Lucky Per is the New Greatest Story Ever Told
By: Camille Cusumano
Tags: Fiction, Literature, Danish, Writing, Bildungsroman

Lucky Per is the New Greatest Story Ever Told

The novel is a soul-searcher’s guide to the Joyful Galaxy of One.

1890 photo of Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan, Wikimedia Commons

One is tempted to label Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lucky Per as a novel akin to Homer’s Odyssey, a modern-day hero’s journey. Certainly there is that parallel arc in the obstacle-strewn journeys of Per, the Danish protagonist, and Odysseus. However, it is the eventual homecoming that separates the two — and in my mind elevates Lucky Per above the Greek icon.

The end of this Danish masterpiece might be a Rorschach separating pessimists from optimists—count me among the latter. About two-thirds through, I almost dreaded getting to the end, but then was pleasantly surprised (not all readers will be) and impressed beyond measure. Endings often make or break a book or movie.

Without spoiling, I’ll say that what I loved about the way the novel resolves Per’s life is that it validated my personal worldview. Imagine that!—in a novel written about 120 years ago in Scandinavia. In my esteem the resolution is enlightened, prophetic, and ahead of its time.

Lucky Per was my new best friend for a week as I curled up everywhere, from my bed to buses to public benches, with that hefty hardcover book (1 1/2 lbs, more than 600 pages, including the introduction and translator’s note).

Where had Per been all my life? Untranslated into English was where, until 2019. Naomi Lebowitz, a professor at Washington University, has done a brilliant translation of the work. Lucky Per was first published in 1904 and in 1917 Pontoppidan was awarded the Nobel Prize. Everyman’s Library has made available to us English speakers a true masterpiece, a bildungsroman, a novel that deals with the character’s formative years, mid- and late-life, and spiritual education.

Lucky Per is that and so much more, as the author delves deeply into not only religious thought of the times, but also the enduring, even ancient, spiritual and philosophical tropes, as well as the attitudes toward technological advances of the time. Fairytales, mythology, and nature are important threads in the novel. (Pontoppidan was born just as Hans Christian Anderson came out with New Fairy Tales and Stories). This may sound like the makings for a muddy stew of a read but it all works, along with all the contradictions and paradoxes in the character, Per (the nickname for Peter Andreas).

The throughline that drives the long novel is Per’s quest for greatness, a singular goal that waxes and wanes but never truly vanishes. The idea of what defines greatness matures with Per. We are with him from his early youth as the incorrigible middle child of eleven children (six girls and five boys — boy, could I relate, as number five of ten kids). Per’s father, a minister in the country village of Jutland, is a dour, humorless, God-fearing man in the worst sort of way — ruthlessly soul murdering.

By page twenty-one Per (who is always Peter Andreas to his big family, only becoming Per out in the secular world) has his first soul-saving epiphany during one of his many punished rebellions:

“He had never known so strongly as in that moment that he did not belong to his house, to that half-dark, stuffy room where his father and siblings now sat and sang hymns and muttered apprehensive prayers in the middle of a magical winter’s night — in a sort of underworld blindness to the light and full of dread of life and its glory. He felt himself a thousand miles from that scene, under a wholly different heaven, at one with the sun and stars and the sailing clouds.”

Soon to follow this awakening is Per’s first idea of how to achieve greatness—to the benefit of his fellow Danes. Thanks to the perceptiveness of one elder, a math teacher, he decides to become an engineer (as was the author before becoming a journalist):

“He wanted to be an engineer. That profession seemed to him to command the most possibility for the real fulfillment of his dream of a proud and free-roaming life, rich in adventure and exciting incidents. Also, the choice of a practical profession would give him the means to break away cleanly from his family and the glorified centuries-old traditions . . . [his father] would often disparage the general joyous anticipation of a great technological future.”

