QI The Book of the Dead

relationships were notoriously messy, full of betrayal and recrimination. Her story reminds us that sometimes a dead father, particularly an iconic one, might be more useful than a living one.

     
    Hans, the father of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), died when his son was eleven, but by then the die was already cast. The Danish storyteller responsible for some of the most popular tales ever told endured a life of misery that bordered on the operatic. He was born in an Odense slum, the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman (possibly the only thing he had in common with Stalin). The family lived in a one-room house and, even before his father’s death, the young Hans had been subjected to enough trauma to fill a lifetime of therapy. Several biographers have suggested he may have suffered sexual abuse as a boy – in his mostly autobiographical first novel, The Improvisatore , a man called Federico lures a young boy into a cave – and an early teacher called Fedder Carstens, whom Andersen claimed was ‘fond of me, gave me cakes and flowers and patted me on the cheeks’, mysteriously left town within a year of Andersen’s arrival at the school. As an adult, Andersen had a severe dislike of underground places.
    They were a warm family, but his father became obsessed with the idea let slip by his grandmother that the family had once been rich and possibly even royal. This made an impression on the young Hans and fuelled his sense of being different from the other children in his neighbourhood. As soon as his father died, he was forced to work to support himself. It was a dismal experience.While helping his grandmother at a hospital for the insane, he looked through a crack in a door and saw a naked woman in a room singing to herself. The woman noticed him and threw herself at the door in a murderous rage: the little trapdoor through which she received her food sprang open and she glared at him, her fingers scrabbling at his clothes. When an attendant at last arrived, Andersen was screaming in terror, ‘half-dead with fear’.
    His experience in a clothing mill was no better. His appearance was so effeminate that a group of his co-workers forced him to pull his trousers down in front of the rest of the workforce to see if he was a girl. Later, he signed up as a carpenter’s apprentice but, on his first day at work, the previous episode still fresh in his mind, he could do nothing but stand trembling, blushing and upset. The other apprentices noticed his distress and taunted him until he fled.
    Andersen wasn’t an unprepossessing young man. Clumsy, pin-headed and perpetually dreamy, he walked around with his eyes half-closed: people would ask his mother if he was blind. Even his walk was unintentionally comic; one contemporary described it as ‘a hopping along almost like a monkey’. This physical clumsiness meant he failed to fulfil the one dream that had sustained him since his early childhood: to become an actor. However, Jonas Collin, one of the directors of the Royal Theatre, took pity on him after his audition and offered to pay for him to return to school. The friendship with Collin and his family was one of the few relationships that Andersen managed to maintain through his life – but the return to school was a disaster. At the age of seventeen he was put in the lowest class with eleven-and twelve-year-olds, which, when added to his lanky frame and his dyslexia, made him an easy target for the sadistic bullying of the headmaster, who referred to him as an ‘overgrown lump’.

    Andersen emerged from this in worse shape than before. He was deeply neurotic, tormented by stress-induced toothaches, convinced his addiction to masturbation would lead to his penis falling off or send him mad. He was terrified of open spaces, of sailing, of being either burned or buried alive and of seeing a woman naked (the result of his experience at the asylum as a child). He was so embarrassed about his skinny, concave chest that he built it up by stuffing newspaper in his shirt.
    His love life was equally barren. Not one of his (usually gay) crushes was reciprocated. As his literary fame grew, he began to travel widely and struck up friendships with Mendelssohn and Dickens, and got to know Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Heinrich Heine. But rather like Heaviside there was something about Andersen’s manner that annoyed people. He could be both vain and ingratiating at the same time. After staying with his hero