FOR LAUREN AND DANIEL, AGAIN!
Hans Christian Andersen is surrounded by a group of admirers in this photograph taken in 1863 by Henrik Tilemann.
Contents
Denmark’s Perfect Wizard
Ordering the Tales: From the Familiar to the Strange
PART I: TALES FOR CHILDREN
The Emperor’s New Clothes
The Snow Queen
The Princess and the Pea
The Nightingale
The Ugly Duckling
The Little Mermaid
The Tinderbox
The Wild Swans
Thumbelina
The Little Match Girl
The Steadfast Tin Soldier
Ole Shut-Eye
PART II: TALES FOR ADULTS
The Red Shoes
The Shadow
The Psyche
The Most Astonishing Thing
The Story of a Mother
The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf
The Phoenix
The Goblin and the Grocer
Auntie Toothache
The Flying Trunk
Heartache
The Bell
PART III: BIOGRAPHIES
A Fairy-Tale Life? Hans Christian Andersen
Andersen’s Illustrators
PART IV: ANDERSEN’S READERS
PART V: BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgments
Works by Hans Christian Andersen
Secondary Literature
Denmark’s Perfect Wizard
THE WONDER OF WONDERS
He was a perfect wizard,” August Strindberg declared in a tribute to the author whose stories had enthralled him in his childhood. “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Tinder Box,” and other tales had drawn him into an enchanted world far superior to the drab realities of everyday life.1 Charles Dickens, Henry James, Hermann Hesse, W. H. Auden, and Thomas Mann—these are just a few of the writers who either grew up with Andersen’s stories, doting over them, or grew into them, admiring their imaginative force.
Today, we are rapidly losing sight of the sparkle and shimmer that Strindberg and others found in the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish writer who was born over two hundred years ago in the small town of Odense. We think of Andersen as the poet of compassion (“The Little Match Girl”), the enemy of hypocrisy (“The Emperor’s New Clothes”), or the prophet of hope (“The Ugly Duckling”). While there is no reason to challenge those assessments, we should not forget that Andersen does far more than parade vices and virtues before us. If his tales were only about sending messages and broadcasting morals, we would not still be reading him today.
And read him we do. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, lists Andersen among the ten most widely translated authors in the world, along with Shakespeare and Karl Marx. Andersen’s stories have been part of bedtime reading rituals and school curricula in Beijing, Calcutta, Beirut, and Montreal. “The Snow Queen,” “The Ugly Duckling,” and “The Princess and the Pea” are not just story titles but terms with a kind of global currency. How many of us have grown up admiring the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” identifying with the newborn swan in “The Ugly Duckling,” and weeping over “The Little Match Girl”?
Strindberg was exactly right to call Andersen a wizard, for there is something in his stories that transcends good and evil—something that we can, for want of a better term, call magic. That magic has nothing to do with ethics but has much to do with luck, good fortune, and chance. “The moral of every fairy tale,” as Adam Gopnik tells us, “is not ‘Virtue rewarded’ but ‘You never know’ (which bean will sprout, which son will triumph).”2 Fairy tales move in the subjunctive mode, presenting perils but also opening possibilities, telling us what could be and what might be rather than what should be. Along with what would seem to be mere randomness or serendipity also comes the reassurance that everything will, in the end, turn out all right.
We feel a catch of the breath when the Snow Queen’s carriage lifts off and flies through the air. Our hearts begin to pound when an evil witch turns boys into wild swans who soar over distant seas. And we thrill to the sight of ferocious dogs, eyes the size of teacups, guarding chambers containing untold wealth. But even that magic does not fully capture what is at stake in Andersen’s wizardry. Nor does it suffice to point to the mix of the wild and the weird, the charming and the brutal, the droll and the bloodcurdling in the stories, for those traits surface with predictable regularity in fairy tales from all cultures.
Hermann Hesse once hinted at what creates magic in Andersen’s tales when he recalled “the beautiful magic sparkle” of their “whole, multicolored, magnificent world.” Fairy tales like Andersen’s are invested above all in surfaces, in everything that glitters, dazzles, and shines. Still, they give us psychological depth, even when the characters themselves are described only in terms of appearances. Sadness is typically expressed as tears (sometimes made of crystal), and gratitude comes in the form of material objects (a miniature golden spinning wheel, a silver flute, or a dress of diamonds). As the stereotypical plots of fairy tales churn with melodramatic fervor, they also sparkle with surface beauty. The result is something I will call ignition power—the ability to inspire our powers of imagination so that we begin to see scenes described by nothing more than words on a page.3
Kay Nielsen: Hans Christian Andersen
Committed to color, texture, light, brilliance, and clarity, Andersen’s fairy tales try to create the tangible beauty that they are, by virtue of their medium as mere words, powerless to capture. In “The Little Mermaid,” the sun looks like a “purple flower with light streaming from its calyx”; the eleven brothers in “The Wild Swans” write on “golden tablets with pencils of diamond”; and the soldier in “The Tinderbox” enters “a huge hall where hundreds of lamps were burning.” The bright wonders and vivid marvels that tumble fast and thick through the narratives go far toward explaining what drew artists like Rackham, Dulac, and Nielsen to Andersen’s stories, and their illustrations, as I discovered, when read with the text, can take your breath away.
