Isak Dinesen

BY CURTIS CATE

IN A world which is becoming increasingly wedded to the idea that writers are made and not born, Isak Dinesen stands forth as a shining exception. Here is someone who never went to college, never took a course in creative writing, and who has never felt the professional urge to spawn books as Detroit manufacturers mass produce automobiles.

In a half century of creative life, she has written four books of stories and a book of reminiscences about Africa, an average of one book per decade. To this we must add her only novel, The Angelic Avengers, but this work, which she likes to call her “illegitimate child,”was composed in such a mood of amateur fun that she casually dictated it to a secretary, improvising chapter by chapter as she went along, at a time when her fortunes were at a low ebb and when she wanted to seek relief from the grim monotony of the German occupation of Denmark. When the novel was published at the end of the war, it appeared under a French pseudonym — a second nom de plume, since, like George Sand, she had already hidden behind a man’s name, Isak, when her first tales appeared.

There is a somewhat cynical proverb which says: “À dix-huit ans on adore, a vingt ans on aime, à trente ans on désire, à quarante ans on réfléchit.” Isak Dinesen had done all these things; she had adored, loved, desired, and reflected before her first book was ever published. She was forty-nine years old when Seven Gothic Tales appeared in 1934, which may help to explain why it was a work of such perfection that, had she never put pen to paper again, it alone would have sufficed to assure her a solid niche in European fiction. If I were a teacher of English, I would give my students this book to read to reassure them that not every would-be author of twenty can, or need try to, be a Rimbaud.

In Isak Dinesen the storytelling instinct is a heaven-sent gift. She was born with an imagination charged with such energy that it works even in her dreams. “The moment I fall asleep,”she told me not long ago, “ I have lovely dreams. I hardly know what people mean when they say they have nightmares. I have them only occasionally, when I am ill or suffer from a high fever. . . . You know,” she continued, “I do think in modern art that painters are specializing much too much in nightmares. I don’t like nightmares, and I don’t think nightmares sufficiently important to make a subject for art. Anyone can have a nightmare, then it is over.”

We are a long way here from the dark, gloomy universe of Franz Kafka and from that morbid introspection which has cast its pall over so much of modern literature and art. For Isak Dinesen is one of those happy mortals whom Thomas Mann liked to call “the children of sunlight, the children of the Gods” — those who are blessed, not cursed, by the gift of creation.

One often hears it said that, before setting out to write a novel, the aspiring writer should first cut his teeth on the compact grist of the short story. But how often do we hear it suggested that before writing short stories one should begin by telling them? In Out of Africa Isak Dinesen has written of her great friend, the English big-game hunter and flyer, Denys Finch-Hatton:

Denys had a trait of character which to me was very precious, he liked to hear a story told. For I have always thought that I might have cut a figure at the time of the plague of Florence. Fashions have changed, and the art of listening to a narrative has been lost in Europe. The Natives of Africa, who cannot read, have still got it; if you begin to them: “There was a man who walked out on the plain, and there he met another man,” you have them all with you, their minds running upon the unknown track of the men on the plain. But white people, even if they feel that they ought to, cannot listen to a recital. If they do not become fidgety, and remember things that should be done at once, they fall asleep. The same people will ask you for something to read, and may then sit all through an evening absorbed in any kind of print handed them, they will even then read a speech. They have become accustomed to take in their impressions by the eye.

Isak Dinesen’s love of stories is so great that her tales are peopled with characters who like nothing so much as telling or listening to stories. Whence, I think, the presence of sailors and fishermen in so many of them; for is not the mariner, as in Coleridge’s famous poem, the prototype of the eternal storyteller? Thousands of years before the printing press was invented, the Ulysseses and Sindbads of the world were plying the seven seas and filling the monotony of the long, star-filled nights with the recitations of their adventures. Only the desert Bedouin, beneath the fire-filled dome of heaven, feels the same wordless solitude, the same craving for companionship and exchange of fantasies in that soft, sunset hour when he sits crosslegged by his tent and his camels.

