Why More People Should Read This Danish Masterpiece

Yet a funny thing happens on the way to the city: we glimpse an interior world that threatens to hold us back in the town. First a neighbor threatens, in a private meeting with the pastor, to report Per to the town council for stealing apples. As if translating appearances for one too myopic to read them, he emphasizes the cost to the pastor’s position: such a report “will not make your appointment to this parish look good.” But the echo that comes back suggests the pastor’s true concern, not an indignant “my appointment!” but a broken “My son . . .”

In a later incident, when he confronts Per directly, we are securely grounded in the son’s perspective, and participate in Per’s “contempt” for the old man. For a moment, the feeling seems mutual. The father snaps, “It’s gone that far with you, has it?” But then the perspective flits in an odd direction: he has said this, we are told, “without revealing that his worst anxiety”—Per committing some more fleshly sin—”has already, in reality, been allayed.” There is the usual authorial bemusement here at an old man’s prudery, but also a rare emotional force to his fear for his son’s soul. And rarer still is the negative capability that would leave such a clash unresolved—the way our subjective sense of the father, deepening, doesn’t overwrite our initial objections so much as sit alongside them in anxious correction.

This curious quality of suspension and reversal haunts the rest of Lucky Per no less than its folkloric echoes. Once in Copenhagen, under the influence of new acquaintances, Per attempts to shed his bohemian indifference about attire:

He had already ascertained that, to certain eyes, a white shirtfront and an immaculately fitted coat could have more significance for a young man’s future than a prolonged, dedicated, ascetic diligence. Nothing vital was lost so long as appearance was maintained.

Pontoppidan is a great poet of mood, in the sense that his characters are always in one, and that the moods are astutely observed, cross-hatched, even counterintuitive. Where a typical realist might show us a character doing one thing and feeling another, Pontoppidan gives us Per doing one thing, feeling another, and then, in some hidden vault of the self, feeling a third thing he doesn’t even feel he feels. On the surface, he is rather proud of himself as he strides through the streets. But the word “ascetic” is enough for us to feel the pastor s memory ghosting along beside him, trailing the crowd of mocking neighbors we understand must have made Per ashamed. For us, at least, appearance has not been maintained.

And this Oedipal ambivalence is only one of the book’s double visions. In the course of its long unfolding, dozens more characters bloom into parallactic dimension: from Chief Boatswain Olufsen, who prides himself on his “little miscellaneous garden,” to his wife, who steals out to water it with her “nightclothes still under her apron”;  from Trine, the good fairy of the Olufsen household, to Fru Engelhardt, who starts as Anna Karenina and ends as Mae West; and—still a startling conjunction—from the anti-Semitic painter Fritjof Jansen to Lea Salomon, a level-headed Jewish matriarch who loves her husband but, wonderfully, will not let him kiss her right hand.

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No discussion of this novel can be complete without addressing the depiction of Jewish life that takes up much of its middle act. That geometric fact alone would be noteworthy, issuing as it does from a pastor’s son, but Pontoppidan’s treatment of his Jewish characters is even more remarkable for its variety, its complexity, and its frankness. In this regard, his only real competitor among lapsed-Protestant writers is George Eliot, and with all due respect, Lucky Per’s Salomon family, among whom Per finds a fiancée and a fortune, leave her Daniel Deronda in the dust.

One strength of the portrayal is its lived reality. The Salomons palpably share the world in which their author moved, rather than being imagined ex nihilo, or researched into being. Indeed, we might say that the cosmopolitan Copenhagen of Lucky Per belongs more to them than to the title character. As the first long chapter dedicated to the Salomons makes clear, their links to the ghettos and shtetls are generationally attenuated; they are, rather, representative of the class of cultured, moneyed, and assimilated Jews who in the 1870s, along with their Gentile analogues, were leading sleepy Denmark into the future.

