Dance on the Paper

On Dance of the Dwarves

By : Bjørn Bredal

Toulouse-Lautrec once said something to the effect that the sole purpose of this life is to make the best of things as they are. Lautrec was just over five feet tall. The main character and narrator of Dværgenes Dans (Dance of the Dwarves) is 136.5 centimeters in stature and, in his own words, “an unusally nice specimen of an achondroplastic.”

Anne Marie Løn quotes ToulouseLautrec himself in her sumptuous novel about the dwarf Tyge Willhof-Holm, a moving and masterfully told account which leaps out of fantastic historical material that Løn has made the absolute best of. Tyge is twenty-three years old and in 1922, the year of the narrative, organist in the chapel of Western Cemetery in Copenbagen. His father, Master of the Royal Hunt and lord of the family estate Willhofsgave on Horsens Fjord, would have preferred to see his son a musician in a different employ, namely the Royal Symphony Orchestra. But the dwarf has perceived his natural limitations, taken his life and finances in his own hand and chosen a secure position in the municipal funeral chapel, which has a fine pipe organ with two manuals, pedals, and every possible combination of its twelve beautiful voices. One spring day when Tyge is playing for one of his innumerable funerals he sees in the mirror above the console the figure of a woman. Infatuation and drama are upon him.

The love story spans a few weeks in the spring of 1922, but along the way a fantastic genealogy is unfolded. Tyge, with seven beautiful sisters and a handsome brother, is the afterthought in the aristocratic manorial family. The father insists on keeping Willhofsgave as an entailed estate, but he is on the road to economic ruin as the family, meanwhile, appears to be headed for extinction: Two sisters in the beautiful pleiad have died, the remainder eschew men, while the brother Helmuth sticks to men.

The Willhof-Holm family are enlightened, have distinguished traditions for scientific and public spirited activities, Tyge’s father has a well-balanced threefold attitude towards life embracing the pragmatic, the scientific, and the Christian, and all of the children are independently creative and industrious individuals in the fields of art and science. But love is lacking.

A pivotal figure in the story is the domestic help and nanny through alt the years, Melvida Valentin, nicknamed Vidde. She is the woman in Tyge’s life, and she turns out in the most singular manner to be the key to the love which breaks into the family’s story that spring day in 1922, when Tyge sees the woman’s figure in the mirror while playing his organ in the funeral chapel, and Vidde is on her deathbed at Willhofsgave.

This is incredibly exciting material. An unceasing counterpoint between the talent and learning which radiates from Tyge's narrative on the one hand, and then his personal appearance as the reader visualizes it with all of the clichés and preconceptions associated with “dwarfism”, also as it is defined in modern, enlightened general reference works. Anne Marie Løn presents fascinatingly and effortlessly an immense knowledge of “nannyism”, just as she constantly holds up before us art's reflective figures, first and ultimately Karel van Mander's formidable canvas, in Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, of Giacomo Favorchi, the Electoral Prince of Saxony’s Italian dwarf.

I cannot get over the fact that a popular writer, in the best and most qualitative sense of the word, like Anne Marie Løn can select: and compose material so demanding and steeped in knowledge as this. Her enriching reflections on the present fin de siècle cultural disintegration, the battle of the sexes, women’s - and men’s - liberation, all are embedded in a free and easy, flowing, captivating, vivid narrative which the reader devours with tremendous emotional and intellectual satisfaction.

The fourth generation of the lords of Willhofsgave is, at the beginning of the novel, in the process of closing in on itself. Anne Marie Løn has the dwarf Tyge and his great love open the history again. The history of the modern world.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 15

Translated by Kenneth Tindall