We trudged through the deep snow, with snowflakes swirling like mad around us. I picked her up, held her, and pushed her along. We fell only twice, both times landing softly.
We reached my gate, where we shook off some of the snow. On the stairs we shook off more, and yet there was so much snow that it almost covered the floor of the entrance hall.
We took off our overcoats and undercoats and everything else that was wet. The landlady gave Auntie dry stockings and a dressing gown. She would need them, the landlady said, and added that it would be impossible for my aunt to return home that night, which was true enough. She invited Auntie to settle in the parlor, where she would make up the sofa that was in front of the door to my room, a door that was always kept locked.
And it happened.26
A fire was burning in my stove, and a tea urn was placed on the table. The little room began to grow quite cozy, although not as cozy as Auntie’s parlor in the wintertime,27 with its thick drapes covering the door, heavy curtains over the windows, and double layer of carpets over three layers of thick paper. You would sit there feeling as if you were in a tightly corked bottle, filled with warm air. Still, as I said, it was quite cozy in my place. Outside the wind was whistling.
Auntie began to reminisce and tell stories about her youth and about the brewer—old memories were revived.
She could remember when I got my first tooth and how excited the family was.
The first tooth! The tooth of innocence, gleaming like a little white drop of milk, my baby tooth.
After one came, more followed, a whole row of them, side by side, above and below—the finest baby teeth, although these were only the advance troops, not the real ones that would last for a lifetime.
They also appeared, and the wisdom teeth as well, the flank guards in the row, born in pain and great tribulation.
They disappeared too, every single one of them. They leave before their tour of duty is over. When the very last one goes, that is not a day for celebration but a day of mourning.
That’s when you’re old, even if you feel young.
That kind of chatter and thoughts like that are not very pleasant, yet we talked about all those things. We returned to the childhood years, talking on and on. It was midnight before Auntie retired to the parlor next door.
“Good night, my sweet child,” she called out. “I shall sleep as snugly as if I were in my own bed.”
And she slept peacefully, but there was no peace inside the house or outdoors. The wind rattled against the windows, banging the long, dangling iron latches on the house and making the neighbor’s back-yard bell ring. The lodger upstairs returned home. He was taking his little nightly stroll up and down the room. He kicked off his boots and finally got into bed to sleep, but his snoring was so loud that anyone who wasn’t deaf could hear it right through the ceiling.
I could not sleep nor could I calm down. The weather didn’t calm down either. It remained animated. The wind howled and sang in its own way. My teeth also began to act up, humming and singing in their own way. An awful toothache was on its way.
A draft came in through the window. The moon was shining onto the floor. Its beams came and went as storm clouds come and go. Light and shadow alternated restlessly, but all at once a shadow on the floor began to take shape.28 I stared at the moving form and felt an icy blast.
A tall, thin figure was seated on the floor, the kind of figure children draw with a pencil on their slates and that is supposed to look like a person. Its body was a single thin line, with two more lines making the arms, another two the legs, and the head as a polygon.
LORENZ FRØLICH
Auntie Toothache appears as an accusatory wraith who will get her revenge on the author for aspiring to be a poet.
The figure quickly grew more distinct. A very thin, fine cloth was draped around it, showing the figure of a woman.
I heard a buzzing. Was it she or was it the wind droning like a hornet through the crack in the windowpane?
No, it was she, Madame Toothache herself! Her Horrible Highness,29 Satania infernalis. God save us from her visits.
“How pleasant it is here,” she buzzed. “These are nice quarters—marshy ground, filled with bogs! Mosquitoes have been buzzing around here with poison in their stingers. And now here I am with my sting. I have to sharpen it on human teeth, and that fellow over there on the bed has such nice white shiny ones. They have stood up to sweet and sour things, heat and cold, nutshells and plum pits. But I’ll make them wiggle and waggle, feed them with a drafty gust and give them a chill right down to their roots!”
What a terrifying speech! What a terrifying visitor!
