HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
Andersen constructed myriad fictional doubles, shadows, and reflections, but he also did not resist the temptation to represent himself in more prosaic terms. In fact, he gave in to that temptation multiple times, writing no fewer than three full-length autobiographies, each an effort to shape a life in ways that would enable him to live on like his fictional characters.1 Making a name for himself, pursuing fame and fortune, achieving immortality: these were the motives behind many of the autobiographical writings, as Andersen himself conceded. “Every day I get a better sense of how much I am recognized,” he declared with undisguised glee. “In Germany it seems as if my name will soon be as well known as it is here at home. Yesterday I completed my biographical sketch, which will be placed at the beginning of Only a Fiddler.”2
It is no accident that two of the three versions of his life contained the term “fairy tale” in their titles and that even the third is entitled The Book of My Life. The True Fairy Tale of My Life was commissioned by a publisher to introduce a German edition of Andersen’s works and was written in 1846. It was later published in English as The True Story of My Life. It is to that life that I will now turn, for, even if it does not take us more deeply into the fairy tales, it provides background and context for them, bringing to life the author and the culture in which he wrote the tales. For that reason, I have also not hesitated to include annotations that reveal something about Andersen the man, for the fairy tale of his life is as absorbing, improbable, and captivating as many of the tales he produced.
All three of Andersen’s autobiographies were, despite a commitment to getting out the facts, exercises in making fiction, in creating the illusion of an untroubled life and indulging in cheerful self-promotion. Consider the opening paragraphs of The Fairy Tale of My Life, published in 1855 as the definitive autobiography:
My life is a lovely story, happy and full of adventures. If, at the time when I was still a boy and going out into the world poor and without friends, a good fairy had come along and said, “Choose your course in life and the goal of your efforts. . . . I will guide and protect you until you attain it,” my destiny could not, even at that time, have been guided more happily, more prudently, or more fortunately. The history of my life will reveal to the world what it tells me—there is a loving God who directs all things for the best.3
Andersen continues with a description of his parents (who, according to him, doted on each other), and he draws on all his verbal resources to describe the two as loving, compassionate, hardworking, and thoughtful. He paints the picture of a childhood in which he is the adored center of attention. The household becomes the site of art (with pictures, books, songs), and even domestic objects sparkle with beauty (the plates as well as the pots shine).
In the year 1805 there lived in Odense, in a small, humble room, a young married couple, who were extremely attached to each other. He was a shoemaker, scarcely twenty-two years old, a man with a richly gifted and truly poetical mind. His wife, a few years older, did not know much about life and the world, but she possessed a heart full of love. . . . During the first day of my existence, my father is said to have sat by the bed and read Holberg out loud, but I ended up crying all the time. . . . Our little room, which was packed with the shoemaker’s bench, the bed, and my crib, was the abode of my childhood. The walls were covered with pictures, and over the workbench was a cupboard containing books and songs. The little kitchen was full of shining plates and metal pans.4
Reality was quite different from the childhood paradise described by Andersen. It also diverged sharply from the Hollywood fantasy of Andersen as portrayed by Danny Kaye singing “wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.” As the Swedish novelist Per Olov Enquist puts it: “He did not grow up in a Danish idyll. He was born into the ragged proletariat, in among dirt, decay, promiscuity, and prostitution—and into a family where there was a great deal of mental sickness. . . . His maternal grandmother was a prostitute with three illegitimate children, one of whom was Hans Christian’s mother. In her turn, she appears to have spent time as a prostitute; she became an alcoholic at an early age and died of delirium tremens in the workhouse in Odense.”5 Andersen’s life story may have ended with “happily ever after,” and, somewhat ironically, it reads exactly like a real fairy tale. Its beginnings are marked by classic dysfunctional family behavior and by all the horrors of what emerges right after “once upon a time” and before “happily ever after.”
