was not exactly glowing with Christian faith: “If Christ is to come and dwell in me, it will have to be in the manner described in the heading the almanac assigns to the Gospel reading for today: Christ comes in through closed doors.” It was Sunday, April 22, 1838. Over at Holmens Church it was an important confirmation Sunday. One of the hopefuls who had taken up her position in the group was named Regine Olsen, a girl of sixteen summers. She, too, would subsequently enter via closed doors. And exit again.
Among the journal entries from the spring of 1838 is one, dated May 19, that is totally different in tone from all the others: “There is an indescribable joy that glows within us just as inexplicably as the unmotivated outburst by the Apostle: ‘Rejoice, and again I say, rejoice’ (Philippians 4:4). This is not joy about one or another thing but is the full-throated shout of the soul ‘with tongue and mouth from the bottom of the heart’: ‘I rejoice for my joy—from, with, by, upon, for and with my joy’—a heavenly refrain that suddenly interrupts all our other songs, as it were; a joy that cools and refreshes like a breath of wind, a gust from the trade wind that blows from the grove of Mamre to the eternal dwelling places. May 19, 10:30 A.M.” This seems to be a brief account of a conversion, and in keeping with pietistic practice, a record was made of the time it was written down, so he could cling to the moment when worldly perdition had been replaced by transfigured salvation. The words “with tongue and mouth from the bottom of the heart” (which Kierkegaard put in quotation marks) do not, however, come from the apostle Paul. They are taken from the verses chanted by night watchmen in Copenhagen; undeniably, this is quite a way from the grove of Mamre, the oasis near Hebron which according to the Old Testament was one of the places one could encounter God and receive his prophetic promises.
So we do not know what really happened that morning in the middle of May 1838. The journal entries that precede and follow it do not provide the slightest clue. Perhaps the entry is merely a poetic sketch, but whatever occasioned it, joy, indescribable joy, was linked to Christ. Søren Aabye had come to understand, as if in a dizzying flash of insight, that—however things might be with the world or with one’s own life—God is love and that God is thus also the God of joy. He was so completely enveloped in joy that language neither could nor needed say anything at all. One does not have oneself to thank for such a joy. It is given. Joy is a gift, pure and simple, an experience that proceeds inexplicably from the Father of Light and is therefore blindingly indescribable.
This is Christianity at its best.
Death of a Merchant
“I am,” the aged Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard wrote to his sister Else in late June 1838, “although not really sick, very weak in both soul and body, and I must say the same for my sons. This letter will probably be the last you will receive from my hand, because I can no longer either think or write, and I hope that my homeward journey is near at hand.—Pray for me, my dear sister, just as I will pray for you, that God will grant us a blessed exit from this sinful world.—When the harvest is finished, see if you can send me a couple of words about how it went.”
He was a practical man to the last. Else never did get to write about the harvest, however, and the harvest wasn’t good that year; it rained too much, especially in the latter part of July. The water did not merely ruin the grain. It also got into the old house on Nytorv; it seeped through chimneys and stovepipes and suddenly began running across the floor of Peter Christian’s room. It so annoyed the old man that he wanted to sell the house. Peter Christian dissuaded him from doing this, however, and on August 5 they went to church together, and, for the first time since the death of Maria, Peter took communion. Søren Aabye had moved back home again. When he did so is uncertain, but it must have been before July 10, because the journal entry for that day reads: “I hope that my contentment with living here at home will be like that of a man I once read about. He, too, was tired of his home—and he wanted to ride away from it. When he had traveled a little way his horse stumbled and he fell off. And when he got to his feet he chanced to see his home, which now looked so beautiful to him that he immediately remounted his horse, rode home, and remained there. If only one views it from the right angle.” On Monday, August 6, Søren Aabye dined together with his father and brother. He and his father had argued earlier in the day—Peter Christian had heard the raised voices and noted it in his diary—but the dispute had apparently been smoothed over and the old man was suddenly in excellent spirits. Peter Christian, on the other hand, was feeling a bit dispirited after dinner and sought to divert himself by going out to call on the Hahn family.
The next morning, shortly after the housekeeper had served coffee to the master of the house, he rang for her again, complaining that his head was spinning. Shortly thereafter he had “nausea and many urgent bowel movements,” and for a moment Peter Christian feared that his father had perhaps been attacked by the cholera that was present in Denmark at the time. Bang, the family physician, was out of town, so they sent instead for Nutzhorn, who upon arrival prescribed an emetic. When this started to take effect the old man became strikingly weak; he refused to drink anything, and between bouts of vomiting he fell into a strange, snoring sleepiness. The housekeeper, however, thought that this was quite normal, so the others went to the dining table to have their coffee.
But a little before two o’clock that afternoon the sick man began hawking with an unprecedented ferocity. They rushed in and found him lying unconscious on the floor, his mouth full of vomit. Peter Christian poured cold water on his head without effect, and even though Nutzhorn was due to return at three o’clock, Peter Christian decided to send for Dr. Dørge, who showed up half an hour later. Like Nutzhorn, who soon rushed back into the thick of things, Dørge was a decisive man who understood that powerful remedies were needed: “He prescribed leeches for the head, dough plasters for the calves. And Nutzhorn, who came back, doubled the number of leeches and prescribed plasters for under his feet as well as a Spanish fly on his neck, though none of this had any discernible effect. He continued to lay there, his breathing occasionally blocked by mucus but otherwise coughing violently, and more and more he breathed as though he were in a real death struggle. Our hopes that he would regain some sort of consciousness, at least for a day or perhaps a bit longer, were utterly unfulfilled, as Nutzhorn had predicted all along. Even at the moment of death he merely gasped a couple of powerful sighs and then gave up the ghost. It was on the 9th at two o’clock in the morning, and along with Søren I was called down right away, but it was no use, because it was all over.”
