MOST SATURDAYS, AND ESPECIALLY IN THE AUTUMN AND winter, it was my habit to go along to Herr Nilsen’s jazz pub in C.J. Hambros plass with my friend Eskil Nordlie, who taught philosophy at the University of Oslo, to hear the afternoon concert that started at four and went on till six. It was one of the few times I felt I was living in a big city, in that crowded little corner bar, with its heavy venetian blinds permanently closed and still with a brownish patina on their beige slats from the days before the smoking ban, all except those on the side where the windows had been replaced, blown in by the shockwave from Anders Breivik’s bomb in 2011 as it swept down the long dog-leg of Apotekergata. Whenever I went there I would be reminded of a long-running programme on Norwegian State Radio (NRK) I tried never to miss called ‘Studio Socrates’, in which guest philosophers talked in a discursive way about the works and ideas of various writers and thinkers, breaking off every now and then to play a track by the featured jazz artist and towards the end of the programme trying to relate the thinker to the music in some unexpected way. I remember one broadcast featuring Henri Bergson and Chet Baker, another on Simone Weil and Jan Garbarek, another linking Knut Hamsun, his novel Hunger and the Stoic philosophers. It struck me as an original and inspired sort of combination and one that Eskil and I sometimes aspired to during those Saturday afternoons at Herr Nilsen’s, often continuing at Burns’ bar, opposite the National Theatre, to which we adjourned after the session finished. As this was a period when I had begun to read Kierkegaard, our conversations often turned, at my initiative, to a discussion of the man and his ideas. Among other things, I was trying to achieve clarity in my own mind about the continuing validity of one of the more prominent historical characterizations of the Scandinavian people as melancholic and dark-minded. On this particular Saturday afternoon I remember that as we took our seats in front of the little corner stage I said to Eskil that it was growing ever more clear to me that, under the influence of television and the internet, cheap air travel, and immigration on a scale unprecedented in the recorded history of the region, as well as changing perceptions encouraged by the international success of such basically cheerful phenomena as Abba, IKEA and a-ha, this handy characterization was becoming obsolete, and that I wanted to understand its historical roots before it disappeared completely.
‘What do you make of Kierkegaard’s possible contribution to this persistent association with melancholy? And if you doubt it, given that his writing did not become widely available in English until the middle of the twentieth century, then perhaps a case might be made for his influence through the work of writers and artists more well known than himself and over whom he is known to have exerted an influence, such as Henrik Ibsen, whose Brand after all is a dramatization of the pain Kierkegaard himself faced when he had to choose between his love for Regine Olsen and his work? Or better still Edvard Munch, who explored Kierkegaard’s conception of angst in the cycle of paintings he called “The Frieze of Life: Images from the Life of the Modern Mind”, which included Scream, Vampire, Madonna, Ashes, Puberty, The Sick Child and The Dance of Life? Surely Kierkegaard’s identification with this conception of angst, so often translated into English as “anxiety”, and not incorrectly so – and yet the English word seems to fail to capture the sheer extent of what Kierkegaard was trying to describe, that unfocused and diffuse fear that hums away at the back of the mind, at times so loudly one is completely incapacitated by it, and at other times so quietly one has to stretch one’s hearing to almost unendurable limits in order to hear it at all. Surely… .’
At this point I broke off, having noticing the pianist glaring at me repeatedly over his shoulder, and resolved to wait until the musicians took their first break before asking Eskil for his response. ‘Strayhorn’, as they called themselves, were about fifteen minutes into their set before the pianist swivelled a microphone in front of his face and introduced the musicians. Four of the five of them were from Bø in Telemark, he announced. Norwegian local patriotism is a benign but enigmatic thing and for some reason this got a round of applause and some subdued, American-style whoops of approbation. With what I thought was rather perverse timing, Eskil chose that moment to turn to me and remark that I was wrong, Kierkegaard was not melancholy.
‘Melancholy is impotent,’ he said. ‘It sits there with a cloak over its bowed head. Kierkegaard was passionate in his darkness. And you’re quite wrong to suppose that Kierkegaard is important as a thinker. He is important as a story. As a terrible, cautionary tale. Let me tell you why.’
Søren Kierkegaard. After a sketch done by his nephew Niels Christian Kierkegaard. SZ Photo/Bridgeman Images.