In the last years of her life, Andersen’s mother, the woman with a “heart full of love,” sent a steady stream of letters to her son, asking for financial help. The promising young writer ignored most of those pleas while he was on the road, traveling on a royal stipend to Rome, where he worried about his teeth, and to Naples, where he took careful notes about items in the Secret Room (a private collection once known as the Cabinet of Obscene Objects). Andersen was, to be sure, worried that any money he sent might be wasted on spirits, but it is clear that he was never as attentive to his mother as might be expected from the testimony in his autobiography. “All my childhood memories, every spot seems dark to me,” Andersen later confessed in a letter to his friend Edvard Collin, written from Odense a year before his mother’s death. On hearing news of his mother’s death, he mourned her loss with characteristic narcissistic grief: “Her situation was a harsh one, and there was almost nothing I could do for her. . . . I am truly alone—no one is bound by nature to love me.” Twenty years later, he repeats the sentiment while reminiscing about his “endlessly bitter anguish”: “I wept but could not accustom myself to the idea that now I have not a single person in the world who, by blood and nature, must love me. . . . I cried my heart out and had a feeling that the best had happened for her. I would never have been able to make her last days bright and free of sorrow. She died with a joyous faith in my happiness, that I was somebody.”6
Creating a “somebody” was of paramount importance to Andersen. As noted earlier, when he was a boy, his mother consulted a fortune-teller, who prophesied a grand future for the gawky youngster: “He will have better luck than he deserves. He will be a wild bird, flying high up and being grand. One day the town of Odense will be illuminated in his honor.”7 Becoming that “somebody” meant, if not denying his humble origins, then at least taking some of the tarnish off the reputation of his relatives. Andersen fashioned for himself a new identity, one that elevated him from the provincial shabbiness of Odense and the hardscrabble circumstances of his family life to a more genteel rank. He was fond of referring to his birthday not as April 2, 1805, but September 6, 1819, the day that, at the age of fourteen, he arrived in Copenhagen to turn himself into a somebody and to enact the fairy-tale plots that he had heard as a child and was to refashion as an adult.
The town of Odense, located on the island of Fyn and separated from Copenhagen by the Baltic Sea, was the fourth largest town in Denmark, with a population of about 7,000. Here the young Andersen was exposed to storytelling, superstition, and colorful local customs. More importantly, Odense had a theater. Traveling players from the Royal Theater in Copenhagen performed there, turning Andersen’s interest in thespian culture into a lifelong passion. The provincial “Clumsy Hans” sang, danced, declaimed, and wrote plays. He was able to take his passion and throw himself—young, virtually penniless, and uneducated—into a new urban and urbane environment, absurdly confident that he would be able to make contacts with the right people and eventually make a name for himself in Copenhagen.
“THE GREAT POET YOU THINK YOU’LL BE”
Andersen’s journey to Copenhagen in 1819 required a boat ride to the small port of Korsør and a thirty-six-hour ride by mail coach to the city’s outskirts, where unofficial passengers were dropped off. Carrying a small bundle of clothes, the fourteen-year-old Andersen walked to the city gates and made his way to his lodgings, at 18 Vertergade. He had 10 rigsdaler in his pocket (his “savings” from bit parts as a page and a shepherd in Odense) and began knocking on doors. One evening he turned up at the home of Giuseppe Siboni, the choirmaster and conductor of the Royal Theater, where he was offered, in keeping with the city’s charitable custom, something to eat. In the kitchen he recited the fairy tale of his life to the housekeeper. She whispered the story to Siboni, who decided to entertain his guests with the aspiring actor. The boy’s repertoire in Siboni’s parlor was evidently “a quaint blend of the high and the low: an aria from a ballad opera, which he had learned back home in Odense from a visiting Frøken Hammer; a couple of ample scenes from plays by Ludvig Holberg; as well as some home-brewed poems that no doubt sounded both provincial and pathetic.”8 Siboni’s dinner guests included many of Denmark’s leading literary lights, among them the poet Jens Baggesen, who declared to those assembled: “I predict that he’s going to make something of himself one day!”9
Siboni’s offer of free singing lessons, along with leftovers from the dinner table, enabled Andersen to take the first real step toward creating a new identity along the lines of the fairy-tale narrative that he had constructed. But only a few months later, Andersen’s fine soprano voice broke (he blamed himself for wearing bad shoes in the winter), and Siboni advised him to return to Odense. Andersen was distraught: “I who had described to my mother in the rich colors of the imagination the happiness which I actually felt, now had to return home and become an object of scorn! Filled with agony at this thought, I felt as if crushed to pieces. Yet just in the midst of this apparently great unhappiness lay the stepping-stones to a better future.”10
One of those stepping-stones led in the direction of writing for the theater rather than performing on stage. In 1822, at the age of seventeen, Andersen submitted three different plays to the Royal Theater, each more bombastic and derivative than the next, but not wholly without merit, as one of the theater managers imagined. “When one takes into consideration the fact that this play is the product of a person who can barely manage decent penmanship, who knows nothing of orthography or Danish grammar . . . and furthermore possesses in his brain a hodgepodge of good and bad all jumbled together . . . one can still find in his work individual glimpses.”11 Given what Andersen had been able to confect with no education at all, he was recommended for a stipend to attend a grammar school. Jonas Collin, a senior government official who was to become Andersen’s patron and mentor, worked with the directors of the Royal Theater to secure the funds that would enable the hopeful young dramatist to make up for his educational gaps by attending a school in Slagelse, a provincial backwater that would have none of Copenhagen’s distractions.
