The Art Life

"Our imaginary home, the home we share."
— Roberto Bolaño, "Dance Card," tr. Chris Andrews

1. How does Art Arrive on Earth?

In the months since filmmaker David Lynch left the planet, under the deep freeze and then the toxic thaw here by the Great Lakes, where they've reinforced the disused industrial roads to truck in heavy equipment for the foundation of an inestimably massive black site that locals aren’t supposed to know about, some poets and I huddled in our separate beds, so late in the work day it was almost the work morning, and shared links to interviews with the always-elder Lynch, parables of how Art entered his life, and thereby, our own.

Here's one. It takes place circa 1961 in Alexandria, Virginia. It's about ten o'clock at night when fourteen-year-old Lynch opens his eyes in the dark:

Well, I was on the front lawn of my girlfriend's house in the ninth grade, and I was meeting a fellow named Toby Keeler who didn't go to my high school, went to—he went to a private school, and he was telling me that his father was a painter. I thought at first his father was a house painter. But he said, no, a fine art painter. And a bomb went off in my head, a bomb that changed my life. In a millisecond completely changed my life. From that moment on, I wanted to be a painter—only that.

In another version, the elder Lynch attests on behalf of the younger: "And I wanted to live the art life.”

Even now, when it's so late, or even then, in 1961, at the bombsite somewhat closer to the beginning of the end of the world, "the art life" opens up from the slightest aperture: a single word slipped into the adolescent ear on a suburban lawn at night. The word "painter" is excised from its familiar context, both professional and domestic, and inserted into a strange one—"fine art." Precise as a bomb, it restarts the clock.

Lynch repeats and repurposes the nocturnal lighting and scenography of his initiation into the Art Life in accounting for his transition from painting to film:

I had a painting going, which was of a garden at night. It had a lot of black, with green plants emerging out of the darkness. All of a sudden, these plants started to move, and I heard a wind. I wasn’t taking drugs! I thought, Oh, how fantastic this is!

And I began to wonder if film could be a way to make paintings move.

In this parable, Art enters from elsewhere, and through the ear: I heard a wind. A cosmic soundtrack arrives out of synch but then adheres to the sticky picture track prepared for its arrival. A new phase of the Art Life begins. Art severs the artist from the mundane, but sticks around, like a severed ear in the grass, as its own uncanny aperture.

For the young Lynch, the Art Life begins with the word "painter," uttered on the lawn at night. For the Korean modernist Kim Haekyŏng, it began with the first two words from the title of the film beloved by his Francomaniac occupiers, Cocteau's Le sang d'un poète; Le sang became Yi Sang, the alias under which he undertook a farcical campaign of art-as-crime which ended in his internment and death. For the queer Helsinki poet Gunnar Björling, it was the obnoxious term "dada," and for the teenaged Kurt Cobain, the adjective "punk." For the young Kazuo Ohno, a poster of the flamenco dancer La Argentina provided the form, stance, costume, and demeanor for the exacting postwar Japanese dance practice Butoh—the same La Argentina who provided the emblem of the theory and practice of the duende for Lorca.

So Art arrives on Planet Killer, to a species that most needs and mostly doesn't deserve it, slipping its dubious toxin or glitchy bug into the brain of the waking artist through the slightest of apertures: an advertising poster, a movie title, a chance encounter, a magic word. Yet from that smallest of openings issues the new life, the Art Life.

2. The Art Life of Tove Ditlevsen

Born in 1917 to working-class parents, Tove Ditlevsen was a celebrated voice—and a celebrity—in Danish literature for nearly four decades. She debuted at 21 with the poetry collection Pigsend, variously translated as Girl-soul or A Girl's Mind. Published during the Nazi occupation and bearing a drawing of a "chaste" naked maiden on its cover, the book became a sensation, as did its author. (According to her translators Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, Ditlevsen claimed to be 20, so as "to seem extra precocious.") Three decades of publishing in an ever-expanding array of forms and media followed, from novels, poems, and essays to radio plays, lifestyle features, advice columns in women's magazines, and even wittily composed personal ads planted like bombs in the newspaper edited by her (fourth) ex-husband.

