i've managed to pick up, while puttering around in alderman, a book called the kiss of the snow queen. ordinarily it sets my teeth on edge to see anyone read a work of literature as a psychiatric case - as was the stated purpose of this book - and besides which, simply remarking on parallel or transformed incidents from an author's childhood would make it no better than that pallid alison lurie book i read the other day - such books do not illuminate the text - nor, i think, do they particularly illuminate the man, even though they seem to. but as a matter of fact i have been developing an interest in andersen the man, whose biographies and studies take up 2 whole shelves in alderman. he wrote an autobiography which he called "the fairy tale of my life" and he certainly saw himself a fairy tale hero, no doubt about that, the ugly duckling who became the great swan amongst storytellers. his birthplace, odense, is named for odin, and some think this fitting, although i do not think of anderson as a sage. when you come down to it, most authors fit nooteboom's description of herman mussert - a funny little ugly man who loved beauty. (although some of them are apollos. yes.)

i'm not so sure, though, that i'm keen on anderson saying - his stories are written for children but directed at adults - at least, that's the impression i got when he said that "children only understand the trappings." and that the "something elses" are pointedly meant for the mothers and fathers who are reading these to the children. i think madeleine l'engle formulates this in opposite terms - that if she has anything to say that's too difficult for adults to understand, she writes it as a children's story. it's a less patronising than anderson, although i suppose i'm also uneasy about the romantic ideals of the child as uniquely sensitive and capable of grasping truths that the adult cannot. was it l'engle or winterson who said that the truth of the imagination is not the same as the truth of what we call "reality", "the world"? no, i think what l'engle said was that truth and facts are not the same thing, so the reality of the imagination must be a mangled winterson quote.

i need to sit down and read some anderson. i would also like his autobiography. what an inconvenient weekend - not to have the library.