But now it was Eskil’s turn to attract the beady eye of the pianist, and for the next twenty minutes we said nothing and simply enjoyed the music until the first break was announced. We asked the only other guest at our table, a bearded man wearing a pale biscuit-coloured suit with the widest padded shoulders I have ever seen, to save our places and, showing our blue-stamped fists to the youth on the door, stepped outside to the pavement and the fresh late afternoon air. Eskil sank into a seat by one of the three or four round smokers’ tables that faced across C.J. Hambros plass, towards the impressive white façade of the Oslo District Court, and began talking about Kierkegaard. He told me that Kierkegaard was the youngest in a family of seven children, and that by the time he was twenty-two all of them, apart from one older brother, were dead. His mother too. According to Eskil, this profound personal experience of the brevity of life had led Kierkegaard to think of living as a preparation for death, and in its turn this awareness gave him a driven sense of the value of time. In fifteen years of active literary life, Kierkegaard’s output was prodigious. On a single day in 1843 he published three books. Kierkegaard’s father Michael rose from the lowest peasant class to become a wealthy importer of textiles. As a boy of fourteen, while out tending his master’s sheep, he had looked up into the sky one day and cursed God for the unfairness of his fate. What happened to him subsequently – the sudden fabulous wealth, the succession of deaths in his family – seemed to him God’s enigmatic response to this curse. He instructed Søren in a dark vision of Christianity that the boy resented for a long time, inducing a sense that he had had no real childhood at all. Later, Søren learnt to see the legacy as a chance to reinvent his own idea of what being a Christian really meant. On his father’s death in 1838 he inherited a fortune that relieved him of the need to earn a living and enabled him to start in earnest on what he had decided would be his life’s work: as a thinker and writer. In May 1837, at the house of a Copenhagen friend, Kierkegaard met and courted a precocious and talented young girl named Regine Olsen. When she was eighteen years old, in 1840, he proposed to her and was accepted, but a year later, in September 1841, he broke off the engagement. Shortly after that, he published the book that made him famous throughout Scandinavia and which is probably still the title most commonly associated with his name, Either/Or.
Eskil explained that these features of his early life – the intimacy with death, the enforced immersion in his father’s world of guilt, the self-wounding decision not to marry the woman he loved – became the motor of all Kierkegaard’s thought. He willed it to be so. His huge quarrel with the then dominant school of speculative philosophy represented by Friedrich Hegel was that the objectivity of such philosophy was pretended, and that universal systems of thought such as that offered by Hegel were flawed through a fatal overestimation of the power of reason. For Kierkegaard, reason was a useful tool for dealing with many of life’s situations, but it was out of its depth when faced with the most profound existential questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What is death? He criticized Hegel for not living out the consequences of his own thought:
A thinker erects a huge building, a system, one that encompasses the whole of life and world-history, etc. – and if one then turns attention to his personal life one discovers to one’s astonishment the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a store-house next door, or a kennel, or at best in the caretaker’s quarters... Spiritually a man’s thoughts must be the building in which he lives – otherwise it won’t work.
Kierkegaard’s objection to so-called objective, speculative philosophy was not merely that it was inauthentic and a falsification of the lived life; he saw real dangers in the prospect of its triumph:
An epidemic of cholera is usually signalled by the appearance of a certain kind of fly not otherwise observable; may it not be the case that the appearance of these fabulous pure thinkers is a sign that some misfortune threatens humanity, as for instance the loss of the ethical and the religious?
Abstract philosophers favour the tidy crowd over the untidy individual. Kierkegaard was passionately concerned to develop a philosophy that was neither an abstract discipline nor a game with words, but something with profound relevance to the everyday life of the individual:
I go about with the idiotic thought that everything should be done to make people aware, with the thought that every individual person is a tremendous thing, that not a single one, let alone a thousand, should be wasted.
His gesture in breaking off his engagement to Regine was, in his view, an example of a sacrifice made in the name of being authentic and true to his beliefs – in this case that he could make neither her nor himself happy if he sacrificed the compulsions of his vision for the ease of married life.
