Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  “Let’s have one,” says Kerrigan, and signals the waiter by tipping an imaginary snaps glass to his lips. The waiter comes with a bottle of Jubilaeum and two glasses.

  “Doubles, please,” says Kerrigan.

  “Adult size,” says the barman, and fills the glasses to the lip so that the liquor is almost convex atop the glasses.

  “Know what that is called?” she asks, pointing to the top of the pour. “A meniscus.”

  They raise the glasses by the stems carefully, nod, snap them dry. “To the meniscus,” he says. “Sounds a bit naughty. Is there also something called a womeniscus?”

  She smiles. “That’s called a pussy.”

  The man with the Påske Bryg looks over again, still wistful, and his wistfulness makes Kerrigan feel fortunate by comparison.

  They cross H. C. Andersens Boulevard to the Town Hall Square, pausing to glance at the statue of Hans Christian Andersen seated in bronze, gazing up toward Tivoli Gardens. She is into her Moleskine again.

  “This was done by Henry Luckow-Nielsen in the fifties.” They stand gazing at Hans Christian in his bronze chair.

  “There’s also another, much older one in Kongens Have, the King’s Garden,” she tells him. “The Erotic Museum on Købmagergade used to have a big poster of that Andersen sculpture with a naked woman seated on his knee. How Andersen would have blushed. That sculpture was made during his lifetime. There was a competition for his seventieth birthday, and the first couple of entries Andersen looked at showed him reading to children—which had been stipulated in the competition guidelines. He didn’t like it. ‘Madonna with child,’ he hissed. He picked the winner—his solitary self, telling a story to an imaginary audience he didn’t have to share his pedestal with. He was a vain man in his old age. All his life, actually. Poor H. C.,” she says, pronouncing the h as “ho” in the Danish fashion. “Poor Ho. C. Such success and so unhappy. All the women he adored, to no avail, poor man. He was always being spurned. But he always ‘got his money back,’ as he referred to writing about his sorrows—whether it was a toothache or a heartache. He puts one of his spurners, Louise Collin, in his tale ‘The Swineherd’ as the haughty princess, and in ‘The Little Mermaid’ as the prince. Hans Christian himself was the mermaid, by the way.”

  Kerrigan, lighting a small cigar, snorts and sits on a bench just back from the statue. She joins him at the opposite end of the bench. He glances at her face, her lips, charmed by her knowledge, her enthusiasm, her wit and irony. He wants to kiss her mouth, considers taking a bold course and doing just that, but he doesn’t dare run the risk of scaring her off. He is also titillated by the thought of her visiting the Erotic Museum, and saying pussy.

  But his attraction makes him remember how hard he fell for Licia. He remembers Licia rolling in the Ionian surf in a bikini the blue of her eyes on the north shore of Cephalonia. How she smiled and stared deep into his eyes. Her love made me into the me I always wanted to be, had been waiting all my life to be: a man loved by a woman like Licia. A man who made a beautiful baby girl with a woman like Licia. She was the woman I hungered for all my life. Then he remembers the neighbor woman on the one side visiting him once, after Licia was gone, inferring, quite unmistakably, that Licia had spent a lot of time with the neighbor man on the other side.

  But in some way he is comforted by the information on Andersen—great men have been unhappy, too, he thinks. You are not the only man who has been thrown away.

  He says, “Hard to picture that lovely little bronze lady on her rock in the water off Langelinje as a transvestite. Andersen in scaly drag.”

  “Not everyone shares your view of her as lovely.” She digs a packet of Prince from her bag, lights one, chin tipped up as smoke issues from her lovely pursed lips.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I hear someone cut her head off.”

  “Twice. The statue was sculpted by Edvard Eriksen and had sat there peacefully since 1913, donated by Carl Jacobsen, the founder of Carlsberg Breweries. He donated many sculptures to Copenhagen. One night in 1964, someone climbed out to her rock with a metal saw and cut her head off. Many believe it was done by the artist Jørgen Nash, referred to as the ‘Mermaid Killer.’ The mermaid’s head was recast and replaced, but someone did it again about twenty-five years later. The theory is that the first time, Nash did it because as an artist he was furious that such a sentimental statue based on such a sentimental tale should come to be a symbol of Copenhagen. The second time, however, it was said to be a journalist trying to make news and a name for himself.”

