A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen

by Morten Høi Jensen, James Wood (Foreword)

Beautifully written, sympathetic and incisive, this is the first English biography of a major Scandinavian author who is ripe for rediscovery

While largely unknown today, Danish writer and Darwin translator Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century and part of a generation that included Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg. His novels Marie Grubbe and Niels Lyhne as well as his stories and poems were widely admired by writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce.
 
Despite his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight, Jacobsen became a cult figure to an entire generation and continues to occupy an important place in Scandinavian cultural history. In this book, Morten Høi Jensen gives a moving account of Jacobsen’s life, work, and death: his passionate interest in the natural sciences, his complicated and nuanced attitude to his own atheism, and his painful descent toward an early death. Carefully researched and sympathetically imagined, this is an evocative portrait of one of the most influential and gifted writers of the nineteenth century.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to pick up this appealing brief recent biography of Jacobsen after reading the 19th-century Danish author's masterpiece, Niels Lyhne (1880). While Jacobsen is not well-known today—I came to him through Nella Larsen, though I must have been overlooking references to him in Joyce, Rilke, and Lukács for years—Jensen demonstrates his extensive influence, particularly on German-language literature, around the turn of the century. Jacobsen was lauded by figures as diverse as Rilke, Kafka, Freud, Mann, Joyce, Adorno, and Zora Neale Hurston. Stefan Zweig called Niels Lyhne "the Werther of our generation," with its timely depiction of a young man's life lived without the comfort or promise of the divine.

But with superb critical acuity, Morten Høi Jensen shows that the story of Jacobsen's intellectual context and posthumous reception is more complex than his simply giving voice to atheism in the decades after Darwin. This biography is as much about the short-lived Jacobsen's milieu in a modernizing Scandinavia as it is about the sadly circumscribed and uneventful life of the tubercular author.

Jensen takes us to a Copenhagen roiled in the 1860s and '70s by an insurgent freethinking and liberal mentality. The trained botanist Jacobsen participated in this cultural transformation with his translations of Darwin, but Jensen also emphasizes the influence of other figures, most notably the commanding Georg Brandes, an atheist, liberal, and feminist who would become probably the most important European literary critic of his time.

While I came away from Jensen's book wanting to read Brandes, Jacobsen also benefits from the contrast with such a persona. Surrounded by agitators like Brandes, Jacobsen comes in Jensen's telling to seem an appealingly thoughtful, quiet figure, tough-minded but kind, long-suffering but non-complaining, lonely but generous, a man who demurred, and not only due to illness, from confrontation and conflict, from polemics and culture wars.

Jacobsen's troubled diffidence, his accurate understanding that atheism raises problems rather than solving them, allowed his writing to be ahead of its time. The perceptiveness granted the writer by a retreat from social controversy is an urgently needed lesson in our time, when every poet and novelist is expected to indulge in phony and predictable political grandstanding every day on Twitter.

Nothing could have been further from [Jacobsen's] nature than to mount the barricades on behalf of an abstract political cause—or any other cause, for that matter. Years later he would write to Edvard Brandes: "I am too aesthetic in a good and bad sense to be able to join in such direct procurator-speech-types of works, in which problems are supposedly debated but are actually just postulated as solved"—an almost direct rejoinder to Georg Brandes's exhortation that contemporary literature ought to take social and political problems up for debate.

In Niels Lynhe, atheism's demotion of the human being from the center of creation clearly entails the end of utopian humanism, which the melioristic liberals and leftists of Jacobsen's time did not understand; they failed to grasp that ideals like egalitarianism and progress silently presume monotheism's assurance of human exceptionalism and equality before God. Brandes, who started out translating Mill and ended up translating Nietzsche, exemplifies the growing awareness of what godlessness may cost, but the price of living without God is embodied narratively, rather than via abstract argument, in Jacobsen's proto-modernist prose, with its sometimes baffling commitment to the sensations and perceptions of the chaotic inner life. Such a recognition of the inner life and the subjection of every individual to death, however, may provide a surer basis for a humane society than fantasies of a world transformed by an activist mankind that has stepped into the now-vacant place of God.

Aside from these big ideas, Jensen is also good on more local and more literary matters. His portrait of Jacobsen's small hometown, Thisted, and the confined life the author was forced to live there with kindly parents who did not quite comprehend him, is beautifully novelistic in its own right. And Jensen also demonstrates an impressive command, more than matching that of the book's introducer, James Wood, of the main currents and movements of 19th-century European literature. Some of the literary paradoxes raised by Jacobsen's posthumous canonization, for instance, are explained well: how is it that a Danish author mainly influenced by French and English literature came to have such an impact in Germany? Jensen explains it lucidly, placing Jacobsen expertly among his peers: Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola, Rilke, Mann, Joyce.