Per’s life spans eight books (or chapters), the first titled “His Youth.” Thus begins Per’s sentimental education. Young and impetuous, Per is the Holden Caulfield archetype, green, naïve, the big city his oyster: “Freedom’s hour finally sounded for Peter Andreas . . . he was 16 when his father consented to send him to Copenhagen to study at the Polytechnic Institute . . . His departure from home had cost him no tears.” Like Holden in Catcher in the Rye, Per is fraught with angst, alienation. Through Per’s point of view we observe the superficiality of society. Just as Catcher in the Rye “deals with complex issues of innocence, identity, belonging, loss, connection, and sex” (Wikipedia), so does Lucky Per in this first book.

Per soon morphs into another immortal soul searcher, Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau, and is prone to romantic flights of fancy. We see Per hopscotching through puppy love with free-loving Lizbeth, whom he insensitively drops for the virginal Francisca. Soon enough, like his doppelganger Moreau, he licks his chops for a more mature love with the proverbial older married woman, the Baroness. (For Moreaux, it is Madame Arnoux). That doesn’t last long either.

Pontoppidan’s scope in his novel is broader than that of Flaubert who claimed that he wanted “to write the moral history of the men of my generation — or, more accurately, the history of their feelings.” Still, Lucky Per, like L’Education Sentimental can be at turns “ironic and pessimistic,” but with a heavier, more detailed lampooning of (Danish) society.

Per resembles another famous French realist character, Eugène de Rastignac, the protagonist in Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot. Both Per and Eugène are of poor extraction, aspiring naively to fit in high society, ambitious to achieve their lofty goals, dismissing advice of others, and eager to lean on their own wits and charm, often through relationships with women. However, Pontoppidan early on in Per’s soulful journey, has begun to touch on the turn-of-the-century concerns in industry, technology, population, poverty, nature. This painting of the very same concerns of our day is what separates Poppontidan from Flaubert (and Balzac, Zola, and other naturalists who preceded him). And which makes him so relevant today.

In Book (or chapter) 2, Per starts hanging out in bohemian cafés and pubs with “foaming tankards” galore. “It was here, through these old people who emptied the cup of joy to the dregs, that Peter Andreas had found his first sanctuary — a provisional refuge on the way to that country of happiness his dreams had promised him.” Per takes in the rants and intoxicated pontificating as he and the reader get an earful of the artsy pedantry.

In a dark, poorly furnished room, Per keeps working on his innovative idea to connect Denmark through its waterways by an expansive network of canals. In one of the pubs, Per’s proposed engineering project comes to the notice of one Ivan Salomon, the son of Copenhagen’s affluent Jewish family. Ivan takes genuine interest in Per and doggedly desires to be his benefactor. Ivan is a sort of philanthropic investment capitalist who wants “to discover a genius someday and champion him.” Ivan praises Per, telling him“he was marked out to be an Aladdin, a charmed boy on whose Caesar brow God’s finger had written, ‘I come, I see, I conquer!’”

Even as Per, we are told, is humiliated to get “this prophecy from the mouth of a foolish little Jew,” he accepts the invitation to the social gatherings at Ivan’s wealthy family homes — in the city and the country.

There in those lavish settings intricately detailed by Pontoppidan, we see Per’s character slowly ripen. A hormonal Per is instantly attracted to one of Ivan’s sisters, Nanny, who is the more sensual and flirtatious. But then, the older sister, Jakobe, who is reserved, less endowed with conventional beauty, attracts Per for her more grounded wisdom, intellect, and inner attributes. If at first Per latches on to Jakobe for selfish material reasons, as their relationship grows, Per develops a deeper, more authentic self. We observe Per alternately fall from grace (cheat on his lover, lie by omission or commission), feel remorse, probe his own moral or immoral behavior, and return to steadfast earnest belief in his own raison d’être. Per emanates a sort of pride that equally keeps self-respect intact and at times trips him up.

