Marie Grubbe Read online

  The Author

  Jens Peter Jacobsen was born in Denmark in 1847. He studied botany at the University of Copenhagen and he translated Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man into Danish. He published his first work in 1872, the short story Mogens. A year later he was diagnosed with TB while travelling in Italy.

  He wrote two novels, Marie Grubbe (1876) and Niels Lyhne (1880), as well as some poems and short stories, before dying in 1885 at the age of 38.

  The Translator

  Mikka Haugaard was born in Denmark in 1953. Her father is Danish and her mother American and she grew up bilingual. She studied classics at Cambridge University and did research in Roman history. She now teaches classics and psychology at a London school and lectures for the Open University. She is married with two children.

  She is the author of two novels: Gabriel’s Bureau and The Dream Maker. Marie Grubbe is her first translation for Dedalus.

  Contents

  Title

  The Author

  The Translator

  Introduction

  A Few Notes on the Translation

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The novel Marie Grubbe was based on a true story. Seventeenth century Denmark was a time of turbulence and change; the constitution was altered to give King Frederick III absolute power and the country was engaged in a disastrous war with Sweden.

  Marie Grubbe (1643–1718) was a wealthy heiress from an undistinguished noble family in Jutland. She was very young when she was married to the illegitimate son of Frederik III, Urik Frederik Gyldenløve, who became Viceroy of Norway, but the marriage did not last. Her father then made her marry a neighbouring landowner, but she left him for their coach driver, who was more than twenty years younger than herself. It was a case of third time lucky, until her husband was sentenced to hard labour for manslaughter.

  Such are the bare bones of the story which became Jens Peter Jacobsen’s first novel, published in 1876. Little is known about her beyond these events, but one can’t but feel the presence of a forceful, unusual woman. One of the servants giving evidence at her divorce from her second husband quoted her as saying that ‘she wished she was divorced from Palle Dyre and had Søren again, he was such a lovely and quick man, and she so liked the smell of tar and horse dung, and there was no one that she wanted more than him, even if all he owned were the clothes on his back.’

  We also know that she didn’t change her mind: twenty years later the playwright Ludvig Holberg met her by chance when he had to leave Copenhagen because of the plague. She and her husband had been working a ferry and running an inn, but now he was in prison awaiting trial for manslaughter and she was on her own. Holberg stayed at their inn, and Marie told him that her third marriage had been the only happy one.

  The novelist and poet Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1875) was born in Thisted in Jutland, not far from where Marie Grubbe grew up. He started writing poems when he was only a child, but his interests were as much scientific as literary. He studied science at Copenhagen University, specialising in botany, and he won a gold medal for a paper on fresh water algae. It was science and Darwin in particular that shaped his outlook on life – he translated both On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) into Danish, and he wrote several articles on the theory of evolution.

  ‘There are,’ wrote Jacobsen in his diary at twenty, ‘moments when I think that the study of nature is my calling, others when I feel that it’s poetry, particularly when I’m excited by a fine poem or I’m poring over ancient Norse religion. If I could take the fixed laws of nature, its riches, its questions and wonders and let them inhabit the world of fiction, then I think I’ll have achieved something quite out of the ordinary.’

  That Jacobsen chose literature over science may partly have been due to the hard hand of fate. At the age of twenty-six he suffered a haemorrhage of the lung while travelling in Italy. He returned home to Thisted immediately. The doctors were not very hopeful, as he had advanced TB. He spent much of the rest of his life being looked after by his family in Thisted and devoting himself to writing. His own closeness to death haunted him and made him all the more aware of the rich joys and variety of the senses. There is something very sensual about his writing, and his approach is not unlike that of an impressionist painter. In Marie Grubbe roughly four thousand words are devoted to describing the effect of light and the sound of wind, and one gets the impression that this is more about the joy of a thing itself than to create atmosphere.

  Jacobsen combines a fine ear and feel for language with a passion for science and the new ideas of evolution. His aim, as he wrote in his diary, was to take ‘the fixed laws of nature and let them inhabit the world of fiction.’ He uses the story of Marie Grubbe to explore human sexuality, but being a novelist too, the book is rich in characters and atmosphere. The subtitle of the book is ‘Seventeenth Century Interiors’ and the book reads as a series of images or tableaux. Jacobsen wants to depict the times as much as Marie Grubbe herself, and so we meet alchemists – King Frederik III was an alchemist as well as an amateur carpenter – heretics, soldiers, fanatics, executioners and court ladies and gentlemen. We witness a series of moments that curl themselves around the plot of Marie Grubbe, but there is no ‘and then’: this is a modern novel and at its heart lies not so much a story as a vivid sense of the moment, the conjurer’s magic with words and place.

  Jacobsen wrote one other novel, Niels Lyhne (1880) and a book of short stories (1882). A book of his poems was published a year after his death in 1885 at the age of just thirty-eight.