I recommend A Difficult Death, then, both as a perceptive, well-researched, and clearly-written introduction to a time and place in European literature that has fallen out of familiarity in the Anglophone world and as an exemplary life for our time, a time when we could use more Jacobsens and fewer Brandeses.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is nothing more banal than death." -- Nietzsche

A wonderful biography of an extraordinary writer.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well-written and interesting biography on a little-known Danish author. I hadn't heard of him until I listened to the author of this book discuss Jacobsen on a podcast (Sacred & Profane Love) that I follow. Jensen described Jacobsen like a Danish Dostoevsky so I knew I would be fascinated by him. His biography provides insightful literary analysis on some of Jacobsen's work and interacts with interpretations of Jacobsen's work that floated around Denmark and Europe in the 1870-80s.

Jacobsen was a poet, author, committed Darwinist, atheist, quasi-existentialist, and literary critic. His work was concerned with the "fundamental incongruousness, the vexing doubleness of human nature" (190). Like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Jacobsen recognized that "the unmooring of the self from its traditional place in the cosmos was an ambivalent, and deeply disorienting, experience" (61). If man is simply a product of evolution (no longer to occupy the center of the Enlightenment's universe) why is death such an existential and metaphysical problem for us? Jacobsen does believe that mankind is simply a product of evolution--but, for him, that only highlights the oddity of our "religious" impulses. Jensen (an atheist) says of one of Jacobsen's short stories in particular, "[This story] is also a confession of Jacobsen's own inability to escape a Christian eschatology . . . Jacobsen's once jubilant atheism is shipwrecked amid the detritus of an inescapably religious sensibility" (119).

I am a Christian so I find the religious aspect of Jacobsen's work to be fascinating. I think there is serious affinity between he and Dostoevsky. However, he is a genius in his own right and ought not be mined by Christian apologists for a "Look at your worldview, atheist!" moment. There is a lyricism in Jacobsen that is downright Romantic. There is serious literary value in his work that ought to be admired by his readers, Christian or not (funny enough, Jensen regularly highlights how Jacobsen's tendency toward lyricism frustrated his peers).

Diagnosed with tuberculosis, Jacobsen spent the last 12 years of his life (he died at 38) mostly alone, weak, and in a constant struggle to write and work. Some of the passages that explore his solitary life were difficult to read. It was touching to see Jacobsen's relationship with his brother, observed through their extensive letter correspondences. It was gut-wrenching to read that Jacobsen's letters, intended to comfort his grieving brother for his wife's death, were "now like dress rehearsals. It is not a stretch to imagine that Jacobsen intended his words of comfort to be applicable not only to William's loss of his wife, but also to the inevitable loss of his older brother" (155).

This was a great biography of a brilliant man. Read it.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty dry and academic biography, but nonetheless accessible and definitely interesting. I’d never heard of Jens Peter Jacobsen, a Danish writer acclaimed in his time and admired by other writers such as James Joyce, Strindberg and Thomas Mann as well as many others, but little known or heard of today. His works are explored in some detail in the biography, which slows down the narrative if you’re not familiar with his writings, as having a plot described is never as satisfying as reading the actual book, but I very much enjoyed learning about this forgotten writer and feel enthused enough to read something by him in due course.

[Klissia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A influência de Jacobsen foi imensa - espantosamente imensa, na verdade, dado quão pouco ele escreveu e quão jovem era quando morreu."

Talvez o livro não seja tão largo como minha curiosidade sobre o escritor mas ainda assim conseguiu sumarizar suas obras,vida e importância no cenário literário de 1890 em diante.

Hoje um pouco "esquecido",suas obras tem uma forte influência,lido e reverenciado por escritores como Rilke, Stefan Zweig,Kafka,Thomas Mann,Robert Musil,Boris Pasternak e até Freud.
Assim como escritoras da Harlem Reinassance:Nella Larsen e Zora Neale Hurston.

Uma das piores coisas de ser humano é esperar, a sua doença que o fez ter uma vida "horizontal ", lhe deu uma morte anunciada ,este tema se reflete nas suas obras, sobre morte,pessimismo mas também a beleza dos seres deste mundo.

Ele só queria simplesmente ser lembrado...
De fato uma morte difícil.

Obs: talvez Camus tenha se inspirado em um dos seus contos para escrever
"A Peste "???