Monday, December 6, 2021

Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement

Tove Ditlevsen

Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement

The Danish memoirist built a literature of disaster, brick by brick.

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Hilton Als

February 8, 2021

Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs, “The Copenhagen Trilogy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation. It’s because the author, who died by her own hand in 1976, when she was fifty-eight, makes profound and exciting art out of estrangement. Like a number of dispassionate, poetic modernists—the writers Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler, say, or the visual artists Alice Neel and Diane Arbus—Ditlevsen was marked, wounded, by her own sharp intelligence. Her world—the world she describes in “Childhood,” “Youth,” and “Dependency,” the three short books that make up the trilogy—was cash poor, emotionally mean, and misogynist. The sun must have shone sometimes in Denmark before and during the Second World War, but the atmosphere in “The Copenhagen Trilogy” is damp, dark, and flowerless. It’s not so surprising, then, that one of the first works Ditlevsen published, as a teen-ager, was a poem titled “To My Dead Child”:

I never heard your little voice.
Your pale lips never smiled at me.
And the kick of your tiny feet
Is something I will never see. . . .
See how I kiss your icy hand,
happy to be with you yet awhile,
silently I kiss you, weeping not,—
though the tears are burning in my throat.

In this attempt to imagine a mother’s repressed grief at the stillbirth of a child, Ditlevsen, who went on to publish more than twenty volumes of verse, fiction, children’s literature, and memoir, was beginning to explore the territory she masters in the trilogy’s terse, cinematic chapters: the drama and the particularity of disappointment.

You can’t be disappointed without first having hoped. As a little girl, Ditlevsen yearned for a complete union with her mother. “Childhood” (which was published in Danish in 1967 and is translated here by Tiina Nunnally) opens with the five-year-old Tove living with her parents, Alfrida and Ditlev, and her older brother, Edvin, in a small apartment in Vesterbro, the red-light district of Copenhagen. Times are hard. But they’ve always been hard. Tove’s parents met while both were employed at a bakery before the First World War. Ditlev, who was ten years Alfrida’s senior, had been sent to work as a shepherd when he was six. Social advancement was connected to economic advancement, and you couldn’t achieve either without an education. But higher education—or high school—was not an option if you were penniless, like Ditlev. A bookish socialist who wanted to be a writer—a dream that “never really left him,” according to his daughter—he was eventually hired as an apprentice reporter at a newspaper, but, “for unknown reasons,” he gave up the job. In any case, Ditlev’s love of words can’t compete with Alfrida’s constant arias of disillusionment. Alfrida is unhappy with the life she has made with her husband, but what can she do? She’s a woman. And poor. Her life is limited. Still, she makes an opera out of her dissatisfaction, and Tove is her rapt audience. Being an audience is one way to be loved. Being silent is another. Ditlevsen writes:

In the morning there was hope. It sat like a fleeting gleam of light in my mother’s smooth black hair that I never dared touch; it lay on my tongue with the sugar and the lukewarm oatmeal I was slowly eating while I looked at my mother’s slender, folded hands that lay motionless on the newspaper. . . . Behind her on the flowered wallpaper, 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 picture I found so tender and sad. But my mother burst out laughing and it sounded like dozens of paper bags filled with air exploding all at once. . . . [I]f I hadn’t looked at the picture, she wouldn’t have noticed me. Then she would have stayed sitting there with calmly folded hands and harsh, beautiful eyes fixed on the no-man’s-land between us. And my heart could have still whispered “Mother” for a long time and known that in a mysterious way she heard it. . . . Then something like love would have filled the whole world.

No mother is ordinary to her child. She is always as beautiful, confusing, and monumental as the world. It’s only when the child grows up that the parent becomes ordinary—which is to say, human. Part of the work of becoming an adult is figuring out how to reconcile your vision of your parents with who they actually are. Ditlevsen’s early obsession with writing may not have given her insight into that process, but she did learn how to use language to describe the rejecting force of Alfrida’s various gripes and dismissals. By the age of seven or so, Ditlevsen knew that writing was her vocation, and that, as such, it would separate her, “unwillingly, from those I should be closest to”; the gravitational pull of creativity would tear her away from her family, as it does to so many writers, even as she tore her family apart, the better to see it and tell its story.

