A Fairy Tale

The unfortunate tourist was the Danish children’s author Hans Christian Andersen, who was in London in 1847 to promote his books. It is typical of the sort of situation Andersen got himself into throughout his life. The bicentennial of Andersen’s birth is coming up in 2005. In his home country, elaborate celebrations are planned. A massive two volume biography by Jens Andersen has just come out in Denmark, and in the United States a new translation of his best- known stories by Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank has been published.

The impression most Americans have of Andersen stems from the musical, starring Danny Kaye as an extremely noisy teller of children’s stories. And then, of course, there are the cartoon versions of his fairy tales, which have had their teeth pulled by Disney. The real Andersen–in both his life and his stories–is considerably darker and more complicated.

He is both dated, closely tied to the ideas of his own age, and very modern, the famous author on perpetual book tour. He was a great and enthusiastic traveler who lived in mortal fear of being robbed and who brought his own rope along in case fire should break out in the hotels in which he was staying. He was a snob of the first rank who avidly collected the orders of the courts of Europe and at the same time a self-made man who could see that the Prince of Wales was a fat wastrel. He was a sensitive soul, who would save a worm from a beetle. Given to fits of crying, he could be maudlin and descend into bathos of the worst Victorian kind. At the same time he was an extremely vain and ambitious man who plotted his career with tenacity.

His appearance was decidedly odd. One contemporary Danish painter described him as belonging to that category of people “who are set apart by their terrible outward appearance.” He was six feet tall, which made him large in his day, but he seemed to lack a spine. He had tiny beady eyes, a huge nose, massive hands, the handshake of a dead fish, and huge feet. And he dressed like a Parisian dandy. He was of course totally uncoordinated and prone to accidents. Yet he was able to cut some of the most intricate paper silhouettes for children with a gigantic pair of scissors he always carried with him. He was aware of his own failings and inconsistencies, but always insisted that his surroundings put up with them: “Accept me as I am. It is against my nature to be any different.”

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN was born in 1805 in the provincial city of Odense, the son of a poor shoemaker and a superstitious washerwoman who later died of alcoholism. His father, a rather imaginative and kind parent, joined the Napoleonic armies and returned a broken man, while his grandfather was demented, a figure of fun in the streets of Odense. The young Hans was left to himself much of the time.

Determined to escape from rural backwardness, the gangly youth arrived in Copenhagen on September 6, 1819, at age fourteen, set on becoming famous and fulfilling the prophecy of a fortune-teller who had predicted that his hometown would one day become illuminated in his honor. He did not know a soul in the capital except his mother’s sister, who ran a brothel–in which he stayed in a cupboard-sized room without a window.

Starting from this rather unpromising point demanded careful planning and considerable nerve. His first ambition was drama, and he set about seeking out the leading theatrical names. With a deep bow he would introduce himself: “May I have the honor of expressing my feelings for the stage in a poem written by myself?” In one celebrated instance, he appeared at the residence of the leading ballerina of the day, Mrs. Schall, rushed into her entrance hall, pulled off his boots, and began frantically performing all the parts of a comedy he had seen in Odense, singing and using his high hat as a tambourine.

But he persevered and managed to attract the attention of some of the leading lights of the day. It soon became obvious that he was unsuited for acting, singing, or dancing (he had only one performance, as an extra playing a troll), and he switched to being a poet who wrote impossible plays for the stage, which were routinely turned down. Convinced of his own genius, he deluged people with poems and bits of dialogue, much of it cribbed from others. When caught plagiarizing some famous playwrights, he whimpered rather disarmingly, “Yes, but they are so very talented.”

His mentors rightly felt that his intellect needed schooling and sent him to Latin school, where he had to study with much younger classmates and endure the humiliations of a sadistic headmaster, the memory of whom was to trouble him for the rest of his life. In his autobiography, “The Fairy Tale of My Life,” a highly idealized version of events, he presented himself as the archetypal lonely genius forced to suffer much before the world pays attention. Smug and tiny Denmark is not the most hospitable place, then or now, for the kind of almost American self-invention Andersen practiced. But, in a certain way, he needed the adversity and fed upon it. Throughout his career, the fuel that powered him was the unwillingness to let his opponents, real or imagined, get him down.

That commands a certain respect–but Andersen was also hugely infuriating. Reading about him in Jens Andersen’s new biography often makes your toes curl. He combined aggressive self-promotion with gross flattery. He especially appealed to the mother instinct of the wives of wealthy and influential men, and his self-centeredness could be monstrous. When he heard that one of Copenhagen’s leading literary hostesses had died, his only response was to wonder whether she had managed to read his latest novel before she died. Denmark’s other famous author of the era, Søren Kierkegaard, contemptuously dismissed Andersen’s constant appeals to the reader’s sympathy as that of a “sniveler.”

