SCANDINAVIAN LEGENDS

Bror and Karen Blixen as big game hunters in 1914.

In and She was the girl who lost it all – the father, the husband, the farm and the love of her life – but won it back by writing about it. KAREN hunting BLIXEN chose not to take her own life and against all odds she survived the syphilis she got from her husband – but died from undernourishment. Marianne Juhl tells the spectacular story of the for a life Danish author who became world famous for her novel Out of Africa. 2 Scanorama march 2007 Scanorama march 2007 3 n April 10, 1931, Karen Blixen sat down at Finch Hatton. Before long the two of them were embroiled in a the desk on her farm in the Ngong Hills in passionate affair. But Blixen was to lose Hatton, too. In 1931, his to write the most important letter little Gypsy Moth biplane crashed in flames in Kenya. Even if of her life. It was one week before her 46th there was much to suggest that the initial ardor in their relation- LEGENDS birthday and 17 years after she first came ship had cooled by this time, she nevertheless lost a close and to the country and the people whom she had grown to love with much-loved friend in the most dramatic of circumstances. Oall her heart. Now, however, her coffee plantation was bankrupt She received the news of Hatton’s plane crash shortly before and had been sold. Karen had spent the past six months toiling learning she must leave the coffee farm in the Ngong Hills that she to gather in the final harvest and trying to secure the prospects had spent 17 years of her life running and fighting for – first with for her African helpers. Her own future was a black hole. Bror, and later alone. The enterprise had finally been declared “Dear Tommy,” she wrote to her brother, “to me it would bankrupt and sold by order of the court. As a result, Blixen was seem the most natural thing to disappear with my world here.” forced to bid farewell to her beloved Africa, the African people The only tiny ray of hope was to finish the book she had been whom she described as “the great passion of my life” and her own working on for some time. Would her brother support her free, Bohemian lifestyle. Losing the latter was undoubtedly the financially until it was completed? If he was unable to do so, greatest loss of all. she assured him it was of little consequence and concluded her When Blixen was finally compelled to return to , she Blixen was forced to bid farewell to her beloved Africa, the letter with the words, “I know that I can die happily, and if you was ruined. With no husband, no children and no education, she are in doubt, let me do that.” had to move into her childhood home with her mother. Her sal- African people and her own free Bohemian lifestyle. If you look at the first chapters of the story of Blixen’s life, it vation was the unfinished manuscripts she had stowed in her is easy to understand why the sense of loss crops up time and baggage as the ship sailed from Mombasa. Even so, at the time time again in her work. they represented only the faintest glimmer of hope. Top left: Blixen When she was just 10 years old, she lost her beloved father. In 1912, shortly before her 28th birthday, Blixen fulfilled what shows her new He committed suicide. We don’t know why – only that it came aren Christentze Dinesen was born in 1885 at Rung- was the only requirement made of a woman in the upper-class car to her mother as a terrible shock to everyone in the family. stedlund, a country house on the shores of the Öre- society of the day: she became engaged. The lucky man was her Ingeborg Dinesen. Above: Blixen in When, at the age of 29, she married the Swedish baron Bror sund Sound just north of Copenhagen. Her father, second cousin, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, a Swede and the third Africa in 1930 von Blixen-Finecke and settled with him in British East Afri- Wilhelm Dinesen, came from a land-owning family, son in an aristocratic family from the southernmost Swedish together with her ca (which a few years later would become Kenya), it would not Kwas commissioned as an officer and fought in several wars. For a province of Skåne. As Bror was neither the oldest son nor the first servant Juma, two be long before her doctor in broke the next shocking time, he lived as a hunter among Native Americans in Wisconsin in line to inherit the family estate, Count Mogens Frijs, uncle years before she news. The illness that had been tormenting her was not some before returning to Denmark in 1881 to marry and settle down to both Karen and Bror, suggested they try their luck in British was forced to sell the farm. unknown tropical disease: it was syphilis. as a country squire. East Africa. There they could buy a farm and Bror could make Left: Denys Finch That startling diagnosis and the experiences of Bror Blixen’s On her mother’s side, Blixen came from a line of well-to-do use of the years he had spent – albeit with only limited success Hatton, English unfaithfulness that follow in its wake tore their marriage apart. merchants, and her maternal grandfather, Regnar Westenholz, – studying agriculture. officer and big When her relationship with her husband was at its lowest served as Denmark’s Minister of Finance in his latter years. Young Bror was a less than avid scholar. He had a much greater game hunter who ebb, she met the English officer and big-game hunter Denys When Blixen’s father hanged himself in 1895, he left behind a affinity for hunting and horse-racing, parties and female compa- died in a plane crash in 1931. wife and five children aged one to 14. Blix- ny than he ever demonstrated for en was the second-oldest child, 10 years the school bench. After Karen’s old and completely devoted to her father, family had provided the necessary who had already begun to take her with capital, Bror left for Africa and him on his hunting trips. From now on, bought the farm in 1913. Karen K ONGE L IGE B I BL IOTE

