SOURCE: Ingwerson, Faith, and Niels Ingwerson. “Introduction: The Age, the Man, and His Vision.” In Quests for a Promised Land: The Works of Martin Andersen Nexø, pp. 3-33. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Faith and Niels Ingwerson trace the political and cultural climate during Martin Andersen Nexø's time, also providing overviews of his major works and themes.]

Martin Andersen Nexø was always involved in the history of his age: he recorded it as he saw it, and he wanted to set his mark on it. His oeuvre is a statement that was meant to influence opinions and affect lives. A necessary delineation follows of his times, his life and career, and his artistic universe—the contours of which may be less clear-cut than they at first seem.

ASPECTS OF DANISH SOCIAL HISTORY

In 1869, at the birth of Martin Andersen, who in 1894 added Nexø to his name, the industrial revolution was transforming Danish society. Small factories and cheap new housing projects were forming a dark ring around the old city, and the inhabitants of the old neighborhoods were looking with suspicion, if not apprehension, at the new masses. In small ways labor had begun to organize; thus, a class struggle was in the offing.¹

Although in the rural areas, where the majority of the people still lived, feudalism had supposedly been abolished, the traditional way of life—as the early parts of Pelle the Conqueror and Ditte, Humanity's Child show—continued along age-old patterns. The common peasantry, the almue, worked on the farms for food, lodging, and meager wages. Many, however, followed Pelle's and Ditte's example and went to the city, which seemed to offer jobs and upward mobility. Those workers were eventually to give a different face to Danish politics. Their example was followed, somewhat later, by the working classes in the other Scandinavian countries. Between 1871 and 1916, Social Democratic parties were formed in all of Scandinavia, and as a rule, those parties were closely tied to the labor unions.² During the same years, the political spectrum in Denmark—going from right to left—consisted of the following major parties: the Conservatives, the Liberals, the Radical Liberals, and the Social Democrats. Toward the close of the First World War, leftist splinter groups—such as the syndicalists and the anarchists—resenting what they saw as the authoritarian stance of the Social Democrats, attempted to dominate the unions. Ironically, those schisms led to the formation of the fairly doctrinaire Danish Communist Party.

The first significant stirrings of a socialistic movement were felt in 1871, when the young Louis Pio (1841-94) started a magazine that advocated the overthrow of the prevailing political order. In fact, Pio formed a section of the First International (1864-76) and wrote to Karl Marx predicting a glorious future for socialism in Denmark. The authorities took Pio seriously, for when he organized a rally in May, 1871, the police intervened and arrested its leaders. The conservative government prohibited the International, but in consequence of that repressive act more unions began to form.

The laborious process of unionizing the often timid workers continued, and by 1890, a national workers' organization was in existence. Its adversaries, the industrial employers, responded in kind; thus, both sides were readying themselves for a confrontation. The workers were simultaneously making themselves felt within the parliamentary system, for their party, that of the Social Democrats, gained three seats in the election of 1890. The party had, however, abandoned Pio's allegiance to the First International and had modeled itself—following the German example—along the non-revolutionary, reformist lines of the Second International (1889-1914). The Social Democrats could then join the bourgeois Liberal Party in opposition to the Conservatives, whose rule—without a parliamentary majority—was unconstitutional. The success of the strategy of the Social Democrats was evidenced by their having twelve members elected to parliament in 1898.

The spring of 1899 was a decisive one for the Danish workers' movement. In a major conflict between labor and management, both sides showed their muscle; quickly spreading strikes led to punitive lockouts. As the battle of wills grew more intense, fears grew that the nation was heading for an economic breakdown. Finally, after nineteen weeks of sparring, the adversaries began negotiations that resulted in a settlement, which some deemed to be a major victory for labor and which others evaluated as, at best, a preservation of the status quo. Although the victory may have been largely symbolic, such symbols were of tremendous significance; the average worker undoubtedly felt that labor had proved its ability to stand up to intimidation and to make its adversaries listen and yield. Scenes from that dramatic period make up the rousing third volume of Pelle the Conqueror.

One reason for the clout of the workers was that Denmark by then had become quite heavily industrialized. Stock companies, which had been rarities twenty years before, were now numerous, and foreign capital was pouring into Denmark. Thus, the country was becoming a modern capitalistic state, in which employers were becoming more and more distant and anonymous. By the same token, the private production of commodities by artisans was slowing down, since the small shops could not compete with the new technology, the specialization, and the cheap labor of industry.

Although skilled workers felt politically stronger and more secure in their jobs—as the fourth volume of Pelle the Conqueror reflects—they simultaneously adopted the habits and norms of the petit bourgeoisie. It was that abandonment of those workers on the lowest rungs of society which Nexø later was to portray in the heartbreaking latter part of Ditte, Humanity's Child, which in graphic detail captured the suffering of the very poor. That novel thus indirectly comments on a sad historical irony: as the critic Anker Gemzøe has documented, the labor settlement of 1899 had served to consolidate the power of management.³ The strength of unions was curbed both by the agreement that compulsory arbitration should determine the outcome of future conflicts and by the ruling that management should remain in complete control of the daily process of production.

Since the leaders of labor had little tradition or theory upon which to rely, they had agreed to conditions that in the long run favored their opponents. For labor, such tangible gains as shorter hours, prohibition of child labor, better salaries, and job security seemed to be unquestionably solid steps forward. It should also be recalled that the Social Democrats, who were committed to working within the parliamentary system, had adopted the reformist idea that historical inevitability would see to the collapse of capitalism and the peaceful birth of a socialistic state.

Such a commitment to strategies in behalf of an evolutionary political process was naturally anathema to revolutionary minds within the workers' movement, but the anarchists and syndicalists belonged to a distinct minority, and their protests had little effect. Actually, the Social Democrats made impressive gains in the first elections of the new century, and by 1913, their party occupied thirty-two seats in parliament. Party leaders, such as Thorvald Stauning (1873-1942) and Frederik Borgbjerg (1866-1936), negotiated favorable health insurance and unemployment benefits but tended to discourage the supposedly inflationary demands for heavy salary increases.

During the first decades of the new century, the industrial workers could take pride in a party that protected and represented their interests. Since the Social Democrats still had to cooperate with the Liberals, a party dominated by farmers, the plight of the unorganized farm workers—the rural proletariat—was largely neglected. Only the recently established party of the Radical Liberals, one that counted the radical intelligentsia among its voters, took it upon itself to represent the interests of a segment of the poorer rural population, namely, the small holders. When that party formed a minority government in 1913, a close alliance was established between it and that of the Social Democrats, and in 1916, Thorvald Stauning—who was later to become the first Social Democratic prime minister—was appointed to a ministerial post.

Although that event may seem mundane, it reflected the substantial power of the growing labor force. The Radical Liberals had needed the support of the Social Democrats, and together they adopted a policy of wage and price regulations that was intended to keep the government in control of the national economy during the chaotic years of the First World War. To the Social Democrats and Radical Liberals that policy meant, in theory, that the lower-income groups would be protected against the fluctuations of a simple liberalistic economy; to the conservative parties it meant, ominously, that a strong state would be forged to the destruction of a liberalistic society.⁴

During the war Denmark remained neutral, while prospering from its proximity to warring nations that badly needed supplies. That situation inspired extravagant economic speculation and created a special breed of profiteers who—resentful of the interventions of the government—gambled on wild investments. As Nexø's retrospective work In an Age of Iron shows, fortunes were quickly made and lost.

Labor, however, did not prosper. Wages were not in keeping with the rising prices, and since raw materials necessary for industry failed to arrive as the war intensified, many workers were laid off. The sense of crisis was augmented by the ascent of the Bolshevik regime in Russia, since it seemed possible that ravaged Germany, then clearly losing the war, and even discontented Denmark were ripe for revolution.

The effect of that economically motivated political tension was that Danish workers were polarized. In the press the Social Democrats, who had finally become part of the political establishment, vehemently attacked the Soviet Union, whereas the syndicalists, who opposed the strong participation of a labor party in government—since the unions would then be subject to the state—found the Soviet experiment admirable and were gaining the attention of many uneasy workers. In the year 1918, there were a number of wildcat strikes, as well as some demonstrations that ended in violence and arrests. Behind those actions of protest there were a few new, small leftist parties and organizations that advocated the overthrow of the bourgeois order. Never in modern times had Denmark seemed closer to revolution.

