CW: Addiction, drug use.
There are 26 pages of warm-up before it happens. It’s not unlike watching a serious athlete prepare, knowing that you, as a spectator at home on the couch, are about to see something well beyond your own capabilities. There is often a glorious joy in spectator sport, in living vicariously, and celebrating the potential and achievement of other human beings. Here is no different. Those initial pages are filled with a restrained wonder. Tove Ditlevsen drops little things on you here and there, like comparing her father and the house’s stove: they are both large, and warm, but unlike the stove, she is not afraid of her father. During this warm-up, a young Tove is enrolled in school. We are introduced to her family dynamics (father and brother are avid readers, and socialists. Her mother is vehemently not.) Tove grew up in a relatively insular apartment building on a relatively isolated street, and we meet her at exactly the point that she begins to realize that there is a world beyond what she knows. It is a world that is often unpleasant and unsafe, but is mysterious, and therefore alluring. Street fights break out constantly. Drunks sprawl, unconscious or worse, in gutters. If you go to certain places after dark, you’ll never come back. Sirens blare in the distant dark as a young Tove tries to sleep. I flip through those first pages with a kind of reverent anticipation. If all of this is preparatory, what’s the real thing going to be like?
I am not alone in my opinion that it is on page 27 that the book truly begins, at the start of chapter six. Tove pulls a lever, and the chandelier gives way, falling into the audience, landing in a burst of crystal and bone that is both beautiful and grotesque.
“Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own…You can’t get out of childhood, and it clings to you like a bad smell. You notice it in other children — each childhood has its own smell. You don’t recognize your own, and sometimes you’re afraid that it’s worse than others’. You’re standing talking to another girl whose childhood smells of coal and ashes, and suddenly she takes a step back because she has noticed the terrible stink of your childhood. On the sly, you observe the adults whose childhood lies inside them, torn and full of holes like a used and moth-eaten rug no one thinks about anymore or has any use for.”
Welcome to The Copenhagen Trilogy. Tove Ditlevsen is not, for lack of a better expression, fucking around.
It was at this point in my single-volume hardcover that I decided I needed to purchase the individual paperbacks of each volume, and not just for Na Kim’s spectacular, iterative cover art. The books were originally published as three volumes, Childhood, Youth, and Dependency, and were reissued by FSG (translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman) in early 2021 as both a fancy hardcover and in three paperback volumes as originally intended. I decided very quickly that I absolutely needed to have each and every version of the book. The Copenhagen Trilogy had me by the throat, and I was all-in. I never wanted to be without some part of this book, reading from a weighty hardcover at home, and from the slimmer paperbacks on the bus or the train. If Tove Ditlevsen could not escape from her own life, neither would I. I was going to follow Tove to the edge and back. I was (to borrow an expression from Hole) ready to ache like she ached.
In most bookstores you will find The Copenhagen Trilogy in nonfiction, often in Memoir, a much-maligned section often associated with vanity and celebrity. But what, then, are we supposed to do with books like the Copenhagen Trilogy, or the criminally under-read and similarly “rediscovered” W-3, Bette Howland’s relentlessly brilliant memoir?
One possible answer (as is literally being debated right now on everyone’s least favorite website that they can’t stop using) seems to suggest that the line between Fiction and Nonfiction is blurring. Despite being largely about the author’s own life, books by the likes of Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard have been legitimized, enshrined in the Fiction section (and that’s the last I will say on the subject of the A-word). You also have Truman Capote (you may have heard of him), giving us whatever the fuck a “Non-Fiction Novel” is when he wrote In Cold Blood, which stitches together real events with imagined bits of dialogue or set dressings. And yet, historian and frequent Christmas gift, Erik Larson, does largely the same thing and his books are assigned to the history section. What then do we do about novels like Laurent Binet’s HHhH, which recounts real events? Historical fiction? What about books like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, or Robert Coover’s legendarily difficult-to-publish The Public Burning, or the National Book Award Shortlisted When We Cease To Understand The World? All of these use real people as their characters, but throw them into largely fictional settings. I’ve seen these books defined as, again, whatever the fuck “Historiographical Metafiction” might mean, other than being the grad school equivalent of something like “non-fiction novel.” It’s also entirely possible that none of these words actually tell us anything at all, and as usual, people are just obsessed with taxonomies and refuse to take even one deep breath.
