She was rather fond of scenes - Niels Lyhne, irony, and the eternal gnome child

Happiness generally makes people good, and Niels strove earnestly in every way to shape their lives so nobly, beautifully and usefully that there would never be a pause in the development of their souls toward the human ideal in which they both believed.  (194)

My struggle with Niels Lyhne was with passages like this, the ones that directly challenged my usual, and useful, ironic mode of reading.  In the same paragraph Niels looks at his old poems, and finds that “he would regularly get tears in his eyes over his own poems.”  It seems cruel, yet necessary, to laugh at this, especially since a horrible tragedy strikes Niels two sentences later.

Jacobsen never gives us any of Niels’s poems.  I have a theory that the especially gooey passages, the ones with the great wingspans of tenderness and oceans of love, are meant to be extractions from Niels’s awful, awful poems.

The structure of the book sees Niels encounter a woman, one chapter, one woman.  Crushes, love affairs, his mother.  Although the bulk of the book belongs to Niels, in every case there is a point where the perspective shifts to the woman, and in almost every case the woman’s perspective is in some way ironic.  Early in the novel, for example, Niels spends too much time yearning after a widow.  She becomes engaged, Niels (finally) makes a pass at her, perhaps with her encouragement, but the result is a fight and tears.

The widow is genuinely upset, but as she cries she watches herself cry in a mirror.  (Are there flowers? Yes, “the variegated flowers of the sofa cushions”).  She begins to imagine other endings to the fight.  She begins to enjoy herself.  “She was rather fond of scenes” (107).  Poor, foolish Niels.

The women in Niels Lyhne are types, but at least with some variety.  The great flaw in the novel is that Niels Lyhne is so flat.  He is something of a Romantic Everyman and as such is never allowed to be too interesting.  I have not yet mentioned his atheism, a major theme of the novel, but it does not help much with the personality.  It is more of a position to argue.  What is the opposite of a Bildungsroman?  Niels never really develops much, part of the cost of the short novel’s birth-to-death scope and constant summarizing.

The best scene in the book is part of the long chapter that fills twenty percent of the novel, the account of an affair between Niels and Fennimore, who is married to Niels’s best friend.  Again, the best part of the best scene is given to the woman.  During a bleak winter night, Fennimore, alone, learns some terrible news.  For six pages, she wanders around her house, miserable.  “In black swarms, from every direction, the dark thoughts came flying like ravens, lured by the corpse of her happiness, and pecked at, beak after beak, while the warmth of life still lingered in it” (173).  A new set of images are developed, as if this is a novella within the novel.  The furniture turns sinister and Gothic.  The portraits of the family that owns the house become:

all those strangers who had been witness to her fall and guilt, somnolent old men, prudish-mouthed matrons, and the eternal gnome child that they had everywhere, the girl with the big round eyes and the protruding, high-domed forehead.  (174)

The “footstool with the black poodle on it,” a blatant reference to Goethe’s Faust, is also strange, but not as strange as the eternal gnome child.

Niels and Fennimore meet, fight, and separate.  In this case each character’s “ending” is ironic, but the irony is the usual novelistic stuff, where the characters do not understand each other or even themselves, where they act for reasons other than what they believe.  This, at least, I know how to read.

the mist of distance had veiled the turbulent throng of details - Jacobsen's flowers

Niels Lyhne’s father has died, and his mother is ill.  Mother and son travel for her health.  Here, I thought, Jens Peter Jacobsen will surely include some details.  Please watch Jacobsen laugh at me:

In dreams and in poetry it had always somehow been on the other side of the lake; the mist of distance, full of presentiment, had veiled the turbulent throng of details and gathered the shapes in broad outlines into a completed whole, and the silence of distance had spread its festive mood over it, and it had been so easy to grasp in its beauty…  (92-3)

Well, there is a lake, since the trip eventually ends in Switzerland (and not just anywhere, but at the setting of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse).  You might wonder  – I certainly did – what the antecedent of “it” might be.  I believe that “it” is defined in a preceding paragraph as “the glory she had so sadly longed for,” but I cannot be sure.

