March 25, 2021 43
Awful But Joyful
Deborah Eisenberg
The Copenhagen Trilogy:
Childhood; Youth; Dependency
by Tove Ditlevsen, translated
from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally
and Michael Favala Goldman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
370 pp., $30.00
The Faces
by Tove Ditlevsen, translated
from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally.
London: Penguin, 129 pp., £8.99 (paper)
By the time Tove Ditlevsen committed
suicide in 1976, she was one of Den-
mark’s most popular and acclaimed
writers. In the fifty-eight years of her
life, she’d had two children and custody
of a third, and four husbands. She’d
soared out of poverty, and all told, she’d
published about thirty books—primar-
ily collections of poetry but also novels,
memoirs, stories, and children’s books.
She’d written magazine pieces, too,
and, of all things, an advice column.
The information readily available
about her in English is oddly sketchy,
and little of her work has been trans-
lated into English, but what we have
includes her memoir, The Copenhagen
Tr i l og y, and a novel, The Faces. Both
were published in Danish between 1967
and 1971, though neither was translated
into English until years later.
The Copenhagen Trilogy and The
Faces are very different books, but they
draw on the same material—Ditlevsen’s
life—and both display a distinctive style;
an uncanny vividness; a gift for convey-
ing atmospheres and mental sensations
and personalities with remarkable
dispatch; the originality and deadpan,
trapdoor humor of the significantly es-
tranged; a startling frankness; and a
terrible commotion of unresolved con-
flicts and torments. Both books also
accelerate from zero to sixty before
anyone has a chance to buckle up.
The Faces starts right off with the
protagonist, Lise Mundus, experienc-
ing flickerings of delusion, which in
short order explode into full-blown
psychosis. It’s generally a poor idea to
go rooting around in a work of fiction
for clues to its author’s life and psyche,
but the invitation here is so unequiv-
ocal it seems boorish to turn it down.
Among other parallels Mundus is, like
the author, a famous writer, and like
the author she is suffering from marital
problems as well as the inability to work
that’s known rather emptily as “writ-
er’s block”; Mundus was the maiden
name of Ditlevsen’s mother (who once
urged her daughter to use it as a nom de
plume); and Ditlevsen herself endured
several institutionalizations.
In its articulation of deeply oppressive
anxieties—concerning fame, class, love,
money, aging, identity, autonomy, feel-
ings of fraudulence, and the question
of a writer’s responsibilities concerning
social issues, to name a few—writing
clearly provided her, in this instance
at least, with an orienting echo. Para-
doxically, the novel’s explicit portrait
of Mundus sheds more light on some
of the concrete matters that bedeviled
Ditlevsen than does her strictly autobi-
ographical Copenhagen Trilogy.
The most conspicuous difference be-
tween The Faces and The Copenhagen
Tr i l og y is tone. The Faces crackles and
seethes with rage. Treachery, cruelty,
and malevolent stupidity encroach on
Mundus from every direction, and per-
haps the greatest dramatic satisfaction
the book offers is its courtroom feeling
of ambient culpability: Lise Mundus v.
husband, housekeeper, children, and
world—and vice versa.
The Copenhagen Trilogy, by con-
trast, is fastidiously unjudgmental to-
ward those who people it, including its
author, though an autobiographical ac-
count is an ideal vehicle of complaint.
The reader of autobiographical ma-
terial more or less expects allocations
of blame, at least implicit ones, often
neatly dovetailing with lurid confes-
sion—in other words, a satisfyingly
simple, easily understood way to inter-
pret a life, though nothing of that sort
can be entirely accurate or honest. Hu-
mans, to be blunt, rarely have the faint-
est idea why we do what we do, but we
yearn and pretend to understand, spin-
ning out explanation after explanation.