Yet with his mastery of implication, Pontoppidan makes clear that this belonging, in all senses, is unstable. Philip Salomon, the nature-loving “King of the Exchange,” grows a little nervous when he steps out into the country, away from the protections of city life;  his feeling of security has slipped. Meanwhile, the “jolly” Romantic Fritjof collapses into a hateful singularity of vision, a sort of fascist nostalgia for the lost privileges of race. And for all Per’s unease at Fritjof’s jeremiads, his complex and shifting feelings toward the Salomons seem driven by his own sense of a vanished birthright. It’s not their money he’s after, though that might help with his canal plan. It’s what he perceives—incorrectly—as their comfort in their own skins.

One of the great strengths of Lucky Per is the way it gives play to all shades of anti-Semitism, often without the moral scare quotes we feel in Eliot. Against the charms of impetuous Nanny Salomon, or of her brother Ivan, an ingratiating bachelor whose “deepest self” is “altruistic, childlike, empathic,”  Pontoppidan sets the prejudice not only of Fritjof and his circle, but of Per himself. He sees Nanny, at first, as an “Oriental beauty” and dismisses Ivan as “a foolish little Jew.” If he comes to feel pleasure, even admiration, in the company of the Salomons, it is less a mark of distinction in his character than a function of habitual exposure to other people, which in Pontoppidan can wear down a bias but never quite wear it out.

It might be tempting, early on, to mistake the character’s point of view for the author’s. When we enter the Salomon household, we enter, too, the tropes of phrenology. The father, Philip Salomon, must, among other qualities, have “uncommonly thick red lips.” The court jester, Uncle Heinrich Delft, enjoyable for reasons that have little to do with any stereotype, must nonetheless have an “ape-like head.” His sister Lea’s beauty, and the suggestion that he himself is “a testimony to the irregularity with which characteristics peculiar to the Jewish race emerge,”  open up an interesting double reading: perhaps his ugliness is the aberration? Yet some “peculiar characteristics” certainly attach to the initial portrait of Jakobe, the brilliant oldest Salomon daughter, with her “large hooked nose . . . wide mouth . . . and . . . short, recessed chin.” The impression made on Per is “disagreeable,” and it seems impossible to say in this moment that a novel that would see her so clinically doesn’t share the sentiment.

But then something amazing happens. The instant Per leaves the room, Jakobe complains, “But the staring eyes! I found him rather repulsive.” And for all her intellectual gifts, her distaste, driven home by another echo, is no less physical than Per’s. “He made an unpleasant impression on me, like a horse with glass eyes.” Later, Jakobe will decide that perhaps she has assessed too harshly his “peculiar attributes of character.” And in the space of a phrase, we see stereotype become stereoscopic—every perspective has its opposite, everything is fathomlessly deep. And superficial:  tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to. What is left but for the two of them to fall in love?

This surprising development is the largest single instance of double vision in the novel, as it grants us privileged and extended access to Jakobe’s mind. Indeed, she becomes almost a co-protagonist;  it is no stretch to call her, as Lebowitz has elsewhere, “one of literature’s greatest and most interesting heroines.” Jakobe is as intelligent as anyone out of James, as bold as anyone out of Austen, as perverse as anyone out of Dostoevsky. Moreover, she is Per’s doppelgänger, driven by her own ambitions and urges.

And she opens, in one of Pontoppidan’s signature clearings, a view to the real wages of anti-Semitism. It is a flashback to a Berlin train station, where, waiting to depart for the south, she sees, “some way off  on the platform, a group of pitiable, ragged people, surrounded by a circle of curious, gaping onlookers held back by police.” And then

on the large, half-darkened waiting room floor, hundreds of the same kind of fantastic, ragged forms she had seen on the platform . . . men, women, children, gray-bearded old men, suckling infants lying on their mothers’ breasts. Some were almost naked; many had bloody bandages around their foreheads or hands; all were sallow, emaciated, dirty, as if they had been wandering for days in the sun and dust.