The delicate description of Thumbelina’s cradle, with its mattress made of violets and its rose-petal blanket, produces something that, even if it remains invisible, is nonetheless wondrously exquisite. Andersen’s “The Goblin and the Grocer” (a tale little known outside Denmark) reveals just how powerfully words on a page can transform even a dark garret into a site of aesthetic pleasure. The goblin of the tale’s title peers into the room of a student, who is reading at his desk:
How extraordinarily bright it was in the room! A dazzling ray of light rose up from the book and transformed itself into a tree trunk that spread its branches over the student. Each leaf on the tree was a fresh green color, and every flower was the face of a beautiful maiden, some with dark, sparkling eyes, others with marvelous clear blue eyes. Every fruit on the tree was a shining star, and the room was filled with music and song.
J.R.R. Tolkien recognized the power of fairy-tale discourses and the “elvish craft” that produces other worlds from mere words. Storytelling in its “primary and most potent mode” draws on the magic of language to create Elsewheres, universes that form enchanted alternatives to the real world:
The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood we have already an enchanter’s power?
??upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes.4
Step by step, word by word, Andersen, the “perfect magician,” mapped and named the objects in his other worlds.
In his college lectures on seven great novels—all “supreme fairy tales”—Vladimir Nabokov affirmed the power of language to construct other worlds of rarefied beauty.5 Like Andersen, Nabokov saw the supreme value of fiction in its power to create beauty through language. He considered it his duty as a writer to produce intellectual pleasure in the reader, who can observe the artist “build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.”6 Andersen would have understood the metaphor, for he too saw in the intersection of beauty and pleasure the supreme value of fiction. And that is why we still read him today.
We remember Andersen for the power of his images, for his castles of glass and steel. His paper cuttings, sketches, and collages remind us that he was supremely dedicated to the visual, a painter as much as a poet. C. S. Lewis once described how the Chronicles of Narnia were inspired by visual cues: “Everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.”7 Drawn to the fairy tale because of “its brevity, its severe restraint on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and ‘gas,’ ” Lewis instinctively recognized the importance of surface beauty and knew that he could depend on it to fuel the narrative engines of his multivolumed Chronicles. Like Andersen’s fairy tales, his fantasy narratives depend on the evocation of breathtakingly beautiful objects, figures, and landscapes.
If Andersen’s magic lies in the beauty of his tales, critics have been reluctant to call attention to it. They have, however, quite correctly described a poetics that mingles satire with sentiment, whimsy with tragedy, and passion with piety. And, above all, they have seen mirrored in the tales the maker of the tales. Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, one of the most recent biographies of the writer, begins by declaring that its subject was a “compulsive autobiographer” and proceeds to document in superbly comprehensive ways how the art charts the stations of its author’s troubled soul. In the fairy tales, we discover, the truest self-portraits are etched in generous and fulsome detail. “He is the triumphant Ugly Duckling,” Jackie Wullschlager declares, “and the loyal Little Mermaid, the steadfast Tin Soldier and the king-loving Nightingale, the demonic Shadow, the depressive Fir Tree, the forlorn Little Matchgirl.”8
Reginald Spink, an earlier biographer, summarizes the collective critical wisdom of decades in his observations about the way in which Andersen’s fairy tales stage personal anxieties and desires and exorcise the demons haunting his imagination: “Andersen never stopped telling his own story. . . . Sometimes he tells it in an idealized form, sometimes with self-revelatory candor. In tale after tale—‘The Tinder Box,’ ‘Little Claus and Big Claus,’ ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier,’ ‘The Swineherd,’ ‘The Ugly Duckling’—he is the hero who triumphs over poverty, persecution, and plain stupidity, and who sometimes, in a reversal of the facts, marries the princess (‘Clodpoll’) or scorns her (‘The Swineherd’).”9 In other words, either the stories square with the facts of Andersen’s life (in which case they are purely autobiographical) or they do not at all square with those facts (in which case they are still autobiographical).
Andersen was an expert in making paper cuttings, and some of his work is astonishingly intricate, mingling ballerinas with theater masks and death’s heads.
Swans and ballerinas figure frequently in Andersen’s paper cuttings, and this example offers an artful mingling of the two.
