The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

by Hans Christian Andersen

  From: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Vintage, 1989), 81

  VINCENT VAN GOGH

  This morning I visited the place where the dustmen deposit the rubbish. My heavens, it was beautiful! Tomorrow I shall have some interesting things brought to me from this dump, including some broken street lamps to delight my eye or—with your permission—to use as models. It would be a splendid subject for a fairy tale by Andersen, all the rubbish cans, kettles, tin bowls, chamber pots, metal jugs, pieces of rusty barbed wire and stove pipes which people have thrown away. I am sure I shall dream about it tonight.

  Don’t you think Andersen’s fairy tales are very beautiful? I am sure he must draw illustrations as well.

  From: Letters to Anton G. A. Ridder van Rappard, 1882, 1883. Cited by Kjeld Heltoft, Hans Christian Andersen as an Artist, trans. David Hohen (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers’ Forlag, 2005), 11–12

  URSULA K. LEGUIN

  Part of Andersen’s cruelty is the cruelty of reason—and of psychological realism, radical honesty, the willingness to see and accept the consequences of an act or a failure to act. There is a sadistic, depressive streak in Andersen also, which is his own shadow; it’s there, it’s part of him, but not all of him, nor is he ruled by it. His strength, his subtlety, his creative genius, come precisely from his acceptance of and cooperation with the dark side of his own soul. That’s why Andersen the fabulist is one of the great realists of literature.

  Now I stand here, like the princess herself, and tell you what the story of the shadow means to me at age forty-five. But what did it mean to me when I first read it, at age ten or eleven? What does it mean to children? Do they “understand” it? Is it “good” for them—this bitter, complex study of a moral failure?

  I don’t know. I hated it when I was a kid. I hated all the Andersen stories with unhappy endings. That didn’t stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering them . . . so that after a gap of over thirty years, when I was pondering this talk, a little voice suddenly said inside my left ear, “You’d better dig out that Andersen story, you know, about the shadow.”

  From: “The Child and the Shadow,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 51

  P. L. TRAVERS

  There are no rabbits in Hans Andersen. But, for all that, unlike the Grimms, he has never been in eclipse. His tales were among my early grims and I loved, and still love, his retellings of what he was told in childhood—tough, shrewd, ironic, witty—and his own folksy, miniscule fables, “Five Peas in the Same Pod,” “The Darning Needle,” “Soup on a Sausage Pin,” “Auntie Toothache,” as well as that subtle story, “The Shadow,” wherein he showed himself, for once, to be wiser than he knew. But the great reverberant setpieces, so admired, wept over, doted upon—“Mermaid,” “Snow Queen,” “Red Shoes,” etc., filled me, in childhood, with unease and a feeling that I was being got at. Oh, I wept and, I suppose, doted—but felt no better for it. Grimms’ belonged to the sunlight, asked nothing, never apologized, curdled the blood with delight and horror, dispensed justice, fortified the spirit. Andersen, moon-man, asked for mercy, was always sorry, curdled the feelings with bane-and-honey and undermined the vitality by his endless appeal for pity. When the millstone was dropped on the wicked stepmother, I did not miss a breath. That was how it should be. But for Karen who had her feet cut off because she preferred red shoes to God, I had to break my heart; suffer for Kay and his monstrous word—“the artifice of Eternity,” as Yeats put it—when Now, as it seemed to me then, and does still, would have been a better, if more demanding word; and try, ever failing, to be a good child in order to shorten, by three hundred years, the term of the Mermaid’s waiting time.

  From: “The Primary World,” Parabola 4 (1979): 92

  MAXIM GORKY

  I took with me to school the Stories from the Bible and two tattered little volumes of Andersen’s Fairy Tales, three pounds of white bread and a pound of sausage. In a dim, tiny bookshop near St. Vladimir’s Church I found Robinson Crusoe, a thick book bound in yellow, with a picture of a bearded man in a fur cap and a wild animal’s skin on his shoulders in the front. This I didn’t like at all, but the fairy tales appealed to me at once, in spite of their tattered binding.

  In the dinner-break I shared out the bread and sausage and we began reading that marvelous story “The Nightingale,” which had us all enthralled from the first page.

  “In China all the people are Chinese, and the Emperor himself is a Chinaman.” I remember how that phrase enchanted me not only by its simple, laughing music but by something which was wonderful and good besides.

  There was no time to finish “The Nightingale” in school-time and when I got home I found Mother frying eggs over the stove.

  In a strange, faded voice she asked:

  “Did you take that rouble?”

  “Yes, I did. Look at these books.”

  She gave me a thorough hammering with the frying pan, took away the volumes of Andersen and hid them away for good, which I found a lot more painful than the beating.

