The Danish Novel of the Century
On Havoc
By : Jens Kistrup
"Frank suppression" is what Tom Kristensen called the memoirs he published a couple of years after his seventieth birthday. To divulge the truth - but not the whole truth. To risk oneīs own life - but at the same time to keep out of harmīs way. To confess - to conceal. To stop just before everything really starts to go wrong.
This peculiar combination of frankness and modesty, or maybe rather angst, which throughout his life was characteristic of the commentaries Tom Kristensen made on his life and his work.
This also applies to his great novel Havoc 1930. And in a way, one can well understand him.
It is an autobiographical work. The main character, Ole Jastrau, poet and critic who leaves his job as literary editor at the Copenhagen daily newspaper Dagbladet to go to the dogs as an inveterate drunkard - who is he but Tom Kristensen himself? And the small world of Copenhagen where the story takes place, with the newspaper Dagbladet as its epicentre and target of the authorīs easily aroused irony - doesnīt this make Havoc a roman á clef, in which the vast majority of the characters are extremely easily identified with the reality of the late 1920s. In itself, this is not far from the truth. And part of the reason for the very cool reception Havoc received when it came out was instinctive indignation. Resentment at the fact that Tom Kristensen had encroached on an area that was considered private - and only private.
The conservative critic Henning Kehler at Berlingske Tidende was of the opinion that Tom Kristensen could at least have waited until his hangover had worn off. "This rendering of the soul is bogged down in the blow-by-blow details of drunkenness. That is the consequence of identifying oneself too strongly with the essence of what one is writing about."
And at Politiken - the fictitious Dagbladet was actually Politiken - the indignation manifested itself as pure insult. In Politiken, Svend Borberg wrote that Havoc, both as a "roman á clef" and as a new Tom Kristensen" was a disappointment: "It is the authorīs personal showdown with a period in which he had got himself into a smutty blind alley. There is a limit to how long someone can be interested in a blind alley, in chronicling how sordid it is, and that it leads nowhere".
And in Ekstra Bladet, Frejlif Olsen, the paperīs editor, expressed the opinion that Tom Kristensen not only lacked decency towards his own person, but that he had also treated the inside life of his news and his colleagues in a way that leanes more towards private vindictiveness and malice. Like Svend Borberg, Frejlif Olsen was disappointed - because Havoc, "with its crudeness and its monotonous, unimaginative elaborateness, was more like insufferable libel than a work of literature".
That Knut Hamsun had a different view of the book naturally seemed to rehabilitate Kristensenīs good name. In a letter to Tom Kristensen shortly after the book was published, he wrote: "I have written books myself, but now I feel humbled, for none of them is as good as yours". (The letter was published in the Danish press with Hamsunīs permission). Later on, Havoc shares certainly increased in value - it is one of the greatest Danish novels of this century - maybe the best.
A Process of Emancipation
Tom Kristensen contributed to this upgrade himself. Not by producing a commentary as to how the book had come into being, that is still missing, but by - in a mystifying sort of way - making it obvious to people just how much writing Havoc had cost him. Most dramatically in an interview with Erik Rostbøll in Det Danske Magasin in 1954: "It is one great devil-maycare mortal sin. All other characteristics of this, my "major work in Danish literature" are of little consequence in comparison. The book is a sin. And this has got nothing to do with theology or the philosophy of life. It doesnīt operate at that level. Havoc has cost human lives, which is why it is a mortal sin".
"But the other thing that has to be said in the same mouthful is: What guarantee do people think they have that I wrote Havoc in order to tell the truth? Oh, no thanks for being so kind as to think the best of a great poet, but the bitter pill that Havoc should have been had it been true, became an intoxicating brew instead. I intoxicated myself in the filth. But you see, when I dipped my pen deep enough it led me back to the bottle. Itīs laughable, really, but then I usually have a good laugh at it. Why not? But for that reason we can well agree that it was destructive. I intoxicated myself in something that I hated like the plague. And the book that should have scared of people attracted them instead. They played along with the game."
My reason for quoting these partly conflicting statements is that both the delusion of the critics and Tom Kristensenīs exaggerated self-accusation say something of Havoc as a novel that cannot be interpreted in one way only. A novel about drunkards, a study in self-destructiveness, where the fantasies of the alcoholic seem especially powerful because the linguistic sensual apparatus functions throughout the novel with virtuoso precision - which Havoc of course, is all about.
But Ole Jastrau is not just an alcoholic bound to his vices - and his past, the half impotent fear of women, which in psychoanalysis is actually defined half as an Oedipus complex, half as a Maria Magdalene-Madonna complex. The paradoxical thing about Havoc is that it is just as much a - negative? positive? - tale of passion, religious and psychological. The passion with which Ole Jastrau takes up the fight with - and consummates - his destiny is a power which drives the novel forward on a human and an artistic level.
For this reason it is not sufficient, either, to see Ole Jastrau as a man who go to the dogs - and wants to do so. Because Havoc is just as much the story of a process of emancipation - Ole Jastrauīs release from all that which wants to entrap him, to fetter him, to save him whether this "salvation" is professional (the opinions of journalism, its "meningitis"), religious (the faith/the authority of the Catholic Church), political (communism) or sexual (the marriage that has gradually broken down, the more or less misbegotten relationships with women from several social layers from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat).
