Something splendid from the state of Denmark
Eric Christiansen
BROTHER JACOB by Henrik Stangerup, translated by Anne Born Marion Boyars, f15.95, pp. 301 Christianity's first and foremost duty is to return to the monastery from which Luther broke away', wrote Kierkegaard in his diary. But he wasn't able to do much about it, Denmark being what it was and is: a country where religion is social, or it is nothing.
The Lutherans won control very quickly, because they had the better army, and they established a State Church in 1537 which has never been seriously threatened by any other form of Christianity. It is a domesti- cated dispenser of moral gravy compared with which the C. of E. and even the Kirk can seem wild and wonderful movements of the spirit, operating on the margins of society. Even today, with religious indiffer- ence in power, the bishops will bless the tin gods: internationalism, feminism, football, and the less acute forms of Marxism and sexual licence all qualify for the unction formerly sprayed on king, nation, army, and model piggery. And even the atheists are parsons in disguise. There is no escape.
Therefore, an apparently godless people produces a surprising number of God- bothered intellectuals; even converts to Roman Catholicism, though 'Catholic' is the — or a — colloquial word for 'barmy'. And then there is the other tendency, also pin-pointed by Soren Kierkegaard, (whose first name also became synonymous with tarmy'): to become an uncritical inhaler of German hot air, a `wind-sucker' of stale foreign ideologies, just because they are not Danish.
It seems a bit uncalled for to introduce a writer by referring to his nationality, but the subject is not shunned by Mr Stangerup, or immaterial to his work. His flight from the kail-yard has taken him far, and into some very queer country. He has become an advocate of European unity in much the same way as refined young Britons supported Stalin in the 1930s, because they didn't like the way things were at home. This may seem odd, consid- ering what a tolerably civilised place Den- mark appears to outsiders, and what a pious fraud 'Europe' is, but an earlier Stangerup novel (The Man Who Wanted to Be Guilty, translated by Gress-Wright, 1982) explains his predicament. The hero is so bugged by social workers who can only interpret human behaviour in terms of social deviance or social conformity, that he claims to have killed his wife, in order to be held personally responsible for a bad act. I suspect that this situation is more rather than less likely to occur in a Federa- tion of Europe, but who can be sure?
Stangerup took the flight from Legoland a stage further in The Road to Lagoa Santa (translated by B. Bluestone), the story of a Dane who got away from Copenhagen in the 1840s and resolved his anxieties about science, morality and God by living in Brazil, where things were different. (Admirers of Douglas Byng will recall Mex- ican Minnie, that haunting song about a land
Where Passion and Crime Are a Hundred Per Cent all the time).
Now he goes back to the 16th century, and recounts the escape of one of the last Danish Franciscan Friars, and his undaunt- ed attempts to live according to St Francis. Hounded from Denmark by Lutherans, he tries again in Germany, and ends up in Mexico, where he maintains his faith against the racism of the Spanish clergy on one side, and the subtly insidious polytheism of the Tarascan Indians on the other. He dies there, having revealed to his friends that he is, in fact the son of a Dan- ish king, and the Indians carry him to a secret grave, where he is venerated as a sort of saint to this day.
It sounds too good to be true, but the biography consists of factual fragments already fitted together into a novelistic shape by an archivist in Copenhagen, Jurgen Nybo Rasmussen. He started with four separate people, three of them called Jacob: Friar Jacob the Dane who died in Mexico, Friar Jacob of Gottorp who led Is he going to be all right, doctor? I'm a bit sentimental, and I wouldn't like to lose him.' the exiled Danish Franciscans in Germany, and Friar Jacob Johansen, who was a Friar in Denmark. And then there was the anonymous author of the short Chronicle of how the Franciscans were persecuted. He might have been the same as J. Johansen, and J. J. might have been the same as the others; and since the saintly Jacob was rumoured to have had royal blood (although there is no record of his actual paternity, or any missing Jacobs in the Royal Family) it was all fitted together and slipped into the Biographical Lexicon. So now we have a case of fiction imitating truth imitating fiction.
The plot is fine, even if most of it takes place inside Jacob's head. However, the temptation is always to engage the sympa- thy of modern readers by giving old-time characters modern ideas: you could call it the 'I voted Labour in 1066' school of his- torical novelists. The name of this hero may remind English readers of David Caute's entertaining Comrade Jacob, which succumbed to that temptation in its day. Stangerup manages the business quite adroitly by anchoring his Jacob to Erasmus, More and Rabelais, rather than to Marx or Che Guevara. And in case anyone should doubt whether Franciscan friars actually attempted to create societies modelled on More's Utopia, or apply the principles of Erasmian humanism to their mission, well, some of them did: Bishop Juan de Zumar- raga, and Vasco de Quiroga are the names that spring to mind.
So Jacob ought to be a credible figure, even in his reckless sympathy for the Indi- ans; and others did in fact attempt to win for them the right to receive communion and become priests, and many friars occu- pied themselves by recording in detail pagan mythologies and chronicles. Mawk- ish stuff, if this version is anything to go by, but there again, the Franciscan tradition is apt to be sentimental. 'Could Francis be one of our people?' asks an Indian convert at one point, impressed by his habit of addressing sun, moon, stars, wind and fire as brother or sister, just like the Tarascans and their Aztec enemies. But Jacob knows by then that for most Spaniards, Indians simply don't count.
So he dies, and goes to an unorthodox sort of heaven, where there are not many Lutherans or Roman Catholics or Scandi- navian socialists for that matter. An acidu- lous American reviewer has written of this book that 'in his fidelity to history, Stangerup has produced a work that demands from the reader the patience of a saint.' All right, all right: there's no sex, there's plenty of religion, and some of the dream-sequences are leaden. But there's more to it than that: vigour, powerful images (he is a film-maker, too) and a mind at work in the middle of chaos. To compare him with another international bestseller interested in Franciscans: he makes Umberto Eco seem a bit slick, con- trived, and detached.
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