“So you are a poet!” she said. “I’ll make sure you’re well versed in the meters of pain. I’ll thrust iron and steel into your body and seize all the fibers of your nerves.”
It felt as if a red-hot awl was being driven through my cheekbone. I began to writhe and twist.
“What an excellent set of teeth,” she said. “What an organ to play on! A splendid mouth-organ concert—with kettledrums and trumpets, piccolos, and a trombone in the wisdom tooth. Grand poet, grand music!”
And then she began to play.30 She looked horrible, even though I couldn’t see much more of her than her hand, that shadowy, gray, ice-cold hand with its long fingers, thin as awls. Each of them was an instrument of torture; the thumb and index finger were pincers and a screw. The middle finger ended in a sharp awl. The ring finger was a drill, and the little finger squirted mosquito poison.
“I’ll teach you how to write in meters!” she said. “A great poet must have a great toothache. Little poets have only little toothaches.”
“Oh, let me be a little one!” I begged. “Let me be nothing at all. I’m not a poet at all. I just have fits of poetry, like these fits of pain. Go away! Go away!”
“Will you finally admit that I’m more powerful than poetry,31 philosophy, mathematics, and even music?” she asked. “Mightier than all those feelings painted on canvasses and carved in marble? I am older than every one of them. I was born near the Garden of Eden, just outside it, where the wind was blowing and toadstools were growing in the damp earth. It was I who made Eve wear clothes in the cold weather, and Adam too. Believe me, there was power in that first toothache!”
“I believe everything you’re telling me,” I cried. “Just go away! Go away!”
“Well then, if you promise to give up being a poet and never again put verse on paper, slate, or any kind of writing material, then I’ll leave you alone. But if you start to write again, I’ll be back.”
“I swear,” I said. “As long as I never have to see or feel you again!”
“See me again you shall,” she said. “But in more substantial shape, one that is dearer to you than I am. You shall see me as Auntie Millie, and I shall say to you: ‘Write, my sweet boy! You are a great poet, perhaps the greatest we have!’ And believe me, if you start writing poetry, then I will set your verses to music and play them on your mouth organ. You dear sweet child.32 Remember me when you see Auntie Millie!”
Then she vanished.
Her parting shot was a jab in the jawbone with what felt like a glowing awl. But the pain soon subsided, and then I felt as if I were floating on gentle waters. I saw white water lilies, with their large green leaves, give way and sink beneath me. They withered and dissolved, and I sank along with them and slipped into a peaceful slumber.
“Die, melt away like the snow!”33 the waters sang. “Fade away into the clouds and drift away like the clouds!”
Grand names and inscriptions glowed and shone down to me through the waters—fluttering banners of victory, proclaiming immortality but written on the wings of a mayfly.
My slumber was deep and without dreams. I did not hear the whistling wind, the slamming gate, the clanging neighbor’s bell, or the lodger’s vigorous gymnastics.
What bliss!
A sudden blast of wind blew open the locked door to Auntie’s room. Auntie le
aped to her feet, put on her shoes, pulled on her clothes, and came into my room.
I was sleeping like one of God’s angels, she said, and she didn’t have the heart to wake me up.
I woke up on my own and opened my eyes. I had completely forgotten that Auntie was in the house. But as soon as I remembered, I also remembered the toothache apparition. Dream and reality merged.
“I suppose you didn’t do any writing last night after we said good night to each other?” she asked. “I hope you did. You’re my poet, and you always will be.”
It seemed to me that she was smiling ever so slyly. I couldn’t tell whether it was the kind Auntie Millie, who loved me so dearly, or the horrible one, to whom I had made a promise the night before.
“Have you written any poetry, my sweet child?”
“No, no!” I shouted. “You are Auntie Millie, aren’t you?”
“Who else could I be?” she asked. And it was Auntie Millie.
She kissed me, climbed into a hansom cab, and rode home.
I wrote all this down. It is not in verse, and it will never be published . . . 34
The manuscript ends here.
My young friend, the grocer’s apprentice, could not find the missing pages. They had gone out into the world as wrapping paper for salted herring, butter, and green soap. They had fulfilled their mission.
