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.
It’s not all depressing. “The Princess and the Pea” works out for everyone. Public nudity is the worst thing to happen in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” And you may have fond memories of “Thumbelina” — until you reread it and realize you blocked out how narrowly she escapes an arranged marriage to an elderly mole in a netherworld of eternal darkness. “The Ugly Duckling”? Let’s not forget that after enduring hideous physical abuse — the bulk of the story — he wants to kill himself.
There’s “The Little Mermaid,” of course, whose tongue is cut out and for whom every step is like walking on knife blades — until she’s forsaken by the prince and dies. “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” is thrown into a fiery stove and melts, for love of a paper-doll ballerina. We all know the fate of the protagonist of “The Red Shoes.” (Clearly, pyromania and a loathing of dancers were big business in the Victorian era.) And in “The Snow Queen” — in which a shard of ice enters a boy’s heart, freezing all love for his sister-close best friend — let’s just say no one sings “Let It Go.”
Yet “The Little Match Girl” retains a special horror, described by my colleague Liz as “every child’s worst nightmare.”
I remember one day, while working in a shop in my 20s, my co-worker turned to me out of the blue and said, “Do you ever just randomly find yourself thinking about ‘The Little Match Girl’?”
The answer was yes.
A few years later, I was having a drink at a Brooklyn bar with another friend — one who had grown up in another country, as it happened — when a look of sadness passed over her face.
“I was thinking about the saddest story of all,” she said.
“‘The Little Match Girl’?” I asked.
The answer was yes.
In theory, I want to read these stories to my son, as they are a part of our cultural fabric, for good or ill. In practice, I dread inflicting the inevitable trauma occasioned by tale after tale of heartbreak, loneliness, death and punishment. And the day is coming: He’s already been asking some hard questions about the H.C.A. statue in Central Park. But what I know for sure is that Hans Christian Andersen possessed a certain genius — not merely in the fecundity of his lurid imaginings, but in his talent for identifying a child’s primal terrors, exploiting them and implanting story lines so lasting they might well be mistaken for the ancient folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.
A couple of years ago, I had the chance to visit Denmark for the first time. Much to my companions’ embarrassment, I persisted in singing lusty renditions of “Wonderful Copenhagen” every few minutes, but when we got to the large bronze rendering of Andersen by the Tivoli Gardens one of them was kind enough to take my picture. I remember I felt it would be overly familiar to sit on his knee, as someone in my group proposed. So the photo shows me leaning against it — smiling on a beautiful, sunny day, while a haunting refrain played in my head: “Then she saw a star fall, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. ‘Someone is dying,’ thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only one who had ever loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star falls, a soul was going up to God.”
Perhaps as Andersen had intended, I was in touch with my childhood self.
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