I used to think that DH meant "D*ck Head" and would totally misunderstand the post...LOLOL

what is ugly? what is beauty?

we are just a bunch of skins wrapped around muscles and tissues and bones...

some are just luckier and born with thicker skins....LOLOLOL

I think I am ugly, my wife thinks I am hot. That's good enough for me...ROFL...

interestingly enough, I've read this article about Hans and thought you might find it interesting?


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When he wrote The Ugly Duckling, the great 19th-century Danish story-teller Hans Christian Andersen was writing from experience. His own life began in painful obscurity; when he tried to make his way out, his awkwardness and odd appearance led him to make a fool of himself. But in the end, his great talent brought him fame and fortune. No wonder he called one of his autobiographies The Fairy-Tale of My Life.

Andersen was born 200 years ago this year and to celebrate the bicentenary this very long and very dense biography by a Danish literary critic has been published in English. The author's decision to start with Andersen's arrival in Copenhagen in 1819, determined at the age of 14 to make a new life, and not to explain his background until around page 350, deprives the book of narrative energy; indeed, it is not so much a biography as a series of overlapping episodes and ruminations. This is a pity, as the story of Andersen's journey from squalid poverty to the courts of kings and his metamorphosis from a clumsy, half-educated provincial youth into a venerated writer is an inspirational, almost magical tale.

It is hardly surprising that Andersen suppressed or tidied up the facts about his background. He had to conceal not just poverty, but the fact that although his father was a respectable enough cobbler, and a reader, his mother was illiterate, his aunt kept a brothel and he himself was born out of wedlock.

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Andersen himself was a tall, ugly boy with a big nose and big feet, and when he grew up with a beautiful singing voice and a passion for the theatre he was cruelly teased and mocked by other children.

From the start, his eager, naive manner disguised a strong will and a ruthlessly ambitious nature. He proved good at attracting patrons in the theatrical and literary salons of Copenhagen; before long he was taken up by well-connected benefactors who arranged for him to be educated and supported at government expense. Andersen was, in fact, an early and shining example of what can be achieved by subsidising talent.

At the heart of this book, as of Andersen's life, is the story of his relationship with one particular family of benefactors. Jonas Collin, a prosperous lawyer with a keen interest in the arts, brought Andersen into the family circle and gave him, for the rest of his life, the emotional security he craved. The platonic love of his life was Edvard Collin, his benefactor's son, around whose straightforward and heterosexual nature Andersen spun an intense romantic fantasy of what this biographer rather prissily calls "sensitive friendship".

Andersen's tortured sexuality was kept hidden for half a century after his death in 1875, not least because the Collin family controlled his papers and wished to avoid embarrassment; but it is now accepted that although he frequently fancied himself in love with women, he was sexually and emotionally drawn to young men. His diaries and notebooks indicate that he was terrified by and ashamed of sex; he probably died a virgin. As this biographer indicates, it cannot be a coincidence that Andersen, perhaps the greatest of all writers for children, remained by nature childlike and pre-pubescent.

As well as the fairy-tales which made him famous, and changed for ever the way children, as subjects and as readers, are perceived, Andersen wrote plays, novels, poetry, travel books and journalism. He was also a performer, who loved to read his work aloud, and an entertainer who would hold children spellbound as he used scissors to make brilliantly inventive, slightly sinister cut-out pictures of dragons and princesses, mermaids and trolls. He was much loved, and usually a welcome guest, especially after he became famous - although his visit to Charles Dickens at Gads Hill in 1857 was a disaster. Dickens's daughter called him "a bony bore".

For all his huge success, Andersen's later life was hardly serene. He struggled to keep his family at bay; while he travelled the world and lived well at other people's expense, his mother died of drink in a poorhouse and his half-sister of consumption in Copenhagen's red light district. He fell deeply in love with his friend Edvard Collin's son; at the same time he took to visiting brothels in Paris, where to the girls' surprise he only wanted to talk. He had long been haunted by the recollection of his paternal grandfather, who lost his mind in old age and would wander the streets with leaves and flowers in his hair; as Andersen himself became more eccentric and unkempt, he, like his grandfather, was jeered at in the street. But he died well-tended by friends, and was given a state funeral.

This biography is detailed, authoritative and useful, but the translation is painfully awkward and hard to read. Surely a phrase such as "His Rhyming Demon was now stirring so often inside him and thirsting for freedom" could have been better put? This is not the only book being republished to mark Hans Christian Andersen's bicentenary; the fairy-tales have also been reissued. They are the best possible testimony to the genius of a complex man and the transforming power of art.