“People Think I’m a Hack Writer”
A writer is never better than his most recent book, and Kierkegaard strug-
gled to surpass himself every time. “I never forget the anxiety I myself felt,
that I might be unable to equal what I had previously achieved,” he wrote
with desperate sincerity, referring toStages on Life’s Way, which had been
published on April 30, 1845, one day after the publication ofThree Discourses
on Imagined Occasions. He was also concerned about how the book would
be received by the reading public: “Much of what is said in ‘In vino veritas’
will perhaps seem frightfully sensual. I can already hear the cries of indigna-
tion.” But there was no outcry, and June was more than a week old when
Kierkegaard quietly noted the reason: “Stagesdoes not have as many readers
asEither/Orand attracts virtually no attention. This is excellent. In this way
I shake off the gawking mob that insists on being present whenever it thinks
there is a disturbance.” A deficit in the material world became a surplus in
the world of the spirit.
The two books were reviewed inBerlingske Tidendeon May 6 by a certain
“n,” who presented their author, who had just turned thirty-one, with a
slightly delayed birthday present: “If one dares to believe the rumor—which
is surely correct—according to which Mag. Kierkegaard is the author of
Either/Orand the series of works that obviously stem from the same hand,
one might think that he possesses a magic wand with which he can instanta-
neously conjure up his writings, given the almost incredible productivity
his literary output has shown in recent years.” Reviewer “n” displays com-
pletely unfeigned admiration for Kierkegaard’s almost supernatural abilities,
which are all the more impressive since “each one of these works is excep-
tional in the profundity of its reasoning, pursuing its subject in the most
minute detail, all the while displaying unusual beauty and elegance in its
language, and in particular displaying such linguistic suppleness that there
is no living Danish writer who can be compared with the author.”
Kierkegaard reacted to these superlatives three days later by having an
article titled “A Declaration and a Bit More” published inFædrelandet.Init
he protested against n’s thoughtless and confusing way of placing him “in
very close association to the authorship of a number of pseudonymous
books,” of which he was absolutely not the author—a point that he makes
with such dialectical skill, with such Kierkegaardian style, that everyone
could see that itwasin fact Kierkegaard! He would very much like to be
praised, of course—“Oh, yes!,” he writes—but not by a nobody like n,
who disappears “like a sneeze.” If he is to be reviewed, he asks that it be
by one of the genuine authorities—Heiberg, Madvig, or Mynster—a trio