There once was an ugly duckling, so despised by the other birds that he fled the farm to explore the wider world. But because of his very great ugliness he was taunted there too, until one day he caught his image reflected in a pond and he had turned into a beautiful swan. The Ugly Duckling, first published in 1843, was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s many autobiographical fairy tales: “It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard,” he wrote, “if one has lain in a swan’s egg.”
Andersen’s subject, from the start, was the outsider destined for greatness. “At school,” he recalled in The Fairy Tale of My Life, the third of his three memoirs, “I told the boys curious stories in which I was always the chief person, but was sometimes ridiculed for that.” His stories were miniature epics (The Princess and the Pea is 300 words long) and his characters, like the author himself, solitary figures of spiritual greatness for whom the world is a place of inexplicable cruelty. Other versions of Anderson’s life can be found in his first published fairy tale, The Tinderbox, in which a clever soldier discovers the magic formula for wealth and success; The Steadfast Tin Soldier, in which a one-legged, love-sick toy falls from a window, is swallowed by a fish, and then thrown into a stove where he melts into a heart-shaped lump; and The Little Match Girl, where a frozen, homeless child, on her last night on Earth, gazes through a window at a happy bourgeois family.
Had Anderson been as handsome as Danny Kaye, who played him in the Hollywood musical Hans Christian Andersen (1952), he would not have become a teller of tales. It was his fabulous ugliness that fuelled his ambition. “I shall have no success with my appearance,” he reflected, “so I make use of whatever is available.”
Everyone who met him remarked on his appearance. As a 20-year-old student in Copenhagen, he was described as “a lanky figure in a worn-out grey coat whose sleeves did not reach his emaciated wrists”. As a 40-year-old celebrity in a London drawing-room, he was described as “long, thin, fleshless, boneless… wriggling and bending like a lizard with a lantern-jawed, cadaverous visage”. He described himself in one of his poems as having a nose “as mighty as a cannon” and eyes as “tiny” as “green peas”. Edmund Gosse was “almost painfully struck… by the grotesque ugliness of his face and hands, and by his enormously long and swinging arms”. Anderson’s friend William Bloch also recalled his “out of proportion” arms and legs, together with his “broad and flat” hands, and “feet of such gigantic dimensions” that no one would ever steal his boots.
Added to this were what Bloch called Anderson’s “strange and bizarre” movements, and others noted his “ludicrous” manners and “obsequious contortions”, including deep theatrical bows. Heinrich Heine, the living writer Anderson most admired, mistook him for “a tailor” because of his “fawning servility”. If he sounds like a character invented by Charles Dickens, it is because Uriah Heep was modelled on Andersen, whom Dickens met in 1847. David Copperfield’s first sighting of Heep was “a cadaverous face” peering out of the round tower: “He had a way of writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm, which was very ugly, the snaky twistings of his throat and body.” “If you’re an eel, sir,” counsels Betsey Trotwood, “conduct yourself like one. If you’re a man, control your limbs, sir!” In our own kinder age, we might diagnose Anderson with dyspraxia.
The life of Andersen was indeed the stuff of fairy tales. He was born in 1805 in a one-room cottage in the poorest part of Odense, a town on the Danish island of Funen rich in folk heritage. His father was a cobbler whose workshop was also in the cottage, and his mother was an illiterate washerwoman; his aunt ran a brothel, and his grandfather was insane. As a boy, Andersen watched the old man carve wooden figures with beasts’ heads, which he then gave to the village children. It was in the spinning room of the asylum where his grandmother was employed that he first heard the fairy tales that transfixed him, and when, on forest walks, his father told him tales from The Arabian Nights, Andersen knew he was destined to be another Scheherazade.
Andersen, a dreamy and effeminate only child, preferred his own company. His favourite pastime was the toy theatre made by his father, for which he wrote plays to be performed by the dolls whose clothes he designed and sewed. His first production was a tragedy taken from a song in Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within the play performed by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Everyone was obliged to hear my play,” Anderson recalled in his first memoir, The True Story of My Life, written when he was 27 and not yet a household name. “It was a perfect treat for me to read it, and it never occurred to me that my audience might not experience the same pleasure in listening.” Anderson’s performances were mocked by the street boys who chased him home, where he wept. He also had a fine soprano voice, and was known, he recalls, as “The Funen Nightingale”. In his fairy tale The Nightingale, the bird’s voice becomes famous and moves emperors to tears, until he is replaced by an automaton.
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Andersen became a great writer because he was a great listener: he learned as a child that a story’s power lay in its capacity to be retained. “Pleasure in listening” was vital: a strong and rhythmic narrative embeds itself and Andersen remembered, word for word, every tale he ever heard and every play he ever saw.
If The Red Shoes and The Emperor’s New Clothes enter us like arrows, it is because they came to him in the same way: “It often seems to me,” Anderson reflected, “as if every hoarding, every little flower is saying to me: ‘Look at me, just for a moment, and then my story will go right into you.’” It is part of his genius that his fables, micro-concentrations of imaginative strength, feel like oral legends that have been passed down for millennia in the collective unconscious.
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