Using himself and his own life as source material, Kierkegaard offered an analysis of personal development in a series of three stages – actually four, though the first of these, the philistine, is never referred to as a stage. Each constitutes an upward step from the one preceding. In the philistine stage, life passes in a state of complete unawareness. As philistines, we sleepwalk through our days. We may do so very successfully, hold high office, become wealthy and famous; but we are missing the point. The aesthetic stage ensues when we awaken to the realization that life is both larger and stranger than we had at first thought. It involves a stepping back from life, a realization that events and people can be manipulated. But the sole use the aesthete makes of this insight is to stave off the boredom that comes from seeing through everything, and the revelation that, seemingly, none of it matters much. The ethical person is the aesthete who has exhausted the pleasures of his lucid dreaming and come to understand that these involve no more than an endless chain of repetitions and meaningless choices that may well be damaging to those who are unknowingly manipulated. Kierkegaard captures the moment of realization in a bleakly hilarious rant:
Marry, you’ll regret it; don’t marry, you’ll regret that too; marry or don’t marry, you’ll regret it either way; whether you marry or you don’t marry, either way, you’ll regret it. Laugh at the world’s follies, you’ll regret it; weep over them, you’ll regret that too; laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you’ll regret it either way; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, either way, you’ll regret it. Believe a girl, you’ll regret it; don’t believe her, you’ll regret that too; believe a girl or don’t believe her, you’ll regret it either way; whether you believe a girl or don’t believe her, either way, you’ll regret it. Hang yourself, you’ll regret it; don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or you don’t hang yourself, either way, you’ll regret it. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all life’s wisdom.
The aesthete finally realizes the terrifying nature of freedom, of being lost in this Hall of Mirrors and compelled to choose. It was this aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought that so appealed to Jean-Paul Sartre and the Existentialists of the next century – the understanding that the freedom for which we so romantically long may, if we ever get it, bring on an unexpected and vertiginous nausea. The enlightened aesthete then starts to make ethical choices in his or her life.
The first and most important choice, Kierkegaard insists, is to choose oneself. To accept responsibility for our own lives as existing human beings. To accept that we are, for good and ill, the result of our own choices, and to do so in complete transparency and honesty. Only then can the ethical life begin, the life of choosing between things on an ethical basis.
What moves the ethical person to take the final step up, to the religious stage, is a shattering realization of the true nature of what Kierkegaard calls ‘sin’, which is the failure to have the courage to defy reason and to take the ‘leap of faith’ required to commit oneself wholly to the belief that Jesus Christ really was – and still is, in the eternal moment of his life – the incarnation of God on earth. For Kierkegaard, the opposite of ‘sin’ was not virtue but ‘faith’, a faith of almost inhumanly great dimensions, of which only a few have seemed capable. He thought long and hard about what he called the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, and made his obsessed wonder with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac the subject of Fear and Trembling:
The ethical expression for what he was doing is that he was about to murder Isaac, the religious that he was preparing to sacrifice Isaac. The anguish that arises when confronted by such a dilemma would be enough to make anyone lose sleep; and yet without that anguish, Abraham is not Abraham. Or perhaps Abraham did not do what the Bible story says he did, perhaps by the standards of those times what he did was something completely different, in which case let us forget about him, for of what use is it to remember a past which cannot also be a present?... In removing the element of faith by reducing it to an insignificant factor, what remains of the story is simply that Abraham was prepared to murder Isaac.
Part of Kierkegaard’s point was that the Christianity of the Danish state Church took all the power and danger and challenge out of a story like this, turning it into a myth with a happy ending. He wanted people to know that Christianity is a very hard discipline to follow.
Kierkegaard’s Christianity is something many rationalists find hard to accept. The cynical suspect that some kind of intellectual dishonesty is involved; the compassionate see in it an exhausted mind finding refuge from the intolerable burden of thought. But his faith is what makes Kierkegaard so fascinatingly modern. He embodied the collision between the old religion, Christianity, and what he saw clearly was on its way to becoming the new one, Rationalism. Astonishingly rational and analytical himself, he nevertheless insisted that reason recognize its limits. He was the first to identify and explore the nature of angst, that drone of floating unease that seems to accompany us throughout so much of our lives. He believed in the power of prayer and wrote many prayers of his own. One seems to address the idea of angst directly: ‘Teach me, O God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.’
Towards the end of Kierkegaard’s life, his unease with the sort of Christianity promoted by the Danish state Church erupted into outright rebellion. Embarrassed that he might be guilty of the same failing for which he had once criticized Hegel and Schopenhauer – that of not living out the consequences of their philosophy – he launched a fierce attack on the Church, claiming that its priests were mere bureaucrats and that in the interests of inclusiveness and the stability of the nation state what they preached was a vapid Christianity that hardly deserved the name at all. In effect, he was calling for a second Reformation, so extreme at times that he was willing to contemplate doing without the Bible:
A Reformation that removed the Bible would now, basically, have just as much validity as Luther’s removal of the pope. All this about the Bible has given rise to a scholarly and legalistic type of religiousness, sheer diversion. A sort of ‘learning’ in that direction has gradually found its way down through society and no human being now reads the Bible humanly. This causes irreparable harm; it becomes a refuge for excuses and evasions, etc. respecting existence, for there will always be something to check on first, always this sham that one must have the learning in shape before one can begin living – which means one never gets around to the latter.
