The Original Ugly Duckling

...I was born close to the garden of paradise, just outside where the wind blew and the toadstools grew...

...For the 70 years of his life he remained a homeless outsider, rejected in love, self-conscious about his ugliness, preoccupied with his health...

...In old age, he received a pension from the King, and Odense was illuminated to mark his homecoming...

...He had difficulty with spelling (a problem that plagued him throughout his life), and a short-tempered, unsympathetic schoolmaster forbade him to write poetry (though he had already published a volume of juvenilia...

...But in Europe he was sought out by the famous, especially after his first volume of fairy tales appeared in 1835...

...Ultimately, however, even Denmark honored him...

...at his service are the lyrical note, the childlike narrative and the language of describing nature...

...From an early age he loved the theater...

...Many of those most frequently reprinted are the worst: bowdlerizing, substituting pomposity for simplicity, even tampering with plots...

...Children know his fairy tales before they have heard of Shakespeare...

...Someone, meeting him at this time, described him as "a curious, long-legged, awkward boy who came rushing in occasionally with the question, 'May I read something to you?' or 'May I recite something to you?' and then he would recite either some verses of his own or a tirade from some tragedy...

...Andersen's grandmother told him the family had been very distinguished, and had fallen on bad times...

...Across the Channel he was the guest of Dickens, and in Germany he weekended at castles with crowned heads...

...By 11, Andersen was writing melodramas and reading them aloud to the neighbors...

...He was the original ugly duckling...

...In addition, he fell unhappily in love with Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale," who signed herself to him, "your sister...

...How many of us in parks all over the world have sat in his bronze lap to touch that shiny, unforgettable nose...

...He continued to read his works aloud to anyone who would listen...

...One of his most effective stories, "Aunty Toothache," humorously examines the relation between illness and artistic endeavor...

...On one trip to Paris he met with Hugo, both Dumas, pere and fils, Balzac, Lamartine, Scribe, Gautier, and Heine...

...Unlike the folk tales collected by the scholarly Grimm brothers, Andersen's fairy stories are literary productions—some original, some based on traditional material or other writers' works, but all touched with autobiographical concerns...

...The terrible creature of the title, a production of a poet's fever dream, plays on his teeth like a piano, and inquires, "Will you acknowledge that I am mightier than poetry, philosophy, mathematics, and all music...

...In spite of worsening financial difficulties, Andersen refused to learn a trade, and, at 14, set off for Copenhagen to obtain a place in the Royal Theater...

...Believe me, there was power in the first toothache.' Explaining his attraction to the fairy tale genre, Andersen wrote, "To me it represents all poetry, and he who masters it may be able to put into it all tragedy, comedy, naive simplicity and humor...

...He himself excelled at this, and won an audience that appreciated his qualities...

...Another was the absence of critical acclaim in Denmark long after he had gained a reputation abroad...

...The glowing descriptions of Andersen's royal patrons only disgusted the Danish press, which labeled him a toady...

...He stayed home from school to play with the toy stage his father had made him...

...It ruined the party for me.' " This was the beginning of Bredsdorffs fascination with Andersen, and now it has resulted in a rich and rewarding biography of that childlike, yet complex man...

...After his father's death, his mother consulted a witch about the boy's future, and was told that someday Odense would be illuminated in his honor...

...His plays were accepted at the Royal Theater, and he published several volumes of verse...

...this was not true, although it confirmed the boy's sense that he was different, and out of place in his slumworld...

...Yet privately he never felt accepted...

...The fact that the Collins never appreciated his importance as a writer was a source of great disappointment to him...

...The Little Mermaid" expresses Andersen's craving for love and his sense of displacement, while "The Fir Tree" is a cruel self-portrait of his dreams of glory and inability to enjoy the moment...

...No,' she replied...

...at other times he suffered pangs of grief at all the 'almosts': almost a member of the family, almost a son, almost a brother, and saw himself as a homeless outsider...

...Elias Bredsdorff (who heads the department of Scandinavian Studies at Cambridge University) has included in his biography an invaluable chapter on English and American translations of the fairy tales...

...Before long, he was embarked on a writing career...

...As a dinner guest, he worried aloud about food poisoning, and such was his fear of being buried alive that he left a sign by his bedside saying "I am not really dead.' He often lamented that even his greatest successes were spoiled for him by continual anxiety...

...Still, he passed his exams and entered the University of Copenhagen...

...Eventually one of his patrons, Jonas Collin, sent him to a grammar school...

...The first time I realized that Hans Christian Andersen was a person who had really lived, writes Elias Bredsdorff, "was when my grandmother, having read me one of Andersen's tales, told me how she had once met him, even danced with him at a party when he was an old man and she a young girl of 17...

...The Nightingale" (written for Jenny Lind) is a metaphor of the artist...

...Not Ibsen, not Strindberg, not Kierkegaard, not the Nobel prize winners Selma Lager-loff or Knut Hamsun—it is Hans Christian Andersen...

...It was I who made Eve wear clothes in the cold weather and Adam also...

...The ugly duckling, the Emperor's new clothes and the little matchgirl are proverbial...

...Weren't you proud?' I asked her...

...At times," Bredsdorff writes, "Andersen was deeply grateful for being accepted into this tightly knit and, in many respects, self-sufficient patrician family...

...Moreover he couldn't dance and kept treading on my toes with his ridiculously long feet...

...In this period, he also became an intimate with the Collin family, falling in love with the youngest daughter and establishing a lifelong love/hate relationship with the son, Edvard, who managed Andersen's financial affairs but assumed with that responsibility the right to lecture him on his embarrassing behavior and artistic shortcomings...

...But his unquenchable desire for achievement convinced certain of the Royal Theater directors that he was worthy of something better, and they saw to it that he was given a place in the corps de ballet and a living allowance...

...Andersen, who was much older than his classmates, was not a good student...

...Another feature of this fine book is a selection of the papercuttings Andersen employed to illustrate his stories, silhouette phantasmagoria of his familiar themes...

...In fact I felt so ashamed when that ugly old man asked me to dance that I could have died on the spot...

...Kierkegaard's first published work was an attack on one of Andersen's books...

...After devouring the works of the Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg and Shakespeare, he dreamed of becoming a poet...

...At 24, he produced an imaginary travelogue that became an instant success...

...The Tinder Box" and "The Ugly Duckling" tell of the scorned outsider who wins acceptance...

...If they do not interest you, you will have to stand outside the gate with Andersen's other critics, for his is a kingdom of the pure in heart...

...Most people found this a nuisance, and many thought him mad...

...He was born in 1805 in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor but educated cobbler and an illiterate washerwoman...

...Other Danish critics complained about his homey style and grammatical infelicities...