So on the one hand there is the mode that veils the details in mists, but then there is the other side of Niels Lyhne:

… the blended smell of ordinary tobacco and earthen floors, of spices and rancid dried fish and wet homespun… a simple, bright garland stencil beneath the molding; there was a plaster rose in the middle of the ceiling, and the doors were ridged and had shiny brass handles in the shape of dolphins…  blue agapanthus, blue pyramid bells, finely leaved myrtle, fiery-red verbena, and geraniums, colorful as butterflies...  mirrors with flowers in white and bronze painted in the glass – rushes and lotuses floating on the smooth lake...  (124-5)

The ellipses are mine, since this is from a two-page paragraph.  I have omitted all of the furniture, some of it inlaid with mythological scenes.  I had read that Jacobsen had influenced Thomas Mann, and here we see Niels Lyhne turn into Buddenbrooks – this is even the description of the house of a grain merchant!  A young Mann must have gotten a good jolt when he found Jacobsen inventorying Mann’s own family home.

I don’t know what to do with the broad outlines, but I know what to do with those flowers.  If I turn back to the trip with the mother, the vagueness about “it” is soon followed by a long, elaborate furnishing of Switzerland. White snowdrops, “the veined goblets of crocus blossoms,” yellow primroses, blue violets, “velvet-soft moss,” and cherry blossoms “which butterflies speckled with red and blue” (all of this from page 94).  I haven’t named a third of the flowers.  In the furnished room, there is the mirror painted with bronze flowers to resemble a lake; in Switzerland the lake is “red as a copper mirror” (95).  The lake as a mirror is not so original, but combined with the later image something else is going on.  The rebirth of love in the grain merchant’s house is linked back to the death, surrounded by flowers, of Niels’s mother.

Niels does not marry Fennimore but later meets her again and begins an affair.  Could that later scene also be packed with flowers once I know what I am looking for?

She didn’t speak either; she lay there in silence with a heavy smile on her lips, pale as a flower.  (159)

Now that the work has been done, Jacobsen does not even need real flowers to build links, although there are plenty of those, too, and also two kinds of moss, the ground moss “which almost looked like firs or palms or ostrich feathers” and the tree moss that looked “the way you might imagine the grain fields of the elves would look” (162).  Just to make sure, Fennimore even reminds us of that furniture:  “Do you remember the furniture at home?...  How I love that furniture…” (157).  Jacobsen is as directly as he possibly can instructing his reader to page back and reread the description of the furniture.

All of this – the structure, the colors, the metaphors – is first-rate writing.  That moss is exquisite.  What a strange, frustrating novel!

So enormously mild were his judgments - Jens Peter Jaobsen's Niels Lyhne

The back cover of the paperback translation of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880) has testimonials from Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, and Henrik Ibsen.  Jacobsen is Danish, while four of those five fellows are German and Austrian.  Jacobsen’s novel is itself quite Germanic, another descendant of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.  The path of influence or transmission or simply translating and publishing, maybe that is all I mean, went from Scandinavian to German and back.  Thus books that are obscure in English are well known in German.  What percentage of the English-language readers of Niels Lyhne have come to it because Rilke, in the Letters to a Young Poet, writes about it so enthusiastically?  Very close to one hundred, is my guess.

Lord, what nonsense Rilke writes.  “[T]he more often you read it, the more everything seems to be contained within it, from life’s most imperceptible fragrances to the intense, full taste of its heaviest fruits.”  Who can argue otherwise?

Niels Lyhne has just recently been described accurately by litlove when she invokes two of the blurbers:

Hesse, like Rilke, is one of those writers who seems to write about the things I am properly interested in. He writes about how to live, when you do not feel like you fit with the ‘normal’ run of humanity, when you are miserable in ways others say you should not be, or when you simply want to live a good life and do not know how that can be achieved. His characters are always searching for a cure for living, and the answers they come up with – art, love, transcendent wisdom, acceptance with humour – feel like they might just work.

Jacobsen’s novel is one of those, right in that tradition.  Unfortunately for me, these are exactly the things I am not so interested in, because I do not really trust fiction to do them well, so I continually felt like I was reading the novel badly.  There is, after all, really only one cure for living, and by the end of the novel the title character is healed (by a Prussian bullet).

And then finally he died the death – the difficult death. (205)

This is from the 1990 Tiina Nunnally translation.  Whatever whining I might do about the novel, I always appreciated Nunnally’s struggle with it. 

The novel is an episodic parents-to-deathbed story about a sensitive Danish Romantic who flounders about with his vocation (can he be a poet?) and with women.  Sometimes the novel is comic, sometimes not so much; sometimes ironic, all too often sincere; sometimes sharply written, sometimes disastrously gooey. 