  “I don’t recall the story being as bad as that.”

  “Are you a sentimentalist? Some love it. But the way it ends! Her soaring to the heavens and all those rosy clouds!”

  He reaches over to touch the bronze book on Andersen’s bronze knee. “So who else did the old boy have the hots for?”

  “Sophie Ørsted—the daughter of H. C. Ørsted …” She consults her book. “1777 to 1851. He discovered electromagnetism in 1820—you know they still call the unit of magnetic strength for him—an oersted.”

  “Isn’t there also a park named for him here in Copenhagen? Ørsted Park?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And there is a fine sculpture garden there. They have also named an avenue, an institute, and an electrical plant for Ørsted. Anyway, Sophie’s father was one of Andersen’s friends—one of the first to recognize that Andersen’s true greatness was not in his plays or novels or travel books, but in his tales. Most of the critics of the time thought the tales trivial and offensive. They were nonacademic, even antiacademic, because they were written in colloquial language. Andersen became an international success in 1835 with his novel The Improvisatore, the same year that he published his first book of Fairy Tales, Told for Children. Ørsted had better sense than the critics of the time. He told Andersen that the novel may have made him famous, but the tales would make him immortal. Andersen always believed he would be famous. He came to Copenhagen at the age of fourteen as a pauper and threw himself at the mercy of society. ‘First you go through a cruel time and then you become famous,’ he explained, and, by the time he was thirty, he had proven that was true. But his love life was always a cruel time. As you can read in his journals. It is said that for every day that he sets an X he practiced onanism.”

  “Honeymoon of the hand, ey? Did he set a double X when he used the stranger?”

  “Stranger?”

  “His left.”

  She sniggers and glances at him with light in her eyes.

  “Moving right along,” he says. “What cafés did he frequent in Copenhagen?”

  “The only café I know of that Andersen frequented was the Caffé Greco in the Via Condotti in Rome, which was the haunt of everyone in Rome,” she continues. “Casanova, Canova, Goethe, Gogol, Byron, Liszt, the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. Andersen used to go to Greco in 1833 when he was in Rome for the first time. He was twenty-eight. Just before he got famous.”

  “Let’s see,” Kerrigan says. “In 1833, Kierkegaard would have been twenty, right?”

  “Yes. And writing in his journals about the sins of passion and the heart being nearer salvation than the sins of reason!”

  “Sounds a bit like Andersen.”

  “To Kierkegaard,” she says, “Andersen was a ‘sniveler,’ the word he used in a review of Andersen’s third novel. Kierkegaard was one of his sternest critics.”

  “How did Andersen take to criticism?”

  “Generally he would weep,” she says, laughing, and he cannot resist joining her, and somehow their laughter at Andersen’s misery and weak nature a century and a half ago makes him feel stronger in the realization that despite being a great artist, Andersen was pretty much a jerk and a baby.

  “I read somewhere,” she continues, “that when he visited Charles Dickens in England, Dickens found Andersen lying facedown on the lawn of Gad’s Hill, Dickens’s home, weeping. Another bad review. Andersen also stood on the bank of Peblinge Lake— just a few block
s from here—and wept.”

  Kerrigan snickers, and she joins him.

  “But he always got his revenge,” she says, “always got his ‘money back.’ He didn’t take his final revenge on Kierkegaard until twenty-five years after the philosopher’s attack on him—and six years after Kierkegaard’s death—when he wrote the tale ‘The Snail and the Rose Bush,’ in 1861. Kierkegaard is the snail, spitting at the world and retiring into his shell, while the rose—”

  “Andersen?”

  “Naturally … keeps on blooming because it can do nothing else.”