There was a tragicomic aspect to this scene: a dying merchant, whom desperate physicians plied with leeches on his head, dough plasters around his calves, and—as a bizarre and final humiliation—a Spanish fly on his neck! A dried fly of this sort would have been included in most properly equipped physician’s bags, stuffed firmly into a tightly corked bottle, because the fly—which was about the size of an ordinary housefly but was of a metallic greenish-gold color—had a disgusting smell, probably because of the high ammonia content that caused it to be viewed as “beneficial.” The father had died at two o’clock in the morning, and on the afternoon of that same day the people from the probate court showed up. On Tuesday, August 14, he was buried at Assistens Cemetery. In accordance with his wishes the old man was laid to rest next to his oldest daughter, Maren Kirstine. That day the Adresseavisen carried the following item in its obituary column: “Thursday, August 9th, after two days’ illness, our dear father and father-in-law, M. P. Kierkegaard, formerly a hosier here in the city, in his eightysecond year, died in the Lord; this is hereby announced to grieving relatives and friends by his surviving sons and sons-in-law.” We note the epithet “formerly a hosier here in the city,” which, as the years went on, the youngest son would employ almost every time he dedicated his edifying discourses to the deceased. Thus the formulation might indicate that it was he, rather than Peter Christian, who was the author of the obituary.
But it was Michael Kierkegaard himself who had left written instructions concerning the appearance of the marble tablet which he wished placed at the grave site, over his wife and himself. Apart from a couple of spellings in the Jutlandic dialect, he got his way, and the stone, which survives to this day, reads: “ANNE KIERKEGAARD / born LUND / went home to the Lord / July 31, 1834 / in the 67th year of her life / loved and missed by / her surviving children / relatives and friends / but especially by her old husband, MICHAEL PEDERSEN KIERKEGAARD / who on August 9, 1838 / followed her / into eternal life / in his 82nd year.”
Condolence letters came pouring in. Peter Christian’s mother-in-law Nanna recalled “the splendid old man” and sadly reflected that she would never again “receive his friendly, faithful handshake,” while her son Harald wrote that there were but “few men by whom I felt as captivated upon first acquaintance as by him.” Johan Hahn, an old friend of the family, was the only one who noted that it might also be difficult for the younger of the boys. “Poor Søren,” he sighed in a letter to Peter Christian, and continued movingly, “may not this blow strike him down, shake him out of his torpor, so that he does not long for the vanity of this world, but gains the desire and the strength to search after the one thing needful, thereby putting to shame all those who—perhaps now, especially—doubt his seriousness and his integrity, doubt his efforts to achieve peace and reconciliation with God.”
Meanwhile, Søren Aabye sat in his room and noted his father’s death in his journal. Under a cross dated August 11, he wrote: “My father died on Wednesday, the 8th, at 2 o’clock in the morning. I had so deeply wished that he might live a couple of years longer, and I view his death as the final sacrifice his love made for me. Because he has not died from me, but died for me, in order that I might still amount to something, if that is possible. Of everything I have inherited from him, it is his memory, his transfigured image, that I treasure most (transfigured not by my poetic imagination—that wouldn’t be necessary—but transfigured by the many individual characteristics I am now learning about) and I will make sure to conceal it completely from the world. For I well know that at the present time there is only one person in the world (E. Boesen) with whom I can truly talk concerning him. He was a ‘trusty friend.’ ”
It would be difficult to imagine the difference between the two brothers displayed more clearly than in their respective sketches of their father’s death. Where in his diary Peter Christian adheres to the course of events in painstakingly concrete fashion, providing a sketch of the hectic final hours, Søren Aabye’s journal entry is majestic in its rhetoric, lofty, sensitive, practically a hymn. But this shimmering emotion, with which he makes his father’s demise into an expiatory death, a final sacrifice, is shot through with a strange vagueness. The memory of the father had been transfigured, not by the son’s poetic fantasies, but by the “many characteristics” of which the son was now learning. But what were these characteristics? Did the father go to his grave a mystery, or did the son in fact succeed in wresting his secret from him at the eleventh hour? The text does not tell us. In the next journal entry, dated the same day, Søren Aabye reflected on a pair of opposites: In “paganism a tax was levied upon bachelorhood,” while “Christianity recommended celibacy.” This seems deliberate—or is it merely a coincidence that a reflection on the renunciation of sex is the first thing that comes up after the death of the father?
Before we can get our bearings, questions begin to fly at us from every quarter, drawing into their wake one of the most disputed of all Kierkegaard’s journal entries, the entry about “the great earthquake,” a powerful piece of writing:
Then it was that the great earthquake took place, the frightful upheaval that suddenly forced upon me a new, infallible law of interpretation for all phenomena. Then I sensed that my father’s advanced age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse; that our family’s remarkable intellectual abilities merely enabled us to tear one another to pieces. Then I saw in my father an unhappy man who would outlive us all, a memorial cross on the grave of all his own hopes, and I felt the stillness of death increase around me. The entire family must bear the burden of a guilt, it must be the subject of God’s punishment: It was to disappear, wiped out by the mighty hand of God, expunged like an unsuccessful experiment. Only once in a while was I able to take solace in the thought that my father had had the burdensome responsibility of comforting us all with the consolation of religion, of giving us all the final sacrament, so that a better world would await us, even if we lost everything in this world, even if we were to be overtaken by the punishment that the Jews always called down upon their enemies: that our memory would be entirely blotted out, that no trace of us would remain.
