Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter One: Copenhagen
Chapter Two: Germany
Chapter Three: Florence
Chapter Four: Rome
Chapter Five: Naples
Chapter Six: Malta
Chapter Seven: Athens
Chapter Eight: Constantinople
Chapter Nine: The Danube
Epilogue
Thanks
Select Bibliography
Index
Copyright
Having been dragged against his will to live in Denmark, Michael Booth discovered one of the great secrets of travel literature – Hans Christian Andersen’s A Poet’s Bazaar – a fascinating travelogue through a Europe on the cusp of revolution, by the man who invented children’s literature. He discovered, too, his chance to escape Denmark.
In 1840 Andersen was also desperate to flee, writing as he sailed: ‘It is just as well I am leaving, my soul is unwell!’ In Germany he was enraptured by the fiery Franz Liszt. In sultry Naples this latent bisexual wrestled with his erotic demons before travelling to Athens, seeing the dervishes dance in Istanbul, and sailing home up the Danube. Booth follows him every step of the way, reflecting on Andersen’s life, work and pathological self-obsession, encountering his own cast of characters, from an accommodating Hamburg prostitute to a bemused Danish Ambassador to the first ever female dervish, who whisks him off to meet her guru.
Michael Booth is a journalist and food writer who contributes regularly to numerous British and foreign magazines, including Condé Nast Traveller and Monocle, and has written for all of the UK’s broadsheet newspapers. He is the author of four works of non-fiction, Just as Well I’m Leaving, Doing Without Delia, which was a BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’, Sushi and Beyond, which won the Guild of Food Writers Kate Whiteman Award for the best book on food and travel in 2010 and the critically-acclaimed Eat Pray Eat.
To Lissen
‘No son, no brother, can suffer more than I do – but it is just as well I am leaving: my soul is unwell.’
Letter from Hans Christian Andersen to his benefactor Jonas Collin on the second day of his journey to the Orient,
1 November 1840
Somewhere in the wings of Odense Koncerthus, a technician reached behind Roger Moore’s back, checked his batteries and flicked a switch. Moore’s eyes fluttered into life, his spine stiffened and his right eyebrow spasmed into a quizzical arc. The operator pointed him towards the spotlights, waggled a toggle on the control panel, and out he strode onto the largest stage in Scandinavia.
At least, I can only assume this is what happened, out of sight, in the murk of the theatre’s wings. For me and the rest of the two-thousand-strong audience, among them various members of the Danish royal family, local dignitaries, ordinary Danes, Hans Christian Andersen aficionados and maybe, who knows, even the odd Roger Moore fan, his serene detachment to the irrelevance of his speech could only have been explained by the fact that this was a marionette Moore, dispatched from the superstar’s Swiss eyrie to help him bear the burden of his tireless work as an UNICEF ambassador. It was a speech that Roger Moores were giving from Bratislava to Burundi, quite possibly at that very minute.
Either that or Rog had become carried away with the slap and the sherry in his dressing room.
Anyway, while Moore slurred onward about the victims of famine, my mind had drifted. I was not the only one. I looked at my Danish in-laws, sitting on either side of me. I could see from their faces, fixed in polite perplexity, that Moore’s monologue, which had long ago deviated from the work of UNICEF and was now focusing primarily on his career, was cause for some confusion. This bafflement was reflected in the other Danish faces around me. These sturdy, sensible people hadn’t travelled from their sturdy sensible homes on the many islands, fjords and peninsulas of their sturdy, sensible country to listen to a luvvie’s rambling reminiscences. They had come to pay homage to their most beloved writer on what was, in fact, a rather auspicious occasion.
This was Odense’s annual Hans Christian Andersen Festival, which, when Roger finally ceded the stage, would comprise songs, readings, speeches and dramatisations of his work (Andersen’s that is, not Roger’s). Despite the fact that the world’s best loved fairy tale teller fled this rural backwater on the island of Fyn for Copenhagen as soon as physically possible, his birthplace continues to burnish his memory with a fanatical zeal. Think Memphis and Elvis, or Liverpool and the Beatles, and you will have some idea of how important Andersen is to the people of Odense. He is their greatest international export, by an infinite margin.
Ordinarily, bearing in mind what he had put me through, I would probably rather have celebrated Roger Moore’s life than Hans Christian Andersen’s, but this year was different. Different, not just because this also happened to be the sixtieth birthday of the Danes’ universally respected and adored Dronning Margrethe (Queen Margaret) – or ‘Daisy’ as the Danes call her when they know there are no informers around – and Daisy herself was sitting in the front row alongside her jovial French husband, Henrik, but also because the next act on stage was a woman dressed like a transvestite chicken – a Copenhagen costume designer’s nightmarish interpretation of how the clockwork bird from Andersen’s fable ‘The Nightingale’ might look.
And that woman was my wife.
