Nor were many other people tempted to do so, either. For example
J. F. Giødwad, the legally responsible editor ofFædrelandet, had had enough.
Earlier, full of concern about the favorable receptionThe Corsairwas en-
joying, he had encouraged Kierkegaard to give the gutter journal a broad-
side, the sooner the better. When he had been working on his piece about
Møller—as Kierkegaard recalled in a bitter retrospective journal entry from
1855—Giødwad had indeed come “hurrying over to me in order to get
hold of the article, standing there while I wrote the final portion.” But no
sooner had the article been published than Giødwad turned on a dime and
clammed up totally. He had no desire to rub the reading public the wrong
way, and therefore refrained from lending public support to Kierkegaard,
who had now become the object of scorn. Kierkegaard viewed this as un-
forgivable desertion, and in 1846 he felt obligated to break off the connec-
tion with Giødwad, whom he had seen every week for years and who was
one of the very few people (perhaps the only person besides Emil Boesen)
Kierkegaard called “my personal friend,” which he surely was. At any rate,
Giødwad flatly refused to comment on Kierkegaard after Kierkegaard’s
death.
Admiration and Envy: When One Word Leads to Another
From the vantage point afforded us by history it might seem both peculiar
and embarrassing that Kierkegaard, who by 1846 had produced more than
half of his entire literary output, would even bother to pay attention to the
sophomoric pranks ofThe Corsair, which, though of course not entirely
harmless, were nonetheless the sort of thing that ought to be assigned to
the category of “amusement” (a category that, according to Constantin
Constantius, included woman). And, indeed, it is not unusual to treat the
Corsairepisode as a little parenthesis on the margin of the great text consti-
tuted by Kierkegaard’s literary output, or to point to it as an example of
Kierkegaard acting as an ethical corrective to his immoral times. The epi-
sode was, however, something other and more than that; it was, as Goldsch-
midt quite accurately put it, a drama, a dramatic triangle, replete with all
the baggage that accompanies such triangles.
As noted, Møller had had enough when he read Kierkegaard’s piece at
the beginning of January. The same applied to Goldschmidt at the end of
February, when he decided to get rid ofThe Corsair. And Kierkegaard him-
self also had nothing further to say publicly after his second article in early