The Fairy Tellers, page 26
Waking up on a beach, she looks into the eyes of the same handsome prince she rescued from the shipwreck. He leads her into his castle and has her dressed in silk and muslin. Although she can’t speak or sing, she wows everyone with her dancing, even though every step hurts like a stab of a knife and she has to soothe her bleeding feet by dipping them in seawater.
Established as a favourite of the prince, she accompanies him on his expeditions, including a journey to meet his bride-to-be. It tears her heart to see how much he loves his fiancée, but it terrifies her too: for her failure to win the prince’s love will condemn her to dissolve into foam the morning after his wedding. Only one other way can her life be saved: appearing on the surface of the water, her sisters pass her a magic knife from the sea witch. If she plunges it into the prince’s heart, his blood will turn her legs back into a tail and she’ll be able to rejoin them under the sea. But the mermaid loves the prince too much to do this. She flings the knife into the sea and throws herself in.
Light voices soar around her, and at the very moment that she’s turning to foam, she finds herself ascending, joining the ethereal spirits. Her pure heart, they explain, has elevated her among them, and if she performs good deeds for three hundred years, she will eventually be granted her own immortal soul.
Chapter 20
‘First You Have to Suffer’
Dank bilge-water seedy with paper cups, bread crusts, fag butts and what might be the tendril of a jellyfish but turns out to be a condom: this is the wrapping around Denmark’s most romantic landmark. Peering across Copenhagen’s harbour, her fluked tail draped across a granite rock, is the forlorn figure of the Little Mermaid. A bronze nude with a hand across her scaled lap, she looks like she’s waiting for somebody to get her out of there.
Visitors pose on the shoreline or kick off their shoes in quest of the perfect selfie. Occasionally, they turn up with weapons. Over the years, the Mermaid has been doused in paint, blasted with holes, had her arms chopped off, been twice decapitated (the first head was never recovered, the second was returned to a nearby TV station), had a dildo attached to her hand, been draped in a burka and slathered with graffiti by movements ranging from Libertarian Marxists to the self-styled Radical Feminist Fraction and mischievous football fans from Sweden.
Personally, I’ve got nothing but sympathy for the poor bronze Mermaid (read enough of Hans’s stories and you can’t help siding with all those statues, toys and other inorganic characters nursing their private heart sores). But from a literary point of view, are these crude attacks really inappropriate? This is the heroine, after all, who submits herself to mutilation for the sake of unrequited love, offering her tongue to the sea witch and suffering the stabbing pain of walking on two legs. Her voicelessness, her careless treatment by the prince as a pet who sleeps by his door, her passive resignation to her fate; all are part of the peculiar appeal of ‘The Little Mermaid’. In the fairy tale canon, this is a contender for the most misogynist one of the lot – which is why revisionists are so keen on it (not just the Disney storyboarders but, more interestingly, novelists who, in recent years, have transformed the mermaid into a feminist leader or a victim of capitalist exploitation whose body parts are sold to pirates).
But there’s another way to read this tale. ‘Most of what I have written is a reflection of myself,’ insisted Hans. The Little Mermaid is a migrant, turning her back on the comforts of home, grasping for a different life.
‘I arrived with my small parcel in Copenhagen, a poor stranger of a boy.’ So recorded Hans of his arrival in September 1819. His first port of call was the Royal Theatre. He presented himself to a famous ballerina, Margrethe Schall, showed her a letter of introduction and performed a dance from Cinderella. But ‘my strange gestures and curious agility caused her to think me out of my mind, and she got rid of me as quickly as possible’. So he found himself renting an attic room in a house that doubled as a brothel (if you ascend the escalator of the Magasin du Nord, past the chocolate pigs and Swedish underwear, you can visit his old digs, with a wood-burning stove and a tiny bed tucked under a slanting roof – just imagining the long-limbed teen with his oversized feet trying to curl himself to sleep here made me wince), rubbing his tears on a painting of his landlady’s late husband when he was short of rent, attempting and swiftly abandoning a carpentry apprenticeship (he couldn’t bear the teasing of his fellow workers), writing plays that nobody would perform and stories that nobody would print. With his out-of-towner accent and lack of connections, he was nearly as mute as the mermaid: another unusual dancer trying to find his way in a society that saw him as an alien.
