The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

by Hans Christian Andersen

  Kierkegaard takes Andersen to task for his failings as both artist and man. What particularly irritates the philosopher about Only a Fiddler is Andersen’s habit of expressing his “livid indignation against the world” through his characters, even when that sentiment is irrelevant to the narrated events. Andersen could not resist the temptation to turn his heroes into “clients,” whose interests he is constantly defending and whose dignity he is constantly seeking to protect. “Lack . . . of dutiful attentiveness, even in the case where attentiveness is so far from being dutiful that it would even be unreasonable, does not go unpunished.”25 Kierkegaard cites as an example the description of the hero’s appearance at a dance hall in Only a Fiddler: “With hat in hand he bowed politely in all directions. No one noticed it.” An attentive and doting narrator, Andersen hovers over his main characters, tirelessly polishing their haloes. At the same time, he makes it a habit to scold and chastise those who fail to acknowledge the virtues of the figures he favors.

  For Kierkegaard, Andersen makes the grave error of constructing a hero who passively succumbs to his fate rather than challenging it. As author, he then “sits and cries over his unfortunate heroes who must go under, and why?—because Andersen is the man he is. The same joyless battle Andersen himself fights in life now repeats itself in his poetry.”26 Kierkegaard further refines the frontal-attack by pointing out that two paths are open for Andersen’s hero: a “broken manliness,” stemming from a failed attempt to work against fate, or a “consistent womanliness,” based on a failure to put up any resistance at all. Kierkegaard had, as one of Andersen’s biographers puts it, “uncovered the female soul in Andersen’s character.”27

  In his attack on the central character and narrator of Andersen’s novel, Kierkegaard believed that he had laid bare more than Andersen’s “female soul.” He demonstrated how sharply the author’s narcissism and masochism etched itself on his literary portraits, creating a cult of passive suffering that was particularly repellent to a philosopher who endorsed defiantly robust genius. “Genius is not a rush candle that goes out in a puff of air but a conflagration that the storm only incites,” Kierkegaard insisted.28 Despite the contempt he held for individual characters, he still admired the deep personal stake Andersen had in his characters and plots.

  If Kierkegaard can be credited with some shrewd insights in his critique of Andersen’s novel, he seems somewhat off the mark when it comes to the novel’s author, whose resilience in the face of disparagement and disapproval was nothing short of astonishing. The censorious review, like all the cutting remarks made by patrons, friends, and journalists, may have wounded, but it also satisfied Andersen’s amour propre perfectly and, far from producing disaffection and defeat, only renewed his desire for self-display, now with an added dose of self-effacing humor. “I remained an object of derision,” Andersen declared with undisguised pride. “There is, in the Dane, a fondness for mockery, or, to put it more kindly, we have a sense of the absurd.”29 Andersen struck back with the weapons that had been used against him, deploying irony, humor, satire, and pastiche—what he referred to as “salt”—to enliven plots that might otherwise have been mired down in histrionics and melodrama.

  In 1838, Andersen turned a financial corner and also received a substantial boost in self-confidence. That year King Frederik VI of Denmark awarded him an annual stipend of 400 rigsdaler, enough money to allow him to write, travel, and take up permanent residence in Copenhagen’s fashionable Hotel du Nord. If there is any need of further evidence that Kierkegaard was at least half right in his assessment of Andersen’s personality disorders, it is readily available in a letter to Count Conrad Rantzau-Breitenburg, whom Andersen recruited to plead his cause with Frederik VI:

  The happiness of my entire life and all my future endeavors I place in your hands. Just tell the king what I know you have said with such affection to others about me! Do not refuse my plea! If you believe that there is anything moving inside me, then speak for me. I am begging your indulgence just this one time. You will earn distinction through me! [my emphasis] . . . My happiness in life is at stake. Deliver my application to the king, and with God’s help, you will not find reason to be ashamed!30

