Magical Hans

Once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived the poor son of a cobbler and an alcoholic laundress. He was a lonely and ungainly lad – rather an ugly duckling. He read books and played with puppets. All through his barren days and feverish nights, he nurtured a powerful yearning for one thing.

He wanted to be famous. The toast not just of the town but also of the kingdom, and of all the kingdoms of the Earth, and of all the generations to come through all the ages in all the kingdoms.

The townspeople regarded the boy with his ragged clothes and his carrot nose – and they snickered at his dream.

Yet on this, the 200th anniversary of his birth, his kingdom – Denmark – is going absolutely bonkers in tribute – in a wholesome, restrained, perfectly planned Danish sort of way. The rest of the world is celebrating, too.

For where would we be without Hans Christian Andersen?

Think of all the thoughts we would not have thunk.

From his pen flowed “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “Thumbelina,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Red Shoes,” “The Nightingale,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Wild Swans,” “The Little Match Girl,” “The Swineherd,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep,” “The Flying Trunk” – and about 150 more fairy tales.

These are plots and wisdom that feel like they have existed forever. They are hardwired into our brains. It is almost impossible to experience certain situations without running them through a subliminal Hans Christian Andersen filter and coming up with a succinct, acerbic take.

Your co-worker who is forever dissatisfied with the adjustments on her ergonomically impeccable chair? Yes, she’s the princess and the pea.

The president from not-your-political-party is touting his new plan for the budget/war/economy/environment? More emperor’s new clothes, you snort.

And there you are, sweating at the gym: Don’t give up! You’ll be a swan one day.

These are handy concepts.

Karl Rove in 2003 said the essence of a political campaign can be found in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” according to CNN.com. No matter what gaudy fabric the spinmeisters weave, Rove said, “people are going to see the candidate as he or she is at the end of the parade.”

Angry Irish rocker Sinead O’Connor spat at her critics in a 1990 song: “They’ve got a solid case of/ The emperor’s new clothes.”

In a 2003 lecture, the late, legendary art historian Kirk Varnedoe quipped that Andy Warhol “is to the emperor’s new clothes what Chanel was to the little black dress.”

The second-skin familiarity of Andersen yarns makes them perfect grist for Hollywood. Disney changed the ending and fashioned “The Little Mermaid” into not just blockbuster animation but also dolls, lunch boxes and nightgowns for little girls. “The Red Shoes” is more famous as the title of the 1948 film about the ballerina who falls in love.

Told and retold and adapted and appropriated. Later generations feel such a proprietorship that they take liberties with the work. They lop off the first half-dozen scene-setting sentences of “The Ugly Duckling”: It was so lovely out in the country – it was summer! The wheat was yellow, the oats were green, the hay was stacked in green meadows, and the stork walked about on his long red legs speaking Egyptian.

They don’t “translate” ‘Thumbelina’; they ‘retell’ it. They subject ‘It’s Quite True!’ to modern idiom: ‘For Sure! For Sure!’ They ask Virginia Lee Burton, celebrated author of “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” to retell and draw “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in her clipped, light style, and she does.

All because the poor cobbler’s son somehow managed to unlock the shared human storehouse of image, action, moral and meaning, and weave them into captivating tales that spoke universally. His fairy tales were not just for kids. He grew into a literary swan.

“My name is gradually beginning to shine, and that is the only thing for which I live,” Andersen wrote in a letter in his early thirties, according to a biographical essay by Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank in their 2003 translation of Andersen’s best stories. “I covet honor and glory in the same way as the miser covets gold.”

Andersen also wrote six novels, hundreds of poems, numerous plays and travel books. But he is scarcely remembered for those. In another letter, he wrote: “I’m beginning to write some fairy tales for children. I want to win the next generation, you see.”

His wish came true, but his life was not a fairy tale, the Franks make clear. Andersen never got over his insecurities and desperate need for attention and validation. To his death in 1875, he felt like the ugly duckling.

If only he could now be in Odense, where he went to school, or Copenhagen, where he moved, alone, at 14, to seek his fortune. The land that has long since considered him a figure of national pride and a magnet for tourism is trying to outdo itself.

A celebration concert there on April 2, his birthday, was broadcast around the world, kicking off 3,000 global anniversary events. Coins are being minted, beer brewed and wine bottled in his honor. His likeness is turning up on dinnerware and baby clothes. There are bicentenary Web sites in Chinese, Russian and Portuguese.

There is usually a sly edge to Andersen’s stories, mordant humor, psychic spaces that are creepy and chilly. He pricks humanity’s herd instinct and inability to appreciate originality, while offering close observation of talking animals, tiny humans, fantastic situations.

But the edges have been sanded off in some of the retellings and in the sentimental way we remember some of the stories, which is too bad.

“The Ugly Duckling” is more troubling when you realize that it is not about a triumph over destiny and circumstance, which is the lesson you’d rather teach your children. It is about destiny fulfilling itself: “It doesn’t matter if you’re born in a duck yard if you’ve lain in a swan’s egg” – which is another way of saying you can work out all you want and sign up for online dating services, but you’re still ugly unless you were born a swan.

Unlike in the Disney revision, Andersen’s Little Mermaid does not win the Prince’s love. The sacrifice of her beautiful singing voice in exchange for legs has been in vain, and she dissolves into sea foam. But her devotion does win her a chance at an immortal soul.

Some of the tales are beautifully dark, a quality of Andersen’s we may have forgotten. In “The Little Match Girl,” a barefoot child is wandering the snowy city on New Year’s Eve, trying to sell matches. No one buys. When night falls she dares not return home penniless, for her father will beat her.

She seeks shelter in a nook between two houses. To keep warm, she begins to light her matches, one by one. With each flame, she sees a vision. The visions are increasingly elaborate: a warm stove, a Christmas tree, a table set with roast goose. Finally she sees in the glow her dead grandmother, the only person who had been nice to the girl.

She quickly lit the rest of the matches in the bunch; she so wanted Grandmother to stay. The matches burned with such brilliance that they were brighter than the light of day. Grandmother had never been so beautiful or so tall; she lifted the little girl in her arms, and they flew higher and higher in light and joy. There was no more cold, no hunger, no fear – they were with God.

But in the cold dawn, the girl sat in the nook by the house. She had rosy cheeks and a smile on her lips: She was dead, frozen to death on the last night of the old year. New Year’s morning brightened over her little body, sitting with her matches; most of the bunch had been burned. She had wanted to get warm, people said. No one knew the beauty she had seen or in what glory she had gone with her old grandmother into the joy of the New Year.

The understated ending of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” casts a more devastating judgment upon imperiousness and puffery than the more slapstick way it is sometimes remembered:

No one would admit that he couldn’t see anything, because then he’d either be no good at his job or else very stupid. None of the emperor’s other clothes had ever been such a success.

“But he hasn’t got anything on!” a little child said.

“Dear me, listen to that innocent voice,” the child’s father said, and people whispered to one another what the child had said: “But he’s got nothing on – a little child says he’s got nothing on.”

“He’s really got nothing on!” everybody finally shouted. The emperor cringed, because he realized that they were right. But this is what he thought: “I have to see this through.” He walked ever more proudly, and the lords-in-waiting walked behind him, carrying the train that wasn’t there at all.