Poetry and Biography

- interview with Stangerup

By : Iben Holk

IH: Is it not true to say that the new feature in the Lagoa Santa and Dieppe projects is that for the first time you are able to forget yourself in front of a typewriter?

HS: Yes, that’s obvious. That is really what I have dreamt of ever since I started writing. I have always dreamt of writing the novel in which you can just become immersed in a universe that you colour with every single line and every single word, and which has been raised up into something else, which naturally contains inspiration from your own life, but which is also what we might call cosmic inspiration.

IH: Yes, for the paradoxical fact is that you find a language of a particularly poetical quality liberated at the same time as you are bound by respect for historical and biographical fact.

HS: But I have always dreamt of poetical prose, right from the start. I realise that I might use many words here and there, for I like being able to saturate a text with words and then suddenly to come to a standstill and cut passages and use very short sentences - and then back to long sentences again. It’s a sort of protest against the ordinary transparent text. Art must produce something other than a transparent text. - There must be something in a novel that cannot be found elsewhere. And there I feel that with Lagoa Santa and The Seducer: It is Hard to Die in Dieppe I have been able to make two prose poems drawing on the experiences embedded in the other books.

Occupying about a hundred pages, each of these books contains an accurate account of Lund and Møller respectively. I have carefully conformed to them in everything of theirs I have laid my hands on. I only invent when I enter into their minds and allow the age in which they lived to join in the dance - around them. So when the myths talk about Lund, it is pure invention. When the Janus figure takes over in Møller, that curious double character looking both forward and back, it is pure fiction deriving from Møller’s own tale. There I write basing myself on how I imagine what they are like, and then they turn into my characters. But there are these two accounts in the two novels, which are fairly precise, and I follow them so closely, so that - basing myself on the sources - I have come to the conclusion that of course Lund survives as what he fundamentally was, a very handsome and ethical being who after being young and arrogant - when he arrived in Brazil, he didn’t like the people there at all, they were curious semi-monkeys, he thought, curious crosses between blacks and whites - he constantly complained that they were so transparent, so easily seen through, that you couldn’t rely on them; they were like that - well, in brief, they didn’t read books about Naturwissenschaft and they weren’t serious enough. And then he ends by reconciling himself to them and renouncing his theories of nature.

And then it happened that - after being inspired by Lévy and Glucksmann’s analysis - and it is still what I maintain is the central element in their analysis that it is the 19th-century works of philosophy, the German works, that turn into the 20th-century Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago. And that’s where they are new. The analysis contained in what I was preoccupied with when I was in Paris in 78-80 and wrote the two controversial books Retten til ikke at høre til (The Right not to Belong) and Fangelejrens frie halvdel (The Prison Camp’s Free Half) is also subsumed into the books because I can see that the analysis of the cultural history of the 19th century made by Lévy and Glucksmann helped me to understand certain things in both Lund and Møller, to see what kind of men they were.

When Lund cracks, he not only turns not only against Darwinism, but against the whole of German nature philosophy which gradually evolves into anthropology and ends in racism. He believed everything was created - without our being able to say that he was a creationist in the modern American sense - this is a completely different age, so the two must not be confused. So when he is left behind in his solitary surroundings he feels almost like a solitary Jew who is opposed to the World spirit sweeping in from Germany and seeking to bring about revolutions, to create uniformity and to level everything out. So on this point of course he is a curiously distinguished old cultural conservative.

The opposite is the case with Møller. When I had reached an advanced stage in the work, Ellen Olsen Madsen, who was an incredible help to me in the preparatory work for the book, said: O, Henrik, I’m so upset, because I have found some papers for you that I daren’t really send to you, for there are some terrible papers here about Møller towards the end of his life, when in a furious rage about Goldschmidt he becomes - well, you can’t say an Anti-Semite, because that word hadn’t really been invented at that time, but at least there are some terrible aspects to him. No, I must have them as well, I said, for that’s part of the demon. It’s only part of their characters, I emphasise, but it is very interesting that when in crisis, one of them, Lund, almost becomes Jewish in his protest against the spirit of the age, and the other turns into an "Anti-Semite" in his protest against the spirit of the age. So the aesthete Møller, who of course at the same time dreams of reintroducing heathendom, the Nordic plus the Greek, Pygmalion - Hellenism, the Acropolis, beautiful columns, the world as will and idea, created by Man, there is no God - he must of course turn against Kierkegaard at an early stage because it is the New Testament that has to be discarded. It’s not only that affair with Regine, it’s also implicit in the novel because it’s the New Testament he wants to get rid of, he wants to be rid of Christ. And later it’s Goldschmidt he wants to be rid of, and thereby the Old Testament as well. And then in his most desperate period he anticipates - also with a foundation in the sources - what later happened with Gurdjieff, and the whole tradition of finding the way back to Tibet - which is subsequently also implicit in Nazism and perhaps the innermost secret about Nazism, that it was a revolutionary demonic pact against Christianity and thereby also against Judaism. - And there Møller dreams at an early stage some of the same thoughts that are later found around the turn of the century, that we must find the way to Tibet, for by so doing we can hypnotise ourselves into immortality. Gurdjieff has it, this very, very dangerous Russian Central European tradition of race mysticism. It is latently present in Møller. I think it is interesting that the two not only diverge in the Kirkegaardian sense, but that so to speak at every time in their lives they diverge in crucial situations of crisis and go each his own way.

They are archetypal figures in whom of course the drama they experience is the same ideological drama as I myself have experienced in a smaller way in my day. And only by coming through that could I find my way into these two. And so it is interesting to look at the whole of the 19th century and see what they imagined to be communism in those days; of course, it was a completely different communism from what later turned into Marxism. There, Møller is incredibly superb as a communist, or an anarchical communist, for he still dreamt that the King could be retained. They did in those days, they dreamt of having the King at the top. And then it was to be the old French royalist anarchist slogan: For the King! With the people! Against the aristocracy! - All those things we have fought throughout this century come from that age. So for me the 19th century is primarily something we are slowly on our way out of, if indeed we are on our way out. And in my opinion we have not even started on what I will call a new age, and we are repeating the same mistakes all the time.

From Iben Holk (ed.): Henrik Stangerup, Odense University Press 1986.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones