The Lioness

SHADOWS IN THE GRASS (149 pp.)--Isak Dlnesen--Random House ($3.75).

A long time ago, in Africa, Isak Dinesen saw two lions attack an ox. Unarmed but for a stock whip, she flew at the kings of the jungle and lashed them into retreat.

Unarmed but for a pen, Isak Dinesen, 75, has spent the 27 years of her writing life routing the brute realities of the 20th century from her prose. Minute in output but masterful in style and content, Storyteller Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny) pursues gothic romance in preference to realism, the aristocratic spirit above democratic camaraderie, fate before fact. She is Denmark's finest living writer and one of the world's best. No less a fan than Ernest Hemingway told his 1958 Nobel Prize audience that the award should have gone to Isak Dinesen.

She calls her latest autobiographical book a "papyrus from a pyramid," and though it is not fiction, Shadows in the Grass is almost as remote as the medieval Persia and 19th century Italy in which Author Dinesen has sometimes set her tales. In Shadows, she reminisces about the decade (1921-31) when she ran a coffee plantation in the Ngong hill country of Kenya, an Africa now dead beyond recall and yet startlingly alive in these recollections. Characteristically, her theme --the relation of master and servant--would embarrass many contemporary writers to the roots of their social consciousness, but from her it evokes feudal harmonies rooted in a blood consciousness as profound as the roles of father and son, husband and wife. Her mood--dry, elegiac, wounded yet unbleeding--strongly echoes that of the aristocratic author of the brilliant 19th century Sicilian chronicle and recent bestseller, The Leopard; this somehow befits a woman whose African nickname was "Honorable Lioness" and whose real name and title are the Baroness Karen Blixen.

Dark Roots. What the baroness does in this book is scarcely tangible enough to describe. She dips a branch of memory into the pool of the past until it is crystallized with insights, landscapes, literature, and animals that seem as if painted by Henri Rousseau. Who else, one wonders, would have attained a great reputation as a healer merely by holding a Barua a Soldani, a letter from a king (Denmark's Christian X), to the chest of a young native writhing in agony from a badly fractured leg? As the letter became a relic, stiff with blood and grime, and passed from hand to hand in a cabalistic pouch, it also became "a covenant signed between the Europeans and the Africans --no similar document of this same relationship is likely to be drawn up again." Many writers affect to understand Africa; Author Dinesen accepts and respects its opacities ("All roots demand darkness"). She draws a memorable portrait of Farah, her face-conscious Somali majordomo, "unfailingly loyal, a cheetah noiselessly following me about at a distance of five feet, or a falcon holding onto my finger with strong talons and turning his head right and left."

In Isak Dinesen's view. Africa is Nature's pantheon, in which people and animals acquire a kind of equivalence of qualities. A giraffe is "so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plain in long garbs, draperies of morning mist or mirage." Isak Dinesen's mind is not always on Africa and it is very much her own: "I have at times reflected that the strong sex reaches its highest point of lovableness at the age of twelve to 17--to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90." This apparently held for Baron Blixen, whom she divorced after seven years of marriage, when he was 43 and she 36. A notable big-game hunter, the baron served as the model for Hemingway's white hunter in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

A Nobler Race. Though she last saw Africa a quarter-century ago. "Lioness Blixen" has gone on getting scraps of news from "her people," written in fondness, fealty and demotic English. Recently one wrote: "I certainly convinced when I pray for you to almighty God that this prayer he will be stow without fault. So I pray that God will be kind to you now and then." The baroness was touched but melancholy. This old Kikuyu servant had done a year in prison for taking the oath of the Mau Mau.

Mau-Mauism is a tragedy that grieves and baffles Isak Dinesen, but belief in the noble savage is something of a family-heritage. Her father, a venturesome naval captain in the Franco-Prussian War, came to the U.S. after France's defeat, and for three years lived the life of a Pawnee hunter and trapper in Minnesota. He later wrote of his experiences under his Indian pseudonym, "Boganis." Recalls she: "He loved the Indians just as I loved the natives of Africa, and he called them a nobler race than we."

Karen Blixen was born in a Danish literary shrine, Rungstedlund, a rambling, red-tiled house near Copenhagen, overlooking the sea, where-the baroness now lives. Some 200 years ago Denmark's greatest lyric poet, Johannes Ewald, lived and wrote there. At 20 she had some stories published, but was appalled at the thought of being an author, "a piece of printed matter. I wanted to travel, to meet people, to dance." And so she did, until marriage took her to Kenya, and the Depression bankrupted the coffee farm.

He Who Laughs. She went back to Rungstedlund and writing, using the pen name Isak Dinesen. (Isaac means "he who laughs" in Hebrew. Dinesen, her maiden name, signifies the same in Danish.) At 75 she still plays lioness of the manor, with a housekeeper, two maids and a private secretary, though severe illnesses have wasted her away to a moth's wing physique and an unearthly 70 pounds. Apart from fruit, her only nourishment is oysters and champagne. With her dark, luminous eyes and in medieval garb, she looks a trifle like a Danish Dame Edith Sitwell, and a tenacious grande dame she is. Too ill last fall to attend the confirmation of the housekeeper's son, the baroness tape-recorded a speech for the occasion. The master-servant tie is not lightly sundered at Rungstedlund. When the coachman died last year at the age of 90, he had been in the Dinesen service for 65 years.

What sundered the feudal serenity of the black-white relationship in Africa? Not an upper white caste, insists the baroness, but a lower white class: "We should have looked at the quality of those who settled in Africa rather than get as many whites settled as possible. We should have had an elite which could have educated the black lower class."

Furiously, gallantly and without illusions, the baroness has long been at work on a projected 2,000-page Arabian Nights fantasia of a novel to be called Albondocani: "I hope to finish it just before I die, but only just" Recalling the meaning of her name, Isak Dinesen feels she has had the gift of laughter, and something more, "the pure joy of living, a sort of triumph simply because one exists." For the rest, she is content to quote the poet Landor:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the Fire of Life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

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