The Devil in Jutland (iii)

           

 

             He labored over his great work for seven years, and was nearing its completion.  It was a fine, early spring day.  After some light snow, the sun had come out from beneath a layer of dense, grey clouds, and the sky cleared to a crystalline blue.  The cottage stove burned hot.  Soren opened the door and then the windows.  He stood on the threshold and inhaled the cool air: there was a tincture of warmth in it, a harbinger of spring’s new life.   

             As he stood inhaling the air as if drinking cool well a man walked up the path, crunching briskly through the melting snow.  He was dressed in a dark suit and wore a black, bowler hat.  The monochrome of his clothes was offset by a brilliant, red beard, which was bushy, yet neatly trimmed and accentuated with large mustaches that jutted from the sides of his face like the horns of a totemic mask.  He had a simple walking stick.  As he came closer, Soren noted that it was elaborately carved with abstract patterns, like tattoos on a Maori’s face.  Behind the man’s civilized clothes he gave the impression of rude primitiveness, as if a Lap or some race of Nordic forest dwellers had recently been clothed in civilized regalia.  He stopped in front of Soren Christensen and offered his hand.  Soren fully expected that the man had come to inquire about his theological work.  He was not mistaken.

            “Soren Christensen?” the man asked in a husky tone, accented, but Soren could not tell from where.  Soren nodded and took his hand, which was as large as Soren’s, if not bigger, and firm.  Soren indicated that indeed, he was the man.

            “I am Devon Wormwood.  I’m Australian.  I’ve been touring through Denmark and I was in your area.  I’ve read all your works with keen interest and thought if it was not imposing, I’d come by and ask you a few questions.”
            “Please, come in,” Soren gestured and the two men entered the cottage.  The room was so warm the windows were steamed.  “I’m afraid it’s quite hot.  The morning was cold, but now that the sun has come out, and spring is here, apparently.”  Soren motioned to the man to take a seat.  “You may want to remove your coat, Mr. Wormwood.  The cottage is poorly ventilated.”

            “Oh, I quite like the heat,” Wormwood smiled graciously.  “My office is poorly ventilated as well, and can get beastly hot.”

            “Your Danish is excellent, Mr. Wormwood.  I speak English, German and French.  Most of my visitors from abroad prefer to speak in one of those languages.  So few people speak our tongue.  We are a small nation.  For most, it is not worth the effort to learn.”

            “Oh,” Wormwood raised a hand, “in my line of work I have the opportunity to learn a number of languages, and knowing them proves most useful.”

            “And what line of work is that, may I ask?”

            “Acquisitions,” Wormwood answered with a broad smile.  Soren waited for Wormwood to answer in greater detail, and when he did not, he politely moved on.

            “You said you were from Australia?  I did not recognize the accent.”

            “Yes,” Wormwood answered exuberantly, “we lovingly call it the ‘Land Down Under’.”

            “Of course,” Soren smiled, “I’ve met a few of your countrymen.  Very congenial people.”

            “Indeed,” Wormwood frowned mockingly, “that is the face we turn to the world.  But we can be quite ferocious at times.  We have an entire world to conquer and one doesn’t perform such tasks with niceties.”

            “I have no doubt,” Soren said as he straightened in his chair, feeling, for the first time, mildly uncomfortable. “In a hostile land one must often be hostile in turn.  But ultimately civilization will win.  A war of all against all cannot always exist.”

            “Oh, I disagree,” Wormwood leaned forward, resting his hand on his walking stick.  “The entire world exists in such a state.  We teeter on the edge of anarchy at every moment.  That the world has not been plunged into chaos yet is just luck.  Death, chaos, they swirl around us, ready to pounce.  If they have not, it is simply because we exist in an intermezzo of relative peace.  Eventually, the law of the club will return.”

            “Well,” Soren smiled patiently, “if it is as you say, and you have read my work, you are very well aware that I ascribe to the very opposite opinion.”  Wormwood laughed softy at the answer.

            “Yes.  A colleague of yours, a professor from Heidelberg, called your philosophy the latest incarnation of Panglossism.  I must say,” Wormwood chuckled, “I have always found Voltaire’s characterization of Leibniz’s work as unfair – the distinguished Voltaire renders Leibniz into a mere straw man; I must say, I find the opinion of your learned colleague regarding your work in a similar vein: far too one dimensional, even misguided, if I may.”

