Tove Ditlevsen's Flight from the Streets of Childhood

By : Per Hanghøj

For Tove Ditlevsen, Barndommens gade (The Street of Childhood) was just a protective poetic robe, defence against the insecurity and brutality by which she was surrounded, a robe which transformed into a strait-jacket when she became an adult. It ended with, as can be revealed here, that she dissociated herself from the book and achieved personal emancipation with a sincere and honest book, Barndom (Childhood), published in 1967. This book, and others which were to follow, manifest a different way in which to remember. But it was a struggle to transform romantic flight, and thus her image, into a new poetic truth.
   Tove puffed away at her filterless cigarettes, the tape recorder was on the table and soon we were on a lengthy excursion down her problematic street.
   - Reading The Street of Childhood is to experience you as being drawn to a particular place.
   Well I have, but it´s romanticisation, I wasn´t being sincere.
   - When you say that you weren´t being sincere, is it because, among other things, your presentation is such that it appears you didn´t write the poems yourself?
   Yes, it´s so silly to write an autobiographical book like that, so it seemed to me that a poet ought to put in an appearance and so I give my brother that role instead of being honest and sincere, but then aged 20 one wasn´t. I couldn´t be, so I consider the book to be less than successful. Inevitably it leads to an imbalance, because it´s Ester and her mind that´s being described, so it would be natural to make it all clear and explain that she was artistically inclined - rather than it being the brother, my lovely brother. That´s just nonsense.
   - What is the difference between The Street of Childhood and these new books, seen through the filter of memory?
   Outwardly there´s no difference, but there is on the inside, in the appraisal of my parents and my childhood. It´s not possible to write about these things while you´re still so involved in them, as young people are. Things and events have to season for many, many years, incredibly many years, and then they find their natural placing and then there´s an inner imperative to get it written down.
   - Are we then to understand that now we have the actual facts of your childhood?
   I hate realities and facts and truths, I despise them like the plague.
   - What then have you based your reminiscences on?
   On a poetic truth, which is something quite different from realistic truth. The poetic truth is that every single person has their own universe and there is no feasible correlation. What´s important for me is to avoid reality, I live in a particular world of my own. The contents of my books of memoirs are a poetic, artistic fact, but not fact in relation to the Glyptotek over there or that I was born in such-and-such a year. Previously there was a lot of eyewash, now it´s poetic honesty and sincerity, which is mine, and which I hope other people can get something out of too.

Extract from interview brought in Jyllandsposten 30. december 1986

Translated by Gaye Kynoch