How did Andersen affect his readers? That is a challenging question, for readers move like travelers through the landscapes of his stories, leaving few traces behind and only occasionally providing glimpses of their experiences through memoirs. I have assembled here some of those souvenirs of reading, including reminiscences of writers, artists, historians, and others whose insights into Andersen’s tales often capture their power in remarkable ways. They remind us that the stories throb with beauty and charm, but also pulse with horror and dread.
AUGUST STRINDBERG
In Sweden, we don’t say H. C., we just say Andersen, for we only know of one Andersen, and that is Andersen. He belongs to us and our parents, our childhood and adulthood and old age.
When, as a child, I was given a Christmas calendar, I always skipped over the poetry, because it seemed so artificial and prosaic to me. So, when I got my hands on Andersen’s Fairy Tales, I asked an older expert if this wasn’t poetry. “No, it is prose!” the wise man answered.
“Is this prose?”
I can remember the little book with the Gothic type, I remember the woodcuts, the willow tree that belonged in “The Tinder Box,” “The Ball and the Top,” “The Tin Soldier,” “Ole Shut-Eye”, “The Snow Queen,” and all the others. And when I read and had finished reading, life seemed so difficult to me. This terrible everyday life with its peevishness and unfairness, this dreary, monotonous life in a nursery became unbearable to me. Like little plants, we were right up next to each other and felt crowded, quarreling over food and favors. Through Andersen’s fairy tale world, I became certain that there was another world, a golden age, where righteousness and mercy existed, in which parents truly caressed their children and did not just pull their hair, in which something completely unknown to me cast a rosy glow even over poverty and humiliation, the glow that is called by a word that cannot be used anymore today: love.
He also reminded me of Orpheus, the bard who sang in prose, so that not just the animals, plants, and stones listened to him and were touched, but toys also came to life, elves and trolls became real; schoolbooks, those terrors, became poetic; he covered all of Danish geography in four pages! He was truly a wizard!
And so we parted! But one day, at the age of twenty-five, I had to translate “Andersen’s last fairy tales” for a publisher. I could tell that Time had passed for both him and me; it was the time of utilitarianism and the national economy, and there was nothing evil in that, but Pegasus pulled a plow. These fairy tales were a little prosaic, but one of them was amusing; it was called “The Great Sea-Serpent” and dealt with the telegraph cable in the Atlantic Ocean and the fishes’ confusion about this new fish “that had no end.” It was a brilliant idea and I still remember it.
When I was thirty, my friend Carl Larsson was to illustrate Andersen and so I renewed my acquaintance with him, but this time I had the joy of sharing the book with my children. Since they were children of their time, they asked me “if all of that was true.” I don’t remember what I answered! It was about 1880, when all of the old truths had come under discussion.
I turned forty and discovered Andersen’s novels, in German. I was amazed at the clumsiness with which Andersen’s novels had been treated. Only a Fiddler is, after all, a great fairy tale and one of the best, and it can no longer be considered a mistake for a novel to be poetic!
I turned fifty and spent time on the Danish coast. Cavling remembers that I stayed in a little cottage with grapevines running along the walls, I wandered through the beech forest and swam in the sound, and borrowed Andersen’s fairy tales from the lending library. Now we shall see if they have kept their value!
They had! The Tinder Box still made sparks, the Willow Tree bloomed with growth, the Tin Soldier shouldered his rifle, although he had had contact with the gutter, and the year 1900, after utilitarianism and the national economy passed over with their steamrollers. He was a hardy youth!
On Saturday, my youngest daughter will be four years old, and she shall receive Andersen’s fairy tales in Danish, so she can at least look at the pictures. Perhaps she can also read the stories, even if I don’t know of it; for she is a child prodigy, and her grandmother was Danish, from Odense. Andersen keeps, and Andersen follows me!
Politiken has asked what I owe to Andersen. My answer is: Read my “Simple Things” from 1903 and see for yourself where I have gone to school!
