150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen
There once was an ugly duckling, so despised by the other birds that he fled the farm to explore the wider world. But because of his very great ugliness he was taunted there too, until one day he caught his image reflected in a pond and he had turned into a beautiful swan. The Ugly Duckling, first published in 1843, was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s many autobiographical fairy tales: “It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard,” he wrote, “if one has lain in a swan’s egg.”
Andersen’s subject, from the start, was the outsider destined for greatness. “At school,” he recalled in The Fairy Tale of My Life, the third of his three memoirs, “I told the boys curious stories in which I was always the chief person, but was sometimes ridiculed for that.” His stories were miniature epics (The Princess and the Pea is 300 words long) and his characters, like the author himself, solitary figures of spiritual greatness for whom the world is a place of inexplicable cruelty. Other versions of Anderson’s life can be found in his first published fairy tale, The Tinderbox, in which a clever soldier discovers the magic formula for wealth and success; The Steadfast Tin Soldier, in which a one-legged, love-sick toy falls from a window, is swallowed by a fish, and then thrown into a stove where he melts into a heart-shaped lump; and The Little Match Girl, where a frozen, homeless child, on her last night on Earth, gazes through a window at a happy bourgeois family.
Had Anderson been as handsome as Danny Kaye, who played him in the Hollywood musical Hans Christian Andersen (1952), he would not have become a teller of tales. It was his fabulous ugliness that fuelled his ambition. “I shall have no success with my appearance,” he reflected, “so I make use of whatever is available.”
