Tove Ditlevsen’s Childhood, Youth, Dependency and the Book Group

Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood, Youth, Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy, 1968–1971 (Penguin 2020)
First two books translated by Tiina Nunnally 1985; the third by Michael Favala Goldman 2009

Before the meeting: In January this year as part of a series of belated obituaries, The New York Times published an article on Tove Ditlevsen, 47 years after her death. You can read the whole thing at this link (you might have to sign up for a free account to get access).

The short version: Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) was one of Denmark’s most popular authors. Her published works included 11 books of poetry, seven novels and four story collections, as well as the three short memoirs, Childhood (Barndom in Danish), Youth (Ungdom) and Dependency (Gift) that have been collected here as The Copenhagen Trilogy. She didn’t enjoy critical success during her lifetime and was virtually unknown outside Denmark. None of her books of poetry were translated into English. Then in 2016 translator Michael Favala Goldman picked up a copy of Gift in an airport, considered it to be a masterpiece, and set the snowball in motion for a critical discovery in the English-speaking world and elsewhere.

I was prompted to go looking for that background by something about the book itself. Perhaps because I’ve recently read two brilliant memoirs by Annie Ernaux (blog posts here and here), not to mention Proust’s vast À la recherche du temps perdu, I felt that the first book (Barndom/Childhood) and much of the second (Ungdom/Youth) were too neat, too confident in their detail to be trusted as memoir.

The first book begins with Ditlevsen as a small child trying unsuccessfully to avoid triggering her mother’s anger, and observing the life of their apartment block. ‘Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.’ She goes to school, and has an ambivalent relationship with the cool girls who gather at ‘the trash-can corner’. She thinks of herself as unattractive and no one contradicts her. She is hospitalised with diphtheria. She reads a lot and writes poetry that she keeps in a secret album.

In Youth, still living at home, she has a series of terrible jobs, is befriended by the worldly Nina, and enters the world of boys and kissing goodnight at the door. She continues to write and, encouraged by her older brother and Nina, dares to show her poems to a literary gent who offers qualified encouragement of her writing and allows her to borrow from his well stocked bookshelves, then disappears without explanation. Another older man becomes a mentor and publishes one of her poems in his literary journal. She fantasises becoming his wife. At the end of this volume, she has had a book of poems published.

Rather than memoirs, these books read as novelisations of the writer’s early life, and as novels they have an almost generic quality. I was so lulled into thinking of them as fiction that I was taken aback when, in Dependency, Piet Hein turns up as a character. Piet Hein, as you probably know, was a Danish polymath (1905–1996) who wrote little poems he called grooks, of which probably the most famous is

The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain
And simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again,
but less
and less
and less.

He was a real person, who would have been known to the book’s first readers at least as well as Ditlevsen herself, and he was very much alive when the book was published. He is portrayed mockingly as a charming but callous serial monogamist. Maybe, I thought, all the other people named – and to varying degrees shamed – were real as well. I did a little duck-duck-going, and sure enough the people given full names mostly did exist. So I’m guessing that part of the books’ original appeal may have been their gossip value – a popular writer was spilling the beans.

In the third book, things get much worse for Tove, and as a result (I’m sorry to confess this of myself as a reader) the book is much more interesting. Its Danish title, Gift, means ‘poison’ but it’s also some form of the word for ‘marriage’. Michael Favala Goldman’s title, Dependency, suggests both Ditlevsen’s approach to marriage and relationships, and her harrowing experience of drug addiction. In this book, Ditlevsen marries, divorces, and has a child with a new lover (not Piet Hein). When she falls pregnant a second time she has an illegal and traumatic abortion, which leads to her first experience of the opioid painkiller Demerol. The book comes fully alive and gripping in the detailed account of the abortion and her subsequent addiction to Demerol. The harrowing process of drying out, relapsing, drying out again, is described with tremendous force.

I’m not sure I needed the first two books, but I was shaken and stirred by the third.

There’s not a lot of lightness – her relationships with men are terrible and mainly explicitly transactional, though (spoiler alert) that changes at the very end. One snippet of literary gossip is an exception that’s worth mentioning as a moment that makes her (and us) realise how grim her life has become in the grip of addiction and of the controlling lover who administers her ‘shots’. It also casts a somewhat benign light on her ambivalence about her children. She accepts a rare invitation to dinner:

During the dinner I sat next to Evelyn Waugh, a small, vibrant, youthful man with a pale face and curious eyes. … Kjeld Abell asked Evelyn Waugh if they had such young and beautiful female authors in England. He said no, and when I asked what brought him to Denmark, he answered that he always took trips around the world when his children were home on vacation from boarding school, because he couldn’t stand them.

(Page 334)

After the meeting: It was a long time between meetings – I wrote the previous paragraphs a couple of months ago – and my memories of the book had faded when at last we met. In the days leading up to the meeting there were ominous rumblings on our WhatsApp group giving advance notice that many group members either disliked the book intensely or couldn’t finish it for reasons other than lack of time. A lone voice said it was brilliant. It was promising to be an interesting evening.

But then, one chap was attacked by an unruly plate-glass door on his way here and had to be taken to a hospital emergency, which would have been bad enough, but the man who drove him to hospital was the book’s main advocate and – I learned later – he himself had just finished the book and thought it was a masterpiece.

Because of the accident itself and the absence of advocacy, discussion was fairly muted. One chap who had also just finished reading the book gave a spirited account of why he loved it (making it three out of 11 definite thumbs up; maybe three definite thumbs-down). He read it quickly. He couldn’t put it down, he said, and then at time he had to put it down. My sense was that a number of people got to the moments when you have to put the book down and just didn’t want to pick it up again – some would say they were lily-livered.

Someone pointed out that a good deal of the action takes place in Denmark occupied by the Germans, and it’s a revelation that for Ditlevsen and her literary pals the occupation was little more than a dark shadow on the edges of their lives.

But it wasn’t long before conversation moved to other pressing matters: the Women’s Football World Cup – the Matilda’s had beaten France, but not yet been defeated by England, and many of us were in love; the Voice referendum, Peter Dutton’s dastardliness and Anthony Albanese’s alleged lack of statesmanship; the mushroom dinner; parental dementia; and far too much food.

No one was interested in my recitation of the above grook.