Karen Blixen’s motto, Equitare, Arcum tendere, Veritatem dicere - "To ride, to shoot, to tell the truth”, which is the Greek concept of the ideal life, adorns the flyleaf of her great memoir about her coffee farm in Kenya, which begins "I had a farm in Africa". The story is often thought of as a classical five-act tragedy but the ending serves to underline the idealism never lost through seventeen years of her life there.
Out of Africa is seldom thought of as a love story between two earthly human beings, although the Hollywood version brought us much closer to that understanding. The book has long been described as a “prose pastoral” - the story of the author’s love for Africa and all that the term represented. However, the book’s hidden secret is probably that it always was meant to be about earthly love between real humans separated, like Romeo & Juliet, Tristan & Isolde, by death & terrible decisions.
Passion is generally the source of stupendous lyrical writing. Karen Blixen’s prose in Out of Africa goes far beyond anything found in her other books, and resembles the other stories not at all. What gives her memoir its immortal greatness, while her other stories are sometimes difficult to recall? What emotion inspired the story that became one of the most revered films of all time? What causes us to be talking about it nearly a century after the story began?
It’s not because Karen Blixen - who used the pen name Isak Dinesen - spoke directly about what was on her mind. She grew up Victorian: discreet, prim and reserved. Her mentors, who were poets of the Romantic era, pursued symbolism, archetypes, subtlety and suggestion. Never say what you’re thinking; hint at everything; pretend that your story applies to every person, not just you; make it seem that your life follows the great themes of history, not the petty concerns of the individual; describe yourself in the sublime third person, calm, all-wise and controlled; describe your love affair as if it were a continent or a country, laid open to your love, handsome in its lions and acacias, mysterious as a lover in its foibles and its natives, frustrating in the elusive beauty that seems indifferent to your obsession with it; always there yet never yours; challenging and appreciating your talents yet unconquerable.
Why does Karen Blixen’s story draw you in and fascinate through chapter after chapter of history of colonial Kenya? Because you are really reading about the developing life of one woman faced with supreme challenges and disappointments, of tragedies mounting upon themselves that would drive even a well-balanced person to clinical depression. Because the story rests on the vagaries of one individual who chose to do something desperately uncomfortable in leaving her cozy Danish family and going to East Africa as a pioneer farmer in 1914.
Imagine marrying on an unknown continent, without family or friends, surrounded by a foreign culture, faced with a job you have never handled, a language you speak haltingly at best, a climate known for its morbid disease? Setting out with great hope and aspirations only to meet divorce, bankruptcy, and death of your greatest friends? And turning all these immense disappointments into one of the greatest works of poetic prose ever written.
Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film acquired its greatness from Karen Blixen’s original inspiration, but the real story is, as they say, better than fiction. The Hollywood account plays from the male viewpoint of Pollack and his screenwriter, Kurt Luedtke. The overview of colonial Kenya is marvelously authentic, and Klaus Maria Brandauer as Bror Blixen and Michael Kitchen as Berkely Cole were brilliantly cast. But the movie grows long where Robert Redford dominates, and this is because his role is fictional - male-oriented, deprecating, humorless, unsympathetic - qualities opposite to the real Denys Finch Hatton, who made everyone, including the readers of Out of Africa, perpetually smile.
Karen Blixen captures the light and the smells of colonial Africa. She portrays Kenya as it was and even remains today - in the courtliness of its people and the majesty of its wildlife: “The views were immensely wide. Eveything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.” She portrays a society based on master and servant, but one where the mistress is subject to the same god as the peasants. No class is superior to another in the eyes of Fate. The tragic end - a distinctly Scandinavian view - will leave you sobbing with loss. Her departing train leaves behind forever the Ngong Hills: “The outline of the mountain was slowly smoothed and leveled out by the hand of distance.”
Out of Africa is the fruit, not just of Karen Blixen’s experience, but of Western literature, of Scandinavian history, and of the great Romantic movement taking place at the time of her birth. For nearly two thousand years, from the ancestors of Beowulf to Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Scandinavian literature has turned tragedy into entertainment. You will enjoy Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa as one of its finest achievements.
* Linda Donelson is author of the award-winning Out of Isak Dinesen. Buy it here And check out her website here .
Some recent writings have depicted Denys Finch Hatton as a "ladies man", but the writings don't give good documentation for the claims. The same writings describe Finch Hatton as a "gambler", but the term seems based on accounts of young men of the period, particularly parodies written by P. G. Wodehouse. LIttle information exists--such as documents, interviews, or letters--about Denys Finch Hatton's romantic history.
In her superb book "West with the Night", Beryl Markham wrote about him as someone she admired. Recent writers have claimed that Beryl had an affair with him, yet no one has ever quoted Beryl on the subject--even though she was alive when the rumors started. In reply to questions, she told the biographer Mary Lovell that Finch Hatton was "something you would not like", meaning homosexual [Straight on till Morning, 1987]. She told writer James Fox ["Who is Beryl Markham", Observer Magazine, 30 Sept 1984] that she doubted Karen Blixen had consummated her affair with Finch Hatton. Yet Karen Blixen says in her letters that she thought she was pregnant by him. Surviving letters by Denys Finch Hatton might shed more light on his personality, but these few valuable letters have remained private. HIstorically many of his friends have commented about aspects of Denys's personality; but, in contrast to friends who commented about Bror Blixen, no one who knew Denys, ever suggested that women played much of a role in his life.
I was born, brought up, graduated, married and gave birth to a child in Africa (most precisely, Mozambique). Like Karen Blixen, I left Africa not because I wanted to, but because I was forced by adverse circumstances as a result of decolonisation. I've read the book and seen the movie more than 100 times. I have even used them as course material in my English classes at the Faculty of Arts in Lisbon, where I taught for nearly 30 years. The essence of Africa vibrates within every word, every view, every detail in both book and movie - though they are two very different objscts. And my heart bleeds with longing for that unique Continent which Karen Blixen so well captures in her work! "Out of Africa" (the book and the movie) reverberates with MY AFRICA too! And I, too, had a farm in Africa! Only those who have profoundly experienced,lived, and loved that Continent can understand this feeling! Thank God Karen Blixen existed and left us her tribute of love for AFRICA!
I was born, brought up, graduated, married and gave birth to a child in Africa (most precisely, Mozambique). Like Karen Blixen, I left Africa not because I wanted to, but because I was forced by adverse circumstances as a result of decolonisation. I've read the book and seen the movie more than 100 times. I have even used them as course material in my English classes at the Faculty of Arts in Lisbon, where I taught for nearly 30 years. The essence of Africa vibrates within every word, every view, every detail in both book and movie - though they are two very different objscts. And my heart bleeds with longing for that unique Continent which Karen Blixen so well captures in her work! "Out of Africa" (the book and the movie) reverberates with MY AFRICA too! And I, too, had a farm in Africa! Only those who have profoundly experiencved,lived, and loved that Continent can understand this feeling! Thank God Karen Blixen existed and left us her tribute of love for AFRICA!
Karen loved Africa in true sense.In the beginning she also found lots of fulfillment in her relation with Finch Hatton. However, soon to her disappointment she realised that DFH was a philanderer.(perhaps his only serious relation comparatively was with Beryl Markham, the aviator) She did not decide to leave Africa because Denys died. She was to leave in any event, an injured person. Hollywood twisted story right round to glorify their so called love story, and make it a boxoffice hit.
Like Carson McCullers, I read Out of Africa every year. Every year brings new insight, and with each new insight, new pleasure. It's a wonder of brevity, beauty and clarity. The English literary canon would be poorer had it not been written.