Andersen himself colluded with his critics in perpetuating the myth that the stories were all about him, but only partially. In The Fairy Tale of My Life, he reports that at school he told the boys “curious stories” in which he was always the “chief person.”10 In a letter of 1834 (written just before he published the fairy tales for which he became renowned), he suggests, however, that the characters in his works are not just self-portraits but portraits of those he encountered in real life: “Every character is taken from life; every one of them; not one of them is invented. I know and have known them all.”11 And finally, while writing about his growing enthusiasm for the genre of the fairy tale, Andersen suggested that he was relying on storytelling traditions, as much as on real life: “I gained confidence and was greatly motivated to develop in this direction and to pay greater attention to the rich source from which I had to create.”12 Clearly, it was not all about Andersen, and the author himself tells us as much.
As tempting as it may be to map direct connections between a story and its author or to think of the tales as mirrors of their author’s psyche, those moves invariably take us away from the tales themselves. The real risk of focusing too sharply on Andersen and on his anxieties and desires, his pathologies and perversities, or his aspirations and ideals is that, in the frenzy of looking for latent meanings, we lose the sense of wonder aroused by the manifest content of the tales. The Snow Queen’s crystal palace, the utopian realm of poetry discovered by the Shadow, the tin soldier’s dizzying voyage into the sea all lose their power to stir the senses under a barrage of biographical detail. The more we worry about the artist and his disorders, the less we care about the order of the art.
THE EMPEROR’S WONDROUS CLOTHES
Andersen’s great gift was to create magic through the fairy tale in the form of arresting beauty, captivating characters, and absorbing plots. The appeal of his stories is so enduring that many operate like the oral fairy tales to which he was so attached as a child, circulating by word of mouth, creating new versions of themselves, and migrating with ease from one culture to another. Many have become part of local wisdom and lore even as they have attained a kind of global standing.13
Andersen’s name is often mentioned in the same breath as Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, the men who produced the landmark anthologies of folklore at the end of the seventeenth century in France and in the early nineteenth century in Germany. In that now renowned fairy-tale pantheon, Andersen, the son of a washerwoman and shoemaker, is the one who was closest to the common people and who actually grew up with the oral storytelling culture of the spinning room. Yet, ironically, he is also the one who is seen as the champion of the literary—as opposed to the traditional oral—fairy tale. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, Andersen did not reproduce what he heard from the lips of the people. Still his stories circulate just as broadly as those of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. And the films based on them take in their share of revenue for Disney Studios. Despite their literary origins, Andersen’s tales have joined those of Perrault and the Grimms to become the foundational cultural stories and formative childhood plots of Western culture. They are our folklore.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837) is one of the best known of Andersen’s tales, and it is repeatedly described as a classic: “charming,” “beloved,” and “winning.” A recent illustrated retelling by a team of celebrities captures the story’s iconic status: “Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved tale of a king and his invisible clothes has delighted children the world over for generations. Now . . . an all-star cast of actors, celebrities, and award-winning illustrators has re-imagined the classic tale in this hilarious and sumptuously illustrated rendition. . . . The Emperor’s New Clothes is a charming book for the whole family to enjoy.”14 The only terms overlooked in this enthusiastic declaration of family-friendly values are “timeless,” “universal,” and “enchanting”—attributes often ascribed to cultural stories known the world over, for example, “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.”
More effectively than any of the other tales, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” established Andersen’s reputation as a man who created stories for children—not just in the sense of target audience, but also as beneficiaries of something extraordinary. The lesson embedded in it is so transparent that its tit
le circulates in the form of proverbial wisdom about social hypocrisy. But more importantly, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” romanticizes children by investing them with the courage to challenge authority and to speak truth to power.
The plucky child who declares that the Emperor has no clothes is indeed “beloved.” A scientist working in the field of evolutionary biology borrowed the title of Andersen’s tale and praised its hero: “The honesty and naïveté of the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale are sufficient to demonstrate the foolishness of the emperor and his public. The child is capable of honest observation and is willing to state the obvious.”15 “The Emperor’s New Clothes” contains an underlying fantasy about our cultural desire to unmask duplicity along with self-deception and to speak the truth, no matter how painfully humiliating it may be to those in authority—or perhaps especially because it will be painfully humiliating.
D. H. Lawrence urged readers to trust the tale rather than the teller, and I want to take a closer look at this particular tale to reach, if not the truth, then at least a sharper understanding of what really matters in plots that have repeatedly been read as morality plays or as allegories of Andersen’s personal sufferings and fixations. Jack Zipes, in a brilliantly irreverent biography of the Danish author as “misunderstood storyteller,” has suggested that “The Emperor’s New Clothes” enabled Andersen to discharge his hostility toward the aristocracy: “Andersen’s anger at a pretentious and indifferent upper class that lacked sensitivity for art, especially for his particular kind of art, had to be channeled in such a way that he would not become self-destructive.”16 Zipes destabilizes that reading when he asks: “Do we need deceivers to learn the truth about decadent and deceptive emperors? Or do we need childlike honesty?”17 If truth be told, the answers are not at all obvious. Is it possible that the two swindlers in the story are the real champions of truth, after all? Have we been deluding ourselves all along in thinking that the child is the heroic figure who exposes social hypocrisy and collective denial?