Havoc Read online

  TOM KRISTENSEN (1893–1974) was born in London to a Danish metal craftsman and his wife. In 1896 the family moved to Copenhagen, where Kristensen would eventually study Danish and English at the University of Copenhagen. His early works, the poetry collection Fribytterdrømme (Pirate Dreams, 1920) and the novel Livets Arabesk (Life’s Arabesques, 1921), were enthusiastically received, and in 1922 he embarked on a trip to China and Japan, which would inspire his next two books of poetry, Paafuglefjeren (The Peacock’s Feather, 1922) and Mirakler (Miracles, 1922). Kristensen served as the literary critic at the leftist daily Politiken from 1923 to 1927 and then again from 1931 to 1963; the first stint inspired his best-known novel, Hærværk (Havoc, 1930). He would go on to publish more poetry, including the volumes Vindrosen (Windroots, 1934) and Mod den yderste Rand (Against the Furthest Edge, 1936); an autobiography, Åbenhjertige fortielser: Erindringsglimt (Candid Concealments: Flashes of Memory, 1966); and several collections of criticism and travel writing. In 1955, he was named a Knight in the Order of the Dannebrog, and in 1960 he was inducted into the Danish Academy. Kristensen lived a notoriously dissolute life in Copenhagen until 1943, when his third wife, Gerda Westermann, died in bed after a night of heavy drinking. He married his fifth wife, Ingeborg “Bosse” Weber, in 1946, and the two settled in the small southeastern island of Thurø, where they lived together until his death. He is buried next to Bosse at a church in Thurø under a stone inscribed with a line from his 1927 poem “Grass”: “If I bow down as low as I can / my world grows high.”

  CARL MALMBERG (1904–1979) translated more than a dozen books, short stories, and articles from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, including Carl Erik Soya’s Sytten (Seventeen, 1961) and Leif Panduro’s Rend mig i traditionerne (Kick Me in the Traditions, 1961). A Wisconsin native, Malmberg was also the author of the nonfiction children’s book America Is Also Scandinavian (1970).

  MORTEN HØI JENSEN is a writer and critic from Copenhagen, Denmark. He is the author of A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen.

  HAVOC

  TOM KRISTENSEN

  Translated from the Danish by

  CARL MALMBERG

  Introduction by

  MORTEN HØI JENSEN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1930 by Tom Kristensen and Gyldendal, Copenhagen

  Translation copyright © 1968 by Gyldendal, Copenhagen

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Morten Høi Jensen

  All rights reserved.

  Published by arrangement with the Gyldendal Group Agency.

  Cover image: Asger Jorn, Green Language; © 2018 Donation Jorn, MuseumJorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA; photograph courtesy Galerie van de Loo Projekte, Munich.

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kristensen, Tom, 1893–1974, author. | Malmberg, Carl, translator. | Jensen, Morten Høi, 1987– writer of introduction.

  Title: Havoc / by Tom Kristensen ; translation by Carl Malmberg ; introduction by Morten Høi Jensen.

  Other titles: Hærværk. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018003919| ISBN 9781681372075 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681372082 (epub)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Urban Life.

  Classification: LCC PT8175.K78 H313 2018 | DDC 839.813/72—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003919

  ISBN 978-1-68137-208-2

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Caught Between Doctrines

  PART TWO

  Behold the Man

  PART THREE

  Forever and Ever

  PART FOUR

  And All Suns Are Darkened

  Epilogue

  INTRODUCTION

  “A toast to the infinitude of the soul.”

  HAVOC should come with a health warning. Tom Kristensen’s novel, about a thirty-something literary critic who loses himself in a maelstrom of drink, jazz, and sex, is one of the most disturbing and absorbing accounts of self-destruction in modern European literature. Surely no one who reads it would think to disagree with the narrator of Per Petterson’s novel I Curse the River of Time, who says that Havoc “terrified me so the first time I read it that I promised myself and the god who did not exist that I would never ever touch alcohol.” Stretching to just over five hundred pages, it is a Danish Inferno, a tortured descent through every circle of hell—and then some. Unlike The Divine Comedy, however, Havoc does not track the soul’s return to God; it is, rather, the story of a soul’s bewildering journey into itself.