I talked briefly in the last newsletter about resisting the commodification of trauma, that not all art, especially not all art made by women, needs to be about pain in order for audiences to find it accessible and relatable. That’s true! I stand by it. But sometimes, the way a person processes their pain is to sit with it until it turns into words.
Mental health and addiction are standard topics in the histories of male authors, and the Copenhagen Trilogy aims to kick in a door for violently confessional writing by women. Tove engages in a tradition of vulnerability, not just in the general recounting of the author’s life, but in trying to tell us something about ourselves, or about the world, the way that we traditionally expect real capital-L Literature to do. So then, does it belong in memoir? In non-fiction?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter at all. Tove tells us that, from an early age, she was told that “everything written in books is a lie.” From here on, I will be operating under the assumption that none of the genre definitions matter. To me, these books, this trilogy, read as Tove Ditlevsen attempting to tell the story of her life with the same desperate urgency with which it was lived. The events chronicled in this trilogy are not “lies,” as Tove’s mother would have you believe, but I don’t necessarily know that they’re truths, either. Not all the events are as they actually happened (the book is less than 400 pages) but rather, Tove aims to submerge, and nearly drown, the reader in the general textures and tensions of a life from which there was no escape—her own.
The ideas presented in the three volumes evolve as Tove ages. Childhood is about the eternal push-pull of freedom vs. stability, Youth is about the crush of adolescence, the transformative power of simply living out consecutive days, and Dependence is about exactly that, in more ways than one. They are also—as are all histories, personal or otherwise—books about time.
“Whenever I think about my future, I run up against a wall everywhere,” Tove writes near the end of Childhood. It is both a wall that she is willing, and unwilling, to accept. As above, she spends much of the early chapters of Childhood laying out the world in which she was raised, it is grey, and it is insular, and she really only makes one friend, Ruth, and for a while their little street feels like a playground, but the cracks begin to show, and quickly. On Tove’s first day of school, she is punished for already knowing how to read and write, a talent which her parents try to claim that they had no part in, seeing it as shameful. It is right then that Tove confronts, in no uncertain terms, a harsh reality: “There is a world outside my street which [my mother] fears. And whenever we both fear it together, she will stab me in the back.”
Much has been made (as always will be about women writers) about Tove’s relationships to men in the trilogy, but with the exception of Carl, who will meet later, it’s really her relationship with her mother that defines much of Tove’s life. A harsh critic of her young daughter, her mother is overbearing, hanging around the house like a bad mood (think: a house party after a visit from the cops). Tove walks on eggshells through her childhood, and much of volume two is concerned with her escape from beneath her mother’s dish-soap smelling hands (Tove’s observation, not mine.)
Tove’s style is barbed and deliberate, arguably the precursor to cool and aloof writers like Catherine Lacey and Rachel Cusk. Tove is quick, often, to notice the worst in things. Details like the clinical smell of her mother’s hands, or cracks in walls, or smells, or girls using trash cans as hangout spots, transport the reader to Tove’s childhood street, the poverty line arcing high overhead like an overpass. She is repulsed by most of her neighbors, especially the adults, who all seem to eat and drink too much, and are always (sometimes publicly) engaged in something vaguely sexual which Tove doesn’t fully understand, but is quite sure she doesn’t like.
It is during this childhood that Tove begins to write, keeping a secret book of poems that are hers and hers alone. She is routinely told, outright, that nobody supports her desire to be a writer. She is to be a worker, or a housewife, marrying a skilled laborer, retiring on a pension, etc. Writing, for her, is supposed to be a foolish dream from which she needs to wake up, but she refuses. Keeping, secretly, this growing collection, Tove hones her writing, and finds, for the first time, solace in the world in which she lives. So if the adage is true, and people “write what they know” then we can easily empathize, understanding why she writes the way that she does about her childhood, her images flashing like a blade in motion, catching the light for only a split second. She catches these details not to preserve them, but to numb them, embalmed as words on a page.
We also see here the first tips of the hand towards Tove’s subjective reality. She admits that she writes love poems, about meeting lips and passionate moments of destiny, about no one in particular. She draws inspiration from the lives and feelings of those around her, watching as the other girls she has grown up with begin to fall in love, and even have children (on purpose!) She rejects this passage of time, retreating into her poems, wishing that childhood could have lasted forever.
It is these poems (and, as always, some connections (that’s publishing, baby!)) that land her a meeting with an editor, who quite literally looks down his nose at her, and says that he can’t publish the poems. That her love poems to no one are too “sensual,” and that she needs to come back in a couple of years. By the end of Childhood, Tove is simultaneously too old and too young, trapped in limbo, nobody taking her seriously.
