His experience in a clothing mill was no better. His appearance was so effeminate that a group of his coworkers 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 was an unprepossessing young man. Clumsy, pinheaded, 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 fulfill 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’s falling off or drive 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 Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Heinrich Heine. But rather like Heaviside’s, 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 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 orangutan 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 and Heaviside, 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 Dali (1904–89), it was flamboyantly self-conscious. Dali 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 feces 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 Dali, 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’s 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.
Dali’s grandiose self-assurance gathered pace during his teens. But for all the posturing, he was prodigiously gifted and 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 he was seventeen. Dali would call this “the greatest blow I had experienced in my life.” Eight years later, in 1929, things came to a head when his father was made aware of an early Surrealist sketch by Dali called
The year 1929 proved a turning point for other reasons. It was the year that Dali joined the Surrealists and made, with Luis Bunuel, the first and best Surrealist film,
The relationship probably wasn’t consummated—at least not in the usual way. Dali was (like Andersen) addicted to masturbation and much preferred to offer the oversexed Gala to other men (a practice known as candaulism, after the ancient Lydian king Candaules, who arranged to have his friend surreptitiously watch his wife undress). In return, Gala looked after the practical side of their lives, as Dali was incapable of even paying a taxi fare.
By 1936 Dali had become an international sensation, even featuring on the cover of
