The Canals of Copenhagen

THE city of Copenhagen, a wide expanse of red and gray roofs from which green-bronze towers sprout like rococo stalagmites, straddles a narrow strait between the mainland of Zealand and a midget island southeast of the coast. The strait and island, which provide shelter from the temperamental waters of the Baltic Sea, are the reason for the city’s existence; København means nothing more than chapman’s haven, and the town was founded for pure commercial convenience. It became the capital of Denmark out of government’s natural affinity for money.

Copenhagen is a pretty city equipped with palaces, museums, theaters, orchestras, an excellent ballet company, superb furriers and silversmiths, a handsome Renaissance waterfront, a network of canals, and the house where Hans Christian Andersen once lived. Wherefore the Danes urge their visitors to go to the amusement park.

This park —Tivoli — sits in the spiritual if not the geographical center of town, between the Raadhus and the railway station. I arrived in Copenhagen in the middle of a cold, rainy, windy Sunday afternoon, probably the most suicidal time and weather to arrive anywhere, and took refuge in a hotel. It is a new hotel, decorated with a chaste good taste calculated to freeze the blood, but it has one great merit. It is unnaturally tall for this low-lying town. I was assigned a room on the fifteenth floor, where I peered out the window into the scudding gray of mist and rain and considered a ticket to some other place — Marrakesh, maybe.

Looking east through breaks in the weather, I could see the remote pewtery roof-line of the island, the strait, where two tugs were fussing at a large black ship, and a tangle of red brick warehouse and office buildings along the waterfront. Below me was the railroad station, diagonally to the right across Vesterbrogade. Diagonally to my left lay a block full of trees, from which emerged the tops of improbable structures, including, in defiance of all reason, a fierce red and gold pagoda. Tivoli. I began to feel more cheerful, and when the rain let up, headed straight for the park.

In spite of the damp and the cold, it was well populated. Behind the entrance gate, a white filigree structure suggesting onion domes, minarets, Gothic buttresses, and acanthus leaves in exuberant miscegenation, paths rambled in a wily maze which gave the impression that the place went on for miles. There were pavilions offering various styles of food and drink, appealing wooden animals and climbing games in a children’s playground from which all adults were excluded by a labyrinthine yellow lattice, booths for mild gambling, a small but terrifying relative of the roller coaster, an open-air theater, a bandstand, and a string of stalls selling fruit, candy, and souvenirs. These souvenirs are frowsy foolishness, running heavily to iridescent ashtrays and jointed wooden images with tufts of horsetail sticking out of the tops of their heads; these dolls are presumed to represent trolls. I mention them because Tivoli is, as far as I could discover, the only place in Denmark where Such nonsense can be had.

In fact, then, Tivoli contains the normal appurtenances of an amusement park. What it lacks is the atmosphere of peanut dust, greasy paper, peeling paint, wilted tinsel, tarnished gilding, and general dishonesty. Everything is fresh, clean, pretty, and on the level - with the exception of the gambling games, which could hardly survive if they were not rigged a bit in favor of the house. The place is unique among amusement parks in producing the impression that time and money are actually well spent there.

The great beauty of Tivoli is the layout, which, by the clever disposition of trees, shrubs, buildings, and artificial terraces, creates the illusion of vast space in what is actually a small plot of ground. Each enterprise has its own area of operation with no near competition. Barkers and wild neon signs are therefore not necessary; they would not be tolerated in any case. There are numerous waterworks arranged as buffers between rival establishments, and these are a continual source of surprise and amusement.

Although a great deal of water gets shot into the air, the simple fountain is hardly acknowledged in Tivoli. One pond contains a bevy of glass cylinders in which colored water rises, falls, and bubbles in unpredictable patterns. Another is fringed with glass lotus blooms shimmering with interior light, and a flight of huge glittering glass dragonflies skims across a third. The dragonflies are supported on bases which in the beginning dusk were already invisible. All the pools are surrounded by flower beds, which were given over to hyacinths, daffodils, and hydrangeas.