I have had many teachers: Schiller and Goethe, Victor Hugo and Dickens, Zola and Peladan, but, all the same, I will sign this interview as
August Strindberg
Student of H. C. Andersen
From: August Strindberg, “H. C. Andersen. Till Andersen-jubileet 2 april 1905,” in Efterslåtter: Berättelser. Dikter. Artiklar, ed. John Landquist, Samlade skrifter av August Strindberg 54, Supplementdel 1 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1920), 443–45
CHARLES DICKENS
It has been given to Hans Andersen to fashion beings, it may almost be said, of a new kind, to breathe life into the toys of childhood and the forms of antique superstition. The tin soldier, the ugly duckling, the mermaid, the little match girl, are no less real and living in their way than Othello, or Mr. Pickwick, or Helen of Troy. It seems a very humble field in which to work, this of nursery legend and childish fancy. Yet the Danish poet alone, of all who have laboured in it, has succeeded in recovering, and reproducing, the kind of imagination which constructed the old fairy tales.
From: London Daily News, April 5, 1875
HERMANN HESSE
When we were little children, who had only just learnt to read, we owned, like all children, a beautiful, favorite book. It was called Andersen’s Fairy Tales, and every time, once we had read it, we would pick it up again. It was our faithful companion until the end of our boyhood years, our dear childhood, with its treasures and fairies, kings and rich merchants, poor beggar children and bold fortune seekers. . . . In my memory there were no sentences and words, only the things themselves, the whole, multicolored, magnificent world of old Andersen, and it was so well preserved in my remembrance and was so beautiful that I took great care in later years not to open this book again (which seemed in any case lost). For I had unfortunately already, at an early age, made that painful discovery: the books which in earliest childhood and youth were the source of all our bliss, should never be read again; otherwise their old shine and sparkle will be no more and they will appear changed, sad and foolish.
But the story which I read was good. It was not at all as fabulous and effusive and artificial as I had secretly been almost dreading. On the contrary, it looked with fully alert eyes at the real world and sent forth its fairy enchantment not out of vanity and foolish high spirits, but from experience and compassionate resignation. The enchantment was genuine, and as I read again and attended once more to many of the old stories, there reappeared the same beautiful magic sparkle as before. From the furrowed disappointment arose a joy and exuberance, and wherever it lacked something and failed to resound with its old completeness, the fault lay with me and not with old Andersen.
From: “Andersen’s Fairy Tales,” in A Literary History in Reviews and Essays (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970)
Much . . . can be said against middle-class family life in the nineteenth century, but in the midst of its heavy moral discipline, its horsehair sofas and stodgy meals, the average child was permitted and even encouraged to lead an exciting life in its imagination. There are more Gradgrinds now that there were then, and the twentieth century has yet to produce books for children equal to Hans Andersen’s Tales, Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, the two Alices, Struwwelpeter, or even Jules Verne.
Houses are smaller, servants are fewer, mothers have less time, or think they have, to read to their children, and neither the comic strip nor the radio has succeeded so far in providing a real substitute for the personally told tale which permits of interruptions and repeats. . . .
It is to be hoped that the publication of the tales of Grimm and Andersen in one inexpensive volume will be a step in the campaign to restore to parents the right and the duty to educate their children, which, partly through their own fault, and partly through extraneous circumstances, they are in danger of losing for good.
From: “Grimm and Andersen,” in Forewords and Afterwords, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 198–99
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
“Now we shall try a new way. You and I will read these pleasant little Märchen together, and dig nor more in that dry book, that goes in the corner for making us trouble.”
He spoke so kindly, and opened Hans Andersen’s fairy tales so invitingly before me, that I was more ashamed than ever, and went at my lesson in a neck-or-nothing style that seemed to amuse him immensely. I forgot my bashfulness, and pegged away (no other word will express it) with all my might, tumbling over long words, pronouncing according to the inspiration of the minute, and doing my very best. When I finished reading my first page, and stopped for breath, he clapped his hands and cried out, in his hearty way, “Das ist gut! Now we go well! My turn. I do him in German; gif me your ear.” And away he went, rumbling out the words with his strong voice, and a relish which was good to see as well as hear. Fortunately the story was “The Constant Tin Soldier,” which is droll, you know, so I could laugh, and I did—though I didn’t understand half he read, for I couldn’t help it, he was so earnest, I so excited, and the whole thing so comical.
From: Little Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 526–27
HENRY JAMES
The small people with whom he played enjoyed, under his spell, the luxury of believing that he kept and treasured—in every case as a rule—the old tin soldiers and broken toys received by him, in acknowledgement of favors, from impulsive infant hands. Beautiful the queer image of the great benefactor moving about Europe with his accumulations of these relics. Wonderful too our echo of a certain occasion—that of a children’s party, later on, when, after he had read out to his young friends “The Ugly Duckling,” Browning struck up with the “Pied Piper”; which led to the formation of a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment with Story doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes.
