The secret life of Kierkegaard's lover

Thomas E. Kennedy

Among less loudly noted notable events of September 2001 as the publication in Denmark of a slim volume, not yet translated into English, entitled Regine Olsen's Diary. The diary itself is a mere fifty pages, preceeding it a fourteen-page introduction by Erik Sondergaard Hansen (whose actual existence is in question in the Danish press and academic world) and following it an eight-page afterword by Johs. Norregard Frandsen, a contemporary Danish literary critic whose existence is unquestioned.

As of this writing, however, no one quite knows whether the Olsen diary is real or forged, cynical hoax, a prankish thumb in the rib of academia, or brilliant fiction. No one, that is, other than perhaps the diary's owner and foreword-writer, Erik Sondergaard Hansen, who asserts it has been in his family's possession for a century, squirreled away between the covers of a book purchased in auction by his grandfather. Not a literary person himself, he claims to have been unaware that its existence was unknown to the academic world until his recent retirement from a consultancy in the United Arab Emirates where it is purported he lives. However, no one quite seems to know yet whether Erik Sondergaard Hansen is a person or a fiction. Some shrewd observers have noted the similarity between his name and that of the critic who wrote the afterword, Johs. Norregaard Frandsen. (This name-play begins to resemble one of the anti-illusionist ploys Paul Auster so adeptly exercises in his novels and film-scripts, leaving the reader in doubt as to whether Paul Auster is his own main character, whether Paul Auster the author is toying with the reader's susceptibilities, whether Paul Auster is making a statement about the inseparability of author and subject, or whether Paul Auster has simply wearied of trying to differentiate between himself and his protagonist, much as the former American Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, reports to have achieved final author-identification liberation by deciding that the "I" in his poems is, indeed, himself, although the Pinsky "I", he goes on to note, is an ever-evolving and elusive entity.)

Nonetheless, some historical facts do exist with regard to Regine Olsen. In 1840-41, she was the eighteen-year-old fiancee of the then twenty-seven-year-old "father of existentialism," Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55). We know that Kierkegaard wrote about Regine (his "Regina") in his journals, and what we know--or thought we knew--about their relationship, we had from the journal entries he recorded nearly ten years after their engagement was broken. We also know or can surmise or have been told that the novel, The Seducer's Diary, which is embedded within Kierkegaard's first published book of philosophy, Either-Or (1842), has a female main character named Cordelia who resembles Regine Olsen, although the novel's anti-hero--despite resemblances to Kierkegaard in his relationship with Regine--is also claimed, inter alia in a biographical novel by Henrik Stangerup, to be based upon the real-life personage of a then contemporary, upcoming Danish literary scholar, Peder Ludvig Moller, who was to figure in a feud with Kierkegaard which was said to have contributed to the destruction of both.

In the course of the feud, Kierkegaard was cruelly caricatured for the unevenness of his physique in an anonymously published periodical of the time, Corsaren, became a laughing stock in Copenhagen, and retreated from public view. Kierkegaard apparently, and debatably by mistake, thought and pronounced Moller to be involved with the clandestine, anti-royalist Corsaren, causing the socially inferior Moller to lose any chance of tenure at the royally supported Copenhagen University. Moller left Denmark never to return and, after nearly twenty years of philandering, died of syphilis in Normandy in 1865, his considerable promise as a writer and literary critic unfulfilled. (Ironically, among his papers is said to be the script of a novella he wrote about a seducer.) The life of Moller is the fictional subject of a 1988 novel by Henrik Stangerup, It Is Hard to Die in Dieppe (published in English as The Seducer in 1990, tr. Sean Martin).

In the introduction to his book, Stangerup claims to have found in the Danish Royal Library a couple of bags of Moller's papers upon which he bases his novel. This calls to mind the assertion of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous editor, Victor Hermit, at the beginning of Either-Or, that the papers collected in the book were discovered in a secondhand writing desk--or for that matter the later assertion that Olsen's diary was found inside a secondhand book.