As the dark settled in, Tivoli lit up. The pagoda sprouted giddy lanterns on every peak; a mosque, turned inside out, sparkled like a jewelry shop; limelight and brassy action exploded from the bandstand. Ail the paths proved to have lights, fiery mushrooms at ankle height or strange moons glowing in the trees. There were Japanese lanterns, flowers, stars, and flights of invention unrelated to any recognizable model. It amazed me, and continued to amaze me after I had circled the frontiers of the territory, that Tivoli should have room for a promenade in addition to all its other attractions. It does, though — a stretch of walk where young Danes with long legs and long eyelashes ramble under lace-leaved trees and lights like golden lilies. They lean their shoulders together, hold hands, and chortle softly. Or perhaps they actually converse. To the uninitiate ear, the line between articulate Danish and amiable gurgling is not always detectable.

In addition to the adolescents on the promenade, Tivoli harbored families whose small children were trying everything — especially the tiny rowboats on a miniature lake—stout citizens stuffing themselves in the restaurants, and grim ancients who clustered around the gambling booths looking like the bingo crowd in Pumpkin Center. The band, jaggedly reflected among the bubbling glass cylinders, was tootling Offenbach. When the music stopped, I drifted along to the stage where people from the ballet were doing a satirical dance-pantomime on the struggle between spring and bourgeois propriety. Spring won. Looking at the crowd around me, I suspected it was no contest.

Tivoli cannot very well cover more than a dozen acres, and it may be less. It is humiliating to admit that my feet gave out while the Danes were still romping from pagoda to rowboat to tunnel of love. I had hardly burrowed into bed when a bomb went off outside my window, striping the walls with orange and turning the looking glass into a volcano. Why would anybody set off a bomb outside the fifteenth floor of a tourist hotel? Ridiculous. Must be a mistake. Second loud crash. Fireworks.

Down in Tivoli, the branches and light spring leaves of the trees hung like a canopy of ferns over the cold phosphorescent gold of the fireworks ground. An orange spark hissed upward, rose opposite the window, lifted another fifty feet, hovered, and cracked into a red chandelier which blossomed into green, blue, orange, the puffs of color falling through the dark until the last cascade of silver flame lit up the faces of the crowd in Tivoli, upturned like sunflowers to the magic of light in a black sky.

IN THE prehistoric past, the sun was worshiped in Denmark with understandable fervor. Among the surviving relics of this cult is a sun disc mounted on a little wagon with a team of horses, the whole rig made of gold. It was my intention to visit the prehistoric wing of the National Museum to see this sun wagon, along with the lur horns, the Bronze Age weapons, and the various unexpected treasures turned up in peat bogs. But Monday is Monday the world over. The museum was closed, with a sign on the door announcing “LUKKET,”

Hardly surprised, I walked on and found myself on the canal which infiltrates the older sections of Copenhagen. There are a number of canals, but this one loops around Christiansborg Castle and a group of handsome official buildings and gardens. The canal is bordered by unexpectedly wide cobblestone streets lined, on the uncastled side, with narrow old buildings topped by stepped gables. Some of the buildings are rosy brick, some are gray stone; some of the gables are plain, some are finished off with marble swags and ornate moldings. The view down the canal is a fine example of unity in diversity, orderly and uncluttered but never monotonous. Although the facades of the buildings have remained unaltered, except for cleaning and repairs, since the seventeenth century, things have happened to the interiors, and modernized apartments in these places are highly valued, since they combine elegant bohemianism with a view of the canal and its boats.

The boats are divided between jitneys, which chuff off on schedule full of commuting businessmen with briefcases, and sight-seeing launches, which post a schedule but actually leave when the captain concludes that no more passengers will turn up. There are also some small private pleasure boats that buzz about stirring up large wakes.