From: William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1903), 285–86
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Andersen (the Dane) came to see me yesterday, kissed my hand, and seemed in a general verve for embracing. He is very earnest, very simple, very childlike. I like him. Pen [Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s twelve-year-old son] says of him, “He is not really pretty. He is rather like his own ugly duck, but his mind has developed into a swan”—That wasn’t bad of Pen, was it?
From: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon (London: Smith, Elder, 1897), II, 448
A bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses, some of them wringing their hands, others smiling at me enigmatically, come out to meet me as I re-enter my past. . . . There was lovely, black-haired, aquamarineeyed Miss Norcott, who lost a white kid glove at Nice or Beaulieu, where I vainly looked for it on the shingly beach among the colored pebbles and the glaucous lumps of sea-changed bottle glass. Lovely Miss Norcott was asked to leave at once, one night at Abbazia. She embraced me in the morning twilight of the nursery, pale-mackintoshed and weeping like a Babylonian willow, and that day I remained inconsolable, despite the hot chocolate that the Petersons’ old Nanny had made especially for me and the special bread and butter, on the smooth surface of which my aunt Nata, adroitly capturing my attention, drew a daisy, then a cat, and then the little mermaid whom I had just been reading about with Miss Norcott and crying over, too, so I started to cry again.
From: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage, 1989), 81
VINCENT VAN GOGH
This morning I visited the place where the dustmen deposit the rubbish. My heavens, it was beautiful! Tomorrow I shall have some interesting things brought to me from this dump, including some broken street lamps to delight my eye or—with your permission—to use as models. It would be a splendid subject for a fairy tale by Andersen, all the rubbish cans, kettles, tin bowls, chamber pots, metal jugs, pieces of rusty barbed wire and stove pipes which people have thrown away. I am sure I shall dream about it tonight.
Don’t you think Andersen’s fairy tales are very beautiful? I am sure he must draw illustrations as well.
From: Letters to Anton G. A. Ridder van Rappard, 1882, 1883. Cited by Kjeld Heltoft, Hans Christian Andersen as an Artist, trans. David Hohen (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers’ Forlag, 2005), 11–12
Part of Andersen’s cruelty is the cruelty of reason—and of psychological realism, radical honesty, the willingness to see and accept the consequences of an act or a failure to act. There is a sadistic, depressive streak in Andersen also, which is his own shadow; it’s there, it’s part of him, but not all of him, nor is he ruled by it. His strength, his subtlety, his creative genius, come precisely from his acceptance of and cooperation with the dark side of his own soul. That’s why Andersen the fabulist is one of the great realists of literature.
Now I stand here, like the princess herself, and tell you what the story of the shadow means to me at age forty-five. But what did it mean to me when I first read it, at age ten or eleven? What does it mean to children? Do they “understand” it? Is it “good” for them—this bitter, complex study of a moral failure?
I don’t know. I hated it when I was a kid. I hated all the Andersen stories with unhappy endings. That didn’t stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering them . . . so that after a gap of over thirty years, when I was pondering this talk, a little voice suddenly said inside my left ear, “You’d better dig out that Andersen story, you know, about the shadow.”
From: “The Child and the Shadow,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 51
P. L. TRAVERS
There are no rabbits in Hans Andersen. But, for all that, unlike the Grimms, he has never been in eclipse. His tales were among my early grims and I loved, and still love, his retellings of what he was told in childhood—tough, shrewd, ironic, witty—and his own folksy, miniscule fables, “Five Peas in the Same Pod,” “The Darning Needle,” “Soup on a Sausage Pin,” “Auntie Toothache,” as well as that subtle story, “The Shadow,” wherein he showed himself, for once, to be wiser than he knew. But the great reverberant setpieces, so admired, wept over, doted upon—“Mermaid,” “Snow Queen,” “Red Shoes,” etc., filled me, in childhood, with unease and a feeling that I was being got at. Oh, I wept and, I suppose, doted—but felt no better for it. Grimms’ belonged to the sunlight, asked nothing, never apologized, curdled the blood with delight and horror, dispensed justice, fortified the spirit. Andersen, moon-man, asked for mercy, was always sorry, curdled the feelings with bane-and-honey and undermined the vitality by his endless appeal for pity. When the millstone was dropped on the wicked stepmother, I did not miss a breath. That was how it should be. But for Karen who had her feet cut off because she preferred red shoes to God, I had to break my heart; suffer for Kay and his monstrous word—“the artifice of Eternity,” as Yeats put it—when Now, as it seemed to me then, and does still, would have been a better, if more demanding word; and try, ever failing, to be a good child in order to shorten, by three hundred years, the term of the Mermaid’s waiting time.
