Fra introduktionen til Against the Wind - Stories by Martin A. Hansen, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1979

Af : H. Wayne Schow

Like Thomas Mann, Hansen was persuaded that from his parental and maternal progenitors he had inherited a dual nature. His father's people had been comfortably established farmers, steady and responsible, respected among their rural neighbors. His mother - of a more artistic and passionate temperament - was the daughter of a poor woodcutter, from a family whose history was marked by excess, irrationality, and tragedy. "Two kinds of blood course in my veins," he said. To the first he attributed his feelings of social and ethical responsibility, to the second his dedication - both reluctant and willing - to the poet's calling, including its asocial and demonic dimensions.
   Indeed, in the years leading up to 1946, Hansen's own experience persuaded him that the artist is one of the damned. Art was a sickness which consumed one physically and humanly and at the same time the artist's perceptions were sharpened, not only by physical illness but by moral perversity as well:

The pen has stunted the fellow, and ink has made him a predator and a parasite [Hansen once wrote]. This insatiable spider, the poet, must suck the blood from everything in order to fill his inkwell. Yes, there is something evil and devilish in his power to conceive and project, for he devours and destroys the living.

Like Mann's Tonio Kröger, Hansen was convinced for a time that the artist bore Cain's mark on his brow. In a fragment from this period we read:

Cain fled and found a woman of unknown origin, a woman not created by that old, strict, and simple Creator we are told of. With her Cain founded a race cursed with the burden of artistic insight. Few of those who buy a ream of paper and rent a typewriter in order to write immortal works in three months have the slightest suspicion of this. But the old ones knew it. The poet must ride Pegasus, who is the son of Medusa the terrible, whose countenance no one can look on without turning to stone. Medusa the terrible lurks behind the veil of poetry.

This is the other side of the outwardly calm and imperturbable Hansen. This is the man with a guilty conscience who felt alienated from family and social responsibility. This is the man who was irrationally convinced that he would die young, who therefore drove himself demonically for the fourteen years of his teaching career, hunched over the typewriter night after night "until the first streetcars clattered in the distance." This is the man who, plagued with chronic headaches and, paradoxically, sleeplessness, relied increasingly on strong drugs and stimulants to enable him to continue in this costly service, undermining his health in the process and hastening the premature death he feared.
   The external impetus to Hansen's nihilism was the overwhelming impact of World War II on his sensibilities. At first he was deeply ashamed of the Danish capitulation and frustrated that he and others were not called up to resist the German invaders, however futile the effort may have been. Subsequently, under the conditions of enemy occupation, he intensified his personal search for meaning, and to his horror it disclosed the lack of an all-embracing meaning in life - in a word, absurdity: Europe's immense harvest of youthful corpses, piled in heaps, burned on ashen mounds, buried in the pits of Maidanek." Death, the ultimate negation, seemed ubiquitous at home and abroad, and it thrust itself into his writing. Drift toward death, angst in the face of death, refusal to accept death become central themes in his work during this period.
The only adequate response, he became convinced, was existential. One must begin not with preconceived formulas but with experience. Accordingly, when the Danish resistance movement came to enlist his talent, he responded not in the name of nationalism or democracy, but simply because an inner voice demanded resistance and he had no right to deny that voice.
   Eventually Hansen found a way out of his nihilism in what he called ethical pessimism. If one can imagine a point of convergence and overlapping in the thought of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Lägerkvist, and T. S. Eliot, he will have a notion of the position Hansen gradually defined. With these writers he agreed that man cannot avoid responsibility, however meaningless the world around him may seem. Like them, he was fundamentally a religious man who repudiated institutionalized Christianity; like them he passed through a furnace of doubt, as Dostoevsky phrased it. Like the latter in particular, he implied in his writing that one who feels responsibility cannot avoid suffering and sorrow. But if, like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Hansen was driven to find a personal meaning beyond nihilism, he was convinced that the existentially aware modern man must first pass through the abyss of despair. In his notebooks he wrote:

I could remain a poet of the night and damnation if I let myself be carried along, but I will not.... I have stood and stared into the abyss, and it tempted me. I could easily sink into it, and I could depict men as things and monsters; that would perhaps make me more interesting as a poet, but destructive.

And so he made a Kierkegaardian leap, a choice beyond reason to build rather than destroy.
   Gradually he turned back to Christianity, not to that of his youth but to an existential Christianity, marked by unsettling irony, one which attacks most vigorously the self-satisfaction of the religious establishment. However, as one critic has observed, the Christianity in his works usually rests more on the will to believe than on confident capability. A number of his principal characters are but dilettantes of faith in this way.
   In view of these facts, we understand why it was that Hansen's most powerful fiction was forged in the years between 1939 and 1947. For these were years of extreme personal anguish in which the temptations of nihilism were seductively presented to him by the madness of Europe as well as by his own inner demons. But it was also a time in which he struggled intensely to find elements in his almue cultural past that could be viable in an existential world. It is not difficult to understand, then, that he should have struck so responsive a chord in the hearts of his contemporary countrymen. They sensed that he was a good man with decent instincts, one earnestly seeking to affirm the best of their cultural past: at the same time they saw that he was an intelligent man who would not underestimate the difficulty of existence, an intensely honest man who would not flinch from the truth.
   Paradoxically, Hansen's production of fiction diminished quantitatively and, with several exceptions, qualitatively after 1947. It was as if in his intense effort to find a positive vision he triumphed too definitely, in the process eliminating that fruitful, if terrible, tension between nihilism and affirmation under the pressure of which his best fiction had been formed.