Lissen and I had met at a house-warming party in London just before Christmas two years earlier. By the time I arrived at the Islington flat, home to a theatre critic friend, I had moved way beyond being louche and was now, as Lissen would recall, about as drunk as one can be while remaining conscious. It can’t have been a pretty sight, as the drool stains on my lapels the next day testified. In my defence, I had spent the afternoon at the Time Out Christmas lunch, before meandering on to a Channel 4 party in Soho. (Is that a defence?)
I was introduced to Lissen by Suzy, a mutual friend (also a journalist; later to be my best ‘man’), and, confronted with this innocent-faced, curvaceous Scandinavian beauty, with her lustrous light brown hair, bewitching blue-green eyes, and foxy purple leather trousers, I did my best to turn on the charm.
Later, Lissen told me that, such was my overpowering magnetism, I had still been on her mind as she left the party some hours later. ‘Who was that creepy guy with his jumper on inside out?’ she had asked her friend as they walked to the station. Crucially though, in a city where men threw themselves at her like lemmings in Velcro jump suits, the fact that I had appeared aloof – stand-offish even – yet simultaneously interested had worked a perverse kind of magic on Lissen. What I knew to be my increasingly desperate attempt to stop the room from spinning and creating a centrifuge in my stomach that would have resulted in the redecorating of my friend’s new flat in a psychedelic scheme unlikely to have been to her liking, Lissen had taken to be enigmatic charm. In other words, while most men had collapsed in a dribbling heap at her feet, I remained upright and dribbling. I was, therefore, well on my way to being ‘intriguingly different’.
From this, it was but a nod, a wink and a stumbling, apologetic phone call a few days later (along with some masterful and not entirely scrupulous matchmaking from my future best man), to our first date, ensuing courtship and wedding bells. Had I known it would all lead to relocation to a country with withering weather, coruscating taxes, bewildering social etiquette and entire meals of pork fat and pickled fish, I would . . . well, the painful truth is I would have done it all over again. Purple leather trousers do it for me every time.
Lissen’s parents and I left Odense Koncerthus and walked to our car to wait for my chicken-diva wife to emerge in more sombre garb. My father-in-law, Peter, an inventor (and the creator of, among other things, those conical plastic collars that dogs are forced to wear when they are ill, which make them look like they’ve lost a fight with a satellite dish), attempted to extract meaning from, or at least some kind of justification for, the presence of Roger Moore at a joint celebration of their monarch and their greatest writer. I kept quiet, fearing that if I even tried to explain I would somehow be held responsible.
Instead, across the dark skies of my mind, my resentment flew with its now customary speed to the man responsible for my being dragged to this hostile and dispiriting country in the first place – dragged kicking and screaming (well, whining and whinging) away from my friends, my family and my career. The man we had been honouring that evening (and I’ll give you a clue, it wasn’t Roger Moore).
I held this man solely to blame for the fact that I couldn’t see Top of the Pops on a Friday night, or listen to Start the Week in the bath. In Denmark there is no Radio 4, and baths are categorised as unconscionable environmental abuses comparable to dumping your fridge on a Galapagos island (in Denmark a bathroom is not a place of indulgence; it is a place of efficient – preferably in some way painful – cleansing). This was the man who stopped me from buying Viz in my local newsagent (there is no such thing as a newsagent in Denmark – I am not making this up), or diving into a silken pint of John Smith’s in my local (welcome to the tyranny of the Carlsberg brewery). He was the reason I couldn’t find double cream or proper orange juice in the pre-Glasnost-era, par-boiled rice and tinned vegetable warehouse that passed for my local supermarket. They didn’t even have decent crisps, for the love of God!
There were many magnificent things about Denmark, of course, it is just that in my first year there they were all obscured by a fug of self-pity and social confusion. It didn’t help that the Danes are a race of virtually unparalleled beauty, with (mostly) statuesque physiques and the highest educational standards in the world. Living among them was like living with an entire nation of head boys and girls.
They have their dark side, though. Due to this man’s post-humous derailing of my life, I had learned through painful experience that the Danes have no word for ‘please’ and never, ever say sorry if they elbow you in the bus queue. Despite their oppressive obeisance to absurd rules of etiquette (serving smoked salmon on rye bread is akin to offering your guests baked beans from the tin, for instance; it must always be white bread), they were incapable of forming orderly queues. Hold a door open in a Danish department store, as I had done the previous day while out looking for an after-show gift for Lissen, and, at best, people will completely ignore you as, one after the other, they file past. At worst, the withering looks you will receive from hatchet-faced feminists oppressed by your chivalry will make you think twice about doing so again. They make the Hong Kong Chinese – up to that point by far the rudest people I had ever encountered – look like a bunch of librarians on an assertiveness training course. As an Englishman used to apologising when someone else treads on his foot, I took it all terribly personally and would often return home close to tears after a brief shopping excursion. (And though it is clearly wrong to generalise in this way about an entire race, the Danes are proud of being an unusually close-knit tribe, which is all the excuse I need.)
