Kierkegaard (10 page)

The events seem to have catalysed the young would-be writer. Later that same April, Søren's journals go silent again. This time the lack of journal writing is not because of grief but because of a renewed spurt of applied productive energy. Søren is writing in earnest, getting his first proper piece ready for publication. Martensen may have pipped him to the post when it came to Faust, but now Søren has another project in mind that will get him on the literary map. Over the next few months he applies himself to his extended essay and review of Hans Christian Andersen's new novel
Only a Fiddler.

May 5, 1838. Søren celebrates his birthday. Against the odds, he has survived yet another year. The occasion leads to a renewed spiritual reflection on work, life, family, and God.

On May 19, precisely timed at 10:30 in the morning, Søren records an experience he has just undergone:

There is an indescribable joy
that glows all through us just as inexplicably as the apostle's exclamation breaks forth for no apparent reason: “Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice.”—Not a joy over this or that, but the soul's full outcry “with tongue and mouth and from the bottom of the heart” . . . a heavenly refrain which, as it were, suddenly interrupts our other singing, a joy which cools and refreshes like a breath of air . . .

July 6, 1838, Sunday. The spiritual experience is not repeated, but the effects seem to have taken root.
Pastor Kolthoff
—one of the few clergymen for whom Søren retained respect—records in his notes that Søren attended confession and Communion at the Church of Our Lady just down the road from the old family home. There is no question of familial pressure, however, for Søren attended alone. Indeed, the summer marks a time of reconciliation between the three Kierkegaard men, which Søren and Peter especially had been working on for some weeks.

On July 9, Søren rejoices in his journal that his
“Father in Heaven”
has kept his earthly father alive long enough for Michael to take pride in his reformed child. The son prays that the father will experience “greater joy in being my father the second time than he had the first time.” The reconciliation is evidently bound up with Søren's renewed confidence in his faith and his ability to articulate a personally engaging relation to Jesus Christ, for the same entry concludes,

I am going to work
toward a far more inward relation to Christianity, for up until now I have in a way been standing completely outside of it while fighting for its truth; like Simon of Cyrene (Luke 23:26), I have carried Christ's cross in a purely external way.

August 8, 1838. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard is proved mistaken in his conviction that he was cursed to outlive all his children, for by 2:00 a.m. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard is dead. He was eighty-two. In a journal entry marked with a cross, Søren writes:

My father died on Wednesday
. . . I so deeply desired that he might have lived a few years more, and I regard his death as the last sacrifice of his love for me, because in dying he did not depart from me but he died for me, in order that something, if possible, might still come of me.

The entry concludes, “He was a ‘faithful friend.' ”

Michael died reconciled to his son. But he also died without seeing his son marry, finish university, take up a position, or publish anything of significance. To the end of his life he was convinced that Søren had not, and perhaps would not ever, live up to his potential. In later years Peter admitted that Michael was disappointed in Søren for frittering away his talent. Søren too was well aware of the debt he owed to his father that would now never be paid. Many of his most important and spiritually serious books would be dedicated to the memory of the merchant hosier. At the same time, Søren was not blind to the ambiguous nature of the debt. His father loved him and he loved his father, but their life together was still “insane.”

Not at all insignificantly, the passing of the older Kierkegaard means the Kierkegaard boys are rich. The brothers inherit Michael's wealth and Michael's house. Peter moves into his father's set of rooms, and Søren moves back to his old rooms, where he will stay for the coming year. He also inherits over 33,000 r.d., a tidy sum that means Søren will not have to earn a living from whatever it is he decides to put his hand to. In other words, he's set for life.

It is a good thing that Søren did not need to rely on his writing to pay the bills, for this would never become a reliable source of income. Some books made a slight profit while others did not, but throughout it all it was Søren's inherited wealth that subsidised his writing career, beginning with his first book, until he ran out of money at the end of his life. Søren had completed the manuscript of his critique of H. C. Andersen in July, before his father's death, so its cryptic title
From the Papers of One Still Living
does not refer to Søren's relationship to Michael. Instead, the title alludes to the content of the book, which substantially criticises Andersen for writing his novels without a committed “life view.” Andersen has not invested his characters with a clear point of view, thus they (and the author) cannot be said to be fully living. Søren presented the manuscript to Heiberg for publication, but it was
rebuffed. Heiberg—the great arbiter of Danish literary taste—did not like Søren's style.

So it is that on September 7, 1838, just shy of a month after Michael Pedersen was put into the ground, Søren's first book is self-published, the dead man's money paying to launch the career of the still-living son. The book sells fairly well, but it cannot be called a runaway success. It displeases Andersen and confuses most readers. By December, the piece is perhaps more discussed than actually read, but even so the mission is accomplished. Søren has made his literary mark and is beginning to be noticed as more than merely a sharp-tongued wag who is good at parties. As a nod of respect he is asked to be the president of the Student Union.

The short book is impressive, but a sophisticated take-down of a popular teller of fairy tales is hardly the sign of a serious man. In the months following Michael's death, those familiar with the family fully expect that Søren, flush with cash and free from the heavy eye of his father, will now live the sort of indolent life that only a wealthy, foppish rake with a four-cigar-a-day habit can live.
“Now you will never get your theological degree,”
says Sibbern, resigned to losing his young friend and student.