  When Andersen received news of the stipend, he was filled with “gratitude and joy,” in no small part because the stipend had, at one time or another, been awarded to nearly all of Denmark’s literary worthies. He was thrilled that he was no longer “forced to write in order to live” and believed that he would now be “less dependent” upon his friends and patrons, with whom he had regular dining arrangements nearly every day of the week: “Mondays at Mrs. Bügel’s . . . Tuesdays at the Collins’ . . . Wednesdays at the Ørsteds’ . . . Thursday again at Mrs. Bügel’s . . . Fridays at the Wulffs’ . . . Saturday is my day off, then I dine wherever I happen to be invited . . . Sundays at Mrs. Læssøe’s, or in the Students’ Union if I do not feel well enough to make the long walk.” “A new chapter of my life began,” he proudly reported.31

  “I’M IN FASHION”

  The liberation from financial anxieties was accompanied by an expansion of geographical and intellectual ambitions. Andersen’s journey to the “Orient” in 1841 is well documented in The Poet’s Bazaar, a travelogue that charts his travels through Germany to Rome and Naples, and finally on to Athens and Constantinople.32 For a man who was deathly afraid of fire (he carried a nine-meter-long rope ladder with him when he traveled), suffered bouts of agoraphobia (he needed a guide to cross a square), and constantly worried about robbers and murderers (“Oh how good I am at tormenting myself!”), Andersen was eager and adventurous, traveling fearlessly through storms at sea and enduring—as we learn from the diaries—everything from quarantines and threats of robbery to mosquitoes and undrinkable coffee.33 Even Edvard Collin, habitually stingy with praise, declared: “You are a damn good traveler.”34 Andersen’s travels eastward had less of an impact on his writings than on his general outlook and health:

  It was as if a new life were about to open for me, and that was exactly what happened. If this can’t be seen in my later writings, it animates my views about life and my entire inner development. I no longer felt as if I were ailing. As I observed my European home, if I can call it that, vanish behind me, it was as if a current of amnesia passed over all bitter and unhealthy memories. I felt health rush into my blood, into my mind. With courage and strength, I raised my head high once again.35

  After completing his thirteenth trip abroad, Andersen reveled in the power of travel to cleanse the soul: “Travel to me is invigorating. . . . I feel the need, not just to acquire new material—there is enough of that inside me already, and life is indeed too short to plumb the depths of that spring—but in order to put my impressions on paper I need this refreshing bath which seems to make me both younger and stronger when I return home”36

  In the 1840s, Andersen made a number of victory tours through European countries, delighting in the earnest attention paid to him and the outpourings of affection. In Denmark, he remarked, he was a stranger, “a stranger like nowhere abroad.” “I wish I had never seen that place! . . . I hate home, just as it hates and spits on me,” he complained shortly after one of his plays was booed on its premiere in Copenhagen.37 In Paris he was received by royalty as well as by the great poets and writers of the century: Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Vigny, and Honoré de Balzac. In Germany he consorted with dukes and hobnobbed with royalty. In England, he became the darling of the aristocracy and sat for a famous sculptor. When he was abroad, Andersen was sought after and celebrated, treated like a genius and a celebrity, much to his satisfaction. It is at this point that his autobiography becomes tedious reading, deteriorating into detailed lists of medals and decorations and the names and titles of those who had bestowed them.

  Yet even as one part of the fairy-tale fantasy—prosperity and fame—was fulfilled, another part continued to elude him: love and marriage. To a friend he affirmed that he did not yet have
the means to marry: “I must have 1000 a year before I dare fall in love, and 1500 before I dare marry, and before even half of this happens, the young girl will be gone, captured by someone else, and I’ll be an old, wizened bachelor. Those are sorry prospects. . . . No I will never be rich, never satisfied and never—fall in love!”38 Andersen did not marry, but he fell in love many times, although as a rule only when marriage could be completely ruled out as a possibility.