Andersen’s five years in Slagelse and later in Helsingør (Elsinor) under the tutelage of Simon Meisling cannot have been easy. Placed into classrooms with younger, smaller boys, he felt physically awkward and intellectually inferior: “I was just like a wild bird confined to a cage. I had the greatest desire to learn, but for the moment I floundered about, as if I had been thrown into the sea. One wave followed another: grammar, geography, mathematics. I felt myself overpowered by them. . . . The Rector, who took a peculiar delight in turning everything to ridicule, did not, of course, make an exception in my case. . . . One day, when I replied incorrectly to his question . . . he said that I was stupid.”12 Andersen endured humiliation and torment, living under what he termed the “most horrible strains.” Meisling was a tyrant who haunted his dreams years after his education was complete. Elias Bredsdorff, Denmark’s greatest expert on Andersen, records how, over a period of forty years, Meisling ceaselessly troubled his pupil’s sleep: “Nasty dreams with Meisling in them”; “Slept restlessly, dreamt about Meisling”; “Dreamt I had to be examined by Meisling”; “a painful dream about Meisling, in front of whom I stood miserable and awkward.”13
Andersen applied himself to his studies, but not without complaint. Letters to his patrons openly expressed his frustrations and were so laden with self-pity that one of his benefactors wrote back: “You certainly do your best to tire your friends, and I can’t believe that it can bring you any amusement—and all because of your constant concern with YOURSELF—YOUR OWN SELF—THE GREAT POET YOU THINK YOU WILL BE. My dear Andersen! Don’t you realize that you are not going to succeed with all these ideas and that you are on the wrong track?”14
Andersen was on his own, navigating waters troubled by Meisling’s humiliating pedagogical style, by Inger Meisling’s seductive behavior toward the bewildered young man, and by the taunts of younger students mystified by the presence of a seventeen-year-old who towered over them physically but who could not find Copenhagen on a map. Forbidden to read “frivolous” literature or to indulge his equally frivolous desire to write, he nonetheless took the risk of expressing himself through poetry, writing, among other things, “The Dying Child,” a poem published in 1827 on the front page of Kjøbenhavnsposten. Unusual in its expression of the child’s point of view, it also reveals the profound emotional burden carried by Andersen during the years at Slagelse and Elsinor:
Mother, I am weary and want to sleep,
Let me fall asleep on your heart;
But do not cry, promise me you won’t,
For I feel hot tears running down my cheek. . .
You must put an end to those sighs,
If you cry, I will weep with you.
Oh, I am so weary and must close my eyes—
Mother—look! There’s an angel kissing me.15
By 1827 Andersen, despite the many temptations to succumb to failure, passed his examen artium, and the rigors of his formal education were finally behind him.
Publication of “The Dying Child” was followed by an outpouring of verse—ballads, nature poems, portraits, romances, sketches, fantasies—collected in multiple volumes over a period of two years. Andersen remained throughout his life a prolific writer, with thirty-six theatrical works, six travel books, six novels, and nearly two hundred fairy tales and stories flowing from his pen, not to mention constant diary entries and letters to friends (sometimes as many as fourteen a day). The productivity sometimes worked against him. A letter from Edvard Collin is almost perversely cruel in chiding Andersen for being so productive:
You write too much! While one work is being printed, you are halfway through the manuscript of the next. This mad, deplorable productivity depreciates the value of your works so much that no bookseller wants them, even to give away. . . . It is extraordinarily selfish of you to assume such interest in your work, and the fault is no doubt yours, for the reading public has certainly not given you any reason to think so, and the critics least of all.16
Curiously, Andersen seemed to thrive on degrading comments of this type, responding to the stinging humiliations with predictable “shock” and “despair,” then cheerfully bouncing back to apply himself to his writing with more determination than ever. Outwardly he expressed a sense of shame and humility; inwardly he seems to have redoubled his efforts to make the grade as a writer, drawing on his social failures for the material that would shape his literary success. Andersen practiced time and again what one critic calls the “phoenix principle”—the notion that a new identity can be established only once the old one has been crushed. Defeat and failure are the necessary, if not always sufficient, conditions for the triumph of poetry.17 Andersen’s story about the phoenix, included in this volume, invests the beautiful bird with the power of poetry and ends by apostrophizing its regenerative power: “Oh bird of paradise, renewed with each new century, you are born in flames and die in flames.”
THE GREAT, WIDE WORLD
The Improvisatore (1835), Andersen’s first novel, offered clear evidence that writing well was the best revenge. Dedicated to the entire Collin family, the volume can be seen as tribute and reprimand. In a garret facing a cluster of lime trees, Andersen completed a novel that many Danish readers could easily recognize as a roman à clef. Antonio, an Italian version of Andersen, is born in the slums of Rome and has a talent for singing that attracts the attention of the Borghese family. Sent to a Jesuit college with a tyrannical director, he gradually wins acceptance into a new social class through his success as an artist. His happiness is clouded by the unfortunate tendency of well-meaning friends to lecture him endlessly, offering “helpful” criticism in an effort to “educate” him.