Another of Søren's tutors, Hans Brøchner, questions Søren's dedication to completing his finals. The doubters will be confounded, for they've got Søren all wrong. Here is a lad, Søren “the Fork,” raised from childhood to debate, argue, and talk his way through everything. The relationship between father and son was constituted upon verbal sparring—combative conversation was both the punishment and the reward. With Michael gone, Søren has no one left to define himself against. To his journal he will later confide, “
If Father had lived
, I would never have gotten it.” To Brøchner he replies, “
As long as Father was alive
, I could defend my proposition that I ought not to take the degree. But after he died, and I also had to assume his side in the debate, I could no longer resist and had to make the decision to prepare for my degree.”

With the book published and the father buried, at long last it is time
to buckle down. A year's worth of university study has to be crammed into a handful of months. Søren employs Brøchner to prepare him for the finals. He dedicates himself to memorising lists of popes, Hebrew lexicons, Greek verbs, church history, and all the other paraphernalia of a nineteenth-century Danish theology exam. He dutifully attends the required lectures. It is dry and uninspiring and everything else has to be put on hold until it is over. Søren calls this time from autumn of 1838 through to the summer of 1840 “
the longest parenthesis
I have experienced.” By and large the journals and thought experiments are included in the parenthesis, and he writes to his diary,

I must bid farewell
, and you, my thoughts, imprisoned in my head, I can no longer let you go strolling in the cool of the evening, but do not be discouraged, learn to know one another better, associate with one another, and I will no doubt be able to slip off occasionally and peek in on you—Au revoir!

By and large, the journals are thinned out but they do not cease altogether. One common theme running through the remaining entries is Søren's continued winnowing of authentic Christianity from its debased forms and his frustration at poseur philosophers (like Martensen) who align Christianity with Hegelianism. Another theme is love.

Søren never forgets Regine, and he keeps up a sociable relation with her family during this time. “
Even before my father died
my mind was made up about her.” The father's death and the son's inheritance made the union even more feasible, and during his subsequent parenthetical phase, thoughts of Regine continue to grow. “
During all that time
I let her life become entwined in mine.” Yet accompanying all this is a continued reticence about marriage itself and what it implies for Søren's future life. A study in theology is naturally a precursor to ordination, which for the established church in Denmark is akin to a comfortable life as a sort of clerical civil servant. Is the role of the husband, father,
citizen, and clergyman the role Søren the witty, caustic writer is supposed to play?

On February 2, 1839, for the time being, the romantic poet wins out over the prophetic loner or the dutiful academic. Søren, using the Latin form of his beloved's name, bursts into celebration:

You, sovereign queen of my heart
,
Regina,
hidden in the deepest secrecy of my breast, in the fullness of my life-idea. . . . Everywhere, in the face of every girl, I see features of your beauty, but I think I would have to possess the beauty of all the girls in the world to extract your beauty, that I would have to sail around the world to find the portion of the world I want and toward which the deepest secret of my self polarically points—and in the next moment you are so close to me, so present, so overwhelmingly filling my spirit that I am transfigured to myself and feel that here it is good to be.

Still Søren does not directly approach the lady in question. She is young. He is conflicted. And that list of popes is not going to memorise itself.

July 3, 1840. At last the work is done. Søren passes his exams with a “commendable” grade, firmly in the middle of his cohort. His examiners praise Søren's maturity of thought but note the paucity of acceptable theological material in his written answers. To mark the end of his studies, two weeks later, Søren takes himself north to Jutland. The trip is a holiday after the great parenthesis, but it is also a pilgrimage to Michael's childhood home and to the infamous hill. (“
Here on the heath
, one must truly say, ‘Whither shall I flee from thy presence?' ”) Søren is touched by the beauty of nature, bored by the company he meets along the way, and dogged by sadness over his father. “
I am so listless
and dismal that I not only have nothing which fills my soul, but I cannot conceive of anything that could possibly satisfy it—alas, not even the bliss of heaven,” he writes.

Through it all, Søren is also itching to get back to Copenhagen. Before his Jutland trip he had paid a friendly visit to the Olsen home, exchanging pleasantries and lending them a book or two and some sheet music. It is all part of the plan to break the ice with Regine, and now Søren is keen to follow up the next stage. Finally, late in the evening on August 6, Søren returns home. Two days later, Søren calls on the Olsens to enquire after his books and to see if they enjoyed the passages he had marked out for them. The scheme works. From August 9 until September he visits the family often and draws close to Regine. She is eighteen. He is twenty-seven.

September 8. Søren sets off from home,
“determined to resolve the whole thing”
once and for all. Sure enough, he comes across Regine on the street outside her house. He politely requests after her family, but she says there is no one at home. Now is the chance! Søren is rash enough to see this as the opportunity he needs. With heart hammering, he invites himself in.

Regine is a well-brought-up girl, and added to that, she is no fool. She knows something is up, and that it is highly irregular to be in the house alone with a man. He can see she is flustered, so to calm her nerves, Søren asks her to play something on the piano. Regine gets through a piece, while her ungainly visitor, normally so talkative, manages not to say anything at all. The music ends, and still Søren sits and goggles, swallowing nervously. There is nothing for it but for Regine to begin a new piece. Suddenly Søren lurches forward, grabs the music book and dashes it onto the piano. “
O, what do I care about music
; it is you I seek, for two years I have been seeking you!” The floodgates are open and the rest pours out. Søren does not follow up his confession of love with praise for the beloved or even an eloquent defence of his merits as a suitor. Such actions are for normal citizens. Instead, true to form for one whose life was largely lived inwardly, Søren woos his Heart's Sovereign by confessing his melancholia and warning her away from him. A strange proposal, but, in any case, the deed is done. Now it is Regine who must respond.
She would later describe her young self as
“struck completely speechless.”
Fortunately, her upbringing and good sense kicks in. Without a single word or explanation she bundles her untimely visitor out of the house as quickly as possible.