  Riborg Voigt, the sister of a fellow student, was engaged when Andersen met her in 1830, and he could bemoan the fact that she would never be his: “I see that I will never be happy,” he wrote sullenly. “All my soul and all my thoughts cling to this one creature, a clever, childlike creature such as I have never met before. . . . Next month she becomes a wife, then she will, then she must forget me. Oh, it is a deadly thought! . . . If only I were dead, dead, even if death were total annihilation.”39 To Riborg, he wrote despondent letters, declaring his love but also acknowledging that she belonged to another.

  The “childlike” continued to appeal, and when Andersen famously fell in love with Jenny Lind, he again used that term to describe the object of his affections. Andersen was thirty-five, and Jenny Lind was twenty when they met for the first time. The brilliant Swedish nightingale, who began singing for the stage at age ten and who created a sensation on tours to Europe and the United States, was “courteous” but “distant” and “cold,” although she came to love Andersen “as a brother.” “No book and no person has had such an ennobling influence on me as Jenny Lind, which is why I dwell on these memories . . . because she can never be mine.”40 Andersen saw in Jenny Lind his female double, a woman to whose talent and success he aspired: “She sings German the way I no doubt read my fairy tales; something familiar shines through, but, as they say of me, that’s exactly what makes it interesting.” And when he discovered that his fame was great in the city of Berlin, he wrote to the Collins: “I’m a lion, I’m a Berlin lion, I’ve become a male Jenny Lind. I’m in fashion.”41

  Andersen’s sexual desires and practices have become the subject of detailed speculation in the several biographies that have appeared since the bicentenary of his birth. His disastrous visits to brothels (always ending in panicked flight), his homoerotic desires, and his physiological complaints have all been subjected to careful documentation and analysis.42 What many of these accounts miss is the degree to which Andersen’s narcissism conspired with his cult of suffering to ensure that he would have an unending love affair with himself. There are good reasons why he remained a bachelor, and that was the role in which he was happiest, for it allowed him to remain the object of fussy attention from many well-off female admirers and to travel for extended periods. It seems almost prophetic that as a child, while other boys played on the banks, he sat by the lake, weaving a crown of reeds and sending small ships into the waters.

  The fortune-teller who had predicted that Odense would one day be illuminated in Andersen’s honor was proved right on December 6, 1867, when officials awarded Andersen the so-called freedom of the town. Speeches and a banquet were followed by a torchlight procession that Andersen observed from the town hall. “How happy I was,” he reports.

  . . . I was overcome in my soul, and also physically overcome. . . . My toothache was intolerable; the icy air which rushed in at the window made it blaze up into a terrible pain, and so instead of fully enjoying the happiness of these minutes which would never recur, I looked at the printed song to see how many stanzas were left before I could slip away from the torture which the cold air sent through my teeth.43

  Who can fail to be surprised that the promise of what Andersen described as “heavenly bliss” was tainted by pain and sorrow?

  The last years of Andersen’s life were marked by infirmity, depression, and a range of cruel ailments including rheumatism and jaundice. “I have spent endlessly long days recently,” he wrote. “I am not looking forward to anything, have no future any more, the days are washing over me, and I am really only waiting for the curtain to fall.”44 Even writing had lost its appeal, and Andersen found himself lacking in “new, fresh impulses.” Walking through his garden, looking at the roses, snails, and water lilies, he felt as if they had already whispered their secrets to him: “No fairy tales occur to me anymore.”45

  In his last years, Andersen was cared for by the Melchior family, and the writer spent his last days at Rolighed, a manor with the kind of natural beauty described in many of his fairy tales. Attended to by Dorothea Melchior, who brought him a fresh flower from the garden each morning, he knew that the end was near. He died on a summer morning in 1875. On his travels, he had made it a custom to place a sign with the words “I only appear to be dead” by his bedside. Andersen was familiar with stories about people who were put in coffins, then discovered to be still alive. This time, the card was unnecessary, but it would have had a certain truth if it had been placed by his death bed.

  “Will the beauty of the world die when you die?” the fly asks the oak tree in Andersen’s tale “The Old Oak Tree’s Last Dream.” The oak tree reassures the fly in ways that ring true for the beauty of Andersen’s stories: “It will last longer, infinitely longer than I can imagine!”