One evening, after Ditlevsen quarrels with her brother—she is not yet a teen-ager—Edvin discovers the album where she keeps her poetry. Reading her verse aloud, he laughs and mocks her words. The humiliation is great, but Ditlevsen’s shame turns to pity when Edvin breaks down and starts to cry; he hates the life as a tradesman that has been mapped out for him, and his parents are not sympathetic to his plight. Perhaps what Edvin is crying over, too, is his sister’s ability to find a haven in her imagination, one that may open a wide window onto a larger world.

One’s heart sinks at the close of “Childhood,” which sets the tone for what’s to come. Ditlevsen is fourteen and has had to quit school to help support her family. Alfrida doesn’t commiserate; rather, she’s excited by the prospect of Tove abandoning her literary ambitions in order to earn a wage—Alfrida wants to buy a radio. (And, of course, if Tove’s hopes are crushed, she will be more like her mother, who can think only of herself.) But Tove is made of more resilient stuff than Alfrida, and her writing remains at the forefront of her mind, as she works, during the next few years—covered in “Youth” (which was also first published in 1967 and is translated by Nunnally)—as a rich family’s maid, a cleaner in a boarding house, a clerk in a lithographer’s office, a stock clerk in a nursing-supply company, a secretary in the State Grain Office, and an assistant in a lawyer’s office.

Dreaming of words and how to put them together sustains Ditlevsen. Her admiration of other girls is also a sustaining force. Her outgoing friend Ruth introduces her to an old man named Mr. Krogh. He’s a bibliophile who enjoys hanging out with young girls. Eventually, Ditlevsen shows him her poems, and although he doesn’t like them much, he has to admit that she’s a writer. (In this world of emotional deprivation, kindness is usually qualified, if it’s offered at all.) One day, she goes to visit the old man and finds that his building has been demolished. “The world doesn’t count me as anything and every time I get hold of a corner of it, it slips out of my hands again,” she muses. “The world is constantly changing—it’s only my childhood’s world that endures.”

But that world of childhood, colder than the real world, is about to come to a close. Over and over, Ditlevsen makes small but decisive steps toward building a life for herself as an artist. When she is about fifteen, she answers an ad in a local paper: a director is looking to stage a comedy and needs actors. Ditlevsen is eager to become an actress; after all, she likes to perform, and, when she practices her role, she greatly amuses Alfrida. At the theatre group’s first gathering, she meets a beautiful young woman called Nina, and before long they’re spending evenings out together. This is love in action. “I remember Mr. Krogh’s remark that people always want to use each other for something, and I’m glad that Nina has some use for me,” she says. One evening, at a dance hall with Nina, Ditlevsen encounters a tall, distinguished-looking boy named Albert. As they talk, she learns that he, too, writes poetry and has published some verses in a journal called Wild Wheat, which is edited by a man named Viggo F. Møller. Ditlevsen wastes no time in asking for Møller’s address and sending him some poems. He writes back to say that he will publish her.

“Youth” is set in politically significant times—Hitler has come to power in Germany, and some Danes would love to bring his brand of fascism home—but the outside world doesn’t carry much weight in Ditlevsen’s consciousness. Nor does it in ours, because by now her investigation of her own voice has overwhelmed the exterior world—hers and ours. Part of the fascination of “Youth” is its tone; Ditlevsen’s offhanded speech and beautifully rendered sentences, her passivity and her will, make one feel in the presence of an alert sleepwalker—a dreamer who wants to be claimed, told what to do, possessed, or, more precisely, mothered.

