“Take a Taste” 1 2 “Take a Taste”: Selling Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales in 1934 Moa Matthis Department of Language Studies Umeå 2014 3 Department of Language Studies Umeå University SE-901 87 Umeå http://www.sprak.umu.se http://umu.diva-portal.org Studier i språk och litteratur från Umeå universitet 22 This work is protected by the Swedish Copyright Legislation (Act 1960:729) Cover Illustration: Mika Matthis Cover Layout: Ida Holmgren Printed in Sweden by Print & Media, Umeå 2014 ISBN: 978-91-7601-013-6 4 Table of Contents Introduction This Little Book Went to Market Book-of-the-Month-Club 20 Consumer Culture 28 The Flood of Books and the Image of the Author 39 Selling Stories 50 Consuming Isak Dinesen 56 Saving Isak Dinesen for Modernism 62 A Race Apart? A Peculiar Mania 73 A Race Apart and Verisimilitude 79 Ridiculous but Real 88 Profitable Appearances 90 Navigating Through the Literary Fog Gothic Tales? 118 The Allegorical Compass 127 Perfectly Real Human Beings Salvaged by the Past? 142 Salvaged by Romance? 148 Unachievable Closure 160 Nomadic Identities and Desires 163 Conclusion 171 Sammanfattning 179 Works cited 185 Index 197 5 Acknowledgements Having spent most of my life selling my words on a commercial market, it has not been easy to adapt to the academic world where the reader has to be imagined differently. At the same time, I firmly believe that the academic reader is no different from the reader in the commercial sphere in that both of them read in order to share the thoughts of our own time. At our first meeting, my main supervisor Professor Heidi Hansson patiently listened to my diffuse explanations of what I wanted to do with Seven Gothic Tales. Then, she very neatly handed my garbled account back to me in the form of one brief sentence: “So, you want to show that Karen Blixen is a middlebrow author?” That sentence has been resting on my mantelpiece while I have been writing, and every time I lost my way I took it down, unwrapped and pondered it. It speaks of the ease with which Heidi identifies the essence of an argument, and her comments and readings have been invaluable. I know that I have tried her patience many times, and I am deeply grateful that she has nevertheless continued to support me. I have known my secondary supervisor Professor Stefan Helgesson as a lucid and learned writer of beautiful prose on a wide range of topics for almost three decades. Now, I also know him as a perceptive reader whose generous advice has encouraged me. Professor Anna Williams’ insightful reading of a late draft of this manuscript heartened me and made me feel that it was worthwhile to plod on towards the end. I would also like to thank the literary seminar at the Department of Language and Literature in Umeå: Nicklas Hållén, Katarina Gregersdotter, Hilda Härgestam-Strandberg, Malin Isaksson, Van Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren- Leavenworth, Tove Solander, Anette Svensson and Anna-Lena Pihl. Outside of the academic world, my colleagues in Fotokopieringsfondens Stipendienämnd för Facklitteratur have provided spirited conversation as well as unlimited sources of knowledge about everything having to do with culture. Over the last four years, Anders Björnsson, Lilian Edvall, Ingmarie Froman and I have read through thousands of pages of sometimes heartrending applications from authors all over Sweden, and while it was hard work the company turned every 2 meeting into a seminar on the sociology of culture that I will sorely miss. My co- readers in the Bokcirkeln have listened to my self-pitying complaints without paying much attention, and then reminded me of the joy and excitement of inter- disciplinary readings of every kind of writing, ranging from Anne Carson to Anne Applebaum. Together with Ingrid Elam, Göran Hemberg, Kenneth Hermele, Olle Jeppsson and Mikael Palme, I share the thoughts of our time. I also want to thank Mikael for kindly cautioning me against “applying” Bourdieu without the empirical data to back it up, and Göran for keeping the art of oral story-telling alive. Anna Rosenhall, Paula and Nadine Rosenhall-Gomis have shared their home and their lives with me when I have been in Umeå. Finally, my husband Kenneth Karlsson is and remains the mainstay of my life, emotionally and intellectually. Mika and Palmer remind me every day that there is one identity that is reassuringly absolute: that of a parent. For that, I am grateful. 