Amongst the many strikes against Hans was his appearance. One of the people who knew him best, Edvard Collin, described him around this time as ‘a lanky boy with an oblong, old face, pale eyes and pale hair, and a pair of yellow nankeens reaching only to the middle of his shins’. His awkward physique and physiognomy would be the subject of many cutting remarks over the years. Clara Schumann (wife of the composer) called him ‘the ugliest thing that can exist’ and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s son suggested that ‘He is rather like his own ugly duck’. The English poet Edmund Gosse recalled being ‘struck, at the first moment, by the grotesque ugliness of his face and hands’. But, like many others, Gosse discovered that closer acquaintance softened this initial hostile impression: ‘His eyes, although they were small, had great sweetness and vivacity of expression, while gentleness and ingenuousness breathed from everything he said.’ This was a common pattern: aversion giving way eventually to appreciation.
So it was, among the wealthy families whose patronage Hans courted. ‘One has to bow, one has to please!’ he wrote in a candid diary entry: ‘because one is born poor, he is placed under an obligation and subjection to these richly born people’. His efforts paid off. Not long after his arrival in Copenhagen, he talked his way into the drawing room of the director of the Royal Choir School. He won enough hearts for a subscription to be set up, enabling him to rent a room, and he was accepted into the Royal Ballet School. He did the rounds of the great and good, singing and reciting at various dinner parties, where he was received with a mixture of condescension and charity. His appearance and poor education worked against him – the only role the Royal Danish Ballet could find for him was a troll, and when a play he wrote was rejected by the Royal Theatre, its board of directors recommended sending him to a grammar school in Slagelse, on the other end of the island from Copenhagen.
He was miserable there. The headmaster was one of those merciless pedagogues you find in Dickens novels, forbidding the young storyteller from imaginative writing and ordering him to satisfy himself with the humblest of prospects. But, like bees making honey or spiders spinning webs, Hans couldn’t help pouring out his creativity. He jotted down tales, including one about a tallow candle, which remained unpublished and was only discovered, by accident, in 2012. It tells of a candle, the spawn of a sheep and a melting pot, disheartened about its lack of purpose in life until it meets a tinderbox that sets it alight. Now, the teenage fairy teller tells us, it ‘had found its place in life – and proved that it was a real candle which shone for a long time to the delight of itself and its fellow creatures’. Although the tale is very short, it expresses the challenge that Hans was undergoing: only by giving delight to others would he be able to enjoy a measure of happiness for himself.
The philanthropist who had arranged his place in Slagelse was a jurist called Jonas Collin, whose family became the most important connection in Hans’s life. ‘I was in some way really afraid of the father [Jonas],’ he recorded, ‘due to the fact that I regarded him as my life’s destiny, indeed, my entire existence depended upon him.’ Jonas’s son, Edvard, became a lifelong friend, who would give Hans feedback on his work, negotiate his publishing contracts, and to whom Hans would leave his estate; and Edvard’s sister Louise was the object of Hans’s affection for a time (her engagement to another man in 1833 left him distraught). It was through friends like the Collins that he was able to step across the threshold into Copenhagen society and seek an audience for his early works.
Among these was a poem, ‘The Dying Child’, printed in the Copenhagen Post when he was just twenty-two. With its sentimentality and religious passion, it hit the zeitgeist of the 1820s and won him many admirers. But he was barely getting started. During the course of his twenties, he brought out a couple of operas, a poetic drama, several vaudevilles, three collections of poetry, some lyrical dialogues, a fictional picaresque (in which the narrator meets, among others, St Peter and a talking cat) and a travelogue about Germany.
This restless output was getting him known, but it was in 1835 that he made his mark. A first full-length novel appeared, The Improvisatore (which, he exulted, ‘gained me respect among the noblest and best of people’), and he produced a booklet entitled Eventyr, fortalte for Børn – Fairy Tales Told for Children.FN1
Its success was not a foregone conclusion. The first review, in the journal Dannora, suggested the tales ‘will certainly not have any edifying effect’, taking particular offence at ‘The Princess on the Pea’, and the reviewer expressed the hope ‘that the talented author . . . will not waste any more of his time in writing fairy tales for children’. Another review, in the Danish Literary Gazette, insisted ‘it is no empty convention that one must not put one’s words together in the same disorderly fashion as one may do perfectly acceptably in oral speech’. Even Hans’s own acquaintances were ambivalent. ‘Several of my friends whose judgments I valued,’ he recalled, ‘advised me definitely not to write any more fairy tales.’