Fear the Soul
Faced by all these exterior and interior tyrannies, Ole Jastrau stems only to have one method of escape - to resort to alcohol, to the security of being among other alcoholics at the Bar des Artistes. There is something ritualistic about the way that he returns to this fixed point of departure, which maybe in spite of everything is less of a prison than a guarantee of the freedom he never completely loses: "Here, and only here, was there a tranquillity, that was out of this world". And although the conclusion of the novel its "epilogue" is not unambiguous - does Ole Jastrau make the trip to Berlin as secretary for the exiled economist Professor Geberhardt or doesnīt he? - it is hardly a coincidence that it is to Geberhardt that he contemplates linking his fate.
Because of all the many main and subordinate characters he is the only one that represents the same desperate consistent urge to be free as Ole Jastrau. He does not actually appear in the book, but a few words are quoted from an interview with him with which Ole Jastrau would have had little difficulty countersigning: "From time to time one is seized with loathing at being an active participant in the cock-eyed developments of his world, and they have now got such a tight hold on me that I am going to leave". Ole Jastrau does not utter the words himself and probably never could have, because his conflict - the permanent state of crisis he finds himself in - is quite a different one. His misfortune is that he is living in a reality that is falling apart. A reality that has become unreal.
Opinions turn people into shadows. And fear lurks everywhere. At the newspaper he has "a feeling in his spine as though someone is always following him with a dagger in their hand". At the nightclub, Guldaldersalen, as though language itself fills him with fear - each and every word has some sneaking connotation. What Ole Jastraus reality lacks is a soul. And it is soul he is seeking, or rather culturing. Tom Kristensen gave Havoc the motto "Fear the soul and do not nurture it, for it resembles a vice". And a vice - or obsession - is what it becomes for Ole Jastrau.
A Danish Ulysses?
It is soul that he seeks in the younger generation - and in the poet Steffensen, who follows him like a shadow, moves into his flat and writes the poems he has realised in the form of opinion or alcohol (Drunken stupors are poems that canīt pull themselves together). It is soul he believes he is chasing through all the boundlessness he is always talking about. An infinite person, a cultic person. His search for the soul even makes him see himself as a sort of reincarnation of Jesus: "I canīt forget Jesus among the whores. The more I go on the drink, the closer he becomes to me. He is resurrected within and in the midst of all this boorishness, here, within me". When Jastrau, drinks, it is in order to drink himself into infinity - and into invulnerability. There is a moment in the novel when he feels he has freed himself, independent both of the newspaper and of the church that has attempted in vain to convert him, and which he has not wanted to be converted by: "Everything that had previously tormented him over at the paper, everything that had been able to weaken his position, which sometimes drowned in a rattling sound a very weak voice in a shattered telephone handset. Nothing, nothing could hurt him anymore. So powerless were all those people towards him now. Their good advice, their warnings, their malicious pleasure, their intrigues. Just indistinct voices in a cracked telephone handset.
A Danish Ulysses? A Danish Counterpoint? The further the period of which Havoc is the product - the 1920s - disappears into the distance, the more clear it becomes how strongly Tom Kristensenīs novel makes its mark as the last, most desperate and artistically most vital expression of the search for a (religious) standpoint in life, which later literature has had to manage without. So the dangerous and tempting thing about Havoc is that the more ideology you accredit it with, the more you risk getting onto the wrong track. One could of course say that one is then sharing the same fate as the main character Ole Jastrau, whose story in the novel is a series of wrong turns, which all end without result or in a blind alley. But confronted by all wrong tracks, he maintains an irony or rather self-irony - almost a sort of integrity - which prevents him from going entirely to the dogs. For example, towards the end of the novel he says: "There is something I want, and when I drink, I sometimes think for a moment that I have got it. Spirits are the only substitute for religion - should I put it that way in jest?"
In jest? In the midst of this intoxication - and the action of the novel seems like one endless stream of drinking bouts - Ole Jastrau maintains a noticeably illusionless sober-mindedness towards himself. He is "just a simple man, who has little experience in absolute soul or absolute freedom. Thus far I have succeeded in becoming a drunkard". This defeat, if it is not more an awakening than a defeat? - is played through towards the end of the novel in a wide variety of keys. Was this not a philosophical objective? Did he not want to get behind the beliefs, his own beliefs? And of these beliefs - which could just as well be called illusions or self-deception - was the belief in the infinity of the soul the greatest illusion, the misdeed itself: "You have got to have means to go to the dogs. It was only the soul that was of interest, and I couldnīt bloody find the soul".
Total Chaos, Total Freedom
Ole Jastrau is extremely preoccupied by his own appearance - the indefinable mongolian features, which are both of a wise man and a drunkard, his increasing stoutness, the shapelessness: "During these first stages of shapelessness was the soul. The infinity and unmanageability of the soul - what has become of that?" Havoc one big catalogue of what became of it - or rather what did not become of it. Does Tom Kristensen allow Ole Jastrau to go to pot? He certainly doesnīt save him: "There was so much to think about. But all of it lay in such a large pile of wreckage, all that he was supposed to have been thinking about".
The total chaos; but also the total freedom from everything. It is in the light of this duplicity that Havoc should be read. In a certain sense the book carries on a tradition - the novel of defeat - in Danish literature. But it does so with merciless consistency and with an artistic vitality the like of which is not to be found in any earlier or later Danish novel. It is a sorry thing to have to say so, but no one has been able or even dared to take up the challenge and compete with Havoc on its own terms. That is what makes it a classic which is still just as much alive as it ever has been, this the greatest Danish novel of this century.
This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine nr. 1, 1991
Translated by Hugh Mattews
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