The brewer is dead; Auntie is dead; and the student is dead, the one whose sparks of genius ended up in the trash.
Everything ends up in the trash.35
And that’s the end of the story, the story about Auntie Toothache.
1. Where did we get this story? The narrator raises the question of origins at the start, beginning with an authorial “we,” as in “Heartache,” but shifting quickly to “I.” His question implies an audience interrogating him about the source of the story. He claims to provide nothing more than the frame for the story that bears the title “Auntie Toothache.” He nonetheless becomes a double of that story’s author, for both are writers and both have produced stories with the title “Auntie Toothache,” even if one story is embedded in the other. The framed tale was not uncommon in nineteenth-century European novellas, but Andersen used it sparingly.
2. They are needed as wrapping paper for starch and coffee beans. Books, the narrator observes, are constantly recycled, circulated, and disseminated, even if in odd ways that do not conform to the author’s aspirations. The narrator receives mere pages or fragments of the student’s narrative, and he sends those pages out into the world, reconstituting them to form a new narrative that will also circulate in various forms, sometimes as trash, but sometimes as the inspiration for new stories.
3. I know a grocery boy. The narrator names his source, revealing a connection between nourishment for the body and the nourishing of the soul. The grocery boy, who begins life in the basement and is dedicated to commodities, stands in sharp contrast to the poet who occupies a garret and has lofty aspirations. Carl Spitzweg popularized and sentimentalized the image of the starving poet in his 1839 painting The Poor Poet, which shows an (aging) poet in a garret, books at his side, nightcap on his head, and umbrella perched above him to protect him from leaks in the roof.
4. The unusually clear and beautiful handwriting caught my eye at once. Clarity and beauty are characteristics valued by Andersen the author, and the handwriting of the student signals something positive about the quality of his writings.
5. half a pound of green soap. In Danish, something too slippery to handle is as slippery as “green soap.”
6. AUNTIE TOOTHACHE. The title of the student’s narrative is the same as the title of Andersen’s story. As Jacob Bøggild points out, we cannot trust the student’s claim that the manuscript was not meant for publication. “Why provide it with a title, then” (Bøggild, 33)? The student also constantly makes appeals to the reader or addresses the concerns of an implied reader: “Who was Auntie Millie and who was Brewer Rasmussen?”
7. There’s something of the poet in me. The touch of poetry, the student narrator insists, exists in every human being as a beam of sunshine, the aroma of a flower, or a haunting melody. Appreciation of nature’s beauty suffices to ignite the divine spark. Note that poetic consciousness is developed through sensual experiences from the real world—light, smell, and sound.
8. I feel as if I am walking through a vast library. The narrator turns the world into an opportunity for reading. The transformation of the city into a text designed for his consumption reveals the distance he keeps to the world, yet it also demonstrates the fertility of his imagination, which uses the outside world as a stimulus for fantasy and philosophy.
9. Just then a leaf, fresh and green, fell down from a linden tree. The leaf carried in through the window can be seen as both a leaf from a tree and a page from a book. The student “reads” the leaf, just as he reads everything in the world around him and uses those readings as a point of departure for fantasy and philosophy. Indeed, the student begins to philosophize about how the leaf demonstrates our limited knowledge of the whole: We are doomed to know only fragments (leaves) but are forever in search of knowledge about “the whole big tree.” The narrative before the reader also represents nothing more than single leaves, providing only partial knowledge of its author(s). “Auntie Toothache” repeatedly mourns fragmentation even as it attempts to achieve it through a life-narrative that comes to us as single leaves or fragments.
LORENZ FRØLICH
Auntie Millie declares that the author is a poet and that he has extraordinary powers of imagination.
10. even though it was very bad for our teeth. Much as the narrator’s aunt is presented as benevolent, her indulgence of the children with sweets affiliates her with the misery of the toothaches brought on by the second aunt in the story, a double of the real-life Auntie Millie.
