Karen Blixen with her brother Thomas on the family farm in Kenya in the 1920s (Wikipedia)
Known to the world as the writer Isak Dinesen, she kept her married name even after her divorce, and those two names are the only words carved on her large black gravestone, sunk in the deep woods at Folehave, her childhood home in Denmark, outside of Copenhagen.
The habit of forming pacts to shape her chosen life began when she was standing on a granite boulder at Folehave with her younger brother Thomas, then fourteen. Their father had committed suicide when “Tanne,” as he was called, was only nine; Thomas could not have remembered him. But this fact did not in any way shadow their reverence for what they believed their father represented. After fighting in four wars, living with the Chippewas in North America, hunting big game, drinking and seducing, he taught his children by example that “One cannot live life without great courage.”
Standing on that boulder, Karen and Thomas promised to “serve their father’s God: the greatness in life.” This vow sent Thomas off to war against Germany in World War One. He survived.
It also sent Karen off to Kenya in British South Africa after her marriage to Bror Blixen, another hard-drinking, big-game seducing hunter who insisted on using the farm they bought under the Ngong Hills with money borrowed from Karen’s family, to raise coffee. This proved a disaster: coffee cannot be raised at that altitude. After years of mounting debts attributed to Bror’s mismanagement, Karen’s family called in their loans and the farm had to be sold. Bror also gave Karen syphilis.
In despair, sick, childless, penniless and divorced, Karen had to return at forty to Folehave. There she made herself into a writer.
Before that, she was absorbed in running the Kenya farm and in being a part of the colonizing British in South Africa without ever questioning the system, so similar to plantation life in the U.S. south. Her gleaming writing about that life, best known in Out of Africa which begins with the resounding sentence, “I had a farm in Africa under the Ngong Hills,” ignores the complexities of ruling over a large group of the original settlers there, the Kikuu, who worked the coffee and became, she believed, her friends. She is also able to pass lightly over her husband’s disastrous effect on her life, never wanting to divorce him.
After their divorce, she changed her mind about the meaning and significance of modern marriage, writing in 1918 in a letter to her mother, “I believe that much unhappiness in marriage stems from the fact that civilized human beings are burdened with an old-fashioned idea of the mutual right of ownership—I will not be another person’s property for anything in the world—and I don’t believe in owning anyone else either.” This realization allowed her to become a writer and to enjoy the benefits and accept the frustrations of a life alone.
Not really alone, though, because as her house at Folehave, now the Karen Blixen Museum, illustrates with its cabinets of china and crystal, its beautifully set dinner table for twelve, as well as such as items as her long kid gloves, hung on her tiny bedstead, she was surrounded by friends whom she entertained lavishly with food, wine and her stories. These became the fascinating tales of her two best-known collections, Gothic Tales and Winter’s Tales, touchstones for my life as a writer.
She had great charm as well as an amazing capacity to dramatize herself as seen in this late photograph by Richard Avedon. Her lively sense of humor meant that on her publicity trip to the U.S., she would ask to meet both Marilyn Monroe and Carson McCullers and reportedly danced on the table with Monroe when they all ate lunch together.
In the gift shop at her museum, all her books are displayed, including a beautiful little German edition of my favorite, Babette’s Feast. One can also buy copies of her damask tablecloth and matching napkins and a replica of the severe knitted cap she wore at the end of her life.
Her pact with the devil summed up that complex and fascinating life because, as she wrote, “Africa, among the continents, teaches you: that God and the Devil are one, their majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons or divided the substance.” (Out of Africa, 1935)
And, “When a person cannot accept what the majority considers to be misfortune, then his Satanic Majesty is an excellent and essential ally, because he is a merry fellow and can laugh. Of course, he has set down certain conditions for his His help.” (Karen Blixen writing to Aage Henriksen, 1953)
His condition was that, with His help, she would turn all her so-called misfortunes into stories: “And you see, he has kept his part of the bargain.”
She came to understand that “Through all the world, there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!” (Babette’s Feast in Anecdotes of Destiny, 1958)
“Be brave,” she insisted, “Be brave!”
I read “Out of Africa.” Now I want to read the other books you mention.