With the publication of this bildungsroman, Andersen joined the ranks of the great British and European novelists, and his name came to be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens, Balzac, and Goethe, even if he did not share their stature. He began riding what he himself described as the crest of a wave: “Never before has a work of mine absorbed people so intensely. Hertz came to see me . . . telling me, in quite a beautiful way, that many people here who no longer cared about me, are now devoted to me.”18 The work was translated almost immediately into German, English, Swedish, Russian, Dutch, and French and marked the true launching of his literary career.
Just after completing the manuscript for The Improvisatore, Andersen, almost as an afterthought, began to write some tales for children. To be sure, the focus on childhood in The Improvisatore and its fairy-tale ending can be seen as building a sturdy literary bridge to the new enterprise that courted the attention of children rather than adults. But Andersen had something different in mind. In 1835, on New Year’s Day, he wrote to a friend: “Now I am beginning to write some ‘Fairy Tales for Children.’ I want to win the next generations, you see.” “People will say this is my immortal work!” he added. “But that is something I shall not experience in this world.” Others had greater confidence in a rapid ascent to literary fame. In 1835, Andersen wrote that his friend H. C. Ørsted (the Danish physicist known for his study of the magnetic fields produced by electric currents) had declared that the tales would make him “immortal.” “I myself do not think so,” he added, with uncharacteristic modesty.19
The first review of Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (Fairy tales, told for children) was disappointing. The anonymous critic failed to find any “edifying effect” and expressed hope that “the talented author, with a higher mission to follow, will not waste any more of his time in writing fairy tales for children.”20 Other reviewers were not particularly generous, complaining about the “disorderly” language. Like the Grimms before him, Andersen was accused of writing in a roughhewn, conversational style that was not sufficiently literary. This first volume of the fairy tales, which included “The Tinderbox,” “Little Claus and Big Claus,” “The Princess and the Pea,” and “Little Ida’s Flowers,” was in many ways the Danish answer to the Brothers Grimm. The first three tales reworked stories Andersen had heard as a boy in the spinning room of an asylum in Odense known as Greyfriars Hospital (his grandmother worked there and let him wander the enclosed grounds and public spaces). Only the fourth was his own invention.
All four fairy tales hiss and crackle with narrative energy. Brisk and breezy, they were meant for reading out loud, with numerous nods in the direction of oral storytelling conventions (“A soldier came marching down the road—left! right! left! right!”) and also to Andersen’s own animated, exclamatory style (“That was a real story!”). Although scholars have made us aware that Denmark’s most famous author of children’s tales had a wellknown aversion to being around children (he was outraged that a statue in his honor was designed to include children hovering around him), there is also evidence that Andersen spent plenty of time with the children of various wealthy families that offered him hospitality. He often went out of his way to entertain them with stories and with his famous paper cuttings. Edvard Collin reports that Andersen told stories
which he partly made up on the spur of the moment, partly borrowed from well-known fairy tales; but whether the tale was his own or a retelling, the manner of telling it was entirely his own, and so full of life that the children were delighted. . . . He didn’t say, “The children got into the carriage and then drove away,” but “So they got into the carriage, good-bye Daddy, good-bye Mummy, the whip cracked, snick, snack, and away they went, giddy up!”21
Like Lewis Carroll, who rehearsed Alice in Wonderland by telling stories out loud on “golden afternoons,” Andersen tested and developed his style with the children who would become the audience.
Many commentators have pointed to the explosive fantasies of social revenge embedded in the early tales: Little Claus outwits Big Claus, and the soldier in “The Tinderbox” dethrones the king and queen. These stories, Jackie Wullschlager astutely observes, provided an outlet for Andersen’s “rage against the bourgeois society that tried to make him conform.”22 But it is important to keep in mind that the tenor of Andersen’s tales does not deviate sharply from the standard of many other European collections of fairy tales, where revenge figures importantly as part of the happy ending. Still the deep sense of resentment that wells up in Andersen’s writing was emphasized again and again by contemporaries, including one of Andersen’s fiercest critics: Søren Kierkegaard, the other great Dane of the nineteenth century. A philosopher and theologian best known for his monumental Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard was the founding father of existentialism and a man whose patrician upbringing, academic earnestness, and austere confidence stood in direct opposition to everything that Andersen was.