Kierkegaard’s death in 1855, at the age of forty-two, of a tentatively diagnosed tuberculosis, involved indignities beyond anything Samuel Beckett ever described. Doubly incontinent, and when not so, constipated, his rectum regularly flooded with soapy water, bedbound, with bedsores, his head dangling down onto his chest, the wasted muscles of his legs stimulated daily with electrical prods, his faith remained strong to the end. A visitor asked if he was able to pray in peace in the hospital.
Yes. And when I do I pray first for the forgiveness of sins, that everything may be forgiven; then I pray to be free of despair in death, and the saying frequently occurs to me that death must be pleasing to God; and then I pray for what I would so much like, to know a little in advance when death is to come.
As Eskil ended his account of the life of Kierkegaard as a cautionary tale, Strayhorn’s drummer, a shaven-headed man of about fifty wearing a black polo-necked sweater and heavy-rimmed spectacles, stamped out a cigarette on the pavement and walked past us, and we followed him back inside, returning to our seats. We watched him step up onto the stage, his shaven head shining beneath the spotlights, spectacles glinting, sit down behind his drum kit and play a little here-we-are-again drum roll. The talking died down, and the pianist announced that the second set would be devoted to tunes from Dizzy Gillespie’s Groovin’ High to mark fifty years since the release of the original album. It was not music I had any particular relationship to, and I found myself, as one sometimes does, withdrawing from the moment and pursuing instead my own thoughts on the subject of Søren Kierkegaard and any possible significance his life and thought might have for an understanding of the Scandinavian character. My interest had been intensified by an article I had come across in the weekly Morgenbladet on the subject of a case of murder from the year 1721 that seemed so strangely predictive of a situation described in Fear and Trembling that my first assumption was that the story must have been what inspired Kierkegaard to write the book. In the ‘Preamble from the Heart’ section – which follows on from the opening accounts of the four different ways in which Abraham might have tried to interpret God’s terrifying command that he sacrifice his only son Isaac on Mount Moriah – and the ‘Speech in Praise of Abraham’ section, Kierkegaard presents the following scenario: a priest preaches a sermon on the story of Abraham and Isaac in his local church one Sunday morning. With his low opinion of the institutional Church in general, and of its servants in particular, Kierkegaard imagines the members of the congregation dozing off during the sermon, all except one man, who hears the story in all its terrible detail and is so haunted by it he loses the power to sleep. A few days later, this man emulates Abraham and kills his own son as an offering to God. As soon as he hears the news, the priest rushes to the parishioner’s home and bursts in on him. He denounces him with a greater passion than any he ever put into his Sunday sermon, cursing the man, calling him despicable, the lowest of the low, demanding to know what devil it was that possessed him and made him want to murder his own son; and Kierkegaard imagines the father replying that he has only done what the great Abraham did in the sermon the priest preached on Sunday.
Kierkegaard’s point is that the priest was preaching, as it were, in his sleep, without listening to himself and with no idea at all what he was actually saying. The only person who had listened and tried to understand the story had been this parishioner. Of course he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Who could? Knowing that in some mysterious way, one was supposed to admire Abraham. This is Kierkegaard’s idea of real faith. That a man never questions the word of God – not even on something like this. The Bible has its happy ending for the father and son: an angel comes down and stays Abraham’s upraised hand as he is about to kill Isaac, and then Abraham sees the ram with its horns caught in the thicket and realizes God wants him to sacrifice this instead. But in Kierkegaard’s version, the parishioner isn’t so lucky. No angel to stay his hand, no ram to take the place of his boy. The upshot of it all, according to Kierkegaard, is that such a man would either be executed or shut away in a madhouse. But was Kierkegaard right in his analysis? I wondered. Was his imagined killer copying only Abraham’s outward behaviour, without any deeper understanding of the man? Granted, the killer assumed that the same sequence of events would occur for him as for Abraham: an angel would intervene, a ram appear, and all this would happen in the moment between lifting the knife and applying the knife to his son’s throat, so that he was not merely miming the sacrifice but showing God he was willing to go the whole way. Only in his case, that’s not what happened.
The group were now playing their version of ‘Salt Peanuts’ and, as the trumpeter launched into the solo, it occurred to me that Kierkegaard’s parishioner was like those trumpeters in the Fifties who idolized Dizzy Gillespie, and who thought that if they bent the horn of their trumpets upwards the way Dizzy did that would somehow magically enable them to play as well as he did. Or like those Fifties’ alto-sax players who took heroin because they thought that was the secret of Charlie Parker’s brilliance.
