Soren Kierkegaard

This successful literary debut meant that Kierkegaard would be admitted
to the charmed circle of the Heiberg family. Johan Ludvig Heiberg was a
poet, literary critic, translator, journal editor, playwright, and subsequently
head of the Royal Theater, which he supplied with vaudevilles—delightful
comedies of intrigue, replete with songs and never-insurmountable roman-
tic complications—that delighted the audiences of the day. In brief, Heiberg
was the paladin of elegance and wit, of irony and urbanity, good manners,
and intellectual aristocracy, for better or worse. Thus Heiberg was an insti-
tution, an aesthetic supreme court, whose verdicts, while not always per-
fectly fair, were beyond challenge and were therefore of fateful significance.
Furthermore, Heiberg was the administrator of a literary dynasty of noble
lineage. At the time of his banishment from the country in 1800, his father,
P. A. Heiberg, had unquestionably been the country’s best-known writer.
During the period from 1827 to 1845, his mother, Thomasine Buntzen,
known under the name of her second husband as Mrs. Gyllembourg, had
anonymously published no fewer than two dozen novels and short stories.
And, finally, Heiberg was married to Johanne Luise Pa ̈tges, a goddess sprung
from the proletariat, who at the age of thirteen had become the object of
his distinguished erotic lust and who was now indisputably the leading lady
of the Danish stage, the dazzling, bespangled muse of the age. Everyone
admired her, worshipped her, and fell in love with her so thunderously and
passionately that they became profoundly depressed or even—in keeping
with the tragic style of the day—committed suicide. When she starred in
the title role of Oehlenschla ̈ger’sDina, the Copenhagen crowd was so trans-
ported that they unharnassed the horses from her carriage and themselves
drew it from the Royal Theater to her home, an homage previously shown
only to King Frederick VI and the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen! Mrs. Hei-
berg was simply deified by her fans, who could purchase her likeness in the
form of an engraving, or embroidered on handkerchiefs, or emblazoned on
the crowns of their hats; if this was insufficient, people could also choose
from a variety of products bearing Mrs. Heiberg’s name, including a brand
of cigar, a houseplant, a lamp, a type of soap, stationery, tearoom pastries,
chocolates, and a waltz by the Danish waltz king, H. C. Lumbye.
For a quarter century Mrs. Gyllembourg lived with her son and daughter-
in-law, which not only required a great deal of patience and understanding
(the mother-in-law lived to age eighty-three!) but also facilitated a working
partnership that mean-spirited wags dubbed “the Heiberg Factory.” While
the son published his mother’s short stories and plays, she herself wrote for
her son’s journals, and in the evenings Luise appeared on stage in the roles
her husband and her mother-in-law had written with her in mind.