Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 40: Truman Capote's comments on Isak Dinesen?

Q. Have you read Truman Capote's comments about Isak Dinesen?

A. Capote's view of Karen Blixen is somewhat romanticized, but his comments about her talent for conversation concur with the opinion of many:

"The late Danish genius, the Baroness Blixen, who wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, was, despite her withered though distinguished appearance, a true seductress, a conversational seductress. Ah, how fascinating she was, sitting by the fire in her beautiful house in a Danish seaside village, chain-smoking black cigarettes with silver tips, cooling her lively tongue with draughts of champagne, and luring one from this topic to that--her years as a farmer in Africa (be certain to read, if you haven't already, her autobiographical Out of Africa, one of this century's finest books), life under the Nazis in occupied Denmark ("They adored me. We argued, but they didn't care what I said; they didn't care what any woman said--it was a completely masculine society. Besides, they had no idea I was hiding Jews in my cellar, along with winter apples and cases of champagne.") Truman Capote: Conversations. Edited by M. Thomas Inge. University Press of Mississipi, 1987, p. 358.