44 The New York Review
and on my fifth birthday he gave me
a wonderful edition of Grimms’ Fairy
Ta le s, without which my childhood
would have been gray and dreary and
impoverished.”
Ditlev, who was sent out as a shep-
herd at the age of six, once had liter-
ary ambitions of his own, though by
the time Tove was a child he worked,
she tells us, as a stoker. He lost his
regular job when she was seven and
subsequently was often unemployed,
but Tove’s family was not as poor as
her parents had been growing up, and
it was relatively peaceable and affec-
tionate, despite the unrelenting frus-
trations of hardship: she slept with her
parents, her brother in the other room,
and although the family never actually
starved, at times there wasn’t enough
food; her front teeth were pitted from
rickets until she was an adult and could
have them fixed.
A slightly creepy fairy-tale mist,
courtesy of the Brothers Grimm, clings
to the Copenhagen neighborhood
of Vesterbro where Tove grows up.
Downstairs lives Rapunzel with her
long golden braid, whose parents both
work at the Carlsberg brewery and
“each drink fifty beers a day.” When
they come home they keep drinking
and beat Rapunzel, who always comes
to school with bruises. “When they get
tired of beating her, they attack each
other with bottles and broken chair
legs” until, invariably, the police come,
to the disapproval of Tove’s parents,
who “think Rapunzel’s parents should
be allowed to kill each other in peace if
they want to.”
In the adjacent apartment is the
“spiritlike” Ketty, who looks like
Snow White in her white fur, silver
high heels, and yellow silk dress—a
“beautiful sight that cheers my heart
night after night,” though Ditlev says,
bewilderingly:
It’s scandalous when there are chil-
dren around.... My mother doesn’t
say anything, because during the
day she and I are often over in Ket-
ty’s living room drinking coffee
or hot chocolate. It’s a wonderful
room, where all the furniture is red
plush.Although Tove’s parents don’t fight,
they know how to wound each other
in sensitive spots. Alfrida disdains
Ditlev’s love of books as well as his
politics: “My father was a scoundrel
and a drunkard,” she says, “but at least
he wasn’t a socialist.” And Ditlev isn’t
above callously spoiling his lively, girl-
ish wife’s moments of joy.
A dutiful joylessness seems in fact to
have been rather a specialty of the “mel-
ancholy, serious, unusually moralistic”
Ditlev, though the burden falls mainly
on Tove’s wonderfully promising older
brother, Edvin, who seems destined to
have a future as a “skilled worker”—
which, according to the author, ensures
a future of cloth instead of newspaper
on the table and eating with a knife
and fork. To this end, Ditlev refuses to
allow Edvin to quit his car-painting ap-
prenticeship, although Edvin hates the
job passionately and the cellulose lac-
quer is destroying his lungs.
Tove is under no such pressure; girls
are supposed to marry “a stable skilled
worker who doesn’t drink,” be sup-
ported, and have babies, or else find
a steady job. When, as a small child,
Tove announces that she wants to be a
poet, Ditlev’s response is “Don’t be a
fool! A girl can’t be a poet.” But she
was born irrepressibly a poet, and al-
though for years after the incident she
kept her aspirations to herself, it didn’t
stop her from writing poems through-
out her childhood.Like many mother’s girls who have
scary, unpredictable mothers, Tove be-
came especially adept, especially early,
at concealing her “true self”—a skill
that eventually got a stranglehold on
her. But there’s one thing she does not
have to conceal from her mother: her
intelligence, which Alfrida tries, poi-
gnantly, to leverage into a bit of special
standing. “Poor people’s children can
have brains too,” she announces.
When Tove turns six, Alfrida enrolls
her in school, proudly telling the rude,
witchy principal that her daughter “can
read and write without mistakes.” The
chilly response is “‘That’s too bad....
We have our own method for teach-
ing that to children, you know.’... My
mother moves a little bit away from me
and says faintly, ‘She learned it by her-
self, it’s not our fault.’” And like many
mother’s girls who empathize with their
mothers’ suffering, Tove experiences in
herself Alfrida’s shame, whether she is
cause or witness.
Unsurprisingly, Tove is a weirdo,
and she exhibits various peculiarities
in addition to brains that seem often
to appear in a constellation along with
a drive to make things out of words:
she doesn’t really know how to play
(I was elated to learn that like me she
was baffled by hopscotch), at times
she seems amazingly obtuse, she risks
bursting into tears when she encoun-
ters beauty, she’s unusually sensitive
and unusually self-involved, she’s re-
pelled by coarseness or an ugly use of
language, she often doesn’t get the joke
or the point, and she can be hilariously
literal-minded.
Her parents allow her to go to mid-
dle school, where she will be among
“better” people, and for a while she
can stave off the terrifying prospect of
fending for herself in the wide world.
Her father is not too moralistic, it
seems, to write her papers with or for
her, though the results can be a bit
bizarre. But it is understood that her
education is to end with graduation
from middle school and her confirma-
tion, after which she’s to find a job and
pay her room and board at home—at
least until she’s allowed to move out at
eighteen.
The implacable future is at the
threshold, and the distress and sheer
peculiarity of childhood are burning
off, leaving Tove with only an ashy res-
idue of warmth and comfort:I read in my poetry album while
the night wanders past the win-
dow—and, unawares, my child-
hood falls silently to the bottom of
my memory, that library of the soul
from which I will draw knowledge
and experience for the rest of my
life.“Being young is itself temporary, frag-
ile, and ephemeral,” the author writes
in “Youth.” “You have to get through
it—it has no other meaning.” And by
implication, you have to get through
it to something—the place that’s wait-
ing for you in the world. Tove has en-
visioned her place from the start: shehas a vague desire “to break into high
society someday,” but that is subsidiary
to her fierce drive to write poems and
become known for them.