The Social Democrats, nevertheless, prevailed. Since management wanted peace on the postwar labor market in order to ensure stepped-up production, the workers were able to obtain significant wage increases and the eight-hour workday. In the election of 1920, the Social Democrats made considerable gains and became—with forty-two seats—the country's second largest party. Although the next government was formed by the Liberal Party, it was clear that the day of organized labor's national rule was close; in 1923, Stauning became the first Danish Social Democratic prime minister. The Social Democratic Party, which became and remained the nation's strongest party, was to be out of power for only short periods. It was instrumental in planning and establishing the modern welfare state. Although the party would often be ready to cooperate with parties to its right, especially with the Radical Liberal, it quite consistently refused to form alliances with parties to its left. As a result, those who deplored the reformist line of the Social Democrats were to find that the party constantly discredited itself by giving way to bourgeois ideology.

Nexø had sporadically favored the camp to the left of the Social Democrats, and although he had periods of reconciliation with the party, after the events of 1918 he never trusted its leaders. His fictionalized memoirs, Morten the Red, offer in minute detail a record of the compromises of the Social Democrats that gradually turned him against the party. Nexø, who retained his identification with the class from which he had risen, could not forgive the Social Democrats for three betrayals: (1) that in their progress they had left the very poor behind to form a new proletariat; (2) that they had turned out to be opportunistic and, in spite of their rhetoric, adopted bourgeois political measures; and eventually, (3) that they had refused to recognize the Soviet Union as the ideal socialistic state.

The remainder of Nexø's life does not need to be outlined politically but can be treated more fittingly in a biographical sketch. It suffices to add that Nexø watched the international political scene closely and wrote polemically and spoke passionately against those political forces and historical events that threatened his vision of an ideal society. He deplored the rise of fascism; he castigated the Social Democrats for their less than vigilant attitude toward the fascists; and eventually, he lashed out at Western hostility toward the Soviet Union after the Second World War.

NEXø'S LIFE AND CAREER

Martin Andersen Nexø had firsthand insight into the ways in which the poor—whether they lived in the country or in the city—eked out an existence.⁵ He was born in a slum district of Copenhagen, and although his parents, Mathilde and Hans Jørgen Andersen, soon moved to a healthier neighborhood, the boy's early years were not easy. His father, a stonemason from the island of Bornholm,⁶ was a hard worker, but one prone to spending his money in taverns; thus, Nexø's mother, an undauntedly brave woman, often had to support the family.

In 1877, the family moved to Nexø, a tiny, old-fashioned, coastal town on Bornholm. There, the family's economic circumstances improved somewhat. The internal family situation, however, remained unaltered, and as before, the three surviving children sought shelter with their mother. It is hardly surprising that Nexø praises the endurance of the hardworking women of the poor throughout his works or that such women became a symbol in his works of the best qualities within the lower classes.

Martin received some rudimentary education, but as soon as he was old enough, he had to help his father in the quarry or tend cattle in the fields. True to custom, he left home after his confirmation and started work as a farm hand. Since he was a sickly boy, the hard physical labor of farming exceeded his strength, and instead he sought to become an artisan. In 1884, he apprenticed himself to a shoemaker in Rønne, the island's largest town. Although he found the work boring and his six years in Rønne to be lonely ones, he fortunately discovered the vast world of books and a small circle of people—inspired by the Grundtvigian folk-high-school movement—in which such authors as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Henrik Ibsen were eagerly debated.⁷ The gifted Martin was slowly acquiring a taste for education, and in 1891, he eagerly accepted an opportunity to attend the island's rather mediocre folk high school.

In those years socialistic ideas and rumors of labor unrest reached even the backwater of Rønne, where the old artisans fearfully and helplessly saw their crafts being threatened by industrially produced goods. During a summer vacation from the school, Martin worked as a mason's helper and encountered a German glazier, who told rousing tales of battles between workers' organizations and industrialists. As the young German was about to leave, he admonished Martin never, upon becoming an author, to forget the plight of the proletariat.

That exhortation must have seemed strange to Martin, for he merely wanted to become a teacher. Having been given some financial support, he went to Askov on the Danish mainland of Jutland. Askov was the flagship of the thriving folk-high-school movement, and in a sense, it became the young man's university. Martin delighted in the excellent teaching at Askov, and although he never shared in the school's Christian idealism and even actively reacted against it, he remained forever grateful to the folk-high-school movement for the role it played in his life. In the gruff voice of the later socialist rang the rhetoric of the folk high school, and in his way, Nexø continued to work in the spirit of the movement: he saw himself as an educator who would bring light to the people.⁸

In 1893, after two years at Askov, Martin obtained a teaching position in Odense, but owing to illness—first diagnosed as pneumonia and then as tuberculosis—his life suddenly took a different direction. With financial backing from various individuals, he was able to leave for Italy in order to regain his health. He was to help earn his way by writing travel letters to Danish newspapers.⁹ When at Askov he had written for the school paper, and later he not only had published an article on Bornholm and some poems but had even practiced within the genre of travel chronicles by sending to a Norwegian newspaper a false, but lively, account of a supposed trip to Australia.¹⁰ It seems that the former farm hand and cobbler had begun to imagine having a career as a writer, and it was then that he added “Nexø” to his name.¹¹

Nexø's travels in Italy and Spain—from December, 1894, to June, 1896—revived his health and spirits. Although he had to endure long waits for money from home, he was a joyful vagabond. His splendid and vivid articles indicate that his stay in southern Europe had a major impact on his life: in Spain he encountered the proletariat anew and deeply admired its stubborn optimism in the face of suffering and oppression. Nexø's first journey abroad was both a catalyst and a homecoming, for it renewed his solidarity with the classes he, as a budding author, had left behind.

From Nexø's return to Denmark until the year 1901, he held several teaching positions; then, at the age of thirty-two, he made up his mind to live by his pen alone. Since he had married by then and had a family to support, it was a rather daring decision, even though he already had some books to his credit. One of them, completed shortly after his return from Spain, was the collection of short stories Shadows (Skygger, 1898).

The stories composed at that time fluctuate in choice of style and subject matter. Some of the texts, which are in the vein of the so-called “decadent” literature of the 1890's, use Naturalistic detail to record a favorite theme: the process of mental deterioration. It is highly likely that Nexø was influenced in his own such writing by his friend and fellow writer Jakob Hansen (1868-1909), who was deeply infatuated with Nietzsche.¹²Shadows also contains texts, however, that amply suggest the path Nexø's mature works were to take. The famous story “The Lottery-Swede” (“Lotterisvensken”), as well as poignant glimpses into the plight of the Spanish proletariat, not only give a disturbing insight into the degradation and destructiveness of poverty but also distinctly place the blame for such conditions on the class system. Nexø, as Børge Houmann maintains, may not have analyzed and understood the nature of capitalism nor have advocated socialism as a remedy against oppression, but in Shadows he gave vent to both a righteous anger and a revolutionary fervor.¹³

If a common denominator can be found for Shadows and Nexø's following works, it is that—much like the works of the radical intelligentsia of the 1890's—they took swipes at the dictums and morality of the bourgeoisie. The young author fared better when he relied upon personal experience, rather than upon literary convention, and his two collections of short stories called From the Earth (Muldskud, 1900 and 1905) contain tersely brilliant studies of the extraordinary fates that he remembered from Bornholm.

Nexø was becoming more comfortable with his craft, and his novel Waste (Dryss, 1902) showed that he had also learned to handle the longer narrative form. Waste tends to be overlooked by critics, who find it decadent and relegate it to fin-de-siècle literature. Although Waste revels in the egocentricity and defeatism of the age, it is also a well composed and angry book, the sheer verbal energy of which suggests an authorial will to transcend the cultural fatigue of the radical intelligentsia.

It was to that anti-bourgeois segment of society that Nexø felt closest during his early years as an author, and it was to that group that Jakob Hansen and such socially committed young writers as Jeppe Aakjær (1866-1930) and Johan Skjoldborg (1861-1936) belonged. Although, many years later, Nexø characterized that period of his life as one of confusion, he saw Waste as having been a liberating transition, for “through that book on sickly individualism (egoism), I had found the common, natural being: the worker, the proletarian.”¹⁴

A testimony to that exuviation is Days in the Sun (Soldage, 1903), in which Nexø records the journey that he and his wife took in 1902-03 to retrace the steps of his first trip abroad.¹⁵ As Børge Houmann has pointed out, in Spain Nexø recognized and thereafter retained a heartfelt sympathy for the anarchists' deep-seated suspicion of authority, an attitude he knew well from the common peasantry of Bornholm.¹⁶ Nexø was at last ready to confirm his solidarity with the proletariat.