3 Introduction In 1968, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt published a collection of essays entitled Men in Dark Times. In her preface, Arendt described her essays as explorations of the uncertain, flickering lights that illuminated the darkness of the first half of the twentieth century with its “political catastrophes, its moral disasters” (vii). One of the illuminating lives and works that Arendt explored in this book was Isak Dinesen’s, the Danish author known as Karen Blixen outside the English-speaking world. To Arendt, Dinesen belonged in the company of light-bearers because she had been able to turn the disasters of her life into stories, re-creating herself in the role of a story-teller when she had lost her farm in Kenya and her lover Denys Finch-Hatton. As such, she reminded the world that we have to accept life’s tragedies, “be loyal to life” was how Arendt put it, without giving in to despair or self-pity (97). Life is not a fiction that can be bent to the whims of our wills and desires, but by looking back and using our imagination we can create fiction out of life as long as we do not mistake the one for the other. To tell the story of one’s life retrospectively is to create order out of chaos and to make peace with life transformed into destiny: “The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings,” wrote Arendt (104). There is no doubt that Arendt considered Isak Dinesen a major author, but her essay is a strikingly ambiguous kind of celebration.1 In her biography about Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl framed her own decision to write a biography by referencing Arendt’s reservations about the genre and her desire to separate private from public and work from action, in line with her political thoughts (xvii). Young-Bruehl claims that while Arendt did write biographically, as she did in Men in Dark Times, she did not write intimately and avoided gossipy realism, heading her own warning in the essay on Isak Dinesen that “our eagerness to see recorded, displayed and discussed in public what were once strictly private affairs is probably less legitimate than our curiosity is ready to admit” (93). 1 In an essay on story-telling and theory, Lynn R. Wilkinson has discussed Hanna Arendt’s use of Dinesen’s works to illustrate her own theses on politics, history and philosophy, focusing on the centrality of story-telling to political thought and action. 1 And yet, the first sentence in Arendt’s essay on Dinesen reads The Baroness Karen Blixen née Karen Christentze Dinesen – called Tanne by her family and Tania first by her lover and then by her friends – was the Danish woman author of rare distinction who wrote in English out of loyalty to her dead lover’s language. (95) These first lines strike a strangely intimate, gossipy chord, approaching and naming the subject as a family-member, friend and lover and Arendt’s introduction of Baroness Blixen, Karen, Tanne, and Tania is markedly different from the introductions of the other historical figures of this volume. In her essays on Walter Benjamin, Hermann Broch, Karl Jaspers and the others, work precedes biography and we never learn what these men were called by family, friends or lovers. Since Arendt was a close friend of all of them there is something very odd about the way she chooses to resist base curiosity in their cases, while giving in to it in Dinesen’s case.2 One way of explaining Arendt’s intimate approach to the topic of “Isak Dinesen,” would be to think of it as a consequence of the fact that this essay was originally published as a review in The New Yorker of Parmenia Miguel’s biography Titania. The Biography of Isak Dinesen, in 1968. On the other hand, Arendt is highly critical of what she calls Miguel’s “wrong-headed delicatesse,” especially in the matter which is “by far the most relevant new fact the book contains,” revealing that Dinesen’s ex-husband had “left her a legacy of illness,” but refusing to name the venereal disease and withholding the medical history which “would indeed have been of considerable interest” (99). Simply put, Arendt wanted to know more about the intimate details of Dinesen’s private life than Miguel’s biography was prepared to offer. Since it was, as Arendt pointed out, commissioned and supervised by the author, the responsibility for holding back ultimately fell on Dinesen who, according to Arendt, made a fool of herself by being led astray by her vanity and need for adoration. By not telling the world about her syphilis, Dinesen refused to add yet another piece to the public 2 The only people in this volume that Arendt did not know personally were Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Rosa Luxemburg, Pope John XXIII, and Isak Dinesen. 2 representation of her life as a story about loss and ultimate redemption through the act of story-telling. Parenthetically, Arendt comforted herself with the suggestion that it was perhaps not the wise story-teller Isak Dinesen who made the decision to withhold tragic truth, but rather Baroness Karen Blixen (99).