Tove Ditlevsen’s "The Copenhagen Trilogy"
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Where reading is concerned, I’m often late to the party. Years and sometimes decades after everyone else has feasted on this or that novel or memoir or story collection, it will finally occur to me to pick it up. I like to read blue-chip books. I like to feel like I discovered the book myself. (This is why I seldom read beyond the headline of a review.) E.L. Doctorow, Leslie Marmon Silko, Elena Ferrante, James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Uwem Akpan, the novels of Joyce Carol Oates: All were news flashes to me. Someday I might even roll the dice on Dickens.
All this is to say how remarkable it is that I read The Copenhagen Trilogy the same year—2021—that it was published in the U.S. More remarkably, I have just now read it again. It is that astonishing, the reigning favorite of all the books on my favorites shelf.
If you’ve ever known a soul-deep feeling of estrangement, an existential otherness and aloneness—and isn’t that more and more a condition of life today?—I can’t imagine a better book to read. In case you’re not familiar with its history: It’s a three-part memoir by one of Denmark’s most lionized writers, Tove Ditlevsen. The first two parts, Childhood and Youth, were originally published as individual volumes in Denmark in 1967; four years later came the third, called Gift—a word that in Danish, depending on the context, can mean either poison or married. It’s the part of the story in which Ditlevsen is both addict and wife. In the U.S. edition, this part is called Dependency.
One of many things Ditlevsen does brilliantly is convey the way a young child makes sense of the world. Young Tove exists in a stream of consciousness, marked by the impressions of what happens to float past—scraps of her mother’s conversation, the comings and goings of neighbors she watches from her bedroom window, the beautiful picture of a happy family in a book. The picture is especially affecting because the world she’s trying to make sense of happens to be brutal: poverty, unemployment, “the half-starvation you feel at the smell of dinner coming from the doors of the more well-to-do, when for days you’ve been living on coffee and stale pastry,” alcoholism, scabies, husbands and wives who scorn and beat each other, parents who beat their children. But the harshest part of Tove’s harsh world is her own emotionally stunted family: a mother who turns cold at will, who never touches her with love except once in an ambulance when Tove has diphtheria, a father who calls her a fool for wanting to be a poet. Tove’s parents and brother unite in laughing at her feelings, especially her tears.
And so she learns to keep her feelings and thoughts to herself. And so grows her feeling of difference, the feeling of being abnormal, other, isolated and disconnected. Regarding a girlhood friend: “I’m always afraid of revealing myself…. I’m afraid that she’ll discover how I really am.” Talking with other girls about marriage: “I smile in agreement as if I’m also looking forward to such a future, and as usual, I’m afraid of being found out. I feel like I’m a foreigner in this world…” Cheering the loudest at middle-school graduation: “It bothers me a lot that I don’t seem to own any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people’s reactions.” Estrangement is both cause and effect.
But if it’s a source of pain, it’s also a source of strength. Tove the schoolgirl hides herself behind a mask of stupidity even as she considers herself a child genius. The language of poetry that flows through her separates her from her family in a way that gives her the ironclad determination to live on her own as soon as she’s able. As a teenager and then a woman, her sense of singularity allows her to leave jobs, relationships, marriages that don’t suit. “I don’t want anything to happen to me that I don’t want.…”
What she does want, more than anything, even more than she wants to be normal, is to be a writer, and her alienation is in every way conducive. Tove is alienated from herself, meaning she can step outside herself to regard herself, her lifelong subject. (“It’s as if all I can see in the whole world is myself.”) Detached as she is from other people, she feels no compunction about building her life around writing. And from an early age she is a fabulist, untethered from and unbothered by the truth. She writes a poem and lies to her grandmother that it’s a song she learned in school. When she starts middle school, she turns her father from a furnace stoker to a more impressive-sounding machinist. When she leaves school forever at age 14—there is no money for her to continue—she says goodbye to her teacher with easy fabrications about her rosy future.
This isn’t to say that Ditlevsen dissembles. Neither she nor anyone else in the Trilogy is exempt from her unvarnished observations and assessments. Her prose, even when it’s poetic, is spare, direct, precise. Her humor runs from dry to casually scathing. “One evening Nadja comes over, dressed, as usual, as if she had just escaped a burning house.” “Her name is Edith Schnoor and she lisps from sheer self-importance.” She serves up her own ingenuousness for amusement, as when she publishes her first poem in a literary journal: “The next day two copies of Wild Wheat arrive in the mail and my poem is in both of them.”
Tove’s perceptions, her inner world, the world of her (rapturously received) poems and stories and novels: This is what’s real to her. The actual material circumstances of her life are matters she labors to avoid, striving to preserve “the curtain that is always hanging between me and reality.” And it turns out that the most effective curtain is drugs. The first shot of Demerol is so ravishingly blissful that you read with pounding heart and clenched stomach, knowing addiction is coming, calculating the number of pages left and thinking, Well, there aren’t so many; how bad can it be? Very, very horrifyingly bad, as Tove knowingly, willingly deals away her dignity, her autonomy, her health, her daughter, almost her life.
When it’s over, when she’s hospitalized and has survived the worst skin-crawling agony of withdrawal, something surprising happens: Tove thrives. For the first time in her life, she’s in a safe, protected place where people care for her and about her, and she feels connected to them and doesn’t have secrets. She is attached—so much so that when she’s deemed well enough to graduate from a locked ward to an open one, she decides to stay where she is known.
This is a book preoccupied with being known. And unknown. And unknowable. Tove’s reaction when one of her uncles dies—“I think about the fact that no one except Aunt Rosalia has known him or knew what he was really like”—echoes the lament that ends the very first chapter: “My mother is dead and there is no one to tell her story as it really was.” From childhood, Tove dreams of “meeting some mysterious person who will listen to me and understand me. I know from books that such people exist….” Her hospital experience is proof that such people exist outside of books. And The Copenhagen Trilogy is proof that—no matter how far removed you may be from Denmark of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s—when it comes to feeling seen and known and less existentially alone, the right book can be as good as a person.
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