11. Her age never seemed to change. That the aunt is well-preserved may be to her credit, but it also underscores the fact that there is something about her that is unnatural, rather like her artificial teeth.
12. She had once suffered a good deal from toothaches. That Auntie “once” suffered from toothaches suggests that her white teeth are in fact artificial, and Brewer Rasmussen knows the secret to her “beautiful white teeth.”
13. He had no teeth at all, just a few black stumps. Brewer Rasmussen’s lack of teeth is invoked just before we learn about Auntie’s “beautiful white teeth.” The “whiteness” of her teeth—which may be the result of a cosmetic intervention—is matched against “black” stumps, creating a strong contrast between beautiful gleaming surfaces and a grotesque darkness and lack. The plenitude, wholeness, and immediate presence of Auntie’s teeth—whether artificial or real—are juxtaposed to the hollow, decaying, fragmented absence in Rasmussen’s mouth. The teeth are more than they appear to be, for they come to be implicated in the deeply problematic relationship between wholeness and fragmentation in the poetics set forth by the author.
Andersen suffered all his life from bad teeth, and in a diary entry of January 19, 1873, he describes losing his last tooth: “Dr. Voss arrived around three o’clock and extracted my last tooth. He gave me an anaesthetic, but I could still feel the wrenching pain. . . . I was lighthearted at the thought that I no longer had any teeth left, but not quite as ecstatic as the other day when he extracted the first of the four loose ones. Well, now I am completely toothless.”
14. As a child he had eaten too much sugar. Ever the educator but also the tempter, Andersen cannot let the opportunity slip to warn children about the hazards of eating sweets in excess.
15. In fact, she didn’t even sleep with them at night. As Nathaniel Kramer points out, “the revelation that Auntie Millie has dentures appears harmless enough, but the fact that this presumption of health and wholeness is shown to be false has significant consequences for what Auntie Millie represents. That Auntie Millie’s teeth are in fact false points toward a corruption in the concept of wholeness and totality that she embodies. Such a full and
complete presence that has escaped fragmentation is shown to be a counterfeit and a fake. The hopes and aspirations with which she plies the student can also be shown to be equally false” (Kramer, 20–21).
16. “That child is going to become a great poet!” Andersen’s mother had consulted a fortune-teller when he was a child and learned from her that he would one day attain fame as a poet.
17. When I have toothaches and poet-pains. The connection between Auntie Millie and Auntie Toothache is made explicit here, suggesting that the physical pain associated with decay parallels the activity of writing, which also serves as a compensation for corruption and loss.
18. “Just write down all your thoughts.” Auntie’s naïve attitude toward writing suggests that she embraces an unproblematic notion of poetry, one that associates it with a spontaneous outpouring of feeling that will serve the purpose of diversion and create popular entertainments. Rather than seeing it as craft that has to be perfected and practiced (consider the poet’s different drafts of the experiences in his house later in the story), she sees writing as effortless.
19. “Jean Paul.” Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825) was a well-known German writer famous for his sprightly erudition and humorous, digressive style.
20. “it’s a very noisy house.” The rant that follows may be a conscious imitation of Jean Paul’s sprawling, associative style. The student’s interior space cannot be insulated from the outside world, which is constantly invading his domestic space (carriages outside, for example, make the pictures inside rattle). The noise and commotion take on the character of a barrage of aggressive assaults on the narrator’s desire for tranquillity. The litany of complaints culminates in the deeply ironic declaration “Otherwise, it’s a perfectly nice house, and I’m living with a quiet family.”
Andersen himself grumbled about acoustical assaults from the outdoors. In Rome, he complained constantly about the heat and noise: “It is oppressively hot. . . . There is a frightful din in the streets, an eternal ringing of cowbells, goats with smaller bells, a screaming and screeching; and then I live right across from someone who practices figured bass or tunes piano for the whole town. It’s a grabbing, roaring, screaming, rending maelstrom for the ears; blacksmiths hammer, wagons roll, boys scream and people who are talking quietly about household affairs seem to be having a fight” (Diaries, 159–60).
The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen Page 45