  For a man who wrote so little, he made a remarkable impression: the dramatist Strindberg wanted to make a play out of Marie Grubbe. He didn’t, but the book influenced Miss Julie, probably his most famous play outside of Scandinavia. Jacobsen became the spokesman of a generation in Germany and Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘He was the Werther of our generations,’ wrote Stefan Sweig in a preface to a German edition of Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne published in 1925, ‘we modelled our feelings and our behaviour on him. Some of us even learnt Danish; a few friends would get together so that we could read Niels Lyhne and Jens Peter Jacobsen’s poetry in the original, and in this way might worship him even more. That’s how much we loved this writer.’ Photographs of his melancholy face, with his large eyes, high forehead, hair messily swept back and long moustache, were for sale for those who worshipped Jacobsen, the writer who expressed that sense of isolation of a generation which couldn’t any longer believe in God and had to face life in the raw.

  But he is also a writer’s writer – his style is singular and his choice to abandon plot for a string of moments seen from within puts him at the beginning of modernism. In a passionate article written at the age of nineteen, James Joyce speaks of Jacobsen as a writer who is pointing the way forward. Joyce later learnt Danish so that he could read Jacobsen. Thomas Mann, Rainer Marie Rilke and Hermann Hessen shared Joyce’s enthusiasm for Jacobsen’s lyrical prose.

  His influence has been largely European, with one very curious exception: Zora Neale Hurston, a black American writer, took the story of Marie Grubbe as told by Jacobsen, as well as some of his language and ideas, and transposed them to early twenti
eth century black America. Her book, Their Eyes were Watching God, about a woman who marries three times, third time to a man who owns nothing but the shirt on his back, transforms Marie Grubbe into something new and fresh. The novel ends with a metaphor taken from Jacobsen, the metaphor of a net enclosing the world, and, as in Jacobsen, this metaphor is both something figurative and tangible.

  A few notes on the translation

  The story of Marie Grubbe is set in the seventeenth century, and Jacobsen’s research managed to give the book some flavour of that period. The dialogue makes some use of Jute dialect and German, as Danish was very influenced by German at the time. A Danish reader would not find a few German words a problem, but German is not a language with which most English people are very familiar. I have made use of some French, as the English language of the time had a tendency to borrow from French. For dialect I decided to go to Yorkshire, as the landscape and isolation is very similar to that of Jutland.

  Illegitimate sons of kings were given the name of Gyldenløve, meaning golden lion. Two illegitimate sons of kings feature in Marie Grubbe: Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve (1638–1704), the son of Frederik III, and Ulrik Christian Gyldenløve (1630–1658), the son of Christian IV. Since the names are very similar, I have called one Christian Gyldenløve and the other Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve to avoid confusion.

  Mikka Haugaard

  I

  That air below those crowns of lime trees had swayed across brown heath and thirsty fields; it had been baked by the sun and filled with the dust of the road, but just now the thick, hanging screen of green had made it clear, the cool lime leaves had chilled it, and the scent of yellow lime flowers had made it wet and given it weight. Now it lay there shimmering, quiet and content, in that vault of pale green, caressed by gently trembling leaves and the quick beat of the wings of white and yellow butterflies.

  Those lips that breathed the air were full and fresh. The breasts it swelled were small and young. Her feet were tiny, her waist slender and her figure slim. A kind of lean strength lay in her whole body.

  Abundance was only to be found in her thick hair. A shadowy gold, it lay half tied up, half down because her small, dark blue velvet hat had slipped off, and was hanging around her neck by its knotted string and down her back like a small monk’s hood. Otherwise there was nothing of the convent about her dress: a wide and square-cut linen collar turned down over a coarse lavender frock, with generous slashed shoulder puffs through which flowed a wide pair of fine Holland sleeves. A scarlet bow was on her breast and scarlet bows adorned her shoes.

  She walked with her hands behind her back and her head bent forwards. She was coming slowly up the path with playful, graceful steps, but not straight, rather in wide curves; one moment she was just about to bump into a tree on one side, the next to disappear through the trees on the other. She would stop now and then, shake the hair off her face and look up towards the light. The subdued brightness gave her white child’s face a dull glow and softened those blue-tinged shadows beneath her eyes. Her red lips turned a brown scarlet, and her large blue eyes became almost black. Yes, she was lovely: a high forehead, a slightly curved nose, short sharply-defined lips, a strong round chin, delicate round cheeks, very small ears and fine, elegant eyebrows…

  She smiled as she walked, light and carefree, no thoughts in her head. She smiled in harmony with everything around her. Reaching the end of the path, she stopped and began to swing on her heels, first to the right and then to the left. Hands still behind her back, head held high and eyes on the sky, she hummed a colourless tune, fitfully, in time to her swinging.

  There were two flagstones and some steps leading to the garden and its sharp, white sunlight. The sky, cloudless and a whitish blue, looked right into it and the limited shade there hugged the ground by the trimmed box-hedge. The light hurt her eyes, and even the hedge was sending out flashes of light from its bright leaves. Southern wormwood slung itself in bands of white here and there, around thirsty busy lizzies, Japanese lanterns, wallflowers and carnations, which were standing, their heads together, like sheep in an open field. The peas and beans by the row of lavender were falling off their supports with the heat; the morning glory had given up the fight and faced the sun head on, while the poppies had shed their big red petals and stood there with bare stalks.