            “Well, thank you,” Soren answered flatly but graciously.

            “Regardless,” Wormwood continued with a curious smile, “there are essential problems.  Of course, your theological speculations about God are towering and majestic.  They are beautiful creations.  I must confess they quite unmanned me; at times I was weeping.  I must muster some strength and even courage to critique them.  But there is the unsettling biographical element to contend with…”

            “Biographical?” asked Soren Christensen as he folded his hands across his chest.

            “Yes, the biography of God as we begin in Genesis and conclude in Revelation.  God changed.  There is a progression.  Your God is immaculate and removed from the world and unchanging; that other God is fully engaged, even distracted by his creation -- almost tragically distracted.  I don’t see the correspondence between your God and this other God.”

            When Soren was sure Wormwood was finished, he began to explain his position.  It was an exposition that was nearly identical to the one he gave to all “critical” visitors who asked similar questions.  Wormwood listened patiently.

            “You see, there is where we differ,” Wormwood said energetically. “I take a rather literal view of the Scriptures.  I don’t see them as the starting point of speculations about God.  They are the beginning and ending word about God, and unerringly so.  And then there is Jesus.  His world is ruled by Satan, and by demons… death and disease are caused by sin, and he defeats them; he is the armed agent of the Father, sent to cleanse the world of Satan and evil and prepare for the Kingdom of God.”

            Soren, again, said the words he always did when presented with this line of criticism.  When he finished, Wormwood said nothing.  He simply smiled broadly and stood up, offering his hand.

            “Well, thank you for your time.  You are as interesting in person as you are in the pages of your books.  What you say is compelling, but I’m not sure that the woman with the flow of blood, Jarius’ daughter, and Lazarus would wholeheartedly agree.  Good day, sir,” and Devon Wormwood left the cottage and strolled casually into the warm, spring light, twirling his walking stick playfully.

The Devil in Jutland (ii)

His wife was a simple woman from a coastal town, and he met her accidentally when his star was just rising.  She was the eldest daughter of a moderately successful herring exporter, and Soren was a young pastor and instructor at the local university who had just published a learned monograph that caused quite a stir.  He claimed that evil, as an entity, either personified by the devil or conceptualized as an idea, did not truly exist.   

This was certainly not a novel idea, but it came about at a time when learned theologians, while toying with the concept, had proved incapable of jettisoning the familiar and even comforting image of Satan.  Soren Christensen’s monograph became a lightning rod for the debate, and legions either piled onto his side or onto the side of Evil.  He was thrust into the light of academic celebrity and remained there.  He met Katrina at a small gathering of her father’s for the faculty of the Religious College.  When Soren saw her he instantly fell in love.  It was a firm love.  He loved her with the conviction he had for his students, his books, his ideas, his church and his God, but with the added dimension of the erotic.  Her small body and his robust frame seemed inappropriately matched - but it was not the case.  It was a passionate pairing, though no one ever suspected it.   In public they were the perfect picture of decorousness; they never even held hands.  But their secret malady was a great pleasure and release, and soon, in quick succession, Katrina bore a son and a daughter and seemed poised to bear many more. 

In between the two children Soren completed a large, rather formal theological work in elaborate Danish prose which stated, essentially, that nothing existes but God; there was no evil, no deprivation. God was All and All was God.  Only errors in human perception led to other, divergent opinions.   

Soren followed up this production with several popular essays that were printed, widely read and soon translated into every major European language.  He was able to quit teaching and with his income buy a modest but spacious house in Blundsoun, on the North Sea.  There he wrote in a small cottage in the yard, facing the sea wall.  The building was heated by a stove in the winter time and a peasant girl brought him a parcel of charcoal every morning.  The stove was small, but gave off a great deal of heat and he often had to open the cottage door for a fresh breeze, even in the deep of a North Sea winter.   

They were not ideal conditions, but they suited his temperament.  He wrote every day and gave periodic lectures at the local university and gymnasium which were well attended.  Men from other parts of Europe and even America often knocked on his door to meet this illustrious man of God who had the good fortune to present at the right time and place an idea that had existed for eternity: the world is wholly good.  There is no evil.  There is only sloppy, ill-considered thinking about such lofty, perfect ideas as the Good and God.