The novel Pelle the Conqueror brought Nexø and the Social Democrats closer together. Houmann points out that, when Nexø started his ambitious tetralogy about the industrial proletariat's struggles and success, he turned his attention for the first time to the conflict between organized labor and management, the battleground of the Social Democrats.¹⁷ The hero of the novel, Pelle, a victorious labor organizer, was a symbolic embodiment of the labor movement's hopes and dreams.

Although Nexø had declared that he wrote as a proletarian revolutionary—and although he had prophesied, after the Potemkin incident in 1905, that one day the red flag would fly over Europe—Pelle the Conqueror was not a revolutionary novel.¹⁸ Pelle became a Social Democrat, for in spite of his anarchistic leanings, he worked within the system and shunned violence as a means of change.

Pelle the Conqueror was quite well received, and its author soon became a celebrity on the party's lecture circuit. The novel was successfully serialized in numerous Social Democratic newspapers, at first in Germany and then in Denmark. Nexø's rise to international fame had begun.

Nexø had become a Social Democrat in 1910. The party he joined was led by a generation who had modeled it along reformist lines. Although Nexø had little in common with the leaders of the party, he vested his belief in the Social Democratic masses both at home and abroad and hoped that the various workers' parties would ensure world peace. He was thus deeply disillusioned when the German Social Democrats, upon the declaration of war in 1914, became intensely nationalistic and when the editors of the famous satirical magazine Simplicissimus even urged him publicly to side with the German people. Nexø, who liked Germany, sadly refused; four and a half years passed before another contribution by Nexøappeared in Simplicissimus.¹⁹

Nexø nevertheless continued to visit Germany during the war, and as a loyal Social Democrat, he sent home optimistic bulletins. As the war was drawing toward its painful close, however, he grew increasingly ill at ease as a mouthpiece for the Social Democrats. His speeches never dealt with the nitty-gritty of party issues but rather painted vistas of a glorious future for the masses. The intolerance of Stauning and other Danish leaders toward those who broke with party discipline undoubtedly vexed Nexø, and in a draft for a speech in behalf of some rebels he grumbled that “respect for the law must have its limits.”²⁰

The events of 1918 changed Nexø's life. He was angered by the vicious attitude of the Social Democrats toward the syndicalists, and on November 19, he sent a sum of money in support of the jailed leaders of the Workers' Socialist Party. Since the act was touted in that party's paper, it called down upon him the wrath of the Social Democrats. Nexø retaliated by renouncing his membership in the party.

During those years Nexø wrote and published Ditte, Humanity's Child. Its vision, in comparison with that of Pelle the Conqueror, is a dark one, since Nexø focuses on those of the poor whom the Social Democrats had betrayed. The book's suffering protagonist is a proletarian woman, who at the age of twenty-five dies, completely worn out by inhuman toil. The novel was the second installment in Nexø's grand plan for a trilogy on the Danish worker. Pelle, the hero of Pelle the Conqueror, the first part of that overall trilogy, is barely mentioned in Ditte, Humanity's Child. When he is, he is shrugged off as a mere party loyalist by his former friend Morten, a writer of proletarian novels. Even in the earlier work there were indications, as the novel approached its joyful conclusion, that Nexø was trying to create a distance between himself and Pelle; in Ditte, Humanity's Child Morten is clearly intended to be Nexø's mouthpiece.

Ditte, Humanity's Child is generally recognized as being a second masterpiece. Although Pelle the Conqueror brought Nexø glory, Ditte, Humanity's Child did little to alleviate his drastically altered situation at the end of the war. He had become estranged from the Social Democrats and, more importantly, also from the people about whom he wrote. He was a successful writer and a member of the literary establishment; thus, no matter how well he served his beloved masses by his pen, he had become separated from them.²¹ When one reads the third part of the planned trilogy, Morten the Red, which encompasses those pre- and postwar years, one gains the nagging feeling that Nexø had become a lonely man, a man with numerous acquaintances and many correspondents but few close friends. His political disappointments, feeling of isolation, and marital crises are depicted in unpleasant and unrelenting detail in Morten the Red. In 1913, he was divorced and remarried, but in 1924, that marriage was also dissolved. It, too, became part of Nexø's fictional memoirs.

The disillusionment with the Social Democrats that colors Ditte, Humanity's Child was undoubtedly a result of the events of 1918. In many ways that year was a milestone in Nexø's life: from then on, he wholeheartedly embraced the Russian Revolution and judged people and movements according to whether they were for or against the Soviet Union. His absolute faith in the Soviet Union may seem amazing, but for Nexø, the October Revolution was a realization of his—and his class's—dream of the rise of the proletariat. First and foremost Nexø let his deep solidarity with the proletariat be his guide; he wanted the lower classes to lead decent lives and to receive the value of their hard work. That dream was hardly revolutionary and had been espoused by bourgeois political parties as well, but as far as Nexø was concerned, only communism was honestly devoted to that program. Nexø was never—as he happily admitted—a theorist, and his reading in Karl Marx was scant.²² Therefore, he easily fell into inconsistencies and even doctrinal heresy, but he was undoubtedly more genuinely committed to the improvement of the social conditions of the masses than many a well trained Marxist. Perhaps Nexø's attitude toward the Soviet Union and the goals of communism can be most adequately summed up by suggesting—as Jørgen Aabenhus does—that, to Nexø, the Soviet Union became a symbol of everything that was supportive to peace, to joyful work, to personal happiness, to justice, and to equality.²³ The new Russia was appointed Nexø's Eden, and it was impossible for him to question the governance of that Promised Land.

When, in 1922, Nexø traveled to the Soviet Union, he found a nation in which leaders and masses were close to one another. In Lenin—and later in Stalin—Nexø saw the embodiment of the proletariat, a genius who had preserved his qualities as a member of the common people.²⁴ Nexø published his exuberant impressions of the new Russia in Toward the Dawn (Mod Dagningen, 1923), a book that bourgeois critics greeted coolly, for it depicted the Soviet Union as a nation in which the solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems were sought with joy and courage.

Once Nexø called Marx a prophet or seer, and it was much the same role that the author took upon himself as the years went by.²⁵ Although he had become a prominent member of the Workers' Socialist Party and later became involved in the struggle between various leftist parties that eventually resulted in the formation of the Danish Communist Party in 1923, he had little taste for the cumbersome details of day-to-day politics.²⁶

In 1923, Nexø left Denmark for a seven-year exile in southern Germany, where he put much of his energy and money into establishing a proletarian publishing house that eventually failed.²⁷ He married Johanna May in 1925 and thus achieved a new stability in his life. He became fairly reconciled with the Danish Social Democrats and wrote for their press—the Communist Party's press in Denmark was then minuscule and thus hardly a forum; in fact, in 1929, the major Social Democratic newspaper arranged the celebration in honor of Nexø's sixtieth birthday.

On that same day, Nexø's new novel, In an Age of Iron, appeared. It was a book voicing a relentless criticism of the ruinous economic speculations on the part of the Danish farmer during the years of the First World War. Ironically, the book appeared just prior to the economic catastrophe of 1929.

In 1930, Nexø and his family returned to Denmark and to trouble. In a letter in 1924, he had told a friend:

I feel just marvelous down here [in Germany]. The proportions are bigger, and people are bigger too. The bourgeoisie here does not treat me like rabble, even though I stand up for the revolutionary proletariat; on the contrary. And although one is not prone to megalomania, it is pleasant to be treated decently. I represent the public consciousness through my production, which expresses the greatest in the age, the movement of the lower classes. Everybody here has a sufficient sense of history not to say, like those at home: “He has written so nicely about the poor that one can't imagine his being a communist.”²⁸

Whether this statement reflects simple self-esteem or conceit is a moot point, but it does reflect the important fact that Nexø, who felt a proud solidarity with the international proletariat, was prone to making rather undiplomatic remarks about the Danish “duckpond.” He riled the nationalistically minded and, of course, all those who remained fearful of the Soviet Union. Actually, owing to crude forms of harassment, Nexø and his family found it necessary to move to Copenhagen from the small provincial town in which they had settled initially.²⁹

Although Nexø seemed to have lost a good deal of his standing with the Danish people, he was nevertheless a writer of world renown—a fact that Hitler underscored, after he took power in 1933, by blacklisting Nexø's books—and he became an untiring participant in international movements and conferences for the preservation of peace and for a resistance to fascism. He visited the Soviet Union several times, and in numerous articles and the book Two Worlds (To Verdener, 1934) he reported with relish the continued social progress in the communist world. To him, the Soviet Union was the only effective bulwark against fascist imperialism; thus, even the Moscow Trials, a part of which he witnessed, could not shake his faith in communism.³⁰

In 1937, after he had visited war-torn Spain to attend an anti-fascist authors' conference, he wrote a pamphlet admonishing the Western world to wake up to the threat of a fascist usurpation of power. In his honor the Danish volunteers who enlisted to fight against Franco even called their unit “the Nexø brigade.”³¹

During the 1930's, Nexø wrote his remarkable Memoirs (Erindringer, 1932-39). They were well received by bourgeois critics, who distinguished between Nexø the wonderful writer and Nexø the red politician, an irritating distinction that haunted him for the rest of his life. In 1939, when he published a strong attack on the Finnish government, which he considered to be semi-fascist, many of the admirers of his art turned against him.³² The Winter War between Finland and Russia was on everybody's mind, and in Scandinavia, sympathy ran heavily in favor of the little nation, valiantly fighting against its gigantic neighbor.

