The Tell-All Memoirist Who Shied Away From Fame

“The cruel, gray facts,” unlike the “truths in your heart,” are a matter of record, the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen writes in Childhood (1967), the first volume of…

“The cruel, gray facts,” unlike the “truths in your heart,” are a matter of record, the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen writes in Childhood (1967), the first volume of her trilogy of memoirs, known in English as The Copenhagen Trilogy. “No one can change them. Therefore: I was born on December 14, 1918, in a little two-room apartment in Vesterbro in Copenhagen.” Except that is not the fact. She was born in 1917. What to make of this blatant falsehood, undercutting the seeming guilelessness of this spectacular trilogy?

Perhaps 1918 seemed a more auspicious start, marking her as the child of a new era—“the year that the World War ended and the eight-hour day was instituted.” Perhaps, as Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, two of her English translators, suggest, it was so that she would “seem extra precocious!” by placing the publication of her first, well-received book of poetry in her twentieth year, rather than her twenty-first.

Either way, this mischievous, self-aggrandizing lie is characteristic of Ditlevsen and her understanding of the function of literature.

“Everything written in books,” her mother, Alfrida, scornfully tells a young Tove in Childhood, “is a lie.” Alfrida, whose captivating, contradictory presence looms large in Childhood and the rest of the trilogy, “doesn’t care for facts.” Later, after her brother remarks that her early poems are skillful but dishonestly based on experiences she had not had, Ditlevsen reflects that “you sometimes have to lie in order to bring out the truth.” When it comes time to publish her first novel, she writes that “in one way or another it’s about me, even though I may never experience the things the people do in the book.” Her final novel, Vilhelm’s Room (1975), translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, explicitly takes up these questions of narrative, emotional, and biographical truth.

As the book opens, the narrator proclaims, “I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm.” But almost immediately, the narrative voice starts to blur.