Thanks to this man, this antiquated children’s writer with a face like a deep sea fish, I could muster no fellow feeling for my local football team (the Danes are generally far too mature to get excited about sports), nor for that matter could I find much cheer in the local music scene (when was the last time you chose to listen to an Aqua CD?). Thanks to him and his damned bird, instead of the Ferraris and Bentleys in which I used to swan around London, courtesy of one of my freeloading, sorry, freelancing jobs writing about cars for a national newspaper, I was now the proud owner of a puce-coloured Renault Kangoo – the car equivalent of an anorak from Millets. This because the Danish government, in its nannying wisdom, thinks that cars are bad things and impose import duties of 180 per cent, rendering them an absurd luxury that every Dane burdens themselves with debt for life to afford.
I had come to believe that Denmark exalted in its mediocrity. You think I’m exaggerating? Well, let me tell you about Jantelov (Jante’s Law), a unique Danish phenomenon. You’ll be shocked, I promise.
Jantelov was the nickname given by the twentieth-century Danish satirist Axel Sandemose, in a novel he wrote in 1933, to the oppressive, small-minded spirit that he believed reigned across the land. It can be summarised by two of its commandments, as imagined by Sandemose: ‘Don’t believe you are anything special’ and ‘Don’t believe you are better than us’. Similarly, another Danish saying – ‘the further up a tree a monkey climbs, the more you see of its bottom’ – also refers to their disapproval of conspicuous achievement. (Think of it as a kind of tall poppy syndrome only with much lower corn, so that it takes only the slightest eccentricity or achievement to render oneself conspicuous.) Though it is fictional, there are actually some Danes who believe Jantelov to be a real doctrine, and many wholeheartedly endorse its insular, ‘Who do you think you are to be eating smoked salmon, isn’t fish paste good enough for you?’ dogma. It remains one of the defining characteristics of even the most worldly, cosmopolitan Dane, and it was one of the most difficult things I had to come to terms with as a foreigner living there.
Some examples: if a man buys a new Mercedes, he will almost certainly have to endure jokes along the lines of: ‘Did someone order a taxi?’ from his friends and family every time he turns up at their house. If someone scores top marks in an exam, their tone will be almost apologetic when telling you. (The Danes consider it unseemly to brag about such things.) Flash clothing labels are a no-no, and few men wear suits and ties to work on a daily basis – even Danish politicians attend parliament in knackered old jumpers seemingly plucked from the dog basket. Posh restaurants are for very special occasions only, which explains why they have to charge such exorbitant prices: their ‘regulars’ only return for milestone wedding anniversaries every ten years or so. Buy yourself some nice new towels and the Danes will think you are Elton John.
I happen to have something of a Mercedes fetish, I dream of an Armani suit and love eating out. My fresh-towel addiction makes Elton look like St Simeon Stylites. It was clear from an early stage that I was going to have problems assimilating.
You can witness Jantelov at work on the streets of Copenhagen any day of the week: Danes will, to a man, wait at the crossing until the green man tells them to cross, even though they can see no cars for miles. I was once hissed at for crossing on a red and, in the end, concluded that, when it comes to dealing with traffic, the Danes simply cannot think for themselves. Listen carefully and you can hear them bleating as they cross.
Hans sodding Christian bloody Andersen – this delusional romantic masochist, my wife had explained some months earlier when she won the role in the musical, had fallen in love with the Swedish singer, Jenny ‘the Swedish Nightingale’ Lind, famed throughout Europe for her captivating vocal charms. Andersen, the bird-faced, big-nosed geek, failed to woo said songstress, vented his frustration with frequent masturbation sessions (methodically recorded with a ‘+’ in his diary) and, in a last desperate attempt to catch her attention, wrote ‘The Nightingale’ about a pure, virginal bird displaced in the affections of a king by a vulgar mechanical replica. And thus Andersen, indirectly I grant you, had given my wife the excuse she needed to escape her South London misery.
Lissen hated living in London, I’m not really sure why; looking back, maybe I should have asked. I think it was something to do with the relentlessness of fitted carpets in English homes and the way your bogeys go black every time you open a window. That, and the daily risk of violent assault. But all the time that I was earning enough money to maintain our lavish consumer lifestyle (limitless supplies of Imperial Leather and After Eights eaten during daylight hours – that kind of thing), and she was only receiving unemployment benefit from Denmark, it was hard to justify a move. Admittedly, Danish unemployment benefit is a sizeable amount – comparable to an English primary school teacher’s salary – but the likelihood of me finding work to support us in Denmark, at least work that didn’t involve wearing a red uniform with stars to denote my skills with the deep fryer, was slim.
That had all changed when Lissen received the job offer of a lifetime from one of the most venerable stages in Denmark, the Folketeater (the People’s Theatre). Now, she argued, we could move to Denmark, and she could support us. This would mean that I could finish that novel that I hadn’t yet begun, but when questioned always claimed was my ultimate ambition in order to deflect further questioning regarding the vacuity of my normal work.