In the torrent of recriminations following upon Nexø's criticism of Finland, he was exposed to abuse and attack. It is informative of the mood of the Danish nation and of the degree of Nexø's unpopularity that a few of the measures suggested took extreme forms. Some gentlemen of the press suggested that the book auto-da-fé be revived, and a few cases of burnings of Nexø's works actually took place. Furthermore, in parliament demands were made, albeit unsuccessfully, that Nexø's yearly government subvention be rescinded.³³

Nexø was persona non grata; nonetheless, after Hitler's juggernaut invaded Denmark on April 9, 1940, Nexø's books were again in great demand at the libraries. In 1941, when Hitler sent his war machine against the Soviet Union, the Communists in the occupied countries were interned. Apparently, the Danish police were eager to cooperate with the Nazis and, incredible as it seems, arrested a much larger number of people than that demanded by the German authorities. Among those unwarrantedly detained was the seventy-one-year-old Nexø.³⁴

Nexø protested, even to the attorney general. He met only silence. Three months later he was released, but his earlier position as persona non grata was then made official: it was forbidden to mention him in the press, and his works were not reissued.

The occupation of Denmark gradually grew more repressive, and when the Danish government was cursorily dismissed in August, 1943, the Gestapo arrested many prominent Danes. Although Nexø's name then figured on the internment list, he and his family managed to escape to neutral Sweden.

Late in 1944, Nexø accepted an invitation to visit the Soviet Union; from there, he returned to Denmark after its liberation in May, 1945. During those euphoric first months of peace, praise was lavished on Nexø. Tribute was paid to the old author at a mass meeting in a park in Copenhagen. Among the more than 70,000 Danes gathered were the chieftains of the Social Democratic Party, his old adversaries. Børge Houmann points out that, in that period of reconciliation, the Social Democrats and the Communists were actually cautiously contemplating unification. During those festive days, the nation had high hopes for a future of progress, cooperation, and peace.

According to Houmann, Nexø retained a healthy skepticism toward such optimism, and in his speech to his well-wishers he wryly noted that he did not love Denmark for what it was, but for what it might become.³⁵ For a short time Nexø nevertheless was not only accepted but even embraced by the Danish nation. He had become a national symbol of resistance to oppression, and he was made an honorary member of the Danish Authors' Association.³⁶

Since the protagonist of this idyll was Martin Andersen Nexø, it could not last. In October, 1945—a week before the first election after the Occupation—the first volume of Morten the Red appeared. Although it dealt with the events leading up to the First World War, it could easily be read as an indictment of the compromising spirit of the Social Democrats. Nexø's following publication in December, 1945, only made matters worse, for in Letters to a Countryman (Breve til en Landsmand) he reiterated his disapproval of the role the Social Democrats had played in the workers' movement and during the Occupation.

Once again public opinion began to turn against Nexø, and when he was awarded a life-long honorarium by the Danish state in April, 1946, protests streamed in. A prominent Danish minister observed bitterly that no Danish author had ever spoken more derogatorily about his native land than had Nexø.³⁷ The public mood did not improve. The Cold War estranged the Danish Communists from the majority of their countrymen, and in February, 1948, Nexø gained notoriety by defending the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia. Soon afterward, when the Danish Authors' Association resolved to protest the Soviet intervention, Nexø resigned from both his honorary and his regular membership in it.

In the Danish press Nexø was ridiculed as a senile old man who, having lost his artistic gifts long ago, now dishonored past public esteem by drifting about among socialist nations while continuing to accept his yearly honorarium from the Danish state. The chorus got louder when, in 1951, Nexø rented a house in Radebeul, a suburb of Dresden in East Germany. The major Danish Social Democratic newspaper hastened to rename him Martin Andersen-Radebeul; the paper intended, of course, to intimate that Nexø's choice of country was close to treason to his native nation. Børge Houmann points out, to set the record straight, that the main reason for Nexø's decision to settle abroad was his poor health and that he intended to spend the warmer seasons in Denmark.³⁸ In Dresden, Nexø continued to work on the third and final volume of Morten the Red, but he died before he could complete it, in 1954.

Nexø's friends Hans Kirk and Børge Houmann edited the unfinished manuscript and issued it under the title Jeanette in 1957. Finally, the trilogy that Nexø had dreamt about for years—a trilogy consisting of Pelle the Conqueror, Ditte, Humanity's Child, and Morten the Red—was completed. Unfortunately, whether one reads the last work as fiction or as memoir, it seems dispirited. Although political events are rendered in minute detail, they do not add up to a clear picture of the age, and unfortunately, the epic quality of the earlier novels is markedly lacking.

Through the years Nexø had grown increasingly furious whenever critics invoked aesthetic criteria in judging his books, but such criteria cannot be omitted—especially since Nexø himself was ready to evaluate proletarian works and the role of the writer on artistic grounds.

In 1906, Nexø wrote his colleague Johan Skjoldborg and thanked him for his most recent novel but added that it was not “artistically” on a par with his earlier production: “Here in Sara [1906] you give us too often that conclusion which the reader should reach on his own.”³⁹ That sort of aesthetic advice from the author of Pelle the Conqueror is not surprising. Similarly, in a letter to Josef Kjellgren, written in 1944, Nexø admonished his young colleague, “let them [dramatic human destinies] work on the reader, so he in turn is also allowed to build! If you have suggested and sketched your world correctly, he will then construct it in all its details for you—and he is thankful that he is permitted to share the labor. Nothing annoys the competent reader more than being presented with a fully completed work.”⁴⁰ Curiously enough, since Nexø was then composing Morten the Red, it was not a piece of advice that he himself followed.

Although Nexø maintained that he never worked with his style and often reiterated that he preferred practical work to that at his desk, the author's protestations must be taken with a grain of salt. If an author is criticized for allowing tendentiousness to weaken his art, he may become understandably defensive and then take the offensive by declaring himself completely indifferent to aesthetics.⁴¹ Nexø espoused the view that the artist was not an outstanding individual, as he was assumed to be by the dying bourgeois culture, but an exponent of the constructive forces among the masses.

Despite that proclaimed attitude, Nexø was visibly irritated when critics claimed that he was influenced by other authors, such as Zola, Dostoevsky, and Gorky. Nexø emphasized that he read little, in fact, that he had to catch up on reading his supposed models.⁴² His inspiration, he pointedly remarked, lay in the experiences of his own life and in that of his class; but since his articles often reveal a knowledge of both classical and contemporary social literature, it seems fair to suggest that, from quite early in his career—ever since the success of “Pelle” had allotted him a public role—Nexø was engaged in projecting an image. That image is of a proletarian who fights with his pen for the cause of his people; thus, it is an image that, although predominantly true, downplays the artist in favor of the crusader. As the years went by, Nexø's impulse increasingly to belittle art eventually became detrimental to his own art.