From: “The Primary World,” Parabola 4 (1979): 92
MAXIM GORKY
I took with me to school the Stories from the Bible and two tattered little volumes of Andersen’s Fairy Tales, three pounds of white bread and a pound of sausage. In a dim, tiny bookshop near St. Vladimir’s Church I found Robinson Crusoe, a thick book bound in yellow, with a picture of a bearded man in a fur cap and a wild animal’s skin on his shoulders in the front. This I didn’t like at all, but the fairy tales appealed to me at once, in spite of their tattered binding.
In the dinner-break I shared out the bread and sausage and we began reading that marvelous story “The Nightingale,” which had us all enthralled from the first page.
“In China all the people are Chinese, and the Emperor himself is a Chinaman.” I remember how that phrase enchanted me not only by its simple, laughing music but by something which was wonderful and good besides.
There was no time to finish “The Nightingale” in school-time and when I got home I found Mother frying eggs over the stove.
In a strange, faded voice she asked:
“Did you take that rouble?”
“Yes, I did. Look at these books.”
She gave me a thorough hammering with the frying pan, took away the volumes of Andersen and hid them away for good, which I found a lot more painful than the beating.
From: My Childhood, trans. Ronald Wilks (New York: Penguin, 1991), 214
LAFGADIO HEARN
Consider the stories of Hans Andersen. He conceived the notion that moral truths and social philosophy could be better taught through little fairy-tales and child stories than in almost any other way; and with the help of hundreds of old-fashioned tales, he made a new series of wonderful stories that have become a part of every library and are read in all countries by grownup people much more than by children. There is, in this astonishing collection of stories, a story about a mermaid which I suppose you have all read. Of course there can be no such thing as a mermaid; from one point of view the story is quite absurd. But the emotions of unselfishness and love and loyalty which the story expresses are immortal, and so beautiful that we forget about all the unreality of the framework; we see only the eternal truth behind the fable.
From: “On Reading,” in Life and Literature (New York: Kessinger, 2005), 18
ALISON LURIE
Though some of his stories are brilliant and moving, most are sad, distressing, or even terrifying. As a child I was frightened and upset by many of them, especially those in which a little girl misbehaves and is horribly punished. The crime that seemed to cause the most awful result was vanity, and it was always little girls who met this fate, never boys. In “The Red Shoes,” for instance, Karen thinks of her new morocco-leather shoes even when she is in church, and as a result she is condemned to dance in them to exhaustion; she is only saved from death when she asks the local executioner to chop off her feet with his axe. Even worse in some ways was “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf.” In this tale a “proud and arrogant” child called Inger also comes to grief because of love of her new shoes. . . .
I was also deeply disturbed by one of Andersen’s most famous tales, “The Little Mermaid,” in which the heroine gives up her voice and agrees that every step she takes will feel like walking on knives, so as to have the chance of attracting the love of a prince whom she first saw at his birthday party on board a ship. . . . I took her story as a warning against self-sacrificial and hopeless love. I did not realize that in this tale Andersen had foretold his own future. He would be rejected again and again by those he loved most, but unlike the Little Mermaid he never gave up his voice, and the best of the stories he told would survive for hundreds of years, “wherever there are children.”
From: “The Underduckling: Hans Christian Andersen,” in Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter (New York: Penguin, 2003), 9–11
FAY WELDON
“Does it hurt?” he asked at last.
“Of course it hurts,” she said. “It’s meant to hurt. Anything that’s worth achieving has its price. And, by corollary, if you are prepared to pay that price you can achieve almost anything. In this particular case I am paying with physical pain. Hans Andersen’s little mermaid wanted legs instead of a tail, so that she could be properly loved by her Prince. She was given legs, and by inference the gap where they join at the top, and after that every step she took was like stepping on knives. Well, what did she expect? That was the penalty. And, like her, I welcome it. I don’t complain.”
“Did he love her,” asked the judge, “in return?”
“Temporarily,” said Polly Patch.