But, for all the negativity, Hans was gratified by the reactions of the very people best able to judge his tales. ‘Wherever I go,’ he wrote in June 1836, ‘and there are children they have read my fairy tales, and bring me the loveliest roses and give me a kiss.’ The popularity of the tales was driven by the very same issues that had aggravated the critics: children were enchanted because Hans addressed them in a familiar, conspiratorial tone, the voice of an oral teller sitting in the room beside you; and because the earthy, mischievous storylines gave more attention to entertainment than edification. More tangibly than any other children’s author, Hans connected with his readers’ experiences. His tales swung between attractive fantasy settings and recognisable locations like nurseries and flower gardens, and he furnished them with objects – such as tin soldiers, candles and spinning tops – that surrounded the children as they listened to the tales. ‘All right, we will start the story’, begins the invitational opening to ‘The Snow Queen’; ‘The Tinderbox’ springs open with the dramatic sound of a marching soldier: ‘Left . . . right! Left . . . right!’ To Hans’s young, early readers, it felt as if he was on their level. As one of them put it, ‘I do like your fairy tales so much that I would like to go and see you . . . when Papa comes home from Africa I will ask him to take me . . .’ (The child was called Anna Mary Livingstone, and her father was the famous explorer.)
With the appearance of his third volume of fairy tales in 1837 (including the instant classic, ‘The Little Mermaid’), Hans’s reputation was sealed. The following year, he was awarded an annual grant from the king, releasing him from the financial anxieties that had burdened him since arriving in Copenhagen. He marvelled at the success he was enjoying, confiding to a friend: ‘The first ones I wrote were, as you know, mostly old ones I had heard as a child . . . The ones that were my own creations, such as “The Little Mermaid” . . . were the most popular, however, and that has given me inspiration.’
Lonely Hans
‘I sit with my gaily coloured slippers in my dressing gown, with my legs put up on the sofa,’ wrote Hans in 1838, describing his daily life in a letter; ‘the stove purring, the tea urn singing on the table, and I enjoy a smoke. Then I think of the poor boy in Odense wearing his wooden shoes, and then my heart melts, and I bless the Lord.’
The red-painted building where he rented his rooms, overlooking the canal in Nyhavn, a short walk from the tiny attic, faces several eateries named for Hans’s tales – a golden-breasted naiad adorning the canopy of ‘The Mermaid’ a few doors down from ‘The Tinderbox’. And Hans is still there – at least, an animatronic Hans, in top hat and tails, poring over his book in a souvenir shop in the basement, surrounded by plastic mermaids, toy soldiers and editions of his tales in more than a dozen languages.
But if success fastened around him, and held on tight for the next four decades, it didn’t resolve the problem that dogged Hans until his final days: loneliness.
In his early years away from Odense, Hans used to wander around the park of Frederiksberg Palace and other similar places, addressing songs and speeches to the flowers and the birds. Once, he recalled, a stable boy ‘asked me if I was mad, whereupon I sneaked away, silent and embarrassed’. Such incidents reflected his imaginative restlessness, his eccentricity, and also his yearning for companionship. To answer that need, he was drawn to many young women, amongst whom one of the first was the kindly Louise Collin. In gratitude for the comfort she gave when others were teasing him, Hans presented her with paper-cuttings – the surreal patterns he cut out with scissors, drawing on his remarkable eye for visual detail. An earlier love interest was Riborg Voigt, daughter of a well-off merchant, who became the subject of a love poem; a letter she wrote to him would be found in a pouch around his neck when he died. There were several others, including the opera star Jenny Lind, who dominated his passions in the 1840s. But somebody as idiosyncratic-looking as Hans was never going to have it easy, and to make things even harder, he was wrestling with his own personal hang-ups.
