Kierkegaard was at his wits’ end, and this becomes clear when we inspect
the large number of unpublished attacks and rejoinders—some of them tes-
tily aristocratic, others venomous and hairsplitting, some in the low-comic
style that wasThe Corsair’s special province, others in various other styles—
all of them groping in vain for an appropriately wry face and a fitting pose.
If the controversy had been “a purely aesthetic controversy about who was
the wittiest and that sort of thing, then of course the matter would have
been easily settled,” he noted rather objectively, but unfortunately that was
not what the controversy was about. Thus, in a piece that was repeatedly
rewritten and that became increasingly unfocused and embittered, Kierke-
gaard felt obliged to insist that he was not “in competition withThe Corsair”:
“I hope that no clever soul busies himself with saying ‘that was really not a
witty article.’ No, in fact, that is not what it is supposed to be.” All the
same, several pages later he made the attempt: “Petrarch believed he would
be immortalized by his Latin writings, and it was his erotic poetry that did
it. Fate treats me even more ironically. Despite all my diligence and my
efforts, I have not been able to fathom what it was the times required—and
yet it was so close at hand. It is inconceivable that I did not discover it by
myself, that someone else had to say it: It was my trousers....Were they
red with a green stripe or green with a red stripe!” In a way it was not
without humor. It was just all too intellectual, and therefore it was simply
ineffectual when the people to whom one was speaking were “Jew business-
men, shop clerks, prostitutes, schoolboys, butcher boys, et cetera.”
It was only too human. A growing sense of defeat put Kierkegaard in an
aggressive and disorganized state of mind in which he reacted to the absence
of evenhandedness with increasing unevenhandedness: “The Corsairis of
course a Jewish rebellion against the Christians (the opposite of a pogrom)
and against other Jews if they will not acceptThe Corsair’s notion of re-
spect....Because, look over there in the cellar entrance, there he sits, the
idea ofThe Corsair, the dominator, he himself, the enforcer, the book-
keeper, the cellarman, the vagabond prince, the usurer Jew or whatever
you want to call him....Soletusgetthese talents out into the open and
see what they can do. Let them write on the same terms on which other
authors write, one on one, using their real names without hiding in the
cellar—then I will fritter away even more hours on a polemic of this sort.”
The Squint-Eyed Hunchback
Kierkegaard came to fritter away more than a few hours. Indeed, he frittered
away days, weeks, months on this polemic against Goldschmidt and his
“office of literary garbage collection,” which he threatened with fire and