As well as the car-swanning-around-in, this other ‘work’ typically consisted of things like writing a history of the bikini for the Radio Times; television reviewing for Time Out (imagine being paid to watch TV all day!); a trip in search of the best beaches in the Philippines for one newspaper, and an important investigation into who was best, Leonardo da Vinci or Leonardo di Caprio, for Tomorrow’s World magazine (now defunct, can’t think why). Another typical assignment saw me fly all the way to Argentina to learn how to play polo, despite never having ridden a horse before (I do not recommend this); for another I went to Tokyo just to take a bath. And then there was the time I spent three days going slightly insane in the world’s biggest shopping mall. Happy, pointless tasks undertaken in order to write happy, pointless and forgettable newspaper articles.
But now Lissen had called my egotistical bluff by offering me a chance to express my inner Updike. In response all I could do was to open and close my mouth like a beached guppy and then watch as my magnificent media career and PR-party-packed life in SW1 disappeared down the U-bend to be replaced by life in a dull, grey, little land with endless TV shows about cattle, an odd liquorice fixation, and, of course, the bleak mid-winter weather, which lasts around 300 days of the year.
Damn you, Andersen, I thought to myself, as I clambered, shivering, from the freezing fog of April in Odense into my Postman Pat van. Damn you and your puerile fables, damn your clumsy moralising and your ugly duckling (we get the self-reference). And most of all, damn your Little Mermaid, that pathetic love-sick fish whose statue I had recently seen for myself for the first time – having schlepped miles out of the city centre to find it – sitting slumped on some rocks across from the grimmest part of Copenhagen’s run-down industrial harbour front mostly, it seemed, for the edification of Japanese cruise ship passengers and as an evening rallying point for local vandals.
Of course, looking back, I can see that the contempt in which I held the man I now realise to be unquestionably one of the greatest literary innovators of the nineteenth century was irrational, unfounded and verging on the pathological. Likewise, my rage at Denmark was distorted out of all proportion (although I still think the liquorice thing is weird). I would, in fact, come to love this man like a long-lost twin and yearn for Denmark as if it were a Bahamian paradise (well, almost). But at the time the bile was genuine, the targets, in my mind at least, wholly deserving.
Did I keep these gripes and moans to myself in our everyday life? Did I suffer stoically, putting on a brave face for the sake of marital harmony?
What do you reckon?
That night, back in Copenhagen, I continued to rant and rage like a toddler with a full nappy, as I did most nights, and most mornings come to that. I complained – again – about the way the Danes drive with a complete lack of courtesy (finding a space in the car park at Netto was like trying to find a safe bed as the Vikings rampaged through Lindisfarne); and wondered aloud for the umpteenth time why every bloody cake and confection had to have a wodge of marzipan hidden somewhere beneath an otherwise tempting exterior. And what was with the open sandwiches? Was there a bread shortage or something?
I was Eeyore that time everyone forgot his birthday and Albert Steptoe at his horse’s funeral rolled into one, and my sulking was beginning to affect our marriage. Resentment was brewing on both sides of the bed. Lissen had taken to wearing ear plugs. What stopped her from calling the police and simply asking them to escort me to the airport, I will never know.
In order to show at least a token commitment to my adopted home I had recently begun learning Danish at an intensive language school in Nørrebro, an area just outside of the city centre popular with immigrants. The school was off the main high street, behind a Turkish grocer’s and above an Indian restaurant, and went under the mysterious and cruelly misleading acronym KISS. To this day I have no idea what that stands for. I was far too busy coping with its boot-camp methods and the sadism of its teachers to ask.
Being treated like a retarded twelve-year-old had come as a violent shock to my twenty-nine-year-old system, as had the daily bicycle ride across the city, typically in weather conditions that would have had Amundsen shrugging defeat and asking someone to call him a cab.
The day after Lissen’s royal command performance was a Monday. The rain acupunctured into my cheeks as I cycled up H.C. Andersen’s Boulevard and past the giant statue of its eponymous author, looking like a daydreaming undertaker, in his stovepipe hat and long coat. As I crossed the vicious wind tunnel of the city lakes, the gusts billowed beneath my parka, making me look like an unhappy cross between Marilyn Monroe and the Michelin Man.
At school, I climbed the stairs to the second-floor classroom, experiencing my daily, spine-chilling schooldays déjà vu (how is it that all educational institutions, everywhere, smell exactly the same?), and took my seat around the long rectangular table between Ahmed, an Islamic fundamentalist Afghan refugee, and Ibrahim, a Pakistani accountant, also a refugee. Our merry band of students made up a virtual united nations of misfits in a country that would probably have preferred it if we had stayed at home: there was a Peruvian film student, two French women – one an air stewardess, the other a biochemist – an American lawyer, a Russian optician, an Iraqi doctor and a Serbian model, all here for one of two reasons: either they were refugees who had wanted to come to Britain but weren’t allowed in or they had shacked up with a Dane. I think it is safe to say that none of us had woken one morning and said to ourselves: ‘I don’t like living here. Denmark seems so much more attractive!’
