To Steer and Sail at Will

By : Henk van der Liet

Thorkild Hansen (1927-1989), is one of the great travellers in twentieth century Danish literature like his renowned countryman Johannes V. Jensen, he travelled for two reasons, to encounter new aspects of reality, and register them as the reporter he felt himself to be, and, at the same time, to look at the effects the changing surroundings had on himself. Thus, the outward journey was accompanied by an inward one as well.

To save or destroy
There is, nevertheless, at least one aspect in which Thorkild Hansen and Johannes V. Jensen differ fundamentally. Before Jensen died, he destroyed all his private documents and archives, whereas Hansen preserved them and published his diaries and an autobiography. Several volumes of diaries and collections of published and unpublished writings have even appeared posthumously. The last thing he himself had prepared for publication before he died even happened to be a newspaper column on Johannes V. Jensen. In this essay, which appeared shortly after his death, Hansen discussed the reasons why Jensen, fully conscious of what he was doing, did not leave any personal documents about his private life behind. Jensen wanted his works to speak for themselves and did not like to divert the interest in his work towards his personal circumstances. Hansen valued the importance of the private documents, both as a source for understanding the individual author´s works, and as an art-form in its own right. As he said in the column on Jcnsen, there are numerous writers who became world famous, precisely because of their diaries, autobiographies, and so forth, and not in the first place as a result of their literary works. As Thorkild Hansen points out in this final essay, the irony, of Jensen´s example is, that in destroying his personal documents, he stimulated what he least of all intended: he became an enigmatic figure that drew at least as much attention to himself as to the works he created.
   Thorkild Hansen did not make the same mistake as Jensen had done. On the contrary, he saved his diaries and personal archives and, before dying, he already had prepared the second two-volume set of his diaries for publication. They appeared a year after his death, entitled Et atelier i Paris I-II. Dagbog 1947-52 (A Studio in Paris, 1990). Beforehand, he had published De søde piger. Dagbog 1943-47 (The Sweet Girls, 1974) and a number of travel diaries from different periods of his life. Thus, in contrast to Jensen, we have in Hansen´s case, one of the best documented private lives in modern Danish literature.

A faked interview?
Unintentionally, but perfectly coincident with Hansen´s preoccupation with the relationship between life and letters the last book published during his lifetime was the autobiographical picture-book, Søforhør. The dust-jacket of this sturdy volume shows a close-up photograph of the author sitting at the oars of a rowing boat, looking the potential reader straight in the eye. The picture suggests an atmosphere of intimacy; the stage for a straightforward, face-to-face dialogue, is set. The vast sea is visible behind the back of the rowing author. No one else is near who can possibly overhear what is to be discussed, and neither the author nor the reader can leave the scene. Both are, literally speaking, in the same boat. And the text that follows apparently lives up to the expectations. It turns out to be an honest dialogue between the writer and an anonymous interviewer, where no questions are held back or intimate details concealed. At times, the interview gives the impression of a confession. But what puzzles the reader is the fact that the identity of the interviewer is never revealed, notwithstanding the fact that he or she proves to have an exceptionally detailed and intimate knowledge of the private life and works of Thorkild Hansen. While reading, one has a growing suspicion that tile author has faked the interview and simply written the entire text himself, answers as well as questions.
   This peculiar book, as well as nearly all of Hansen´s other works, has caused a lot of debate among critics. Recent studies of Søforhør have affirmed the idea that it might be an autobiography and nowadays the book is widely regarded as such. Søforhør in no way represents a standard autobiography. The form of a self-arranged interview, the great amount of photographs, and the apologetic nature of the text sooner point in the direction of biography or even hagiography (the biography of a saint), than of what is ordinarily understood by the epitaph "autobiography".

A controlled mixture
Furthermore, the pictures are so dominant by their presence that the text is sometimes reduced to the level of subtitling. These over one hundred - often full-page -photographs, impart an impression of objectivity and reliabilitv to the text. Hansen states in the text that all his works are basically of a documentary nature. In a provocative fashion, he even makes it clear that he disliked fiction, and that he regarded himself sooner as a historian or a reporter, than as a writer of fiction. But, as the chosen guise of his autobiography illustrates, the balancing of fact and fiction was a game of hide and seek with the reader. The contents of Hansen´s inquiry of himself in Søforhør turned out to be a fully controlled mixture, vacillating between reality and fantasy, between truth and lie, dynamics that are at the core of modern (auto)biography.

The documentarist
In more than one sense, it is true that Thorkild Hansen was a documentarist. He recorded human endeavour and individual people´s characters, as well as his own. Reading his impressive production, one becomes increasingly aware of the fact that, in creating other, often historical, people´s lives, he also tried to come to an understanding of his own individuality. In attempting to disentangle the mystery of human existence in general, he also sought to shed light on the complex inner world of his own personality. And just as he managed to split himself into the roles of both the interrogator and the subject of enquiry in his autobiography, he undoubtedly let the characters in his novels also act as disguises for himself and vehicles for the existential quest that occupied him all his life.

To fulfil life
To judge from Søforhør, Thorkild Hansen regarded himself as a man who had managed to fulfil the life that was destined for him. In a somewhat nineteenth-century fashion, he had accepted the life and career that was written in the stars for him. Thus, he complied with the fundamental conditions of traditional autobiography. That is, in retrospect to become conscious of the crucial phases of one´s personal developmerit, and in this way deduce patterns which form the core of one´s individuality.
    In the so-called interview, he employs outdated notions like fortune, destiny and luck, which seem to be surprisingly accurate in Hansen´s case. One of the questions that Hansen elaborates on in Søforhør is the balance between mere luck and determination in life. The sequence in which he tells about the way he got on his first archaeological expedition to the Middle East is especially noteworthy. Meditations of this kind reveal that Hansen was never a great philosopher, but a wonderful story-teller with a good eye for human interest.
    Thorkild Hansen´s sudden death, during a sailing trip in the Caribbean, may be regarded with due symbolism. For him, sailing the seas was identical with putting one´s existence in the hands of the unpredictable forces of nature and destiny. Therefore it did not surprise him that the chemical composition of sea-water was identical with that of human tears. On a symbolic level, Thorkild Hansen merged with the characters he had created in his novels and the personality, he had meticulously staged in his diaries.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 8, 1995