Tag: Tove Ditlevsen

All kinds of people, all kinds of lives, and all equally lonely: The Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen

Sharp and unsentimental, the prose of Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen crackles across the page, exposing the painful insecurities of ordinary people as they navigate the often messy experiences of life—housewives who question their marriages, children who worry that they don’t belong, families falling apart, and a potential daughter-in-law who suddenly sees the charms of her beloved in a different light after meeting his mother. She excels at capturing domestic discomfort at all its varying levels of tension. The ten stories comprising her 1952 collection The Umbrella, each one short and neatly contained, demonstrate this ability clearly.

Ditlevsen’s stories reflect the time in which they were written, especially with respect to the restricted housebound roles women were often expected to accept once they were married, but her ability to dissect the strained dynamics between spouses, and between parents and children, is timeless, universal. The title story is a pitch-perfect example. Ditlevsen portrays Helga, the protagonist, in a cool, detached tone, as a woman with clear physical and emotional shortcomings—or as she puts it “only averagely equipped”—who had always expected more from life than it could deliver. In her case, she dreamed of owning an umbrella, but that was considered vain and frivolous. Yet, it is difficult not to empathize with her in the stifling conditions imposed on her by the social conventions of her time. Hopelessly attached to her mother and schooled to channel all her energies into keeping house and home for her husband, she is caught in a scheme so rigid and lifeless that it traps both her and Egon, driving him to drinking and her to withdraw. However, her much more proactive mother is concerned by the situation and insists that she sit down with her husband to “talk it out”:

But Helga had never tried to put herself in another person’s shoes; it had never been necessary. Her entire character consisted of a pile of memories without a pattern or plan. There were a number of pairs of brown eyes, a twilight mood, an immense, undefined expectation, a yellow dress, and an umbrella.

When the possibility of finally realizing her dream arises, something explodes in Helga—at least for a moment.

The couples in Ditlevsen’s stories struggle with real or imagined fears and desires, but when there are children involved, it often becomes even more complicated. Painful truths surface when marriages break up, families are torn apart, or new a baby threatens the fragile security of an adopted child. In “A Nice Boy,” seven year-old John was “the nicest boy in the whole area when it came to running errands, chopping wood, washing diapers, and whatever else a person has to do to get ahead in the world.” He was kind and gentle and terrified of doing anything that might cause his parents to regret “taking him in.” Especially now that they had a little boy of their own.

He raced ahead at the thought. He knew he was in debt to humanity because he wasn’t born properly to his mother and father like his little brother, but had ended up with them, by an improbable stroke of luck. He was adopted, and his real parents were horrible people from Copenhagen, who weren’t even married. ‘God forbid you ever meet them,’ his mother had said when she told him that. For a while afterward he would stare at the outsiders who visited his town, imagining they had come from Copenhagen to take him away.

Elsewhere, “One Morning in a Residential Neighbourhood” sees a little girl who is excited to be going on “a trip” with her father, unaware that she is leaving her mother and brother behind for good because her mother has fallen in love with another man. She cannot understand the sorrow and simmering anger of those around her.  In “Evening,” another girl whose parents have already parted, feels torn between her affection for her real mother and her real father, both of whom have remarried, and her uncertainty about how she feels about the new “mommy” and “daddy” who have come into her life. In the opening lines, she is introduced in manner that captures her state instantly:

Hanne was only seven, but she already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety. She always wanted to be somewhere other than where she was at the moment.

In this, as in the other stories in this collection, Ditlevsen so keenly captures her protagonist’s—and, to be honest, our—deepest desires, griefs, and apprehensions in precise poetic prose that is both clear-eyed and compassionate.

Published as part of the Penguin Archive collection of extracts from larger works, it must be noted that this same collection has also been published together with another of Ditlevsen’s collections as The Trouble with Happiness. Nonetheless, there is something quite irresistible about these red and white pocket-sized volumes that offer an excellent taste of an author’s work. The only shortcoming is the omission of a bio for the author and translator.

Umbrella by Tove Ditlevsen is translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman and published by Penguin Random House.

Slippery features, mocking voices: The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen

She put on her bathrobe and sat down at the dressing table, making as little noise as possible. In the mirror her face seemed to her tired and used, like an old glove. Her mouth was set in brackets by two faint, sketchy lines that stopped a little before the slope of her chin, as if the unknown artist had been called away in the middle of his work. Her eyes had that same open, sincere expression as in children who are telling a lie. Three delicate wrinkles lay like a pearl necklace around her neck, and they would dig deeper day by day. Would this face last out her time, this face that bore traces of so many things the world must know nothing about? Did it turn toward her with hostility whenever she wasn’t looking? And what would be underneath, when it fell apart one fine day?