Break times became a forum for our shared exasperation with the Danes, whose supposed liberal attitude is one of the great myths of international political theory. As with their neighbours the Norwegians and the Swedes they are, in fact, raving nationalists; their compulsive flag waving makes Americans look like unassuming global peacekeepers. Ordinary Danes will haul up their flag – a white cross on a red background, which, if you ask them, they genuinely believe to be the most beautiful in the world – at the slightest excuse: to welcome friends back from holiday; to mark a child’s birthday; even the buffet laid on to celebrate the cat’s successful hernia operation will be decked out in paper flags and napkins with the Dannebrog on them. Every single home and business has a flagpole out front – even allotments have them. Danish friends tell me there is nothing sinister in this at all, it is merely a celebratory tradition, but I had even heard that, chillingly, it is illegal to fly a foreign flag on Danish soil.
As with many smaller European states, racism is on the rise here too. Sometimes it felt as if, given the choice and with no one looking, many Danes (I am thinking here of the ones who regularly vote for the ‘send the Muslims home’ party, which, terrifyingly, is the power broker in parliament) would prefer to remove the vertical part of the white cross on the Danish flag, and just turn it into the universally recognised No Entry sign.
The conversations with my classmates – many of them the target of racial discrimination, particularly when it came to trying to find work – were the only compensation for the myriad miseries of the Danish lessons. Their life stories were often remarkable and occasionally harrowing, although I had soon learned not to engage Ahmed in conversation for the simple reason that he might kill me.
The week before, when I had asked why he had left his homeland, he had claimed that his religious beliefs had been too extreme for the Taliban, who were in power when he had fled. Too extreme for the Taliban! I wanted to ask how this could be possible, but Ahmed had swiftly added: ‘In my country if one man makes another angry, he kills him.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I said, trying to stop my bottom lip from quivering. ‘Hmm, what is that over there on the other side of the room?’
And then there was the daily torture of The Sentences.
This was the essence of the KISS system: every day, at the end of each morning’s lessons, we were given fifteen sentences in Danish, plus around two pages of vocabulary to learn. If we were unable to demonstrate that we were word perfect in The Sentences, both orally and in written form, the next day, the teacher would put a black mark against our name. Three black marks received over the course of each three-week module would mean that you had to repeat the entire module again. Gradgrind would have loved it.
This was humiliating and stressful enough, but the method of daily testing, in which the teacher would randomly fire key words from each of the sentences to different students around the table like some Erasmusian sniper, and then expect them to fire back the entire sentence instantly, compounded the terror. The content of the sentences was the final drop of vinegar to sting the wound. Though many were of the innocuous ‘Jan and Pernille take the train to Århus’ kind, there were other, more sinister phrases clearly designed to brainwash the new arrivals. ‘Danes don’t drop litter’ was one (as if this were a typifying characteristic of other nationalities); ‘Danes never call in on someone without ringing ahead to let them know’ was another helpful piece of social indoctrination. We were also asked to recite the questionable mantra: ‘Danes welcome people of all races and colours’. But I drew the line, and took my black mark on the chin, when asked to chant out loud: ‘I like rock music, especially Danish.’
I have to admit that, though their methods exhibited about as much humanity and compassion as a foie gras goose farmer, stuffing vocabulary and grammar down our gullets, the KISS system worked. However painful and humiliating their process, the KISS teachers managed to achieve something no one had ever been able to do before them: to get me to speak a foreign language. That it happened to be one of the least attractive languages on earth, every word stuffed with glottal stops like a Geordie tongue twister ready to trip the unwary into spittle-flecked, gob-flobbed linguistic knots, only heightened the sense of achievement.
When Danes speak it invariably sounds like they are telling you off. ‘I love you’ is ‘Jeg elsker dig’, pronounced something like: ‘Yiye ellskere die’. When shouted it sounds like something a Viking might yell as he plunges his horned helmet into your guts for the umpteenth time. Danish is not the language of love; it’s more the language of an angry farmer who has just caught you trespassing on his turnips. For an entire year I was simply unable to make out individual words. It just sounded like the prolonged throat clearance of a heavy smoker (which bearing in mind that many Danes – including their queen – smoke like laboratory beagles, might well explain it). At school we spent hours crossing out the letters and syllables lost to the ravenous glottal monster – usually losing half the word in the process: which helped actually. Slowly, I began to figure out the subject of conversations and, as my confidence built, I would occasionally jump, Eric Cantona-like, into a dinner-party mêlée, grasping completely the wrong end of the stick. ‘Ah, yes, I once knew a girl with ginormous breasts too!’ I would interject triumphantly to a group of people who turned out to be deep in discussion about Proust (which, trust me, sounds very similar to the Danish for ‘breast’). And so my linguistic progress was very much of the ‘two steps forward, one dinner-party invitation back’ kind.
That Monday at KISS we were to be spared The Sentences. Instead, our teacher, Steen (think Torquemada in a chunky sweater), had prepared a spot of translation work. He had photocopied some stories for us, in Danish, which we were to read, translate into our own language and answer questions about in Danish at the end of the session.