It is to this great family of mariners and storytellers that Isak Dinesen belongs. Last winter, when she was in the United States, she would sometimes come into the living room where she was staying and, sitting down by a table, would proceed to entertain the privileged guests invited in to meet her. “ I shall tell you a story,” she would quietly begin, looking out over the assembled company with her incredibly large, owl-like eyes. And out the story would come, as though pulled from a magician’s hat, each new word, each new sentence following effortlessly, faultlessly on the footsteps of its predecessor, without hitch or hesitation. Isak Dinesen admires the modern novel and the good novelist - she once said that discovering Crome Yellow was like coming upon a rich, new flower — but she knows that her own art is different and far older. As she once gaily remarked to an interviewer: “I am really three thousand years old, and have dined with Socrates.”

THE author of Seven Gothic Tales was born seventy-four years ago and given the name Karen Dinesen. Her father came from an old country family of Jutland, and from him she inherited a certain yearning for romance and adventure and a taste for letters.

The young daughter’s upbringing was of that fruitfully haphazard kind so often found in the nineteenth century. Spurred on by her father and by his memory — for he died when she was only ten, leaving behind him a volume of memoirs about Paris and the Commune and a collection of “hunting letters” (Boganis’ Jagtbreve) — she browsed at will in the family library, avidly reading Shakespeare, Dante, and other classics. She received private instruction at home and was sent to Switzerland and England to perfect her knowledge of English, which she speaks and writes as fluently as her native tongue, and French.

At the age of twenty she published her first short stories in several Danish literary reviews, but though they were well received, she had no particular desire to be a writer. Much of her time was then devoted to painting, which she made a special trip to Paris to study — a biographical detail of no slight importance, since, along with her other gifts, Isak Dinesen is a loving observer of nature who can make a landscape glow in words like a Ruysdael or a Gainsborough.

In 1913 she was engaged to her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen, and as newlyweds they started life together in East Africa. For the next seventeen years she lived on a large coffee farm in the highlands of Kenya, not far from Nairobi. Here everything held and delighted her artist’s eye: the mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up above the distant, blue Ngong hills; the unfamiliar trees growing up, not in arcs or cupolas, but in flat, horizontal layers; the brilliant, diamond-studded nights, and the new moon lying on its back; the lumbering elephant, padding along as though it had an appointment at the end of the world; the royal lion, its face still red up to the ears from its dawn banquet; the giraffes, looking like long-stemmed, speckled, gigantic flowers; the ballet of the black-crested cranes which, the ritual wing-beating dance completed, would rise from the ground and soar away like the peal of church bells, leaving behind them, as an echo of their flight, a faint chime from the clouds. Not least, the dances of the chalksmeared Kikuyu and Masai warriors, leaping about with their spears to the rhythmic sound of drums, and the native mind fascinated and enchanted her.

Not all was beauty and light, however, during these years. Her marriage was not a success, and shortly after World War I she and her husband were divorced. While he gave himself up to big-game hunting, she was left to tend some ten thousand acres of farmland against periodic assaults of drought and locusts. From the start it was a losing battle, for the plateau on which the farm was situated was too high for successful coffee raising. The dreaded day finally arrived when she knew that she would have to sell the farm that had been her home for so many years and bid good-by to her friends and to all her native servants, who had come to look upon her as some kind of divinity. As though this were not misfortune enough, just as she was preparing to leave Africa, her greatest friend, Denys Finch-Hatton, was killed in an airplane accident.

Yet out of all these mingled joys and sorrows there sprang a book which soars and sings. Bernardine Kielty, who visited the Dark Continent after reading Out of Africa, has said that she knows of no book that has so lyrically caught the spell of Africa. It may well have been this book of beautiful reminiscence, as much as Seven Gothic Tales and Winter’s Tales, which moved Hemingway to say, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, that it should have gone to Isak Dinesen.