This journal entry is part of a small group of entries that have a clearly autobiographical character. It is preceded by two quite brief quotations with which Kierkegaard wanted to sum up the principal themes of his childhood and youth. In the first quotation, under the heading “Childhood,” he cites Goethe: “Halb Kinderspiele, / Halb Gott im Herzen” [German: “Half children’s games, half God at heart”]. In the second quotation, under the heading “Youth,” he cites the Danish poet Christian Winther: “Beg?—we will not! / Youth on the road of life / Forcefully seizes the treasure.” These quotations are succeeded by a passage with the heading “25 Years Old,” consisting of twelve lines from act 3, scene 5 of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Immediately thereafter comes the entry about the great earthquake.
H. P. Barfod was so captivated by these journal entries that he broke entirely with the principle of chronological continuity and placed them at the very beginning of the multivolume selection he titled From Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers. In doing this, of course, Barfod also assigned these entries a salient place in the reader’s consciousness. They became introductory sentences, redolent with fateful significance. Where these entries had been located in the journals before Barfod began his cutting and pasting cannot readily be determined. Indeed, even Barfod himself was apparently not entirely certain, for he reported: “During the summer of 1838, after his birthday in May, but before his father’s death in August, the deceased appears to have wanted to sum up, in brief sketches, the story of his life up to the age of majority [in those days, age twenty-five], on three sheets of fine stationery, gilt-edged in small octavo size.”
The first three entries and the beginning of the fourth (the one about the great earthquake) are on three sheets of gilt-edged paper. These sheets, the reverse sides of which had not been written upon, were glued together at some point: The first sheet, with the childhood motto, is glued to the second sheet that has the motto about youth; this has in turn been glued to the third sheet, that has the Shakespeare quotation plus the first two lines of the entry about the great earthquake that was cut off immediately below the line ending with the words “a new, infallible.” In the first journal entry, the word “Childhood,” which is underlined with a wavy line, is written the same size as “Youth” in the second journal entry and “25 Years Old” in the third. Since the writing is uniform and the journal entries are on the same sort of paper, they were in all probability written at the same time. It is not known who glued them together, but by all indications it was Barfod, who may have found the three pieces of paper lying together. In fact, in January 1838 Kierkegaard had had plans of writing “a short story with mottoes composed by myself”; with a little imagination, these “mottoes” could be the journal entries in question.
To this bundle of loose ends must be added the bothersome fact that the manuscript of these journal entries disappeared after the type had been set for Barfod’s edition. The next set of editors, Heiberg and Kuhr, therefore had to make do with reprinting the entry about the great earthquake from Barfod’s edition, situating it in the elastic group of “loose papers” from before the year 1838. In February 1911, however, the vanished original manuscripts of the first three journal entries and the first two lines of earthquake entry turned up. They had been at Reitzel’s Bookshop, which now turned them over to the university library. To his great chagrin, however, Reitzel was compelled to report that he had been able to find neither the remainder of the earthquake entry nor the two succeeding entries, which Barfod (and, with him, posterity) had linked to the great earthquake.
These technicalities are decisive for interpreting the great earthquake, whose specific significance depends on when it was written down. What, in fact, were the events that Kierkegaard introduced with his dramatic words, “Then it was …”? As we have seen, Barfod assumed that the journal entries had been written down after Kierkegaard’s twenty-fifth birthday, May 5, 1838, but before his father died, on August 8 of that year, and Barfod justifies his assumption by pointing to the fact that Kierkegaard had written “25 Years Old” above the Shakespeare quotation. The assumption does not hold up, however. This quotation must have been written down significantly later than Barfod claimed, because Ernst Ortlepp’s German translation of Shakespeare, which Kierkegaard cites, was not published until May 10, 1839, thus at least a year after the events Barfod mentions took place. Age twenty-five must therefore not be taken too literally, but was more likely a way of referring to the age of majority itself. Thus, when it is claimed that the author supposedly found himself in some sort of state of shock at the time he wrote the lines about the great earthquake, this is not only a dramatically erroneous conclusion, it is also psychologically implausible, because when a person is in shock he is scarcely likely to sit down and write in his most meticulous handwriting on the finest, gilt-edged paper he owns, nor is he likely to express himself in as literary a fashion as here was the case.
In the mid-1870s, when he was at work on his biography of Kierkegaard, Georg Brandes was the first to attempt to discover what events or confidential information had made such an impression upon Kierkegaard that he would have labeled it an earthquake. Brandes had once spoken about the matter with Hans Brøchner but could no longer remember what Brøchner had told him, and in the meanwhile Brøchner had died. Brandes therefore contacted Kierkegaard’s nephew, Frederik Troels-Lund, and in a letter to him dated September 20, 1876, Brandes wrote: “I have a dim recollection that it was something about the old hosier’s relationship with Kierkegaard’s mother (whom Kierkegaard, strangely enough, never mentions with one single word), something about an improper premarital relationship or about having wronged her in some pecuniary fashion.” Troels-Lund, who answered three days later, could neither confirm nor deny this supposition, but to set the record straight he had interviewed “several members of the family—distant relatives, it is true—but none of them knew anything except that in general the old man had been tightfisted and that in his younger days he had perhaps been a bit wild.” This was a skimpy result, but Brandes could get no further with the matter, and in his biography he had to restrict himself to remarking: “What sort of secret offense this was is of course unknown. But by all indications it had something to do with the relationship between the parents.” Their youngest child supposedly came to learn of it, and this—Brandes implied—triggered the great earthquake in his life.