Literature, money, popularity, photography, and circulation in media are all mutually reinforcing elements of Ditlevsen's singular, and singularly modern, career. In her foreword to a new selection of Ditlevsen’s poems, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), translated by Hersi Smith and Russell, the contemporary Danish author Olga Ravn further reckons that "Ditlevsen was one of Denmark's most photographed writers. Her fame helped keep her financially afloat." This is emblematized by Ravn's remark that, after Ditlevsen's early death by suicide at fifty-eight, "photographs of her funeral procession show a sea of working-class women trailing behind her coffin through the streets of Copenhagen."

So how did Ditlevsen arrive at such an exceptionally robust Art Life? By her own account, hers was not a birth starred for Art. Her father, a committed socialist, was a stover in a factory, though frequently unemployed; a habitual reader, he was inconsistent in his support for his daughter, insisting, "Fool, a girl can't be a poet!" Her favored older brother was waylaid in his attempt to attain the higher economic and social rank of "skilled worker" when the cellulose to which he was exposed at his apprenticeship permanently damaged his lungs. Her mother was a vivacious but frequently vindictive figure whose constant refrain, settling like shrapnel in the flesh of her young daughter, was "Everything written in books is a lie." As a practical concern, the young Ditlevsen was not permitted to enter high school, but rather left for a series of domestic jobs meant to prepare her for gift, which in Danish translates as both marriage and poison.

How Art came for young Ditlevsen provides both the theme and the plot of her novelistic-memoirs, presented to anglophone readers as the Copenhagen Trilogy but really made up of three separate volumes: Barndom (Childhood, 1967), Ungdom (Youth, 1967) and Gift (Marriage/Poison, 1971, rendered in English as Dependency.) The packaging of these works as a handsome single-volume edition under the export-only title Copenhagen Trilogy in 2021 appears to be an invention of the marketing team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Yet such cunning engineering is felicitous, as it has allowed the anglophone reader to meet Ditlevsen as an artist, and literally on her own terms: the early Art Life as she conceived of it toward the end of her own.

Childhood opens with a defining scene of Art's arrival. Here the not-yet-school-aged Ditlevsen is seated at the kitchen table, looking past her unreliable mother—"Beautiful, untouchable, lonely, and full of secret thoughts I would never know," the girl sentimentally supposes.

Behind her on the flowered wallpaper, the tatters pasted together by my father with brown tape, hung a picture of a woman staring out the window. On the floor behind her was a cradle with a little child. Below the picture it said, 'Woman awaiting her husband home from the sea'. Sometimes my mother would suddenly catch sight of me and follow my glance up to the picture I found so tender and sad. But my mother burst out laughing and it sounded like dozens of paper bags filled with air exploding all at once.

The mother unleashes scornful laughter in the attempt to break Art's spell on the daughter, but somehow is also converted, in this moment, to Art's uncanny purposes. She begins to sing a saucy ditty "with a clear and defiant little-girl voice that didn't belong to her." Next comes a transcription in full of the ditty, in which an unfaithful wife leans out the window to warble at her lover "Can't I sing / Whatever I wish for my Tulle? / Visselulle, visselulle, visselulle." Thus the child fulfills Art's imperative, transcribing the scene in the library of memories; the author, on the page.

Young Ditlevsen’s acolyte-like attendance on Art is rewarded as this opening chapter concludes:

I carried the cups out to the kitchen, and inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul like a protective membrane. A song, a poem, something soothing and rhythmic and immensely pensive, but never distressing or sad, as I knew the rest of my day would be distressing and sad. When these light waves of words streamed through me, I knew that my mother couldn't do anything else to me because she had stopped being important to me. My mother knew it, too, and her eyes would fill with cold hostility.

If the opening scene establishes the sightlines and eerie acoustics of Art's arrival in Ditlevsen’s life, here Art enforces an even more startling adjustment in circumstance. The "light waves of words" transform the child's sense of her own place in the world, temporarily neutralizing immediate axes of violence and control—her mother "had stopped being important to me." The rest of the Trilogy—and the rest of Ditlevsen's life and work—will be spent devising ways to parry the world's hostility and step into the power of the Art Life.