Soon to be a published poet, Ditlevsen is working at the State Grain Office. She passes the time watching people walk their dogs. She writes:

Some of the dogs have a short leash that’s jerked 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. There are also the masterless dogs that run around confused between people’s legs, apparently without enjoying their freedom. I’m like that kind of masterless dog—scruffy, confused, and alone.

Will Møller make a difference?

He does. Some seven or eight years older than Alfrida, considerate, and socially connected, he is more accessible than Mr. Krogh. Ditlevsen begins to spend time with Møller, whose sitting room is dominated by the color green—green curtains, green walls, green drinking glasses. It’s a place where ideas can grow, and maybe love. But the outside world is not so verdant. England has declared war on Germany. Ditlevsen recognizes the momentousness of this, but is preoccupied with anxiety about her writing, and about whether the destructive times will stand between her and publication. A wonderfully destabilizing writer, she admits to something that a more timid memoirist would never cop to: monstrous self-interest. By baring her bathos along with her genius, she makes us reflect on our own egotism. How many of us have thought only of ourselves at a time of great calamity for others?

In 1939, Møller helps publish a volume of Ditlevsen’s poems, titled “Girl-Soul.” After a courtship that feels more like an adoption, she marries him and moves in with him. Set in his ways, he needs his own space and sleeps in a different room. Which is fine with Ditlevsen: when she wakes up, she can get to work without interference.

As I read the third volume of “The Copenhagen Trilogy,” “Dependency” (which was published in Danish in 1971 and is translated by Michael Favala Goldman), I marvelled, again and again, at Ditlevsen’s authority—and at her shoulder-shrugging. Her “after all, it’s just life” mode reminded me of a conversation I used to have with Berlin-based friends about the “Berlin affect”—a sort of pervasive cool disinterest—and I wondered if Copenhagen also cultivates an atmosphere in which the complexities of existence are viewed from a rueful distance. Throughout the trilogy, Ditlevsen tells stories about being broken—and breaking others—with the utmost control. Although she can express a kind of self-governing feminism, especially when it comes to her work, a profound passivity often sets in. She wants to be saved, but who will do the saving?

When Ditlevsen is around twenty, she takes up with a man named Piet, who, like Møller, is privileged. (All the partners she describes in “Dependency” are upper-class and educated.) Piet persuades her to leave Møller, but it isn’t long before he dumps her for another woman. Oh, well. And then there is Ebbe, who makes Ditlevsen feel loved for the first time. They marry and have a child, Helle. But, after the girl is born, Ditlevsen loses interest in sleeping with him. The important thing is her writing. (Helle quickly learns to tell her dolls that Mama is working whenever Ditlevsen is at the typewriter.) At least through her work she can place a “veil between myself and reality.”

Ditlevsen is constantly performing a dance of the seven veils. Despite her bluntness on the page, no one in her life can know her. Her childhood taught her not to share her feelings; she cannot express her dissatisfaction or her fears to Ebbe. To do so would be to reveal vulnerability or need, and thus risk the kind of rejection she got from Alfrida. Ditlevsen hasn’t been with Ebbe for very long before she meets Carl at a party. A scientist with a medical degree, he admires her beauty; what Ditlevsen notices that first night is his teeth—“so crooked it looks like they are in two rows.” Riveted by this oddity, she sleeps with Carl, then finds out that she’s pregnant. She doesn’t know whose baby it is, Carl’s or Ebbe’s. “I can help you with that,” Carl says over sandwiches. He gives her an abortion after administering a shot of Demerol. Peace in a bottle—and with a man in control of it.

Separated from Ebbe, Ditlevsen manages to finish a book of short stories, but she no longer has any desire to write. All she wants, really, is another shot. One day, Carl asks her when her divorce will be finalized:

Anytime, I said, figuring that once I was married to him it would be even easier to get him to give me shots. Wouldn’t you like to have another baby? he asked. . . . Sure, I said immediately, because a child would bind Carl to me even more, and I wanted him with me for the rest of my life.

