I found two Isak Dinesen books at a yard sale a couple of months ago for ten cents each—Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa. I read the former first and just finished the latter. The two books are very different—the former is a collection of highly stylized and intricately weird romantic tales, the latter a factual account of the author’s experiences running a sort of plantation in Kenya. But what unites them for me is the strength of the author’s personality, as expressed in her writing. This was a person who wrote confidently and boldly, and I get the definite sense that she would have showed those traits in other aspects of her life as well. I don’t think she was a timid person.
Seven Gothic Tales has a spooky Scandinavian feel, it's an orchestration of effects and sleights and nuances. She chooses the role of artificer, a maker of illusions and effects. Some of the stories are thrilling and exotic, others are a bit vague and dream-like.
In Out of Africa, the sense of power comes from the way the author so capably puts across her personal understanding of her experience managing a large coffee plantation in Kenya. The book is neither modest nor grandiose; the author has a cool, supple, and poised intelligence which can be philosophical, analytical, or sympathetic as the occasion requires. She presents her 17 years in Africa exactly as she wishes us to see them, selecting people and events to give her experience resonance and coherence.
Reading the book in 2011, though, it’s difficult not to wonder about certain things. Dinesen runs a 6000-acre farm, staffed by hundreds or perhaps thousands of Africans, primarily of the Kikuyu tribe. She is friendly with many of her so-called natives and tells us of the lives and tribulations of several of them, but never without a certain paternalistic distance. Indeed, she writes of favorite horses and dogs, as well, and in much the same way—they are noble, they endure, they die. Dinesen’s natives are being run off the land as systematically as the Indians of the American west were—at one point she explains why her people will have to relocate after she sells the farm: “The natives cannot, according to the law, themselves buy any land…” If this fact caused Dinesen any dismay, it is not evident from this book. Perhaps she is just extending her own personal stoicism to those around her.
We read of the blue peaks of the Ngong Hills, of safaris down into the Masai Reserve. We read of the slaughter of several lions, and of a plague of locusts. We read of the ways of the hardworking Kikuyu, of the warlike Masai, and of the Somali, with their fierce Islam religion and their sequestered wives. Somalis served as loyal major domos to the white landowners, aristocrats among the Africans, and you wonder how their homeland could have come to the awful state it is in today. Reading Out of Africa makes me want to visit Kenya, to walk the cool uplands of the west country and to see the stars and the moon and the sky as Dinesen describes them. Of course, today her property is within the suburbs of Nairobi, so I doubt if the walk would be quite as exhilarating as in her day.
I would like to someday read Judith Thurman’s biography of Blixen to learn about everything that she has left out. Even just a few minutes of browsing in wikipedia provides all sorts of surprises—What of the husband who gave her syphilis and whom she divorced in 1921? What of the brother who came out to help her run the plantation for four years? What of her love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton (or is it Hatton-Finch), which is the main substance of the 1985 film made from Out of Africa? It is odd to think that the movie, using the same title, tells of events that are barely hinted at in the book. Dinesen is a ruthless editor of her own life, throwing out whatever doesn’t suit her purpose. I haven’t decided if I think this is quite honest.
Was Kenya in the 30s really so idyllic? Perhaps not. But I do not think it was any the worse for Karen Blixen’s having been there.
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