So committed to his engineering invention, Per is willing to endure long stretches of solitude to fine tune it. Aside from Ivan’s unconditional belief in him Per suffers constant rebuffs, even insults, from stodgy social institutions. He is viewed as too young to be so brilliant. Going in and out of depression over such rejections, Per keeps his nose to the grindstone. The invention is his Sisyphean rock throughout the novel. Perhaps love is too. He often comes so close to the summit in both camps, only to have the rock fall back. At times it appears that Per is the one shooting himself in the foot. Other times, it seems society’s cards are stacked against him, in a way those of us who identify with soul searchers, who are willing to think outside the box, can relate to.

Disillusionment is inevitable. Before entering the Polytechnic Institute, Per “had imagined it as a kind of temple, a solemn intellectual workshop where the future happiness and well-being of free men were forged by the thunder and lightning of the mind. He found instead, a hateful, ugly building . . . many dark, melancholy rooms permeated with the smell of tobacco . . . He had expected his future teachers to be devoted preachers of natural science’s sacred gospel; he met instead old, dry schoolmasters in the lecture halls, . . . .. One of them a perfect mummy . . . a pedant. . .”

Per’s and Jakobe’s relationship once it gets some traction (by a fleeting, impulsive Prince Charming kiss on a staircase) drives this novel upward to its true maginificence. Their romance in all its vicissitudes is the real heart and soul and spirit of the book. There is always a tentativeness about their love. They take turns being the one to hold back. Jakobe’s first impression of Per is that he is a dolt, a fop, maybe if she spoke Yiddish, a nebbish. Per’s initial negative Jewish sentiment seems to dissipate as he becomes guardedly comfortable in the sumptuous Salomon homes. And while he does accept financial support from them, it is always with a bit of resentment. His pride assures himself he will repay it once his invention gets backing.

Notwithstanding Per’s flaws and Jakobe’s fragile introverted life, they do genuinely fall in love and progress through its stages. It takes some doing on both parts and it develops over time, not in the Hollywood fast-track manner. Literary loves always put me in mind of Stendhal’s seven stages of love. One can mark stages for Per and Jakobe but they seem to divert from the Stenhalian model, given that their love grows from initial antipathy. (Consider the purity of the lotus that springs from muddy waters.)

One wonderful, significant high point occurs when Per is working abroad in Austria and Jakobe surprises him with a visit. It is at a time when Per has had another of his awakenings, this one in nature: “Now his vision was not captured by the mere lines and colors of maps, but by the vastness, spirit, the mystical powers of nature to which he was made susceptible by his anxiety . . . the immense power of forms and the deep stillness of eternity that called out strange and new feelings and moods in him.” So when Jakobe joins him in the Alps their bonding is full of openness and joy, their defenses dropped, perhaps the most intimate they will ever be.

Something huge happens to Jakobe during this visit. It seems sad that Per may never know about it. Whether or not that is for the best, both characters move on to higher selves and there is a cherished resolution to their relationship, one that’s atypical for novels of this time. Think of the many Madame Bovary types who had to suffer and die in the end for their sins of impurity. Or, consider Thomas Hardy (1840 to 1928) whose novels I’ve loved. However, much as he was critical of Victorian society, he never bestowed upon his hero or heroine the sort of transcendence that Per and Jakobe will reach.

During Per’s travels for work the engaged lovers write to each other. This often serves as a modus operandi for Pontoppidan’s Socratic discourse on religion. During a visit in Rome, Per, the minister’s son, reads the ancients and has this aha moment as he writes Jakobe, “Never have I felt so strongly as now what a crime against humanity Christianity has been. Never have I understood with such shame how far we still have to rise . . .”

There in Rome Per finds “a clearer and clearer understanding that Christianity was a lot older than Christ, in whom it only found its culmination, at least for the time being. And he couldn’t take comfort in the thought that it would have been but a passing phenomenon if the powers and princes of the state had not seen some advantage in helping it onto the spirit’s throne. It seemed to have taken root in a primal human need and to suck sustenance from an instinct that lay outside nature. . .”

