The Ugly Duckling

By Angela Wigan

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

by ELIAS BREDSDORFF

376 pages. Scribners. $10.

"Children ask of the story what they ask of a dream," observed Poet Randall Jarrell, "that it satisfy their wishes." For more than a century, Hans Christian Andersen has satisfied the wishes of the Western world's children. One hundred years after his death he remains the unsurpassed master of the fairy tale. Who has not smiled ruefully at the imperial victim of The Emperor's New Clothes, or identified with The Princess on the Pea? What youth remains ignorant of Andersen's articulate birds and magic elves? Yet, as Cambridge Professor Elias Bredsdorff brilliantly demonstrates, these creatures were the offhand productions of a vast and thwarted literary ambition.

"First you go through terrible suffering, and then you become famous," Hans naively informed his mother when he left home at 14 to join a Copenhagen theater troupe. The boy suffered more than he planned: he was a catastrophe as an actor, dancer and singer. But he radiated intelligence, and something about him hinted at fame. Benefactors sent the adolescent to school, where Hans decided to become a playwright. "You can stand pain if you can write about it," he declared to a friend. The fledgling author became, says Bredsdorff, "a man of deep and apparently irreconcilable contrasts." Heinrich Heine, who observed Andersen in action, called the writer "a tall thin man with hollow sunken cheeks [whose] manner reveals the sort of fawning servility that princes like." All his adult life, Andersen oscillated between vanity and self-abnegation, pride and humility. He was a Christian who rejected the main dogmas of religion, a generous miser, a snob 'who championed the underdog. If contrast described his psyche, irony defined his life. Like Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes entertainments outlasted his "serious" work, Andersen was to see his poetry, novels and travel books fade and his trivia be come immortal.

By the time he was 40, the little fairy tales had propelled Hans to the courts and palaces of Europe; in America, he was given a place with the Brothers Grimm. The comparison slighted the Dane. The Germans had collected their stories in the Black Forest; Andersen had pulled his from his brain.

Eternal Juvenile. The applause brought little joy. "I have imagined so much and had so little," Andersen noted in his diary. That complaint sounds like the whine of a child -- and, in fact, Andersen remained an eternal juvenile.

He never married or had a home. He fell in love three times (once with Singer Jenny Lind), but the affairs were little more than heroine worship. Like his invention The Fir Tree, which was disappointed at every stage of its growth, Hans could never recognize happiness until it had evaporated.

Bredsdorff painstakingly traces the storyteller's journey from deprived youth to global enchanter. In the process he unlocks the nursery where Andersen has been kept for decades. For the first time in a generation, the writer is observed and analyzed as innovator, lapidary stylist and original humorist. Bredsdorff never fully reveals the genius behind the tales -- that must be perceived in the stories themselves. In the end, the shards of autobiography speak universal truths. The consolation of the ugly duckling remains the motto of Hans Christian Andersen: "It doesn't matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you are hatched from a swan's egg."

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