Not long after Brandes published his biography, the Norwegian professor Fredrik Petersen turned to Peter Christian Kierkegaard and asked his opinion of Brandes’s interpretation of the great earthquake. The professor specifically asked for clarification concerning whether the offense in question consisted of “unfaithfulness to a spouse.” About this the older brother had no doubts. “Dr. Brandes has been about as unlucky as possible when he permits himself to guess that ‘unfaithfulness to a spouse’ was the reason for the melancholic scruples Søren alludes to in connection with his and my father,” Peter Christian noted tartly in a multipage account dated January 1877. And, he continued: “I would hope that even the most recent philosophy admits the impossibility of producing proof that something did not occur (a nonfact).” For his part, Peter Christian—who as he wrote, “had early on found and studied the three small gilt-edged sheets with their little oracular sayings”—believed that the cause of the great earthquake was to be found in the many deaths with which the family had suddenly been afflicted. In particular, the passing of the sisters Nicoline Christine and Petrea Severine had had a powerful impact, all the more so because their marriages to the Lund brothers had given the home a “stamp of gaiety and cheerfulness which we sometimes felt a bit lacking because of our parents’ advanced age and their plain, old-fashioned way of living.” The next death was no less moving, however, Peter Christian continued; it came just as he himself had come “closer to a living appropriation of Christianity” and had survived “a serious bout of typhus.” Things in the family had begun to brighten up a bit. “But then my Maria died…. Then there can be no doubt that Søren was conquered by the dark view … that the family would die out and that Father would survive us all.” Of course, in the end it did not come to pass; the father died before his two sons, and this, according to Peter Christian’s version, was what compelled his younger brother to revise his earlier view and come up with a new interpretation “which, be it noted, was in many respects identical with the previous view, only even more rigorous.”
In his letter to Professor Petersen, Peter Christian wanted to make it plain that he, too, had been taken into confidence by the father, and that it was hardly likely that during the last months of his life the old man would have “told Søren of a transgression by which he was burdened.” Both assurances were set forth in the interest of historical objectivity, but they also contain echoes of his old rivalry with his younger brother, whose relationship with their father had had an intimacy that Peter Christian would rather not recall, much less put on public display. If we read Peter Christian’s account in the light of what we know today, we are also struck by what he did not recount: He flatly rejected Brandes’s conjecture about adultery, but at the same time he remained silent about his father’s premarital relationship with Ane even though it would have been very natural to have mentioned it in that context. Also striking is the fact that he did not even allude to the event that overshadowed everything in the family’s more or less mythic self-understanding—his father’s cursing of God—of which Peter Christian had patently been aware for more than a generation. Indeed, about a decade earlier he had had his memory of this incident painfully refreshed. One morning in February 1865, when he was at the bishop’s residence working on Søren Kierkegaard’s journals, Barfod read journal JJ from February 1846 and came upon an entry that was of such a personal character that he thought it proper to submit it to the bishop. The entry read: “How terrible for the man who once, as a little boy watching sheep on the moors of Jutland, suffering terribly, hungry and weak from the cold, had stood atop a hill and had cursed God—and the man was unable to forget it when he was eighty-two years old.” When Peter Christian finished reading the entry through he burst into tears. “That is my father’s story—and ours, too,” he said to Barfod, whereupon (still according to Barfod) he “recounted the details of the matter, which I ought not repeat here.”
Later generations of researchers would have been spared countless headaches if Barfod had gone just a little bit out of his way to repeat “the details of the matter”—and a great deal of irritation would have been avoided if he had at least refrained from mentioning his sin of omission. It makes matters no better that Barfod confessed that out of concern for the aged bishop he “couldn’t find it in his heart” to publish “his brother’s painful outburst”—that is, Søren Aabye’s journal entry about cursing God that has just been cited—and he therefore left it out of his edition of From Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers. Barfod’s suppression of such a decisively significant journal entry is psychologically understandable, but in principle it was just as unwarranted as Peter Christian’s subsequent denial of its existence. He might have had many reasons for this denial, but his reaction to the journal entry at the time of its discovery testifies in itself to the great importance he attributed to his father’s cursing of God, which apparently was the great earthquake in Peter Christian’s life. He assumed that this had also been the case in Søren Aabye’s life, but in this respect he was probably wrong, inasmuch as merely by mentioning the incident in his journal, the younger brother had given it a sort of public character. On the other hand, there is hardly any reason to doubt that the father’s cursing of God did play an enormous role in Søren Aabye’s understanding of himself and that it functioned as a sort of all-purpose explanation of the untimely death of the children. None of them were to live beyond age thirty-three—no longer, that is, than Jesus—an age limit that was surely rooted in the family’s partiality for numerological mysticism. Thus Søren Aabye, who had been initiated into the unfathomable logic of coincidences, wrote in his journal on January 22, 1837: “It is quite remarkable that Christ lived to be exactly thirty-three years old.” At that time Peter Christian was thirty-two, pale and sickly after his typhus, so presumably it was Peter Christian’s turn to die next. But miraculously he recovered, and on July 3, 1838, when he turned thirty-three and went to take communion with his father, Søren Aabye noted: “Idées fixes are like cramps—a foot cramp, for example—the best cure for them is to step on them.”
Just more than a month later, the morbid theory about untimely death collided with the demise of the father, and this must have come as an indescribable relief for the two sons. At the same time, of course, the death was a catastrophic event, especially for the youngest son, who would later speak of his father’s death as “a frightfully shattering event.” Nonetheless he clung to remnants of the original theory, namely that not one of the children would live longer than age thirty-three. So on July 6, 1839, when Peter Christian turned thirty-four, Søren Aabye was forced to see his “law of interpretation” invalidated yet again. This, then, was the state of affairs when Kierkegaard wrote the journal entry on the great earthquake, presumably in September of that year. Three years earlier, at some point in January 1836, he had sketched the paradoxical anatomy of the situation: “Superstitions are strange. One might think that once a person has seen that his morbid fantasies are not fulfilled, he would abandon further belief in them; but on the contrary, they grow stronger, just as the desire to gamble increases in a person after he loses in the lottery.”
