The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  In his early years, struggling to win recognition as an actor, playwright and poet, he thought Denmark was too poor and too small for him, unlike Italy, for example, ‘filled with food and flowers’; and he escaped, becoming perhaps the most widely travelled Dane of his generation. When a woman once asked him, ‘Tell me Mr Andersen, have you ever on any of your many and long journeys abroad ever seen anything as beautiful as our little Denmark?’, ‘I certainly have,’ he replied. ‘I have seen many things more beautiful’. ‘Shame on you,’ she retorted. ‘You are not a patriot.’ But European culture was a food Andersen could not live without, and the welcome and admiration he received from the great artists and writers of many countries were indispensable to him. He had to struggle hard and endure serious poverty before he won approval from his compatriots. The literary elite did not like his rejection of conventional literary prose and preference for colloquial language that everyone could enjoy. Others criticised him for being too conventional, or for being too keen to win the approval of the upper classes, and for his ‘fawning servility’ towards the aristocracy. He never quite overcame the handicap of being the son of a shoemaker, though he was lionised in the salons of the rich and powerful. He recorded with pleasure how ‘the Grand Duke of Weimar pressed me to his bosom, we kissed one another. “We are friends for life,” said the Duke. We both wept.’

  Andersen was not a revolutionary, for all his sympathy with the underdog. His philosophy was that the Ugly Duckling could become a beautiful swan, but when that did not happen, he would say, ‘God directs all things for the best.’ He achieved his own transformation by escaping from adulthood into the fantasy universe of childhood. In his eyes, children were as excluded from the adult world as he always, to some extent, felt himself to be. Writing about childhood without moralising about it, but delighting in playfulness and humour, allowed him to use fairy tales to express thoughts he otherwise had to hide. Rebelling against the idea that literature’s purpose was to create harmony, he wrote, ‘I seek all the discords of the world . . . I believe I am myself the discord in this world.’ He was indeed always tormented by anxiety: he imagined that his fellow travellers in stage-coaches were about to murder him; he remained so afraid of death that he carried a rope with him everywhere, in case he had to jump out of a house on fire, and he was so afraid of being buried alive that he always kept a note by his bedside which read, ‘I only appear to be dead.’

  Denmark’s national solutions to Andersen’s perplexities have almost unanimously been judged to be impressive. The country has erected formidable barriers against anxiety, creating the most all-embracing and effective insurance institution in the world, guaranteeing freedom from the worries of unemployment, ill-health, ignorance and poverty. But there are fears that national institutions cannot touch, and there are new fears and new desires that rise up as soon as others are forgotten. Despite Denmark’s top ranking in wealth and happiness, its children (according to UNICEF’s comparisons with other countries) rank nineteenth in tests of reading, maths and science. Only 22 per cent of its children ‘like school a lot’ (but no country has more than 40 per cent). Only 70 per cent of Danish fifteen-year-olds spend time ‘just talking with parents several times a week’, less than Hungarians (90) and Italians (87), but more than Swedes and Australians (50), or Germans (42) and Israelis (who come bottom at 37). Denmark is ranked eighteenth in ‘family conversation and interaction’ and nineteenth in the proportion of those who live with step-families (though there is no information about what difference that makes). It comes three from the bottom, with only Finland and the United Kingdom below it, in the proportion of children under fifteen who have never been drunk. Still, it does much better than the U.K. and the U.S.A., which come near the bottom in many of the tables. If Andersen were to come back today, would his nation’s acclaimed social institutions be able to cure him of his anxieties?

  Karen Blixen (1885–1962) was also a Dane who found it difficult to be Danish and nothing else. She reacted against Andersen’s philosophy and against the national search for security. She wanted more from life than what Denmark offered her. Escaping to Africa, she wrote: ‘Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams.’ Her father had gone off to serve in the French Army, identified himself with the revolutionary French Communards, then lived with the Chippewa Native Americans of Wisconsin, and finally committed suicide when he learnt that he had syphilis. She admired people like him who defied authority and enjoyed danger and struggled against fate, which she saw as a chance to attain heroism and immortality. Only people who had nothing to lose could have that courage, which for her meant aristocrats like herself and the proletariat. The middle classes, fearful of risk, craving for security, were, for her, ‘the devil’. ‘I cannot live with the middle class.’ She despised the sacrifices they were willing to make to pay for the welfare state, which she found ‘suffocating’. Never having recovered from having been ‘watched over too much’ by her mother, who was constantly trying to protect her from innumerable dangers, she believed that the only person who had ‘loved me for myself’ was her rebellious father, and so she had no sympathy for the pampering of children being turned into a national policy for pampering adults too. By contrast ‘my black brothers here in Africa’ loved adventure. ‘My Somalis are happy whatever happens, as long as something is happening’: they become ‘quite desperate in an uneventful life’. Even the English wild-game hunter with whom she had a great love affair, ‘who makes me tremendously happy, carries no weight in comparison’. Africa ‘released’ her so that she could ‘discover herself’.