The piece in Morgenbladet was based on a book by Erling Sandmo called Mordernes forventninger (‘Expectations of Murderers’). Sandmo’s book has nothing to do with Kierkegaard but concerns the subject of how and when the idea arose that a murderer might be insane at the time of the deed and so not be accountable for his or her actions. It was part of the discussion that filled the news media during the weeks and months leading up to Anders Breivik’s trial for the bombing of the government buildings in Oslo and the shootings on the island of Utøya, which resulted in the deaths of seventy-seven people, the majority of them young political activists. The journalist used the case studies in Sandmo’s book as a way of putting the question of Breivik’s sanity into a historical context. One of the studies concerned a murder committed in 1721, in a remote farming community in Norway’s Rendalen valley, by a man named Olav Tollefsen Fiskvik.
One Sunday, Fiskvik went to church and heard the priest deliver a sermon about Abraham’s faith and devotion to God. Just like Kierkegaard’s hypothesized parishioner 120 years later, Fiskvik was afterwards unable to get the story out of his mind. Four years passed. Then, on one Thursday in July, Fiskvik went off into the woods and took his seven-year-old son Halvor with him. He said he was looking for bark, and for wood to make a new handle for his axe. Fiskvik’s wife Siri said there was no need, that she and the serving girl Gjertrud had just been out gathering bark. But Olav said he had to go anyway, and so father and son set off hand in hand through the trees. There was something in Fiskvik’s manner that Siri found disturbing; she sent Eli, her daughter from a previous relationship, after them.
Not long afterwards, Eli came running back. She was very frightened and said her stepfather had chased her away with the axe. Then father and son walked on deeper into the forest, Olav still holding Halvor by the hand. When they came to a clearing, Olav stopped and began gathering wood, piling it up. He told Halvor to turn around and face the pile, and then raised the axe above his head with both hands and swung down at his son. Halvor fell forward across the woodpile. His father hit him again twice, to make sure that he was dead. Olav added more wood to the pile and tried to set light to it – but the wood was still green and the flame wouldn’t catch, so he turned and retraced his steps back home. On his return, Siri asked where Halvor was, and Olav said something she didn’t understand, that the boy’s spirit was out walking. Siri told Eli to go out and find him, so that he wouldn’t get lost. That was when Olav told her the truth, reaching out his arms towards her, saying: ‘God will love us now, now we too are God’s children.’ He said that God had told him to sacrifice Halvor if he wanted to be loved. Gjertrud the serving girl said that God would never make such a demand. It was at this point that Fiskvik realized what he had done. He said he wanted to die. He agreed to show them where the body lay. Gjertrud told Siri to stay at home, as she would not be able to bear the sight, and it was Gjertrud who lifted the little body from the smouldering woodpile and carried it back to the farm.
In 1721 the idea that a killing committed ‘while the balance of the mind was disturbed’ might involve a mitigating circumstance had not yet been thought. The punishment for murder was quite simply death. But in this case something remarkable happened. The Rendalen bailiff made it his business to talk to those in the community who knew Fiskvik. He learned that Fiskvik had periods when his thoughts seemed to go astray and he would wander about the valley threatening and frightening people with his behaviour. When he was in the grip of these moods, his father and brothers would be contacted, and Fiskvik would be overpowered and held in a locked shed on his father’s farm at Akre until the mood had passed.
The bailiff listened to all this before handing down his judgement on the case. He did not order Fiskvik’s execution. Instead, he ordered that he be kept locked up by his relatives for the remainder of his life. And since his wife was too poor to keep him on their farm in this way, and lacked the physical strength to control him anyway; and because it would be an intolerable burden for her to see the killer of her son every day for the rest of her life, the bailiff ordered that Fiskvik’s birth family should bear the responsibility. And that is how the matter was dealt with. Fiskvik stayed locked up on his father’s farm until his death in 1751. It was care in the community. What else could you call it?