Typical of the trembling theatrics with which he interpreted his life, Kierkegaard wrote the following in his journal for Wednesday, May 5, 1847: “How strange that I have turned thirty-four. It is utterly inconceivable to me. I was so sure that I would die before or on this birthday that I could actually be tempted to suppose that the date of my birth has been erroneously recorded and that I will still die on my thirty-fourth.” Hans Brøchner, with whom Kierkegaard must have shared his frightening notions, states plainly that Kierkegaard was so convinced of their validity that “when he did reach this age, he even checked in the parish records to see if he really had gone beyond the limit.”
On the birthday itself a letter arrived from Peter Christian. As was his custom, the younger brother burned it, but Peter Christian must certainly have touched on the particular importance of the thirty-four years, for two weeks later Søren Aabye replied to the letter, noting that the birthday in question had long haunted his thoughts as a miraculous impossibility: “At the time it happened, it amazed me not a little—indeed, now I can say it without fear of upsetting you—that you turned thirty-four. Both Father and I had had the idea that no one in our family would live longer than thirty-four years. However little I agreed with Father in other respects, we had important common ground in a few strange ideas, and in such conversations Father was almost always delighted with me because I could portray the idea with a lively imagination and pursue its implications with daring consistency. In fact, a curious thing about Father was that he was most richly endowed with something we least credited him as possessing—imagination, albeit a melancholy imagination. Thus, the thirty-fourth year was supposed to be the limit, and Father was supposed to outlive all of us. That is not how it has turned out—I am entering into my thirty-fifth year.”
Thus father and son had jointly worked out the notion of the death of the children before their “thirty-fourth year,” and we are to understand that it was Søren Aabye who together with the father fostered the idea in their melancholy way, while Peter Christian had been excluded and was only now being introduced to the theory. Presumably he had never had the least inkling of the frightful fate that the eldest and youngest Kierkegaards had for years viewed as intended for him. It is worth noting that in his letter to Peter Christian, Søren Aabye made absolutely no mention of his father’s curse, which of course was the foundation of the theory about the thirty-four-year age limit. But perhaps he made the tacit assumption that Peter Christian could infer the theory about cursing God, which he had presumably known about from a relatively early date.
What is more probable, however, but also much more frightful, is that the father’s cursing of God was not the only explanation of the origin of the theory! Because not a few circumstances seem to indicate that the cursing of God was only one component, and that the curse only makes sense when it is viewed in conjunction with a sin of a quite different—somatic—order. The great earthquake—and not the cursing of God in itself, that sin of childhood to which Søren Aabye, despite all his neurotic tendencies, would not have attributed such far-reaching consequences—was therefore a sudden glimpse into this other order.
Not until 1845 did Kierkegaard present a poetic version of this causeand-effect relationship; that was how long he waited. And we, too, will have to wait until then.
From the Papers of One Still Living
For Søren Aabye, May 5, 1847, represented the deadline with respect to those conclusions from coincidence that the father and son had arrived at with such “melancholy imagination.” In 1838 he still had nine years left. He was one still living, and the shock had not paralyzed his ability to work; indeed, quite the opposite was the case. In fact, in the midst of everything—as Emil Boesen confidentially informed Martin Hammerich in a letter of July 20, 1838—Kierkegaard had “written a piece on Andersen which is to appear in Heiberg’s Perseus; the style is a bit heavy, but it is a good piece of work in other respects.”
Heiberg agreed, but he nonetheless sent Kierkegaard some critical comments about the article, because if one was going to appear in Perseus, it had to be with style. Perseus was a “journal for the speculative idea,” addressing itself to those who were able to “express positive and independent ideas” about art, religion, and philosophy. Among its 133 subscribers the journal counted H. N. Clausen, Mynster, Oehlenschläger, Sibbern, and Hans Christian Ørsted, so it was the absolutely right place to get one’s positive and independent ideas published. Heiberg’s letter to Kierkegaard has not survived, but from Kierkegaard’s servile reply to Heiberg, dated July 28, 1838, we may infer that Heiberg had been dissatisfied with the article’s style and had requested that the young man write a reasonably readable Danish. Kierkegaard therefore turned to his old schoolmate H. P. Holst and asked him to do something with the language. Holst relates that during their time at school there had been a regular traffic between the two of them: Kierkegaard wrote Latin compositions for Holst, while Holst wrote Danish compositions for Kierkegaard, who expressed himself in a hopelessly Latin Danish crawling with participial phrases and extraordinarily complicated sentences. Thus Holst was aware of the problem, and indeed he insists that over the course of the summer he actually translated Kierkegaard’s piece into Danish. In his final examinations on leaving school Kierkegaard earned top marks in Danish, laudabilis præ ceteris, so Holst’s account, which was written in 1869—nearly forty years after their schooldays and thirty years after the book on Andersen—should be taken with a grain of salt. In any case, no sooner was the manuscript ready than Perseus folded, so Kierkegaard had to contact Reitzel and underwrite the publication of his “piece on Andersen” as a little book in itself. The whole enterprise came to fruition on September 7, 1838, and on that date, less than a month after his father’s death, Kierkegaard could call himself an author, the author of the work From the Papers of One Still Living, Published against His Will by S. Kjerkegaard. The cryptically titled work was a seventy-nine-page analysis, simultaneously intensive and not a little offensive, of Hans Christian Andersen as a novelist, with continuing reference to his third novel, Only a Fiddler, which had been published on November 22, 1837.