  1. Andersen’s first autobiography was entitled Levnedsbogen (The Book of My Life) and was written in 1832. Not meant for publication during his lifetime, it was first published in 1926. Andersen wrote a second autobiography for a German edition of his works called Das Märchen meines Lebens ohne Dichtung. It was published in London in 1847 as The True Story of My Life. The German autobiography was expanded and published in Danish in 1855 as Mit Livs Eventyr (The Fairy Tale of My Life).

  2. “H. C. Andersens brevveksling med Henriette Hanck,” Anderseniana, 1943, 238.

  3. Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Paddington, 1975), 1. I have edited the language of the translation for the sake of accuracy and readability.

  4. Ibid., 2.

  5. Per Olov Enquist, “The Hans Christian Andersen Saga,” trans. Joan Tate, Scandinavian Review 74 (1986): 64–65.

  6. Jens Andersen has harsh words for Andersen’s behavior toward his mother: “While Anne Marie Andersdatter was dragging out her life in the poorhouse in Odense, her son was performing Holberg in the Hofmansgave garden, learning waltz steps at Bramstrup, and being luxuriously conveyed from one estate to the other in a coach- and- four, accompanied by the landed gentry.” Letter of July 3, 1832, in H. C. Andersens Brevveksling med Edvard og Henriette Collin (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1933), I, 104. Letter of December 16, 1833, in H. C. Andersen og Henriette Wulff. En Brevveksling (Odense: Flensteds Forlag, 1959), I, 151. Hans Christian Andersen, Mit Livs Eventyr, in Samlede Skrifter (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1855), XXI, 163.

  7. Bo Grønbech, Hans Christian Andersen (Boston: Twayne, G. K. Hall, 1980), 20. Andersen refers to this incident in The Fairy Tale of My Life, 22.

  8. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 22.

  9. Ibid., 23.

  10. Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life, 31.

  11. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 49.

  12. Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life, 45.

  13. Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of His Life and Work, 1805–75 (New York: Scribner, 1975), 67–68.

  14. Breve til Hans Christian Andersen, ed. C.S.A. Bille and N. Bøgh (Copenhagen, 1877), I, 580, March 8, 1827.

  15. The translation is mine.

  16. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, “Introduction: The Real H. C. Andersen,” in The Stories of H. C. Andersen, trans. Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 8–9. The letter from Collin is dated December 18, 1833.

  17. Heinrich Detering, “The Phoenix Principle: Some Remarks on H. C. Andersen’s Poetological Writings,” in Hans Christian Andersen: A Poet in Time, ed. Johan de Mylius et al. (Odense: Odense Univ. Press, 1999), 50–65.

  18. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Wulff,
April 29, 1835, H.C. Andersen og Henriette Wulff. En Brevveksling (Odense: Flensteds Forlag, 1959), I, 151.

  19. Hans Christian Andersen, letter to Henriette Hanck, January 1, 1835, in “H. C. Andersens Brevveksling med Henriette Hanck,” Anderseniana (1942), 104.

  20. Ibid., 124.

  21. Grønbech, 89.

  22. Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: Knopf, 2000), 153. Jack Zipes writes that, when Andersen took pen in hand, “it was to shield himself from his fears and to vent his anger” (Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller [New York: Routledge, 2005], 1).

  23. Ibid., 179.

  24. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 257.

  25. Søren Kierkegaard, “Andersen as a Novelist: With Continual Reference to His Latest Work, Only a Fiddler,” in Early Polemical Writings, ed. Julia Watkin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), 91.

  26. Ibid., 75.

  27. Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, 253.

  28. Kierkegaard, “Andersen as Novelist,” 88.

  29. Hans Christian Andersen, Travels, trans. Anastazia Little (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999), 22.

  30. C. St. A. Bille and N. Bøgh, Breve fra Hans Christian Andersen (Copenhagen, 1878), I, 397–98.