Johannes V. Jensen

Biography

Jensen’s first novels appeared in the weekly Revuen under the pseudonym Ivar Lykke, at forty-five kroner a book. They were adventure stories full of murders and mysteries, breaking off at the most exciting point so that the reader would come back the following week. That was how the medical student paid for his studies.

He was born on 20 January 1873 in Farsø, in the north of Jutland, the second of eleven children. His father, the veterinary surgeon Hans Jensen, was interested in natural science, collected folklore and was a convinced atheist; his mother came from the island of Falster. The children were taught at home, then Johannes spent two years at the local school, and a priest prepared him for the gymnasium. He failed the entrance examination but was admitted anyway. In 1893 he finished at Viborg Cathedral School with mediocre marks and went to Copenhagen to study medicine. Of the eleven children, four became writers; the best known besides him was his sister Thit Jensen. His relations with her remained difficult for many years.

He published his first poems in January 1894, in the magazine Journalen. After three years of medical study he gave it up.

His serious prose began with the novels “Danskere” (1896; “Danishmen”) and “Einar Elkær” (1897 or 1898). Later Jensen would gladly have struck them from his list of works. Both books were written under the influence of the symbolism of the 1890s and reflect disillusionment with large modern cities. It was then that the “Himmerland Stories” (1898–1910) began to appear, tales about the region where he was born. One of the characters was modelled on his grandfather, the weaver Jens Jensen. In 1900–1901 he wrote “The Fall of the King”, a historical novel about Christian II; three short novels, published separately, were later joined into a single book. In 1999 readers of Politiken and Berlingske Tidende, independently of each other, named it the Danish novel of the century. Two American novels followed, “Madame d’Ora” and “The Wheel”, with a rough idiom and borrowings from detective fiction that shocked contemporaries. A poem, “Paa Memphis Station” (“At the train station, Memphis”), also came out of his trip to America.

In 1906 came the book “Digte” (“Poems”), with prose poems without metre, and it earned him a reputation as one of the first Danish modernists. Beside it stand his portrait poems of Columbus, Darwin, Andersen, Bjørnson and others. In all he wrote about 275 poems, and almost every Dane knows the words of his “Danmarkssangen” (“Hvor smiler fager den danske Kyst”, “Where the fair Danish coast smiles”).

He regarded “The Long Journey” (1908–1922) as the main work of his life, a cycle of six novels about the origin and development of humankind, from the glacier and the first people to the Cimbrians and Columbus. His essays, too, revolved around the idea of evolution. On receiving the Nobel Prize, he explained in a short autobiographical account that he had wanted to bring the theory of evolution into literature in answer to the Nazis’ distortion of Darwinism. His most widely read books were finished before 1920. Later he turned to biology and zoology, trying to derive an ethics from Darwinian ideas. To my mind, it is these late writings that are read least today. His racial theories and sharp polemics damaged his reputation, though no clearly fascist views have been found in him.

He translated a good deal: three poems by Walt Whitman were included in “Digte”, with Aslaug Mikkelsen he translated Rudyard Kipling, and in 1930–1932 he brought out the Icelandic sagas. His “Hamlet”, in which the prince appears as a hero and rebel like the fairy-tale Askeladden, was received with hostility by critics and mocked in revues. Even so, in 1949 the Danish Translators’ Association gave him its honorary prize. For Politiken he wrote about 450 articles and columns, while his own newspaper, Pressen, he published for only a month. From 1922, after his break with Politiken, he put out the journal Forum; it lasted half a year. His play “Trods” (“Defiance”) was first staged on 1 February 1903 in Chicago before Danish emigrants; “Madame d’Ora” was staged in Berlin in 1914.

One part of Jensen’s life was devoted to sculpture. He modelled portrait busts of the painter Fritz Syberg (1929), the painter Johannes Larsen, the physicist Niels Bohr (1943) and others, and made statuettes of animals: a rhinoceros, a gorilla. In 1920, at his summer house in Tibirke Bakker, he built a large mammoth of mortar and brick. He himself regarded this work as a private matter. A bust, “Burmand” (“A Burmese”), has been in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen since 1993.

In 1944 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style”. He had been nominated many times before, first in 1925, and every year from 1931 to 1944. The ceremony in Stockholm took place on 10 December 1945. Jensen died on 25 November 1950 in Copenhagen. In 1991 a museum opened in his birthplace in Farsø, now the Johannes V. Jensen and Thit Jensen Museum, and a part of northern Greenland was named Johannes V. Jensen Land.