In his autobiography, The Fairy Tale of My Life, published in 1855, Andersen relates that a bit after the publication of his Fiddler he had encountered Kierkegaard, who had apprised him of a forthcoming critique that would treat the book much more fairly than had previous reviews, “because,” as Andersen explained, Kierkegaard said that “I had been completely misunderstood!” Andersen therefore expected a genuine encomium about his book, but time passed, and in his almanac entry for August 30, 1838, Andersen whined impatiently: “Experienced mental torture about Kierkegaard’s as yet unpublished critique.” A bit more than a week later, the long-awaited critique appeared, and Andersen had a shock: “An atrocious letter from [Christian] Wulff and immediately thereafter Kierkegaard’s critique. Eduard [Collin] gave me cooling powders. Walked as if in a coma.” Poor Andersen! It helped a little when kindly B. S. Ingemann, Andersen’s lifelong friend, wrote consolingly on December 9, 1838: “Kierkegaard’s review has weighed upon your spirits, I should think. I don’t see that it contains any bitterness or any desire to injure you, however. He probably intends much better by you than he has indicated. The conclusion contains hints of a friendly attitude, albeit strangely repressed.” Ingemann did find it “one-sided and unreasonable” that Kierkegaard had expressed his “disapproval in printer’s ink” while simultaneously formulating his “thanks and approval in invisible ink”—but that was just the way Kierkegaard wrote. And since Ingemann was acquainted with Andersen’s delicacy of temperament, he added, as a preventative of further suffering: “By all means you must not allow this opposition to depress you.”
Naturally, Andersen allowed himself to get depressed anyway, but by 1855 he had collected himself sufficiently to have forgotten his immediate reaction, and he instead characterized Kierkegaard’s book in a technical and objective manner as difficult “to read with its heavy Hegelian style. It was said in jest that only Kierkegaard and Andersen had read the entire book…. At that time, this is what I got out of it: that I was no writer, but a fictitious character who had slipped out of my category.” And Andersen, who did not like to be on unfriendly terms with anyone, especially not with someone who was famous, added graciously: “Later I better understood this author, who has obliged me along my way with kindness and discernment.”
Practically nothing is known about the relationship between these two geniuses, Andersen and Kierkegaard, prior to 1838. Both were members of the Student Association at the university, and they could also have run into one another at the Music Society. Before writing his debut book on Andersen, Kierkegaard had been acquainted with Andersen’s little Journey on Foot from Holmens Canal to the East Point of Amager, the novels The Improvisatore and O. T., the drama Agnete and the Merman, and a few fairy tales. At one point in 1837 he noted that The Improvisatore, which had come out in a second printing that year, did not really amount to much—apart from a single observation: “The Italian takes his leave in the evening by saying felicissima notte, and Andersen notes that ‘The Scandinavian wishes one “Good night, sleep well,” while the Italians wish one “The happiest of nights!” Southern nights possess more than—dreams.’ ”
Viewed with historical hindsight, the fact that the first book by Kierkegaard and the first book about Andersen should end up being one and the same book seems a miraculous coincidence. But there are at least three good reasons not to be too surprised that it was precisely Andersen whom Kierkegaard chose as the object for his debut as a critic. First of all, Andersen was a gilt-edged popular success as a novelist, and not only in Denmark. Accompanied by a lengthy biography of the author (for which Andersen himself had provided much of the material), Only a Fiddler appeared in German translation in 1838, followed in the autumn of that year by a Dutch translation, and just before Christmas the book came out in Swedish, retitled as The Fiddler from Svendborg. So the man Kierkegaard set out to criticize was far from being a literary nobody. On the contrary, he was a man in the midst of a grandiose career, one who had been granted a place on the civil list with an annual pension of four hundred rixdollars. When Bertel Thorvaldsen, the legendary Danish-expatriate sculptor, returned to Denmark on September 17, 1838, he was granted the sort of reception normally reserved for deities who return to earth. Along with Oehlenschläger, Heiberg, Grundtvig, Winter, Hertz, Holst, and Thomas Overskou, Andersen was in the boat that sailed out to greet Thorvaldsen aboard the frigate Rota, anchored offshore, where the sculptor was welcomed with music, song, and shouts of jubilation. For the second reason, Andersen was situated problematically with respect to the establishment, in particular to the Heiberg circle. While he had had a number of his poems published in Flyveposten, his attempts at drama had never been to Heiberg’s taste, and Andersen himself was of course so uncouth and eccentric that one of the innumerable treacherous trapdoors installed (figuratively speaking) in the theatrical Heiberg home had soon yawned under him and sent him on his way—down and out. “Anyway, Andersen isn’t so dangerous,” Kierkegaard, ready for battle, wrote in his journal, “from what I have been able to learn, his main strength consists of an auxiliary chorus of volunteer undertakers, a few wandering aestheticians who continually give assurances of their honesty.” Finally, Only a Fiddler broke with the period’s norms and expectations with respect to the novel as a genre. People could not accept that it had a negative ending. It was the author’s task to put forth a defense of the inherent harmony of existence, and Andersen did not do this. His novel was full of conflict and to a great extent it blamed society for the fact that its hero, Christian, comes to an unhappy end.