The writing poems part is no ob-
stacle. The private act of writing is
the core of her being, her desperately
needed peace and pleasure. But how
on earth is she going to find anybody
who’s interested in reading or publish-
ing her poems?
Luck is the only real resource for
young people whose ambition is in no
way matched by privilege, and Tove
turns out to have a few lucky encoun-
ters as she wanders through the forest
of things arbitrarily chosen by life—
jobs, habitations, boyfriends, and so
on—that must be gotten through. A
friend of her brother knows an edi-
tor who reads her poetry and tells her
kindly to get back in touch with him
when she writes some poems for adults.
It’s hardly the response she was hoping
for, but on the other hand it’s a seri-
ous one, and it resides in her mind as
a distant, guiding star until one day by
chance she sees in the newspaper that
the editor has died.
Sometime later Mr. Krogh appears in
her life. He is the first truly kindred spirit
she has ever encountered, aside from her
beloved little thieving childhood friend,
Ruth, though he and Ruth occupy the
opposite—or oppositish—ends of some
spectrum. Strangely enough, it is Ruth
herself who effects the improbable in-
troduction. Mr. Krogh has offered,
not very credibly, to introduce Ruth to
somebody who can give her a job as a
chorus girl, and Ruth brings her friend
along as a bonus to both Tove and Mr.
Krogh: a cash source for the young girl,
another young girl for the cash source.
The favor Ruth does, however, is not
the one she intended to do. “How in
the world did you two ever find each
other?” Mr. Krogh exclaims, and dis-
misses out of hand Tove’s viability as a
chorus girl. But no matter—his apart-
ment is a miracle, lined with books and
paintings, and a recognition between
aesthetes has already occurred. Tove
returns home with a borrowed copy of
Les Fleurs du Mal and vastly extended
horizons.Hitler is now chancellor of Germany,
sending seismic tremors throughout
Europe, and Tove is renting a freezing-
cold room with tissue-thin walls. She
finally has a private place to write,
though the noise of the typewriter
is painful to her exquisitely sensitive
landlady, Mrs. Suhr, who rhapsodizes
over the picture of Hitler she has hang-
ing in the living room and the music of
his speeches blasting away on the radio.
One night Mrs. Suhr bursts into her
tenant’s room: “‘Did you hear him?’
she shouts enraptured. ‘Did you un-
derstand what he said? You don’t need
to understand it at all. It goes right
through your skin like a steambath.’”
She offers Tove a cup of coffee, and
although Tove hasn’t had anything to
eat or drink all day, she doesn’t want
to sit under Hitler’s picture: “It seems
to me that then he’ll notice me and find
a means of crushing me. What I do
would be considered ‘decadent art’ in
Germany.” The next day Germany in-
vades Austria.
Ditlevsen describes with disdain the
allure of authoritarianism among peo-
ple she runs into and their misplaced
identification as its beneficiaries. Andyet she has a counterbalancing aversion
to political engagement. In The Faces,
set and written during the worldwide
political and social upheaval of 1968,
Mundus hallucinates Gitte, her young
housekeeper, saying accusingly:“You quoted Hemingway. Repeat
what you said.”...
“Let those who want to save the
world do so,” [Mundus] said slowly,
“if only I can be left in peace to
comprehend it clearly....”
“Yes,” said Gitte, satisfied, “that’s
what you said. And thus your fate
was sealed. Hemingway shot him-
self in the head.... He belonged to
the dead world.”And in The Copenhagen Trilogy, during
the occupation almost the only mention
of the Nazi presence is when a woman
on the streetcar showily moves away
from some German soldiers sitting next
to her; Tove herself sees the soldiers
simply as tired boys who would no doubt
prefer to be at home, and she writes a
poem about them. The world’s fragile
situation fills her with horror and fear,
but it’s specifically fear of the effect it
might have on her personal life.
Although unemployment is high,
Tove finds a succession of jobs that
range from the preposterous to, even-
tually, several office jobs that she likes.
Surprisingly, she enjoys learning short-
hand and applying the skill. In the
evenings she goes out dancing with
her friend Nina, and then back to her
typewriter.
One day after a long hiatus Tove goes
to visit her friend Mr. Krogh, but the
building where he lived has been torn
down. So a second conduit to her ar-
dently desired future has disappeared
into thin air. But at one of the evening
dances a life-changing few minutes ca-
sually tick by. An attractive young man
asks Tove to dance. He is somewhat
more polished and expresses consid-
erably more interest in her than the
usual young men, and he ascertains
that she writes poetry. He does, too, as
it happens. After the dance is over, his
attention turns abruptly to a pretty girl
sitting alone across the room, but Tove
has already elicited what she needs: the
name of someone—Viggo F. Møller—
who edits a poetry journal, Wild Wheat.
She mails off a few poems to him and
finally, finally a response arrives: “Dear
Tove Ditlevsen: Two of your poems are,
to put it mildly, not good, but the third,
‘To My Dead Child,’ I can use.” She
calls, and they arrange to meet. “You
know what,” says her mother, “that ed-
itor—he probably wants to marry you.”
And as amused as she is by her moth-
er’s fantasy, it occurs to Tove that—
assuming he’s single—she herself has
“nothing against marrying him. En-
tirely sight unseen.”
Nor does she change her mind when
she does see him, despite the thirty-odd-
year difference between them. She finds
Viggo F., as he’s called, warm, knowl-
edgeable, magnificent, even handsome.
“Like all other young girls,” she says, “I
want to get married and have children
and a home of my own.”The romance that follows is heart-
rendingly flimsy:I sit close to him so that our legs
are touching each other, but it ap-
parently doesn’t make any impres-