As Ditlevsen enters her schoolyears, both "the grownups" and her schoolmates can easily detect her attunement to Art's presence; she cries, for example, at the unexpected beauty of rote school hymns. Yet the same class, gender, and family pressures which attempt to reform her abnormal connection to Art ultimately offer a thrilling and unexpected solution when the girls in her class begin buying and circulating "Poetry Albums," something between an autograph album and a yearbook, which girls are expected to tote around, exchange, and inscribe insipid quotes in. Even Ditlevsen’s mother consents to buy her one.

The arrival of the Poetry Album represents a true turning point for Ditlevsen; for the first time, she has a designated place to collect her own poetry. At first, the album provides her with a way to hide her nascent poetry in plain sight, though she conceals the album itself under a pile of folded towels, in her underwear, even taking it to the hospital with her under the pretense of collecting autographs. But it also becomes a means of “publishing” her work—at first unintentionally, when her brother finds the album and both praises Ditlevsen’s facility and jeers her "lies," and then purposefully, as she begins to show it to other youths and then, finally, to possible editors. In fact, rather than entrust the precious album to a mutual acquaintance so he can approach an editor on her behalf, she heads for an editor's office herself, poetry album in tow. This heroic self-belief does lead to publication, first of an individual poem, then a book of poetry, then a novel, and finally a fully realized, very public Art Life.

Crucially, the miraculous arrival of the Poetry Album transforms Copenhagen Trilogy itself into a kind of poetry album. Here, amid the alternately grim, drab, and highly thrilling scenes of her childhood, youth, and dependency, Ditlevsen inscribes snippets of poems, whether by herself or others. Considering that these memoirs were written some three decades later, the keenness and delight with which Ditlevsen recalls these early poems amplifies their power; the reader discovers them along with the young poet, whether it be a verse by Baudelaire ("the pitchers are filled with wine, / the twilight-veiled earth"), a lyric passage by the Nobelist Johannes V. Jensen ("And now like the evening star, then like the morning star, shines the little girl who was killed at her mother's breast"), or a draft of what will become Ditlevsen's own first publication, in 1939, the poem “To My Dead Child":

I never heard your little voice,
Your pale lips never smiled at me.
And the kick of your tiny feet
is something I will never see.

These poems hang like amulets amid the velvet-draping of the prose. They mark Art's path, the path the girl must follow: the dazzling coordinates of the Art Life.

3. There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die

With the newly selected poems, anglophone readers who came to know Ditlevsen through the Trilogy will feel a strong sense of familiarity, delight, and allegiance. The opening selection from Pigsend (especially "To My Dead Child") will cause the fangirl's heart to leap. The decision to title the volume There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die seems to ratify a readerly inclination to imagine the "extra precocious" girl-poet of the Trilogy as the ghostwriter of this entire selection, even though it collects verse written well into middle age. Ravn makes this connection in her foreword and draws out its political implications:

You could say that Ditlevsen's so-called sentimentality is a poetic anachronism that functions as a subversive tool, an anachronism on a par with a woman's emotional life. There live girls in us that will not die.

A more ambivalent reading of the title, however, redoubles its power. The girl who will not die haunts and unsettles the poet. The opening poems, written in Ditlevsen’s youth, place the female speaker at the center of the roles Romantic poetry assigns the young girl: that of dying, or dead, or ideal. In “Ritual,” Ditlevsen’s girl-speaker seizes and redecorates this convention: "When I am dead, please lay me / to rest in a jet-black coffin, / and dress me in a crimson gown / with long sleeves made of velvet." The funeral procession shall be accompanied, improbably enough, with the 1925 Dixieland-pastiche "Dinah" (popularized by one Fanny Rose Shore, who became so identified with the song she made her stage name Dinah!) By the final quatrain, the party is over, and the speaker rests in her desired coffin.

This jet-black coffin with its young, speaking girl—now alive, now dead—forms a persistent, uncanny battery in the book. We encounter the young girl and her dead, alive, dead-alive progeny again and again. In a consistent trope, the adult woman-speaker reflects on the lost dreams of girlhood, yet the thick, conventional nostalgia is pierced by a startling image:

It was on a night like this
I must have been seventeen—
are the red shards of my love
still there in the tall grass?

Here the scene of love becomes the scene of the crime.