Reading the story it seemed to me a remarkable and even a peculiarly Scandinavian solution to an intolerably difficult situation, and not one that I could ever imagine a British judge of the period arriving at. Having offered Eskil a précis of the situation I said as much as we sat outside during Strayhorn’s next break. Knowing already that Eskil thought I had a tendency to idealize Scandinavian societies, and that he sometimes spoke as if he were on a personal mission to cure me of sentimental delusions about them, I was unwilling to let all of my argument depend on the lenient treatment of Fiskvik, but challenged him to account for the very striking fact that Norway, Denmark and Sweden had all abandoned the use of capital punishment several decades before the British did so. ‘The last British woman to hang was Ruth Ellis in 1955,’ I said. ‘The Swedes stopped hanging women back in 1890: Anna Månsdotter, lover of her son and murderer of her son’s wife. Look here.’ I took out my phone and showed him the famous photograph taken in secret a minute or two before her execution, with Anna standing next to the priest and looking over at her executioner, the tall man standing to her right.
The execution of Anna Månsdotter, 1890. Wikimedia Commons.
‘And the last Swedish man to be executed was Alfred Ander, back in 1910, for a murder committed during an armed robbery. In Denmark, the last judicial killing took place in 1892. Norway stopped executing people even earlier,’ I went on. ‘In 1876.’
‘I know who that was. It was Kristoffer Grindalen. A complete fucking bastard,’ Eskil said without looking up. He was still studying the image on my phone, vainly trying to zoom into the woman’s face with quick, flexing movements of his fingers before handing the phone back to me. A giant blue tram rumbled past the Oslo Courthouse on its way up Kristian Augusts gate. The pianist emerged, talking, with three or four other people. On the other side of the tramlines, hooded skateboarders clattered up and down the courthouse steps. Eskil had taken his beer outside with him. He nodded a greeting to Strayhorn’s drummer, who sat down at the table next to ours. I realized now that he was actually the house drummer, I’d seen him playing at Herr Nilsen’s many times before. He stretched out his legs, patted his pockets, couldn’t find his cigarettes, smiled and pointed at the packet of Teddies glistening on the table in front of us. Eskil gestured expansively. Sure, go ahead. It was November, and cold. We smoked in silence for a few moments. A fine net of drizzle was falling through the warm orange light of the sodium street lamp on the corner of C.J. Hambros plass and Rosencrantz gate, and looking into it I felt a familiar rising ecstasy, as powerful and as irrational as angst and yet its polar opposite, a sensation of almost unendurable happiness, to be talking and talking about things I would never tire of trying to understand, and to be completely at ease with the certainty that I never would understand them, for who knows what the magpie thinks. From the open doorway of Per på Hjørnet, the bar next to Herr Nilsen, I heard the sound of a power trio, recognizing like an old friend the busy acoustic riff that opens Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Oh Well’. Just warming up, checking their sound, getting ready for the night. I became so lost in the joy of the moment that when Eskil next spoke it took me several seconds to remember what we had been talking about.
‘You mean you see this as an early example of the advanced, liberal, humanitarian thinking that is typical of a precocious spirit of enlightenment among Scandinavians in the field of crime and punishment?’ he said, smiling slightly, his brow creasing.
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Well, I don’t. I don’t think the bailiff’s procedures were necessarily psychologically advanced at all. Consider this: if he was being logically judicial about it, where did the ultimate responsibility for the murder lie? Following the religious logic of the time, it lay with God. But you couldn’t say that in 1721. You couldn’t even think it. Somewhere along the line it must have occurred to the bailiff that perhaps Fiskvik was another Abraham, a ‘knight of faith’ as Kierkegaard called people of naturally limitless and unquestioning faith. Had he sentenced Fiskvik to be hung, he might well have felt that he was putting his understanding of human nature above God’s. Which would be blasphemous.’
‘Well, even granted that,’ I said, ‘What about the Scandinavians’ record on capital punishment? Streets ahead of anyone else.’
‘But how valid is that,’ replied Eskil, ‘when we executed Quisling and a whole lot of other collaborators after the war?’
‘Treason is special,’ I objected. ‘And anyway, Quisling wasn’t mad.’
‘Are you so sure? Have you read Universismen?’ Eskil described a book on which Vidkun Quisling had been working in desultory fashion throughout most of his life. Apparently Quisling believed himself to be a visionary, and to his political vision for his country he had added a religious vision he called ‘Universism’, which he wanted to see as the new state religion after the triumph of fascism. It was his own synthesis of Lutheranism, Confucianism, Buddhism, along with the thought of Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and various others, and what he understood of quantum physics. He called it his Antropokosmiske system, his Anthropocosmic System. None of it is actually very exceptional, but being Quisling he thought it was all deeply original, a new teaching that was destined to sweep all others aside. Quisling worked on his Anthropocosmic System during the last few days of his life, trying to master the prospect of his own death. Sleep can’t have come easily anyway, for the lights in his cell were always left on for fear he would commit suicide and cheat the executioners. Eight hundred pages of essays and notes written on hotel stationery, restaurant menus, the backs of train tickets and pages ripped from magazines. He tried to sum it all up in series of aphorisms written between 1 October and 6 October, which he packed up in an envelope and addressed to ‘Maria Quisling, my beloved and faithful wife. In gratitude.’
