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The second problem is that, despite Hannay's philosophical gifts, and the inordinate amount of space given (in a biography) to the interpretation of Kierkegaard's works, I found Hannay not always reliable in his judgments about those works. The unreliability sometimes shows itself in simple factual mistakes, such as his claim (p. 174) that Kierkegaard "never once owned up publicly or even privately" to have written the pseudonymous Either/Or. (I find it unfathomable how a writer as knowledgeable as Hannay could ignore the "First and Last Declaration" that Kierkegaard appended to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which he takes legal and literary responsibility for all his pseudonymous works, even while asking his reader to recognize the distinction between the views of the pseudonymous "character authors" he has created and his own personal views.) At times Hannay gives what I would call serious misreadings of Kierkegaard's texts, and here, in contrast to the restraint he often shows as historian, he tends to make over-confident judgments about matters that are at best controversial.
I made a long list of such instances, but here I can only cite a couple of examples. On p. 387, Hannay considers Kierkegaard's own claim that his writings served the purposes of "Governance" or divine providence, and asks whether it might be true that Kierkegaard was serving God's purposes: "Surely not. The very idea of God transcends purpose, and thus prudence and imprudence too." This mysterious theological edict is offered without justification or explanation, even though if taken seriously it makes the idea of divine providence impossible. A second example can be found on p. 361, where Hannay discusses Kierkegaard's penetrating discussion of love in Works of Love, and, much to my astonishment, judges that Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, places little value on pity and compassion: "in the struggle out of which Kierkegaard's individual emerges there is, as we saw, a hardening against the pity one is disposed to feel for human suffering … ." From my perspective, this is the exact opposite of the truth.
My own hunch is that many of Hannay's misjudgments arise from a fundamental lack of sympathy for Kierkegaard's Christian faith. Hannay himself was a signatory to the 1980 "A Secular Humanist Declaration," and though, unlike some commentators, he is aware of Kierkegaard's Christian faith and its importance, I find he often views issues connected to that faith through the wrong end of the telescope.
Joakim Garff's Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography is an altogether different kind of book. While even longer than Hannay's work, Garff's biography sparkles from a literary perspective. (This may be partly to the credit of Bruce Kirmmse's excellent translation.) Though Garff spends almost as much time discussing Kierkegaard's works as Hannay does, Garff never loses sight of the story. He knows how to tell a tale, and while certainly long, the book is always a good read. Indeed, much of Garff's biography reads like a novel.
According to Danish historian Peter Tudvad, Garff's work is too much like a novel; that is, it plays fast and loose with the facts. Although Garff's work has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Brandes Award in Denmark, and though the English language version has been extravagantly reviewed by such notables as John Updike, Tudvad, author of Kierkegaard's København (Kierkegaard's Copenhagen) and an expert on the period, has shown that Garff's book is riddled with mistakes. Many of Tudvad's findings have been communicated to English-speaking readers by philosopher M. G. Piety.1 (Everything I say about this below has been derived from Piety's articles, though I first heard about the controversy when a Danish friend sent me a newspaper article from Copenhagen. Moreover, I am referring to the first English edition of Garff's book, published in 2005; a revised paperback edition, not yet available at the time of this writing, is promised.)
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