His discomfort with sex is on display in a diary entry from 1834. Visiting his artist friend Küchler in Rome, the twenty-nine-year-old Hans recalled being abashed by a teenage model who’d come with her mother:
Küchler said he wanted to see what her breasts looked like; the girl seemed a little bashful because I was there, but the mother said ‘fiddle-faddle’ and loosened her dress and pulled it and her shift all the way down to her waist . . . As the mother exposed her, I could feel my whole body tremble. Küchler saw that I went pale and asked me if there was anything wrong with me.
As awkward in the world of sex as Ivan Khudiakov, Hans shuddered at the deluge of sensuality around him. ‘I had no peace from the pimps,’ he wrote while in Naples in 1834: ‘a boy ten or twelve years old pursued me down the length of the street, speaking of this donna multa bella, excellenza! I got really randy, but still resisted the temptation anyway.’
Alongside these sexual frustrations was a deeper ambiguity over sexuality and the constraints of gender, which he expressed through cross-dressing scenes in an early novel and, more directly, in letters to Edvard Collin, the son of his benefactor and a close personal confidant. When he first met Edvard, as a gangly teenager, Hans feared ‘that he could not stand me, that he was arrogant, and even my enemy’. Over the years, however, warmer feelings developed. Writing to Edvard in 1833, he declared: ‘my very softness, my semi-womanliness allowed me to cling to you when I managed to see so many other glorious qualities in you . . . If only you could understand my love’. In another letter, in 1835, he told Edvard: ‘I long for you, as if you were a lovely girl from Calabria, with her dark eyes and stirring glance.’
Edvard, a stiffly conventional figure who refused to address him by the informal pronoun and sent him ruthless assessments of his work, was an unfortunate object for Hans’s passion. In 1834, his damning verdict on ‘Agneta’, an early mermaid tale, ‘shook me profoundly to the core of my being’. The fact that Edvard accompanied his feedback with news of the sudden death of Hans’s mother’s didn’t help, and the following day, the fairy teller wrote: ‘How close I was to ending this cursed life.’ In a book published after Hans’s death, Edvard wrote about ‘how diseased a mind he had’, insisting that Hans ‘was aware of his illness, but had no idea what to do about it, and he was often truly unhappy about it’.
The scholars I met in Denmark all robustly insisted that Hans was neither gay nor bisexual, and maybe that’s true. However, later in life he developed a touching friendship with a young ballet dancer, Harald Scharff, which he marked in his diary as his ‘erotic period’. In one entry, from March 1862, Hans recorded: ‘a visit from Scharff . . . exchanged with him all the little secrets of the heart. I long for him daily.’ In another entry he declared, ‘joy, some kind of sexual fulfilment and an end to loneliness’. The relationship horrified the Collin family, and it dissolved when Scharff became engaged to a female dancer. But it was a small island of companionship in the lonely sea of Hans’s life.
Riding to Fairyland
To the Tivoli Park: Copenhagen’s Pleasure Island since 1843, it combines the latest in roller-coaster technology with a celebration of national heritage. Visitors sip glögg at wooden stalls and photograph themselves in front of the old steam train; a Ferris wheel squeals over a traditional pantomime theatre where the stagecraft is derived from nineteenth-century practice, and among the costumes under the trapdoor are shiny tin soldiers, feathery ballerinas and furry-eared mice.
With Chinese-style pagodas and a camel-shaped roller coaster, this is oriental kitsch, the world of The Thousand and One Nights ready for consumption. It’s no coincidence that Hans published his oriental fairy tale, ‘The Nightingale’, about an artificial bird singing for a Chinese emperor, in 1843, the year the Tivoli was founded. And it’s hard to imagine him being disappointed by a ride on The Flying Trunk. After all, it’s themed around his own tales.
Hold the steel bar and sit tight! Along the track you sweep, tilting past the witch and soldier from ‘The Tinderbox’, spinning behind a cloth-brained Emperor with No Clothes, whirling past Thumbelina as she pops out of a tulip. Flashing in a magic mirror, the Devil glowers from a blood-red backdrop while Gerda rides her reindeer towards the glittering podium where the Snow Queen holds frosty Kai in her grasp. Here is Hans’s uncanny valley, flickering vignettes fashioned from his tales, where visitors are saluted by an animatronic Hans in a top hat, declaring, ‘life is the best fairy tale of all’.
