I FOUND myself sitting between Harold Bloom and Günter Grass, having a lively literary conversation with them, and the Queen of Denmark, and the former President of Iceland, Vigdis Finnbogadottir. Elsewhere in the room were Roger Moore, Harry Belafonte, Isabel Allende and John Hume.
It was like an agreeable dream, but in fact it was the birthday lunch to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen (pictured below) last month, in the town hall of his birthplace, Odense. We had walked through streets of smiling children dressed as princes, swineherds, teapots, needles, peas, and soldiers, past a mermaid on a rock singing soulfully. Herr Grass and Professor Bloom received prizes for their work on Andersen. Both spoke elegantly. Bloom asked himself and us whether Andersen would have felt satisfied with the occasion, and answered, no he would not. No praise was ever enough to satisfy a man of such intense narcissism and self-love. We laughed, and Bloom added a quotation from Freud: “A healthy narcissism is absolutely necessary for the highest creative achievement.”
The Danes are celebrating their great writer with an appropriate mixture of lavishness and dry wit. The streets of Copenhagen are painted with 2,200 very large white footprints showing where he walked. (He was tall and gangling and ugly, and his feet were size 47.) He left Odense at 14, in 1819, and went to the Royal Theatre to become famous, as he knew he must. His father was a shoemaker, his mother a poor washerwoman, his grandfather a madman.
But he knew that he was not an ugly duck; he was a swan. He made for the theatre because it enclosed an imagined world, where he could remake himself. He tried to be a singer, and he tried to be a dancer, and he was laughed at and thrown out. So he took to writing, and found patrons who educated him — he was able to ask, because he knew he must and would succeed. He became internationally famous, travelled the world, and wrote autobiographies, one entitled The Fairy Tale of my Life.
Like many great children’s writers and tale-tellers, he was someone who never grew up. He lived in a world of story and irreality to make his life bearable. And he made his life into a barely real story.
He was a great writer, and his greatness is not limited to what he does to the imaginations of successive generations of children. Europe in the 19th century had a literature in which the imaginative tale — what we, misleadingly in many ways, call “fairytales” — was a form at least as important as the socially realistic novel written by the English. The Grimm Brothers had collected folk tales told by the people because they believed that in these could be found the beliefs, religious and magical, of the ancient Germans. They also collected mythologies, Norse and Teutonic. German literary writers, from Goethe onwards, wrote Märchen, magical tales with occult meanings, set in forests and caverns and rivers. E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote spine-chilling psychological games about dangerous magicians and beautiful automata.
Andersen began by studying these and reworking both tales told by the Grimms and old Danish folktales. He also imitated Hoffmann and other Germans. His Wild Swans are reworked from the Grimms, and the darkly dramatic Travelling Companion is an old Scandinavian story. Andersen brought to these both a respect for the story-shape and his own wonderfully precise imaginative skills — a folk tale is a string of flat events, whereas an Andersen tale makes you see a terrified princess picking midnight nettles to weave magic shirts, feel her terror as she is being driven to execution. His greatest tales — The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid — are his own, and combine the Grimms’ directness with the art-tale’s emotion.
Many children — including myself — have encountered the pain of an unhappy ending for the first time in The Little Mermaid. She is ambitious, she suffers for love, her tail becomes legs like “walking on knives”, her tongue is cut out. In a fairytale she would get the prince, and retrieve her voice. Andersen leaves her wounded and disappointed. He said of this tale that it was the only one that had moved him while he was writing it.
The Royal Danish Theatre put on Horse-Radish Soup and Stuffed Cabbage, a phantasmagoria of interweaving tales and sequences all derived directly from Andersen. The set is scaffolding and ladders — possibilities and enclosures — and men, women and creatures dance and posture about it, as one tale metamorphoses into another, ducks and swans, apeheaded ladies, a bounding crimson demon on bungee ropes, lifeless puppets, eels and princesses of all kinds.
The Red Shoes as Andersen wrote it is terrifying. A vain girl wears her new red shoes to church and cannot stop dancing until she finds a priest who will cut off her feet, with the shoes — which then go dancing away with the feet in them. It was based on Andersen’s anxiety as a child about admiring his own new boots in church. In the theatre the red-shoed girl whirls in and out of all the tales.
There is an intriguing dramatisation of The Travelling Companion, in which a youth seeking his fortune is aided by a dead man whose burial he paid for. He wins a princess possessed by demons — and the nastiness of both princess and troll is splendidly acted. There is also an enactment of the alarming tale of The Shadow, in which a man’s shadow detaches itself, becomes human, makes its fortune, wins a princess, and has its original owner executed on its wedding day. This Hoffmanesque tale of doubles, of contrasting timidity and arrogance, like that of the red shoes, is about conflicting parts of Andersen himself.
Kierkegaard, the great Danish thinker, wrote that Andersen had “no personality” and resembled those flowers who have two sexes and none. Andersen felt himself “annihilated” by this opinion and suffered. He did fall romantically in love with both men and women, and his loves were fantasies, not intimacies. One of his innovations as a storyteller is the investment of inanimate objects with personality — as a child will make up a tale with a salt cellar or a fork. He created an arrogant and self-satisfied darning-needle, a stuck-up teapot (with an unmentionable mended lid), a selfimportant piggy-bank, a top in love with a “Morocco-leather” ball who despises him and rejects him for an unattainable swallow. These tales are brilliant because the things have personalities at once too intense and comically restricted. They are completely self-satisfied, and completely limited to what can be thought out by a teapot or needle.
They resemble their creator, self-obsessed and yearning.
These animated things are great storytellers, too. A self-important collar, in love with a garter, makes up a whole mendacious social system in which he “owns' a comb and a bootjack”. The darning needle personifies the fingers of the cook who wields her, and gives all five fingers names and characters. But they are usually defeated. The needle ends up broken and thrown out in the gutter. The collar, too, is thrown away and made into rag-based paper on which the story we are reading is written. Andersen spins selves because he has at once too much and too little sense of his own self.
My favourite moment is when a conceited pea is lying in the gutter, growing “fat and soggy”. It is the last, rejected, one of five whose restricted green life in their pod Andersen has intensely imagined. It persists in narcissism.
“I will get so fat that I burst and that is more than any pea has ever done. I am certainly the most remarkable pea . . .", it said. Andersen, still intensely imagining, cannot resist briefly giving life even to the gutter. The story ends: “And the gutter agreed!” Andersen might even have been briefly content to see the streets of Odense and the theatre that rejected him full of embodiments of his imagined world. In an extravagantly kitsch gala in the national football stadium Tina Turner sang for him Simply the Best. And he was the most remarkable storyteller, perhaps, ever.
