{"id":149733,"date":"2020-12-09T12:34:40","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T17:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149733"},"modified":"2020-12-09T15:00:09","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T20:00:09","slug":"re-covered-a-danish-genius-of-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/12\/09\/re-covered-a-danish-genius-of-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: A Danish Genius of Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

FSG\u2019s forthcoming edition of the Copenhagen Trilogy.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was the Danish writer Dorthe Nors who first introduced me to the work of her countrywoman, the poet, novelist, and memoirist Tove Ditlevsen. This was in spring 2018, when I was commissioning features for the first issue of The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women<\/em>, the rare books catalogue\u2013cum\u2013literary magazine of which I\u2019m the managing editor. \u201cShe is loved by generations of women and put down by generations of men,\u201d Nors wrote in an email. \u201cShe was also nuts and quite extraordinary in her personal life. Many men, drug addictions, often submitted to mental institutions, and LOVED by women readers. I mean: LOVED!\u201d<\/p>\n

This was more than enough to intrigue me, but Nors\u2019s finished piece, \u201cThe Suicide of Tove Ditlevsen,\u201d only left me all the more fascinated. In it, Nors describes Ditlevsen\u2014who was born in Vesterbro, a working-class district in Copenhagen, in 1917, and killed herself at age fifty-eight in 1976, after many years battling depression and addiction\u2014as \u201cthe Billie Holiday of poetry, accessible, complex, and simple all at the same time. There\u2019s a special mournful sweetness in the earlier poems that belongs to the girlish. Later, her prose turned the dreams and disappointments of life as a woman inside out.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was keen to read anything of Ditlevsen\u2019s that I could, but despite what seemed to be her relatively steady popularity in Denmark, few of her books had been translated into English, and those that had were out of print and hard to track down. Then, in one of those joyfully serendipitous moments that do somehow seem to happen in the world of publishing, less than a year after we\u2019d published Nors\u2019s essay, I found myself having lunch with a publicist from the Penguin Classics list here in the UK who was raving about their forthcoming reissue of the forgotten Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen\u2019s \u201castonishing\u201d three-volume memoir, the Copenhagen Trilogy.<\/p>\n

The minute the galleys arrived I fell on them greedily, hoping I wouldn\u2019t be disappointed. I needn\u2019t have worried. Ditlevsen\u2019s autobiographical series\u2014comprised of Childhood<\/em> (Barndom<\/em>; 1967), Youth <\/em>(Ungdom<\/em>; 1967), and Dependency <\/em>(Gift<\/em>; 1971)\u2014is an absolute tour de force, the final volume in particular. They\u2019re as brilliant as I\u2019d been led to expect, but also surprisingly intense and elegant. Ditlevsen\u2019s writing (Childhood <\/em>and Youth<\/em> are translated by Tiina Nunnally, and Dependency<\/em> by Michael Favela Goldman) is crystal clear and vividly, painfully raw. Together, the trilogy tells the story of Ditlevsen\u2019s journey as a writer; as a woman, wife, and mother; and, most candidly of all in that piercing final volume, as an addict. As the trilogy progresses, it becomes clear how deeply intertwined these three different threads of her life were.<\/p>\n

With Farrar, Straus and Giroux\u2019s publication next month of the Copenhagen Trilogy, it\u2019s America\u2019s turn to be gripped by \u201cTove fever.\u201d Meanwhile, here in the UK, Penguin Classics is adding the first of Ditlevsen\u2019s novels to its list: The Faces <\/em>(Ansigterne<\/em>, 1968). (The novel, in this, Tiina Nunnally\u2019s, translation, was published in America back in 1991, by Fjord Press, but has fallen out of print in the years since.) It\u2019s an inspired pick, especially for those readers, like myself, whose introduction to Ditlevsen\u2019s work has been the Copenhagen Trilogy, not least because she wrote it alongside her memoirs, during a period of impressive creativity after what had been a shattering stretch of depression and writer\u2019s block.<\/p>\n

Ditlevsen was married four times, and her discovery of the delights of opioids contributes to the breakdown of the second of these relationships. As we learn in Dependency<\/em>, after a fling with a student doctor named Carl, she finds out she\u2019s pregnant. Unsure whether the baby belongs to him or her husband, Ebbe, she asks Carl for an abortion, which he agrees to perform himself. Having had a rather fraught time with a previous backstreet termination, Ditlevsen asks him for some kind of anaesthetic, and he readily obliges with a shot of the painkiller Demerol. \u201c[A] bliss I have never felt before spreads through my entire body\u201d is how Ditlevsen describes this Damascene moment. Immediately after the effects of the drug wear off, she\u2019s desperate for her next hit. \u201cDemerol,\u201d she thinks, riding the streetcar home after the procedure is complete. \u201cThe name sounds like birdsong. I decide never to let go of this man who can give me such an indescribable blissful feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