John Updike wrote an introduction to a 1997 edition of The Seducer's Diary (Princeton University Press, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong). Updike sees Kierkegaard's smokescreen of pseudonymous editor and fictive writing desk as an attempt to appear to portray himself as a scoundrel which in fact is "an attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast." Yet if Moller really were the model for Kierkegaard's Seducer, or half the model, the variations of motive multiply: an act of revenge masking a wound masked as a boast; or, an act of moral exposure masking revenge masking a wound masked as a boast masking self-incrimination aimed to mask the insult to an innocent's pride covering over ... and so on.

Moller is today hardly more than a footnote in Danish literary history. Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, known to the public at large as Meryl Streep in Out of Africa) is reported to have playfully asked from time to time, "Whatever happened to that Moller fellow?" This seems to have been a convoluted reference to the fact that she had survived the disease of which Moller died. The husband who infected Blixen also brought to their marriage her title of Baroness which, she wrote in her journals, all things told, was worth it.

Behind this complex of fiction, philosophy, biography, diary, and memoir are the facts that Soren and Regine, when he was twenty-seven and she eighteen, were briefly engaged and parted. Kierkegaard's journals, written nearly a decade after their break, give an account of this. On August 24, 1849, he wrote in his journal about "My relation to `her,'" an account of his pre-1838 decision to have her, his 1840 proposal ("I did not say a single word to persuade her. She said yes."), his ultimate regret, and his struggle to free himself in order to pursue his genius which finally succeeded in 1841:

"... she gave herself unreservedly to me, she worshipped me.... With gigantic strength I constrained my whole nature so as to repel her with all my powers."

"Give in," he reports having told her. "Let me go; you cannot bear it. Thereupon she answered passionately that she would bear anything rather than let me go.... I also suggested giving the appearance that it was she who broke off the engagement so that she might be spared all offense. That she would not have. She answered: If she could bear the other she could bear this too. And not unsocratically she said: In her presence no one would let anything be noticed and what people said in her absence remained a matter of indifference."

"It was a time of terrible suffering," he wrote, "to have to be so cruel and at the same time to love as I did. She fought like a tigress.... And so about two months later it broke. She grew desperate. For the first time in my life I scolded. It was the only thing to do."

Her father, Kierkegaard reported, begged him not to break with her: "It will be her death." The journal records the father saying, "She is in absolute despair."

He visited her then to settle things once and for all, and she asked if he would ever marry. As "a necessary cruelty," he writes that he told her perhaps he would do so in ten years time when he had sown his wild oats and needed "some young blood to rejuvenate me."

"And so we parted. I spent the whole night crying in my bed. But the next day I behaved as usual, wittier and in better spirits than ever. That was necessary. My brother told me he wanted to go to the family and show them that I was not a scoundrel. `If you do I will put a bullet through your head,' which is the best proof of how deeply concerned I was. I went to Berlin. I suffered greatly."

Such journals and letters of suffering love feature prominently in the literature of the period. Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) brought the twenty-five-year-old author to international fame. It apparently also inspired many a young suffering swain of the time to put a romantic bullet in his head, so powerful was the effect of the book's unleashing of alienated emotion in the character of young Werther, morbidly enamored of a woman he could not have. To contemporary readers, Werther is more likely to seem a self-absorbed, self-pitying young fool, although as Frandsen aptly points out, quoting Joakim Garff's recent Kierkegaard biography, in his afterword to the Olsen diary, "Werther and Lotte belong to one another eternally because in reality they never got each other." (Quote translated by myself.) Werther's love, however, seems less a love for Lotte than for himself, for his own narcissistic, suffering, alienated self, eternally longing for what he cannot have, and in that unrequited yearning defining his character and, perhaps, the emerging character of European consciousness.

Fictional Werther's narcissism might be seen as the opposite of that the real-life Kierkegaard portrays via his purportedly non-fictionalized journal: Kierkegaard ensnares himself in the love of a woman who, unlike Lotte, is available and willing. Thus denied the pain of pining, he must take the opposite ploy:

"If I had not been a penitent, had not had my vita ante acta (my past life), had not been melancholy, my union with her would have made me happier than I had ever dreamed of being. But insofar as I was what, alas, I was, I had to say that I could be happier in my unhappiness without her than with her.... I had to hide such a tremendous amount from her, had to base the whole thing on something untrue." (Quotes from the diary are translated by Alexander Dru.)