however, the children would be brought K followed a few months later, and

up by their mother, grandmother, maiden DET in January 1914, they were mar- O F

aunt, nanny and governess. As an adult, Y ried in Mombasa. Blixen would often refer disparaging- ly to this fiercely religious and rigidly n my prison my heart sings COURTES Victorian bevy of women who presided of wings, only of wings.” So over her childhood as the “ begins one of the melan- Ladies’ Regiment.” X, SCANPI choly poems Blixen penned “Before the girls grew up,” her brother Iin her youth. With this in mind, recalled in his memoirs, it is easy to understand what an “it was extremely rare to hear any men- intoxicating sensation of joy it tion of a boy by name at Rungstedlund – must have been for her, not only except, of course, for those in the immedi- to flee from her prison in Den- ate family.” mark, but also to escape to the majestic landscapes of Africa and ven as a young girl, Blixen ex- the spontaneity with which the hibited a strong need to create natives lived their lives there. her own world in this strait- “Up in this air you breathed laced female environment. She easily, drawing in a vital assur- After they purchased the farm in British East Africa, Bror and Karin Blixen moved into In the US for the first time in 1959, Blixen enjoyed breakfast with playwright Arthur Miller, Ebegan to write and illustrate her own ance and lightness of heart. In the spacious house there. Here they pose in front of the fireplace in the living room. actress Marilyn Monroe, and author Carson McCullers in the latter’s home in Nyack, New York.

poems, plays and stories at an early age. rie nissen/B US this 2007. spread: previous page: the highlands you woke up in the

4 Scanorama march 2007 morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be,” she wrote is mine and is me, in order to be able to live at all. ... Ah, do you Aunt Mary asked Canfield to put in a good word for Karen in the first pages of her memoirsOut of Africa. think, do you think, Tommy, that I can still ‘become something,’ Blixen’s stories with her own publisher, Robert K. Haas, at the It came as no surprise, therefore, when she later confessed in and that I have not thrown away all the chances life has offered highly regarded Random House company. At first he was unsym- a letter to her sister that she would always choose the life of the me? ... I think I can work longer and get less tired than most pathetic, but after renewing her appeal, Canfield persuaded Greek goddess Diana over that of Venus. In another of her youth- people ... and I really believe that I have developed an unusual him to take a chance on publishing the stories of this unknown ful poems, she had already eulogized the short-skirted goddess degree of fearlessness.” Danish author.

LEGENDS of hunting and her unfettered existence – the same life that she herself could now live in Africa, far away from bourgeois Den- hese last words show a self-insight that those who n April 9, 1934, was published mark and its blinkered perceptions of a woman’s role and her became acquainted with Blixen later in her life could under the pseudonym that Blixen herself had cho- place in society. readily confirm. She possessed tremendous strength sen, Isak Dinesen. Now it was no longer good fortune Of course, it was a less comfortable life than she would have of will and power of endurance – not least over the that came to the aid of the almost 50-year-old author: enjoyed if she had chosen to be lady of the manor in Denmark. Tfrightful physical pains that wracked her for 20 years, as the Oit was the reviews from the big American newspapers. In New Very much so. It was backbreaking work, especially when War large doses of mercury that were used at the time to treat syphi- York Herald Tribune Books, a relieved Karen Blixen could read, World 1 spread to Africa and made everything in the country lis all but destroyed her body. And she had courage, too: she was HINCH L I FF E “Seven Gothic Tales is a literary phenomenon: a masterpiece of much more complicated. not easily intimidated. As she herself wrote elsewhere on the IAN English prose ... it has the air of happy accident that marks a work But Blixen didn’t want a life of leisure. She had no desire to sit way women react to adversity, “they don’t bend, they break.” of genius.” staring at the four walls of her home, experiencing life second- And she was close to the breaking point when the farm was It was still a long journey to the worldwide fame that Blixen’s hand through the achievements of her husband. She wanted to sold in 1931. She toyed with the idea of suicide on more than one writing enjoys today. But the youthful dream of achieving play an active part in life and achieve something herself. occasion during this time. She had already mentioned the pros- BY TRANS L ATED pect to Thomas in 1926 but finished her letter by confessing, “I t was in 1926 that the first rumblings of discontent were want so terribly to live, I want so terribly not to die.” heard from the family investors. After several more years Nevertheless, in 1931, she wrote to a Danish friend to say that She confessed to her sister thatW she would always choose

of poor coffee harvests, Blixen was finally forced to relin- she would give herself six months. If she couldn’t make a go of NISSEN /B US 2007.

