Anecdotes from Scheherazade

By Stefan Kanfer

ISAK DINESEN by Judith Thurman; St. Martin's; 495 pages; $19.95

When Ernest Hemingway awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he informed the committee that there was another author more deserving: "That beautiful writer Isak Dinesen." It was not one of Papa's displays of calculated modesty. The Danish baroness Karen Blixen, who hid under a series of pseudonyms, did deserve the prize she never received. Other rewards came: public adulation, critical respect, worldwide royalties. But as Poet Judith Thurman makes clear in her scrupulous and elegant biography, the baroness also suffered tribulations that force weaker souls to despair or madness. "All sorrows can be borne," she declared, "if you put them into a story," and most of her 77 years were spent transmuting the tragic into the anecdotal.

Karen Dinesen was nine when her beloved father hanged himself. The aristocrat had been an adventurer and writer in his youth; along the way he contracted syphilis. The symptoms, combined with an inborn melancholia, undid him. His life haunted Karen's. The imaginative, brilliant child read her father's account of his travels with American Indians, written under the Chippewa name Boganis. Her literary career began with a play entitled The Revenge of Truth; when she was 22, her first published tale was signed Osceola, the name of a Seminole chief.

A child of both centuries, Karen embodied the strictures of the old and the morale of the new. She obeyed a series of mottoes: "It is necessary to sail, it is not necessary to live"; "Be bold. Be bold. Be not too bold." Another, often repeated, writes Thurman, was that the final word as to what you are really worth "lies with the opposite sex." That value was assayed in a series of lifelong flirtations, romantic failures and a doomed marriage to her cousin Bror Blixen. The couple quixotically exchanged Bror's family farm in Denmark for acreage in Kenya. Coffee growing, the young groom announced, was the only thing that had any future. He had wholly discounted his wife's genius.

Africa warmed the Nordic strains of Karen's life and art. She began to tell stories to her tribal servants. The feudal relationship took on the characteristics of a folk tale. When she read poetry, a tribesman begged her to "talk like rain some more." As she invented stories, her listeners came to regard her as a kind of Scheherazade, a role, Thurman points out, in which "the challenge of seduction was heightened by the perils of failure."

The farm and the marriage rapidly deteriorated. In 1914, Bror, a notorious womanizer, infected Karen with syphilis. In the future it would affect her spine and cause her incalculable agonies. Initially, though, it was sexual jealousy that provided the sorrow. After the divorce, there seemed little to hold the baroness in Africa--except Denys Finch Hatton. A romantic British figure out of a silent movie, he was a World War I veteran, pilot, expatriate and gentleman farmer. She became pregnant by him and miscarried. Four years later the lovers quarreled ferociously. A few days afterward, Denys died in a plane accident near Nairobi. There seemed nothing left of Karen's life but recollected griefs: she decided to put them between cloth covers.

Forty years after its publication, Out of Africa remains one of the century's great pastorals. The author described elephants "pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world" and giraffes "in their vegetative gracefulness [like] a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing." Denys was remembered but not sentimentalized; Africa was her hero. The book bore the name Isak Dinesen. Isak, in Hebrew, means "the one who laughs," but the laughter her work engendered was not the stuff of jokes. Her subject was the human comedy, displayed in the ironic and the grotesque. In other volumes, from Seven Gothic Tales to Anecdotes of Destiny, that comedy was informed by modern psychology, but obsessed with the past. All were written in English, Isak Dinesen's second language, and they seemed to have been carved, letter by letter, in oak. Medieval kings and modern commoners, Christian rituals and gypsy miracles crossed her confined stage; desire and experience were at odds: "two caskets of which each contains the key to the other."

That paradox marked all her short stories, works that struck a chord of international response. Several Dinesen collections were bestsellers; in her 70s she became a celebrity when she toured America speaking of mottoes, myths and destinies. "A group of my young friends has determined that I am 3,000 years old," she said, and at times it appeared to be true. In a frail, wasted body only her eyes seemed alive, bright with pain, dramatized with kohl. When her old play was performed in Copenhagen, the author gave instructions that the witch should look like Isak Dinesen, a theatrical attempt to cast her final spell.

It had already been cast. When Karen Blixen died in 1962, the doctor listed the cause of death as emaciation. The circumstance recalled a line from Out of Africa: "And by the time I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all. for fate to get rid of." The works remain, and like all classics they bear the weight of truth.

--By Stefan Kanfer

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