I've read Tove Ditlevsen's memoirs (she lived from 1917-1976) in the translated 'The Copenhagen Trilogy' (2019). The first two memoirs were translated by Tiina Nunnally in 1985; the final volume was translated by Michael Favala Goldman. These three memoirs have been put together into one book as a trilogy published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January 2021.
That was an utterly depressing read. A tale of systemic sexism, of children raised by emotionally distant and often violent parents, a young adult's bad life decisions, drugs and addiction, and the author's suicide at 58 years old. I've never felt more pessimistic after reading a book.
In an interview, the translator opined that 'The Umbrella' is fairly representative of Tove Ditlevsen's writing. He said, "Tove Ditlevsen knows how to read a room. I feel she is so precise about revealing the masks that we adults wear—pride, powerlessness, for example—to cover up our immaturity. Ditlevsen’s fiction tends to be realistic and heavy, with no happy endings."
The story introduced us to Helga, a twenty-three-year-old woman who was "only averagely equipped" to move about in the world, and when she was put on the marriage market, she was plain and "drab" as could be. She didn't seem to have strong interests of her own. She simply floats along in life and conforms to what her parents and society expect of her. The story is set in a time when women as wives, weren't expected to work. They were expected to keep house. So Helga did. Her newly married husband Egon soon grew bored with married life, and didn't come home on time for dinner anymore.
Helga didn't have income of her own. She scrimped and saved from her household allowance. I winced at that. However, her marriage felt like it was a milestone part of the process of being an adult, and she didn't really love her husband, Egon. So I'm not sure where the fault(s), if any, lies in this marriage. Helga seems to exist in her own world, and rather detached from reality.
The umbrella is a metaphor. It was a parasol that Helga wanted. It was the one thing she latched on to, and made plans to have it. She couldn't explain why she wanted it. She simply wanted this lovely slender thing of silk. She was finally pushed to buy it for herself, as though she finally does something for herself, using the household money. She showed her husband her new purchase. He then cruelly broke it.
Then she walked silently past him into the little living room, back to the manageable, the tolerable, the predetermined. She sat by the window as before, finally realizing that this was her place and that everything was the way it was supposed to be. The colors in her memory mixed together, forming the beginning of a kind of pattern. She realized that she could never be the owner of an umbrella. It was only natural—it made sense that the umbrella was ruined. She had set herself up against the secret law steering her inner world. Few people, even once in their lives, dare to make the inexpressible real.
Helga smiled distantly at her husband. It was as if he had suddenly caused some string inside her to vibrate slightly, maybe because he had shown her the limits of her potential before it flowed out into nothingness. She didn’t think about it like that. She just thought, This is exactly as if I had cheated on him, and he’s forgiven me. And she nodded, seriously and absently, as if to a child who wanted to take a star down from the sky and give it away, when he, intensely occupied with screwing a new bulb into the ceiling fixture, said to her over his shoulder, “You’ll get another umbrella.”
In an interview with the translator Michael Favala Goldman, the interviewer Deborah Treisman suggested that the protagonist Helga seems to lead a life that is "emotionally stunted". She also said that much of the author's writing mirrors her life. The translator agreed.
To me, the voice of the story seems quite similar to that of her memoir. Do you feel that there’s overlap between the autobiography and the fiction?
There is a ton of overlap. Several of the stories in the collection “The Trouble with Happiness” appear to be extrapolations of scenes that are mentioned only briefly in her memoirs. The woman with the umbrella appears as an early memory of Ditlevsen’s in Chapter 5 of “Childhood.” There is no doubt that Ditlevsen mined her life for material. She was adored for this during her lifetime, especially by female Danish readers, but also looked down upon by the male Danish writing establishment. I think she was ahead of her time.
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