She both does, and does not, accept the wall against which she collides, over and over, as she grows up. It is a wall that both holds her back, and one that protects her from what she will eventually endure.
And so it is that she smashes headlong into her teenage years, leaving behind any kind of formal education, and immediately moving into the working world, keeping always in the back of her mind, like the ticking of a clock, a deepening connection to language. Volume two, Youth, opens with the nightmarish recounting her first job, which lasts only a day. Tove thinks of the work as that she, herself, has been purchased for a certain number of hours, and it becomes clear that the family for whom she is working is under a similar impression. Toni, the family’s pajama-clad child, meets Tove, looks her in the eye, and immediately declares that “you have to do everything I say or else I’ll shoot you.” The mother laughs, and immediately puts Tove to work.
She ruins the family’s grand piano, simply decides that she cannot return to that particular job, and strikes out to find others. Youth, by comparison to the other two volumes, is much more a straightforward account of a period of Tove’s life, swapping the universal for the personal. Things progress linearly through new friendhips, a series of soul-sucking jobs, relationships with boys, all of whom are dreadful, or worse, boring.
The second world war arrives, almost suddenly, and hovers in the background like a weather pattern (WWII as mere set-dressing is another clue that this is Tove’s story as she wants to tell it.) When Tove does finally achieve, firsthand, the Woolfian ideal of the room of her own in which to write, it comes with the slight caveat of renting said room from a Nazi landlady who listen’s to propaganda at full volume, but complains about the staccato bursts from Tove’s typewriter. With a name and an address of her own, Tove feels cautiously complete. Out from beneath the shadow of her mother and directly beneath the roof of an actual totalitarian. Tove takes her writing seriously despite her landlady, and eventually sends three poems off to a man named Viggo F. Møller, an editor and the publisher of a literary journal. A man thirty years Tove’s senior, who comments on her age during their first meeting. She ends up marrying him.
Viggo publishes Tove’s first ever collection of poems to immediate acclaim. She has arguably achieved everything she had dreamed of, unsupported, back in Childhood.
The first two volumes of the trilogy set gently like the sun. Night rolls in across the continent, and nights in Denmark are long.
On that first miserable day of work, back at the beginning of Youth, Tove writes: “There was something or other wrong with everything that my mother was responsible for.” She says this of a hole in her homemade dress. She leaves unspoken the implication about her.
If childhood is shaped like a coffin, then Tove’s adult life is wrapped tightly, circular and suffocating, like head-wound gauze.
First we have to acknowledge the triple meaning of the title in its original Danish: Gift, meaning both “marriage” and “poison,” which would stand on its own, were it not also a word in English. Dependence, as a translation, is probably as perfect a word as could be possible.
Second, the length of the third volume is nearly that of the first two put together. It is, quite literally, heavy. It is also the only volume to greet the reader with “PART ONE” upon opening it. The proceedings here feel stuffy, almost funerary.
Dependence begins by spitting you out, like waking up hungover. The world has gone stagnant and infirm. “Everything in the living room is green - the carpet, the walls the curtains - and I am always inside it, like a picture.” Tove is unhappy in this marriage to her editor. They do not sleep in the same room, as Viggo is used to living alone and doesn’t like to share anything with anyone. Tove is isolated, lonely, the only people she sees are “old people” (Viggo’s friends) whereas she, at around age 20, still feels connected to her youth.
The marriage to Viggo is largely inconsequential, other than priming Tove to accept loneliness as a part of her life, and after two years, the two are divorced. Through her reputation as a poet of note, she is almost immediately engaged again, this time to a man named Ebbe, with whom she spends a couple of years, eventually marries, and has a child. She fills her days with Helle, and working on her writing, until, during a trip to her public-healthcare doctor (it’s very funny to me, as an American, that she specifically mentions that) she learns that she is two months pregnant. She emphatically does not want to be, and Tove Ditlevsen gets what she wants, she’s Tove Ditlevsen.
And so begins what she refers to as a “doctor odyssey.” Shopping around, whispering all the while, if there is anyone that will perform an abortion for her. When she finally does find a doctor, one who has a reputation for performing such procedures, he tells her that the water is too hot, he is being watched too closely, and furthermore, he’s a fan of her writing, so he definitely can’t afford to be providing a taboo and illegal service for someone famous. He does, however, provide her with the address of someone who can help. In the end, the procedure is risky, more like inducing a miscarriage than what we think of today as an abortion. She has to spend the night in the hospital.