From: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (New York: Ballantine, 1983), 172–73
Andersen was a visionary tale-teller, but his fairy-realm was malign. Of his aesthetic eminence, I entertain no doubts, but I believe that we still have not learned how to read him.
From: Introduction to Hans Christian Andersen (New York: Chelsea House, 2004), xv
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR.
I particularly remember my mother sitting in her chair reading aloud to her children. She was a splendid reader, spirited and expressive, and Tom and I insisted that she keep on reading to us long after we were able to read to ourselves. . . . My mother began with fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen; with Greek and Roman mythology, especially as marvelously rendered by Hawthorne in The Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales; and with the wondrous Arabian Nights.
From: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 62
ROSELLEN BROWN
And what of “The Little Mermaid”? . . . I know that in the mermaid’s voicelessness Andersen captured one of our—I mean humans’—primal terrors, that much I can vouch for. He gave us an implicit judgment of the limitations of mere beauty, beauty unendowed with self. He held forth an ideal of love and loyalty to the point of death and made us, while we’re admiring it, wonder if the game is worth the candle. He suggested that too much wanting can change the one who desires (whatever her object) to the point of deformity. He reminded us of how difficult, perhaps even how impossible, it is to try to leap certain barriers and successfully become something we are not.
Which of these, at age eight or nine, did I grasp? Which of them helped to form my storytelling soul and which did I respond to because I was already partway to who I was to become? I could write a convenient fiction here that would connect all these dots, Andersen’s and mine, but I want to end where I began, invoking the modest truth and admitting how little of it I possess where my own childhood is concerned. How mysterious these stories were, that’s all I know I felt, and how wonderfully dangerous and disorienting, coming at me out of nowhere. How amazing to break the silence, like the Ancient Mariner to lay a firm hand on the listener’s arm and begin anywhere, anywhere at all.
From: “It Is You the Fable Is About,” in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, ed. Kate Bernheimer (New York: Random House/ Anchor, 2002), 58
KATHRYN DAVIS
The point is ownership. The point is, I believed these were my stories. Mine. I didn’t think they’d been written for me, Andersen having “had me in mind,” or that they conveyed my view of things with unusual precision—no, when I heard these stories I was infused with that shiver of ecstasy that is an unmistakable symptom of the creative act. I felt as if I’d created the stories, as if they had their origin in my imagination, as if they were by definition my original work, having “belonged at the beginning to the person in question”—that person being me.
From: “Why I Don’t Like Reading Fairy Tales,” in Bernheimer, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 85–86
PETER RUSHFORTH
In the fairy-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, the innocent and pure in heart always seemed to triumph, even after much fear and suffering: Hansel and Gretel outwitted the witch and escaped; the seven little kids and their mother destroyed the wolf; the three sisters in “Fitcher’s Bird” overpowered even death itself to defeat the murdering magician. But he could still remember the mounting desolation with which he read some of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tales when he was little. He had read them over and over again, hoping that this time the ending would be a happy ending, but the endings never changed: the little match-girl died entirely alone, frozen to death on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by burned-out matches; the little mermaid melted into foam after bearing her suffering bravely; and the steadfast tin soldier and the ballerina perished in the flames of the stove, leaving only a little tin heart and a metal sequin behind. He had been unable to put them away and forget about them. He had been drawn, compulsively, to read them with engrossed attention, and had wept as he found himself realizing what the inevitable and unchanged end of the story would be.
From: Kindergarten (New York: Avon Books, 1979), 112
BARBARA SJOHOL
Not all of Andersen’s tales appeal to me anymore, and many make me shudder. I believe Gerda is the reason I can still reread “The Snow Queen” without gagging on the saccharine Christian symbolism that spoils some of his other works. Though there’s a bit of the sentimental in the ending of the story when Gerda and Kai return by foot (Gerda presumably still without shoes) to the garden of their childhood, the effect is deeply satisfying. If our hearts are open, we can return to the Edens of our youth, even if we are, like Gerda and Kai, now fully grown.
From: “The Ice Palace” in Rereadings, ed. Anne Fadiman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 193
LOIS LOWRY
“Tell me a story, Annemarie,” begged Kirsti as she snuggled beside her sister in the big bed they shared. “Tell me a fairy tale.”
Annemarie smiled and wrapped her arms around her little sister in the dark. All Danish children grew up familiar with fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen, the most famous of the tale tellers, had been Danish himself.
“Do you want the one about the little mermaid?” That one had always been Annemarie’s own favorite.