In 1824, just fifty years after the appearance of Goethe's Werther and sixteen before the Soren-Regine sorrows (or perhaps more relevantly twenty-four years before Soren recorded them in his journal), another young Danish man's fictional journal told of the breaking of his fictional heart by an unfulfilled love in S. S. Blicher's The Journal of a Parish Clerk (tr. Hanna Astrup Larsen). Blicher's Morten Vinges's love is for a character who is herself based upon the real-life Marie Grubbe (ca. 1643-1718), a noblewoman who ran off with her father's gamekeeper, fell from grace, and ended as a prostitute, the victim of her own natural instincts.

Grubbe's story has been told repeatedly in Danish letters, perhaps most notably in the 1876 novel by J. P. Jacobsen whose fiction was admired, inter alia, by Rilke, Freud, and Joyce. In the Blicher version, the focus is on the parish clerk who watches the romance blossom even as his own young heart bleeds; years later, he chances again upon the ruined object of his yearning and experiences a spiritual epiphany about the insignificance of human life before the infinite greatness of God. Morten Vinges's journal is a fiction created by Blicher just as the journal of another broken heart, this time the record kept by the heartbreaker, was a fiction of Soren Kierkegaard's, The Seducer's Diary, which appeared one year after his breakup with Regine, as did another fictional account by Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym of Constantin Constantius), The Repetition, closely resembling a story of the Kierkegaard-Olsen romance. In the Jan Lindhardt notes for that Kierkegaard novel, it is pointed out that Kierkegaard seemed to have been considering having the lover in his novel (himself in some sense) end it all as young Werther did, with a bullet in his own head, though not because of his unfulfilled desire to have her, but his unfulfilled desire to be free of her. This Kierkegaard novel was reissued in 2001 by the same house that published the Olsen diary; blurbed on its back cover as "a philosophical, erotic-existential, nearly post-modern novel," the book cannot be called an easy read. Kierkegaard's thirteen months with Regine provided much inspiration for future writings.

Most interesting I think is the novel whose anti-hero is said to be based on the above-mentioned Moller, The Seducer's Diary. However, it is in some ways difficult not to relate the innocent fictional Cordelia Wahl of Kierkegaard's novel with the spurned real-life Regine Olsen. Unlike Lear's third daughter, the Cordelia of Kierkegaard does carry her heart as a kiss on her full, pretty lips. Johs, the eponymous seducer, with cynical strategy plans and enacts the seduction of the young woman. Having achieved his conquest, he concludes, "Why cannot such a night be longer? ... still, it is over now, and I hope never to see her again. When a girl has given away everything, then she is weak, then she has lost everything.... Now all resistance is impossible, and only as long as that is present is it beautiful to love.... I do not wish to be reminded of my relation to her; she has lost the fragrance ... I will have no farewell with her; nothing is more disgusting to me than a woman's tears and a woman's prayers, which alter everything and yet really mean nothing. I have loved her, but from now on she can no longer engross my soul."

Then, this Johs concludes, with a speculation that cannot help but recall a claim in K's own journal, if "one would make (a girl) so proud that she would imagine that it was she who tired of the relationship ... (it) ... might have psychological interest, and along with that enrich one with many erotic observations." (Quotes are from the translation by David F. Swenson, Lillian Marvin Swenson, and Walter Lowrie.) The aim of the suggestion reported in K's journal, however, is claimed to "give the appearance that it was she who broke off the engagement so that she might be spared all offense."

Here is where we find the point of essential difference between K's journal, K's fictional seducer's diary, and the newly published diary of Regine Olsen. In her diary, Olsen tires of K's melancholy and difficult manner, his walking out on plays that bore him, his last-moment refusal to attend a ball she has been longing for. She reports sending him away, telling him not to come back. Pale and weeping, Kierkegaard makes her promise to say that it was he who broke with her. She remarks that no one would believe that, but agrees and writes that she will keep her word.

