A fairy-tale existence

Denmark is celebrating the life of Hans Christian Andersen on the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth. It's a quirky rags to riches tale that could have inspired many of his stories, writes Christine Madden.

Once upon a time, a boy living in poverty in a rural Danish village felt very much alone and displaced in his environment. He sensed greatness inside him, so he left for the big city in search of fame and fortune. In later years, when he, remarkably, achieved his fame and fortune, he wrote a parable about his hard journey to acceptance and success. Called The Ugly Duckling, it was, of all the fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen wrote, the one with which he most identified.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Andersen's birth, and the Danes have pulled out all the stops to celebrate and venerate this enigmatic writer. With cultural events of every description - theatre, dance, music, museums, light displays, readings - as well as games, tours, lectures and even a special exhibition at Legoland, Denmark will this year become something of a fairy-tale land itself.

Through all this adulation, the Danes have managed to apply their salty sense of humour to the portrayal of their literary hero. Like in the fairy tales for which he is known, Anderson's character incorporates frequently neurotic foibles and idiosyncrasies as well as diverse talents.

He was born in Odense on April 2nd, 1805, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman. His father volunteered for the army to fight Napoleon but, by the time he arrived at the battlefield, the French emperor had already been vanquished. Instead of battle glory, he brought illness back with him, most likely tuberculosis, and he died while Andersen was still very young. Left alone with two children (she had a daughter from a previous liaison), Andersen's mother suffered the arduous conditions necessitated by washing the clothes of the rich in the icy water of the river, and sank into alcoholism.

Andersen put his ignominious environment behind him, leaving Odense at the age of 14. He later referred to the date he first arrived in Copenhagen, September 6th, 1819, as his "second birthday".

His first impulse drew him to the performing arts. With only about the equivalent of €10 in his pocket, he wanted to do ballet at the Royal Theatre. He put to use a facility for wheedling benefactors with a combination of pathos and ability born from bravado and desperation. He discovered where the head of the ballet school lived, talked his way past the maidservant and started to dance in the drawing room for the director. Although his aplomb got him into the ballet school, he then switched to singing (Andersen wore a size 46 shoe, so wasn't quite built for a dancer) and then acting.

But his creative gifts didn't lie in the performing arts. On the strength of plays he submitted in desperation to the Royal Theatre, the theatre director recognised literary talent, and Andersen received a scholarship to attend school. The humiliation of beginning primary education as a teenager and the bitter experiences he had until finishing school, in 1828, aged 23, stayed within him throughout his life, furnishing inspiration for his writing.

After publishing several poems during his studies, he published his first prose work and got his first play on stage in 1829. With the success of both of these, his calling as a writer seemed established. He wrote his first novel, The Improviser, in 1835, and in the same year published his first booklets of Fairy Tales Told for Children, to "win the coming generations" as he wrote to a friend, as well as to see if there was money to be earned in this genre, which enjoyed much popularity during the Romantic period.

Although he was more interested in theatre writing - which at that time was more lucrative than books - and novels, claiming he wanted "to be the first novelist in Denmark", his fairy tales teased out his real genius. Upon reading the first of these, his friend, the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted prophesied, "if the novels will make you famous, the fairy tales will make you immortal".

As well as his 156 fairy tales, he wrote six novels, five travel accounts, 40 dramatic works, three autobiographies and about 1,000 poems, and kept a voluminous correspondence and a diary now published in 10 volumes. His interests took him on travels throughout Europe and to Africa; of his nearly 70 years on his death on August 4th, 1875, he had spent nine of them abroad. He also nurtured his interest in visual art, making many intricate paper cut-outs and collages.

Yet he invested a comparable amount of energy into the creation of himself as a mythic figure - he even titled one of his biographies The Fairy Tale of My Life. Throughout his life he remained nomadic and, although his money situation improved with fame, he never left off staying with grand families in their equally grand houses and estates. Even within the city, he moved from boarding house to hotels to friends' and patrons' homes, never owning his own house despite the riches he would earn in later life.

He was quite vain, and took advantage of the burgeoning art of photography: he sat for many portraits, but only wanted to be photographed from the side.

Several phobias dogged him. He had a morbid fear of being buried alive, and requested his coffin have an air hole just in case. And he kept a note on his bedside table that cautioned "I only seem dead". He was also terrified of fire - justifiably so, given the frequency with which fires ravaged parts of Copenhagen, including royal buildings. He always travelled with a length of rope in his bags so that he could escape a burning dwelling by the window, and once complained about a lodging that was several stories high - further than his rope would hold him.

Despite the several love interests in his life, he never married or consummated any of them, as far as the evidence suggests. Speculation abounds as to whether he had homosexual tendencies, which he would have suppressed for moral and religious reasons. Like his character the Tin Soldier, he seemed doomed always to admire an exquisite and seemingly kindred spirit from afar. One of his amours was the famous opera star Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale", who kept him at bay by referring to him as her brother.

His first love, Riborg Voigt, was betrothed to another man. When he died, her farewell letter was found in a leather bag around his neck. Perhaps, like many other writers, he was addicted to unrequited love and the creative surge that comes from desire, and was afraid of seeing an ideal debased into reality.

Andersen found himself in his fairy stories, which have been translated into 123 languages, including Irish, Chinese, Esperanto, Braille, Frisian and Old Russian. The characters and their predicaments frequently seem like metaphors for life as he experienced it, dreamlike symbols thrust from the deep well of his complex personality. Like the little mermaid, who rose from a lower to a higher world, Andersen became one of the first upwardly mobile people in a changing Europe, going from abject poverty to a status that gave him access to the upper echelons of society. And, like her, his past in a dark and murky world never really left him, and he could only express it through an art form, and in pain.