Youth

by Tove Ditlevsen

  21

  I’ve been with many celebrities. I’ve seen them, I’ve talked to them, I’ve sat next to them, I’ve danced with them. As soon as I stepped in the door, I was moving on a completely different plane than usual. I walked in a glaring light and cast the rays of the celebrities back like a mirror. I reflected their images, and they liked what they saw. Flattered, they smiled and gave me many compliments. They even praised my dress, although it is Nina’s and it’s too big for me. But it hid my shoes, which are old and worn and need to be replaced. The celebrities constantly gathered in clusters around Viggo F.’s green shape, which appeared and disappeared like duckweed on a windy pond. It swelled back and forth before my eyes, and I repeatedly sought it out because it was my protection and my security among all the celebrities. Viggo F. introduced me to them with pride, as if he had invented me. ‘My youngest contributor,’ he said to the press photographers, smilingly twisting his mustache. I was photographed with him and some of the celebrities, and the picture was in Aftenbladet the next day. It wasn’t very good, but Viggo F. said that it was important to be friendly toward the press. And I was friendly. I smiled the whole evening to all of the celebrities who wanted to meet me, and in the end my cheeks hurt. My feet also hurt from dancing, and when I finally left, the whole thing was as unreal as a dream. I couldn’t remember who had become the ‘Top Wheat’ and the ‘Top Rusk’. But a young man I danced with said that everyone was chosen eventually. I, too, would someday be the ‘Top Wheat’, it was just a matter of writing a lot for the journal, regardless of whether it was good. The young man also asked me if I wanted to go to the movies some evening, but I turned him down coldly. I had quite different plans for my future. I’ve gotten a job as a temporary through the union and now I’m earning ten kroner a day. I’ve never had so much money in my hands before. I’ve paid the dentist bill and I’ve bought a light gray suit with a long jacket because the brown one had gone out of style. I don’t spend much time with Nina anymore, because now I’m totally uninterested in meeting a young man who might want to marry me. After Viggo F. looked at my poems and selected some of them, I sent them to Gyldendal Publishing Company and now I’m going around waiting for an answer. ‘If they don’t want them,’ says Viggo F., ‘you just send them to another one. There are plenty of publishers.’ But I’m certain that they’ll want them, since Viggo F. says they’re good. He knows the director, who is a woman. Her name is Ingeborg Andersen and she dresses like a man. ‘But she’s not the one who will decide,’ says Viggo F., ‘it’s the consultants.’ They are Paul la Cour and Aase Hansen, and I don’t know either of them. I don’t know any of the celebrities because I almost never read newspapers and have only read authors long since dead. I’ve never realized before that I was so dumb and ignorant. Viggo F. says that he’ll take care of getting me a little education, and he lends me The French Revolution by Carlyle. I find it very exciting, but I would rather start with the present day. One evening when I’m visiting Viggo F., the doorbell rings and I hear a low female voice out in the hallway. Viggo F. comes in with a sparkling, plump, dark little woman who shakes my hand as if she means to tear it off, and says, ‘Hulda Lütken. Huh … so that’s what you look like. You’re becoming so celebrated it’s almost unbearable.’ Then she sits down and speaks the whole time to Viggo F., who finally asks me to leave, because there’s something he wants to talk to Hulda about. Later he explains to me – what he has already hinted at – that Hulda Lütken can’t stand other female poets. While I’m waiting to hear from Gyldendal, I sometimes go home to visit my parents. My father says that of course it would be fun if I had a poetry collection published, but that you can’t make a living as a poet. ‘She won’t have to, either,’ says my mother, eager to fight. ‘That Viggo F. Møller – he can support her.’ I tell them about the shower and, in her thoughts, my mother also stands under Viggo F.’s shower. I tell them about the wine in the green glasses and, in her thoughts, my mother drinks from them too. They have cut out the picture from Aftenbladet and put it in the frame of the sailor’s wife. ‘It’s good,’ says my mother. ‘You can really see that you’ve had your teeth fixed.’ She says with pride, ‘The doctor says that I have high blood pressure. I also have hardening of the arteries and a bad liver.’ She’s gotten a new doctor because the old one was no good. Whatever you said was wrong with you, he said that he suffered from the same thing. The new doctor agrees with all of my mother’s suspicions and she is devoted to him. Since Aunt Rosalia died and both Edvin and I have moved out, she’s very absorbed with her health, even though she never gave it a thought before. She’s going through the change of life, the doctor said, and the people around her must be considerate of her. That’s what she told my father, who never dares lie down on the sofa anymore, which she always has nagged him about. He sits up and reads and sometimes he falls asleep with the book in his hand. I never stay home for very long because I get tired of listening to my mother’s alarming symptoms from her inner organs. But I feel sorry for her because she never had very much in this world, and the little she had, she lost. One day when I come home from work, there is a big, yellow envelope lying on the table in my room. My knees grow weak with disappointment because I know what it contains. Then I open it. They have sent my book back with a few apologetic sentences, to the effect that they only publish five poetry collections a year, and they’ve already chosen them. I take the letter and go over to Viggo F. with it. ‘Oh well,’ he says, ‘it was to be expected. We’ll try Reitzel’s Publishing Company. Don’t let yourself be beaten by something like this. Trust in yourself, otherwise you’ll never get anyone else to.’ We send the poems to Reitzel’s and a month later they’re sent back. I think it’s starting to get interesting because I know that the poems are good. Viggo F. says that almost every famous writer has been through the mill – yes, there’s almost something wrong if it goes too smoothly. Finally the poems have almost made the entire rounds, and it’s hard to keep up my courage. Then Viggo F. says that it’s a question of money. The publishers make almost nothing on poems; that’s why they’re reluctant to publish them. But Wild Wheat has a fund of five hundred kroner meant for cases like mine. He’ll give the money to a publisher to publish the poems. He’ll talk to his friend, Rasmus Naver, about the matter. Mr Naver agrees to publish the poems at his company, and I am happy. He comes over to Viggo F.’s to talk to him about it. He’s a kind, gray-haired gentleman with a Fyn accent, and I smile at him sweetly the whole time so that nothing about me will make him give up the idea. He says that Arne Ungermann would probably draw the cover without a fee, and he likes the title: Pigesind, or ‘Girl-Soul’. I like it too. Finally it’s worked out and I don’t know how to show Viggo F. my gratitude. I kiss him and ruffle his curly hair, but he is so absent-minded lately. It’s as if he does want to do something for me, but he has something more important on his mind at the moment. One evening he tells me about the concentration camps in Germany and says that all of Europe will soon be one concentration camp. He also shows me a journal in which he has written an article against Nazism and he says that it will be dangerous for him if the Germans ever come to Denmark. I think about my poetry collection that will come out in October and have a strange feeling that it will never appear if the world war breaks out. ‘If they go into Poland,’ says Viggo F., ‘the English won’t stand for it.’ I say that they have put up with so much. I tell him about my time at Mrs Suhr’s. I tell him that every time I heard Hitler speaking through the wall on Saturday, he invaded some innocent country on Sunday. Viggo F. says that he can’t understand why I didn’t move out before, and I think that he doesn’t know what it is to be poor. But I don’t say anything. Arne Ungermann comes over one evening and shows me the cover drawing. It depicts a naked young girl with bowed head, and it’s very beautiful. The figure is chaste and devoid of all sensuality. He and Viggo F. talk about the world situation and are very serious. Now I’m almost always at Viggo F. Møller’s, and my mother thinks that I might just as
well move in with him. ‘When,’ she says impatiently, ‘do you intend to marry him?’

