Tuesday, December 7, 2021

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen review / Confessions of a literary outsider

Facing demons … Tove Ditlevsen. Photograph: Per Pejstrup

FICTION IN TRANSLATION

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen review – confessions of a literary outsider

The Danish writer reflects on success, addiction and divorces in three volumes of compulsive autofiction: Childhood, Youth and Dependency

Liz Jensen
Wed 16 Oct 2019 09.00 BST

or the four decades after the outbreak of the second world war, Tove Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers, whose many identities – dreamy working-class misfit, ruthlessly focused artist, ambivalent wife and mother, literary outsider and drug addict – were constantly at war. While always the central protagonist in her dispatches from the frontline of her own life, she never pretended to be the heroine. Which makes it unsurprising that in an era with an appetite for autofiction, her mordant, vibrantly confessional autobiographical work should be experiencing a revival.

Ditlevsen was a famous poet by her early 20s, but she did not consider herself young. Why would she, when a working-class childhood ended at 14? Already she had been sacked as a maid, for scrubbing a piano down with water; been nanny to a boy who announced: “You must do everything I say or else I’ll shoot you”; lived in a boarding house with Hitler’s portrait on the wall; embarked on the first of her four doomed marriages; and taken a lover who sent identical “dear Kitten” letters to all his mistresses.

Ah, those men. The Copenhagen Trilogy reveals how uneasily Ditlevsen’s childhood conviction that she would one day become “a woman poet” sat with the prevailing belief – championed fervently by her domineering mother – that only marriage could protect a girl from poverty and social shame. Though Ditlevsen fulfilled her ambition to live by her pen, society’s message remained tattooed on her soul.

Idly observing dogs outside the State Grain Office in Youth, she identifies wryly with “those masterless dogs that run around confusedly between people’s legs, apparently without enjoying their freedom”, and envies those with owners. “Some of them have a short leash that jerks impatiently every time they stop. Others have a long leash and their Masters wait patiently whenever an exciting smell detains the dog. That’s the kind of Master I want. That’s the kind of life I could thrive in.”

Little wonder, then, that when a literary magazine accepts her first poems for publication, Ditlevsen’s imagination is fired not by the Woolfian dream of financial security and a room of one’s own, but by the eligibility of its ageing editor: “If he’s single, I have nothing against marrying him. Entirely sight unseen.”

Though written years after the events they describe, the pages – fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman – have the immediacy of diary entries so fresh that the ink has barely dried. In reconstructing her own gaucheness, lack of education and shameless opportunism, Ditlevsen’s strength as a writer lies in her militant refusal to present her choices and their consequences – be they love affairs, backstreet abortions or chronic drug addiction – through the filters of hindsight or amour-propre.

With characteristically dark wit, Ditlevsen titled the final, most powerful volume “Gift” – a word with two meanings in Danish: marriage and poison. The English title Dependency is equally apt; within a few chapters, Ditlevsen, divorced from the literary editor (because yes, reader, she did marry him), has escaped the pressures of a second doomed union and new motherhood and stumbled into the arms of her next husband, a quietly deranged doctor who fulfils her needs as no man has done before.

To Ditlevsen the opioid Demerol, a shot of which he gives her as an alternative to foreplay, has a name that “sounds like birdsong”. Immediately, the mental and physical bliss it offers is infinitely more intense than the escapist rush she gets from writing. “I smiled thankfully at him,” she writes, “and the fluid went into my blood, lifting me up to the only level where I wanted to exist. Then he went to bed with me, like he always did, when the effect was at its peak. His embrace was strangely brief and violent.”

As her dependency on Demerol and her supplier deepens, the narrative becomes utterly, agonisingly compulsive. It builds to a wrenching climax made all the more poignant by the fact that after five years of virtual captivity in the realm of addiction, Ditlevsen – finally clean, but a stranger to her own children – remains shakily aware that the gift of her third marriage lingers in her blood.

And there it would stay. At the age of 58, after a series of mental breakdowns and a fourth divorce, Ditlevsen put an end to her own life. Although the Copenhagen Trilogy is only a small part of her extraordinary legacy, its evocation of a working-class woman’s battle with masters, leashes and her own demons makes it a masterpiece in its own right.