It is a fine book, and its somewhat naïve philosophy touches us. Of course no civilisation can sustain such intransigent and extreme individualism, unless it is prepared to go back to the days when men held clubs and grunted. But, even so, we still feel nostalgia as we read this summons to total irresponsibility, to the great disorder of life and sex that preceded society, rules, prohibitions, the law…
Lima, August 1988
Seven Gothic Tales
The Tales of the Baroness
Baroness Karen Blixen de Rungstedlund, who signed her books with the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, must have been an extraordinary woman. There is a photo of her, in New York, alongside Marilyn Monroe, when she was just a scrap of a person, consumed by syphilis, and it is not the beautiful actress but the wide, ironic and troubled eyes and the skeletal face of the writer that steals the photo.
She was born in Denmark, in a house on the seashore between Copenhagen and Elsinore, which is today very like her imaginative and surprising personality: an enclave of plants and exotic birds. She is buried there, in the middle of the countryside, under the trees that witnessed her first steps. She was born in 1885, but gave the impression of having been educated a century earlier, the century that began in 1781 and ended with the Second Empire in 1871, that she called the ‘last great age of aristocratic culture’. Almost all her stories take place between those years. She was spiritually a woman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although, as she confessed in a radio interview towards the end of her life, her friends suspected that she was ‘three thousand years old’. She never set foot in a school; she was educated by astonishing governesses who, at twelve, had her writing essays on Racine’s tragedies and translating Walter Scott into Danish. Her upbringing was polyglot and cosmopolitan; although she was Danish, she wrote most of her work in English.
She began writing stories and tales as a child, but her literary vocation came late; her vocation as an adventurer came precociously early. She inherited both from her father, the very engaging captain Wilhelm Dinesen, who, after a perilous military career, fell in love with the native peoples of North America and went to live among them. The Indians accepted him and baptised him with the name of Boganis, which he put on the cover of his memoirs. He ended up hanging himself when Karen was ten years old. As befitted a baroness, she was married very young to a lazy and sickly cousin, Bror Blixen, and they both went to Africa to plant coffee in Kenya. The marriage did not go well (the mal français that devoured the life of Isak Dinesen was caught from her husband) and ended in divorce. When Bror returned to Europe, she decided to stay in Africa and manage the seven-hundred-acre estate on her own. She did this for a quarter of a century, in a stubborn fight against adversity. Her life on the African continent, which became an integral part of her, and whose people and landscapes were transformed by her irrepressible imagination into a unique vision, is beautifully captured in Out of Africa (first published in 1937 in Europe and 1938 in the United States).
While she was an agricultural pioneer, fighting against plagues and floods and administering her coffee estate, in the first decades of the century, Baroness Rungstedlund had no urgency to write. She merely scribbled in notebooks sketches of what would become some of her future stories. She was more attracted by safaris, expeditions to remote areas, getting to know the tribal peoples, having contact with Nature and with wild animals. The primitive surroundings, however, did not prevent her having a refined cultural life, which she organised herself, through her reading and through her contact with some curious representatives of the culture of Europe who appeared in those parts, like the mythical Englishman Denys Finch-Hatton, an Oxford aesthete and adventurer, with whom Karen Blixen maintained an intense emotional relationship. One can imagine them discussing Euripides or Shakespeare after having spent the day hunting lions. (It is not surprising, for that reason, that the only writer that Hemingway always spoke of with unreserved imagination was Isak Dinesen.) The isolation of that African plantation and the narrow circle of European expatriates that she frequented in Kenya explains to a large degree the kind of culture that so surprises the reader of Isak Dinesen. It is not a culture that reflects its age, but rather ignores it, a deliberate anachronism, something strictly personal and extraneous, a culture dissociated from the great movements and intellectual preoccupations of its time and from the dominant aesthetic values, a very singular re-elaboration of ideas, images, sights, forms and symbols that come from the Nordic past, from family tradition and an eccentric education, full of references to Scandinavian history, English poetry, Mediterranean folklore, African oral literature and the stories and way of narrating of the Arab jongleurs. A formative book in her life was the Arabian Nights, a forest of stories linked by the narrative cunning of Scheherazade, who was the model for Isak Dinesen. Africa allowed her to live, in an almost uncontaminated way, within a capricious culture, outside tradition, created for her own personal use. This culture shapes her world, and helps to explain the originality of the themes, the style, the construction and the philosophy of her stories.
Her vocation as a writer came about after the bankruptcy of her coffee estates. Despite the fact that the price of coffee kept going down, she, with characteristic temerity, carried on with the crop until she was ruined. She did not just lose her estate, but also her Danish inheritance. It was, she recalls, at that time of crisis, when she realised that her African experience was coming inevitably to an end, that she began to write. She wrote at night, fleeing from the anguish and business of the day. In this way, she finished the Seven Gothic Tales, which appeared in New York and in London after being rejected by several publishing houses. She would later publish other collections of stories, some of very high quality like the Winter’s Tales, but her name would always be associated with her first stories published in that collection, which remains one of the most dazzling literary achievements of the twentieth century.
Although she also wrote a novel (the forgettable The Angelic Avengers), Isak Dinesen was, like Maupassant, Poe, Kipling or Borges, essentially a short-story writer. The world she created was the world of the story, with all the resonance of unbridled fantasy and childlike enchantment that this word implies. When one reads her it is impossible not to think of the book of stories par excellence, the Arabian Nights. In her stories — as in the Arabian Nights — the passion most commonly shared by all the characters is, alongside putting on disguises and changing identity, that of listening to and telling stories, evading reality in a mirage of fictions. This tendency reaches its apogee in ‘The Roads Round Pisa’, when the young Agnese della Gherardesca (dressed as a man) interrupts the duel between the old prince and Giovanni to tell the prince a story. This vice for fantasy gives the Seven Gothic Tales, like Scheherazade’s stories, a Chinese box structure, stories that burst out of stories or dissolve into stories, among which the main story, hiding and revealing itself an ambiguous and elusive masked ball, is told.