  They fall silent in the cool spring evening air. Then she says, “Kierkegaard wasn’t really discovered until twenty years after his death, when Georg Brandes lectured on his work in Germany, and the French made him ‘the father of existentialism.’ Brandes didn’t like ‘The Little Mermaid’ either. Or ‘The Ugly Duckling,’ because the swan that emerges is a domesticated one, not a wild swan. In the folktales and ballads in Denmark, some wildness is shown in nature and in our soul and fate. Many of the old Danish folk ballads were about the elfin women who lure men so they become elfin-struck, elfin-wild, making them dance in the woods and lie with them.”

  “Like Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’ ” An image of dancing in the woods with Licia flashes through his mind.

  “Yes. And there were also elfin women who stood glittering at the edge of the road through the woods waving to lonely travelers to come and dance with them, but if a traveler left the road to go to her, he was led in deeper and deeper as the elfin woman backed away. Finally, when he reached her, she would turn and he would discover she had no back, and he would disappear into the back that was not there, never to be seen again.”

  Kerrigan shifts on the bench, wondering that she is able to sit so still and straight with her cigarette while producing such a wealth of facts. He studies the face of the bronze Andersen sculpture seated so high above him. The thick lips curving out over protruding false teeth, the Hebraic nose, the narrow eyes. “He must have been a pain in the arse.”

  “He traveled with a length of rope in his luggage in case the hotel caught fire, so he could lower himself from the window. He was even said to leave a note by his bedside every night: ‘I only seem dead.’ In case he should slip into a coma while sleeping.”

  Kerrigan asks, “I wonder if he ever read Poe?” at the same time appreciating the conjuncture of the possibility, even probability, feeling enriched in spirit by the moment. “Did he have any friends at all?”

  “Well, he had many fans and royal champions. He knew Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, the Grimm brothers, Liszt, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas. Charles Dickens presented him with a twelve-volume illustrated edition of his works, every volume of which was inscribed with the words, ‘To Hans Christian Andersen from his friend and admirer Charles Dickens.’ In fact, one of Andersen’s tales, ‘The Dung Beetle,’ was written on a public challenge by Dickens to write a story about such a creature. Andersen dedicated the first English edition of his tales to Dickens. He was also Dickens’s house guest in 1857, but he overstayed his welcome by about three weeks—ignoring the visdom of the old Danish proverb that a fish and a guest begin to stink after three days. After that, Dickens stopped answering his letters. Andersen wrote sadly about the end of the friendship in his journals: All over, and that is the way of every story. Which are the closing words of his own tale ‘The Fir Tree.’ ”

  When Kerrigan hears that line—All over, and that is the way of every story—he feels penetrated by it, wounded. He finds himself watching not the statue of Andersen but the face of his Associate, her eyes like green lamps flickering to green shadow. The sureness with which she speaks, the volume of information, faltering only occasionally to consult her Moleskine.

  He drops his cigar and steps on it, looks at her again. “You are a very learned person,” he says softly.

  She gazes at him with a mild blankness. “I am an autodidact,” she says. “A good research secretary. I don’t know anything. I just repeat facts.”

  “I think you know a lot more than you know. But you did say you go barefoot on the weekends. I find that a rather charming picture.” I would love to see your naked little trotters. “Do you paint your toenails?”

  “Would you not like to know.” She stubs out her cigarette against the iron foundation of the bench and tosses it into the gutter. “Shall we push onward to the Palace?”

  The Palace Hotel is just across the Town Hall Square. Kerrigan is startled once again to see, among this elegant architecture, the Burger King and 7-Eleven shops on either prime corner of the square leading into the Walking Street, and the Kentucky Fried Chicken joint a few doors away.

  “This whole place,” she says as they cross the Town Hall Square, “used to be crisscrossed with trolley tracks. Tom Kristensen describes it in Havoc as a kind of desert that he crosses each evening from his job there in the newspaper, over to the west side, where we’ve just come from.” She points diagonally across the square to the windows of the newspaper Politiken.