The ways of Providence are mysterious, and the stonyhearted Nemesis which brought Isak Dinesen back to her native Denmark in 1931 may have secretly intended to free her from her myriad agricultural preoccupations in Kenya so that she could at last find the time to apply that final seal of perfection to the tales she told her friends. After the publication of Winter’s Tales, which was smuggled out of occupied Denmark and published in the United States in the middle of World War II (1942), fifteen years were to elapse before she was ready to let the world see another group of her stories. This collection, which had an air of finality about it and was called Last Tales, was published in 1957. But it was followed one year later — as though a delightful surprise to both author and public — by another, smaller volume of five stories, entitled Anecdotes of Destiny.

“ This is played on a lighter instrument,”she remarked to me recently. “ You might say it was played on a flute, where the others were played on a violin or a cello.” And it is so indeed, for we have only to read “ The Immortal Story” — the tale of a wealthy tea trader obsessed with the idea of bringing literature to life and of playing the part of puppetmaster with human beings — and compare its happy ending to that of “The Poet” (in Seven Gothic Tales), where a similar theme is worked out to a quite different and tragic conclusion against the somber organ notes of Faust.

Today Isak Dinesen lives, as she has done for the past quarter of a century, in the coastal village of Rungsted, in a tall-roofed, eighteenth-century house which was once an inn where Denmark’s greatest lyric poet, Johannes Ewald, lodged for three years in the 1770s. A bare fifty yards away the cold Baltic washes the bone-white strand, close to the road which leads from Copenhagen to Elsinore.

Here, attended by great vases of flowers, old pictures of sailing schooners, and soft lace curtains which trail upon the floor like bridal trains, Isak Dinesen sits at peace with the world. But her hands, like Penelope’s, are busy still, weaving new fantasies on the ancient loom of myth. And it is a truly monumental tapestry she is working on today, “a tremendously long novel,” she once described it, “which has got a real plot to it, but in which each chapter may still be read as a tale of its own.” The title, Albondocani, is taken from The Arabian Nights, but the novel itself is set in seventeenth-century Naples at a time when it was ruled by the Bourbons. If the live, creative spark that has sustained her through the maladies of the last few years can give Isak Dinesen strength to complete this ambitious design, it will provide a fitting grand finale to the life of one who, though small and frail, has always been a grande dame.

NOT, long ago, in Rungsted, I asked her why she had thought of calling her first book of stories Seven Gothic Tales, when in fact they are all set in the nineteenth century. Was it because this age was close enough to the memory of her own youth to be brought back vividly to life, and at the same time glamorous enough to make the stuff of fine stories? She looked at me for a moment out of her extraordinarily deep, penetrating eyes and then said slowly: “ Yes, yes, I suppose you can say that, that it was an age I heard older people, an older generation, talking about. But it isn’t only that. I think it natural for authors to go back a bit in time. Take Thackeray, for example, with Vanity Fair, or even with Henry Esmond, though that was going a little further back, or Walter Scott — I don’t mean in his medieval novels, but in books like Guy Mannering or The Heart of Midlothian — or Tolstoy in War and Peace. They were all times a bit before, but still close to their own. . . . Yes, you can say that the nineteenth century made a playground for fine stories. The generation before my own has something fascinating for me. You know it so well, yet you say: ‘ Why did they behave like that?’ Now people are not interested in it any more. It is a world that is all gone.” She paused as a wisp of distant memory drifted before her eyes. “And when I used the word ‘Gothic,” she went on, in her peculiarly mellow, almost oracular voice, “ I didn’t mean the real Gothic, but the imitation of the Gothic, the Romantic age of Byron, the age of that man - what was his name? - who built Strawberry Hill, the age of the Gothic revival.”

The use of the word “ Gothic" in the title of her first work was, as a matter of fact, anything but a literary affectation, for there is more of the genuine Gothic in Isak Dinesen’s stories than there is in The Castle of Otranto. The allusion to Horace Walpole, who was a fully eighteenth-century man of letters, does, however, put us on the right track; for it would be a mistake to think that the deliberately archaic language, particularly in the mode of speech, which so often characterizes Isak Dinesen’s tales, owes anything to the influence of nineteenth-century authors like Thackeray or Dickens.