Every dog has its day. And, like a dog, Ditlevsen will do whatever it takes to get what her rapidly developing habit requires. Drugs are like sex for her and Carl; when she’s high, she’s blissed-out, satisfied—and it’s then that Carl takes her, roughly. When she retreats from him emotionally—in order to attend a literary dinner that includes Evelyn Waugh, whose “sharp pen” she admires—Carl shows up, uninvited, to pull her away. Complicit with his need for power, and her need for his power, she leaves with him. What would Alfrida’s caustic rejection mean to her now? Nothing can hurt Tove, not even the neglect she inflicts on Helle. (The couple hire a nanny, ostensibly so that Ditlevsen can work, but mostly so that Helle, and their new baby, Michael, won’t interfere with their rituals. Carl and Tove also, incredibly, take in a baby that Carl fathered with another woman, to keep her from being put up for adoption.)

Nunnally and Goldman have done an excellent job with Ditlevsen’s strong rhythms and the dramatic sweep of her story. But it’s a sweep in miniature—a catastrophe in a box. Unlike Karl Ove Knausgaard and many other recent memoirists, Ditlevsen doesn’t have a larger philosophy about pain or death; she is drawn to the flatness of facts and the way they mix with dreams. She builds a literature of disaster, brick by brick, entombing within it all the people who couldn’t love her and whom she couldn’t love. Her individualism, which is also a form of skepticism, reminds me of the dissolute, romantic voice that shapes Robert Musil’s epic “The Man Without Qualities,” and of Diane Arbus, who saw the fascination in everything, even in what others might label wrong. In her first book of photographs, Arbus described a nudist colony populated by latter-day Adams and Eves:

After a while you begin to wonder. I mean there’ll be an empty pop bottle or a rusty bobby pin underfoot, the lake bottom oozes mud in a particularly nasty way, the outhouse smells, the woods look mangy. It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation had said, “All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.” And they did.

For some, mucking things up can be an assertion of will; negative attention is better than none. Reality—or one’s understanding of it—can be as dependent on pain as it is on hope, and Ditlevsen is addicted to both.

“Dependency” strikes me as an inspired title for this volume, which is called “Gift” in Danish—a word that can mean “marriage” or “poison.” Ditlevsen has a dependency not only on Demerol but on the question of what it means to be a wife while also a lovesick daughter and an artist. In a way, being a junkie is her most selfless role; one of the reasons you get high is to forget who you are and concentrate on how you feel as the world melts away.

Eventually, she is admitted to a hospital to get clean. Her doctor urges her never to see Carl again, and she returns home to children who are strangers to her and immediately meets a new, caring lover named Victor. Reading this, I thought of the cruel, glittering, and beautiful world of “Veronika Voss” (1982), one of the last films directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, also a drug addict with an interest in power and degradation. In it, a former star, addicted to morphine, becomes a slave to a doctor who withholds the drug at will. Imagine what Fassbinder would have made of such lines as the following, which close “Dependency”:

There were five doctors in the town, and Victor visited every one of them right away and forbade them to have anything to do with me. So it was impossible for me to get the drug, and slowly I adapted to accept life as it was. . . . I started writing again, and whenever reality got under my skin, I bought a bottle of red wine and shared it with Victor. I was rescued from my years of addiction, but ever since, the shadow of the old longing still returns faintly if I have to have a blood test, or if I pass a pharmacy window. It will never disappear completely for as long as I live.

Adapting to accept life as it is. How many of us have managed to do that without giving up the dreams that helped define us in the first place? ♦

This article has been updated to include new information about Tove Ditlevsen’s first published work. It was “Prose and Poetry,” which appeared in Wild Wheat, No. 9, in July, 1937. Although Ditlevsen suggests in “The Copenhagen Trilogy” that “To My Dead Child” was her first publication, it actually appeared two issues later, in Wild Wheat, No. 11, in September, 1937.

Published in the print edition of the February 15 & 22, 2021, issue, with the headline “Dream Lover.”

Hilton Als, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of “White Girls” and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University.

THE NEW YORKER