  The soul in question belongs to Ole Jastrau, or “Jazz,” a once-promising radical poet turned respectable man of letters. On the surface, he leads a life of enviable bourgeois comfort: he has a wife, Johanne, and a young son, Oluf; a prestigious job as the literary editor of the major newspaper Dagbladet; and a comfortable, spacious apartment on Istedgade, a short walk from Copenhagen’s Town Hall Square.

  But something is amiss. As the novel opens, the atmosphere in the apartment is unmistakably suffocating. There is a mounting volume of review copies waiting to be read, a telephone that won’t stop ringing, and a son angling for his father’s attention. Then, suddenly, there are two unexpected visitors: the young Communist critic Bernhard Sanders and the crude, bohemian poet Stefan Steffensen. Wanted by the police for their political agitations, they seek refuge in Jastrau’s apartment, hoping the following day’s elections will favor the Social Democrats under whose government they expect to receive amnesty. Sanders and Steffensen need Jastrau to help them, and yet they openly mock him for his political complacency and for being a sellout, while Jastrau proves oddly powerless before them. After all, they are younger than him, they have not yet abandoned their youthful ideals, and one of them—Steffensen—even writes poems, good ones. They represent everything Jastrau believes he has sacrificed for a life of comfort and security. To his wife’s displeasure, he resignedly lets them spend the night.

  And so it begins. Later that same evening, Jastrau pays his first of many visits to the Bar des Artistes, conveniently located a few doors down from Dagbladet’s offices. There, behind the heavy red portieres and blue clouds of tobacco smoke, amid a whirl of cocktails and high-balls and bottomless glasses of whiskey, Jastrau slips out of respectability and into the deepest, darkest recesses of his own being. Improbably, he claims to know just what he is doing. He seeks, he says, the infinite soul. But the journey will cost him everything: his family, his job, his home, his reputation. Not that the price really matters. Only the jazz records playing on the phonograph, the clink of ice swirling in the cocktail shaker, the evening’s encroaching darkness—only these things matter. In the Bar des Artistes there are no nagging wives or impatient children, no looming deadlines or ringing telephones. “It’s always night here,” Jastrau tells Steffensen, “and there’s always the sound of music. You don’t get a chance to feel there’s such a thing as emptiness. Now we’ll very quietly—and very slowly—go to the dogs.”

  •

  Havoc occupies an unusual place in Danish literary history. Beloved by cultural anarchists and literature professors alike, it has achieved both cultlike veneration and canonical status. Since its publication in 1930, it h
as never been out of print. As recently as 2015, it was reissued in an authoritative new edition by the Society for Danish Language and Literature. In 1977, it was made into an acclaimed film with a screenplay by the novelist Klaus Rifbjerg, and in 2014, adapted for the stage by the Royal Danish Theatre. To this day, it is still possible to sign up for a walking tour of Ole Jastrau’s Copenhagen, as faithfully evoked as Leopold Bloom’s Dublin.

  Upon its publication, however, Havoc was less enthusiastically received. The novel’s candid portrayal of alcoholism, adultery, and syphilis was deemed excessive and cynical, even nihilistic. Reviews were by and large dismissive, and Kristensen’s publishers warned that projected sales ahead of the Christmas season did not bode well.

  Still, the novel was eagerly discussed and gossiped about by Copenhagen’s literary and cultural elites, not least for its supposedly incriminating portrait of the author himself.

  Kristensen was, by then, a well-known poet and journalist. He’d debuted in 1920 with the poetry collection Fribytterdrømme (Pirate Dreams), which catapulted him to the forefront of the disillusioned post–World War I literary generation. His poem “The Land Called Atlantis,” with its expressionist imagery of chaos and destruction, was taken to be the rallying cry for a new generation of writers:

  Thus is the land of our longing, Atlantis,

  where every harmonious prejudice fails.

  Colors are ruptured and forms burst asunder,

  and beauty is built upon ruthless contention.

  In chaos I raise up my gun

  towards beauty’s bright star and take aim.

