Childhood, Youth, Dependency (1967, 1971)

Pulp Fiction Books on Main Street has a very small shelf across from the cash register for STAFF PICKS. I always glance at it when I'm in the store, sometimes opening a book and reading a little. What drew me to Tove Ditlevsen's Childhood, Youth, Dependency (1967, for the first two books; 1971 for the third) was the blandness of its title, how it reminded me of another Northern European title, Halldór Laxness's Independent People (1934/35), which I enjoyed.

Childhood, Youth, Dependency is exactly what it says it is, and readers can expect to hear the first person account of an author who grew up working class in Copenhagen in the 1920s and 30s. Tove is drawn to  reading and writing poetry and is observant of the world around her; she is also a hard worker who is often put in situations where she has to find her way through trial and error, and their are errors, some of them funny, all of them bittersweet. 

Reading Ditlevsen's "Childhood" section at the same time as Brigid Brophy's contrasting review of Jean-Paul Sartre's "autobiography up to the age of ten", aka Les Mots (1963), makes its own jokes.

Here's a passage from Brophy's essay "Genet and Sartre", first published in London Magazine (1964):

"The difficulty was that a child has no positive personality to impose. The only response the child could make to his grandfather's infatuation was to play the part of the child. He also played the beauty, at least till his curls were cut off. (Even the grandfather, Sartre sardonically reports, was disconcerted by having taken a 'little wonder' to the barber's and bringing home 'a toad'.) He played the infant prodigy -- and there is a passage of lovely buffoonery in which he is briefly sent to school and withdrawn because the teachers fail to see his prodigiousness." (from Reads, 1989, pp. 54-55)

Now here's a clip of Greg, who has a lotta "positive personality to impose," and to which Larry rewards accordingly -- with typically disastrous results!