A Garden Encounter

I have to confess, my meeting with Hans Christian Andersen in Miss Cox’s garden did not live up to my hopes.

In the bitter cold I nearly froze to death, as I waited on the bench. Finally, his tall, awkward form loomed in the arch of the garden entrance. He greeted me in Danish, then in German, and then, I think, in Italian. Andersen enjoyed traveling. In his amiable wanderings, he covered most of Europe. He also visited England where his fairy tales were more popular than in his native Denmark, despite the tales being badly translated. I knew he was a friend of Charles Dickens, so imagine my embarrassment when I realized he spoke not a word of English. I, who rarely venture ten miles from home, speak no other language.

There we sat on the bench, a world apart. I am sure he felt out of place, yet, that is the story of his life.

The son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, he entertained notions of being an actor, a dancer, or a singer. He hung around the theater in his hometown of Odense. Outwardly inept and inwardly confident, he cut a strange figure. He possessed an adequate singing voice, which became the calling card that got him into the houses of the local upper class as part of the entertainment for dinners. He liked what he saw.

At fourteen he departed for Copenhagen to join the Royal Theater. They told him to get a job. Even after his voice changed, ending his singing career, he persisted in acting and dancing, for which he had no aptitude yet for which he maintained a continued desire.

Still trying to find a place in the theater, he turned his hand to playwriting. Two plays were quickly rejected by the Royal Theater, although Jonas Collin, the financial director, saw a spark in the young Andersen that suffered from a lack of formal education.

Collin arranged for Andersen to enter grammar school. The seventeen-year-old Hans sat in a class of eleven-year-olds, becoming a natural lightning rod for his schoolmaster’s animosity, who heavy-handedly forbad his older student from such upper-class pretensions as creative writing. Andersen suffered four years of this treatment, falling into depression.

Years later, in the 1840s, after achieving literary and financial success, he still did not find his place in society. Moving among the upper class and even royalty, he remained in the minds of his new acquaintances the son of a cobbler—an oddity. Even his benefactor and adopted family, the Collins, addressed him formally, never intimately.

Andersen did not help matters. He persisted in falling romantically, sometime publicly, in love with unattainable women and men, notably the famed singer Jenny Lind and well-known dancer Harald Scharff.

Andersen found his place in establishing a body of writing that appealed to children and adults and that has neither clumsy moralism, nor needless florid description, as writing meant for children tended toward in that period (and beyond). His tales resounded with human experience, drawn from his own internal and external struggles, cast in the form of little mermaids, tin soldiers, and match girls. The stories were a mix of heartfelt emotion and social commentary. There really had been nothing like it before. He influenced future writers such as Lewis Carroll, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, and A.A. Milne.

But for the moment, Andersen and I sat staring at each other. He put up a finger, the internationally-recognized sign for “wait,” took out a piece of paper and scissors from his inside coat pocket, and, folding the paper in half, skillfully and quickly cut away until he depicted two swans facing each other. He handed it to me as if that had been the purpose of his coming, then hastily escaped the confines of the garden.

I will treasure the paper cutting.

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