She knows that she\u2019s \u201cin love with a clear liquid in a syringe and not with the man who had the syringe,\u201d but she leaves Ebbe for Carl. As soon as her divorce comes though, she walks down the aisle again, figuring that \u201conce I was married to him it would be even easier to get him to give me shots.\u201d He wants her to have his child, which she also agrees to without question: \u201cSure, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

So as to convince Carl to give her regular Demerol injections, she pretends an old ear complaint is still troubling her. He suggests she might need an operation\u2014she\u2019s dubious at first, caught in a bind, but when he tells her that she\u2019ll be able to have all the Demerol she wants while recovering, that\u2019s enough to convince her. While they search for a surgeon willing to perform the job, Carl gets his wife a prescription for methadone to tide her over when he\u2019s not in the house with his hypodermic at hand.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a truly flabbergasting state of affairs: the fact that Ditlevsen willingly undergoes a major surgical procedure she doesn\u2019t need, and which ultimately leaves her permanently deaf in one ear. Indeed, her entire relationship with Carl reads like something out of a soap opera: the way he aides and abets her increasingly desperate addiction; the fact that relatively early on in their relationship, on discovering that another woman is pregnant with Carl\u2019s child, Ditlevsen adopts the baby\u2014\u201cI didn\u2019t think one child more or less made any difference,\u201d she explains serenely\u2014and raises it as her own, alongside her daughter (fathered by Ebbe) and her son (fathered by Carl); and perhaps most dramatic of all, the way their marriage culminates in Carl\u2019s institutionalization for psychosis, at the very moment that Ditlevsen herself is first sent to rehab.<\/p>\n

With the same gruesome, unflinching attention to detail with which Ditlevsen describes these real-life trials and tribulations in Dependency<\/em>, in The Faces <\/em>she tells the story of Lise Mundus, a forty-year-old wife, mother, and successful children\u2019s book author, who loses her grip on sanity and finds herself in a parallel nightmarish world of psychiatric wards and hallucinations.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When we first meet Lise, she\u2019s living with her philandering husband, Gert, her children, and the woman who works as the family\u2019s housekeeper and nanny, Gitte. A relatively new addition to the household, Gitte is \u201cthe result\u201d of Lise\u2019s sudden rise to fame two years earlier, when she won a prestigious literary prize. Until that point, life had been easy. Her books had been \u201cnicely reviewed in the women\u2019s pages, had sold well,\u201d but Lise herself had been \u201creassuringly overlooked by the world that was preoccupied with literature for adults.\u201d Winning the prize changed this though:<\/p>\n

Fame had brutally ripped away the veil that had always separated her from reality. She had given a thank-you speech that Gert had written for her, and during the speech she had been seized by her childhood fear of being unmasked, fear that someone would discover that she was putting on an act and pretending to be someone she was not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most unnerving of all though, Lise hasn\u2019t been able to write another word since.<\/p>\n

The Lise we meet in the opening pages of the novel is like a rabbit caught in the headlights. She\u2019s wary, her various suspicions tipping over into full-blown paranoia. Her fears seem irrational, but just as she\u2019s slipping into a sleeping-pill-assisted oblivion one night, her husband appears at her bedside, bringing with him the news that his lover, Grete, has committed suicide. Her marriage clearly has its problems. The next morning, Lise thinks she hears Gert and Gitte plotting to try to get her to do away with herself, just like Grete, but when she confronts them, they accuse her of confusing \u201cdream and reality.\u201d In an attempt to escape what she now thinks of as their evil clutches, she takes a massive overdose of sleeping pills then immediately calls her doctor for help: \u201cHell enveloped her and she hid her face in her hands. Tears slid down her cheeks and it felt like her face was melting and running through her fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two days later, she wakes up in hospital\u2014the \u201ctoxic trauma centre\u201d to be exact\u2014her throat raw from having had her stomach pumped. Physically, she\u2019s in sound condition, but psychologically, she\u2019s still struggling. She\u2019s moved to the state hospital, and this is where things begin to go drastically downhill. She believes someone\u2019s hidden a loudspeaker in her pillow, and she searches for it anxiously. Meanwhile, when the woman in the next bed introduces herself, Lise is shocked to see that her neighbor has the head of a donkey:<\/p>\n

