12 JANUARY 1974, Page 18

REVIEW OF BOOKS

Richard Luckett on the aesthete who became a saint

In one of his Godly Discourses Spit-en Kierkegaard explores Christ's injunction to

"consider the lilies of the field." The first lesson that he draws from them is the lesson of silence: "To pray, that is, to pray aright, is to become silent." He introduces into his ar gument the figure of the poet who, though he knows that it is the faculty of speech which distinguishes man from the beasts, prefers the silence under the sky because "it distinguishes itself infinitely above men who are able to talk." The discourse is moving and persuasive (as Kierkegaard intended it to be), but it is also a little absurd. For it is hard to imagine a writer more insistently loquacious than Kierkegaard, nor one whose methods have less affinity with the quality of quiet which he attempts to describe.

In his lifetime there appeared the series of discourses, published under his own name, and the principal works by which he is known today, which were put out pseudonymously; after his death editors began to work on the vast mass of his journals and unpublished papers. As Josiah Thompson, his latest biographer*, remarks: "The enormous productive outpouring sometimes seems out of control, cascading over the reader like a waterfall." And though Kierkegaard lived a secluded and increasingly retiring life, he also incited controversy. In 1845 he provoked the Copenhagen satirical weekly Corsair to attack him, with the result that children would follow him in the streets to observe that sartorical oddity eagerly seized on by the paper's cartoonists — the uneven length of his trouser legs. His biographer, Georg Brandes, was later to recollect how his own nurse, when he was a child, would reprove him for untidiness of dress with a pointing finger and incantation: "Spiren, SOren." In the year of his death Kierkegaard created an altogether more serious affray with his ferocious attacks on organised religion and the Danish state church; it ended, not with mockery, but with a public demonstration at his funeral. Yet it could be claimed, with justice, that everything he wrote was inherently controversial, in method as well as content. The pseudonyms within pseudonyms, the whole fictional ap-, paratus of letters, commentaries and diaries out of which Kierkegaard created his works, are all weapons of debate, the dialectic of the man who rejected Hegel. In the words of the man who taught him moral philosophy: "He's so polemical through and through that it's just terrible."

Sooner or later somebody will write a book about Kierkegaard's reputation and the way in which, some seventy years after his death, his polemics became of such importance to people outside Denmark. It would be a curious and interesting record. He was translated into English largely as a result of the enthusiasm of Charles Williams, the poet and theologian, who, happily, worked for the

Kierkegaard Josiah Thompson (Gollancz £3.90) Oxford University Press. Few of those who read him, however, can have been committed Christians; it was in connection with existentialism that he became widely known, and his thinking seemed of more importance to philosphers than theologians. W. H. Auden's feelings about Kierkegaard are relevant here, since they illustrate both his appeal and its attendant problems. Auden was an early enthusiast for Kierkegaard, and it is probably not coincidental that he also owed his conversion to Christianity in large measure to Charles Williams. Yet his enthusiasm was not wholly unqualified and when he came to edit a selection from Kierkegaard he deliberately ignored the Attack upon 'Christendom', on the grounds that it was "that contradiction in terms, an 'existential' book . . . . What for the author was the mos,t timportant book of his life is for us, as readers,-the least." In his last years Auden had very largely rethought his attitude to Kierkegaard: he never doubted his genius but he questioned his orthodoxy and even his sincerity. That this change of heart marked a period in approaches to Kierkegaard is borne out by Professor Thompson's revised version of the life.

