Mogens and Other Stories

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They are types of the kind he has described in the following passage: “Know ye not that there is here in this world a secret confraternity, which one might call the Company of Melancholiacs? That people there are who by natural constitution have been given a different nature and disposition than the others; that have a larger heart and a swifter blood, that wish and demand more, have stronger desires and a yearning which is wilder and more ardent than that of the common herd. They are fleet as children over whose birth good fairies have presided; their eyes are opened wider; their senses are more subtile in all their perceptions. The gladness and joy of life, they drink with the roots of their heart, the while the others merely grasp them with coarse hands.” It is a sentiment My Love encapsulates, as it considers the contrasting difficulty of ageing alongside the beauty of time spent in an eternal partnership. It isn’t all despair.

I had this short book on my TBR pile for years and finally read it a few years ago after that blurb caught my eye. A few weeks ago I happened to be reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and I saw that his detailed comments about Jacobsen were even more enthusiastic: Jens Peter Jacobsen writes like no other author I have read from his respective time period or country – not that I can think of another Dane that I’ve ever read. Yes there is great charactization and an interesting look at the time & place in which he lives but it’s the level of detail to which he is dedicated in describing things that really sets him apart. Atmosphere and having the place or setting be a character, if not the main character, is what really sets his work apart. Jacobsen was born Josephine Winder Boylan on August 19, 1908 in Ontario, Canada. Her birth was “premature and dramatic, greatly surprising her American parents who were vacationing in Canada and anticipating her arrival several months later,” writes poet Elizabeth Spires. According to Spires, Jacobsen said of her birth “I must have been a fierce particle.” After her father died when she was five, she and her mother moved frequently before settling in Baltimore when Jacobsen was fourteen. After earning a diploma from a private girls’ school in Baltimore in 1926, Jacobsen acted with the well-known Baltimore theatre troupe, the Vagabond Players. She married marrying tea-importer Eric Jacobsen in 1932; the couple had one son, Ereland. The councilor was a friend of nature, nature was something quite special, nature was one of the finest ornaments of existence. The councilor patronized nature, he defended it against the artificial; gardens were nothing but nature spoiled; but gardens laid out in elaborate style were nature turned crazy. There was no style in nature, providence had wisely made nature natural, nothing but natural. Nature was that which was unrestrained, that which was unspoiled. But with the fall of man civilization had come upon mankind; now civilization had become a necessity; but it would have been better, if it had not been thus. The state of nature was something quite different, quite different. The councilor himself would have had no objection to maintaining himself by going about in a coat of lamb-skin and shooting hares and snipes and golden plovers and grouse and haunches of venison and wild boars. No, the state of nature really was like a gem, a perfect gem. Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference

THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ROSES

Endlessly inventive and with literary thrills a-plenty, Matt Wesolowski is boldly carving his own uniquely dark niche in fiction’ Benjamin Myers A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen by Morten Høi Jensen, 2017, Yale University Press (978-0300218930) urn:isbn:1404353887 Republisher_date 20170810145544 Republisher_operator [email protected] Republisher_time 291 Scandate 20170809105223 Scanner ttscribe14.hongkong.archive.org Scanningcenter hongkong Top_six true Tts_version v1.50-56-g22e3243 Worldcat (source edition)

Of all my books just a few are indispensable to me, and two even are always among my things, wherever I am. They are about me here too: the Bible, and the books of the great Danish writer, Jens Peter Jacobsen. . . Get yourself the little volume of Six Stories of J. P. Jacobsen and his novel Niels Lyhne, and start on the first story, in the former, called "Mogens." A world will come over you, the happiness, abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,—it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys.

MRS. FONSS

I wrote a version of Ghosts six years ago when I was waiting for a film to be financed and was all too aware of the insidious virus of boredom. For some reason I couldn't stop thinking of Oswald's "Give me the sun…", and I read the play, not having seen it for at least 20 years, with a sense of discovery: The producer, Sonia Friedman, commissioned it with a view to presenting it in the West End. It didn't get produced because another production popped up and waved it away. Quoted in Jensen, A Difficult Death, xxii-xxiii in the translation by M. D. Herter of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1954), 24-25. In Two Worlds, a woman makes a charm to transfer her illness to another woman through a curse. It works. It turns out that isn’t good news. Friedrich Nietzsche realized that the blows to the moral framework of society would have serious repercussions. Nietzsche, when proclaiming that "God is dead," knew that without a replacement for religion the whole of humanity would descend into nihilism, pointing out that "our entire European morality" was "built upon [the Christian God]."[10]