  “Hærværk,” says Kerrigan. “Havoc. I know the Danish title literally means ‘vandalism,’ but ‘havoc’ is the right translation, I think. It’s very contemporary. About a man—a person—destroying his best possibilities for position. And destroying his position to win back the greater part of his nature.” Then he wonders how that applies to him. Licia destroyed his best possibilities. He examines that thought for self-pity but can find only a statement of fact.

  They are standing under the tall pedestal, atop which is the statue of the Lyre Blowers, and she checks her book. “Incidentally,” she says, “it is said that the horns of the lyre blowers in this sculpture sound only if a virgin over the age of fifteen walks past and that, in fact, they’ve never been heard.”

  Kerrigan smiles but is thinking about Jazz Jastrau in Havoc raising his Lindblom cocktail—one part gin, four parts absinthe—and whispering, Now we begin, quietly, slowly to go to the dogs. “It was a religious book, really,” he says. “Spiritual. A man revolting against the lies of a ‘profession,’ of ‘employment.’ At one point in the book, he says he can never forget Jesus among the whores, and the more he squanders and drinks, the closer Jesus comes to him, rising amidst the havoc of his heart.”

  “So simple?” she says, glancing at him, and he averts his eyes.

  They cross past the looming dark structure of St. Nicholas Church, no longer a church at all but a restaurant, among other things, with a green metal pissoir on the street outside it. Behind the church (Skt. Nikolaj Kirke), his Associate takes him around one side to show him a bust, half hidden in a nook of red bricks. “That’s Tausser, the artist. His real name was Svende Aage Tauscher. Lived from 1911 to ’82. He was a vagabond, a bum really, a drunk, homeless. Still, he painted something like nine thousand pictures in his life, most of them sold to buy drink. When his gallery owner scolded him for selling the pictures so cheap, Tausser said he needed the money because it made him feel so sad when he didn’t have enough when it came his turn to buy a round.”

  Kerrigan studies the bust—a bearded, rumpled, sagging face beneath a rumpled fedora, but with character in the sags, the wrinkles. He thinks how often he passed this church, never noticing Tausser. And he wonders how the man continued to work, to be productive, despite his homelessness, his alcoholism.

  In the Café Nick down the street, Kerrigan asks, “What did Hans Christian Andersen drink?”

  “He liked porter.”

  “Let’s drink a porter then,” says Kerrigan as they sit beneath a large 1920s painting of a woman in a lilac shirt smoking a cigarette, no doubt a racy matter at the time, and the waiter brings them bottles of Carlsberg black stuff.

  They toast the dead tale-teller with a skål, then they drink to a sketched portrait of Tausser on the wall here, too—one that was done by the same man who did his bust, Troels Lybecker. There is another sketched Tausser portrait on the wall, from 1976 by Rune Dyremark. “They say the church was
full when Tausser was buried,” Kerrigan’s Associate says.

  “Pretty good for a homeless guy. How wonderful if there are really ghosts,” says Kerrigan. “If Andersen’s spirit were here right now, witnessing our toast. And Tausser.”

  “They say when you speak of a dead person, he comes back to life for the time you speak.”

  Then they sit in silence among the paintings and dim light of the Nick. Kerrigan is a little tight and wonders if she is really as sober as she seems. He glances at her Moleskine book on the table, wondering how such a slender pad can contain so much information; she dutifully opens it, though he thinks he sees some hesitation pull at the corner of her comely mouth.

  “There used to be an expression, ‘Nicolai Bohemians.’ It applied to the customers of all the small bars and cafés that were around this square, around the church, Sankt Nikolaj. You know who Saint Nikolaj was?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Santa Claus! Father Christmas. This café opened in 1904. It was the main café frequented by artists, but they called the whole area the Minefield because there were so many bars here, tempting people.”

  Kerrigan considers the nearly century-old café, the seven centuries of church here, the great fire of 1795, places himself in the midst of it. Then he remembers the name of a poet who used to drink here. “I know something about this place,” he says. “A poem. Want to hear?”