Hans Christian Andersen. - Review - book review

Contemporary Review, April, 2001 by John Knight

Hans Christian Andersen. The Life of a Storyteller. Jackie Wullschlager. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. [pound]20.00. 505 Pages. ISBN 0-713-99325-1.

On New Year's Day 1835 Hans Christian Andersen wrote, 'I am now starting on some "fairy tales for children"'. Three months later, he wrote again 'with a mixture of pride and irony' to say that the tales were now completed, that publication was imminent and that his readers would call them 'the work of my immortality!' Ever the hypochondriac, he, nevertheless, felt that he wouldn't live long enough to 'enjoy the experience in this world'. His gloomy prediction turned out to be wrong: in his sixties Andersen was described by Sir Edmund Gosse, as 'one of the most famous men at that time alive in Europe'. But, had not a fortune-teller in Odense told Anne Marie Andersen that her son's achievements would one day bring great credit to his home town?

The son of a sickly young shoemaker and his even younger wife, Andersen had been born into extreme poverty and it was, Jackie Wullschlager believes, precisely because he came from such an impoverished background that 'he sought public attention so assiduously afterwards'. The family lived and slept in one small room. Anne Marie was illiterate, addicted to schnapps and immensely superstitious. Andersen grew up terrified of the dark and fearful of churchyards. In later years, when he had become an inveterate traveller, he always carried a rope in his luggage in case the hotel in which he was staying caught fire and, such was his fear of being buried alive, he kept a note on his bedside table which warned: 'I only appear to be dead'.

Once, in a cold winter the window panes of the Andersens' cottage had frozen over and his ailing father had made out the figure of a maiden with outstretched arms in the frosted glass. 'She has come to fetch me', he had joked and a year later, when his corpse lay stiff as a board on the bed, Anne Marie told her son that the Ice Maiden had, indeed, carried his father off. Andersen never forgot that traumatic night in 1816, recalling it in two of his fairy tales. In The Snow Queen love triumphs over death while in The Ice Maiden the author reasserts his parents' fatalism and the outcome is reversed.

To understand the man, study the boy. On a sunny September afternoon in 1819 Anne Marie Andersen walked with her fourteen-year old son to the gates of Odense. She had bribed the postillion with three rixdollars to take the lad on the mail coach to Copenhagen where, it was hoped, he might find a patron who would pay for an education. The search for such a benefactor took Andersen three terrible years. But, eventually, the gangling youth found himself in the presence of a cool, taciturn civil servant and well-known philanthropist who promised little. But Jonas Collin, Director of the Royal Theatre and one of the most powerful administrators in the city, was 'a man of actions, not words'. He had the ear of the King and managed to secure a grant, enabling the poor cobbler's son from Odense to attend grammar school.

Andersen's humiliations, however, were not over: the headmaster was a sadist and the other boys -- all much younger -- taunted him cruelly. Ever afterwards, he craved admiration like a junkie desperate for a fix, turning his back on his humble origins and seeking his friends among the rich and powerful. Mary Russell Mitford cruelly described him as 'a toad-eater, a hanger-on in great houses ... a man who values his acquaintances for their rank and their riches and their importance in the world ... who uses fame merely as a key to open drawing-room doors, a ladder to climb to high places'.

It was in the drawing-rooms of those great houses that he wrote some of his stories and looked fondly on princelings -- 'look' being the operative word for, when it came to sex, Andersen was not only ambivalent, but frightened. He was smitten with Carl Alexander von Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Edvard Collin, the son of his benefactor, and Harold Scharff, a dancer at the Royal Theatre. Most men, explains Jackie Wullschlager, grew out of such friendships and married, but for Andersen they were examples of 'homo-erotic longings and obsessions with individual men which lasted a lifetime'. Such feelings were sometimes supplanted by sexual longing for a woman and he entertained something of a 'grand passion' for Jenny Lind but the famous singer, like Andersen himself, was happily married to her art. 'The world would he so beautiful', he wrote, 'if only everyone would let their heart play a greater part than it is allowed to do'.

From adolescence Andersen had linked poverty with sexuality and this, as Jackie Wullschlager points out, is most apparent in his novel OT 'where sex is seen as a dark force coming from the criminal underclass'. The message in several of his stories, like Poultry Meg's Family, is that sex brings one down socially and is, therefore, to be avoided. One must assume that in this matter Andersen took his own advice since, as far as we know, he died celibate. When he passed into history on 4th August 1875 both the King and Crown Prince of Denmark were among the mourners at his funeral in Copenhagen Cathedral; not one of his own family attended.