He had never known the intensity and vastness of this kind of feeling before [Niels is having an affair with a married woman], and there were moments when he felt himself a titan, much more than a human being; he sensed such an inexhaustibility within him, such a wingspan of tenderness swelled from his heart, so wide was his vision, so enormously mild were his judgments.  (166)

The whole page is like that.  “They were currents in the great ocean of love, single reflections of its full light, splinters of love, just as meteors that race through the air are splinters of a planet, because that’s what love was” etc. and so on.  Then two pages later begins one of the sharpest, most precise scenes in the book.  It has been a while since I read a book with such wild swings in rhetorical mode, and in quality.

But perhaps the result is more aesthetically coherent than I realize.  I will write about the book for another day or two, mostly the good parts, I hope.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway - more Scandinavian books - I can't read all this

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with English, etc.  But it is easy to get me excited about literature, so suggestions are most welcome.  And if anything looks appealing, perhaps we can read it together.

Denmark

At the forefront are Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.  The former I read in some quantity just before I started Wuthering Expectations, which was a while ago, I admit, but close enough that I doubt I will revisit him now.  The latter is, I fear, a philosopher, and thus spinach.  In real life, I like spinach, so that is just a metaphor.

More to the point are two short books by Jens Peter Jacobsen, the 1880 novel Niels Lyhne and the 1882 collection Mogens and Other Stories.  Jacobsen has had a strange career in English, kept alive by the glowing testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke seems to rank Jacobsen with the Bible.  I should see for myself.

Another novel, Pelle the Conqueror (1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø, I have meant to read for twenty-five years since I saw the magnificent 1987 Bille August film adaptation.  The novel will unfortunately not feature Max von Sydow, but it likely has other virtues.  It is long – the film only covered a fraction of the book – and grim.  I have no idea how it is written.

Isak Dinesen’s work is from the 1930s and later, but so many of her stories are set in Denmark’s past that she would fit well with the older writers.   I am thinking of Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942) in particular.

By chance, unconnected to this project, I began reading the contemporary conceptual poet Inger Christensen, and I would like to continue my study of her work.  And I mean study – anyone want to help me work on her cosmic long 1969 poem it?  It (it) features elaborate mathematical patterns – tempting, yes?

Sweden

Even poking around, I still know nothing about Swedish literature.  August Strindberg obviously tops the list, and I hope to read a number of his plays, ranging from the 1888 Miss Julie to the strange 1907 Ghost Sonata.  But there are also novels, stories, essays, some freshly translated.  Please, I beg you, recommendations, guidance.

The Queen’s Diadem (1834) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is a novel I encountered a year ago in this post by seraillon.  It is either deeply original, or a knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or something in between.  The Hoffmann connection by itself would give me something to write about.

Hjalmar Söderberg is another novelist I met through book blogs.  I have read a number of convincing posts about his short, intense 1905 novel Doctor Glas.  If I like it, there are a couple of other Söderberg books in English.

Norway

Henrik Ibsen, of course.  I have read six Ibsen plays, I realize, yet I still feel at sea.  I want to read or re-read a good chunk of them, although I will likely follow conventional opinion and ignore his early phase.  Critics are always dividing Ibsen’s work into phases.  Expect lots of Ibsen.

Knut Hamsun had a long, complicated career, but I know him from his early novels Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  Talk about intense.  I would like to revisit those and also read another from the same run, Mysteries (1892).  Then – then I don’t know.  Hunger would likely make my Top 50 Novels of the 19th Century list, if I were to make such a thing.

Off the track – far, far off – is Farthest North (1897) by Fridtjof Nansen, a favorite of min kone, the account of his insane attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing his ship in the winter ice.  Eventually, he just decided to walk.  Utterly nuts.  Sounds wonderful.

Now, some trouble.  Henrik Pontoppidan, Karl Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlöf, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Frans Eemil Sillanpää – the early Scandinavian Nobelists, the ones who, unlike Hamsun or Sigrid Undset lost their place in English, or never had one.  I gaze upon these names in ignorant awe.

I have often thought that it would be a great book blog project to sort through these and other old prize winners.  I do not believe it is my project.  Yet already comments in the previous post have me warily eying a long, recently translated Pontoppidan novel, the 1904 Lucky Per, which sounds either like a standard attempt to move Naturalism into Danish, or else something much stranger.  Hmm hmm hmm.

Please feel free to correct my errors and recommend more books.