The years following the publication of The Improvisatore and the first installment of the fairy tales were good ones for Andersen. “My name is gradually starting to shine,” he wrote in 1837, “and that is the only thing I live for.”23 In the next decade, he would write nearly all the fairy tales for which he is known, with one volume appearing on an annual basis between 1835 and 1845. Nye Eventyr (New fairy tales), which contained both “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Nightingale,” appeared in 1845, showing Andersen at the height of his narrative powers. His melodramatic plays and rambling novels—The Improvisatore was followed by O.T. and Only a Fiddler—are not often read today, but they were moderately successful, even if they did not turn Andersen into “Denmark’s foremost novelist,” as he had hoped. Only a Fiddler is remembered today primarily because it was the subject of Kierkegaard’s eccentric first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, Published against His Will, which contained a long essay entitled “On Andersen as a Novelist: With Constant Reference to His Latest Work, Only a Fiddler.” With consummate sophistication and erudition, Kierkegaard offers a penetrating critique of Andersen’s novel, shedding light on its weaknesses, but more importantly laying bare the strategies of a narrator who is constantly defending his characters against social slights. If Kierkegaard makes the error of using Andersen’s fiction to draw conclusions about his character, moving the focus from the work itself to its author, his critique nonetheless offers some insight into the cult of suffering that shadows the cult of beauty in Andersen’s works.
Andersen reports that he ran into Kierkegaard on the streets of Copenhagen shortly after Only a Fiddler appeared. Kierkegaard commiserated with him about the stupidity of critics and promised a favorable review of the book. Yet what the philosopher put into print turned out to be a heavy-handed Hegelian rant, one that even Andersen realized might end up with no more than two readers: the reviewer and the author of the book. The two made amends later in life, and Andersen sent Kierkegaard a copy of his Nye Eventyr (1848) with a witty dedication: “Either you approve of my things, or you do not approve of them, yet you come without fear or trembling, and that at least is something.” Kierkegaard, in return, sent Andersen a copy of Either/Or. Andersen’s acknowledgment suggests that the wounds had healed: “You have given me great pleasure by sending me Either/Or! I was really surprised, as I’m sure you can imagine; I had no idea that you would look kindly on me, and yet here I see that you do! God bless you for that!”24
Kierkegaard takes Andersen to task for his failings as both artist and man. What particularly irritates the philosopher about Only a Fiddler is Andersen’s habit of expressing his “livid indignation against the world” through his characters, even when that sentiment is irrelevant to the narrated events. Andersen could not resist the temptation to turn his heroes into “clients,” whose interests he is constantly defending and whose dignity he is constantly seeking to protect. “Lack . . . of dutiful attentiveness, even in the case where attentiveness is so far from being dutiful that it would even be unreasonable, does not go unpunished.”25 Kierkegaard cites as an example the description of the hero’s appearance at a dance hall in Only a Fiddler: “With hat in hand he bowed politely in all directions. No one noticed it.” An attentive and doting narrator, Andersen hovers over his main characters, tirelessly polishing their haloes. At the same time, he makes it a habit to scold and chastise those who fail to acknowledge the virtues of the figures he favors.
For Kierkegaard, Andersen makes the grave error of constructing a hero who passively succumbs to his fate rather than challenging it. As author, he then “sits and cries over his unfortunate heroes who must go under, and why?—because Andersen is the man he is. The same joyless battle Andersen himself fights in life now repeats itself in his poetry.”26 Kierkegaard further refines the frontal-attack by pointing out that two paths are open for Andersen’s hero: a “broken manliness,” stemming from a failed attempt to work against fate, or a “consistent womanliness,” based on a failure to put up any resistance at all. Kierkegaard had, as one of Andersen’s biographers puts it, “uncovered the female soul in Andersen’s character.”27
In his attack on the central character and narrator of Andersen’s novel, Kierkegaard believed that he had laid bare more than Andersen’s “female soul.” He demonstrated how sharply the author’s narcissism and masochism etched itself on his literary portraits, creating a cult of passive suffering that was particularly repellent to a philosopher who endorsed defiantly robust genius. “Genius is not a rush candle that goes out in a puff of air but a conflagration that the storm only incites,” Kierkegaard insisted.28 Despite the contempt he held for individual characters, he still admired the deep personal stake Andersen had in his characters and plots.
If Kierkegaard can be credited with some shrewd insights in his critique of Andersen’s novel, he seems somewhat off the mark when it comes to the novel’s author, whose resilience in the face of disparagement and disapproval was nothing short of astonishing. The censorious review, like all the cutting remarks made by patrons, friends, and journalists, may have wounded, but it also satisfied Andersen’s amour propre perfectly and, far from producing disaffection and defeat, only renewed his desire for self-display, now with an added dose of self-effacing humor. “I remained an object of derision,” Andersen declared with undisguised pride. “There is, in the Dane, a fondness for mockery, or, to put it more kindly, we have a sense of the absurd.”29 Andersen struck back with the weapons that had been used against him, deploying irony, humor, satire, and pastiche—what he referred to as “salt”—to enliven plots that might otherwise have been mired down in histrionics and melodrama.
