A SECOND REVIEW OF
KIM, MY BELOVED BY JENS EISENHARDT

Kim, Min Elskede by Danish writer Jens Eisenhardt (1933-2012) was published by Borgen of Copenhagen in 1981 and translated from the original Danish by Stephen Foster as Kim, My Beloved, published by the Acolyte Press of Amsterdam in  1989. A PDF will be found here.

“I dream that the world might accept our happiness”
by C. Caunter
8 August 2024

From time to time one chances upon a book that isn’t a dud, or a chore, or even an alright pastime, but a story that grabs hold of the reader and impresses on him that it’s long been impatient to find him. So it proved with an oldie I recently decided to read and immediately read a second time: Kim, My Beloved by Jens Eisenhardt (1933-2012). Those who haven’t read it may nonetheless be familiar with the title, as this work was published by The Acolyte Press, that unique explosion of Greek-love fiction and nonfiction, in 1989. It is the eminently readable translation by Stephen W. Foster of Kim, min elskede, published in 1981 by Borgen of Copenhagen. Presented as a novel, the book was characterised by one Danish review at the time as ‘an unmistakable autobiographical portrayal in novel form’. Reading it, one has little doubt about its veracity, even if details may have been fictionalised. This article discusses both the book and the author behind it.

Narrator Jens Eisenhardt, originally from Copenhagen, reminisces about events that took place twenty years earlier. Back then, in 1961, he was a 28-year-old teacher at a progressive efterskole – an independent residential school for boys and girls aged 14 to 18 – in a rural part of the island of Funen. Not seldom is the reader of Greek-love literature transported to the setting of a boarding school, as also in Roger Peyrefitte’s Les amitiés particulières and Edmund Marlowe’s Alexander’s Choice. The present book, however, does not focus on the school but instead hones in narrowly on the relationship between the two protagonists. When 14-year-old, ‘Copenhagen-bold’ Kim Steffensen arrives at the school as a state-sponsored ward, Jens is almost instantly smitten, at least in his recollection. ‘André Gide said somewhere that there is nothing more difficult than observing beings in growth. One should view them, actually, only from the side, in profile … I see you in profile. Your low forehead, your dark, fine hair plastered down with Brylcreem or Brilliantine and combed back in a hopeless, unbecoming attempt to follow the duck-tail fashion of the day. Your nicely shaped ear. Your light, slightly projecting cheek which reminds me of the Slavic boys I have met in East Europe’ (p. 9).

Those boys from Liverpool

Of Kim’s background we learn little, other than that his father died before his birth and he got himself into some kind of trouble back in Copenhagen. At the school, however, he is mild-mannered, polite and keen to learn, bookish even. Five months after his arrival, Jens invites him over to his teacher’s den for a talk about his future. He treats him to all manner of delicacies from the local supermarket, but fumbles his attempt to declare his love and decides instead to keep it hidden. Over the year and a half that follow, he pours his passion into tutoring Kim in literature, languages, arts and history, as well as marshalling his friendship with teachers at other schools to open future paths of study for the boy.

The teacher-pupil relationship grades into a friendship, and the two do more and more things together. Jens moves into a house of his own on the school premises, and when the boy visits him for extra tutoring they listen to jazz and other music (Kim has to remind Jens what ‘those boys from Liverpool’ are called). However, when it comes to his secretly nursed love, Jens can’t confide even in otherwise sympathetic people and friends. ‘I realise this will be the price I will have to pay over and over again in the future for being together with you’ (p. 65). Sometimes another teacher intrudes on their togetherness, dropping in on Jens. ‘In just a few minutes, for the benefit of our Home Economics teacher, and all normal grown-up persons, I will have to glance at my watch and ask, ironically, whether you don’t think it might be time for you to go off to bed. And our Home Economics teacher will sit back and we’ll exchange a few meaningless homilies about what a nice boy you are. Good God! I can’t endure it’ (p. 50).