One can’t comfortably premise one’s
life on this great void in human under-
standing, but a memoir that accommo-
dates it is bracing, as well as profoundly
unsettling.Memoirs and autobiographies have
their own, very individual purposes,
but however complex and mysterious
the author’s motives, they reveal things
no other sort of account can—while
foreclosing alternative views. An out-
line of Ditlevsen’s behavior, and that ofothers who appear in The Copenhagen
Tr i l og y, would include a lot that you
don’t want to encounter in your parent,
child, lover, or spouse, but we are asked
neither to condemn nor to forgive—
only to look. The author presents her-
self to us with very little editorializing
and, it seems, very little varnish.
The narrative of The Copenhagen
Tr i l og y is governed, like the narratives
of other memoirs, by the exigencies of
memory within the fluid time of the
mind—and also by the fact that in real-
ity, as opposed to fiction, it’s reality, not
some writer, that gets to decide what
comes first and what next.
There are plenty of lacunae in The
Copenhagen Trilogy and some appar-
ent inconsistencies, but its seductive
sheen is irresistible, and, after all, it’s
the memoir of a poet, not a dossier.
There are no inert sentences, nothing
that feels forced or written for effect.
The language is elegant—as natural,
responsive, and true as wet clay—and
the observations provide the pleasur-
able shock of precision, rather than
the sort of approximation we have
more reason to expect when reading.
Ditlevsen stays remarkably faithful to
the unformulated consciousness of the
moment. Clichés about poverty are
absent, and no scene is distorted or
obscured by the usual sediment of con-
solatory and sentimental attitudes. The
experience is overwhelming—it’s as if
Ditlevsen has moved into your head
and rearranged all the furniture, and
not necessarily for your comfort. The
book is as propulsive as the most tightlyplotted thriller; even when you want to
put it down, it seems to adhere to your
hands.
The three short volumes that con-
stitute The Copenhagen Trilogy are
“Childhood,” “Youth,” and “De-
pendency,” and the trajectory brings
Ditlevsen from the strangeness of
childhood—the awkwardness of find-
ing oneself set down on the planet
without having quite the right equip-
ment or quite the right shape to exist
on it—through the period of explora-
tion and discovery following her grad-
uation from middle school at the age of
fourteen, and ultimately into the gothic
nightmare of her maturity.
“Childhood” opens with little Tove’s
beautiful mother, Alfrida, sitting ab-
sently over the newspaper reports of
the Treaty of Versailles and the Span-
ish flu:My mother was alone, even though
I was there, and if I was absolutely
still and didn’t say a word, the re-
mote calm in her inscrutable heart
would last until the morning had
grown old....
Behind her on the flowered wall-
paper, the tatters pasted together
by my father with brown tape, hung
a picture of a woman staring out
the window. On the floor behind
her was a cradle with a little child.
Below the picture it said, “Woman
awaiting her husband home from
the sea.” Sometimes my mother
would suddenly catch sight of me
and follow my glance up to the pic-
ture I found so tender and sad. But
my mother burst out laughing....
When hope had been crushed
like that, my mother would get
dressed with violent and irritated
movements, as if every piece of
clothing were an insult to her....
[Her] dark anger always ended in
her slapping my face or pushing
me against the stove.... I carried
the cups out to the kitchen, and in-
side of me long, mysterious words
began to crawl across my soul like
a protective membrane. A song,
a poem, something soothing and
rhythmic and immensely pensive.The spell is so intense, the hand so
light, that you hardly know how you
came to find yourself enclosed in this
snow globe with a terrifyingly volatile
mother; a possibly self-deluding father;
an economic and historical setting; a
tiny, incipient author who can already
conceal and fortify herself within a
protective bower of words; and raging
storms of love, fear, resentment, isola-
tion, desire, shame, delight, grief, and
pity.Tove was born in 1917, so it’s un-
likely she could read 1918’s news, but
as she writes in The Faces, “She never
thought ‘yesterday’ or ‘tonight,’ but al-
ways ‘once.’” She was “Mother’s girl,”
she tells us in “Childhood,” though
her mother hit her “often and hard,”
and she had little feeling for her fa-
ther, Ditlev, who never hit her and, on
the contrary, was always kind to her.
“All of my childhood books were his,Tove Ditlevsen on her childhood street in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, circa 1950BirtheMelchiors/Scanpix