Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

THE WRITER KNOWN to the world as Isak Dinesen created her own myth in Out of Africa, a magical account of a young Danish woman's life on an African farm in the early years of this century. Since the publication of that classic memoir, the Isak Dinesen myth has grown, essentially because of her published works, yet considerably enhanced by a persona she invented to charm and enchant: the draped clothing, the gothic allure of the syphilis believed to be racking her body and, as she aged, the alarming thinness, the witchlike features, the cigarette dangling from the skeletal fingers and the husky rasping voice reading the works which had made her a world figure.

Since her death, the story has been furthered by a number of biographies and by the film Out of Africa, in which a National Geographic romantic gloss was overlaid on the more complex truth of Dinesen's story. Linda Donelson's intent in this engrossing retelling is to return the depth and color of reality to a rich and finally tragic story. In doing so, Out of Isak Dinesen forces the reader to think about reality and myth and their role in the lives of notable women of the first half of the twentieth century.

Reality is harsh; we sink happily into the romance of myth. Bella Abzug's political stands were the solid stuff of her life, but we love her hats too--in the same way that, beyond the books and the sculpture, it's fun to remember Colette in bed at the end of her life carefully made up in her daily blue eyeshadow, and Louise Nevelson trailing about in caftan, turban and false eyelashes. Good enough, as long as we also learn from what was difficult and solid in these lives.

Donelson sketches in the early days of her subject's life, but really starts the detailed story with the marriage of Tanne (the family name for Dinesen) to Bror Blixen, a second cousin and a member of the Swedish aristocracy. He was the twin of the man she initially loved, who married another. In her late twenties she accepted Bror on the rebound, somewhat because of the title she coveted, and though Bror's connection to her was also fueled by his need for her solid bourgeois family's money, Donelson makes a very good case for a true attachment between the couple.

Tanne's family feeling was strong. She trusted Bror, she had known him since childhood. There was comradeship--and sexual passion--in the union. They were in agreement about buying land in Africa, and began their adventure with the highest hopes for the financial success of the coffee plantation and for the happiness of their marriage. Within a year, for Karen Blixen, much of that dream was shattered.

For all the intense fascination Africa offered Karen, the life the couple had chosen was no dream. They bought land in Nairobi in 1913. The First World War made for great difficulties in running the plantation, and through a misunderstanding the couple were suspected of German sympathies. Bror's plans for financially successful crops changed often. Karen began to question her husband's ability to manage. Her family had invested the money for their venture, remaining steadily involved in all its matters and exerting a disagreeable constant pressure on the Blixens.

Then, within the first year, Karen learned through a friend that Bror was sexually active outside the marriage. When Karen became mysteriously ill and the doctor diagnosed syphilis, her husband was the only possible source of this infection. He had picked it up from a Kenyan woman, apparently, been only mildly sick himself, but in passing it on to Karen he imparted a major affliction. She overcame it physically, but the fear of it terrorized her and addicted her to the lifelong use of arsenic. Her medical history is filled with frightening and mysterious symptoms. (Donelson is a doctor and her book includes an informative appendix on Isak Dinesen's medical history and another on the subject of mercury vs. arsenic as a cure for syphilis.)

OUT OF ISAK DINESEN is a meticulous account of the ups and downs of the marriage, as unfathomable as most marriages. As late as 1918, the couple were again living in a kind of harmony, hoping to conceive a child. And though letters to Mom are not always truthful (one thinks of Sylvia Plath's cheery notes home at the moment her marriage was disintegrating), Karen wrote her mother, "you may laugh at me if you like, but... I feel like Khadijah, the Prophet's wife,--and am certain that I have married a great man..."

It was Bror who asked for a divorce. Karen feared the open admission of failure, and as much as she dreaded the loss of her lover and companion, she treasured her title. To cease to be the Baroness Blixen was to lose part of the persona she was developing. (She was a snob, and loved the aristocracy, yet her instincts and family tradition were deeply democratic, nonracist and feminist. It was the bourgeois class she loathed, particularly the British colonists and their violent and stupid racism.) And she feared to lose Africa. After the separation and divorce, she continued at the farm with the help of her family, particularly her brother Thomas.