Thus Kierkegaard’s criticism begins by emphasizing the positive life view to be found in Mrs. Gyllembourg (who, with due respect for her self-imposed anonymity was referred to merely as “the author of A Story of Everyday Life”) and in Steen Steensen Blicher, whose works are characterized by a joyous view of life and a confidence in the world. All other things being equal, despite difficulties, the story ends happily. In Andersen things happen in precisely the opposite fashion, and according to Kierkegaard this was because Andersen lacked a life view. “In a novel,” Kierkegaard declares, “there must be an immortal spirit that survives the whole.” And this spirit is endowed with its requisite immortality by none other than the author’s life view, which to this extent functions as “in the novel [as] Providence.” One ought not merely scribble away the best one can; one must permit one’s experiences and impressions to be refracted in a poetically refined prism. If an author lacks a life view, his novel not only becomes chaotic, it also becomes unpleasantly private. Although during this same year Kierkegaard remarked in his journal that “an author always ought to give something of his personality, just as Christ feeds us with His body and blood,” Andersen had gone too far. For he had not succeeded in maintaining the requisite distance from his literary work, and consequently he had gradually become enmeshed in it. Indeed, his “novels stand in so physical a relation to his own self that their genesis can be seen less as his productions than as amputations of his self.” Thus Kierkegaard’s point and Andersen’s problem is that Andersen’s own “person volatilizes itself into fiction, so that sometimes one is actually tempted to believe that Andersen is a fictional character who has run away from a group of such characters composed by an author but not yet completed.”
These were the words on which (according to Andersen himself) Andersen had fastened, but if he had needed to take cooling powders to regain his normal temperature when he had finished reading Kierkegaard’s work, it was because he had sensed that he had been the target of an attempted murder, a night of the long pens. Kierkegaard had thus attacked Andersen’s lack of certainty as an artist—the “tremor of the hand that causes his pen not only to spatter but to chatter.” Kierkegaard had further criticized him for failing to choose his mottoes with a sufficiently musical ear: Lacking both spirit and sense, Andersen merely cited “second-rate, third-rate, et cetera-rate poets,” which was why his novels come to resemble “factory products.” Andersen also lacked a sense for psychology; he lacked clarity. And, in connection with a purely technical note about mathematical powers, the reader is referred to this androgynous footnote: “Andersen’s first power is better compared to those flowers in which male and female are situated on the same stalk”—here Andersen, whose sexual proclivities were not always entirely unequivocal, would surely get the point.
Worst of all, of course, was that Andersen had been utterly unable to manage his hero, the semiautobiographical Christian, who was portrayed as a misunderstood genius but who was most of all a “sniveler” and a conceited “sap,” who had to go through so awfully much before he—at last, thank God!—perished. In the biography of Andersen that accompanied the German edition of Only a Fiddler—and in late July 1838 had been summarized in Kjøbenhavns Morgenblad—it was revealed that every time Andersen was confronted with an important decision he would burst into tears. This was probably the source for Kierkegaard’s “sniveler.” A genius is too sensitive for this world, that is Andersen’s message. This was much too sensitive for Kierkegaard, who rebuffed Andersen’s sap of a genius with this fiery rejoinder: “A genius is not a little candle that goes out in the wind, but is a raging fire that the storm merely incites.” Geniuses are inextinguishable; they are not mere bunches of matchsticks in the hands of a fate, blue with cold, that needs something with which to warm itself.
Kierkegaard reserved for a later occasion a more positive definition of the sort of life view that could have guided Christian safely through Andersen’s novel—the absence of which was the real cause of the novel’s failure. At one point, however, Kierkegaard does write that a life view presupposes that one does not “permit one’s life to fizzle out too much.” Indeed, he generally emphasizes a sort of self-censorship as the precondition for being able to “win a competent personality for oneself,” because it is only “such a dead and transfigured personality—not the multifaceted, earthly, palpable personality—that is and ought to be capable of producing anything.” Therefore, not just anyone is capable of producing; this is something reserved for the very few. And here readers are requested to fasten their seat belts and hold on to their hats and reading glasses: “A life view is in fact something more than an epitome or a sum of propositions maintained in their abstract neutrality. It is more than experience, which as such is always fragmentary. It is in fact the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshakable self-certainty that has been won in a battle against the whole of the empirical world, whether it has oriented itself only with respect to all worldly relationships (a merely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example), thereby keeping itself free from contact with a deeper empirical world—or has discovered what is central both for its heavenly and its earthly existence by directing itself toward heaven (the religious), thereby winning true Christian conviction.”
And this is not so inconsiderable, especially if one bears in mind that this requirement for a writer to die away from the world has been set forth by a twenty-five-year-old university student who has himself scarcely got started with life, but who nonetheless gives a successful author, eight years his senior, the hard news that only dead and transfigured personalities have the right to be productive.
He set forth this requirement in a book entitled From the Papers of One Still Living, a title that has always been puzzling. It has been called mysterious, unreasonable, strange, affected, artificial, and many other synonyms. It has been seen as connected to the two deaths that had occurred immediately prior to the book’s appearance—Poul Martin Møller’s death in March, and Kierkegaard’s father’s death in August—and also to Kierkegaard’s notion that he himself would die before his thirty-fourth year. And finally, it has been speculated that the title reflects Kierkegaard’s critique of Andersen’s spineless notion of a genius and thus represents a sort of defiant triumph: Here we have the voice of a genius who was not broken, even though existence had treated him much more roughly than that sniveler of a supposed genius we see in Andersen.
Most often, however, people have ignored the fact that the title had originally been attached to the never-completed farce The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, which in its final version would have borne the subtitle: “From the Papers of One Still Living, Published against His Will by S. Kierkegaard.” But this is not merely a case of the literary recycling of a half-dead title; the recycling was in fact grounded deep within the book’s theme, namely that the writer has (or has not) died away from the world. Thus on January 9, 1838, Kierkegaard noted in his journal that he had hit upon a designation for the special “class of people” who were to be his future readers. He had come upon the idea in Lucian, the Greek poet who at one point discusses some paranekroi (fellow dead), which Kierkegaard translated in the singular as “one who, like me, is dead.” This is how Kierkegaard imagined his reader, and although there was a dark, romantic fantasy here, there was also something else. To die is, in fact, to die away, to die away from this world, from one’s immediacy, in order to be resurrected, in the world of spirit, to a second immediacy.