Frightened, she turned away without answering. Another donkey head was lying on that side, staring at her. She turned onto her back and looked up at the ceiling while her mind was convulsed with terror. She knew that there were institutions filled with deformed and monstrous human creatures who were kept hidden from the world, and who lived and died without anyone other than the hospital personnel ever seeing them. Had they brought her to that kind of place?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is only the beginning of her torments. Patients sound like \u201cwound-up dolls whose batteries were almost dead,\u201d and Lise hears her husband speaking to her from behind the pipework and grating in the hospital bathroom. Then Gitte appears, dressed in a nurse\u2019s uniform, offering a glass of juice. They\u2019re still plotting to kill her, Lise realizes: \u201cThe liquid had dark particles on the bottom, and all at once she knew there was poison in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

By inviting the reader deep into the dark, troubled recesses of Lise\u2019s mind\u2014presenting what she hears and sees as hard facts, in exactly the way that Lise herself is experiencing it\u2014Ditlevsen delves headfirst into the horrors of psychosis. But there\u2019s also something transcendent about Lise\u2019s experience: \u201cTime raised its terrible wings and flew away toward a reality that was not her own. All weight was lifted from her, and she stared up into a blue sky that was studded with memories.\u201d In yielding to the voices, Lise finds relief: \u201cThey spoke to her so tenderly that the sweetness of surrender filled her like a drug.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that Ditlevsen was herself one of insanity\u2019s intimates does much to explain this book\u2019s harrowing authenticity,\u201d wrote Susan Spano Wells in her\u00a0New York Times <\/em>review of the novel in 1991. Depression and addiction stalked Ditlevsen\u2019s life from the very beginning. Her maternal grandfather was an alcoholic. \u201cHe drank a whole bottle of schnapps every day,\u201d Ditlevsen\u2019s mother tells her daughter in Childhood<\/em>, \u201cand in spite of everything, things were a lot better for us when he finally pulled himself together and hanged himself.\u201d Theirs isn\u2019t the only family in their neighborhood dealing with such problems. The courtyard below the building in which Ditlevsen grows up is thick with the \u201crancid stench of beer and urine,\u201d and another little girl, Rapunzel\u2014whose parents work at Carlsberg and \u201ceach drink fifty beers a day\u201d\u2014beat their daughter with a stick or attack each other with \u201cbottles and broken chair legs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although not physically abused herself, Ditlevsen still envisages childhood as bodily harm. \u201cWherever you turn, you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it\u2019s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart,\u201d she writes in Youth<\/em>. It\u2019s a sentiment that\u2019s echoed in the early pages of The Faces<\/em>, when Lise describes how attuned she is to the hidden terrors lurking in the corners of her home: \u201cIt was essential to remain completely still and avoid sudden movements so that whatever was inside the built-in cupboards, those disturbing cavities, would not come tumbling out with all the compressed terror of her entire childhood.\u201d Ultimately, both Ditlevsen and Lise discover the act of writing provides a lifeline\u2014it\u2019s what Ditlevsen poignantly describes as her \u201conly consolation in this uncertain, trembling world.\u201d<\/p>\n

This battle between her writing and the demons that plagued her raged right up to the very end of Ditlevsen\u2019s life. It\u2019s remarkable that she managed to publish as much work as she did, and of such high quality, given what else she was dealing with along the way. As Dependency <\/em>draws to a close, we can see the dark conclusion to her life story beckoning\u2014it was published only five years before she committed suicide. While wandering the city streets one dark night, Ditlevsen finds herself transfixed by the brightly lit window of a chemist\u2019s shop. \u201cI kept standing there,\u201d she writes, \u201cwhile the yearning for small white pills, which were so easy to get, rose inside me like a dark liquid. Horrified, I realised while I stood there that the longing was inside me like rot in a tree, or like an embryo growing all on its own, even though you want nothing to do with it.\u201d By contrast, The Faces <\/em>offers us the possibility of a more positive, albeit sadly fictional, future. In the final lines of the book, Lise\u2014back at home, reunited with her family, and about to fall asleep\u2014resolves that tomorrow she\u2019ll start writing again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0The Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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