In fact, however, years later, when K and the man Olsen later married were both dead, Regine Olsen is reported to have given an interview in which she revealed that she had initiated the break, not K. The newly published diary supports this. Kierkegaard scholars in Denmark (perhaps offended that the diary was not shown to them before publication so that it could be submitted to the scientific scrutiny of what one journalist has called their "big bad electron microscope") respond by claiming that Regine was only fulfilling the proposal of K that he take the blame and leave her honor intact. After all, upon K's death she was given the opportunity to edit the portion of his journals dealing with their relationship and voiced no disagreement at the time, in 1855, when she was thirty-three and living in the Danish West Indies with her husband, who was Governor. Not until forty-one years later, when the husband died, is she said to have changed her story--a strange chronology.

By most accounts so far in the Danish press, the diary is a forgery, but most recognize it as a highly skilled one. More than one have saluted it as a brilliant fiction--in form, content, and effect. Frandsen--himself under suspicion as the forger--begins his afterword, "Literature exists to give the possible story form and meaning and in so doing can contribute to the creation of new and alternative views." (My translation.) He goes on to compare the frustrated love between Kierkegaard and Olsen with other great stories of aborted romance--Dante and Beatrice, Abelard and Heloise, Petrarch and Laura, Romeo and Juliet, Werther and Lotte--who, in the words of biographer Garff, "belong eternally together because they never got each other in reality." Of the couples named, some existed in life, some only in fiction, and the actual existence of some of the women has been questioned--for example, Dante's Beatrice and Abelard's Heloise.

But an interesting alternative question in connection with speculation about the veracity of Regine Olsen's Diary is that of the veracity of Kierkegaard's journal. Not whether K actually wrote it, but whether what he wrote in it was true, or at least honest and not self-serving, or was as much fiction--or a mixture of truth and fiction--as the seducer Johs's fictional diary or the fictional letters that tell young Werther's story, or for that matter, the fictional journal that tells the story of Severin and Wanda in van Sacher-Masoch's late nineteenth century novel of obsession, Venus in Furs.

How much truth is a human being capable of? When the President of the United States reports on the State of the Nation, when the Roman Catholic Pope issues a purportedly infallible encyclical titled "The Splendor of Truth," when the New York Times reports "All the News That's Fit to Print," what degree of selection, arrangement, omission, focus, subjective-objectivity and objective-subjectivity decides the final product, the final word, or aims to predetermine the final interpretation?

This is the secret life of the writer, the witness, the juror, the judge, the defendant, and the plaintiff: the imperfection of our ever-deteriorating equipment of perception and memory, shadowed always by desire, encaged always in a single skull, a single heart.

Kierkegaard's Either-Or was written in vigorous opposition to the emergent philosophy of Hegel, which encompassed the synthesis of "both-and." Kierkegaard insisted upon a decisive choice between practical alternatives. "Both-and," he wrote, "is the way to hell."

Among the most characteristic metaphors of the twentieth century was Hamlet's doubt, his faulty choices, lunging to slay unclear shapes moving behind a curtain, hesitating to act against a profound wrong, fearing to disturb the universe, fearing to choose. Perhaps this is not surprising in a century which for the West was largely defined by existentialism. Existence precedes essence. For a human being to define his or her own essence is an undertaking requiring great courage and intelligence.

"What," as Pascal asked, "shall we make of our darkness?"

Regine Olsens Dagbog, (Regine Olsen's Diary), Hobjerg, Denmark: Hovedland Press, 2001.

Note: Corsaren, titled after Byron's poem of the same name, was founded in 1840, the year Kierkegaard and Olsen were betrothed.

Thomas E. Kennedy's latest books are the novel Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story and Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction, both published in 2002. He has previously published three novels, two story collections, four books of literary criticism and several anthologies. Another novel, Bluett's Blue Hours, A Winter's Tale, is scheduled for publication in 2003. His stories, essays, poems, travel writing, interviews and photographs appear regularly in American and European anthologies and periodicals and have won a number of awards.

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