The Devil in Jutland (i)

This is a story I wrote a few years back.  We can consider this, as these things go, as a B side:

    The Devil in Jutland      

           “How can you say the Devil does not exist, after this?”

           

            The words caught in Soren Christensen’s throat before they fell out and hit the floor like leaden weights.

            A large wooden cross hung on the wall; to its sides, a stained glass window, sparsely adorned with scenes from the Gospels, let in a trickle of dim light.  Soren Christensen could barely see the closed coffins of his wife, his son, and his daughter through the haze of his grief and the failing light; his hands were shaking and he pressed them and pressed them, but felt no sensation, either of pain or strain.

            He said these words, but at no more than a whisper.  To say more would have been in direct contradiction to his entire life’s work.  But even the evidence of his eyes was a contradiction to his theology.  

           His wife, his son, and his daughter were in coffins.  They were all small.   She was a woman who would be called petite anywhere else, but on this stretch of the Danish coast facing the fierce gales and waves of the North Sea she was a common physiological type: small-boned, light women, with slim waists, elevated cheekbones and deep set eyes, as if from Tartar blood.  But they were not swarthy --  no, quite the contrary: their hair was so blond it was nearly white, and the eyelashes, so bleached and fine they blended seamlessly with pale skin.  His children, Rasmus and Maria, were duplicates of Katrina, his wife: diminutive angels swaddled in white and adorned in death by soft, blond halos.

            Soren Christensen was a dark man.  He had brown hair, which he parted down the middle, a waxed moustache, and nut-colored skin, which turned a deeper shade of mahogany when the cold north sun turned, by degrees, brighter, and suddenly produced summer in this land, spreading white light so intense it had the luminous glow of heaven.   

           And Soren Christensen was large: broad in the shoulders, square in the jaw,  his immensity  supported by thick, wide-set legs.  His hands were round, powerful, and forcefully appealing.  When he held a pen in his hand, the puny instrument was dwarfed by his massive digits, as if he was manipulating a child’s toy.  But all that awesome energy was kept in reserve.  He was gentle, affable, and soft-spoken.   

           His theological work involved him in no small amount of debate, but he was never known to raise his voice.  His great body was the only marker of force that he required.  It was also his greatest trump card: a visible symbol of his absolute surrender to Christ.  Soren Christensen was a man who, if he had not laid down his life to the Lamb of God, would have been a powerful, violent drunkard, a brutal womanizer, a capricious and quarrelsome man eager to enter a simply fight because he was all but assured he would win it.  His appetites would have ruled him.  But that was not his fate.  He had harnessed all his vast energies for God, and he worked ceaselessly and without rest for the glorification of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost -- the latter of which he likened to a fire that saved men’s souls.

Pen of Iron

Robert Alter’s Pen of Iron is a serious investigation of the influence of the King James translation of the Bible in American fiction.  Alter focuses on Moby Dick, Absalom!  Absalom! and Seize the Day.  But he also gives considerable attention to other writers and  works of fiction, including Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln.

Alter is a bit of an elitist, and seems to really like no writer or book wholeheartedly.  He is pedantic, his favorite word is recondite, which means esoteric or difficult, which could very well characterize his analysis and prose.  But Alter should be read.  He should be read carefully and slowly.  Few can delve into a topic as deeply and richly as he does.  And in this book, which is really only a few quick snapshots of how the King James version of the bible enriched American literature, we can see his well-read, well-reasoned mind working at its best. 

Although this book my not be the last word on this topic, it provides much food for thought.

A Tired Novel

Appelfeld’s “All Whom I Have Loved” is a tired novel, about tired people eking out their tired lives.  The exhaustion can infect the reader too, so you should beware.  Part of the problem is that Appelfeld is going over ground that he has gone over before with a more accomplished hand.  So what is left is the material in this novel, which is what is left over.  

Can a tired novel be good?  In a sense, yes.  Appelfeld accomplishes his goals in this work.  We are shown the whole sweep of the life of a family, we get it all, with almost nothing left out.  This is part of the problem. More could have been left out to the benefit of the novel.  As a novella, this might have worked, but as it is, Appelfeld just gives us too much material for the set up.