  She jumped down the steps, and ran through the sun-hot garden, head down, as if running through a yard in the rain. She made for a triangle of dark yew, slipped behind them and into a vast leafy arbour, a relic from the time of the Below family. The upper branches of a wide circle of elms had been woven together as far as they would reach, and the round opening in the centre had been covered with lattice wood. Rambling roses and Italian honeysuckle grew strong among elm leaves, making a fine cover, though on one side it had not worked, and hop vines, more recently planted, were strangling the elms without being able to close the gap.

  In front of the entrance to the arbour were two giant whitewashed seahorses. Inside, there was a long wooden bench and a table. The top of the table was made of stone, a big oval thing once, but most of it was now on the ground in three pieces, while a small, fourth piece lay loose on one corner of the table frame. Here the child sat herself down, put her feet on the bench, leaned back and crossed her arms. She closed her eyes and sat quite still. A few small furrows appeared on her brow, and from time to time she moved her eyebrows, smiling softly.

  “Griselda lies at the feet of the count in a room with crimson rugs and a gilt four-poster bed, but he pushes her away. A moment ago he tore her from her warm bed. Now he is opening the narrow arched door, and the cold air streams in on poor Griselda who is lying on the floor, weeping. And there is nothing between that cold breath of night air and her white warm limbs except some thin, thin linen. But he throws her out and locks the door on her. Then she presses her naked shoulder against the smooth, cold door and sobs as she hears his soft steps on the rugs. And through the keyhole falls the light from a scented candle, settling like a small, round sun on her bared breasts. Then she slips away, down the dark marble staircase. And all is quite silent. She can’t hear anything but the soft beat of her naked feet on the icy steps. Then she’s outside. The snow – no it’s the rain. It’s pouring down, and the water, cold and heavy, is splashing down on her shoulders. The linen cloth is clinging tightly to her body and the water is dripping down her bare legs. With her delicate feet she steps into the soft, cold mud, which slides out beneath the soles of her feet. The wind… The bushes are tearing at her and slashing her dress – but she isn’t really wearing a dress – just as they slashed my brown petticoat!

  “Oh, there must be nuts in Fastrup-lund, what with all those nuts in the market at Viborg… God knows whether Ane’s teeth are giving her any peace… No, Brunhilda! The wild horse is galloping away… Brunhilda and Grimmild – Queen Grimmild – they wink at the men, turn and walk away. And they drag out Queen Brunhilda, and a coarse, dark fellow with long, thick arms – someone like Bertel at the tollhouse – takes hold of her belt, tearing it in two. Then he pulls off her smock and her petticoat; and with his dirty fists he whips the gold bracelets off her white, delicate arms. Then a big, half-naked, rough brown man puts his hairy arm round her waist and breaks off her sandals with his big fat feet. And Bertel twists her long, black locks round his hand and starts dragging her away. Her body bent forward, she follows him, and the big man puts the palm of his sweaty hands on her naked back and he pushes her ahead. Ahead to the black, snorting stallion. Then they sling her into the grey dust of the road and fasten the long tail of the horse round her ankles…”

  Again a frown appeared, but this time it lasted longer. She shook her head, looking more and more annoyed. Finally she opened her eyes, began to get up and looked around, tired and dissatisfied.

  Mosquitoes were dancing in the gaps between the hop vines, and from the garden came gusts of mint and lemon balm, dill and aniseed. A small, bewildered, yellow spider ran tickling across her hand and made he
r jump up from the bench. She went towards the entrance and stretched for a rose high among the leaves, but could not reach it. Then she went out into the garden and began picking the rambling roses. The more she picked, the more eager she became, and soon her skirt was full. She carried them into the arbour and sat down by the table. One by one she lifted them out of her skirt and laid them on the stone surface, close together, till the stone was hidden below a pale red, fragrant cover.

  When the last rose was on the table, she smoothed down the folds in her skirt and brushed off the loose petals, and leaves stuck in the wool of her dress. She remained seated, her hands in her lap, staring at the rose blooms.

  This palette of flowers, from a white that blushed to a red turning blue, rippled in shades and shadows; they were joined by a damp and almost heavy pink and a lilac so elusive that it seemed to be coming and going with the air. And every curved petal, finely arched, soft in the shade, came alive in the light with thousands of barely visible sparks and flashes. All that lovely rose blood collected in veins and spread through the skin… and then that heavy, sweet scent, the rising mist of the red nectar seethed deep inside the flower cup.

  Hastily, she rolled up her sleeves and put her naked arms into the soft, damp coolness of the roses. She twisted and turned them, and the loose petals fluttered to the ground. Then she jumped up and with one sweep cleared everything off the table, and went out into the garden, straightening her sleeves. Blushing, with quick steps, she followed the path out, then walked slowly along the garden wall towards the open road. A cartload of hay had overturned, just outside the entrance to the farm. Many cartloads were waiting behind it, unable to get in. The overseer was beating the driver with a brown polished pole which gleamed in the sunlight.