{"id":33245,"date":"2012-12-02T07:31:17","date_gmt":"2012-12-02T06:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/?page_id=33245"},"modified":"2012-12-02T07:34:33","modified_gmt":"2012-12-02T06:34:33","slug":"andersen-what-was-he-like-by-elias-bredsdorff-nr-1","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/?page_id=33245","title":{"rendered":"Andersen : What was he like ? by Elias Bredsdorff Nr.1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andersen : What was he like ? by Elias Bredsdorff Nr.1<\/strong><\/p>\n

Having read some of Andersen’s posthumously published letters Georg Brandes, the Danish literary critic, whose brilliant scholarly appreciation of Andersen’s genius as a writer of fairy tales in 1869 had given much pleasure to Andersen himself, described him in a letter to Bj\u00f8rnstjerne Bj\u00f8rnson, the Norwegian poet, as ” a mind completely and entirely filled by himself and without a single spiritual interest”. However harsh these words may seem they are not entirely unjustified. Throughout his life the one thing which interested Hans Christian Andersen most was: Hans Christian Andersen. All his life he had a desperate craving for affection and praise, and his famous vanity was to a large extent a childlike inability to conceal his pleasure at winning recognition and fame.<\/p>\n

His diaries and letters abound with stories of strangers abroad who, when learning that he was a Dane, asked him whether he knew Hans Christian Andersen, and each time he was equally delighted to report their reaction when he revealed his identity. A friend described how one day Andersen, seeing a man he knew on the other side of the street in Copenhagen, crossed over and said, “Now I’m being read in Spain, well, goodbye! ”<\/p>\n

Much of Andersen’s best fiction is also basically about himself, not only his six novels but also the fairy tales and stories. He is the soldier in “The Tinder Box<\/a>“; he is the sensitive princess who can feel one pea through twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds; he is the student in “Little Ida’s Flowers”; he is the Little Mermaid, the outsider who came from the depths and was never really accepted in the new world into which he moved; he is the little boy who could see that the emperor had nothing on; he is the ugly duckling transformed into a beautiful swan; he is the poet in “The Naughty Boy”, hit by one of Cupid’s arrows; he is the fir tree incapable of enjoying the moment and always either looking back nostalgically to the past or hoping for something better to come; he is the gardener in “The Gardener and the Squire”, etc., etc. Andersen has, as Hans Brix once said, written more self-portraits than Rembrandt ever painted.<\/p>\n

His critics called it being obsessed with himself; he called it being subjective, and wrote in his diary: “It can never be wrong for a poet to be subjective, for that in itself is a sign of the amount of poetry he has inside himself.” His quarrel with some of his early Danish critics, especially a man called C. Molbech, was that they wanted him to write the way they wrote; he wrote in his diary on March 27, 1834: “Let me follow my own nature. Why must I trot according to fashion? If my gait is slouching, well, then it is the natural way for me to walk. If he [Molbech] doesn’t find nuts on my tree but apples, then it doesn’t necessarily mean that my tree is no good.”<\/p>\n

Index<\/a> – \u00a00<\/a> \u00a01 \u00a02 \u00a03 \u00a04 \u00a05 \u00a06 \u00a07 \u00a08 \u00a09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andersen : What was he like ? by Elias Bredsdorff Nr.1 Having read some of Andersen’s posthumously published letters Georg Brandes, the Danish literary critic, whose brilliant scholarly appreciation of Andersen’s genius as a writer of fairy tales in 1869 had given much pleasure to Andersen himself, described him in a letter to Bj\u00f8rnstjerne Bj\u00f8rnson, … L\u00e6s mere Andersen : What was he like ? by Elias Bredsdorff Nr.1<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":169,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-33245","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33245"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33271,"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/33245\/revisions\/33271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hcandersen-homepage.dk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}