From: Number the Stars (New York: Laurel Leaf, 1998), 11
ROBERT K. GREENLEAF AND PETER B. VAILL
A friend of mine in Madison, Wisconsin, tells a story about Frank Lloyd Wright many years ago when his studio, Taliesen, was at nearby Spring Green. Mr. Wright had been invited by a women’s club in Madison to come and talk on the subject “What is Art?” He accepted and appeared at the appointed hour and was introduced to speak on this subject.
In his prime, he was a large, impressive man, with good stage presence and a fine voice. He acknowledged the introduction and produced from his pocket a little book. He then proceeded to read one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, the one about the little mermaid. He read it beautifully, and it took about 15 minutes. When he finished, he closed the book, looked intently at his audience and said, “That, my friends, is art,” and sat down.
From: The Power of Servant Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1998), 61–62
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ
I read whatever I found in the house. It was an age of sets, and several were stored in the bedroom I inherited when I was ten and my sister left to get married. Dickens in brown leather with a black horizontal stripe was cozy looking, but the Harvard Classics in black leather and gold trim were forbidding—especially Plutarch’s Lives and Marcus Aurelius and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. I did manage to find one, though, volume 17, containing all the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales, which I practically licked off the page. They tasted bitter and pungent, like curries. The most bittersweet story, exotic yet familiar, was “The Little Mermaid,” and rereading it today, I can easily see why. Like me, the “silent and thoughtful” mermaid lusted after the world. No matter how ravishing and secure the undersea realm she shared with her five loving sisters, the world way above lured her from her earliest years. She craved light, the great ball of the sun that beneath the water’s surface was translated into a purple glow.
From: Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 24–25
HUGH WALPOLE
Hans Andersen was not, I would say, exactly a charming person. He was ugly, conceited, sensitive, quick-tempered, and elusive. As the hero of a novel he would annoy many readers. He would seem feckless and ungrateful, and a bit of a muff. And yet he is part of all of us. If you feel the pathetic and humorous and lonely uniqueness of human beings, you must know that only the very unperceptive and heavy-minded are irritated by him; and out of that strange personality he produced these wonderful fairy stories, wonderful because they are filled through and through with that sense of oddity and loneliness that gives human beings so much beauty.
From: Foreword to It’s Perfectly True and Other Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, trans. Paul Leyssac (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938), vi
PHYLLIS M. PICKARD
Children have always gained immensely from listening to adult communications. What caused many of the children to suffer nightmares were the occasions when Andersen’s own unresolved problems came through in inartistic form. For instance, there are some lurid accounts of death beckoning, of the gallows, of murderous treatment of grandmothers. It is all understandable when facts about Andersen are known, but it is not artistry for children. He loved his blue-eyed grandmother, but it was she who took him to the asylum and the prison through which he suffered so much. His resentment comes out, for instance, in a tale in which a robber hits his grandmother on the head, uses her corpse for climbing on to reach the money, and even finds a second grandmother to slay.
From: I Could a Tale Unfold: Violence, Horror and Sensationalism in Stories for Children (London: Tavistock, 1961), 89–90
Most of Andersen’s stories have sad endings, and that may have been one of their attractions for me. At seven, I had already seen my mother vanish, her sudden death the new defining point in my life. I had lost a place as well, having been moved to another house. I had seen my father fold into himself, quit his job, become a wanderer in the forests, a hunter spellbound by grief, his tamped spirit somehow comforted by the rough riverbanks, the difficult chases, the dog’s companionship. Death and transformation were two things I understood. I think I knew instinctively that the tales in my favorite book held an unusually powerful truth in the absence of the usual “happily ever after.”
From: “The Most Enchanting Book I Read,” in Remarkable Reads, ed. J. Peder Zane (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 35
A. S. BYATT
Hans Andersen’s Snow Queen was not only beautiful but intelligent and powerful; she gave Kay a vision of beauty and order, from which Gerda, with Andersen’s blessing, redeemed him for the ordinary and everyday. Andersen makes a standard opposition between cold reason and warm-heartedness and comes down whole-heartedly on the side of warm-heartedness, adding to it his own insistent Christian message. The eternity of the beautiful snow-crystals is a false infinity; only Gerda’s invocation of the Infant Jesus allows a glimpse of true eternity. Andersen even cheats by making the beautiful, mathematically perfect snowflakes into nasty gnomes and demons, snakes, hedgehogs, bears. . . . Science and reason are bad, kindness is good. It is a frequent, but not a necessary opposition. And I found in it, and in the dangerous isolation of the girl on her slippery shiny height a figure of what was beginning to bother me, the conflict between a female destiny, the kiss, the marriage, the child-bearing, the death, and the frightening loneliness of cleverness, the cold distance of seeing the world through art, of putting a frame around things.
