Difficult Death by Morten Høi Jensen

Author:Morten Høi Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300233633
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER SIX

The Atheist

He could not stand the indifference of life any longer, of being released at every turn and always thrown back on himself. No home on earth, no God in heaven, no goal out there in the future!

—Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

Two gifts perforce he has given us yet,

Though sad things stay and glad things fly;

Two gifts he has given us, to forget

All glad and sad things that go by,

And then to die.

—Charles Algernon Swinburne, “Félise” (1866)

IN late November 1880, the young Herman Bang was sent to Thisted to cover a recent shipwreck near Klitmøller. The Copenhagen-bound Sleipner had set sail from Grimsby in the United Kingdom on November 12, carrying 480 tons of coal. Just a few days later a severe leak prompted the captain to divert to Klitmøller, but the ship banked on a reef just half a mile off shore and was pummeled with waves during a storm. All fourteen crew members drowned before rescue boats were able to reach them.

Bang went to see the remains of the ship that had washed up on the beach and interviewed locals who had witnessed the tragedy. Then he crossed the thin strip of land separating Klitmøller from the Limfjord and arrived at Thisted, where he decided to seek out the small harbor town’s most famous living resident. Yet when he asked locals where he might find Jacobsen, people assumed he was referring to Christen, Jacobsen’s father. “Oh, his son,” they said, perhaps privately wondering why anyone would want to speak to that consumptive blasphemer. For Bang, however, it was a momentous occasion. He had greetings to convey from mutual friends in Copenhagen, and was surely curious to meet the famous and elusive author in the flesh. “I wasn’t very old back then,” he later recalled, “and I was very excited and nervous as I stood there in the little foyer or hallway or whatever it was, waiting to meet the author of Marie Grubbe for the first time.” But when Jacobsen entered, Bang was startled. “I hadn’t expected him to look like that—not that sick. His tall figure was almost doubled over. I, who had seen so much lurking disease, did not expect him to be so marked by death already.”1

Death had long preoccupied Jacobsen. In a letter to Edvard Brandes he wrote that “there is really no other resolution possible than death,” adding, “I would go so far as to say that any modern work of literature that ends is no good (a death ending excepted, and all conditions synonymous with it).”2 Indeed Niels Lyhne, the last pages of which Jacobsen dispatched just a few days after Herman Bang’s visit, is perhaps the most death-haunted novel in European literature. Compressed into fewer than two hundred pages are the deaths of no fewer than seven characters—including, famously, the hero himself. If in Marie Grubbe the emphasis was on the individual death we carry within us, death in Niels Lyhne is a metaphysical problem that asks questions of life—especially as the answers of religion have ceased to offer assurance.

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