The elfin mind.(Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life)(Book Review)

The elfin mind

Jens Andersen Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life, translated by Tiina Nunnally. Overlook Hardcover, 608 pages, $35

"It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard, if one has only lain in a swan's egg." Anybody who has been a child will recognize this as the happy discovery of the Swan formerly known as the Ugly Duckling. But what was true of the Duckling in question is misleading. Consider: the melancholy Duckling had only to wait to outgrow his adolescent awkwardness. Those born in figurative duck-yards need pluckiness, not mere patience, to attain swanhood.

Hans Christian Andersen, the Duckling in that histoire a clef, had pluck in spades, but it's not surprising that his famous character didn't need it. This new biography by Jens Andersen (no relation) gives us an odd man-child so sure of his "inner swan" that it never occurs to him that his nature might not assert itself. In 1819, when Andersen arrived without a single rigsdaler in Copenhagen (having left his widowed mother behind in Odense), he "was quite calm because [he] trusted blindly in Our Lord." Yet that faith, however genuine, was perhaps a less reliable buoy than his observation about "the heroes in all the tales," that "things always went well in the comedies and stories."

The Grail in Andersen's story was cultural heroism. At first, he wished to be an actor or dancer. He was rangy but graceless; his histrionic sensibility ruled out his becoming a stage presence one could take seriously. Even so, members of Copenhagen's upper class patronized him--in both senses of the word. He was a figure of fun. His saving grace was the elemental brilliance that effloresced from his energy and confidence. A young girl who'd seen Andersen delivered this fairly common judgment: "He's in the city right now, writing tragedies and stories, which he sometimes reads aloud for us. There are occasional beautiful places in them, but in general it's all such dreadful nonsense."

Even some of Andersen's best children's tales could be described that way. "The Elfin Mound," which joins pungent pre-Christian lore to a wild disregard for the fairy tale's usual morally instructive aim, is nonsense in the strictest sense. Why? In 1835, Andersen wrote of his stories that he'd "written them exactly as [he] would tell them to a child," and then: "I have managed quite ...