I wandered from dock to dock until I found a launch about to leave. I did not much care where it might be going. It turned out we were to make a tour of the harbor.

The captain — or perhaps he was the engineer - was a pleasant-faced elderly man who never uttered a word, presumably because speech would have separated him from his large aromatic pipe. Information came from a young woman who wore chino pants, a man’s shirt, and a battered gray raincoat. Her hair, amber-colored and curly, frothed from under a gob’s cap, and she cultivated a decidedly salty manner. She sat on the engine hatch, swinging her feet, and took a head count. Any French? No. Germans? Four. English? One. Danes? All the six remaining passengers, who were told that they would have to make do with the foreign tongues. They did not complain, and, the launch having turned around as neatly as a top, we set off down the canal.

The principal charm of the excursion lay in the canals on both sides of the harbor. We passed a houseboat tied up in the green shadow under an overhanging tree and crawled under low stone bridges where the engine aroused absurd booming echoes. The water flickered with red and white reflections from the buildings ashore and sometimes flashed silver as a high cloud passed over. Our guide proved to have a wide nautical acquaintance, but between shouted greetings to other boats she pointed out the fish market, the serpentine tower of the stock exchange, numerous churches of distinction, and, inevitably, Hans Andersen’s house. We passed dry docks, the edge of a navy yard, and the spot from which a Russian ship had recently refused to sail until divers had inspected the hull for lurking explosives. The guide was clearly of two minds about the Russian suspicion of sabotage; it was rather flattering that Danish inaction should have produced such a state of nerves, and it was also silly, because open assault with evidence left behind is demonstrably not the Danish way.

This observation led logically to the source of half the current excitement in Denmark. (The other half was a book on suicide.) The launch turned toward the shore and slowed until it hung motionless alongside a flattish boulder. “That rock.”announced the guide tragically, “is where the little mermaid was until some wicked villain cut off her head.” We all gazed upon the boulder with funereal respect.

Once the launch had moved on, the guide went into details. The bronze statue representing Andersen’s romantically amphibious heroine had been a Copenhagen landmark for fifty years, much admired from the landscaped walk above the beach. Recently, somebody had come by night, equipped with a hacksaw and a good eye for police patrols, and had decapitated the mermaid just above the collarbone. The operation was particularly tricky because the boulder on which the statue sat is never entirely above water, the shore is paved with slippery rocks, and the promenade is pretty well lighted. There was also the matter of carrying away the head. While the vandals had serious practical difficulties to overcome, they had in their favor the utter irrationality of the project, for what the authorities do not foresee, they take no measures to prevent. The criminals operated so neatly that no clue was left behind, and the embarrassed police had not even the shadow of a suspect. Meanwhile, the mermaid had been taken away to have her head recast.

It had all been a most shocking affair, the guide concluded, for everybody in the harbor, all the people coming and going with boats, had considered the mermaid more as a living friend than a piece of statuary. “We really loved her, you know. She meant home and Copenhagen to all of us.”

All of us, I discovered some days later, was an overstatement. A group of literary and theatrical people, enterprising characters with an average age of about thirty years, gloated over the business. Their reasons were officially aesthetic. The statue was denounced as a dreadful piece of nineteenth-century sentimentality designed to encourage foreigners in the belief that sugary fairytales represent the apex of Danish literary achievement. The simpering attention lavished on Andersen by tourists is particularly maddening to Danes who have discovered that Andersen in translation loses the satirical, irreverent, even malevolent wit which makes him, on his own ground, closer kin to Dean Swift than to Andrew Lang.

I presently began to suspect other, unofficial reasons for the glee aroused by the mutilation of the mermaid. Nebulous, difficult to pin down, largely unjustifiable on any practical grounds, there ran through the talk of these young Danes a steady current of exasperation with efficiency, comfort, and good order. They complained not that it is difficult to grow rich, but that it is almost impossible to stay poor; not of the quality of housing, but of the red tape involved in finding a place to live, or, much worse, in getting permission to build one; not of deficiencies in social or medical services, but of their enervating, pervasive, constantly improving embrace. They complained of their elders — always talking about being resistance fighters in the war, when everybody knows there was hardly a shot fired during the whole business —but there was more envy than cynicism in the tone. Finally, they complained of having nothing serious to complain about, which for persons of artistic ambition practically amounts to technological unemployment.