I should of course have guessed that the stories would be by Andersen, and that I would be given ‘Den Lille Havfrue’ (‘The Little Mermaid’). I began reading with much accompanying eye rolling and tutting, like a stroppy thirteen-year-old (it’s not easy reading and rolling your eyes at the same time, but I was pretty determined).
But then something quite unexpected happened.
To describe reading this story in Andersen’s original Danish as a road-to-Damascus moment is perhaps overstating things (it was probably more like if St Paul had all his life refused to try Marmite, then someone had slipped some on a pitta and he had actually quite liked it), but it certainly made me reconsider my opinion of its author.
‘The Little Mermaid’ is a remarkable piece of work, about as far removed from the Disney film version as an Arctic nature documentary is from an episode of Pingu, and not at all how I remembered the works of Andersen I had read as a child. I didn’t, for instance, recall the bit where, following some fairly poor negotiating on the mermaid’s part, the witch cuts out her tongue in exchange for growing legs, and insists that she can never return to her family and must experience excruciating pain every time she takes a step. Or that the prince gives the fish the finger and falls for another woman (I guess her lack of tongue was always going to be a bit of a turn-off), leaving the mermaid high and dry. Or that the witch informs her that if she wants to return to the sea she must kill the prince and allow his blood to drop onto her feet to turn them back to a tail. And I am sure that in Uncle Walt’s version she doesn’t end up as a ‘daughter of the air’, doomed to float around ethereally for 300 years in order that one day she might obtain an immortal soul. In fact, it all seemed uncannily similar to a Lars von Trier script.
The mermaid’s yearning is so raw and intense that it must surely have been taken directly from Andersen’s life, yet at the same time he also describes the awakening of a teenage girl’s sexuality with a vivid authenticity. The viewpoint is sympathetically feminine, yet at times strongly misogynistic, if not downright sadistic. And is it me, or could there be a hint of the homoerotic in the subtext of a forbidden, silent love? Certainly there is an erotic charge that, in the context of a supposed children’s story, quite makes one blush – ‘She remembered that his head had rested on her bosom, and how warmly she had kissed him,’ Andersen writes, and let’s not forget, the mermaid is naked most of the time.
Meanwhile, you could spend all day hypothesising about the symbolism of the story. When the mermaid’s newly formed feet bleed with her every step, is this a loss of virginity or the onset of menstruation? And I shudder to think what Andersen was getting at when he described the sea witch as ‘allowing a toad to eat from her mouth . . . and ugly water snakes to crawl all over her bosom.’ Beatrix Potter it ain’t.
My curiosity was well and truly aroused. What kind of man could have written something like this?
On the way home from school that afternoon I stopped at the bookstore on Rådhuspladsen (the town hall square) and picked up an anthology of Andersen’s stories, plus his autobiography. I read through the afternoon and into the night, peeling away the layers of each story, marvelling at their humour, their wisdom and their striking modernity.
I read ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’, a poignant hymn to the disfigured and the different of society in which a one-legged tin soldier endures a traumatic journey to return to his true love, the figurine of a ballet dancer, only to be cruelly thrown into a fire by a little boy ‘just as things were going nicely for them’. ‘The tin soldier stood there dressed in flames. He felt a terrible heat, but whether it came from the flames or from his love he didn’t know.’ At that moment the dancer is also blown into the fire and they burn together. I don’t know about you, but I am a sucker for this kind of thing (Charlotte’s death scene in Charlotte’s Web does it to me every time). Andersen gives great pathos; as I was to discover, it was one of the defining qualities of his life.
The conspiracy of ignorance in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is still a universally recognised scenario today, invoked by critics of everything from Damien Hirst’s pickled cattle to New Labour – ‘I know I’m not stupid,’ the Emperor’s official thinks when he is unable to see what the swindlers are weaving, ‘so it must be that I’m unworthy of my good office. I mustn’t let anyone find out.’ – but a world of satire and wit emerges if you return to the original text.
I was astounded to discover that ‘The Princess on the Pea’ – one of his most iconic stories (and, you might say, a precursor to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that the rich ‘are different from you and me’) – is just one page long, seven paragraphs in all. It is virtually haiku; if brevity is the soul of wit, Hans Christian Andersen is the James Brown of story tellers.
Had it been written any time after 1965, you might assume ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ was created under the influence of hallucinogens, what with its psychopathic frog-girl princess and talking storks, while ‘Clumsy Hans’, the story of a young man’s successful attempt to woo a princess with a dead crow, some soil and an old shoe, is nothing short of Pythonesque (actually, there’s lots of Python in Andersen, from the naked Finnish women in ‘The Snow Queen’ who write to each other on bits of dried cod, to the chamberlain in ‘The Nightingale’ ‘who was so grand that if anyone of lower rank dared speak to him, he would only say: ‘P!’).
There is a ghoulish anarchy to many of his stories – people are garrotted, 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 has 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’.
In stories like ‘The Shadow’ (about a man haunted by his own shadow) Andersen raises existential questions every bit as knotty as those posed by his contemporary Copenhagener, Søren Kierkegaard. I was taken aback to discover here a tone of black pessimism that thrusts, with rapier accuracy, to the heart of the human condition. Clearly this was a man wrestling with a deep spiritual uncertainty.
