Isak Dinesen, The Art of Fiction No. 14 (1956)
Illustration by Michael Batterberry, 1956.
It was, in a sense, type-casting when a few years ago a film was planned that would have shown us Garbo playing the role of Isak Dinesen in a screen version of Out of Africa, for the writer is, like the actress, a Mysterious Creature of the North. Isak Dinesen is really the Danish Baroness Karen Blixen, and she is the daughter of Wilhelm Dinesen, author of a classic 19th century work, Boganis’ Jagtbreve (A Hunter’s—or Sportman’s—Letters). Baroness Blixen has published under another name as well: a delightful novel (T_A___A___) she prefers not to acknowledge, though any reader with half an eye could guess the Baroness hiding behind the second, French, pseudonym. Literary circles buzz with legends about her: she is really a man, he is really a woman, “Isak Dinesen” is really a brother-and-sister in collaboration, “Isak Dinesen” came to America in the 70’s of the last century, she is really a Parisienne, she lives at Elsinore, she stays mostly in London, she is a nun, she is very hospitable and receives young writers, she is difficult to see and lives a recluse, she writers in French, no in English, no in Danish...
In 1934 the New York publishing house of Robert Haas and Harrison Smith (which was later absorbed by Random House) brought out a book called Seven Gothic Tales which Mr. Haas had accepted on first reading. The cool easy perfection of its prose and the ironical and fantastical tone of the stories made it an immediate success: a book club chose it, it became a best-seller, both the literature and semi-literate reviewers raved. And when that clamor was done the book was found to be still there: a great number of writers and painters were heard discussing it with great enthusiasm, always implying the book to be of that permanency usually labelled Standard Work. In 1937 Random House issued Out of Africa which is the diametrical opposite of the first work: where the Seven Gothic Tales are flights of pure imagination and impudent humor, Out of Africa is a sober and touching account of life on a coffee plantation in Kenya before, during, and after the First World War. It, too, established itself immediately as a work to which devoted readers returned for a second and third time. But only after Winter’s Tales had appeared in 1942, and when by then a new generation of readers had discovered the first book of tales, was the importance of these works generally determined. Outside the canon of modern literature like an oriole outside a cage of moulting linnets, Isak Dinesen offers to her readers the unending satisfaction of the tale told: “And then what happened?... well, then...” Her storyteller’s instinct coupled with the sophisticated simplicity of her style caused Ernest Hemingway, on receiving the Nobel Prize, to suggest it should have gone to Dinesen.
An official biography would read: born 18—at Rungsted, Denmark where she has always lived in an old house once an inn frequented by the poet Ewald, schooled at home, in Switzerland and England, travelled in Holland, France, Italy, married her cousin Baron Blixen in Mombasa and went to live with him in Kenya. Returned to Europe, after a long absence, in 1932, worked at writing and lived in Denmark since then. Has since visited Greece, France, England, Germany, Italy and other Scandanavian countries as well.
SCENE ONE
Rome, Early Summer, 1956. The first dialogue takes place in a sidewalk restaurant in the Piazza Navona, that long space, once flooded, where mock naval battles raged. The twilight is darkening the sky to an iris color and against it the obelisk that stands amidst Bernini’s fountain figures seems pale and weightless.
At a corner table sit Baroness Blixen, her secretary-traveling companion Clara Svendsen, and the interviewer. The Baroness is like a personage from one of her own tales. Slim, straight, chic, she is dressed in black, with long black gloves and a black Parisian hat that comes forward to shadow her remarkable eyes that are lighter in color at the top than at the bottom. Her face is slender and distinguished; around her mouth and eyes play the faint ghosts of smiles, changing constantly. Her voice is pleasing, being soft, but with enough force and timbre for one to hear at once that this is a lady with opinions both of grave profundity and of most enchanting frivolity. Her companion Miss Svendsen is a fresh-faced young person with a charming smile.
ISAK DINESEN
Interview? Oh, dear ... well, yes, I suppose so ... but not a list of questions or a third degree, I hope ... I was interviewed a short time ago ... terrible ...
MISS SVENDSEN
Yes, there was a man who came for a documentary film ... it was like a catechism lesson ...
DINESEN
Couldn’t we just talk together as we've been doing, you could write down what you like?
INTERVIEWER
Yes, then you could scratch out some things and scribble in others.
DINESEN
Yes. I ought not to undertake too much. I’ve been ill for over a year and in a nursing home. I really thought I should die. I planned to die, that is I made preparations, I expected to. I even planned a last radio talk ... I have made a number of radio talks on all kinds of subjects, in Denmark ... they seem to enjoy me as a radio speaker there ... I planned a talk on how easy it was to die ... not a morbid message, I don’t mean that, but a message of, well, cheer ... that it was a great and lovely experience to die. But I was too ill, you know, to get it done. Now, after being so long in the nursing home and so ill, I don’t feel I do really belong to this life. I feel that the world is happy and splendid and goes on, but that I’m not part of it. I’ve come to Rome to try and get into the world again. Oh, look at the sky now!
INTERVIEWER
Do you know Rome well? How long since you’ve been here?