The name of one accomplished artist—that of Cervantes—could nonetheless have been invoked as an influence upon Nexø without stirring up his wrath. Nexø's article on Cervantes from 1904 suggests that he identified with both the author and the hero of Don Quixote.⁴³

The impoverished Spanish nobleman knew both the plight of the poor and the reality of persecution, and in Nexø's opinion, “three hundred years ago Cervantes created with his Don Quixote the first social novel.”⁴⁴ It is tempting to suggest that, in the roving knight who was always in quest of a cause, Nexø found a kindred anarchistic spirit. Don Quixote rejected an unsatisfactory reality, and since he was an accomplished dreamer, he fought to create a world that would fulfill those dreams, no matter how foolish they may have seemed. When chastised for setting free the inmates of a prison, he replied, “For me it was sufficient that they were suffering; I did not ask what their crimes were.”⁴⁵

For Nexø, Don Quixote was a portrayal of the crusading artist. Although Don Quixote might be called a fool, Nexø had nothing against being classed with those whom the establishment scorns as foolish defiers of rules and regulations. In 1934, when Nexø answered an inquiry as to how he had become an author, he cited in his reply, “Yes, how?” (“Ja, hvordan?”), his solidarity with the proletariat as the major impetus to his writing.⁴⁶

The highlight of Nexø's reply is a brief, but marvelous, analysis of Hans Christian Andersen's “Cold Hans” (“Klods Hans,” 1855). Nexø reminds his readers that the artist may often appear to be like the seemingly unintelligent child who does not absorb the learning offered by officialdom and who thus must go to a remedial class. Such children tend to find joy in life's discarded odds and ends, and thus they can actually educate themselves quite well. Andersen's Hans is such a fellow; in contrast to his utterly bourgeois brothers, who have absorbed the knowledge proper to society, he overcomes all obstacles and wins the princess. On his way to the castle, he gathers what others consider to be junk: a broken wooden shoe, a dead crow, and handfuls of mud—all of which come in handy at the castle. There, Hans's impertinent responses gain the interest of the rather bored princess, who lustily applauds him when he slings mud at the head bureaucrat.

“The one who drew the best picture of the artist was Hans Christian Andersen—with Clod Hans,” stated Nexø; and thus he declared his love for those wise fools who, like Hans and Don Quixote, through their actions challenge and change a repressive society.⁴⁷ Both Cervantes and Andersen were consummate artists—as were their heroes—and Nexø identified with them. Nexø would hardly have objected if, when approaching his works, one were to keep in mind Don Quixote's idealism and Hans's irreverence.

NEXø'S VISION

Many of Nexø's mature works are filled with an infectious feeling of expectancy toward life. He voiced the optimistic conviction that a healthy culture was just on the brink of replacing one that was outworn but bitterly clinging to its hegemony. Nexø intended his works to be one of the means of impelling that necessary and inevitable transition. In the preface to Pelle the Conqueror Nexø unequivocally expresses a simultaneously mundane and lofty vision of the future: “Pelle the Conqueror was to be a book about the proletarian—that is, about the human being itself—who naked, equipped only with health and appetite, enrolls in the ranks of life; about the worker's broad strides across the world in his endless, half-unaware wandering toward the light!”⁴⁸

In an examination of the contours of, and the ideological forces behind, Nexø's vision, his choice of genres is important, for he was undoubtedly aware that the use of a given literary form—if only to transform it—was an ideological decision.⁴⁹

Although the older Nexø may not have read much, he had periodically read voraciously in both youth and early manhood. As Houmann suggests, Nexø's acquaintanceship with works of some of the great entertainers of the nineteenth century—Eugene Sue, Fenimore Cooper, Captain Marryatt, Karl May, and Jules Verne—may have given him that sense of plot, even of melodrama, which sometimes fortunately marks and sometimes unfortunately mars his fiction.⁵⁰ Nexø's later reading in Ibsen, Bjørnson, and Strindberg may well have sharpened his sense of literature as a forum for the vigorous debate of social problems. As Nexø prepared to become a teacher, he became quite well versed in the Danish classics, and according to a former student, he was an inspiring teacher of older Danish Literature.⁵¹ In short, the proletarian writer had a fairly solid literary ballast.

When Nexø was asked what he intended to accomplish with Pelle the Conqueror, he placed the book within the context of literary history as precisely as could any academic critic.⁵² Nexø pointed out that most works depicting the fates of heroes had grown increasingly individualistic and pessimistic during the nineteenth century, and he declared that his novel was meant to be an antidote to that development.⁵³

Although Pelle the Conqueror is meant to be the harbinger of a new consciousness and a new age, the form that Nexø used to present his vision was the traditional one of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman.⁵⁴ Through that choice he registered his opposition to the pessimistic novel of his own era, for in the latter—in contrast to the earlier Bildungsroman—the hero no longer had the power to determine his own fate. Pelle, however, is still a hero who, through personal growth, finds his rightful position within society.

With Pelle the Conqueror Nexø thus employed and transformed a humanistic, bourgeois paradigm and created a socialistic Bildungsroman. The book's variance from the traditional genre is, however, noticeable and significant, for the classical Bildungsroman tends to be individualistic and static in its view of history, whereas Nexø's novel, with its faith in the social progress of the proletariat, promotes a dynamic view of the historical process. Although such optimism may seem less evident in Nexø's later works, most of them—whether fiction or nonfiction—officially share the same function and outlook.

The reader familiar with the tradition of the novel of Bildung will recall that the genre presents the view that existence is basically ordered and meaningful and that the human being who makes the correct choices during life's decisive moments will achieve harmony and fulfillment. In Nexø's Memoirs, he firmly asserted that, through his writing, he had tried to combat chaos.⁵⁵ Order to Nexø may appear to mean a specific political system, but his vision is based primarily upon a humanitarian and humanistic dream of social and spiritual decency. In a speech delivered in 1913, he emphasized the conviction that proletarian striving is motivated by more than economic demands, since the common people desire human dignity beyond all else.⁵⁶ For Nexø, as for such later civil-rights proponents as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, a movement of liberation seemed meaningful only if material and spiritual values were fused.

With such lofty dreams of an ideal society, Nexø did not escape being labeled a utopian. The advent of the Soviet Union, which seemed to prove to him that utopia could be a tangible reality, supported his vision of individual and societal Bildung.⁵⁷ To Nexø, the development in Russia was not an example of extremism, but the natural rise of the long-suffering proletariat. In 1942, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, he called Marxism “the golden mean,” and in Morten the Red, written a few years later, the protagonist informed an incredulous bourgeois radical that “Goethe was the first Marxist.”⁵⁸ As Børge Houmann insists, Nexø was, at heart, a “socialist-humanist.”⁵⁹

Nexø was also a radical rationalist, for his works are a persistent and at times exasperated call to reason. Nexø saw the exploitation by both feudal and capitalistic systems as utterly unreasonable, and he believed that eventually innate reason would triumph over all ignorance and prejudice.⁶⁰ Like the educators of the Enlightenment, Nexø basically held that the human being is good by nature and is capable of growing, a belief that could be found in such disparate camps as those of the writers of the bourgeois Bildungsroman and writers of anarchist manifestoes.

Not only the preeminence that Nexø gives to actual experience over theory, but also the belief he vests in evolution would seem to echo the Enlightenment. As critic Johan de Mylius has ascertained, in Nexø's adamant rejection of Darwinism he did not deny the concept of evolution, but only the liberalistic version of it, which legitimized the exploitation of the masses.⁶¹ Nexø shared the rationalist's conviction that historical development was bound to carry humanity to hitherto unknown heights of culture.

Although Nexø may be called a utopian writer, he is very firmly grounded in social reality, and his vision, even if it may strain some readers' sense of credibility, is a mundane one that is served by his Realistic technique. It is a very tangible world with very palpable problems that one encounters in Nexø's oeuvre. In his anti-individualism Nexø distances himself from both psychological and philosophical pondering, a tendency that may explain why, until recently, scholarship has avoided him.⁶²

Such an assessment of Nexø as an author is nonetheless inadequate, since he often, more or less obviously, transcended the mimetic mode of writing. Whether one confronts one of Nexø's works of fiction, an article, or a speech, it becomes strikingly evident that he relies heavily on a mythically inspired rhetoric, sprinkled with a generous quota of metaphors. He readily admitted that, in order to exert control over his amorphous material and bring out the essence of his vision, he had to resort to a symbolic technique.⁶³ Although Nexø invented symbolism when it was called for, he primarily utilized the symbols that age-old traditions made available to him through oral-formulaic narrative, myth, and the Bible.⁶⁴ He was relying on the “literary” heritage of his proletarian milieu.