Some time ago I was surprised, while reading an address given by Robert Edmund Jones, to come across a quotation from Isak Dinesen. It had never occurred to me to associate their two names, but in a flash it dawned on me why he had found in her a kindred soul. It was because this inspired metteur en scène had immediately recognized in Isak Dinesen a passion for the artistically artificial, deliberately melodramatic, stylized world of the stage. We may not quite realize just what is happening when we open one of her books, but in fact we are softly sinking into the darkened pit at the magic moment when the footlights spring up and cast their golden glow out beyond the heavy velvet folds of the lifting curtain toward the enchanted universe beyond.

Isak Dinesen’s tales abound in allusions to the world of the theater, and it is clear that they are not just there as ornamental decoration or metaphorical flourishes. She shares the view that all men of the stage have instinctively acquired: that the world of the theater is, in a way, a truer and more meaningful world than that of everyday life, and that everyday life is never richer than when it rises to the heights of drama.

If we look closely at the characters in her stories, we find that virtually every one of them is aware of some role in life he or she should be playing. These roles need not necessarily be easy or happy ones; they may, on the contrary, be harsh and tragic, but the characters remain faithful to them. For it is not some hedonistic pursuit of happiness which moves them, but fidelity to the play itself—that is, to life lived at its grandest, at its most heroic. Pellegrina Leoni, the Italian diva in “Echoes,” who has lost her voice in a fire, accepts the fact that she must wander over the face of Europe as an exile, so that the brokenvoiced figure she has become will never cast its shadow over the deathless soprano she once was. Mizzi and her sister, Lotti, in “The Invincible Slave-Owners,” recognize that it is their fate to act out the complementary roles of untouchable young daughter and inseparable dueña in the spas and watering places they haunt, lest love and marriage separate them. The young town clerk in “The Poet” knows in advance that in falling in love with the councilor’s bride-to-be he will be sealing his own doom. But he does so because “An unhappy love is an inspiring feeling. It has created the greatest works in history. ... A hopeless passion for his benefactor’s wife might make a young poet immortal.” So too the Count, that splendid Canute figure in “Sorrow-Acre,” accepts the fact that he must be stonehearted in keeping to the terrible terms he has imposed on the peasant widow, who must reap her acre in just one day, because, as he says of her: “AnneMarie might well feel that I am making light of her exploit if now, at the eleventh hour, I did nullify it by a second word.”

This heroic, larger-than-life world, in which the protagonists swear fealty to some ideal greater and more enduring than their transient selves, inevitably seems a bit alien to us, for we have lost this particular sense of life. Our grandfathers and their fathers had it — to such an extent that they brought the stuff of drama into their daily lives. This is the eternal enchantment of the Romantic age: it loved the theater so intensely that it unconsciously adopted its gestures and poses, its sighs and swooning passions, and even its heroic deaths.

Isak Dinesen’s tales betray a nostalgic attachment to this age, but in so doing they also touch upon one of the transcendent mysteries of human life. In “The Roads Around Pisa,” one of the most intricate and beautiful of her tales, there is a sudden interlude in which two of the leading characters go off to visit a puppet show. At the end of the show the witch appears and says: “The truth, my children, is that we are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy. What is important more than anything else in a marionette comedy is keeping the ideas of the author clear. This is real happiness in life.”

The analogy between the puppet stage and real life is, as Isak Dinesen knows well, much too simple to be true; for where the puppet passively responds to the finger movements of his master, we mortals are not tied by puppet strings to the hands of God. The great drama in human life comes precisely from the solemn obligation imposed on every mortal of discovering the particular role it is his destiny to play. But what happens when, as the witch suggests, the ideas of the author are no longer clear, when the actors are in revolt and no longer recognize the need for either author or allotted role, and when each insists on following his own caprice? Is not the human comedy then bound to degenerate into boundless confusion?

This is, quite simply, the predicament we are in today. And it is this which makes Isak Dinesen, behind her nineteenth-century mask, such a thoroughly twentieth-century writer. We find the same preoccupation with the role in human life in the plays of Pirandello or in the philosophy of Ortega y Gasset. But we would look for it in vain in the contemporaries of Byron, for it would never have occurred to them to doubt that they were enacting a mighty drama, in which each man must play his part, in which the king must be faithful to his kingship as the lover to his passion.