  Before the decade’s end, Kristensen had written two novels and five poetry collections, translated Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and traveled extensively through Europe and Asia. He’d also become one of Denmark’s foremost young critics: in 1923 he was hired as the literary editor of Politiken, the country’s leading center-left newspaper, where he would go on to write about James Joyce, Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence, among others.

  Yet by the late 1920s, Kristensen’s celebrity, such as it was, had less to do with his literary activities than with his excessive drinking. On his return from a trip through Spain in 1925, he became, in the words of one biographer, a passive spectator of himself. Soon, he was an all too recognizable figure in Copenhagen’s nightlife. More often than not, he could be found in the dimly lit depths of the bar at Hotel Kong Frederik, guzzling cocktails with other thirsty journalists from Politiken or crisscrossing the Vesterbro district, in a barely ambulatory state, with the novelist Jacob Paludan. On more than one occasion, his nighttime exploits landed him in a cell at the local police station, where it was joked that Kristensen didn’t have enough blood in his alcohol content.

  Then came the particularly calamitous night in the spring of 1928 when Kristensen struck another man with a bottle. He was escorted to his parents’ house in Valby, and after a few hours of sleep decided in consultation with his mother (alcoholism ran on her side of the family) that it was time to sober up. He quit drinking that same day and soon helped found a short-lived group of literary teetotalers, Frimandsbevægelsen (The Freeman’s Movement), with the writers Aksel Sandemose and Anton Hansen. In the summer of 1928, he even moved with his lover, Bitti, out of Copenhagen and into the countryside, an hour north of the city. It was there, while strolling through Hornbæk Plantage, that Kristensen knew he would have to commit his experience to the page. It would be his third, and final, novel.

  •

  From early on, Kristensen was resolved that his newfound (and, alas, all-too-brief) status as a teetotaler should have no influence on his novel. No preaching and no moralizing would sully its pages. Havoc is not an alcoholic’s confession cloaked in fictional robes. On the contrary, contemporary readers will likely be struck by how exquisitely crafted the novel is. For all the excess it depicts, there’s hardly a superfluous word or pointless digression in it. Everything is precisely where it should be. Kristensen, who met James Joyce in Copenhagen in 1936, was among the earliest Danish writers to respond to the massive, quickening example of Ulysses, and though they differ stylistically, it is clear that Havoc has benefited from Kristensen’s attentive visits to the Joycean toolbox.

  Because he also admired the blasphemer in Joyce, Kristensen was likewise careful to ensure that Jastrau’s fall not be a redemptive one. The real scandal of the novel may be just how wonderfully absorbing it is in its depictions of the pleasure of being drunk. Kristensen makes it seem effortless, even a little desirable, to go to the dogs. “Ah yes, there was something religious about drinking oneself into insensibility,” Jastrau thinks to himself. “A person filled the room with his boisterous, babbling, drunken self—filled the entire room.” At times, indeed, Jastrau’s downfall seems something like a vacation, a letting go of the things that anchor a person to the everyday world: routines, relationships, responsibilities. Drunk, Jastrau is unbounded. Limitless. Time and space dissolve, the busy humdrum world fades away, and the twilight hour gently extinguishes the day. Kristensen’s descriptions of drunkenness are themselves intoxicating in their disorientation:

  And then the human proximity came on in waves until it was like a sea, an element in which it was natural to embrace each other. Friendship. Oh, that precious feeling. Whiskey. Whiskey. Immerse yourself in whiskey and have faith in your friends—unlimited faith. Jastrau’s arm was around Little P.’s shoulder. They sat on high stools with their backs to the bar and stared as if hypnotized at women dancing with each other—oh Sappho!—at flesh-colored legs and dapper shoes that flashed across the carpet in surely executed dance steps, heels in, heels out, acute angles, obtuse angles, the toes cutting innumerable incessant figures.