That usage of inherited elements should not be considered to be merely a technical strategy, for Nexø's oeuvre shows that he thought of the world in terms of the mythically charged figures and structures of the narratives that had been for centuries integral to the almue's perception of life. In much of Nexø's fiction, from the epic novels to the briefest sketches—and even in many articles and speeches—one finds striking touches of parable, fable, fabliau, and particularly of religious legend and folktale.⁶⁵

The last genre is the embodiment of the dreams and hopes of the proletariat. Innumerable tales relate the severe hardships suffered by some poor youth who, through passing the tests of endurance and ingenuity, earns his or her right to the ultimate social reward: a royal spouse and half the kingdom. The tale captures the poor's desire to rise to incredible social heights and to obtain tangible, material rewards. That desire thus symbolizes the proletariat's dream of lykke, that magnificent fortune which repressive social systems had consistently denied it.⁶⁶

Nexø seemingly found the tale quite attractive, in spite of its individualism: one person rises to the pinnacle of success but leaves his or her class behind in its former misery. That traditional view of the tale cannot be dismissed, but it warrants modification, for the final phrase of many a tale, “and then they lived happily ever after,” can be seen in a dual light. They may refer not only to the happy prince and princess, but also to all the people of the realm, for the former pauper has liberated them from a curse. The kingdom was ruled by evil powers, and rightful authority, usually represented by an old king, was powerless. It may therefore not be farfetched to see the arrival of the protagonist as that of a mythical liberator or savior, who slays a monstrous evil, inherits the realm, and thus grants everlasting happiness to all.

Whether or not such a reading can be applied to the majority of known tales is a moot point in this context, for (as Pelle the Conqueror, in particular, suggests) it was Nexø's. Pelle—as well as Poor Per, the hero of several parables and articles—is a rebel with the determination to overcome suppressors.⁶⁷ To Nexø, his own tales echoed the folktales' age-old, stubborn protest against suppression.

It may seem startling that in Pelle the Conqueror Nexø relied both on the Bildungs paradigm, which was bourgeois in origin, and on the folktale, which was, he felt, proletarian in origin. Actually, however, the fusion of the two genres is quite effortless: in the final analysis, the novel of quest seems to derive from the tale of quest. Their structural similarities are striking, and although the tales tend to focus on a material reward, some of them clearly show that the protagonists may earn their material reward only if they have gained that self-knowledge which can be termed maturity.⁶⁸ Such tales imply the spiritual dimension that is central to the process of Bildung: the actual reward lies in finding one's identity not only as an individual, but also as a social being. Both genres imply the marvelously optimistic message that the enlightened human being is the master of his or her own fate. A similar optimism permeates many of Nexø's works, and only the most doctrinaire Social Realist would object that such mythical aspects detract from Nexø's Realism. In fact, the East German critic Erika Kosmalla praises Nexø for having used, and given a new content to, the religious symbolism of the common people. In the same vein, Georg Lukáčs finds that Nexø brought a new vigor to literature precisely by relying on the lore of the masses, a lore that was the vessel of their dream of lykke.⁶⁹

As a Realistic writer, Nexø intended, of course, to give his readers a glimpse of a utopia—of a life blessed by good fortune—and not surprisingly, he turned to the age-old culture he had left behind. In the almue, the common peasantry, who for centuries had tilled the soil, Nexø found a non-individualistic culture that, nonetheless, granted the poverty-stricken individual a profound sense of meaning and satisfaction in life. Although Nexø might deplore the fatalism of that class as a direct hindrance to social progress, he realized that the ability of the poor to resign themselves patiently to hardships enabled them to endure and persevere. Fatalism and optimism were inextricably intertwined, and that union was a guarantee—as Nexø made clear in his Memoirs—that the spirit of the class could not be broken.⁷⁰

As Gemzøe has argued, Nexø met modern technological development with suspicion and sought solace and inspiration in the rural past.⁷¹ The older, seasoned protagonist of Pelle the Conqueror perceives the city as a monster that entraps the masses that have come to it from the countryside, so he attempts to create a model garden-city with ties to a rural way of life. Although Gemzøe emphasized the prominent role in Nexø's thinking that this culturally time-honored preference for nature over culture played, it must be added that Nexø's ideal was a reconciliation between nature and culture, that is, land tamed and made fruitful by the busy farmer. In Nexø's Memoirs, he wrote, “For me the most exquisite kind of activity has always been to work with pickaxe and shovel at a piece of wasteland: to crack stones, tear up thornbushes, transform it into fertile ground. … I know nothing more beautiful than a home that has been wrested from the rocks or the heath.”⁷²

The most explicitly harmonious picture of that past way of life is found in Pelle the Conqueror. Pelle and his father, Lasse, visit the latter's cousin, Kalle, who owns a piece of land on the rocky heath of Bornholm. Pelle and Lasse put in long, hard, unsatisfying hours at a feudally run farm, whereas Kalle, his wife, and children joyously cultivate their own land and reap the results of their labor.

It is Kalle's blind old mother-in-law who gives voice to Nexø's mythically ideal vision.⁷³ As she lies dying, she reminisces about her youth and marriage and, thus, conjures up a world of spontaneity, sensual beauty, and happiness. Her husband would wake her early in the mornings, and together they would delight in the daybreak and make love under the open sky. That remembrance is a testimony to an authentic relationship not only between the sexes, but also between nature and culture, for throughout their life together—in lovemaking as well as in hard, but satisfying, work—those two human beings were at one with a beautiful and bountiful nature.

Perhaps the best term to capture the special quality of those two individuals is that of homo ludens.⁷⁴ Both wife and husband were mature, hardworking people, but in spite of their toil, they could frolic like children and meet life with an exuberant playfulness that testified to their spiritual strength. After such a fulfilling past, the old woman faces death with complete peace of mind. She entertains no notion of an afterlife but meets the unknown without fear, longing, or sentimentality. In this mythically charged portrayal of a woman of the old culture, Nexø made concrete the ideal, but earthy, human being of his vision.

A reconciliation between nature and culture is both a physical and a spiritual ideal, and that fact is brought home by the story “Good Fortune” (“Lykken,” 1907).⁷⁵ After a stonecutter meets with an accident, his family seems headed for destitution; but thanks to a newly enacted law, the stonecutter is granted economic compensation and can move from the rocky hills to a fertile valley. As the story closes, the family is happily working its fields.

In spite of the story's stark Realism, “Good Fortune” has a mythical frame of reference. In its first pages a masterful personification of death appears: he seems to be an educated, but spiteful, man who—since the poor do not fear him—harbors a deep antipathy for them and therefore attempts to break their tenacity and will. Death is associated not only with that barren landscape in which the family initially resides, but also with that fatalistic state of mind which refuses to entertain any hope for the future. The latter deadly impulse is defeated by cultural intervention through social legislation; thus, the story in a concrete manner reflects the ancient death to-rebirth pattern.

In “Good Fortune” and in many of Nexø's other works one recognizes a by-no-means unique equation between barren nature and sterile culture. Numerous metaphors suggest that, to Nexø, the wasteland also mirrored a mental and a societal reality, since senseless violence, selfish sexuality, excessive individualism, the lust for power, and the horrors of war—all are as inimical to humanistic culture as that wilderness which always lies ready to claim the cultivated land.

Nexø's depiction of nature, of even the wilderness, may nevertheless have a strongly pantheistic touch or, as Ejnar Thomsen puts it, pan-erotic overtones.⁷⁶ Although Nexø had no patience with that barrenness which is cultural in origin, he responded with a mixture of awe and fear to primordial nature, be it nature inimical to humanity, humanity's own urge to violence, or feminine sexuality's supposed tendency toward predacity. The author, who proclaimed that first and foremost his work was meant to create order, was deeply fascinated with that chaos which actually posed a threat to his vision. His ambivalence added texture and vitality to his works but unfortunately waned as the author grew older and increasingly less willing to admit to the possible existence of an insurmountable chaos.