While Per is absorbing this knowledge about the human condition, Jakobe has an experience that shapes her later devotion. She witnesses the degradation and indigence of a mass of emigrés waiting to be shipped to America. They are Jews escaping the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe, stranded in a hellish limbo (an outdoor detention center). Another time, she writes Per after a train conductor loudly mocks her “beak,” that she, despite her family’s high-society position, “was reminded that I belong to that same damned and persecuted race.”

Given the times, it seems inevitable that, even after they are engaged to be married, Per would cruelly conclude in a letter to Jakobe that “there was now an irremediable problem in their relationship: they were not rooted in the same spiritual soil.” He only draws this conclusion offhandedly during a visit to his countryside of origin, near Jutland.

This development is the fulfillment of a prophecy early in the novel by one of the numerous characters who appear and disappear. This man, just before committing suicide, tells Per presciently that one always returns to one’s roots “even if we sometimes hate it.” He informs Per that there is “an uncomfortable magical power . . . in all that is homely and habitual . . . We live in a sepulchral chapel of family remembrances and, finally, have no feelings other than piety.” In other words, against our best aspirations and intentions, we will, zombie-like, all return to our origins. Per dismisses him.

Yet it appears that this prediction is coming true. During a visit to the very home territory that disgusted young Per, he falls for a Christian family’s daughter, perceiving her as a better (as in more familiar) marriage mate than Jakobe.

Jakobe is heartbroken and so am I. But this is not the end! The ultimate, the coup de grace of awakenings is yet to come, only after Per marries the home girl, has three children with her, and still finds himself suffering angst and ennui.

What Per does about this continued confusion will sound selfish or selfless, depending on the reader. I go with the latter. In the village there is one Pastor Fjaltring considered eccentric and crazy by most. He might be playing the role of the Fool or Trickster. Per will be chastised for even talking to him but he does so one day and this passing patter might have influenced his final stage in life. In a long diatribe, the Pastor tells Per: “. . . happiness in the worldly sense has made mankind sterile. The soul’s native element is grief. Happiness is an animal vestige in us.”

Per retreats from (abandons?) his young family to a monkish lifestyle in some undisclosed country area, where he lives alone, reads, finds humble work, contentment, even rapture just in day to day life. He will pass his received wisdom on to a neighbor school master who later serves as the voice for Per’s grand finale. In this fully enlightened Per, I recognized Pontoppidan’s fundamental contention that the human desire for freedom and intimacy, is always within one’s grasp because it can only come from within, from one’s Self. Pontoppidan has taken his character through all the external quests, all the passages we all share in, for work, for love, for happiness. Yet in the end, all institutions from religious and academic, to marriage/children are often (do the numbers) stumbling blocks to the very thing we want and think they can offer.

The author takes us inside Per’s mind working on this conundrum: “There was a stray Buddhist saying that has burned into his brain and shone like phosphor every time his soul grew dark: ‘He who loves nothing here on earth and hates nothing, desires nothing — only he is without fear and fetters.’ . . . From all corners of the earth, the same answer! In all ages, the same demand: self-denial, obliteration of the self. Happiness lies in renunciation.”

Once Per finds the golden goose, the secret sauce, the happiness that was always available to him, he becomes a model for his neighbor, the young school master. Through his posthumous journal writings Per relates these pearls: “There is only one thing that can conquer suffering: the Passion.*” And: “Every man’s soul is an independent universe, his death the extinction of the universe in miniature.”

I wonder if Pontoppidan read the ancient Buddhists. One, Pai-Chang, asserted, “It is better to settle the inner truth first, and then afterward gain virtue and knowledge.” Per, like most of us, has done the reverse, but only then, as Pai-Chang taught, he could “turn earth into gold,” figuratively of course.

Disheartened when Pontoppidan would have Per forsake Jakobe for home girl (passing up a diamond for cut glass?), I pushed through the final chapters of the book. I found deep satisfaction in what both Per and Jakobe become. They remain friends as they age, writing each other. Jakobe uses her family riches to start a school for the wretched displaced children she had seen deprived of home and safety. Per bequeaths his money to her school. The saga of Per Sidenius and Jakobe Salomon comes full circle. Quite beautiful.