In 1838, Andersen turned a financial corner and also received a substantial boost in self-confidence. That year King Frederik VI of Denmark awarded him an annual stipend of 400 rigsdaler, enough money to allow him to write, travel, and take up permanent residence in Copenhagen’s fashionable Hotel du Nord. If there is any need of further evidence that Kierkegaard was at least half right in his assessment of Andersen’s personality disorders, it is readily available in a letter to Count Conrad Rantzau-Breitenburg, whom Andersen recruited to plead his cause with Frederik VI:
The happiness of my entire life and all my future endeavors I place in your hands. Just tell the king what I know you have said with such affection to others about me! Do not refuse my plea! If you believe that there is anything moving inside me, then speak for me. I am begging your indulgence just this one time. You will earn distinction through me! [my emphasis] . . . My happiness in life is at stake. Deliver my application to the king, and with God’s help, you will not find reason to be ashamed!30
When Andersen received news of the stipend, he was filled with “gratitude and joy,” in no small part because the stipend had, at one time or another, been awarded to nearly all of Denmark’s literary worthies. He was thrilled that he was no longer “forced to write in order to live” and believed that he would now be “less dependent” upon his friends and patrons, with whom he had regular dining arrangements nearly every day of the week: “Mondays at Mrs. Bügel’s . . . Tuesdays at the Collins’ . . . Wednesdays at the Ørsteds’ . . . Thursday again at Mrs. Bügel’s . . . Fridays at the Wulffs’ . . . Saturday is my day off, then I dine wherever I happen to be invited . . . Sundays at Mrs. Læssøe’s, or in the Students’ Union if I do not feel well enough to make the long walk.” “A new chapter of my life began,” he proudly reported.31
“I’M IN FASHION”
The liberation from financial anxieties was accompanied by an expansion of geographical and intellectual ambitions. Andersen’s journey to the “Orient” in 1841 is well documented in The Poet’s Bazaar, a travelogue that charts his travels through Germany to Rome and Naples, and finally on to Athens and Constantinople.32 For a man who was deathly afraid of fire (he carried a nine-meter-long rope ladder with him when he traveled), suffered bouts of agoraphobia (he needed a guide to cross a square), and constantly worried about robbers and murderers (“Oh how good I am at tormenting myself!”), Andersen was eager and adventurous, traveling fearlessly through storms at sea and enduring—as we learn from the diaries—everything from quarantines and threats of robbery to mosquitoes and undrinkable coffee.33 Even Edvard Collin, habitually stingy with praise, declared: “You are a damn good traveler.”34 Andersen’s travels eastward had less of an impact on his writings than on his general outlook and health:
It was as if a new life were about to open for me, and that was exactly what happened. If this can’t be seen in my later writings, it animates my views about life and my entire inner development. I no longer felt as if I were ailing. As I observed my European home, if I can call it that, vanish behind me, it was as if a current of amnesia passed over all bitter and unhealthy memories. I felt health rush into my blood, into my mind. With courage and strength, I raised my head high once again.35
After completing his thirteenth trip abroad, Andersen reveled in the power of travel to cleanse the soul: “Travel to me is invigorating. . . . I feel the need, not just to acquire new material—there is enough of that inside me already, and life is indeed too short to plumb the depths of that spring—but in order to put my impressions on paper I need this refreshing bath which seems to make me both younger and stronger when I return home”36
In the 1840s, Andersen made a number of victory tours through European countries, delighting in the earnest attention paid to him and the outpourings of affection. In Denmark, he remarked, he was a stranger, “a stranger like nowhere abroad.” “I wish I had never seen that place! . . . I hate home, just as it hates and spits on me,” he complained shortly after one of his plays was booed on its premiere in Copenhagen.37 In Paris he was received by royalty as well as by the great poets and writers of the century: Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Vigny, and Honoré de Balzac. In Germany he consorted with dukes and hobnobbed with royalty. In England, he became the darling of the aristocracy and sat for a famous sculptor. When he was abroad, Andersen was sought after and celebrated, treated like a genius and a celebrity, much to his satisfaction. It is at this point that his autobiography becomes tedious reading, deteriorating into detailed lists of medals and decorations and the names and titles of those who had bestowed them.
Yet even as one part of the fairy-tale fantasy—prosperity and fame—was fulfilled, another part continued to elude him: love and marriage. To a friend he affirmed that he did not yet have the means to marry: “I must have 1000 a year before I dare fall in love, and 1500 before I dare marry, and before even half of this happens, the young girl will be gone, captured by someone else, and I’ll be an old, wizened bachelor. Those are sorry prospects. . . . No I will never be rich, never satisfied and never—fall in love!”38 Andersen did not marry, but he fell in love many times, although as a rule only when marriage could be completely ruled out as a possibility.