  What she wanted above all was to achieve something ‘as myself’ and to discover ever more ‘possibilities for beauty’. ‘All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into stories’; that was ‘the one perfect happiness that a human will find in life’, and she turned the events of her own life into stories. But the need to do so was also ‘a curse’, for in real life she did not escape sorrow: divorced by her husband, who was also syphilitic, having her own health ruined by a false diagnosis of syphilis, she concluded: ‘You know you are truly alive when you are living among lions.’

  However, though her sensitive portrayal of Africa proved deeply moving outside the continent, it was a romantic vision. When her Kikuyu servant who worked for her for many years was suddenly arrested for being a member of the Mau Mau freedom fighters, she was very surprised. She thought she knew him well; but there was a lot he did not tell her. For all her kindnesses to them, Africans could not forget that when they worked on her 6,000-acre farm, it was African land of which they had been dispossessed. What a nation can expect from its relations with foreigners is still a question that has had no perfect answer.

  Nor what women can expect from men. When still only twenty years old, Mathilde Fibiger (1830–1872), the first Danish advocate of women’s emancipation, published a semi-autobiographical novel, Clara Raphael, protesting that women were ‘excluded from all intellectual enterprise’. While emphasising the differences between the sexes, she demanded not that women should be like men, nor that they should have ‘rights’, but that they should have spiritual and intellectual freedom, freedom of the imagination. Her book aroused an enormous amount of discussion and a torrent of reviews, but after two more novels, she accepted that she could not achieve financial independence as a writer and became a telegraph operator instead, the first woman in her country to obtain a civil service job. That was only a partial victory, for she hoped work would be a more effective weapon than argument, but though she succeeded in getting promoted to be a manager, the resistance of the men who worked with her was a constant irritation. When John Stuart Mill’s book The Subjection of Women came out twenty years after hers, she welcomed it, but disagreed with it. Her mother had disagreed with her father and left him. It is impossible to count how many other women disagreed but either said nothing or did nothing. History doe
s not record the silences behind which disagreement shelters.

  Now that the women of Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries have won almost all the forms of equality that laws can guarantee, what is missing? They have freedom from their husbands, freedom from the constraints imposed by child-rearing and domestic chores, freedom from discrimination in the pursuit of every form of work. However, what no-one predicted was that public institutions that took over a large part of the education of children might create a void, a sense of not having lived fully, not having participated enough in the shaping of one’s own offspring, a realisation that to ‘be oneself’ also means creating a unique relationship between parent and child, which is as profoundly a part of life and as elusive as creating a relationship between a woman and a man. A poll of young Scandinavian women suggested that after their efforts to improve the relations between the sexes, the next goal may be to try harder with the relations between generations. Laws cannot programme that very personal adventure, which is private to each duo.

  Denmark’s most influential philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), wrote a scathing and sarcastic review of Fibiger’s first novel, suggesting it should not be taken any more seriously than a new sartorial fashion. ‘If girls were brought up the same way as boys, then goodnight to the whole human race.’ The emancipation of women ‘is the invention of the devil’. ‘Woman is personified egotism.’ And he rejected the woman he was in love with because ‘it is a superstition that something that lies outside a person is what can make him happy.’ Kierkegaard was an escapist, though physically he hardly ever travelled outside Copenhagen. He built a whole philosophy around the idea of individuals being ‘singular’, with a mission to free themselves from the crowds and the stereotypes that menaced their individuality; they needed less knowledge, not more knowledge, to be truly themselves; they should reject the common opinions of the public and make their own minds up, relying on faith, not reason, to find God, a severe and dour God who speaks of sin and guilt. Unlike Andersen trying to escape anxiety, Kierkegaard insisted that ‘fear and trembling’ were necessary to attain faith, which was the main goal of life: ‘Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate . . . Anxiety is the possibility of freedom.’

  Making fun of his compatriots through irony and parody was one of Kierkegaard’s ways of asserting his singularity. He has been called the most amusing of all philosophers anywhere, though it is not clear how much competition he encountered for that title. He is ‘droll and rollicking . . . revelling in the comedy of the contradictions in human existence’. But he found humour even in suffering, even in religion, even claiming that ‘all humour developed from Christianity itself’. Jest, for him, always springs from pain. His compatriots have developed a reputation for using sarcasm and irony as their weapons to prevent their ordered society from being oppressive. When Victor Borge (1909–2000), the comedian nicknamed the ‘unmelancholy Dane’, said ‘Laughter is the closest distance between two people’, did he imply that the distance between them was normally huge?

  All over the world, there have always been practical business and professional people who, while being pillars of conformity, could not help occasionally producing children who rebelled against their placidity. Peter Bang (1900–1957), founder of Bang and Olufsen, which became Europe’s largest manufacturer of high-fidelity equipment, was the son of the manager of Copenhagen’s biggest department store. He escaped to America as soon as he reached adulthood. He became passionate about radio, which for him symbolised the prospect of technology changing the world. He got a job in General Electric, and after some years wrote, ‘I have worked for so many different people, I’m tired of working for others; now I want to work for myself.’ He went back home having decided that independence, not money, was his goal. Olufsen was an aristocrat with a manor house, but with an unaristocratic passion for business. The two joined forces and started a factory in the rural wilds of Jutland, 350 kilometres away from Copenhagen. Bang always felt uncomfortable in the society of the capital city, which he avoided, preferring London, Berlin and the United States. The whole idea of his firm was to escape from banality, to combine technological research with beautiful products, to use avant-garde design as a language to communicate new ideas, and never to make a product until there was a new idea to express.

