Jens Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life,
translated by Tiina Nunnally.
Overlook Hardcover, 608 pages, $35
“It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard, if one has only lain in a swan’s egg.” Anybody who has been a child will recognize this as the happy discovery of the Swan formerly known as the Ugly Duckling. But what was true of the Duckling in question is misleading. Consider: the melancholy Duckling had only to wait to outgrow his adolescent awkwardness. Those born in figurative duck-yards need pluckiness, not mere patience, to attain swanhood.
Hans Christian Andersen, the Duckling in that histoire à clef, had pluck in spades, but it’s not surprising that his famous character didn’t need it. This new biography by Jens Andersen (no relation) gives us an odd man-child so sure of his “inner swan” that it never occurs to him that his nature might not assert itself. In 1819, when Andersen arrived without a single rigsdaler in Copenhagen (having left his widowed mother behind in Odense), he “was quite calm because [he] trusted blindly in Our Lord.” Yet that faith, however genuine, was perhaps a less reliable buoy than his observation about “the heroes in all the tales,” that “things always went well in the comedies and stories.”
The Grail in Andersen’s story was cultural heroism. At first, he wished to be an actor or dancer. He was rangy but graceless; his histrionic sensibility ruled out his becoming a stage presence one could take seriously. Even so, members of Copenhagen’s upper class patronized him—in both senses of the word. He was a figure of fun. His saving grace was the elemental brilliance that effloresced from his energy and confidence. A young girl who’d seen Andersen delivered this fairly common judgment: “He’s in the city right now, writing tragedies and stories, which he sometimes reads aloud for us. There are occasional beautiful places in them, but in general it’s all such dreadful nonsense.”
Even some of Andersen’s best children’s tales could be described that way. “The Elfin Mound,” which joins pungent pre-Christian lore to a wild disregard for the fairy tale’s usual morally instructive aim, is nonsense in the strictest sense. Why? In 1835, Andersen wrote of his stories that he’d “written them exactly as [he] would tell them to a child,” and then: “I have managed quite remarkably to express what is childlike.” A passage from “The Elfin Mound” shows just what Andersen meant by this:
the floor was washed with moonshine, and the walls were rubbed with witches’ fat, so that they shone in the light like tulip-leaves. In the kitchen there was a great quantity of frogs among the dishes; adders’ skins, with little children’s fingers inside; salad of mushroom-seed; wet mice’s snouts and hemlock; beer, from the brewery of the old Witch of the Moor; sparkling saltpetre wine from a grave-cellar,—all very substantial eating: rusty nails and church-window glass were among the delicacies and kickshaws.
Andersen is responsible for such conventionally memorable tales as “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Little Mermaid,” but “The Elfin Mound” is a better example of his elfin mind at work. Its piling-on of the beautiful and the repellent, like the activity of an ant farm, is suited to a child’s imagination. Flannery O’Connor justified her use of the “grotesque” by saying that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Children, ignorant as they are of the literary universe, also benefit from that service: it accustoms their minds to wonder. Andersen, himself a large and startling figure, knew that well.
Jens Andersen’s book succeeds where it hints at the wellspring of that gifted understanding. His account of Andersen’s Dickensian early struggles, and the boy’s state-sponsored education at the hands of the notorious headmaster Simon Meisling (“he was said to have placed pupils who could not answer correctly … on a special bench marked with the sign ‘Particularly Inept Subjects’”), is reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Matilda or even (in its funnier parts) Geoffrey Willans’s “Molesworth” books.
Those interested in children’s literature and not, say, Danish cultural history are likely to find this biography overlong and excessively detailed. (Its leaden dissertation-prose could not be more unlike H. C. Andersen’s freewheeling style.) Yet it does reward its readers. Its analysis of the critical debate sparked by Andersen’s tales, paired with insights into his history and method, make it a valuable guide for anyone who would return to the dying art of children’s literature the beautiful eccentricity of its infancy.
Stefan Beck is assistant editor of The New Criterion.