It dawns on Jakobe that these must be the Russian Jews she has heard about, refugees from a pogrom:

She had read in the newspapers, every day through the whole summer, about these crowds of refugees who were half wild with terror over the scandalous crimes perpetrated against them, abetted by the indifference of the authorities. . . . She had tried to console herself by assuming the picture to be exaggerated, since such inhumanity, committed by a powerful and industrious populace, would be impossible in this century of freedom and enlightenment.

But this novel, with its relentless probing for what lies beyond our blind spots, will leave standing no final protection from the human truth—not class, not learning, not ideology—and in these moments when a character grows strong enough to drop her blinders and simply see, as the novelist sees, Lucky Per becomes not just great, but prophetic.

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And still at its center stands Per Sidenius, likeable-unlikeable, mercurial and unchanging, Nietzschean and Darwinian and Freudian and perhaps even Marxian, all and none of the above. He is the novel’s largest paradox, its toughest selling point in a black-and-white world . . . and, I’ve come to feel, its richest reward. For where Jakobe is the great positive presence in the novel, formed of earthly qualities and attributes, Per, her equal and opposite, is a kind of negative space, an emanation of spirit. In his parabolic fall away from Jakobe in the book’s long third act, he passes through marriage, parenthood, homes, but no position is stable. The only things that seem to leave a mark are his lifelong sense of exile and his restless forward drive. It is Per’s intimation, as he nears one of the great, strange conclusions in the history of the novel, that the burden is not his alone to bear:

We seek a meaning to life, an aim for our struggles and suffering. But one day, we are stopped by a voice from the depths of our being, a ghostly voice that asks, “Who are you?” From then on, we hear no other question. . . . Is what we call the soul merely a passing mood? . . . Or do we have as many souls in us as there are cards in a game of Cuckoo. Every time you shuffle the deck a new face appears: a jester, a soldier, a night owl.

The restless reshufflings of Lucky Per appear, in this light, an attempt to bring into focus an existential predicament we still, a century later, resist seeing clearly. Jakobe’s vision in the train station may throw us into the realm of tomorrow morning’s headlines, but Per is the most audaciously modern thing here: he is, like us, on the way to himself.

Whether he ever gets there is in some sense the engine of suspense driving us forward. But a clue lies in the title, a final obstacle of translation, a final doubling of vision. The Danish word “lykke,” like the German “glück,” means in a single stroke both “happiness” and “luck.” No English word can quite convey the meaning, though Lebowitz lets it rustle through a range of nearby idioms—”by chance,” “hazard,” “fortunately.” In the novel’s stunning last chapter, our “lykke” Per is aging and alone on the Jutland heath, but in full (he feels) possession of himself. We are free to believe him or not, to see him as happy but not lucky, or lucky but not happy, or both things, or neither, but in any case the curious light that seemed to shine behind previous clearings in the text now pours through—”a conclusion of resignation,” Bloch wrote in his misbegotten eulogy, “yet illuminated, like the final paintings of Rembrandt.”

Per Sidenius in these pages is the apotheosis of Pontoppidan’s prismatic vision, the transparency that is the sum of all colors. And naturally, he is the final reversal in a novel full of them. He may have failed at his “great work,” but the author standing behind him manages to “keep the wound open,” as real artists must do. If only for a few moments, he clears a channel that seems to connect what we would more comfortably view as incommensurable seas:  proximity and distance, joy and sadness, the fairy tale and the avant-garde, the 19th century and the 21st. Whatever the vicissitudes of literary fortune, it is our luck he belongs to us now.

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From Garth Risk Hallberg’s introduction to Lucky Per by Henrik Pontoppidan. Introduction copyright (c) 2019 by Garth Risk Hallberg. Reprinted by permission of Everyman’s Library, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Garth Risk Hallberg

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of City on Fire. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and The Millions; His novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was published in 2007.