Preface to the Special Issue: "Hidden, but not Forgotten": Hans Christian Andersen's Legacy in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

A green cloth volume of Andersen's fairy tales in the Grosset & Dunlap Illustrated Junior Library is one of the books I remember most vividly from childhood. And when my first grade teacher discovered I could read aloud Ugly Duckling without any coaching, she exempted me from regular reading instruction. But Andersen probably would not have appeared on a list of my favorite authors. Reading him was a visceral but not especially pleasant experience, because the stories that aroused a ghoulish confusion of terror and pity were the most mesmerizing. The response was triggered not so much by Andersen's words as by Arthur Syzk's jewel-toned illustrations in the Grosset & Dunlap edition. The upper left-hand corner of Syzk's endpapers was dominated by the Snow Queen, whose huge, haunted yet cruel eyes compelled me to stare at its complex design. At the same time, her figure prompted an equally powerful desire to turn away I never got more than a third of the way through that volume of Andersen, because one picture was so frightening that I always stopped at the page that, if turned, would reveal the horrible thing. Skipping ahead to the stories that followed the picture was impossible because of a premonition that something dreadful might happen if all the stories were not read straight through in order. Whatever terrors that picture awakened I was never able to articulate, but for years I disliked so much as touching the volume's spine because of the knowledge that the picture was concealed within. It is the only book I recall inspiring such unsettling feelings, which may help explain why Danny Kaye singing I'm Hans Christian Andersen, / I've many a tale to tell made absolutely no impression on me. The Andersen I had glimpsed in Szyk's illustrations had nothing to do with the Hollywood song-and-dance man on the Cinerama Dome's big screen. I suspect many other people's childhood impressions of Andersen were also formed by their exposure to highly distinctive or freewheeling interpretations of his best-known works rather than by real familiarity with the unmediated texts. Most of us know only the handful of tales that have been the backbone of Andersen anthologies for decades - Princess and the Pea, Swineherd, Little Match Girl, The Nightingale, Red Shoes, Steadfast Tin Soldier, Tinderbox (and even those may not be familiar to a surprising number of people, as I discovered when curating an exhibition on Andersen's illustrators). Admittedly they are wonderful stories all, but Andersen wrote many others - Gardener and His Master, Valdemar Daae and His Daughters, Ehe Shadow, It's Perfectly True, Elfin Mound, the Children's Room, and Jumpers to mention a few personal favorites - which rightfully deserve places in the English-language canon. Andersen himself regretted that the Eventyr's (the Fairy Tale's) best stories threatened to overshadow everything else he had done, convinced that his genius defied easy categorization as a writer of fairy tales. However, being lionized as a beloved author for children was by no means a bad thing for someone who craved the recognition that international fame conferred. Shortly after his death, Andersen attained the status of a writer whose classic works for children were obvious candidates for regular repackaging, just like the fairy tales of Charles Perrault or the Grimms. In Andersen's case, however, the process of recycling his best-known stories in America and Great Britain bestowed a form of immortality - but not without exacting a price. Consider the case of Emperor's New Clothes. It passed long ago into the wider cultural consciousness: few readers of Paul Krugman's 11 November 2005 New York Times editorial would miss the allusion to an emperor with no clothes with reference to President George W Bush, even if they weren't able to identify Andersen as its source. …