My Love-Hate Relationship With Hans Christian Andersen

New York Times

6 days ago

When I was 7 years old, I disgraced myself. We were sitting in my second-grade classroom learning simple addition — that detail is seared into my memory, and just might have something to do with my appalling math SAT scores — and I started to cry. At first, it was silent weeping, fat tears running down my cheeks, but within moments, despite my panicked efforts to stanch the flood, I was sobbing, loudly.
Everyone went quiet; 20 pairs of eyes — thrilled, exhilarated, confused — were turned on me. The teacher led me gently from the room to ask what was wrong. At this point I was too worked up, and humiliated, to answer. She suggested I eat lunch with her in the classroom while everyone else went to the cafeteria.
In due course, we ate. Mrs. Lipton tactfully tried again. Was I upset about something going on at home? I muttered that I was, hoping my lack of detail would seem like obfuscation. Clearly it worked: My parents were called in for a conference, at which point the jig was up.
The reason I had been crying was this: The night before, my mother had read to me 'The Little Match Girl' from a book of Hans Christian Andersen's collected stories. As I sat in class, I started thinking about the friendless urchin, burning her last match in order to warm herself and conjure memories of her late grandmother — only to be found, frozen, on the streets of Copenhagen on New Year's Day. And, well, I bawled.
In his 1976 classic, 'The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,' Bruno Bettelheim writes that a child 'intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.' Unlike the Brothers Grimm, Andersen was mostly writing original work, but his nine volumes of 156 stories have rightly earned the sobriquet of 'fairy tale' in their ability to play on a child's elemental fears.
Andersen — who died 150 years ago, on Aug. 4 — knew great commercial success in his lifetime. But he was lonely and unfulfilled. While he is generally acknowledged by biographers to have been gay (unlike in the Danny Kaye movie, in which he falls in love with a prima ballerina), there is little consensus on which, if any, of his relationships were consummated and which were merely intense crushes. For a while, Andersen and Charles Dickens were friends, but after Andersen paid the Dickenses a visit, and overstayed his welcome, the relationship fizzled. All of which may go some way to explaining the grimness of much of his material.
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