Riborg Voigt, the sister of a fellow student, was engaged when Andersen met her in 1830, and he could bemoan the fact that she would never be his: “I see that I will never be happy,” he wrote sullenly. “All my soul and all my thoughts cling to this one creature, a clever, childlike creature such as I have never met before. . . . Next month she becomes a wife, then she will, then she must forget me. Oh, it is a deadly thought! . . . If only I were dead, dead, even if death were total annihilation.”39 To Riborg, he wrote despondent letters, declaring his love but also acknowledging that she belonged to another.
The “childlike” continued to appeal, and when Andersen famously fell in love with Jenny Lind, he again used that term to describe the object of his affections. Andersen was thirty-five, and Jenny Lind was twenty when they met for the first time. The brilliant Swedish nightingale, who began singing for the stage at age ten and who created a sensation on tours to Europe and the United States, was “courteous” but “distant” and “cold,” although she came to love Andersen “as a brother.” “No book and no person has had such an ennobling influence on me as Jenny Lind, which is why I dwell on these memories . . . because she can never be mine.”40 Andersen saw in Jenny Lind his female double, a woman to whose talent and success he aspired: “She sings German the way I no doubt read my fairy tales; something familiar shines through, but, as they say of me, that’s exactly what makes it interesting.” And when he discovered that his fame was great in the city of Berlin, he wrote to the Collins: “I’m a lion, I’m a Berlin lion, I’ve become a male Jenny Lind. I’m in fashion.”41
Andersen’s sexual desires and practices have become the subject of detailed speculation in the several biographies that have appeared since the bicentenary of his birth. His disastrous visits to brothels (always ending in panicked flight), his homoerotic desires, and his physiological complaints have all been subjected to careful documentation and analysis.42 What many of these accounts miss is the degree to which Andersen’s narcissism conspired with his cult of suffering to ensure that he would have an unending love affair with himself. There are good reasons why he remained a bachelor, and that was the role in which he was happiest, for it allowed him to remain the object of fussy attention from many well-off female admirers and to travel for extended periods. It seems almost prophetic that as a child, while other boys played on the banks, he sat by the lake, weaving a crown of reeds and sending small ships into the waters.
The fortune-teller who had predicted that Odense would one day be illuminated in Andersen’s honor was proved right on December 6, 1867, when officials awarded Andersen the so-called freedom of the town. Speeches and a banquet were followed by a torchlight procession that Andersen observed from the town hall. “How happy I was,” he reports.
. . . I was overcome in my soul, and also physically overcome. . . . My toothache was intolerable; the icy air which rushed in at the window made it blaze up into a terrible pain, and so instead of fully enjoying the happiness of these minutes which would never recur, I looked at the printed song to see how many stanzas were left before I could slip away from the torture which the cold air sent through my teeth.43
Who can fail to be surprised that the promise of what Andersen described as “heavenly bliss” was tainted by pain and sorrow?
The last years of Andersen’s life were marked by infirmity, depression, and a range of cruel ailments including rheumatism and jaundice. “I have spent endlessly long days recently,” he wrote. “I am not looking forward to anything, have no future any more, the days are washing over me, and I am really only waiting for the curtain to fall.”44 Even writing had lost its appeal, and Andersen found himself lacking in “new, fresh impulses.” Walking through his garden, looking at the roses, snails, and water lilies, he felt as if they had already whispered their secrets to him: “No fairy tales occur to me anymore.”45
In his last years, Andersen was cared for by the Melchior family, and the writer spent his last days at Rolighed, a manor with the kind of natural beauty described in many of his fairy tales. Attended to by Dorothea Melchior, who brought him a fresh flower from the garden each morning, he knew that the end was near. He died on a summer morning in 1875. On his travels, he had made it a custom to place a sign with the words “I only appear to be dead” by his bedside. Andersen was familiar with stories about people who were put in coffins, then discovered to be still alive. This time, the card was unnecessary, but it would have had a certain truth if it had been placed by his death bed.
“Will the beauty of the world die when you die?” the fly asks the oak tree in Andersen’s tale “The Old Oak Tree’s Last Dream.” The oak tree reassures the fly in ways that ring true for the beauty of Andersen’s stories: “It will last longer, infinitely longer than I can imagine!”
1. Andersen’s first autobiography was entitled Levnedsbogen (The Book of My Life) and was written in 1832. Not meant for publication during his lifetime, it was first published in 1926. Andersen wrote a second autobiography for a German edition of his works called Das Märchen meines Lebens ohne Dichtung. It was published in London in 1847 as The True Story of My Life. The German autobiography was expanded and published in Danish in 1855 as Mit Livs Eventyr (The Fairy Tale of My Life).
2. “H. C. Andersens brevveksling med Henriette Hanck,” Anderseniana, 1943, 238.
3. Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Paddington, 1975), 1. I have edited the language of the translation for the sake of accuracy and readability.