 

Cloudburst over a thirsting soul

The teacher turns 30; his pupil 15. And then the miracle happens. When finally Jens declares himself properly to Kim, the boy reveals that the feelings are reciprocal. After the long silence, ‘the heavens split and the ground shakes and a cloudburst slakes my thirsting soul in the wilderness’ (p. 149). Their newfound happiness must be painstakingly dissimulated, though: ‘we each have to be constantly on our guard, careful to play our rôles. I as your teacher, you as my pupil. Thus it is, and thus it will remain throughout all the time we move together within the compass of the school’ (p. 81). Jens arranges for them to spend a weekend in Aarhus, where after a night sleeping separately in adjoining hotel rooms – ‘tonight it’s less important that I touch your body than that you’ve actually called me by my first name’ (p. 95) – they experience their first sexual intimacy in the morning.

A school trip to Poland, during which Kim turns 16, proves a tribulation. Before becoming a teacher, Jens was politically active as a socialist and travelled extensively in Eastern Europe. To his political friends as to everyone else, however, he must present Kim as merely a pupil in his charge; a pretence that wears him down. Kim for his part feels ignored and slighted by Jens’s adult friends, who see the boy as a whippersnapper whose constant presence is mystifying. Things don’t become any easier when Jens’s terror of being sniffed out starts to border on paranoia. He begins to imagine that people right around him are talking about the illicit relationship, and Kim has to assure him that this is not the case. The reader certainly gets a taste of the narrator’s highly strung and melancholy disposition. Kim, by contrast, is more laid-back and does not worry nearly as much about the risk they are running. Jens is meanwhile becoming increasingly dependent on sherry and akvavit, the cause of the first true row between himself and Kim. ‘The poison from the poisoned world around us has slowly, over the years, seeped into my body’ (p. 129).

Still, there is bliss to be savoured during many a stolen hour. ‘During the course of that long summer – I think of it as our lucky summer – we talk a great deal about our childhoods. Like all lovers, we feel the urge to tell each other about ourselves. But your childhood is so close to you, it’s still so molten. You burn your fingers on it. So you turn your back on it and believe, in a moment of exhilaration, that it’s behind you forever. How wrong you are. How cruelly wrong. I haven’t the heart to tell you that. You’re still too immature to appreciate your own childhood. You still have its scent. You only want to free yourself from it, to rinse yourself from its smell of milk and sleep and chastity. You still fully and firmly believe that growing up is completely different from being a child’ (p. 135). Then comes the test of separation when Kim goes up to Odense to continue his, still state-sponsored, studies.

The book is essentially an ‘ego-document’: an examination of Jens’s exhilaration and his anguish, which the author sets out to reconstruct from a considerable distance in time. Far less light is shed on the person of Kim, who features only through the prism of how Jens sees him and what Jens feels for him. Even with this limitation, the narrative is compelling: it evidently clamoured to be written, and many turns of phrase linger.

A brief window of toleration

Kim, My Beloved portrays Denmark in the early sixties as a country still under a pall of dour religion and intolerant of homosexuality regardless of the ages involved, though sweeping change was around the corner. Jens frequently reflects on having had to hide his sexuality since childhood, when he used to dream ‘of meeting a boy or a man I could love’ (p. 136). He states: ‘We live our lives in danger, under a grim law’ (p. 67); at one point, before Kim becomes his boyfriend, Jens gets beaten up and robbed by two young men he’s met in a Copenhagen bar frequented by hustlers. While he and Kim are together, a boy at Kim’s school in Odense is expelled for having ‘seduced’ fellow pupils. Amid these depressing events, Jens has only his inner compass to rely on. ‘My ignorance at the time is total. I know nothing yet about the great homosexual tradition which winds through our culture. … Without models, without references, and in an atmosphere of mystery and secrecy, I breathe life into that flame which on our very first day, on the school-yard path, you lit in me’ (pp. 59-60). As Kim’s lover, he observes: ‘I dream that the world might accept our happiness … Good God, all lovers want to gambol in the broadest light of day – nothing new in that: I’m as vain as the next man’ (p. 107).

It’s no surprise that the author Eisenhardt eventually settled on a book format to testify to the great love of his life. It’s also no coincidence that he went public with (a novelised version of) his and Kim’s love story in 1981, two decades after the events, during a brief window when Greek love stood a realistic chance in Europe of becoming socially accepted. The Danish age of consent was lowered to 15 in 1976. In a climate of relative tolerance, the author was not going to get into trouble for publishing this revelation and was going to garner considerable sympathy. According to Stephen Nicholson in his autobiographical account A Dangerous Love, in Denmark this window lasted until the start of the twenty-first century. If so, Denmark, like Portugal, fell in line with the Anglosphere-led hysteria some years later than most other Western European countries. In any case, it is only because of the said window that we have this rare document testifying to an enduring love between a teacher and his pupil; the sort of relationship otherwise learned of almost exclusively through reports of prosecuted cases.

