The author and film-maker Henrik Stangerup (1937-1998) made his debut in fiction in 1958 with Lille Håbs rejse (Little Hopeīs Journey), a book containing three little pieces of prose, or fables, which proved later to be the modest start of one of the most striking and passionate uvres in modern Danish literature. In Little Hopeīs Journey Stangerup adopted a theme which in various nuances permeated the books that followed: the painful struggle with an intractable urge to realise himself despite the merciless accountancy of reality. In Stangerupīs case this lifetimeīs project often led to isolation, wanderlust and dread of losing the love of others, but it also reflected a īnecessaryī authorship, in which the autobiographical material was the principal driving force.
If we look at Henrik Stangerupīs fiction from a chronological birdīs eye view, we see it divides into two large sections, with Fjenden i forkøbet (The Predictable Enemy) from 1978 as the turning point. Not only does the book occupy, in terms of time, the centre of Stangerupīs production, it also does so in its content, because The Predictable Enemy is the transition to the second phase of writing.
The first part runs from the beginning in 1958, via the short story collection, Grønt og sort (Green and black, 1965), on to the novels Slangen I brystet (Snake in the Heart, 1969) Løgn over løgn (Lie upon Lie, 1971) and Manden der ville være skyldig (The Man who wanted to be Guilty, 1973). Additionally, this first phase includes a series of essay collections arising out of the writerīs numerous periods in France, namely as Paris correspondent for Ekstra Bladet from 1964-65, and his experiences as film and book reviewer for Ekstra Bladet and Politiken. These were published, among others, in Veritabel Pariser (Veritable Parisian, 1966), Kunsten at være ulykkelig (The Art of being Miserable, 1974) and Mens tid var (While it Lasted, 1978).
The novels forming the first part of the oeuvre revolve around the subject who mostly in vain tries to find a meaning in life. In the autobiographical first novel Snake in the Heart Stangerup paints a self-ironical portrait of the slippery slope his alter ego, the Danish Paris correspondent Max Mollerup, has chosen to follow. Snake in the Heart is in this respect reminiscent of Tom Kristensenīs Havoc, since both novels are set in the world of journalism and because they describe the inevitable spiritual and social disintegration of their main character. Moreover, Mollerup is himself conscious of his own decline, something which leads to self-contempt, and in the last instance, to his becoming resigned to sink still deeper into the quagmire.
In the next novel, Lie upon Lie, Stangerup again lays about the media world, whose hypocritical manipulation of reality is exhibited in a self-betraying manner. The Man who wanted to be Guilty is a compact futuristic novel set in a utopian society in which everyone must be happy. But, as also happens in the brief title story in Little Hopeīs Journey, happiness also implies the experience of or at least the consciousness of the shadowy side of life.
The end of the seventies brought a serious crisis for Henrik Stangerup, on both the personal and the literary plane. The crisis engendered the autobiographical and heartsearching novel The Predictable Enemy, written after the death of Stangerupīs father in 1976. The book was produced partly as a means of creating a reconciliation with his father, but The Predictable Enemy was also the authorīs desperate attempt to write himself out of the slump he fell into during this period. The crisis was incurred by the break-up of his marriage to the film actress Lotte Tarp and also by the risk he took in filming Holbergīs play Erasmus Montanus. Made in Brazil, the film was a total fiasco which brought ruin on Stangerupīs financial affairs. Not only all that, The Predictable Enemy is a suppressed reckoning with the writerīs painful early years in the shadow of his famous parents: the critic and professor Hakon Stangerup (who was the victim of a smear campaign that discredited the family) and the actress Betty Söderberg (daughter of the great Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg).
The reading public regarded The Predictable Enemy as an extreme example of confessional literature and it is true that the novel is a pretty unpalliated exercise in self-examination of an almost therapeutic type. After the catharsis effected by The Predictable Enemy, Stangerup found a fresh source of material and launched a new project that generated three of the foremost works of his authorship: The Road to Lagoa Santa (1981), It is hard to die in Dieppe (1985) and Brother Jacob (1991). Viewed together, these three historical-biographical novels form a whole, even though they are placed within quite different historical, intellectual and geographical settings.
The inception of The Road to Lagoa Santa was the character of Peter Wilhelm Lund (1801-80), the scientist who after stabilising himself in a promising career suddenly retired to an insignificant village in the Brazilian jungle, where he lived out his last 35 years as the local eccentric among the natives. One of the narrative features that characterise The Road to Lagoa Santa, which is also employed in the books that follow, is its circular structure. This is created by making the beginning and ending of the text the narrative anchorages for the story. Moreover the final scene of The Road to Lagoa Santa is one of the most successful crescendoes in modern Danish literature. In his will Lund had appointed that after his death there should be three days of festival, and when he finally dies the local Brazilians use Lundīs precious scientific library for making rockets and other fireworks. In this way Lundīs books and the entire world picture they represent are transformed "into a rain of stardust bidding farewell to the Doctor from the dark tropical heavens".
The second novel in Stangerupīs historical-biographical trilogy is It is hard to die in Dieppe, whose subject is the critic P.L. Møller (1814-65), the diametric opposite of P.W. Lund. P.L. Møllerīs appetite for life is his undoing and It is hard to die in Dieppe ends, like the foregoing book, with a remarkable and brilliant final scene in which Møller, worn down by syphilis and in a hallucinating berserk rage, goes to meet his end.
Brother Jacob is the crowning achievement of the novel trilogy and Stangerupīs last and greatest novel. The common overall structure of the three books reflects the three existential stages in Kierkegaardīs philosophy. Thus the central figure in Brother Jacob, the Franciscan monk Brother Jacob de Dacia (c. 1484-c. 1566), stands for the īreligiousī stage, whereas P.L. Møller and P.W. Lund represent respectively the aesthetic and the ethical views of life.
Although the three books can be described as historical novels, their cultural and critical aim is at least equally directed at the authorīs own time. In common with the earlier works, the chief personage in the later authorship seeks a meaningful relationship with himself and the world around him, which results among other things in a restless journeying to and fro among various countries and cultures. In that connection, Europe is presented as a life-denying, intellectualistic, unambiguous Abendland in decline, whereas South America stands out as the life-affirming, emotional, ambiguous and vital continent. Stangerupīs appreciation of Latin American culture also finds expression in his book Samba from 1982.
In Stangerupīs last book, Datter af (Mother), he describes his mother Betty Søderberg-Stangerup. The book was written after her death in 1993. But in contrast to The Predictable Enemy, the book Mother does not get to grips with reconciliation, it is rather an attempt to clarify the unresolved relationship of mother and son. The bookīs subtle subtitle, Scenes of a mother, clearly alludes to the motherīs career as an actress and refers precisely to the strange and almost theatrical estrangement that marked their relations. Thus Mother is a suggestive double portrait and a desperate attempt to fill the void in their relationship and emotional life which they were unable to contend with while the mother was alive.
As with Stangerupīs other books, Mother witnesses to the fact that writing was a necessary condition of life for this author. He wrote to keep his inner demons at bay, to relate with the world around him and to come to terms with himself and others. In a way his authorship is one long and stormy attempt to realise an impossible project to make the dream of a different and better life come true despite the inherent recalcitrance of oneself and of reality.
Henk van der Liet is professor in Scandinavian Language and Literature at the University of Amsterdam.
(1999)