Today we have lost this particular vision of the world to such an extent that even the necessity of a role in human life has become problematical. The very floor boards under our feet are no longer sure. For when the presence of the author, of the creator, is no longer clearly felt, when, as Nietzsche shouted, “God is dead,” then all is thrown into confusion, the actors no longer know their lines or what roles they are to play. Each man must become his own director, puppet and master, actor and author. Man, everyman, must become a superman.

ISAK DINESEN’S universe is not that of Friedrich Nietzsche. It is, if such a term can be used, willfully pre-Nietzschean. Yet a similar preoccupation with the human predicament in an age of vast change and perplexity runs through her work. Anyone doubting it should reread “The Deluge at Norderney,” in which the floodwaters have been loosed upon the earth, the world turned upside down, and an actor who has usurped the role of a cardinal speculates on the mystery of creation and on the possibility of a revolution in heaven.

“There are only two courses of thought seemly to a person of any intelligence,” remarks the Persian storyteller, Mira Jama, in “The Dreamers.” “The one is: What am I to do this next moment? — or tonight, or tomorrow? And the other: What did God mean by creating the world, the sea, and the desert, the horse, the winds, amber, fishes, wine?”

Isak Dinesen’s tales are peopled with characters who ply themselves with this second, fundamental question, and this is what gives them their peculiar philosophic depth — something we have trouble finding elsewhere in the field of contemporary letters. Though almost every one of her stories is set in the century which proclaimed the theory of evolution, Charles Darwin might just as well have never lived. His name is mentioned only twice, and then as a kind of interloper who has tried to upset the established order of things. For the rest, Isak Dinesen’s imaginary universe is essentially the universe of Genesis. It is the world of the Creation, of Adam and Eve, of Noah and the Flood, of Paradise and the lost Eden. It is a world in which the saints smile and in which the Queen of Heaven still sits on her radiant throne. It is a world far closer to that of Henry Adams than to that of Charles Darwin, and it is in this sense that the “Gothic” in Seven Gothic Tales finds its supreme justification.

We live in an age which has grown so secular that it sounds strange to hear someone talk in terms of Divine Providence or to question his daily conduct in terms of the Almighty. Even the story of creation, as it is told in Genesis, now sounds to most people like a fairy tale, something which children may believe in but which no educated adult should take seriously. But for Isak Dinesen’s characters, precisely because they move on a luminous and higher plane, the great mystery of creation and the intentions of God can be discussed as the most natural thing in the world.

In this enchanted universe the Divine is never far distant. The flowers, the trees, the birds of the air, the elephant of the jungle and the lion of the plains, no less than man, bear witness to the mystery and glory of creation, much as the assembled beasts, in the rainbow arches of the great Gothic cathedrals, join the angelic host in chanting the praises of the Christ of the Apocalypse.

When Isak Dinesen’s great forerunner, Hans Christian Andersen, composed his fairy tales, he sought to make them as entertaining for adults as for children. It is questionable if he fully succeeded, despite his poetic genius, wit, and extraordinary faculty for infusing life into the most unexpected and seemingly inanimate objects. His tales, nevertheless, enchant us only to the extent that they reawaken in us echoes of the lost innocence of our infancy.

Isak Dinesen’s tales are not written for children. They are far too sophisticated, too psychologically subtle, too philosophically speculative for any but a child genius. This, however, may help to assure them against the skepticism of a down-to-earth age now threatened by a new despotism — that which Dwight MacDonald has brilliantly diagnosed as “The triumph of the fact.” Isak Dinesen’s stories belong to another realm: the realm of the court ball, of the carnival, of the masquerade. They belong somewhere out in literary space in a constellation brightened by the stars of Shakespeare, Plato, and Guy de Maupassant. These are her torchbearers at the banquet table to which, in the mask of Hoffmann, she bids us sit down with Socrates and talk about eternity.