He also seems to have been a keen observer of the pretensions and absurdities of the class system. In ‘The Flying Trunk’ we meet a quill pen with delusions of grandeur: ‘There was nothing exceptional about it except that it had been dipped too far down in the inkwell. But because of this it now put on airs.’ While ‘The Happy Family’ features some snails who look down upon slugs because they have no houses.
Another aspect of the stories that must have been revolutionary at the time (and I must admit, I am writing with hindsight here; I know it was revolutionary) was their informal, conversational style. They often begin with a gag – ‘In China, as you know, the emperor is a Chinaman’ (‘The Nightingale’) – or the literary equivalent of a smack on the back of the head: ‘Come, pay attention! We are going to begin. When we reach the end of our story we shall know more than we do now; for we shall learn that once upon a time there was a wicked gnome of the very worst kind, the devil himself’ (‘The Snow Queen’). They continue in a chatty, direct style, free of periphrase and waffle, full of onomatopoeic exclamations, and often ending with an unceremonious abruptness: ‘Shall we read the story once again from the beginning? It will be no different’ (‘The Snail and the Rosebush’). And as with all the best children’s writers and performers, Andersen never condescends to his younger audience.
He was a true modernist. At a time when most people’s idea of children’s entertainment was to give them a stick and point them towards the nearest mud, and most children’s books were intended to pummel them with facts, literature that spoke directly to them, that had the power to grab them by the shoulders and make them laugh out loud like this, was a seismic shift.
And I defy anyone – even, say, Vladimir Putin – to read ‘The Little Matchgirl’ and not blub like a pansy.
There had been fairy-folk tales before, of course – ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Aladdin’, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and hundreds like them had been handed down orally for generations. Germany’s Brothers Grimm – Jacob and Wilhelm – had been collecting such stories for their anthologies since the turn of the nineteenth century. Charles Perrault had performed a similar curatorial function in France, where flowery, girly romantic fantasies like ‘Beauty and the Beast’ had long been popular. And a Dane, Just Matthias Thiele (later to become one of Andersen’s benefactors), had done the same in his country.
But as I read on I learned that, not only did Andersen imbue the form with a fresh literary vision and a subtle wit, he did something none of those other collectors of tales had done: he dreamed up entirely new stories.
According to the Andersen scholar Elias Bredsdorff, 144 of the 156 stories Andersen wrote were ‘entirely his own invention’, yet in many instances they have supplanted the old fables in the minds of millions, and are showing all the signs of having a shelf life to match.
His very first ‘from scratch’ story was ‘Little Ida’s Flowers’, which, together with ‘The Princess on the Pea’, ‘Little Claus and Big Claus’ and ‘The Tinderbox’ (these last three had their source – albeit heavily reworked – elsewhere) constituted his first collection of fairly stories, published in an unbound pamphlet in May 1835. ‘Little Ida’s Flowers’ showcased several of Andersen’s most abiding innovations: the personification of inanimate objects (in this case Ida’s flowers and toys, which come alive and dance at a ball); the chatty, ‘read aloud’ style; the subtle humour and a hint of darkness (the story ends with the flowers’ funeral).
In volume after volume of Eventyr (folk tales) all the way to his last, the creepy ‘Auntie Toothache’ of 1872, Andersen would develop and refine these revolutionary ideas and introduce yet more. In doing so he elevated a peasant pastime into a literary genre – a genre of which he remains the king to this day. In short, he did nothing less than give birth to children’s literature itself.
Without him there could well have been no Winnie the Pooh, no Wind in the Willows, no Alice in Wonderland, and – unthinkably – no Tales of Mrs Tiggywinkle. There would be no Shrek, no His Dark Materials and, dare I say it, even Harry Potter wouldn’t quite be the same. Several of the characters through the wardrobe in Narnia, Lemony Snicket’s anarchic disregard for the conventions of happy endings, the fact that The Gruffallo is as entertaining for its adult readers as for young audiences – all of this we can trace back to Andersen. And while we are at it, we can safely say that there would probably also be no Disney (and therefore no Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake – but just as we cannot directly blame Wagner for the rise of the Third Reich, neither can we blame Andersen for this).
The universality of his tales is exemplified by the fact that Marxists, feminists, Jungians and Freudians have all claimed him as their own. And many of the stories are now so deeply ingrained in the global consciousness that their titles alone – ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’, and ‘The Princess on the Pea’ – are used as a shorthand to this day by people from the Bronx to Beijing to describe social phenomena, human weakness or improbable circumstances.
Did you know his works have been translated into 145 languages, or that Chairman Mao was such a fan that he put Andersen’s stories on the syllabus of every school in China? Did you know his fairy stories were a great influence on, among others, Oscar Wilde (who was inspired by Andersen to contribute to the genre himself with ‘The Happy Prince’ and other stories), and that Thackeray, Priestley, Auden, Strindberg, Thomas Mann and Dickens were also fans? Did you know that Unesco has named him the world’s ‘most read’ author?