  But the exuberance comes at a price, and when he is not knocking back gin and absinthe at the Bar des Artistes, Jastrau is a walking wreck, bloated and pathetic. His clothes are stained with egg yolk, his face is dirty and unshaven, and the large apartment—long since vacated by his wife and son—is a shambles. And yet Jastrau never wavers in his resolve to drink. He endures even the most repulsive and off-putting experiences—sex with a syphilitic prostitute, that first bottle of cheap port in the morning—with something akin to contentment. “I want to be at ease with myself,” he says, “and observe what comes to the surface from deep down inside me.”

  •

  One of Havoc’s earliest champions was the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Shortly after reading the novel, he wrote to Kristensen to express his utmost admiration. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been so preoccupied with a book before in my life,” Hamsun wrote. “A stroke of genius and a major work . . . there’s no book like yours.”

  Hamsun’s praise is appropriate, for Ole Jastrau is surely one of literature’s great self-unravelers, a distant cousin of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and the narrator of Hamsun’s Hunger. Why does Jastrau drink? What makes Havoc such an unsettling novel is that we never really find out. “There is something I want,” he tells a colleague’s wife, “and when I drink I sometimes feel for a moment that I’ve captured it.” That something is the infinite, a quality Jastrau once sought in his poetry. But between a family, an office, and a telephone, there simply isn’t time for poetry. “You can’t write poetry when you’re pressed for time,” Jastrau explains. “You have to loaf around awhile before you write it, and you have to know that you’ll be able to loaf again after you’ve written it. Laziness? No, that’s not what I mean. Cosmic idleness—that’s what one has to have time for.”

  And so he seeks the infinite in the bottom of a glass. Along the way, he is challenged by the various characters he comes into contact with at the bar or at Dagbladet, all of whom try to influence his search for the infinite—from the Catholic Vuldum and the conservative Kryger to the amoral Steffensen. Yet no political ideology or divine revelation seems to suit Jastrau. “I’m really interested only in myself,” he at one point rebuffs a Catholic priest. “And consequently, in psych
ology, too, which is the basis for an understanding of one’s self. Yes, and I’m also interested in how one constructs a real world—finds reality.” Later, in one of the novel’s most famous scenes, Jastrau and Steffensen seek out the same priest in the middle of a nocturnal bender, only to find the church closed. “What the devil,” Steffensen exclaims, “is God’s house locked up at night?”

  Jastrau seeks the infinite but all he finds is repetition. “It was the same thing over and over—a constant recurrence,” he thinks toward the end of the novel, with a wink to Nietzsche. “It was hell.” That repetition is personified by one of the drunken regulars at Bar des Artistes, “the eternal Kjær”—so called because he lives in the hotel above the bar and is carried upstairs every afternoon at four thirty by the staff to sleep it off, only to reemerge later in the evening, groomed and formally dressed, to begin the cycle all over again. “My life’s purpose,” Kjær calmly explains, “has always been to be a quiet, heavy drinker, and that I’ve achieved.”

  But repetition is not only a theme in the novel; it is also a defining formal device. Words, scenes, and objects echo throughout, from the telephone and the cocktail shaker, to the title of a book Jastrau reviews (Wherefore Hast Thou Forsaken Me?), and Oluf’s voice on the phone—a childish paraphrasing of Jesus on the cross: “Where have you and Mother been all this time?” And then there is the remembered image of the mother who died young, the recurrent figure of the absent father, and finally, the image of Jesus himself. “The more I drink and dissipate,” Jastrau says, “the closer He is to me. He is resurrected inside me in the midst of all this havoc—here, inside me.”

  Kristensen’s use of these religious and philosophical categories, his invocation of Nietzsche and Jesus, is what finally makes Havoc stand out as something more than a story of alcoholic dissolution. Beneath all the jazz and cocktails, the sex and dancing, are premonitions of disorder and chaos. “I have longed for shipwrecks, / For havoc and violent death,” as the famous poem attributed to Steffensen reads. Like other major works of the modernist period, Havoc serves as a portrait of the moral and spiritual malaise of the interwar era. The breakdown of traditional values, the knowledge of the war’s mechanized slaughter, the rise of mass society—all of these developments are sewn into the fabric of the novel. “Life is so dull,” a voice exclaims at the Bar des Artistes. “We need a new world war, damn it!”