SCANDINAVIAN KAREN BLIXEN LEGENDS Bror and Karen Blixen as big game hunters in 1914. In and out of Africa 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 Kenya 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 Denmark, 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 Nairobi 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 K 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 IOTE the school bench. After Karen’s BL I old and completely devoted to her father, B family had provided the necessary IGE who had already begun to take her with L capital, Bror left for Africa and him on his hunting trips. From now on, bought the farm in 1913. Karen ONGE however, the children would be brought K followed a few months later, and DET up by their mother, grandmother, maiden F in January 1914, they were mar- O 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 X, of wings, only of wings.” So over her childhood as the “Rungstedlund begins one of the melan- Ladies’ Regiment.” SCANPI choly poems Blixen penned “Before the girls grew up,” her brother Iin her youth. With this in mind, Thomas Dinesen 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- THIS 2007. SPREAD: to flee from her prison in Den- ate family.” US 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 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.