4. Ibid., 2.
5. Per Olov Enquist, “The Hans Christian Andersen Saga,” trans. Joan Tate, Scandinavian Review 74 (1986): 64–65.
6. Jens Andersen has harsh words for Andersen’s behavior toward his mother: “While Anne Marie Andersdatter was dragging out her life in the poorhouse in Odense, her son was performing Holberg in the Hofmansgave garden, learning waltz steps at Bramstrup, and being luxuriously conveyed from one estate to the other in a coach- and- four, accompanied by the landed gentry.” Letter of July 3, 1832, in H. C. Andersens Brevveksling med Edvard og Henriette Collin (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1933), I, 104. Letter of December 16, 1833, in H. C. Andersen og Henriette Wulff. En Brevveksling (Odense: Flensteds Forlag, 1959), I, 151. Hans Christian Andersen, Mit Livs Eventyr, in Samlede Skrifter (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1855), XXI, 163.
7. Bo Grønbech, Hans Christian Andersen (Boston: Twayne, G. K. Hall, 1980), 20. Andersen refers to this incident in The Fairy Tale of My Life, 22.
8. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 22.
9. Ibid., 23.
10. Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life, 31.
11. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 49.
12. Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life, 45.
13. Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of His Life and Work, 1805–75 (New York: Scribner, 1975), 67–68.
14. Breve til Hans Christian Andersen, ed. C.S.A. Bille and N. Bøgh (Copenhagen, 1877), I, 580, March 8, 1827.
15. The translation is mine.
16. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, “Introduction: The Real H. C. Andersen,” in The Stories of H. C. Andersen, trans. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 8–9. The letter from Collin is dated December 18, 1833.
17. Heinrich Detering, “The Phoenix Principle: Some Remarks on H. C. Andersen’s Poetological Writings,” in Hans Christian Andersen: A Poet in Time, ed. Johan de Mylius et al. (Odense: Odense Univ. Press, 1999), 50–65.
18. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Wulff, April 29, 1835, H.C. Andersen og Henriette Wulff. En Brevveksling (Odense: Flensteds Forlag, 1959), I, 151.
19. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Hanck, January 1, 1835, in “H. C. Andersens Brevveksling med Henriette Hanck,” Anderseniana (1942), 104.
20. Ibid., 124.
21. Grønbech, 89.
22. Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: Knopf, 2000), 153. Jack Zipes writes that, when Andersen took pen in hand, “it was to shield himself from his fears and to vent his anger” (Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller [New York: Routledge, 2005], 1).
23. Ibid., 179.
24. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 257.
25. Søren Kierkegaard, “Andersen as a Novelist: With Continual Reference to His Latest Work, Only a Fiddler,” in Early Polemical Writings, ed. Julia Watkin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 91.
26. Ibid., 75.
27. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 253.
28. Kierkegaard, “Andersen as Novelist,” 88.
29. Hans Christian Andersen, Travels, trans. Anastazia Little (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999), 22.
30. C. St. A. Bille and N. Bøgh, Breve fra Hans Christian Andersen (Copenhagen, 1878), I, 397–98.
31. Elias Bredsdorff cites the schedule as reported by Andersen in a letter to Henriette Hanck (Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen, 132). As Rossel points out, “Andersen’s daily life was extremely comfortable during his later life. He continued to see his old friends at least once a week as their dinner guest, a tradition that stemmed from his early years in Copenhagen. He saw in this way Edvard and Henriette Collin on Mondays, Adolph and Ingeborg Drewson on Tuesdays, Brigitte Ørsted, the widow of Hans Christian Ørsted, and her daughter Mathilde on Wednesdays, Moritz and Dorothea Melchior on Thursdays, Ida Koch, the widowed sister of Henriette Wulff, on Fridays, and Martin and Therese Henriques on Sundays” (Rossel 1996, 73).
32. Hans Christian Andersen, A Poet’s Bazaar: A Picturesque Tour in Germany, Italy, Greece, and the Orient (New York: Minerva, 2004).
33. Wolfgang Lederer, The Kiss of the Snow Queen: Hans Christian Andersen and Man’s Redemption by Women (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 83.
34. Bredsdorff, 150.
35. Hans Christian Andersen, Mit eget Eventyr uden Digtning (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1959), 107.
36. Andersen, Travels, 166.
37. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Wulff, April 1843, in Bille and Bøgh, II, 82.
38. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Wulff, May 3, 1843, in Bille and Bøgh, II, 405.
39. Wolfgang Lederer, The Kiss of the Snow Queen, 79.
40. Andersen, Travels, 215.
41. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 310, 312.
42. Jackie Wullschlager’s biography provides extensive documentation and full elaboration of fantasies, anxieties, and encounters.
43. Ibid., 252–53.
44. Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen, 266.
45. Ibid., 269.