When I described this conversation to the witty, iconoclastic poet and critic Elsa Gress Wright, she said it was only to be expected. “We used to be quarrelsome people, you know — quite recently, too — time of Napoleon. Fight anybody. Fight about anything. Wars all the time. Now all that energy is still boiling around, but there’s no use for it. Too well organized.” Surely it must go somewhere? “Well — we have a high divorce rate and a high suicide rate.”

The government has since taken steps to oblige malcontents, artistic and otherwise, by giving them something definite to denounce. This was not the intention, merely the natural result, of the establishment of a Ministry for Cultural Foundations. On its cultural kick, the Danish Parliament authorized the award of an income of S3000 a year for three years to six writers, six visual artists, and three composers. The announced object was to give the money to “young artists so that they could afford to devote themselves to creative work,” but the committee, like most such committees, wanted to back sure winners, with the result that some of the money went to people who did not need it in the least. The outcries of the unsuccessful candidates attracted the attention of other citizens, from utter cranks to sober workmen. It is reported that one gentleman, unimpressed by arguments that culture is a national necessity, spoke as follows: “If people want to be artists, that’s their business. Why should we workers support them? Some fellows like to fish and some like to hunt and some like to collect stamps. Next thing, you’ll be wanting us to support them, too.”

When I was in Copenhagen, this glorious row had not begun, and the artistic colony had no cause to take up arms.

To sufferers from uncongenial peace and quiet, the attack on the mermaid therefore seemed a blow for anarchy, a consoling proof that chaos and old night still survive in Denmark. Perhaps it was a blow for anarchy, or even a protest against the Andersen cult, but it struck me that the headsman might equally well have been a kleptomaniac art collector who, unable to lift the whole statue (she was quite a sizable girl), had settled for the head.

Since it seemed unkind to mention this theory aloud, I brought up that gold sun wagon at the museum. I still hadn’t seen it. I had seen palace gardens, the ballet, and the city hall. I had seen C. L. David’s museum, which is a fine old town house where white enamel lies so thick on the staircase that it shimmers like porcelain, and the dark, silky eighteenth-century furniture stands much as it did when the house was lived in. I had talked with three housing experts and decided that Danish housing is like Cyprus politics: anyone who understands the situation has been misinformed. I had visited two flowery, casual country towns, a deliberately picturesque fishing village, and the bustling suburb of Gladsaxe, where the lord mayor, Erhard Jacobsen, is conducting experiments ranging from the insanity of a swimming pool (every town in Denmark now clamors for one, and the cement suppliers cannot cope) to a municipal theater and an ingenious time-and-space-saving revision of the school system. But no matter how carefully ! studied the published schedule of operation, no matter how conscientiously I hastened to the doors at what seemed to be the proper time, the museum remained gloomily LUKKET.

Ashamed to admit my incompetence, I merely hinted at an intention to visit the sun wagon. The Danes were all interest, like cats at a mousehole.

Had I been to the museum at all? Well, no — sheepishly — I hadn’t managed to get there at the right time yet. And how many times had I tried? More sheepish, I confessed the truth. Three. Chorus of chuckles and hoots from the Danes. “That’s nothing,” they said. “You have hardly begun.” They claimed to know people who have spent years in futile efforts to catch that museum open. They referred to a folk myth which maintains that it never does open. They assured me that I would quite possibly never get into the place at all.

They were right. Whitsun holidays and extempore changes of schedule continued to baffle me, and I never got past the LUKKET sign. For all I know, the mermaid’s head is in there.