colin lavery

In case the content warning wasn’t enough of a hint, Copenhagen Trilogy, by Tove Ditlevsen, is probably the darkest, heaviest book to get written up on this here blog. The three of us read some fairly bleak, disturbing books on a pretty regular basis though, so I’m sure there will be more to come. And this was a good book that I wanted to write about anyway.

Strictly speaking, the trilogy is a memoir, published in three separate parts; Childhood, Youth, and Dependency.* Ditlevsen was born into Denmark’s working class, which meant that she would have to forego high school in favor of a series of unskilled jobs she kept to help her parents pay rent. Her father laughed at the idea of a woman poet, so it’s unlikely that she would have found familial support even if her family had more money to spare.

We do get extremely brief glimpses of something resembling happiness at points in the memoir, almost all of which are connected to Ditlevsen’s success as a poet. And this happiness is always short-lived.

Shortly after the publication of her first collection of poetry, she was able to move out to her own flat only to discover that her landlord was a Nazi who would interrupt Ditlevsen’s writing by playing Hitler’s speeches loudly enough to be heard through the walls of the flat. The peaceful moments in her various marriages are overshadowed by the coldness she receives from her second husband following the birth of her first child or the fact that her third husband introduces her to Demerol and abuses his privileges as a doctor to enable her continued addiction.

Ditlevsen writes with such little concern for the conventional memoir form that it’s easy to forget that it’s not a work of fiction. She recounts her life’s events chronologically (as far as I can tell), but does not seem to feel the relative import of certain events that one would normally consider life-defining. We learn in passing that she is trying for more children and that her husband plans to take in a child of his from a prior entanglement and are only introduced to them when they show up simultaneously next to Ditlevsen’s bed, without any way for the reader to differentiate between the two children she’s raising.

In all of the reviews I’ve read on this book, most notably Marie Solis’s write up in The Nation, this narrative technique is treated as just another artistic choice that Ditlevsen made while writing this memoir. Through this conventional reading of a very unconventional book, Solis accepts Ditlevsen’s testimony that, by the end of the memoir, she was finally clean from opiates and ready to experience life as a reformed woman. This reading despite the fact that Ditlevsen ended her own life just five years after the publication of Dependency.

A more plausible reading, in my opinion, would be that the uneven pacing and emotional detachment reflect Ditlevsen’s actual recollection of her life and the distance she tried to keep from her own life while she was still living it. “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin and you can’t get out of it on your own,” writes Ditlevsen in the first book. Poetry is the first tool that she learns to use to escape the dreadful conditions of her childhood, first by accident but then intentionally as she embraces the anesthetizing qualities of language. Once she learns that Demerol offers the same escape that poetry once did, she finds no use for writing and seems content lying in bed all day, receiving injections from her husband who is in the midst of his own psychotic episode.

Had Ditlevsen only periodically employed this narrative distance, I may be more open to the idea that this was a stylistic choice she made to dramatize the effects of drug abuse and childhood trauma. Yet the glimpses we get into the more concrete part of her life suggest that she truly maintained an existence removed from what we would consider reality. Aside from the Nazi landlord and the occasional appearance of an inconvenient, occupying German soldier, we would have no idea that her life was occurring during the same span of time as a war that cost 75 million lives. She simply does not engage with it.

Combined with the fact that Ditlevsen committed suicide a short period after her alleged sobriety (she hints at drinking a bottle of wine being her coping mechanism for opiate cravings), the matter-of-fact narration instead reads to me like a haunting, cautionary tale of pushing escapism past any reasonable boundary. She just cannot seem to confront the personal and global atrocities that followed her throughout her entire life, no matter how many times she reduces them to a few sentences amidst objective reflections on life’s mundanities. A captivating, if brutal, retelling of a tragic life.

* (SUPERFLUOUS BOOK NERD NOTE) The final installment was only just been translated from its original Danish in 2019 by Michael Favala Golden, 48 years after it released in Denmark. All three are available for purchase individually in paperback, but I got the FSG hardcover, which features translations by Tiina Nunnally for the first two sections before switching to the Golden translation for Dependency. Not that I’m an expert in Ditlevsen’s prose or Danish translation, but I did not notice a change in the voice between the two translators and only just learned that was translated separately as I wrote this blog.