Foreigner in a childhood full of tears. This is how Tove feels. She is a stranger in the childhood that they created for her, she is a stranger in the conversations of her friends and a stranger in her relationships with her family.
Little Tove lives with her parents and older brother in a working-class neighborhood of Copenhagen in the years following the First World War. Her father is a failed socialist writer, frustrated, often unemployed. Her mother appears as an inscrutable entity: inaffective, subject to incomprehensible mood swings due to latent anger. With a father convinced that women cannot become writers, a distant and irascible mother and the inability to establish real relationships with her peers, Tove has no choice but to pretend and adapt to the harsh laws of the world to which she belongs by entrusting her dreams and wishes to write:
Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it alone.
Ditlevsen opens a glimpse into his past. Through her eyes he retraces with extreme clarity and awareness moments, faces and thoughts of when she was a child.
Hers is a gaze that goes beyond the reality that surrounds her, too hard to accept, too “finished” and desolating. A royal with no escape for a little girl who will become a woman and therefore nothing more than a wife and mother, according to the mentality of the time.
But Tove dreams of more. She will entrust herself to poetry, the only refuge in which the desolation of her life vanishes and her existence takes on new contours. Only her poems have the power to mend the wounds of existence. Only her poems manage to take her away from that demeaning world that she rejects:
Fragile rope broken
never connects again.
Not without losing note,
not without the tone becoming brazen.
With that distance necessary to be able to give shape to memories, the author looks in the mirror of the past to give us the image of a little girl capable of scratching with words that reality that is so alien to her, revealing its evil and beautyless essence. Ditlevsen gives us the beginning of her story in a clear, crystalline language imbued with a disarming sincerity. A short but intense book on every page, capable of settling in the reader’s emotions.
A novel that I recommend reading if you are looking for a deep and intimate story, full of considerations that develop through reflection on childhood, the urgency of writing, precariousness, everyday family life, the female condition.
The future is a frightening and overpowering colossus that will soon collapse on me, crushing me. My torn childhood blows over me, and I don’t even have time to mend one tear, another one is already forming.
Childhood, published for the first time in 1967, is the first autobiographical book of the so-called Copenhagen Trilogy (childhood, youth and addiction) translated and published in English only a few years ago and brought to Italy by Fazi Publisher with the publication of the first volume in 2022.
Tove Ditlevsen lived between the end of the First World War and the mid-1970s. An outsider to the literary world, she went through four marriages and four divorces. Throughout her adult life she had problems with alcohol and drug addiction, dying by suicide in 1976. Her gaze on the world becomes an investigation into herself and the roles she takes on to adapt to a foreign and inhospitable environment that surrounds her, revealing her as an author of great depth, a forerunner of autofiction:
I look up at my evening star, which is like the benevolent eye of God, which watches over me and is closer to me than during the day. Sooner or later I will write down all these words that pass through me. Sooner or later other people will read them in a book and will be amazed to see that a female can – of course! – be a writer.
And yes, little Tove, you did it!
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Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen, Fazi Editore. The Wee Small Blog.