  From: My Childhood, trans. Ronald Wilks (New York: Penguin, 1991), 214

  LAFGADIO HEARN

  Consider the stories of Hans Andersen. He conceived the notion that moral truths and social philosophy could be better taught through little fairy-tales and child stories than in almost any other way; and with the help of hundreds of old-fashioned tales, he made a new series of wonderful stories that have become a part of every library and are read in all countries by grownup people much more than by children. There is, in this astonishing collection of stories, a story about a mermaid which I suppose you have all read. Of course there can be no such thing as a mermaid; from one point of view the story is quite absurd. But the emotions of unselfishness and love and loyalty which the story expresses are immortal, and so beautiful that we forget about all the unreality of the framework; we see only the eternal truth behind the fable.

  From: “On Reading,” in Life and Literature (New York: Kessinger, 2005), 18

  ALISON LURIE

  Though some of his stories are brilliant and moving, most are sad, distressing, or even terrifying. As a child I was frightened and upset by many of them, especially those in which a little girl misbehaves and is horribly punished. The crime that seemed to cause the most awful result was vanity, and it was always little girls who met this fate, never boys. In “The Red Shoes,” for instance, Karen thinks of her new morocco-leather shoes even when she is in church, and as a result she is condemned to dance in them to exhaustion; she is only saved from death when she asks the local executioner to chop off her feet with his axe. Even worse in some ways was “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf.” In this tale a “proud and arrogant” child called Inger also comes to grief because of love of her new shoes. . . .

  I was also deeply disturbed by one of Andersen’s most famous tales, “The Little Mermaid,” in which the heroine gives up her voice and agrees that every step she takes will feel like walking on knives, so as to have the chance of attracting the love of a prince whom she first saw at his birthday party on board a ship. . . . I took her story as a warning against self-sacrificial and hopeless love. I did not realize that in this tale Andersen had foretold his own future. He would be rejected again and again by those he loved most, but unlike the Little Mermaid he never gave up his voice, and the best of the stories he told would survive for hundreds of years, “wherever there are children.”

  From: “The Underduckling: Hans Christian Andersen,” in Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter (New York: Penguin, 2003), 9–11

  FAY WELDON

  “Does it hurt?” he asked at last.

  “Of course it hurts,” she said. “It’s meant to hurt. Anything that’s worth achieving has its price. And, by corollary, if you are prepared to pay that price you can achieve almost anything. In this particular case I am
paying with physical pain. Hans Andersen’s little mermaid wanted legs instead of a tail, so that she could be properly loved by her Prince. She was given legs, and by inference the gap where they join at the top, and after that every step she took was like stepping on knives. Well, what did she expect? That was the penalty. And, like her, I welcome it. I don’t complain.”

  “Did he love her,” asked the judge, “in return?”

  “Temporarily,” said Polly Patch.

  From: The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (New York: Ballantine, 1983), 172–73

  HAROLD BLOOM

  Andersen was a visionary tale-teller, but his fairy-realm was malign. Of his aesthetic eminence, I entertain no doubts, but I believe that we still have not learned how to read him.

  From: Introduction to Hans Christian Andersen (New York: Chelsea House, 2004), xv

  ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR.

  I particularly remember my mother sitting in her chair reading aloud to her children. She was a splendid reader, spirited and expressive, and Tom and I insisted that she keep on reading to us long after we were able to read to ourselves. . . . My mother began with fairy tales, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen; with Greek and Roman mythology, especially as marvelously rendered by Hawthorne in The Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales; and with the wondrous Arabian Nights.

  From: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 62

  ROSELLEN BROWN

  And what of “The Little Mermaid”? . . . I know that in the mermaid’s voicelessness Andersen captured one of our—I mean humans’—primal terrors, that much I can vouch for. He gave us an implicit judgment of the limitations of mere beauty, beauty unendowed with self. He held forth an ideal of love and loyalty to the point of death and made us, while we’re admiring it, wonder if the game is worth the candle. He suggested that too much wanting can change the one who desires (whatever her object) to the point of deformity. He reminded us of how difficult, perhaps even how impossible, it is to try to leap certain barriers and successfully become something we are not.

  Which of these, at age eight or nine, did I grasp? Which of them helped to form my storytelling soul and which did I respond to because I was already partway to who I was to become? I could write a convenient fiction here that would connect all these dots, Andersen’s and mine, but I want to end where I began, invoking the modest truth and admitting how little of it I possess where my own childhood is concerned. How mysterious these stories were, that’s all I know I felt, and how wonderfully dangerous and disorienting, coming at me out of nowhere. How amazing to break the silence, like the Ancient Mariner to lay a firm hand on the listener’s arm and begin anywhere, anywhere at all.

  From: “It Is You the Fable Is About,” in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, ed. Kate Bernheimer (New York: Random House/ Anchor, 2002), 58

  KATHRYN DAVIS

  The point is ownership. The point is, I believed these were my stories. Mine. I didn’t think they’d been written for me, Andersen having “had me in mind,” or that they conveyed my view of things with unusual precision—no, when I heard these stories I was infused with that shiver of ecstasy that is an unmistakable symptom of the creative act. I felt as if I’d created the stories, as if they had their origin in my imagination, as if they were by definition my original work, having “belonged at the beginning to the person in question”—that person being me.

