Alison Lurie - Boys and Girls Forever - Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

A recurrent theme in Andersen’s tales is social snobbery and social ambition. Even inanimate objects feel it: the Darning-needle tries to pass herself off as a Sewing-needle, and the Buckwheat considers himself superior to all the other plants in the field. Andersen too was obsessed with the idea of rising in society. All his life he would seek out rich and titled people, the richer and more titled the better, and he spent some of his happiest moments as the guest of royalty. He spent months traveling among small German kingdoms, staying with one royal family after another, and entertaining them and their children by telling stories. His friends back in Copenhagen did not always approve of this. When he wrote to Jonas Collin, boasting “that while he was ignored at home, Berlin high society gathered round him,” Jonas was unimpressed. According to Andersen’s current biographer, he wrote back saying “what an empty life, he didn’t care to crawl about on the floor with the children of dukes, wasn’t Andersen going to write anything?” 13

One thing that makes Andersen’s weaknesses and faults forgivable is that from his earliest years he was aware of them. “My nasty vanity sneaks in,” he wrote to a friend from the awful boarding school to which he was sent at nineteen by well-meaning patrons who wanted him to receive a proper conventional education. “[T]here is a kind of unpleasant dreaminess in me, something restless and impulsive in my soul. . . .” 14

Andersen was also able to take a humorous attitude toward his own character. As he became more successful he developed a passion for travel, most often to warmer countries where he was already famous; and he indulged this passion constantly in spite of his continuing hypochondria and anxiety. When he was on the road, he was often seasick and consumed by fears of dogs and brigands; he had the obsessive idea that one of his fellow travelers might be crazy and planning to murder him. He recognized the irrationality of all this, though he could not overcome it. “Oh, how good I am at finding things to worry about,” he once wrote in his diary. 15

Jackie Wullschlager’s extensive examination of this strange, deeply self-conscious writer and his work is a remarkable achievement: thoughtful, comprehensively researched, and wonderfully readable. Ms. Wullschlager spent many months in Denmark; she was able to read Andersen’s tales and letters and journals in the original, and correct earlier translations. Her comments on the meaning of the stories, and their relation to his life, are often fascinating—and so is the impression her book gives of her own feelings about Andersen.

Biographers, who necessarily spend many years in the imaginary company of their subjects, usually end up even more devoted to them than they were at first. Yet Wullschlager’s book sometimes gives the impression that as time went on she became more and more exasperated with Andersen. She portrays him as deeply annoying, vain, and egotistic, suffering from “wild imagination, inner rage, tormenting anxieties and hypochondria, insatiable ambition.” 16But she also gives him credit for his charm, brilliance, originality, and—perhaps most striking of all to the reader who knows Andersen only through his works—his sophisticated self-knowledge.

As a writer, Wullschlager has some of Andersen’s own down-to-earth originality and humor. When she describes Copenhagen as Andersen would have seen it for the first time at fourteen, when he left home to make his fortune, she remarks that the city “still had the layout of a fortress. . . . Within, the buildings were forced upwards like asparagus and arranged like flowerpots on a ledge.” 17

Wullschlager attributes much of Andersen’s insatiable ambition to the loneliness and persecution he suffered as an ugly, clumsy, effeminate child who was teased and bullied by other children and ashamed of his family. All his life he was painfully aware not only of his mother’s drinking, but of the fact that his aunt kept a whorehouse and his uncle was in the local insane asylum. And though he gloried in the role of the poor boy who becomes rich and famous, he had a lifelong dread that these shameful connections would resurface. In Denmark, where some of his history was known, and not all his books were praised by the critics, he seldom felt properly appreciated and safe. As he grew older he began to turn against his native land. From Paris, he wrote to a friend in Copenhagen, with characteristic exaggeration:

Here, in this big strange city, Europe’s most famous and noble personalities fondly surround me, . . . and at home boys sit spitting at my heart’s dearest creation! . . . The Danes are evil, cold, satanic—a people well suited to the wet, mouldy-green island. . . . my home has sent me a fever from its cold, wet forests, which the Danes gaze upon and believe they love; but I don’t believe in love in the North, but in evil treachery. 18

Though he became world famous in his lifetime, Andersen’s ambition was never quite satisfied. In a sense it never could be. As his biographer says, “Even after he was famous and secure, his need for constant recognition and praise was pathological, and he craved admiration like a shot of an addictive drug.” 19Andersen, of course, knew this about himself. “My name is gradually starting to shine, and that is the only thing I live for. . . . I covet honour in the same way as a miser covets gold,” 20he admitted in a letter.

Jackie Wullschlager praises Andersen because, she believes, “he gave voice . . . to groups which had traditionally been mute and oppressed—children, the poor, those who did not fit social or sexual stereotypes.” 21It is true that in some of Andersen’s tales disadvantaged persons, animals, and objects receive attention and sympathy. But very often their one-down position is also their downfall. If they aspire to higher status, and especially to union with higher-status people, animals, or objects, they are usually disappointed. The Fir Tree dreams of glory as a Christmas tree, but when he achieves this it does not satisfy him. “It must be that something still greater, still more splendid, must happen—but what?” 22the Fir Tree muses; and he ends up dead on a rubbish heap.

It is true that Andersen’s Ugly Duckling becomes a swan, and is welcomed by the other swans, but in his case heredity takes precedence over environment. As Andersen put it in his story, “It matters not to have been born in a duck-yard, if one has been hatched from a swan’s egg.” 23

Although Andersen wrote more than 150 tales, only a handful of them are usually reprinted in collections for children. There is a good reason for this: 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 little 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. In order to keep them clean, she throws a loaf of bread into the mud for a stepping-stone. As a result of this wasteful but trivial act, Inger and her shoes sink down into the dark, muddy marsh, where she finds herself in a foul-smelling cave

filled with noisome toads and slimy snakes. Little Inger fell among all this horrid living filth; it was so icy cold that she shuddered from head to foot, and her limbs grew quite stiff. The loaf stuck fast to her feet and it drew her down. . . .