  22

  Edvin has left his wife. Now he’s living at home in my old room behind the cotton curtain, and my mother is happy, even though he’s going to move as soon as he can find a room. My mother says that she can understand why he left Grete, because she only had clothes and nonsense in her head and no man can put up with that. But my brother won’t allow anyone to put Grete down. He says that the mistake was his. He didn’t love her, and that wasn’t her fault. That’s also why he has let her keep the apartment. She gets to keep the furniture too, and Edvin will continue to make the payments. I like coming home now that my brother is there. We talk about my poetry collection, and Edvin can’t understand why you don’t get paid for something like that. ‘It’s a piece of work,’ he says, ‘and it’s despicable that it’s not paid for.’ We also talk about Edvin’s cough and about all of my mother’s new illnesses. We talk about my work at a lawyer’s office in Shellhuset, where I get to observe many disagreements between people. And we talk a lot about Viggo F. Møller and the world that he has opened for me. I have to tell my family everything about his apartment – how the furniture is arranged, how many rooms there are, and what books are on the bookshelves. I tell my father that Viggo F. writes books himself, and he says that he thinks he’s read one of them once, but that it was nothing special. My father also says, ‘Isn’t he too old for you?’ My mother protests and says it’s not age that matters, and it never has bothered her that my father is ten years older than she is. She says the most important thing is that he can support me, so I can quit working. They all talk as if he has already proposed to me, and when I say that I don’t know if he will have me, they brush the question aside as a minor detail. ‘Of course he will have you,’ says my mother. ‘Why else would he do so much for you?’ I think about that and come to the same conclusion. The different thing about me is that I write poetry, but at the same time there’s a lot that is ordinary about me. Like all other young girls, I want to get married and have children and a home of my own. There’s something painful and fragile about being a young girl who makes her own living. You can’t see any light ahead on that road. And I want so badly to own my own time instead of always having to sell it. My mother asks me what Viggo F. makes at the fire insurance company, and she thinks it’s strange that I have no idea. ‘He’s just a white-collar worker,’ says my father, full of contrariness, invoking an indignant stream of words from both my mother and Edvin. ‘If I were a white-collar worker,’ says Edvin angrily, ‘I would never have gotten this damned cough.’ ‘At any rate there’s no risk,’ my mother seconds him, ‘of him being unemployed at any minute and loafing around with a book while decent people go to work. Feel my neck,’ she says to me suddenly. ‘It’s as if there’s a knot right here. I’ll have to show it to the doctor. We’ll hire a cook for the wedding – he’s of course used to the best. Soup, roast, and dessert – I remember well how it was at the places where I worked. Couldn’t you invite him home some day?’ I don’t know why I don’t do that. My family is mine. I know them and am used to them. I don’t like having them displayed to someone from a higher social class. Viggo F. has even asked me if he could meet my parents. He says he would like to meet the people who have produced such an odd creature as me. But I think that can wait until we get married. My father and Edvin also talk about the imminent world war. Then my mother gets bored and I lose my good humor. Suddenly it’s a fact. England has declared war on Germany, and I stand with thousands of other silent people and follow the reader-board headlines flashing on Politiken’s building. I stand next to my brother and my father and I don’t know where Viggo F. is at this fateful hour. When we go home, I have a painful, sinking feeling in my stomach, as if I were very hungry. Will my poetry collection come out now? Will daily life continue at all? Will Viggo F. marry me when the whole world is burning? Will Hitler’s evil shadow fall over Denmark? I don’t go home with them but take a streetcar out to my friend’s. There are a lot of celebrities at his house, and he doesn’t seem to notice me. They’re drinking wine from the green glasses and talking very seriously about the situation. Ungermann asks me what I think of his drawing, and I thank him for it. So the book will probably come out after all. I go home without really having talked to Viggo F., and at night I dream uneasily about the world war and Pigesind, as if there really were a fateful connection between them. But already the next day it’s clear that daily life will go on as if nothing had happened. At the office the divorce cases, property line disputes, and other heated disagreements between people pile up. Excited people stand at the counter asking for the attorney, who is seldom there, and I have to listen to them present their special, terribly important case, and no one seems to remember that a world war broke out yesterday. My landlady tells me that pork has gone up fifty øre per kilo, and Nina comes over to confide in me that she’s met a wonderful young man, and she’s thinking of dropping The Shrub again. Nothing at all has changed, and when I go over to Viggo F.’s, he is again in a good mood, radiating calm and coziness in great, warm waves. ‘In three weeks,’ he says, ‘your book will come out. Soon you’ll have to read the proofs, but you shouldn’t let it get you down. Reading the proofs, you never think it’s good enough. It’s like that for everyone.’ Viggo F. isn’t the least bit interested in ordinary people. He only likes artists and only spends time with artists. Everything about me that is quite ordinary, I try to hide from him. I hide from him that I like the new dress that I’ve bought. I hide the fact that I use lipstick and rouge and that I like to look at myself in the mirror and turn my neck around almost out of joint in order to see what I look like in profile. I hide everything that could make him have misgivings about marrying me. He’s right about the proofs. When they arrive, I don’t care for my poems at all anymore, and I find many words and expressions that could be better. But I don’t correct very much because Viggo F. says that then the printing will be too expensive. In the days before the book comes out, I stay home in my room all the time that I’m not in the office. I want to be there when my book is delivered. One evening when I come home, there’s a big package lying on my table, and I tear it open with shaking hands. My book! I take it in my hands and feel a solemn happiness, that isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt before. Tove Ditlevsen. Pigesind. It can’t be taken back anymore. It is irretrievable. The book will always exist, regardless of how my fate takes shape. I open one of the books and read some lines. They are strangely distant and foreign, now that I see them in print. I open another book because I can’t really believe that it says the same thing in all of them. But it does. Maybe my book will be in the libraries. Maybe a child, who in all secrecy is fond of poetry, will someday find it there, read the poems, and feel something from them, something that the people around her don’t understand. And that odd child doesn’t know me at all. She won’t think that I’m a living young girl who works, eats, and sleeps like other people. Because I myself never thought about that when I read books as a child. I seldom remembered the names of those who wrote them. My book will be in the libraries and maybe it will be in the windows of bookstores. Five hundred copies of it have been printed, and I’ve been given ten. Four hundred and ninety people will buy it and read it. Maybe their families will read it too, and maybe they’ll lend it out like Mr Krogh lent out his books. I will wait to show the book to Viggo F. until tomorrow. Tonight I want to be alone with it, because there’s no one who really understands what a miracle it is for me.