QI The Book of the Dead

Dickens in 1857, his host stuck a card above the bed in the guest room saying: ‘Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks which seemed to the family AGES.’ Many think that the character of Uriah Heep was based on Andersen. Once he arrived unannounced to visit the other great contemporary master of the fairy tale, Jacob Grimm. Unfortunately, Grimm had never heard of Andersen and showed him the door.
    His forays around Europe meeting the rich and famous did not go down well at home, and he was often abused on the streets of Copenhagen with shouts of: ‘Look! There’s our orang-utan who’s so famous abroad!’ Even his closest friends, the Collin family, would call him ‘the show-off’, and it was said that there was no man in Denmark about whom so many jokes were told.
    Later in life, Andersen, rich but lonely, took to visiting brothels, paying the girls simply to talk to him. Like Newton andHeaviside, he died a virgin but bad luck pursued him even beyond the grave. The man he had loved in vain since childhood, Edvard, the married son of Jonas Collin, was originally buried with Andersen (along with his wife), as the writer had requested, but the family later changed its mind and moved them, leaving Andersen to face eternity much as he had lived – alone.
    In Denmark, Andersen’s ‘adult’ plays and novels are still read, but it is the fairy tales that have made him famous internationally. Translated into 150 languages, inspiring countless adaptations and still selling by the millions each year, they are truly universal stories. It is impossible not to see Andersen – the gawky outsider whose love remained unrequited – in the tales of the Little Mermaid or the Ugly Duckling. Perhaps because the unhappiness of his childhood meant he was never able to ‘grow up’ properly in his personal life, his best and most powerful writing was always for children.

     
    In most of the lives in this chapter the death or absence of a father operated subconsciously in shaping the pattern of the life. In the case of Salvador Dalí (1904–89), it was flamboyantly selfconscious. Dalí set out purposely to annoy and punish his father, who was a respectable lawyer and strict disciplinarian. The young Salvador deliberately wet his bed until he was eight, and developed a lifelong scatological obsession, depositing faeces all over the house. To further infuriate his father, he also developed illegible handwriting – in reality, he could write perfectly well. At school, again, just to annoy his father, he pretended not to know things.
    The generous interpretation is that this was a form of attention-seeking. The circumstances of his birth were unusual.His parents had lost their first son – also called Salvador – only nine months and ten days earlier. He had been only two years old and the parents never fully recovered from the trauma. They talked continually of their lost ‘genius’, hung a photograph of him over their bed and regularly took the ‘new’ Salvador to visit the grave. It was all very disturbing for the young Dalí, who was made to feel he was somehow a reincarnation of his elder brother.
    He grew up an unusually fearful child, plunging into fits of hysteria if he was touched, or saw a grasshopper or, like Andersen, a naked female body (this wasn’t helped by his father keeping an illustrated medical textbook on venereal disease on the piano to terrify him). But like all the lives in this chapter he had an exaggerated sense of his own importance, dreaming, as Freud and Byron had done, of becoming a great hero:
    At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since .
     
    Dalí’s grandiose self-assurance gathered pace during his teens. But, for all the posturing, he was prodigiously gifted, and was able to paint and draw with a classical precision that few of his contemporaries could match. As his mother remarked of his childhood sketches: ‘When he says he’ll draw a swan, he draws a swan, and when he says he’ll do a duck, it’s a duck.’ At the Royal Academy in Madrid, he got himself expelled for refusing to take an oral exam. He wrote in explanation,
    I am very sorry but I am infinitely more intelligent than these three professors, and I therefore refuse to be examined by them. I know this subject much too well .
     

    His relationship with his father, always strained, deteriorated further after his mother died when