Hans Christian Andersen: The Fan Dancer by Alison Prince Allison & Busby, 401pp, £19.99 in UK
THE story of Hans Christian Andersen - certainly in the version which we pass on to our children - is traditionally presented as a variation on the rags to (relative) riches theme. Born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805, the son of a poor shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman, he has a brief primary education before travelling by himself, at the age of fourteen, to Copenhagen, where eventually he fulfils his early dream of becoming a stage performer. He is befriended by the Director of the city's Royal Theatre, whose financial help enables him to attend, belatedly, a grammar school and, at the age of twenty-three, to pass the matriculation examination for university. He embarks on a writing career, attempting various genres, but attains little critical success in any of them and depends, in the main, on the charity of friends for his survival.
When he is thirty, the first four of his fairy tales are published and though they meet with what Prince describes as "a baffled silence" the second and subsequent volumes (comprising in total some 150 stories) begin to earn national and eventually international approval, to the extent that some of them acquire mythic status. Andersen becomes a celebrity, travels widely throughout Europe, meets a wide range of distinguished writers and other personalities and mingles at home in aristocratic and royal circles. He has some unhappy love affairs, most notably with the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, and dies unmarried in 1875. Monuments and museums are erected in his honour and he is universally recognised as the author of some of the classic stories of children's literature.
But this, while all basically true, amounts - in more than one sense - to little more than a fairy story. By tellingly concluding her new study of Andersen's life and work with one of his diary entries from 1866, where he comments: "My time has passed; gone and forgotten, except perhaps to be torn apart by the mob, but they can only get at the surface which bears the imprint of my reputation", Prince reminds us that she has risen to the challenge of penetrating the veneer while accepting the inevitable limitations of attempting to do so. Inevitable, given what she earlier calls his "complex, difficult life", what she finally summarises as his "sad, strange existence" and what she sees throughout as his fan-dancing, "hiding the naked self from the watching eyes which both admire and are filled with prurient curiosity, for he was at a fundamental level a pretender".
While Prince is not the first commentator to relate Andersen's fundamental "pretending" to a latent homosexuality, no one has argued in such convincing detail the case for a link between the recurring themes of his stories and the suppression of his true sexual nature. This results in some wonderfully ingenious readings of the stories and their symbolism: "The Ugly Duckling" becomes a metaphor for a very special form of outing. But when these interpretations are taken in conjunction with Andersen's desperately sad letters of unfulfilled sexual yearning to male friends such as Edvard Collin and Carl Alexander, the hereditary Grand Duke of Weimar, they cumulatively corroborate Prince's view of Andersen as someone who had early developed a lifelong fear of, and revulsion from, female sexuality, creating a pattern in his relationships with women (Jenny Lind included) whereby he presented himself as attracted only to those who, he knew, would forever be inaccessible.
There may, too, have been further "pretending" in the precise circumstances of Andersen's birth, though here Prince is more cautious. Could he possibly have been the abandoned child of Danish Crown Prince Christian Frederik, later to be king as Christian VIII? Such evidence as there is remains circumstantial, though it gives an undoubted piquancy to Andersen's subsequent dealings with Danish royalty and might even explain his extremely high degree of self-esteem.
Beyond question, however, it adds a further dimension of fascinating speculation to this engrossing and attractively written biography of a man whose life was dominated by an essential loneliness and lovelessness. Regrettably, the overall impressive achievement of the book is slightly marred by the number of typographical errors and by an index which is inaccurate in virtually all of its numerous references to the text.