It takes months for the desperate adrenaline of this episode to wear off, but when it does, and her heartbeat finally slows, she finds herself able to write again. She produces a collection of short stories, and around the time of its completion, she is invited to a party, which she uses an excuse to celebrate. And celebrate she does, waking up the next morning next to a man who is most certainly not her husband. He is, however, a doctor.
So now, three thousand words into this newsletter and I can finally, fully, begin to justify the subject line, or title, or whatever. Part Two of Dependence opens with the admission that Ebbe, Tove’s second husband, is dead. This is a strange and shattering moment because it breaks with what has otherwise been a linear progression, but here is Tove Ditlevsen, the memoirist, addressing the reader directly, from the present as she is writing it. She is looking back on Ebbe’s face, remembering what it looked like when she admitted to Ebbe that she is leaving him, that there is someone else. What she does not tell him is that she’s not in love with this other man, only what he can provide for her.
Carl, the man’s name is, and he has both gotten Tove pregnant, and performed the curettage to undo said pregnancy. Tove was nervous about the procedure, right up until the moment that Carl says to Tove that she has good veins. After that is a feeling unlike anything Tove has ever known before. She will never be afraid of anything ever again.
I was a recently sober person when I read these three books, and so while great credit must be given to Tove’s fearlessness in painting a starkly negative portrait of herself as someone rash and headstrong, unconcerned about the feelings of others, there are certain other things that must be taken into account. I will spare everyone my personal history, or my war stories, or whatever you want to call them, but while Tove’s life may have been her own, the pieces move in predictable patterns.
“Demerol,” she thinks, saying that the name of the drug “sounds like birdsong.” Immediately, and instantly, she has found a cure for the unhappiness that has plagued her for so long. Before, in her younger days, this feeling was mitigated by her one true love: writing. It was her entire life, it protected her, and it was immediately, totally, replaced. Tove wants nothing more than to be given Demerol by Carl, every day, shot up again whenever the incredible feeling begins to wear off. She would never write another word again if it meant that she never had to go back.
This is the way that addiction tries to kill its host. Tove was used to living in isolation, sleeping in separate rooms, and addictions want to keep a person isolated, with nobody there to talk you out of scraping against those chemical heights. She nurses resentments against her mother as a sort-of backseat driver, addiction-wise. Resentment, as it’s understood, is corrosive to a person from the inside out. And resentment is no joke, the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book lists no less than seven different prayers for a person to recite to help combat that one particular feeling. The third pitfall facing Tove is her own celebrity. It took the length of two books for her to break free from the gravity of her proletarian upbringing, but she succeeded, and for at least a little while, she had everything she ever wanted. Addict behavior will always favor instant gratification, and Tove, once she reached adulthood, could have nearly anything, even illegal medical procedures, simply because she is Tove Ditlevsen. It’s this desire for instant gratification that would make someone already wired for addiction do something like drop everything and leave her husband because she was immediately so taken by a substance. The fourth and final piece of this perfect storm is Carl himself, who keeps supplying her with the drugs, and has his own history of instabilities (and dubious medical credentials.) Carl quickly realizes that he can keep Tove, his extremely famous wife, for himself as long as he keeps drugging her, and so he does. Hence, earlier, drawing attention to the triple meaning of that title, Gift.
So Tove does leave Ebbe (now dead, but not then) and she is given the apartment in the divorce, which she promptly moves into with Carl and Helle. Friends stop by and begin to comment that Tove is losing weight, that she doesn’t look as healthy as she used to, that she’s not writing anymore, is everything alright? She assures them that it is. She doesn’t need to write, or to take care of herself, all she wants is a larger and larger dose, and she’s going to say whatever she needs to say in order to get more of it.
In my own climb back up to the surface of functional life, someone in a group somewhere said something that really stuck with me. They said: “A person is only as sick as their secrets.” Tove describes this on nearly every page of Dependency’s second part, all without so clearly naming it, concerned, as always, to describe in truly visceral language what happened rather than analyze why or how. There’s an aspect of the addict mindset that is wholly and completely obsessed with the kind of perverse pleasure, not in the substance of choice, but of having a secret. So, fittingly, it’s the secret, the lie, that sends us to the edge.