From: “Ice, Snow, Glass,” in On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), 155–56
No one, I think, has outshone Andersen in depicting perdition. Who could ever forget what happened to that uppity girl who trod on the loaf? Or to vain little Karen, with her pretty red shoes? Who could forget the horrible tortures to which their defects consign these children? But Kay virtually swoons into his icy hell, and once he is there, the Snow Queen continues to blaze in all her erotic danger.
“The Snow Queen” shimmers with ambivalence and thwarted or suppressed cravings. The author’s stance is impeccable: he recommends to us the rewards of equipoise or eternity, and purity of soul. And yet what the story paints with indelible brilliance is the glamour of immobilization and aesthetic purity.
From: “In a Trance of Self,” in Bernheimer, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 90–114
MICHAEL BOOTH
There is a ghoulish anarchy to many of his stories—people are garroted, have their brains scattered about and endure other wonderfully arbitrary and brutal deaths, sometimes to the extent that you can’t help feeling a good many of these tales are wholly inappropriate for children. In “The Stork,” for instance, the eponymous birds plot a grisly revenge on a boy who taunted them: “In the pond there is a little dead baby, it has dreamed itself to death, we will take it to him, and then he will cry because we have brought him a little dead brother.” While the moment in “Little Claus and Big Claus,” where little Claus dresses up his dead grandmother, verges on the Hitchcockian.
Yet amid all the horror and fantasy, the telling details make it all seem somehow strangely real—like the walls rubbed with witches’ fat to make them shine in “The Elf Hill”; or the way the moon sees a Hindu maiden, “the blood coursing in her delicate fingers as she bent them round the flame to form a shelter for it” in “What the Moon Saw.”
From: Just as Well I’m Leaving: To the Orient with Hans Christian Andersen (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 17
CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES
Hans Christian Andersen wrote dozens of stories about the orphan archetype. He was a premier advocate of the lost and neglected child and he strongly supported searching for and finding one’s own kind. . . . For the last two centuries “The Ugly Duckling” has been one of the few stories to encourage successive generations of “outsiders” to hold on till they find their own. . . . It is a psychological and spiritual root story. A root story is one that contains a truth so fundamental to human development that without integration of this fact further progression is shaky.
From: Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 167
CLAIRE BLOOM
What I remember most from those early days is the sound of Mother’s voice as she read to me from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and “The Snow Queen.” These emotionally wrenching tales, to which I raptly listened and to which I was powerfully drawn, instilled in me a longing to be overwhelmed by romantic passion and led me in my teens and early twenties to attempt to emulate these self-sacrificing heroines, at least on the stage.
The sound of Mother’s voice and the radiance of those long summer afternoons are fused in my childhood memory, creating a pleasurable sensation of warmth and comfort and safety.
From: Claire Bloom, Leaving a Doll’s House (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 9
Andersen was that rare anomaly, wise man and innocent child; he shared with children an uncanny poetic power, the power of breathing life into mere dust. It is the intense life—honest, ingratiating—in Andersen’s tales that makes them unique. Discarded bits of bottle, sticks, doorknobs, and fading flowers give voice to their love, anguish, vanity, and bitterness. They reflect on their past joys, lost opportunities, and soberly ponder the mystery of death. We listen patiently, sympathetically, to their tiny querulous voices and the miracle is that we believe, as Andersen did, as all children do, that the bit of bottle, the stick, the doorknob are, for one moment, passionately living. The best tales of Andersen have this mixture of worldliness and naïveté that makes them so moving, so honest, so beautiful.
From: “Hans Christian Andersen,” in Caldecott & Co. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), 35
WALTER BENJAMIN
In one of Andersen’s tales, there is a picture-book that cost “half a kingdom.” In it everything was alive. “The birds sang, and people came out of the book and spoke.” But when the princess turned the page, “they leaped back in again so that there should be no disorder.” Pretty and unfocused, like so much that Andersen wrote, this little invention misses the crucial point by a hair’s breadth. The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures.
From: “A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), I, 435