From this perspective, the title can be read as Kierkegaard’s indirect declaration that he, too, was unable to say that he has died away; that he, too, was one still living, who like Andersen did not possess the desired life view. Thus, to some extent his criticism of Andersen’s autobiographical work has itself an autobiographical character. The title was not one of defiant triumph but was more an intimation of a sort of solidarity, a fellowship of the imperfect. And toward the end of the book Kierkegaard declares that, as a reader, he evaluates Andersen completely differently than he does as a critic. With a thoughtful smile Kierkegaard recalls his first impression of the book and is then filled with a feeling of gratitude toward the author to whom he owes all this, a feeling that Kierkegaard does not wish to put on paper but which he will whisper in Andersen’s ear when the occasion presents itself. In other words, Ingemann was on the right track when he thought he could discern in the final portion of Kierkegaard’s piece “a friendly attitude, albeit strangely repressed.”
Nothing ever came of Kierkegaard’s intention to whisper confidentially into Andersen’s ear. Andersen, on the other hand, did manage to pay Kierkegaard back with A Comedy in the Open Air. A Vaudeville in One Act, Based on the Old Comedy “An Actor against His Will”. Andersen’s play was performed for the first time at the Royal Theater on May 13, 1840, with Ludvig Phister in the role of an itinerant theater director who disguises himself as a farmhand, set designer, prompter, and other amusing roles, including a philosophical hairdresser—a “hair splitter”—who speaks gibberish and declaims, with great emotion, some of the most opaque passages from Kierkegaard’s book, passages that are not made any clearer by a couple of typographical errors on Andersen’s part. Kierkegaard did not see the play performed, but when it was published on October 26, 1840, he bought it right away and soon thereafter penned the article “Just a Moment, Mr. Andersen!”—a coarse reprimand in which he first mocked Andersen for having taken all of two years to come “rushing into the literary world with 4 shillings worth of polemics”—and then expressed his great annoyance at seeing himself caricatured as a “drivelling Hegelian.” It was a good thing—for both Andersen’s sense of well-being and Kierkegaard’s reputation—that Kierkegaard left the manuscript of the article lying in his desk drawer; it has since disappeared without a trace.
After their collision in 1838, Andersen and Kierkegaard appear to have vanished from each other’s consciousness for long periods of time, but by 1843 when Andersen wrote his world-famous fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling,” the egg had presumably learned its lesson from Kierkegaard and managed to get along splendidly without any warmth from its surroundings. After all, it is no problem to be hatched by a duck pond—provided one has emerged from a swan’s egg. And in his first autobiography, dating from 1847, Andersen demoted the main character in Only a Fiddler from a genius to a talented person who merely imagined he was a genius. The following year he sent Kierkegaard a copy of his New Fairy Tales, a big two-volume edition in which he penned this dedication: “Either you like my little works Or you don’t like them. They are nonetheless sent without Fear and Trembling, and that is something, at any rate.”
Andersen’s effect on Kierkegaard was less marked, but in the draft of “The Seducer’s Diary” Kierkegaard compared the young military officer, who is the seducer’s rival, to the steadfast tin soldier, because the military officer, too, would one day “fall into the gutter.” Similarly, in the draft of “In vino veritas” Kierkegaard had Victor Eremita say “Good night, Wee Willie Winkie” to all ideality, and in so doing Kierkegaard revealed that he was familiar with Andersen’s tale “Wee Willie Winkie.” Both of these allusions disappeared from the final versions of the works in question, however, which was a symbolic augury of Kierkegaard’s subsequent attitude toward his own debut book. Thus, in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, when Kierkegaard would take stock of his entire output, the work simply disappeared from the balance sheet.
It can be debated which of the two—the “raging fire” or the “little candle”—understood the other less, but in any case Kierkegaard did not have the sense for the double entendre, the concealed irony, the sarcasm, the satire of his times, nor the ingeniously crafted naïveté one finds in Andersen’s fairy tales, those world-class artistic miniatures. In 1837, when Kierkegaard was completing an essay on telling children fairy tales, he turned up his nose at “these gangling, childish marionettes who jump about on the floor and ride on hobbyhorses with the sweet little ones,” telling fairy tales “for children and childlike souls.” It seems more than obvious that Andersen and his Fairy Tales Told for Children were the models behind this caricature. One evening in Frederiksberg Gardens, Kierkegaard supposedly remarked to Israel Levin that “Andersen has no idea what fairy tales are. It is enough that he be good-hearted, why should he also attempt poetry?” And then Kierkegaard himself, calling upon his demonic powers of imagery, conjured up “six or seven fairy tales” so that Levin almost “felt uncomfortable.” That evening, Levin recalls, Kierkegaard also remarked that “literature is not for nursing babes or for half-grown girls, but for mature human beings.”
These two men would later make Danish literature world famous, and we are happy to mention both of them in the same breath, but while they were alive they avoided each other’s company, presumably because they reflected each other’s weaknesses. At some point in 1847 Kierkegaard (displaying metaphorical sophistication but psychological naïveté) wrote: “Now, Andersen can tell the fairy tale about the ‘Galoshes of Good Fortune,’ but I can tell the fairy tale about the shoe that pinches.” Kierkegaard was trying to write his way toward the immediacy out of which Andersen was trying to write himself, but both were primitives in the best and most basic sense of the word. Each was himself, for better or worse.