KIERKEGAARD also ascribed the feebleness of some of Andersen’s writing to “these plants where she and he are on the same stem.” This androgynous aspect is explored extensively in the new biography, a bit too extensively perhaps. Authors of children’s books are not supposed to have stunted and sad sex lives like Andersen, or rich and varied ones, for that matter. In fact, they are not supposed to have sex lives at all. The image of the nation’s favorite storyteller masturbating like a moron is not exactly an uplifting one. Still, Andersen saw his sexual innocence as a precondition for his art. He simply did not want to grow up. That is all one needs to know and indeed, all one wants to know.

More amusingly, he was a world-class hypochondriac, beset by phobias of every imaginable kind. He kept dreaming that his teeth were falling out and he lived in constant fear of being buried alive. Often he had a small note next to his bed, saying “I only appear to be dead.” And when once by accident he had borrowed somebody else’s hat, he immediately started worrying about having caught some horrendous skin disease. In anger, he knocked a few dents into the hat.

What makes the reader forgive Andersen for all this is, of course, his talent. Under all the weirdness lay a keen and perceptive mind. He realized when he was being irrational and ridiculous, and his diaries show plenty of self-irony. And his fairy tales came about as an afterthought, writing drills that started with the retelling of folk tales he had heard as a child but soon turned into his own stories.

LIKE ALL GREAT children’s literature, Andersen’s tales operate on two levels: that of the child, who loves the plot, and that of the grown up, who appreciates the irony and satire. His best tales, such as “The Nightingale” and “The Snow Queen,” treat such grown-up themes as the artificial versus the genuine and the conflict between seeming and being. Pervading the stories is a sense of true goodness. One has to be extremely hard hearted not to be touched by efforts such as “The Story of a Mother,” about a mother’s loss of her child, which regrettably the Franks do not include in their new selection.

There is also a delightfully anarchic, antiauthoritarian streak in his fairy tales. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” it is the little child who sees through all the pretension of the court. And one finds the peculiar droll logic that is also present in Lewis Carroll. His use of language is extremely vivid, and he makes the otherwise rather harsh Danish language sound like music. He has a subtle and immediately recognizable tone of voice which the current translators have been very apt in catching. And that is no small achievement. What they are handling here are lines that are etched in the minds of every Dane. The slightest misstep, the merest attempt at taking liberties would cause instant derision.

Surprisingly, Andersen’s diaries and travel writing have aged almost as well as his fairy tales. “When the snow melts and the stork arrives and the first steamships leave the harbor, I get this painful urge to travel.” He speaks of his double nature, his fear of danger and the urge to experience it. He visited Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Britain, and eventually reached as far as Greece and Constantinople. He was keen on railroads and all modern inventions that made quick communication possible.

He planned his foreign conquests like a field marshal. He received honors and decorations from the courts of Europe, including the order of Eagle of the Third Class, bestowed on him by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia (he would no doubt have preferred a first class), and he met the great men of his age: Heinrich Heine, Franz Liszt, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Richard Wagner.

Upon his return to Copenhagen, he would constantly remind the Danes how the outside world appreciated him more than they did–indeed, he was not above planting items in the foreign press about himself which he would then recycle at home.

In Britain, he met Charles Dickens, which he describes as one of the highlights of his life. He felt they had so much in common. Both had unhappy childhoods and both had been able to triumph over adversity. Andersen first met Dickens on the 1847 trip to London, and he met the English author a second time ten years later when Andersen came to stay at Gad’s Hill, Dickens’s summer residence.

ANDERSEN was supposed to stay for a week. He ended up staying for five. His English was totally incomprehensible and his behavior was certainly unusual. One morning Dickens’s wife found him prostrate on the lawn, howling with tears and clutching a newspaper.

It turned out to be an unfavorable review of one of his books. Dickens had to console him and advise him never to bother with reviews.

On another occasion Andersen was suffering from an acute case of corns which had developed during a two-hour cab drive through some of the less-developed parts of London. “Convinced that the cabman was bent on robbery and murder, he had put his watch and money into his boots together with a Bradshaw, a pocket book, a pair of scissors, a pen knife, a book or two, a few letters of introduction and some miscellaneous property,” Dickens wrote in a letter to a friend. When Andersen finally left, Dickens put up a small card on the guest bedroom mirror: “Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the family ages.”

One might have expected Dickens to be more amused–for Andersen was really as delightfully weird as some of Dickens’s own characters.

Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.