What Professor Thompson has given us is not so much a full dress biography as an extended essay. In some ways this is a pity, since a thorough, detailed and chronologically organised biography, in English, would be a useful volume. At the same time it is clear that Professor Thompson was not the man to write such a book — he is too impatient and perhaps too imaginative — and it is equally obvious that there has been just as urgent a need for a view of Kierkegaard, a picture of him as a man and an attempt to describe the shape of his life. In this Professor Thompson succeeds admirably. He is by inclination as polemical as his subject, and he has chosen to write in a mode that recalls both Eminent Spectator January 12, 1974 Victorians and Mrs Lennon's Life of Lewis Carroll — that is, he allows himself the imaginative recreation (though on sound authorities) both of incident, and more ifl portant, of motivation. Such an approach depends on the existence of a conventional notion of a life, and depends for its interest on the modification of that conventional notion. What Professor Thorn!'" son does is to challenge the opinion that Kierkegaard was some kind of nineteenth century saint, and to establish instead a vision of Kierkegaard as aesthete, a provincial Des Esseintes, who nevertheless contrived t_An Manage for himself a martyrdom. Possesseu, of a substantial private income, Kierkegaaru had spent his capital by the age of forty-t',,°' It did not go in gifts to the poor, nor on soy; sidising his books (they made a nice profit an`i in fact added to that income), but on Kierkegaard regarded as the necessities of in`; pleasant and large apartments, light bt!: exquisite meals, sumptuous bindings for 111' many books, carriage drives, and the servicesol of a man-servant, one of whose duties wan te maintain his master's rooms at the precis temperature which he preferred. He had oF; portunities enough; had he wished he coin; have gone into the church or pursued academic career. For a time he toyed with t110` idea of marriage and got engaged, onlY!, realise that the match was an impossibility. " he lived out the life of a Copenhagee bachelor, and wrote with a fixity of purPle that can seldom have been equalled. His circe of friends diminished rather than widened; thid Corsair controversy ensured that he collo I never again experience that pleasure in t,,e streets of his native city which had Or,i`g caused him to treat them "as his draW181; room," whilst the broadsides of his final Ye,15 ranged the world against him. Then, 'Ito money come to an end and just enough ct pay for the hospital and funeral in han..a1 having reached the conviction that 0fficir4 Christianity was a fraud, and that "the Ptist pose of life is to be brought to the high% degree of disgust with life," he contracted_,, staphylococcus infection of the lungs froft, which, shortly, he died. When his nurse seti'i I him flowers in his last days he had them to in a drawer, saying "It's the fate of flower.s„d blown and smell and die." But when a ftl,e",d remarked to him how much in his life "t`,$ turned out just right he replied: "Yes, Th8,1 why I'm very happy, and very sad tha' cannot share this happiness with anyone. 0, Professor Thompson's chief argument,he that this ending is entirely logical, that 1;5, trajectory of Kierkegaard's life is self-c0ns,'4 tent if we see it in terms of a man and r;le work moving ever closer together. !,;°. implicitly rejects Auden's opinion of 1:es irrelevance of the last writings; rather, he sthe them as clinching a coherent pattern. At „o same time he rejects the hagiographers '144'0f would seek to make the life a parabolathe sanctity, and sees it as a reflection of the "necessary failure" which he deduces as end of action in Kierkegaard's The picture that he gives us does not fl'ir accord with that of Kierkegaard's biographers. He barely mentions for inStan to the significance of Holy Week, 18482 whent" o judge from the Journals he underwen _of spiritual experience as drastic as the v!sio which in that year broke out between Prt,Ifsis, and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein. .qtil presumably, is because he is concerned vi.lys the general direction of Kierkegaal thought, rather than with those points.,0. ,which he rested along the way. The end a civilisation within which poetry was impossible; Kierkegaard, in Professor Thompkson's view, evolved a philosophy which led 'JIM, in his last year, through silence to battle ' and death. ' Yet a writer's life and work as Yeats • sitvg, are not the same thing. Professor "°mPson's version is immensely readable and very persuasive; it is also a little too selective and a little too neat. Kierkegaard often described himself as a 'poet,' and lhough he did not write in verse few would challenge the validity of this. He was a stylist arid.a visionary, the acuteness of whose percePtIons are not in doubt. Pound chose silence ,Ind left his great work unfinished, claiming it 18S botched; Kierkegaard apparently denied, 11111111s final writings, much that he seemed to t.4._Nre valued in his early work. As Auden a1.1Y came to see, he was a monodist whose rk became increasingly Manichean, res-?unsive only to suffering. But this does not pvalidate what went before. The lilies of the for Kierkegaard, represented a silence 1;olch he was finally to attain. But their gow • th . ering was as much a part of their being as ew death, and we are privileged to look at 1;oWers in terms of our time, not theirs. So wro.fessor Thompson defines Kierkegaard's porlings in terms of Kierkegaard's final _salon, tying truth to the illusory absolute ut a biological clock.