  From: “Why I Don’t Like Reading Fairy Tales,” in Bernheimer, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, 85–86

  PETER RUSHFORTH

  In the fairy-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, the innocent and pure in heart always seemed to triumph, even after much fear and suffering: Hansel and Gretel outwitted the witch and escaped; the seven little kids and their mother destroyed the wolf; the three sisters in “Fitcher’s Bird” overpowered even death itself to defeat the murdering magician. But he could still remember the mounting desolation with which he read some of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tales when he was little. He had read them over and over again, hoping that this time the ending would be a happy ending, but the endings never changed: the little match-girl died entirely alone, frozen to death on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by burned-out matches; the little mermaid melted into foam after bearing her suffering bravely; and the steadfast tin soldier and the ballerina perished in the flames of the stove, leaving only a little tin heart and a metal sequin behind. He had been unable to put them away and forget about them. He had been drawn, compulsively, to read them with engrossed attention, and had wept as he found himself realizing what the inevitable and unchanged end of the story would be.

  From: Kindergarten (New York: Avon Books, 1979), 112

  BARBARA SJOHOL

  Not all of Andersen’s tales appeal to me anymore, and many make me shudder. I believe Gerda is the reason I can still reread “The Snow Queen” without gagging on the saccharine Christian symbolism that spoils some of his other works. Though there’s a bit of the sentimental in the ending of the story when Gerda and Kai return by foot (Gerda presumably still without shoes) to the garden of their childhood, the effect is deeply satisfying. If our hearts are open, we can return to the Edens of our youth, even if we are, like Gerda and Kai, now fully grown.

  From: “The Ice Palace” in Rereadings, ed. Anne Fadiman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 193

  LOIS LOWRY

  “Tell me a story, Annemarie,” begged Kirsti as she snuggled beside her sister in the big bed they shared. “Tell me a fairy tale.”

  Annemarie smiled and wrapped her arms around her little sister in the dark. All Danish children grew up familiar with fairy tales. Hans Christian Andersen, the most famous of the tale tellers, had been Danish himself.

  “Do you want the one about the little mermaid?” That one had always been Annemarie’s own favorite.

  From: Number the Stars (New York: Laurel Leaf, 1998), 11

  ROBERT K. GREENLEAF AND PETER B. VAILL

  A friend of mine in Madison, Wisconsin, tells a story about Frank Lloyd Wright many years ago when his studio, Taliesen, was at nearby Spring Green. Mr. Wright had been invited by a women’s club in Madison to come and talk on the subject “What is Art?” He accepted and appeared at the appointed hour and was introduced to speak on this subject.

  In his prime, he was a large, impressive man, with good stage presence and a fine voice. He acknowledged the introduction and produced from his pocket a little book. He then proceeded to read one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, the one about the little mermaid. He read it beautifully, and it took about 15 minutes. When he finished, he closed the book, looked intently at his audience and said, “That, my friends, is art,” and sat down.

  From: The Power of Servant Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1998), 61–62

  LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ

  I read whatever I found in the house. It was an age of sets, and several were stored in the bedroom I inherited when I was ten and my sister left to get married. Dickens in brown leather with a black horizontal stripe was cozy looking, but the Harvard Classics in black leather and gold trim were forbidding—especially Plutarch’s Lives and Marcus Aurelius and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. I did manage to find one, though, volume 17, containing all the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales, which I practically licked off the page. They tasted bitter and pungent, like curries. The most bittersweet story, exotic yet familiar, was “The Little Mermaid,” and rereading it today, I can easily see why. Like me, the “silent and thoughtful” mermaid lusted after the world. No matter how ravishing and secure the undersea realm she shared with her five loving sisters, the world way above lured her from her earliest years. She craved light, the great ball of the sun that beneath the water’s surface was translated into a purple glow.

  From: Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 24–25

  HUGH WALPOLE

>   Hans Andersen was not, I would say, exactly a charming person. He was ugly, conceited, sensitive, quick-tempered, and elusive. As the hero of a novel he would annoy many readers. He would seem feckless and ungrateful, and a bit of a muff. And yet he is part of all of us. If you feel the pathetic and humorous and lonely uniqueness of human beings, you must know that only the very unperceptive and heavy-minded are irritated by him; and out of that strange personality he produced these wonderful fairy stories, wonderful because they are filled through and through with that sense of oddity and loneliness that gives human beings so much beauty.

  From: Foreword to It’s Perfectly True and Other Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, trans. Paul Leyssac (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938), vi

  PHYLLIS M. PICKARD

  Children have always gained immensely from listening to adult communications. What caused many of the children to suffer nightmares were the occasions when Andersen’s own unresolved problems came through in inartistic form. For instance, there are some lurid accounts of death beckoning, of the gallows, of murderous treatment of grandmothers. It is all understandable when facts about Andersen are known, but it is not artistry for children. He loved his blue-eyed grandmother, but it was she who took him to the asylum and the prison through which he suffered so much. His resentment comes out, for instance, in a tale in which a robber hits his grandmother on the head, uses her corpse for climbing on to reach the money, and even finds a second grandmother to slay.