Although her work was well known throughout Denmark, it took the 2019 English re-issue of the poet, novelist and memoirist Tove Ditlevsen’s bravura three-volume autobiography, The Copenhagen Trilogy (translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman), for the Danish writer’s fan base to become international.
Born in 1917, Ditlevsen found relatively prompt success as a writer, publishing her first volume of poetry in her early 20s, but her life was far from easy. She was married four times, was no stranger to the perils of backstreet abortions, raised three children, and battled long-term drug and alcohol addictions – struggles that she recounts with both eloquence and candour in the third volume of her autobiography, Dependency. She also suffered from depression, and died by suicide in 1976.
Her astonishing autobiography was such a hit that Penguin quickly followed it up with the re-issue of her 1968 novel, The Faces (translated by Nunnally), the story of a children’s book writer, wife and mother – clearly modelled on Ditlevsen herself — who ends up on a psychiatric ward following a breakdown. Now, they’ve added The Trouble with Happiness to their Modern Classics list, a collection of Ditlevsen’s splendid short stories that combines two books, Paraplyen (“The Umbrella”, 1952) and Den onde lykke (“The Trouble with Happiness”, 1963), newly translated by Goldman into English for the first time.
Speaking in broad strokes, these tales all take family life as their subject, but as the title suggests, contentment, security and happiness feature rarely in the scenes that unfold. Love is present, but this isn’t love that liberates or emboldens, it’s love that makes people smaller, and that traps and binds them together. A woman breakfasting with her family is desperate to abandon them all and fly into her lover’s arms: “The sweet children, the wronged father, the loyal maid, and the flighty mother. What did all these people have to do with her? Why were they taking advantage of her love for this child?” she wonders with angry desperation. Another woman, pregnant by her married lover, sees more than meets the eye when she looks around the doctor’s waiting room. “Behind each of these women was the shadow of a man,” she thinks, “a tired husband who toiled for a throng of children, and whose income couldn’t bear the strain of another child.”
Though Ditlevsen doesn’t shy away from revealing the particular hardships faces by women, her sympathies don’t lie with them alone. In the opening story, “The Umbrella”, a married woman who’s long been obsessing about owning a silk umbrella finally purchases one, which her husband then destroys in a fit of pique. But rather than this leaving her bereft, she’s strangely calm, realising that she should never have presumed to be the kind of woman who could own such a luxurious possession. “This is exactly as if I had cheated on him, and he’s forgiven me,” she understands.
Some of the very best stories here, though, are those that explore the perspective of a child. In “A Nice Boy”, the adopted son of a couple who’ve just had a new baby battles with his “bad conscience”, which grows within him “like a heavy, thick substance”. His parents aren’t unkind, yet the knowledge that “he owed a debt to these people” who have taken him in hangs over him oppressively. It’s just the finest sliver of a portrait of a life, but everything we need to know is neatly packed therein. Ditlevsen understands all too keenly how early trauma works. “Wherever you turn,” she writes in Youth, the second volume of her memoirs, “you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart.”
Such damage is ubiquitous in Ditlevsen’s world; the adults are barely capable of helping themselves, let alone the children in their care, as poor Hanne – only 7 years old and already full of “formless anxiety” – learns in “Evening”. This “lonely little figure”, torn between her divorced parents and her father’s new wife, is watched by all three of them. But “none of them could help her,” Ditlevsen writes, and in their shame, “they didn’t dare look at one another.”
Loneliness runs like a thick black thread through this collection. It doesn’t make for especially cheering reading, but the purity and dazzling insight of Ditlevsen’s writing speaks for itself.
The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories (translated by Michael Favala Goldman) is published by Penguin Modern Classics at £10.99. To order your copy for £9.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