In Nexø's movingly unpretentious introduction to his Memoirs, he confessed that his personal attempt at Bildung might not have been entirely successful: “When I look back, it seems to me that my life has been a struggle against chaos, an endless combat to shape a somewhat acceptable whole from a heap of odds and ends. … My own need to turn over and over various phenomena is deeply connected with my lack of harmony and peace of mind. One cross-examines phenomena in order to find a basis for a middle ground, in desperate attempts to find peace.”⁷⁷

The same restlessness and inconclusiveness can also be found in Morten the Red; Morten has admitted that he had “much trouble with himself in the long-lasting battle to force his sensations and his way of feeling onto a common human level and to reach that stage where he could incorporate ordinary humanity's longings, hopes, and sufferings within himself and represent them in his works. To him that seemed the highest an author could achieve, and that was exactly why at times he was subject to a feeling of having pitifully failed.”⁷⁸ Passages like the above, which suggest both the author's and his fictional alter ego's personal uncertainty and even discordance, may be said to recall stages that are past, but such conflicts seem to have been intentionally dismissed, rather than overcome.⁷⁹

In spite of Nexø's undeniable potential for soul-searching, he resisted the impulse.⁸⁰ The critics Poul Houe and Jørgen Elbek regret that the author did not live up to his early literary promise for probing into the psyche.⁸¹ But Nexø, like his contemporaries Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) and Johannes V. Jensen (1873-1950), seemingly chose to sustain a healthy extroverted attitude that would prohibit an exploration of the self.⁸² In a sense that choice enabled Nexø to create his best known works, but even in these, the limitations that such a choice imposes briefly surface. There are moments in which neither Pelle nor Ditte can deal with inner demons. Although such situations are authorially dismissed as temporary aberrations, their being so quickly glossed over seems to cause them to linger in the mind of the reader. It seems as if Nexø's staunch anti-individualism eventually became directed not only against the bourgeois world, but also against the characters within his own fiction.

Nexø's complexity, often engendered by inconsistency, has been mentioned briefly in the discussion of the nature-culture dichotomy, but his work's other complexities, springing from similar inconsistencies, also deserve attention. In 1918, the author Marie Bregendahl (1867-1940) made the astute observation that Nexø's early works contained more homicides than all Denmark had witnessed during his lifetime.⁸³ Nexø, who otherwise tended in his speeches to be a spokesman for the use of peaceful means in the social struggle, replied by espousing the view that “revolution means cutting to the roots; one cannot have a revolution and let the old remain.”⁸⁴ In many of Nexø's short stories and intermittently in his novels, violence is viewed as both necessary and cathartic.

In Nexø's reply to Marie Bregendahl, he states that he “loves people who are absolute” and that “murder, death are merely symbols for not stopping halfway.”⁸⁵ So they may be, but it is significant that homicidal acts and violent deaths are chosen as objective correlatives for the absolute spirit. Although many savage moments are expressions of social protest, in some cases it seems to be the acts themselves that count, not their results. Nexø often focuses on the kind of mind that, in its peculiar logic, has lost all connection with societal norms and that thus asserts itself through violence.

Nexø's fascination with the grotesque individual fate may call into question his frequently repeated admiration for commonplace humanity.⁸⁶ When he conjures up images of workers with their little homes, neat gardens, and happy—and very traditional—family lives, the reader can hardly object to that vision of blissful normality, but at the same time the reader cannot suppress doubts as to its validity. One well understands that an author who has known devastating poverty as well as the curse of liquor in family life might advocate a mundane utopia, yet one wonders whether Nexø, who testified to the human being's reluctance to settle for the ordinary, was not censoring his own writing. To what extent that censorship was consciously or unconsciously imposed is difficult to ascertain, but at times the implied author and the actual author seem undeniably at odds.⁸⁷

That ambivalence is felt most strongly in Nexø's depiction of women, for female sexuality remains veiled in a haze of mystery. He describes both the child and the old woman with touching, unsentimental tenderness, but the sexually tempting woman emerges as an intriguing and an elusive figure. Even Ditte, who—though she experiences a number of sexual relationships—may seem to contradict this statement, is basically the heroine of a mythically charged legend.

Female sexuality, as mentioned earlier, is linked with beautiful, barren—even deadly—nature. Nexø, in keeping with his sense of cultural mission, had to bring such a force under control. His answer to the threat of female sexuality is, unstartlingly, the institution of marriage. That bourgeois institution tames the excessive individualism of sexual desires and gives them cultural direction. Consequently, the woman who refuses to accept the role of the traditional housewife, but who insists however dimly upon realizing her own dreams is given short shrift in Nexø's works. Once again, however, a certain inconsistency sheds an ironic light on Nexø's vision, for some of those doomed women (for example, Marie in In an Age of Iron) gain in their independence and frustration a stature that is denied others who gladly live life as appendices to their men. Nexø espouses the virtues of the proverbial “doll house,” but the implied author knows better.

Although deciding where the borderline lies between conscious and unconscious self-irony in Nexø's works is nearly impossible, the presence of such self-ironic elements not only supports Børge Houmann's suggestion that Nexø thus gave voice to many of his own personal conflicts, but also compels one to add that many of them remained unresolved.⁸⁸ The modern reader may wish that Nexø would have permitted himself more room for an exploration of those psychological and ideological contradictions. Nonetheless, a thorough self-questioning—such as was common among the authors that preceded Nexø—very likely would have weakened not only the infectious optimism and strength of Nexø's vision, but also the epic power of his best narratives. Perhaps the combination in Nexø's works of an overriding authorial single-mindedness with an implied ambivalence is one that will attract both the reader who craves a meaningful, life-giving vision and the reader who demands an oeuvre of a dialectical nature.

Nexø, who so ardently wanted to destroy bourgeois myths that were detrimental to the proletariat and who spent most of his life deflating such myths, was himself a powerful mythmaker. He dissolved myths very effectively, but in that very act he created others. By necessity a vision of his scope—happiness for all humanity—requires myth. One may charge that he simultaneously preserved bourgeois—or even pre-bourgeois—myths, but as critics Anker Gemzøe and Aage Rønning have pointed out, a man who was so passionately engaged in the historical struggle of his times could hardly help being held captive by some of the contradictions of his age.⁸⁹

Since Nexø's works are so strongly charged both politically and ideologically, proffered advice as to how he should be read may fall on deaf ears. His prejudices as well as those of his readers may well be prohibitive to an appreciation of a masterly, if flawed, body of works. Readers are nevertheless advised to approach Nexø's oeuvre in terms of its simultaneous demythification and mythification of the world.

Notes

1. A number of sources have been used for this section, in particular, vols. XI and XII of Danmarkshistorie, ed. John Danstrup and Hal Koch (Copenhagen, 1964-65); Svend Aage Hansen, Early Industrialization in Denmark (Copenhagen, 1970); and Gemzøe, Pelle Erobreren.

2. Walter Karps, “Labor Movements and Industrial Relations,” in Nordic Democracy, ed. Erik Allardt et al. (Copenhagen, 1981), pp. 308-23.

3. Gemzøe, Pelle Erobreren, pp. 42-44.

4. The Danish term for what here is called Liberal is “Venstre” (left), but the historical process is now making this a right-of-center party, one quite close to the Conservative Party, which has often been its ally in coalitions.

5. Sources for this chapter are mainly the works of Børge Houmann (see the bibliography) and Nexø's memoirs; see Martin Anderson Nexø, Erindringer, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1945).

6. Bornholm is a small, rocky island (227 square miles) situated in the Baltic Sea, ninety miles from the Danish mainland.

7. A folk high school is not a high school, and it does not offer a formal education leading to a degree. The concept of the Folkehøjskole was originated by the theologian and poet Nicolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872) to ensure youth a culturally oriented, but pragmatic, Christian education. Initially, these schools were attended by young people who would never enter a university or professional school.

8. Børge Houmann, Martin Andersen Nexø og hans samtid, 1869-1919 (Copenhagen, 1981), pp. 110-13. This volume, the first of a planned three-volume work, will hereafter be referred to as MAN og samtid, I.

9. For further information, see the discussion of Nexø's memoirs in chap. 6.

10. Houmann rediscovered this item in Illustreret Familieblad, 21 July-29 Sept., 1894, and republished it as Til og i Australien (Risskov, 1966).

11. Houmann, MAN og samtid, I, 130.

12. Nexø and Jakob Hansen had known each other from childhood, and the latter at times played the role of the younger man's mentor. By the late 1890's, Hansen had established himself as a “decadent” writer; but in 1909, he died from tuberculosis. Nexø had worked tirelessly to raise money for his ailing friend. See Børge Houmann, Jacob Hansens breve til Martin Andersen Nexø (Risskov, 1981).

13. Houmann, MAN og samtid, I, 159, 203.

14. From an article composed for the proposed publication of a Russian edition of Nexø's works in 1951; rpt. in Houmann, Omkring Pelle, p. 60. Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are by the present authors.

15. Houmann, MAN og samtid, I, 253-61.

16. Ibid., pp. 260-61.

17. Ibid., pp 302-04.

18. “Det røde Flag,” Verdensspejlet, No. 42 (1905), p. 658; rpt. in Martin Andersen Nexø, Taler og Artikler, ed. Børge Houmann, II (Copenhagen, 1954), 7-9. (If the author's name is not given in subsequent references to articles, the texts are by Nexø.) In April, 1905, the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against its officers and took over the ship; undefeated by the tsarists, the ship's crew surrendered to Rumanian authorities ten days later. The Potemkin incident achieved symbolic significance in the Soviet Union not only because the crew's rebellion against its oppressors was spontaneous, but also because a number of tsarist troops joined cause with the rebels.