Eskil stopped speaking suddenly and fumbled another cigarette out of the packet. I knew that his own marriage was in trouble, and I couldn’t help wondering if, perhaps to his surprise, he had been moved by his own account of Quisling’s last days and supposed mental collapse. That is the appalling truth, I thought, that even monsters can suddenly and unexpectedly appear before us as human, and we have to struggle against the temptation to feel pity for them. The last words of the Nazi Julius Streicher were a cry of love for his wife Adele, muffled by the executioner’s hood pulled over his head but still audible. Even knowing the unspeakable cruelty these people inflicted on others, it seemed to me these sudden flashes of humanity can make life unbearably complicated at times.
‘As it survived,’ Eskil went on, ‘Quisling’s manifesto was incoherent and never attained a form in which it could conceivably have been published in his own lifetime. I read the edited and abridged version published by Juritzen a few years ago, and at the very least you would have to say Quisling was so odd in his general view of life, and of the meaning of life, and of the future of life on earth that modern forensic psychiatry would almost certainly have found him not fit to plead. Like the first two psychiatrists appointed by the court to assess Breivik, who diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic who was in a psychotic state on the day of the killings and unfit to plead. But of course public opinion would have been outraged if Quisling and the twenty-four others executed with him had been found not responsible for their actions.
‘Besides,’ Eskil said, ‘people want to be held responsible for their actions. It’s one of the human rights. Look at what happened to your great hero Knut Hamsun. After weeks of incarceration and examination at the clinic in Vinderen and the Old Folks’ Home in Larvik, the two psychiatrists in charge of assessing his fitness to stand trial, Langfeldt and Ødegaard, psychiatrists of the old school who wore white coats to work, submitted a report to the attorney general stating that throughout the war Hamsun had been suffering from varig svekkede sjelsevner, “permanently impaired mental faculties”, and could not be held to account for things he wrote in the newspapers and said on the radio during the years of the German occupation of Norway. It’s Stalinist. You don’t like what the enemies of the people say so you declare them insane.
‘To me this is the least attractive aspect of social-democratic thinking. A kind of asymmetrical paternalism in which the conception of victimhood has been wildly expanded, that refuses to recognize the existence of bad or even alternative thoughts and treats the thinker of them as a victim in need of treatment. It’s well-meaning, but what it amounts to is an unintended assault on the dignity of the individual. Social democracies like ours are dependent for their successful functioning on a high degree of conformism that is, hopefully, voluntary. In my view, this is one of the main reasons most of the great Scandinavian artists – think of Ibsen, Munch, Strindberg, Hamsun, even Knausgård if you like – are always so ferociously individualistic and seemed to be fuelled by a kind of cornered anger. The art they produce includes this direct reflection of the huge struggle it cost them merely to be allowed to express it. Add Bergman to that list.
‘The other side of it is the suspicion and even fear of great individuality and independence of mind. This is what Kierkegaard devoted so much of his fabulous literary energy to attacking, especially towards the end of his life, when he launched that furious attack on the whole of institutionalized Christianity in Denmark. He wanted people to remember how hard Christianity is. It’s something that can only be attempted at the level of the individual, with the individual accepting complete responsibility for his own life. The state Church was axiomatically a Church for everyone, a club with no membership requirements, and no demands on the members either. He wanted to remind people of the greatness and the mystery and the dread that constituted the essence of real Christian faith. And so, during those last few months of his life, when he almost literally worked himself to death writing and publishing Øyeblikket, ‘The Moment’, his mouthpiece for all this, many of the people he attacked believed in all honesty that he must, of course, have lost his mind. What other explanation could there be?’
Eskil stood up as he said this and flicked the stub of his cigarette out past the canopy into the drizzle. A tiny shower of sparks and then gone. ‘But enough of my tvisyn,’ he said, with a little laugh. ‘I think you call it playing the Devil’s advocate in English. Or judicial vision, something like that. If people really listened to Kierkegaard and tried to follow him, the world would spin off its axis altogether. And I find his refusal to condemn Abraham personally distasteful. In fact, I find his whole idea of the teleological suspension of the ethical distasteful. The pianist’s just gone back inside. Shall we?’