It was all news to me.
Later, I discovered the reason why the notion of Andersen as a revolutionary literary genius had completely passed me by. When Andersen’s fairy stories were first published in Danish, a rabble of opportunistic translators, like Mary Howitt and Charles Boner, scrambled to produce English editions, despite not being able to understand Danish properly. They meddled with, embellished, bowdlerised and disfigured Andersen’s delicate, precise prose so that his stories ended up with all the elegant clarity of the English-language instructions for a Made-in-Korea video recorder (which is why you probably know ‘The Princess on the Pea’ erroneously as the ‘Princess and the Pea’).
But why should the Victorians have influenced my experience of Andersen? For the simple reason that, amazingly, scandalously, the nineteenth-century translations remain the main source for English-language readers of Andersen’s work, and there have been precious few faithful translations since. Even in Politikken, the largest book store in Andersen’s adopted home city, the only English anthology I could find was a translation dating from 1899. So, many, if not most English-language readers will have experienced only a bastardised, woefully outdated version of Andersen.
While I was still reeling from all this, I found a copy of the 1950 Danny Kaye biopic, Hans Christian Andersen, for sale on the Internet. I wasn’t expecting a scrupulous biography – the fact that people burst into song every few minutes does tend to mitigate against realism – but even I could tell this was a risible fantasy. The plot is only tangentially concerned with the facts of Andersen’s life (the fact that everybody calls him ‘Hans’ is a give-away; he was only ever ‘Hans Christian’ or, to close friends, ‘Christian’, never Hans). About the only thing the film gets right, as I was to discover, was the casting of the closet homosexual Kaye in the lead role. Great songs, though.
(Later on, while looking through the archives at the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, I came across original documents and letters about the film. It seems the Danish government was so upset by its inaccuracy that they complained to the United Nations, and the producer Sam Goldwyn was forced to add a caveat at the start of the film: ‘Since he always turned everything into a fairy tale, perhaps it is not unlikely that he would have cast a benevolent and amused glance in the direction of this last, this ultimate fairy tale that we are telling now.’ There is also a very anxious, as I would later find out, a very Andersen-esque letter, from Kaye: ‘I do hope no dire consequences result from the commotion which has been raised in the papers and that at some time or other I will be able to get into Denmark without having stones hurled at me.’)
When I turned to more reliable sources of information on Andersen I discovered his true life story to be far more outlandish than Hollywood’s saccharine, sanitised version, and just as compelling as his fiction. His unprecedented, against-all-odds rise from being the illiterate son of a poverty-stricken washerwoman and a cobbler father (who died when he was eleven), to a globally acclaimed writer, friend of royalty and ‘The most famous man in Europe’ – as the writer Edmund Gosse called him – is one of the most, if not the most extraordinary life stories of any literary figure.
So what do we know about this man’s life? Well, a great deal, as it happens. He wrote four versions of his autobiography, which is in itself indicative of the pathological self-obsession that was one of his defining personality traits. The first was in 1832, aged a Kenneth Branagh-beating twenty-seven, but was only published fifty years after his death; the second was published in 1847; followed by an update in 1855; with a final whitewash in 1869, six years before his death. I say ‘whitewash’ as all of his autobiographies should generally be read with a pinch of salt. Tellingly, he changed the title from The True Story of My Life to The Fairy Tale of My Life along the way. Andersen was a compulsive self-mythologiser and he skirted many of the unpalatable truths of his childhood – his mother’s illegitimate daughter, for example, and the fact that his parents married hastily two months before he was born – preferring to focus on a more romantic story of an innocent talent rising from hardship and obscurity.
Far more revealing are the lengthy, detailed letters he wrote to friends virtually every day of his adult life (many of which survive, along with their replies); and the diary he kept, on and off, from the age of twenty to the day he died, aged seventy, in 1875 (although, even the diary seems to have been written with the assumption that it would one day be published – as one biographer put it, he was ‘a curator of his own existence’). As well as this, Andersen gathered ephemera, like the autographs and dedications of the famous people he met on his travels, in a massive scrapbook, and from 1838 to 1871 he even took the trouble to note down for posterity – on which he clearly had his beady eye from a young age – the bare bones of each day in an almanac.
So, as well as the precise dates on which specific events occurred in his life, we know whom he met and when, his thoughts, his feelings, his ambitions and his disappointments. And from the crosses he makes in his diary and almanac we even know the ins and, mostly, the outs of his ejaculatory habits (he often complained about a sore penis the next day, seemingly oblivious to the cause).
Here are some of the salient facts: Hans Christian Andersen was born at one o’clock in the morning of 2 April 1805, in the city of Odense on the island of Fyn. He was the only child of Anne Marie and Hans Andersen. Dad was a shoemaker, mum a scrubber – in both senses of the word: she was a tad promiscuous – who, unusually for the times, was around ten years older than her husband.
Arabian Nights