19. Houmann, MAN og samtid, I, 409-10.

20. Ibid., p. 362.

21. Helge Rønning, “Martin Andersen Nexø,” in vol. I of Danske digtere i det 20. århundrede, ed. Torben Brostrøm and Mette Winge, new ed. (Copenhagen, 1980), p. 362.

22. In 1932, Nexø admitted that “of Karl Marx I know only the Communist Manifesto.” See Clara Madsen, “The Social Philosophy of Martin Andersen Nexø,” Scandinavian Studies and Notes, 12 (1932), 9.

23. See Jørgen Aabenhus's postscript to Martin Andersen Nexø, Vejen mod Lyset (Copenhagen, 1979), p. 141.

24. Martin Andersen Nexø, Breve fra Martin Andersen Nexø, ed. Børge Houmann, III (Copenhagen, 1972), 75. Hereafter referred to as Breve, a three-volume work edited by Børge Houmann.

25. See Houmann's commentary in Martin Andersen Nexø, Breve, II (Copenhagen, 1971), 13-16.

26. “Lenin,” Land og Folk, 21 Jan. 1949; rpt. in Martin Andersen Nexø, Taler og Artikler, ed. Børge Houmann, III (Copenhagen, 1955), 216-26.

27. See Houmann's commentary in Breve, II, 196-98.

28. Ibid., p. 166.

29. Houmann, Drømmen, p. 144.

30. “Central-Processen,” Arbejderbladet, 13 Feb. 1937; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, II, 125-29.

31. Martin Andersen Nexø, Spanien (Copenhagen, 1937); rpt. in Taler og Artikler, III, 130-45.

32. “Omkring Finland,” Arbejderbladet, 15 Oct. 1939; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, II, 183-87.

33. Houmann, Drømmen, pp. 66-70.

34. Børge Houmann, Hædersgaven (Risskov, 1971), p. 50.

35. Børge Houmann, Den alt for korte danske sommer (Risskov, 1978), p. 18.

36. Ibid., pp. 28-30.

37. Ibid., p. 74.

38. Børge Houmann, Skarntyder og tidsler (Risskov, 1979), p. 76.

39. Martin Andersen Nexø, Breve, ed. Børge Houmann, I (Copenhagen, 1969), 91.

40. Breve, III, 205-06.

41. Nexø expresses this though as early as 1906 in a letter to Henrik Pontoppidan; see Breve, I, 87-88.

42. “Forbillederne,” Politiken, 27 Feb. 1905; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, III, 7-8.

43. “Cervantes og Don Quijote,” Det nye Aarhundrede, 2 (1905), 213-22; rpt. in Martin Andersen Nexø, Taler og Artikler, ed. Børge Houmann, I (Copenhagen, 1945), 9-17.

44. “Art and the Proletariat,” St. Louis Dispatch, 9 Dec. 1938. See Houmann, MAN og samtid, I, 285.

45. Taler og Artikler, I, 16.

46. Berlingske Tidende. Aften-Avisen, 30 June 1934; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, I, 129-34.

47. Taler og Artikler, I, 132.

48. Martin Andersen Nexø, Pelle Erobreren, I (Copenhagen, 1974), 5.

49. Lisbet Holst and Knud Wentzel, Solidaritet og individualitet (Copenhagen, 1975), pp. 150-95.

50. Houmann, MAN og samtid, I, 76-77.

51. Ibid., p. 209.

52. Interview on the Danish Radio, 28 March 1936; rpt. in Houmann, Omkring Pelle, pp. 52-54.

53. Ibid., p. 53.

54. Several critics have maintained that the novel structurally and ideologically is patterned on the Bildung paradigm. See John Fjord Jensen, “Efterskrift” to Nexø's Pelle Erobreren, II (Copenhagen, 1965), 521-29; and Aage Henriksen, Gotisk tid (Copenhagen, 1971), pp. 187-92.

55. Martin Andersen Nexø, Erindringer, I, 9. This vol. contains Et lille Kræ (1932) and Under aaben Himmel (1935).

56. 6 July 1913; printed in Politiken under the title “Fattigper og Fremtiden,” 8 July 1913; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, III, 52-57.

57. “Hilsen til 21 Aars Dagen,” Arbejderbladet, 6 Nov. 1938; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, I, 169-71.

58. Breve, III, 165; and Martin Andersen Nexø, Morten hin Røde, II (Copenhagen, 1948), 369.

59. See the Preface, note 9.

60. Ejnar Thomsen, “Martin Andersen Nexø,” in vol. I of Danske Digtere i det 20. Aarhundrede, ed. Ernst Frandsen and Niels Kaas Johansen (Copenhagen, 1951), pp. 73-98.

61. Johan de Mylius, “Ideologiske mønstre i Pelle Erobreren,” Edda, 75 (1975), 218-19.

62. Only recently have Western critics begun to subject Nexø's works to the kind of thorough analysis that they had given to authors much younger than Nexø.

63. “Pelle Erobreren som selvbiografisk Værk,” Social-Democraten, 23 May 1925; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, III, 80-84; and Houmann, Omkring Pelle, pp. 49-52.

64. These genres, passed on orally from generation to generation and easily retold—since they rely on formulae: stock phrases, personae, and plot elements—constitute a rich tradition in Denmark.

65. Martin Andersen Nexø, Fred og Samarbejde (Copenhagen, 1936); rpt. in Taler og Artikler, III, 109-16. Nexø points out that the dreams of the proletariat have been contained in the folktale since the Middle Ages.

66. Nexø's view of the tale has found support in some recent studies. See Max Lüthi, Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales (Bloomington and London, 1976); and Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell (Austin, 1979).

67. Taler og Artikler, III, 112; see note 65.

68. Rudolf J. Jensen and Niels Ingwersen, “Den onde og den gode lykke,” Meddelelser fra Dansklærerforeningen, No. 2 (1979), pp. 129-45.

69. Erika Kosmalla, “Probleme des Übergangs vom kritischen zum sozialistischen Realismus im Schaffen Martin Andersen Nexø” (Ph.D. diss., Greifswald, 1965); and Georg Lukáčs, “Dichtung aus der Solidarität,” Tägliche Rundschau, 9 April 1947; rpt. in Houmann, Omkring Pelle, pp. 290-94.

70. Erindringer, I, 131.

71. Gemzøe, Pelle Erobreren, p. 109.

72. Martin Andersen Nexø, Erindringer, II, 217. This vol. contains For Lud og koldt Vand (1937) and Vejs Ende (1939).

73. Martin Andersen Nexø, Pelle Erobreren (Copenhagen, 1949). This edition will be used for all further references to the novel.

74. Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York and Evanston, 1970), used the term in his investigation of the presence of play in human behavior.

75. “Lykken,” Illustreret Tidende, 6 Oct.-8 Dec. 1907; rpt. in Martin Andersen Nexø, Muldskud. Anden Samling (Copenhagen, 1924), pp. 199-238.

76. Thomsen, “Martin Andersen Nexø,” p. 83.

77. Erindringer, I, 11.

78. Martin Andersen Nexø, Morten hin Røde, I (Copenhagen, 1945), 190.

79. Erindringer, I, 10.

80. Erindringer, II, 210.

81. Poul Houe, “Martin Andersen Nexøs ungdomsarbejder,” Nordisk Tidsskrift, 45 (1969), 420; and Jørgen Elbek, “Martin Andersen Nexø og hans sammenhæng,” Kritik, 64 (1983), 22-33.

82. As for Jensen's case, see Jørgen Elbek, Johannes V. Jensen (Copenhagen, 1966).

83. Breve, I, 306.

84. Ibid., p. 305.

85. Ibid.

86. Nexø's admiration for the commonly human is expressed in various formulations throughout his work but is sharply delineated in his review of Richard Wright's Native Son (1940); see “Søn af de Sorte,” Ny Dag, 23 March 1944; rpt. in Taler og Artikler, III, 197-201.

87. See Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago and London, 1961). Booth points out the necessity of distinguishing between the author that the text implies and the actual author.

88. Houmann, MAN og samtid, I, 435.

89. Gemzøe, Pelle Erobreren, pp. 135-37; and Rønning, “Martin Andersen Nexø,” pp. 370, 380.