  The originality of Denmark’s welfare state was that its inventors saw it as part of a movement for ‘popular enlightenment’, offering ‘culture for the people’, with an essential aesthetic ingredient, involving the creation of beautiful objects, furniture and buildings that taught people to distinguish between good and evil, and between the useful and the useless. Bang and Olufsen defined themselves in cultural terms, as rebels against the superficiality of mere consumption and entertainment. They insisted on discussing taste and quality before price. They employed Jacob Jensen as their designer who had originally been trained as an upholsterer, and situated themselves as an extension of the artistic movement that made Danish furniture and ceramics distinctive, ‘democratising beauty’, rejecting both ‘bourgeois pomp’ and mass production, and resonating with Japan’s aesthetics of simplicity.

  After the founders’ deaths, however, new managers demanded that the products should be made more cheaply, since much of what was inside them was no different from what was inside products sold at half the price. Jensen was able to resist them for a while, protesting so forcefully that he was never interfered with again. But professional managers and American business ideas did increasingly infiltrate, and eventually designers and engineers lost their power to marketers. The advertising guru Jesper Kunde argued that what mattered was the ‘brand’, not the product, so that the firm should expand and make money in other domains: his book Corporate Religion was inspired by the success stories of Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Disney. Instead of the founders’ single-minded idealism, some of the new managers now likened themselves to ‘gentle priests guiding their sheep’, while the consultants they brought in talked in highfalutin imagery about how they would re-educate the firm to become ‘change agents’ or ‘wild flowers’ or ‘Masai who could look a lion in the eye’. At first, the engineers laughed at this mish-mash of ideologies, but soon they found that they could not escape the consequences of ‘rationalisation’. More and more activities were outsourced, so that they ceased to make objects with their own hands, and spent most of their time writing specifications for external manufacturers. The company was now ‘flexible’ but also in thrall to the servitudes and jealousies of bureaucracy. Not everyone benefits when a firm becomes one of the most successful in the world.

  To the novelist Aksel Sandemose (1899–1965), who spent his youth as a lumberjack, teacher and journalist in Newfoundland, Denmark was a ‘living hell’. The furore aroused by his bestseller, A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks (1933), revealed how profound the divisions were about his famous denunciation of ‘the Ten Commandments of the Jante Law’, the codes of behaviour that prevailed in his native village, whose first commandment was ‘Don’t think you are anything special’ and the last was ‘Don’t think you can teach us anything’. He protested against the widespread view that all achievements must be seen as collective, and that those who dared to stand out should be punished. In such an atmosphere, he wrote, ‘knowledge was something despicable. Art was judged with a sneer. Science was something that occupied the lazy. Never hurry: that’s the refrain all day long.’ He ignored the fact that three out of four Danes said and continue to say they are not troubled by this and like their cosy life; for them hygge, cosiness, is what one should aim for. Sandemose could only dream vaguely of ‘strong, erotic, intelligent women’ solving his problem and he could propose no practical action beyond leaving the country. He was just one of about a million Danes who have emigrated in the last two centuries, from a country which had less than a million inhabitants in 1800, and has only five and half million today

  Why should each of these six heroes and heroines of Denmark have
been so uncomfortable in their own country? They were all international figures, they could not have been what they were had they not nourished themselves on foreign inspiration. Denmark itself lives only because it is international, depending for its prosperity on selling its talents and products all over the globe. Karen Blixen even wrote her books in English, before translating them into Danish. Nations in the past were established among people who spoke the same language, or who were forced to learn the language of the dominant partner, but sharing a language does not mean sharing the same thoughts or tastes. Today, nations survive only if they can talk to those who do not speak their language.

  However, Andersen’s statement that ‘children speak the truth’ reawakens awareness that the adult world has always been afraid of saying openly what it thinks. Blixen’s conclusion that the truth can only be told through stories, as though it is too dangerous to confront it face-to-face, Bang’s desire to let objects speak for themselves, Fibiger’s inability to get herself understood, Kierkegaard’s obsession with contradictions, and Sandemose’s protests at the obstacles that prevent the truth being spoken, are all indications that the conversations within nations and between nations have barely begun. The fear of foreigners has been one of the principal reasons why people with disparate provincial loyalties have united into nations. Nevertheless, foreigners have also had the opposite effect, injecting new ambitions and opening new vistas, and they are not condemned to being seen forever as mere aliens or tourists. The foreigner and the native are a couple, capable of interacting in ways as surprising as a pair of lovers: they are a muse to each other. Nations, like individuals, easily get absorbed in introspection, but that is only a first stage. These six national heroes, who were shaped as much by what they saw outside the place of their birth as by their origins, emphasise that the urge to explore competes with the need for a safe haven. To love one’s country in an informed way requires one to know what others are like. As more and more people begin to do that, the sense of belonging comes to mean something else.