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 storie
s 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.
ONLY A VICTIM
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