Stray dogs in the night

Kim, min elskede appears to be the only book by Eisenhardt to have been translated into English, but it’s not his only one. He debuted in 1956 with Gå ind i din tid (Go into your time), a novel about modern Denmark’s adolescents. After his teaching career he set up as a freelance writer. He was awarded several grants, and books by him were published at least into the 1990s. In Kim, the narrator remarks that a book of his about his childhood under the German occupation is published and made into a radio play. Part of Eisenhardt’s work deals with his left-wing activism, but there’s also Køtere i natten (Stray dogs in the night, Borgen, 1982), a sequel to Kim that’s actually alluded to at the end of the first book. A Danish library website describes the sequel as follows: ‘After two homosexuals have lived together for twelve hectic and intense years, the failed party sits despairing and remembers the happy time.’ Another synopsis adds: ‘The boy/youth has grown away from his mentor/lover, who cannot accept this.’ Together for twelve years. So much for the comment on Goodreads by someone who hadn’t read Kim but was nonetheless content to snipe: ‘Probably a novel suggesting this man-boy-love is a good idea – though these sort of authors never write about how the boy feels in a year or so and is replaced by a younger model.’

Eisenhardt further wrote Englen der blev menneske og andre bøssehistorier (The angel who turned human and other gay stories, Coq, 1983). His story ‘Århus i regn’ (Aarhus in the rain) was included in the gay and lesbian anthology Når mænd elsker mænd og kvinder elsker kvinder: 160 års danske fortællinger om bøsser og lesbiske (2003). He was also a translator who translated an English-language biography of Freud and other books into Danish. Will Ogrinc’s Boyhood and Adolescence: A Selective Bibliography does not mention any titles by him other than Kim, though it does call that book a ‘must-read’, as well as noting that ‘Jens Eisenhardt’ is a pseudonym. The latter notion seemed questionable to me, given that the author used this name throughout his writing career, including for works containing autobiographical information but not dealing with Greek love. The clincher was finding the birth entry in the parish records: Jens Eisenhardt, born at 62 Lyngbyvej, Copenhagen on 18 February 1933 to the engineer (with a shipping line, as confirmed in Kim) Ove Eisenhardt and his wife Inga Margrethe Mathiasen. The record adds that Jens left the Church of Denmark in 1968.

 

When Kim, min elskede appeared in 1981, it was lauded in major Danish news media. ‘Many people should read it … a very important work of art’; ‘It’s an incredibly intense love he describes’; ‘A human document that is both harrowing and encouraging’; ‘A gripping, brave and painful indictment of a social puritanism that forces so many people to experience the most wonderful thing in their lives as simultaneously the most terrible thing of all.’ This gripping indictment can now be found in online catalogues tagged as child sexual abuse literature. If Jens and Kim had met in the early 2020s instead of the early 1960s, it’s unlikely their long-term relationship could have taken off in the first place. The age of consent remains a deceptive 15, but for all intents and purposes is 18 for intergenerational relationships, given that seduction of someone under 18 using age- and experience-based superiority is forbidden. So, of course, are sexual relationships between a teacher and a pupil under 18. Coupled with this, the spirit of the age is now intensely hostile specifically to Greek love and vigilantly primed to nip it in the bud or, failing that, to make participants regret it. Jens’s dream that the world might accept the happiness of couples like Kim and himself is once more just a dream.

Perhaps in connection with this development, the author has evidently faded into oblivion: beyond the inevitable bibliographical traces, there is nothing of substance about him on the Internet. It would be most welcome if a reader of Danish could tell us something about the sequel to Kim, as well as about those ‘gay stories’ and some of the other novels: do they feature Greek love? However it may be, with his paean to Kim Steffensen and their first rapturous, if also nerve-wracking years together, Jens Eisenhardt has secured his place – his and Kim’s – in the celestial Acropolis.