Her comely, mercurial mother mocked her desire to be a poet, telling her that “everything written in books is a lie.” The best she could hope for was marriage to “a stable skilled worker who comes right home with his weekly paycheck and doesn’t drink.”ĭitlevsen’s memoirs, now published in a single volume titled “The Copenhagen Trilogy,” originally appeared in Danish as separate books: “Childhood” and “Youth” in 1967 the astonishing third, “Dependency,” in 1971.
The facts of her early life in a rough corner of Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district were gray and often cruel enough: Hitler was rising to power, her father lost his job, Ditlevsen’s education ended with middle school. That the Danish author (1917-76) was famous in her own country by her 20s, writing a major body of work that includes 11 books of poetry, seven novels and four story collections, doesn’t mean that expressing those truths came easily. “Fortunately, things are set up so that you can keep quiet about the truths in your heart but the cruel, gray facts are written in the school records and in the history of the world.” “I know every person has their own truth,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in “Childhood,” the first volume of her beautiful and fearless memoirs. THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY Childhood, Youth, Dependency By Tove Ditlevsen
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