Lise Mundus has an acute awareness of faces, her own and those of others—what they hold, what they hide, what they give away. And it seems to becoming more of an obsession. Not only has the sudden fame that accompanied her publication of a popular adult novel after years of writing children’s books pushed her face out into public view, but of late she has begun to question the motives of those around her. She already knows her husband is wildly unfaithful, she fears that she is losing touch with her children, and she resents the presence in her household of Gitte, the young housekeeper who looks after everything. And everyone. Haunted by crippling writer’s block, increasingly feeling isolated and alone, she begins to overhear hushed conversations rising through the plumbing and from behind closed doors. Her husband Gert has just suffered the loss of his mistress to suicide, and now, Lise is certain, he and Gitte are conspiring to push her to that same end.

The Faces, first published in 1968 by celebrated Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, is a sharp, tight portrait of a woman’s spiralling descent into an episode of paranoid psychosis , her hospitalization, and subsequent recovery. Ditlevsen’s personal life was marked by domestic upheaval, addiction, and multiple psychiatric admissions, and she is clearly drawing on lived experience here, but she is doing so with poetic clarity and remarkable insight to impart a sense of what it is like to be unable to distinguish reality from hallucination and yet feel like one has full control of one’s sense, no matter how strange the experiences.  However, this is neither memoir nor autofiction. Rather, it is, even through its protagonist’s darkest moments of anxiety and confusion, a story told with great warmth, compassion, and even humour.

At first, there is nothing funny about the fragile state Lise is in as we first meet her. She is haunted by memories, appearances, and even the very rooms she occupies. No matter how she tries to hide her concerns, she believes that others are out to exploit her weaknesses—even her best friend Nadia, a psychologist who drops by to visit and strongly suggests that she stay away from the sleeping pills Gitte provides and call her psychiatrist instead. Lise wants to trust her friend, but what she detects in the faces around her and hears whispered behind her back is getting the better of her. She ends up doing the opposite. Convinced that Gert really does want her out of the way, she downs the entire bottle of pills (and immediately calls her psychiatrist to tell him she doesn’t want to die). She wakes up days later, in the toxic trauma centre.

Once she is medically stabilized, Lise is taken to the psychiatric hospital. By this time she is in a state of full-blown psychosis. Voices speak to her from speakers embedded in her pillow and from behind grates in the room to which she has been confined, strapped to the bed, after she failed to settle on the open ward. This room, which is actually a bathroom, becomes her safe space. She can hide here, protected by the voices that alternately attack her and warn her against the nurses and psychiatrist who are all part of their scheme to destroy her. It’s easy for her to believe the danger, she can read in their false faces. Convinced she is being poisoned, she refuses to eat and resists medication.

As the anti-psychotics begin to take effect, Lise starts to accept and embrace her insanity, no longer terrified, but now increasingly alert and wise to the subterfuge that surrounds her. At least, that’s what she thinks. Convinced, for instance, that a nurse has painted her face to look like someone from her past, Lise reasons that she “did it to confuse her and break down her resistance, but [she] saw right through such childish tricks with her healthy, clear sense of judgement.” And certain illusions are especially resistant, no matter how often (and patiently) she is corrected. She continually sees the male nurse named Petersen as her husband, even when the solidity of own perception starts to slip:

‘That’s right,’ said Gert, satisfied. ‘You’re starting to behave quite sensibly.’ His face was suddenly blurred, the way it looks when you’ve forgotten to wind the film and you’ve taken two pictures on top of each other.

‘You have two faces,’ she said, astonished. ‘That’s not allowed. You can only wear one face at a time.’

If the voices and hallucinations that have fueled her paranoia prompted a most desperate, potentially life-threatening action, their gradual retreat into the hard, tactile environment of the hospital ward leaves her fearing that she will be abandoned. Understanding that the manifestations of psychosis is rooted in one’s own disordered thoughts is unsettling, and for a time Lise actively resists the idea that she is moving toward returning home.

As a reader who has experienced an episode of manic psychosis and hospitalization (albeit under very different circumstances), I am always impressed when an author can capture the salient aspects of  mental illness—the internal reorientation of reality, the distortion of time— so clearly without sacrificing the literary and poetic qualities that contribute to a good story. Drawing on lived experience is not, in itself sufficient, Ditlevsen achieves this balance through point of view and by keeping her narrative short and focused.

When The Faces opens, Lise is already beset by suspicions and hallucinations, so we come to know her, and those around her, entirely through her increasing warped perceptions. With a tight third person perspective—ideal for conveying madness—there is no ground zero. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether there is a justification for her fears; it does look like there may be some gaslighting going on. Even when she swallows the handful of pills it’s not clear if she has been pushed to the limit by outside forces. Yet, once she’s committed to the psychiatric hospital where she wages her daily struggle against the voices that taunt her and her belief that she is the victim of a grand conspiracy, the extent of her illness becomes apparent. We can “hear” the outside voices of the nurses, doctors and other patients, in concert with what she thinks she hears. Now we have to listen and hope that she will slowly emerge from her psychotic state. The actual state of affairs at home, the “real” nature of her reality so to speak, won’t be revealed until she is finally ready to be released.

The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen is translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and published by Penguin Books. (Also published by Picador)