Tove, now married to Carl, begins to pretend to be in pain. There is something wrong with one of her ears, or she tells her assistant, and begins to concoct a frankly wild scheme. She finds, around the house, prescriptions that Carl has written and simply copies them. On regular sheets of paper. She sends her assistant down to the pharmacy, where they fill the prescriptions, no questions asked. Tove is stunned, and proceeds to live like a queen, self-medicating, racking up a pharmacy bill for thousands of kroner a month, which somehow nobody comments on, other than to say “hey uh, Tove, that’s kind of a huge bill.” Oh well!
The sense of time in the book goes completely out the window here. Other casualties are things like coherent tenses, switching occasionally between present and past. The stable Tove of the future, looking back and writing this, is softening our own connection to the reality of the book as she (past Tove) walks through life in a fog of Demerol and Methadone, insisting, always, that she’s not a real addict, as all real addicts do.
It’s a perfect solution to a non-problem, these fake prescriptions, until finally she takes it too far. She has been using the pain in her ear for a long enough time, her fake pain so chronic, that Carl finally insists that she needs an operation to fix it. He knows a specialist.
Tove comes-to in the hospital, now very much in real pain, having had an unnecessary surgery that has left her permanently deaf in one ear. What’s worse, by her metrics, anyway, is that they won’t give her anything stronger than an aspirin for the pain. They “don’t want to turn people into addicts” (which, again, as an American, is just unthinkable. We sure do love our opiates.) The pain, the real pain, is absolutely excruciating for Tove, who literally breaks out of the hospital in the dead of night and hails a taxi, which takes her home, and immediately she begs Carl for drugs. He gives her what she wants.
Faces appear at her bedside and disappear again, unclear if they’re real or not. The whole world is out of focus, scratchy and hot and thick like wool. Her veins, the “good veins” that Carl had commented on, begin to collapse, and before long he is searching for new skin in between her toes. It’s never enough. It never will be enough. The disease always wants more.
The last words that Tove ever hears Carl say are “I was never sure about that earache.” He’s talking to the ambulance driver that is carrying Tove out of the house as she is being committed into a rehab facility, where she lives for several excruciatingly slow weeks. Gradually, she recovers, and learns new ways to live. She has a long, soul-deep moment standing in front of a pharmacy window, and ultimately, she resists it. She goes home. She raises her children. She marries again (her fourth!) She avoids, whenever possible, stopping for too long in front of a pharmacy.
It doesn’t go away, the addict’s way of thinking, you simply learn to minimize it, and to live with it. And while Dependence, and the trilogy as a whole, ends on a hopeful note, Tove Ditlevsen was just 58 years old when she died. She had beaten the odds, become one of Denmark’s most celebrated writers, and she died March 7th, 1976. An overdose, self-inflicted.
While Tove needs to be commended for her willingness to allow us to gaze long at her misery, that too can be a kind of addict behavior, feeding the thing. She shows us her faults, but winks to camera that these are the things she admits to doing. She’s been willing to lie, to tell half-truths, to generally obfuscate, wouldn’t she treat her readers the same? But does it matter either way? Not one bit.
It’s impossible for us to know whether or not her mother really was such a harsh critic of her young daughter. I’ve clicked around the neighborhood in which she grew up on Google Maps and found it insufficiently slaked with menace when compared to the way she wrote it. Are there more acts of secret desperation? More void-gazing in the throes of active addiction? Who’s to say. We may never know the true depths of Tove Ditlevsen, and the lack of objectivity is what grants it authenticity, a fallible book written by a fallible person.
There are, no doubt, things that she kept to herself, but would any of it change our understanding of her, of her work, if we did? “Everything written in books is a lie,” her mother told her. The Copenhagen Trilogy is proof that an author does not owe us everything, and it is a stronger book for what we, as readers, bring to it in order to fill in the gaps. We are reading about Tove, sure, but we are also reading about ourselves, pressing gently on her bruises, which she is bravely showing us, but feeling it in our own bodies. Ultimately, we don’t need verifiable, factual certainties to understand the arc of a life, we can find enough of it in the rhythms of our own days, our own hearts.
“I know every person has their own truth, just as every child has their own childhood” she writes, early in Childhood. “Fortunately, things are set up so that you can keep quiet about the truths in your heart; but the cruel, grey facts are written in school records and in the history of the world and in the law and the church books.”
Childhood, Youth, and Dependence are not historical records. They are not religious texts. They are not law. These books are Tove Ditlevsen’s truth, they are the truths of her heart, and for sharing them with us, we should thank her.