Books: Once Upon a Time

THE WILD SWAN by Monica Stirling. 383 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.95.

In the Danish town of Odense, all the signposts carry an extra arm. It points the way to Andersens Hus, where in 1805 an ugly duckling named Hans Christian Andersen was born. The world today needs no introduction to this cobbler’s son whose fairy stories, published in dozens of tongues, will last as long as there are children to hear them. Andersen did not write them for children, or for money or fame, although the stories brought him both. He wrote them for himself, and Novelist Monica Stirling’s tender biography tells why.

Gangly Youth. The young Andersen saw life as a fairy story more magical than any he wrote. Beneath the Odense River, he knew, lay China, a fantasy kingdom that surfaces in Andersen’s The Nightingale. His father let him dream. “No matter what the boy wants to be,” he told his wife, “if it is the silliest thing in the world, let him have his own way.” At 14, and gangly as a stork, Hans Christian stowed his toy theater, a loaf of bread and 13 rigsdaler into his knapsack and went to Copenhagen.

Copenhagen was a magic town. It was said that the King, after the gates were locked at night, slept with the keys under his pillow. And Hans Christian was sure that if one knocked on the castle door, his majesty would open it himself, in slippers and crown and any old robe!

He was sure, too, that people would be good to him, and so, of course, they were. Giuseppe Siboni, director of the Royal Singing Academy in Copenhagen, took him in off the street to sing at a dinner party, and gave him lessons till his voice broke. The Danish Royal Theater offered him employment as a troll. The King himself, who had read some of his poetry, sent him on a two-year tour of the Continent and granted him 400 rigsdaler a year.

No one ever begged him to grow up, and he never did. He traveled with a child’s restless, wide-eyed curiosity. “Oh what a noble achievement!” he said, riding his first train. “We fly like the clouds in a storm.” He met Dickens, Hugo, Dumas, Lamartine, Kierkegaard, Ibsen. “He looks like a large child, a sort of half-angel,” said the Irish poet William Allingham. He loved as a child loves: marriage and children were grown-up affairs and not for him. His fears were those of a child: of falling ill, taking the wrong medicine, putting letters in the wrong envelopes, missing trains.

Last Tales. All the marvelous stories —The Ugly Duckling, The Ice Maiden, Thumbelina, The Emperor’s New Clothes—burst out like dreams, unbidden, from a talent that did not appreciate itself. Even while reciting his tales on demand to charmed royal circles all over Europe, Andersen waited hopefully for the time when his novels, not very good, and his poetry and plays, only a little better, would get the same acclaim. But that was not to be. And the time came when the last fairy story had been written. “How beautiful life is,” said Andersen, dying at 70, his mind still dreaming. “It is as if I were sailing to a land far, far away, where there is no pain, no sorrow.”