As the group members stepped back up onto the stage, the pianist already bent over the keys and leafing through the sheet music on the stand, I felt moved to make a last defence of my understanding that the Scandinavians were among the first Europeans to institutionalize human kindness in their approach to crime and punishment, and I challenged Eskil again to give me a rational and objective explanation of the gap of decades that separated the abolition of the death penalty in our two countries. He shrugged and said that perhaps it was simply part of the difference between running a big country and a small country.
‘In small countries like ours, everyone is still an individual. That’s a luxury they don’t have in big countries like the USA or the UK. Everyone is family. Even a Breivik. Even Breivik deep down is regarded as someone whom we as a society have failed in some way, whom we failed to prevent from taking the wrong path. Criminals and murderers are people who have got lost in the wilderness and need to be helped back to the way. You have to realize,’ said Eskil, ‘that law in the Scandinavian countries has always involved a strong sense of community. Under the laws of the old Norwegian Gulathing and the Frostating punishment of criminals was a communal responsibility. A thief convicted of a petty offence had to run a gauntlet of stones and turf. The thirteenth-century Bjarkøyretten in Trondheim even stipulated the fine to be paid by anyone who failed to throw something at the thief. We’re all in it together. Always. So shame is a historically powerful factor in small communities like ours. A seventeenth-century French traveller in Sjælland wrote of his surprise at seeing men hanging from gallows by the roadside with the corpses of wolves dangling next them. It was an established practice among the Danes; Saxo mentions it in the Gesta Danorum. The presence of the wolves, he discovered, was to increase the dead man’s shame.’
For their final session, the group was joined onstage by a girl singer. Stylish, in a red dress, with short blonde hair and no make-up, she looped her hand around the back of the microphone, the pianist counted the group in and she began an achingly sad version of ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’. The Norwegian language doesn’t have a voiced ‘s’ and in some inexplicable way the refrain was rendered still more poignant by the way she treated the final ‘s’ as voiceless, You don’t know what love iss. As an audience we were not used to having a singer onstage at Herr Nilsen, and were unsure whether to applaud her each time she sang a verse, as though it were a piano or a tenor solo, or to save our applause to the end. It was oddly nerve-wracking. Sometimes we clapped in the middle of the songs, sometimes afterwards.
Strayhorn, with guest artist, closed the final set with ‘My Foolish Heart’, a song made famous by Billy Eckstine. I watched Eskil watching the singer. His marriage to Gry had broken up about two years earlier. She had moved away and taken the children with her. He hadn’t wanted it to happen. But I knew he had met someone else recently, a woman who worked as a children’s book editor at a publishing house in Drammen, and that he really liked her a lot. As I watched him, I was hoping she liked him a lot too. He moved his lips, mouthing the words now and then, nodding his head in a slow and decided way, as though he had written the song himself and the singer was singing it just the way he thought it should be sung. Then I fell out of the moment and began worrying again about whether or not I had upset the pianist by talking too loudly. There seemed no way of knowing for sure. Did he really glare at me as he went back inside after the break? Or had I just imagined it? And since I knew the whole inner discussion was both absurd and completely irresistible, exactly what kind of Kierkegaardian angst was I suffering from? Was it the substantial or prototypical angst of Mozart’s Don Giovanni? Hardly. Or maybe the tragic angst he discovered in Antigone? Or the psychopathic angst that tormented Nero? In the end, I decided it was none of these, but rather the form explored at length in The Concept of Anxiety – the background hum of anxiety about nothing at all, that knows it’s about nothing at all and is therefore absurd, and so searches the immediate vicinity for a peg, however ridiculous, on which to hang itself. Having surrendered completely to this explanation I presently found myself at the head of the queue that formed in front of the stage as soon as the musicians laid down their instruments to buy the group’s latest CD, the oddly titled Strayhorns and Posthorns, some forty or fifty copies of which were now displayed inside an open brown leather suitcase, to as it were apologise to the pianist and if at all possible encourage him to reassess the low opinion he may have formed of me as an impolite man with no interest in jazz who had simply wandered into the bar in search of a drink. I bought two copies and gave one to Eskil. About 10 o’clock that night, waiting for my tram home at the National Theatre stop, I realized I had left mine at Burns’. On the off-chance he was still there, I called Eskil on the mobile, recalling, as I waited for him to pick up, an anecdote he had told me earlier in the evening, which he called a ‘joke’, about how Kierkegaard was chased down a Copenhagen street one day by a group of small boys throwing stones at him and jeering: Hin enkelte! Hin enkelte! – The individual! The individual!