Donelson also follows closely the fluctuating fortunes of the plantation, making use of Karen's own writings--the stories, memoirs, essays and the wealth of letters to her family and friends. For many, the grotesque elements of Dinesen's gothic tales and her mannered style are off-putting, but all the rest, right down to the intimate letters, are the stuff of lasting literature. One of the effects of this excellent biography is to excite readers to return to these classic sources.

Donelson, who grew up in Minnesota and Iowa, first went to Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching English in Cameroon. She was married in Ghana to a fellow Iowan and they honeymooned in Kenya. Later, she and her husband and their four children lived for two years on a research farm near Karen Blixen's land overlooking the Ngong Hills. Out of Isak Dinesen is imbued with a strong affinity for Africa and for her subject, along with a vigorous belief in the power of story. Sometimes Donelson gets carried away by storytelling. (There are a touch too many phrases like "one may imagine," "who perhaps thought," "the likely truth was.") But basically she carefully documents a narrative that is eminently readable and empathetic, perhaps because of the power of her conviction that she is telling the true story of a flesh and blood woman with whom other flesh and blood women may identify.

Within this formula, however, romance isn't slighted--the romance, to Karen, of the African land, sky, animals, people, its safaris and its waters (and lack of waters--the droughts that constantly threatened the enterprise made her think that wherever she would be in later life she would be worrying about rain in Ngong). The famous romance of Karen and Denys Finch-Hatton, the British aristocrat and sportsman, is here given substance missing in Isak Dinesen's own memoirs as well as in other biographies. Without grossly outing Finch-Hatton, Donelson offers an alternate view of the ambiguities of the relationship--specifically, the probability that Denys was bisexual. (Beryl Markham, one of the first women aviators, also wrote a book about Africa, following the success of Out of Africa. She believed Denys to be homosexual and insisted that he and Karen had no sexual relationship. Donelson doesn't find Markham credible. Karen herself thought she was pregnant twice during Denys's stays with her; she very much wanted a child, but on both occasions, she apparently miscarried.)

What is certainly true is that there was love between Karen and Denys. Donelson describes him as "the most witty and blessed of men...an admirable friend, a warm student of nature, a great sportsman and an incomparable human being." In a letter to her brother Thomas, Karen wrote: "That such a person as Denys does exist...and that I have been lucky enough to meet him in this life and been so close to him...compensates for everything else in the world, and other things cease to have any significance." Yet she cautions, "If I should die and you should happen to meet him afterward, you must never let him know that I have written to you like this about him..."

In 1931, during the grueling time of the failure of the coffee farm, half-mad with the unsettling pressures of selling the land and fighting to safeguard the future of her many beloved African workers, while suffering the shame of an ignominious return home, Karen had asked Denys to leave and find another place to live. As soon as he settled in, he wrote: "Let me know anytime you would like me to run out if you have anything...in which I could help. I have a book here I want you to read. I will bring it out. Best love--Denys."

Soon after, he crashed to his death in the plane they both loved to fly in over the African terrain. For Karen, this final loss was unbearable. She attempted suicide, but was saved by the watchfulness of a friend. She went home to Denmark to become, in time, and with all her will and talents for work and for myth, the writer known in English letters as well as in her native Danish as Isak Dinesen.

The later triumphs are lightly sketched in Out of Isak Dinesen: Dinesen' s world fame, the Nobel Prize nominations, the long public life. Donelsen notes that from childhood Karen had seen herself as the heroine of a romance. She is poised in our minds as such. But Donelsen roots the romance in its harsh as well as its lovely lights--a gifted woman struggling for independence and the freedom to be herself in colonial Kenya under British rule, from the First World War to the Great Depression. Our understanding of one of the foremost writers of the century is immeasurably deepened.

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Comments: Grace@karenblixen.com