In a poem titled "Recognition," the grave becomes a place where adult women apprehend their shared plight: "Wordlessly we understood— / with dead leaves in our eyes and hair." The next poem, “The Children’s Eyes,” begins, "I dread the children's eyes." The conventionally tender maternal gaze which Ditlevsen’s speakers frequently assume when addressing children, however hypothetical and/or dead, is now reversed; it is the children who gaze at the speaker, and their gazes are piercing, haunted, dreadful, strange.

Translators Hersi Smith and Russell render the persistent intensity, deepening tone, and gradually shifting forms of Ditlevsen's work with the immersiveness of a ghost story, converting this Selected Poems into a nimble page-turner. The poems lose the rhyme and boxy shape of the early quatrains, assuming an addictive free verse with short lines that refuse to telegraph their intentions; meanwhile, risen from her youthful coffin, that is, from the coffin of youth, the young girl is no longer identical with the speaker but instead haunts her, while the aging speaker's attitude toward the girl grows more troubled. A poem toward the end of the volume, "Self-Portrait 4," describes with disgust a former neighbor, an old lady who misremembers the speaker-Tove as a noisy, heedless child:

I don't remember
the old woman
from my childhood ...
She knows something
about me she won't divulge
a secret I've never told.

It fills her up
and keeps death at bay
she tells lies and intends 
to outlive me.
I never took the stairs in bounds
I was a quiet child.
I hate her.

Here the speaker wishes to disavow the "old woman" but ends up assigning her a power which seems stored in the pronoun she—a witchy power which the adult speaker also accesses. "She knows something / about me she won't divulge / a secret I've never told." Facing each other across the mirror of that unpunctuated enjambment, "She" and "I" are disturbingly close; they seem to wear each other's faces. Moreover, "she tells lies and intends to outlive me," the speaker complains, but we know from Childhood that lies are what authors write, and in fact young Ditlevsen defends her poems by vowing allegiance to such lies: "I know that sometimes you have to lie in order to bring out the truth."

So, who lies? Who lives? Who hates? Who dies? By the last line, through the fluid and felicitous ambiguity of the translation, that “her” is so porous, so capacious, it's as much a yielding grave as a pronoun; like any grave or woman, it can hold all the hate. Does the speaker hate her child-self? Does she hate the old neighbor-lady who lies about her? Maybe the titular girl-who-will-not-die has now uncannily assumed the role of speaker, casting the adult Ditlevsen as a lying old lady, trying to outlive her child-self. Well, this undead girl will not let that happen. There is a young girl who will not die. And she will have the last word, as she had the first.

Ditlevsen, like David Lynch, pursued the Art Life to the end. In the version she relates in the Trilogy, she has children, husbands, and lovers, but she refuses to keep house, exchanges one husband for another, and seems most at peace when a nanny or female friend is nearby to attend to the babies. All the while, poems rise like stars, novels rise in clouds of racket from the typewriter, sorrow rises from illness, and bliss from drugs; all while she fashions and refashions the scenes, props, and personages of early inspiration into an oeuvre as luminous and haunted as a department store mirror in which the young girl studies her possible futures and the aging woman searches the black pools of her pupils for the little doll who used to live there. That girl will not die, though Ditlevsen does.

And, later, twelve-year-old Olga Ravn encounters Ditlevsen’s poems on a shelf in her grandfather's study and pictures her "wander[ing] through a forest of pop songs, picking shiny, bright-red plastic apples for her poems"—which is to say, she pictures a version of herself, wandering the grove of Art. Her, her, her. Who encounters, who wanders, who picks, who dies? Still later, Ravn edits and publishes I Wanted to Be a Widow, and I Wanted to Be a Poet: Forgotten Texts by Tove Ditlevsen (2015), and the author and translator Michael Favala Goldman spots Gift in an airport gift store and begins it. Still later, the Copenhagen Trilogy is summoned into being, featuring previously published translations of Childhood and Youth by Tiina Nunnally and culminating in Goldman's translation, Dependency. And later, thousands of anglophone readers will read it, and still later, which is to say now, now we can clutch There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die to our chests, just as young Ditlevsen held to the miracle of her Poetry Album.