quish the farm for which she had been solely responsible anything within that time, she would put an end to her life. RIE the life of the Greek goddess Diana over that of Venus. since her divorce from Bror Blixen in 1925. After returning home to Denmark, however, she followed her

I AND This was the catalyst for the three longest letters she ever loyal brother’s earnest entreaties to complete the stories she wrote from Africa to her brother and confidant, Thomas. The began in Africa. As she had written them in English, the lan- letters were a relentless diatribe against the contemporary role guage that had become her new mother tongue in Africa, she “something that is mine and is me” had taken the first step toward of women in general and Rungstedlund’s strict stewardship of contacted publishers in Britain and the USA but was met by one becoming reality. Her literary debut proved she had a talent for it in particular. refusal after the other. writing. Years of youthful depression, intoxicating experiences K ONGE L IGE B I BL IOTE

“But isn’t it frightful that honorable people can allow some- K in Africa, the roller-coaster emotions of romance and the loss of Blixen hit it big in 1937, when her memoir Out of Africa was

one to grow up – merely because they belong to the female sex hen fate, which otherwise had so often struck Karen DET the farm had given her something to write about. As she wrote in published in England and one year later, in the US. She died

O F Ib and Adelaide – without learning anything at all?” she asked her brother, him- Blixen with unpredictable and undeserved mis- Y , the story of the downcast Adelaide who, when peacefully in 1962, in her home at Rungstedlund in Denmark. self a trained engineer. Blixen could not and would not live on fortune, suddenly smiled upon her. Her aunt Mary rejected by her beloved Ib, makes her way to the cemetery to cry love alone, even if she described her affection for Hatton as “an Westenholz had an American friend, the writer Doro- lest anyone should see her weeping in the street:

COURTES Marianne Juhl is a Danish scholar and journalist living in Copenhagen. She is the indescribable happiness.” Tthy Canfield. The two knew one another through the Unitarian “She sat on the grave for a long time, resting in the one kind of author of several books, including Diana’s Revenge: Two Lines in Isak Dinesen’s I BL, “I must be myself,” she continued, “be something in myself, Church to which the Westenholz family belonged and which happiness still possible to her: avowing to the whole world that Authorship in 1985, and provides the content for the Karen Blixen Museum web site. have, own something that is really mine, achieve something that was a major movement in the USA at the time. she was a human being who had lost all.” [email protected] X, SCANPI

Becomes engaged Arrives in Mombasa After a year’s Out of Africa to her second cous- and is married to intense work, her is published in England in, Baron Bror von Bror Blixen the same Meets the English first book Seven and is selected Book of Blixen-Finecke of day. A few months aristocrat and mili- Gothic Tales is the Month in the US the Näsbyholm Manor later, Karen Blixen is tary pilot Denys completed, and the following year in Skåne, Sweden diagnosed as suffer- Finch Hatton at a dinner work of finding a ing from syphilis party in Nairobi publisher begins Visits the US for the first Travels 1912 1913 1914 1918 1925 1931 1932 1934 1937 time. Delivers with her a lecture to the sister to National Insti- Bror Blixen travels to British Karen and The coffee plantation Seven Gothic Tales Paris to tute of Arts and study at East Africa (now Kenya). A newly Bror Blixen is sold by order of the is published in New

1959 Letters art school 1910 established family business with are divorced. court after several years York under the pseu- Karen Blixen’s uncle as chairman of Bror Blixen of financial crisis. Denys donym Isak Dinesen. the board provides the capital to later remar- Finch Hatton dies in a It is chosen as Book 1885 1895 1907 purchase a coffee plantation ries, this time plane crasch, aged 44. of the Month, and 1962 1985 to Cockie Karen Blixen sails from a large print run is Karen Christentze Karen’s father, Makes her debut as Birkbeck Mombasa to Marseilles, ordered. The follow- Karen Blixen dies, aged 77, at Out of Africa opens in New Dinesen is born Wilhelm Dinesen, an author with a short where she is met by her ing year it appears in home on September 7. She is York with as at Rungstedlund, hangs himself in a story, The Hermits, brother Thomas Dinesen, Denmark under the buried in the park at Rung- Karen Blixen, Robert Redford as north of Copen- boarding house in in the Danish journal who accompanies her title Syv fantastiske stedlund, which today houses and Klaus hagen Copenhagen Tilskueren back home to Denmark fortællinger the Karen Blixen Museum Maria Brandauer as Bror Blixen

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