The 1933 Novel That Scandalized Denmark

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By Michael Booth<br>February 11, 2015<br>On Travel

The art and life of Mark di Suvero<br>-->

How an irritable Danish author left an enduring mark on the national character.

Aksel Sandemose in 1963. Photo: Leif Ørnelund

Your modern-day Dane is not what you would call a God-fearing creature. The Danish church, though never formally separated from the state (as happened in Sweden), plays an ever-diminishing role in the lives of the vast majority of Danes, with Sunday attendance experiencing an apparently inexorable decline, divorce increasing, and church leaders gently shunted into the margins of the popular discourse. You would imagine, then, that the teachings of Martin Luther would hold little currency in Danish society today, yet many of the core principles of Lutheranism—parsimony, modesty, disapproval of individualism or elitism—still define the manner in which the Danes behave toward one another and view the rest of the world, thanks in part to the enduring influence of an improbable literary figure.

Aksel Nielsen was a sensitive and sickly child who grew into a weak and stunted young adult. The son of a smith, he was born in 1899 in the somnolent North Jutland town of Nykøbing on the island of Mors. He received a rudimentary education at the local school until 1916, when, at the age of seventeen, he went to sea on a schooner bound for Newfoundland.

This was the first of many flights from reality upon which the bookish Aksel would embark during his life: the next came just a few weeks later on the other side of the Atlantic, where he jumped ship. But, with the world now at war, Nielsen’s habit of scribbling secretively in his notebooks late at night in his bunk bed, combined with his strange accent, aroused suspicion in Canada. His workmates began to think he might be a German spy. Once again he fled, this time back to Denmark, via Spain, working to pay his passage on a ship.

Back home in Nykøbing, few were pleased to see Aksel. His parents had not been happy about him leaving in the first place, and his jumping ship had compounded their disapproval. But in fact, his North American escapades were to prove his making. At the age of twenty-four, following numerous rejections, Nielsen’s fictionalized version of his Newfoundland adventures was finally published as Stories from Labrador, under a newly acquired surname, Sandemose, taken from a place close to his Norwegian mother’s hometown. More books followed, blending fiction and fact in a style critics have likened to Joseph Conrad’s, albeit interspersed with long, rather worthy essays.

There would be yet more flights in Sandemose’s life. The next was to Norway, where he fled in 1930 with his wife and three children following various financial misadventures, including selling the rights to his next book to two different publishers (I did kick myself when I heard about this). During World War II he ran away again, this time to Sweden, following a peripheral involvement in the Norwegian resistance movement. This amounted to little more than sharing a beer or two with actual resistance members, but they grew fearful that Sandemose wouldn’t be able to keep his mouth shut and so persuaded him to cross the border to their neutral neighbor. In 1945, back in Norway, having left his wife and three kids, he fathered twins with another woman.

By all accounts, Sandemose was a deeply unpleasant man, an untrustworthy, amoral fantasist. One of his sons would later accuse his father, variously, of pedophilia, incest, cruelty to animals, and bigamy, while the alleged murder of a Norwegian man has also been added to the charge sheet against him. I recently noticed Sandemose’s portrait on a Norwegian Air 737, one of a series of “Norwegian” heroes featured on the tails of the company’s planes. He makes for an unlikely corporate icon, it has to be said.

Sandemose on a Norwegian Air Shuttle. Photo: SliverFoxNL, via DeviantArt

Sandemose’s works are little read these days, except, that is, for a small fragment of one novel, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, published in 1933. The book is a thinly veiled roman à clef about the people of Nykøbing, which in the book is renamed “Jante.” It caused a storm of controversy, satirizing life in small-town Denmark as being ruled by pettiness, envy, backbiting, gossip, inverted snobbery, and small-mindedness. Naturally, the book generated some especially indignant spluttering in Nykøbing, exposing as it did the mean-spirited behavior of its residents, many of whom were easily identifiable.

The fragment of A Fugitive that has come both to define and to torment the Danes is a list of rules by which the residents of the fictional town of Jante were said to abide. These rules set out the Law of Jante (Janteloven), a kind of Danish Ten Commandments, the influence and infamy of which have spread beyond their home country throughout the Nordic...