Havoc by Tom Kristensen

"Havoc should come with a health warning. Tom Kristensen's novel, about a thirty-something literary critic who loses himself in a maelstrom of drink, jazz, and sex is one of the most disturbing and absorbing accounts of self-destruction in modern European literature."

The above warning is from Morten Høi Jensen’s Introduction to the novel in the New York Review Books edition. I couldn’t think of more accurate words to describe what a reader is in store for with Havoc. Incidentally, the literal translation of the original Danish title Hærværk is vandalism, and that’s vandalism as a ravaging, sacking, smashing, wreckage, defacing and trashing. In other words, creating havoc.

I was initially drawn to this novel since one literary critic called it the Steppenwolf of Danish literature. Ah, the magic theater and a magic carpet ride in Copenhagen – irresistible. And similar to the connection between Hermann Hesse and wolf of the steppes Harry Haller, author Tom Kristensen (1893-1974) most definitely shares much with his protagonist Ole Jastrau – he published poetry and worked as a literary critic in Copenhagen, had rocky relations with women (Kristensen was married five times), and, most famously, was an excessive drinker.

The opening pages of Kristensen's Havoc (published in 1930) provide the frame: Ole Jastrau sits at his desk in his apartment down the street from Copenhagen’s Town Square Hall. There’s a stack of books waiting for his review. No question, Ole needs peace and quiet so he can do his job. But he has anything but peace and quiet: the telephone keeps ringing, the front doorbell keeps ringing and, since his wife Johanne is out shopping, Ole must deal with his nagging young son Oluf. Ahhhhh! Enough to drive a book reviewer crazy . . . or drive him to the bottle for a much needed drink.

The doorbell rings yet again. Standing in the hallway are none other than Ole’s old buddies Bernhard Sanders and Stefan Steffensen, Sanders a Communist agitator and Steffensen an antiestablishment poet, both men wanted by the police, both men wanting to hide out in Jastrau’s apartment. And since Jastrau invites his visitors in, he has just obliterated the prospect of spending the next hours writing book reviews.

As host, Ole Jastrau brings out a bottle of liquor to offer his guests a drink. And it is exactly at this juncture Tom Kristensen offers readers what will amount to a cantus furmus for the entire 500-page novel: “Already, now that he hugged the bottle close against his chest, he felt a warm sense of reassurance. It was as if he suddenly found himself at home – he who felt like a stranger everywhere, here among his own furniture, here with his own son, yes, even with the things he wrote.”

Havoc is intense, every single scene counts and provides its own distinctive sting as we witness Ole Jastrau’s slide into chaos. Thus, in this sense, we have a work of bleak existentialism. Perhaps Ole Jastrau would have felt a kinship with the father of existentialism who also spent his brief life writing in the city of Copenhagen – none other than nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. But, alas, Jastrau wasn’t given the opportunity as Kierkegaard's work and ideas were not rediscovered and brought to light throughout Europe until many years later.

One of the more intriguing parts of the novel is Ole’s ongoing conversations with Arne Vulum, a man of letters and reviewer of foreign literature, a critic known for not having read a single book of Danish fiction for at least five years. Vulum relates with pride the fact he no longer writes in Danish because his home language, like American English, has been infected with the barbarism of materialistic culture. In many ways, the Jastrau-Vulum connection highlights how, from a particular angle, a reading of Havoc can be taken as a denouncement of a society submerged and made soulless by omnipresent, moneygrubbing capitalism.

Since repetition a la Nietzsche’s eternal return is among the novel’s major themes, let me repeat, in a bar blaring with jazz, drinking and more drinking, alone in his apartment following the departure of Johanna and Oluf, drinking and more drinking, in the publisher’s office, roaming out on the street, in bed with a prostitute, each and every scene delivers its own unique existential sting.

One telling example: Ole and Johanna get dressed up to attend a formal party. In his tails and white tie Ole feels like a waiter – and in the daylight he has the sense all of this is a masquerade, even a carnival. Shapely, attractive Johanne puts on her black dress with bold yellow pattern. Swelling curves, full breasts, sexy legs, Ole sees Johanne as too provocative, an untamed creature having a come-on look. As much as Ole Jastrau yearns for the Dionysian frenzy of a swirling booze fueled chaos, the bourgeois in him recoils at the sight of his wife looking dangerous. Jarstau’s conflicted nature does indeed echo Harry Haller, thus I can see why Havoc is the Danish Steppenwolf.

After the party, a get-together that made Jastrau feel as if he was held in the clutches of the flames of hell, he and Johanna ride back in a cab. Jastrau says he can’t take it any longer. Johanna asks in a severe tone why he turned the photographs of his mother and son around at home. Jastrau reflects: “In his mind’s eye he saw himself as he had been there in the apartment – how, unable to rest because of dissipation an the whiskey in his system, he had paced back and forth through the rooms and suddenly felt himself tormented by the two faces, the photographs of his mother and his son, how he had had a feeling that they could see right through him, and then he had turned the pictures around.”

This two hundred pages in. The following three hundred pages rage on, spiraling down in an alcoholic burn. No wonder Morten Høi Jensen issued his warning. And no wonder Havoc has had a cult following ever since. Vandalism given literary form by one of the most articulate and sensitive souls writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Thank you New York Review Books for republishing. An overlooked classic deserving a wide modern audience.


Danish author Tom Kristensen