DINESEN
A few years ago, when I had an audience with the Pope. I first came in 1912 as a young girl, staying with my cousin and best friend who was married to our Danish ambassador to Rome. We rode in the Borghese Gardens then, every day. There were carriages with all the great beauties of the day in them, and one stopped and chatted. It was delightful. Now look at these motors and motorbicycles and noise and rushing about. It’s what the young today want, though: speed is the greatest thing for them. But when I think of riding my horse—I always had a horse when I was a girl—I feel that something very precious is lost to them today. They aren’t acquainted with the elements or in touch with them. Everything is mechanical and urban: children are raised up without knowing live fire, living water, the earth. Young people want to break with the past, they hate the past, they don’t want to even hear of it, and one can partly understand it, the near past to them is nothing but a long history of wars, which to them is without interest. It may be the end of something, of a kind of civilization.
INTERVIEWER
But loathe leads to love: they may be led in a circle back to a tradition. I should be frightened of indifference more.
DINESEN
Perhaps. And I myself, you know, I should like to love what they love. Now, I love jazz. I think it’s the only new thing in music in my lifetime. I don’t prefer it to the old music, but I enjoy it very much.
INTERVIEWER
I really have about a million things I want to ask, if you permit. For instance, about T_A___A___.
DINESEN
(Laughing). Oh, that’s my illegitimate child! During the German occupation of Denmark I thought I should go mad with boredom and dullness. I wanted so to be amused, to amuse myself, and besides I was short of money, so I went to my publisher in Copenhagen and said, look here, will you give me an advance on a novel, and send me a stenographer to dictate it to? They said they would, and she appeared and I started dictating. I had no idea at all of what the story would be about when I began. I added a little every day, improvising. It was very confusing to the poor stenographer.
MISS SVENDSEN
Yes, she was used to business letters, and when she’d type the story from her shorthand notes, she’d put numbers sometimes, like “the 2 terrified girls” or “his 1 love.”
DINESEN
I’d start one day by saying “Then Mr. So-and-So entered the room,” and the stenographer would cry out, “Oh, dear, but he can’t. He died yesterday in Chapter Seventeen.” No, I prefer to keep T_A___A___ my secret.
INTERVIEWER
I loved it, and I remember it had excellent notices. Did many people guess that you had written it?
DINESEN
A few.
INTERVIEWER
And what about Winter’s Tales? That came out in the midst of the war—how did you get it to America?
DINESEN
I went to Stockholm—not in itself an easy thing to accomplish—and what was even more difficult took the manuscript with me. I went to the American embassy and asked them if they didn’t have planes going to the United States every day and if they couldn’t take the manuscript, but they said they only carried strictly political or diplomatic papers, so I went to the British embassy and asked them, and they asked could I supply references in England and I could (I had many friends in the Cabinet, amongst them Anthony Eden), so they cabled then said yes they could, so started the manuscript on its way to America.
INTERVIEWER
It seems a shame that the American Embassy couldn't have taken it.
DINESEN
Oh, don’t be too hard on them. I owe a lot to my American public. Anyway, with the manuscript I sent a letter to my American publishers just telling them that everything was in their hands and that I couldn’t communicate with them at all, and I never knew anything of how Winter’s Tales was received until after the war ended, when suddenly I received dozens of charming letters from American soldiers and sailors all over the world: the book had been put into Armed Forces Editions—little paper books to fit a soldier’s pocket. I was very touched. They sent me two copies of it; I gave one to the King of Denmark and he was pleased to see that, after all, some voice had spoken from his silent country during that dark time.
INTERVIEWER
And you were saying about your American public?
DINESEN
Yes, I shall never forget that they took me in at once. When I came back from Africa I had lost all the money I had when I married, because the farm didn’t pay you know. I asked my brother to finance me for two years while I prepared Seven Gothic Tales and I told him that at the end of two years I’d be on my own. When the manuscript was ready I went to England and one day at luncheon there was the Editor, Mr. Huntington, and I said “Please, I have a manuscript and I wish you’d look at it.” He said, “What is it?” and when I replied “A book of short stories,” he threw up his hands and cried “No!” and I begged “Won’t you even look at it?” and he said “A book of short stories by an unknown writer? No hope!” Then I sent it to America and it was taken right away by Robert Haas who published it, and the general public took it and liked it, and they have always been faithful. No, thank you, no more coffee. I’ll have a cigarette.
INTERVIEWER
Publishers everywhere are the traditional lament of the author.
DINESEN
The amusing thing is, that after the book was published in America, Huntington wrote to Robert Haas praising it, and begging for the address of the author, saying he must have the book for England. He had met me as Baroness Blixen, while Mr. Haas and I had never seen one another. He never connected me with Isak Dinesen. Later he did publish the book in England.
INTERVIEWER
That’s delightful; it’s like something from one of the tales.
DINESEN
How lovely to sit here in the open, but we must be going I think. Shall we continue our discussion on Sunday? I should like to see the Etruscan things at the Villa Giulia: we might chat a little then. Oh, look at the moon.
INTERVIEWER
Splendid. I’ll find a taxi.
SCENE TWO
Rainy warm Sunday noon. The Etruscan Collection in the Villa Giulia is not too crowded because of the weather.
The Baroness Blixen is now attired in a suit of reddish-brown wool and a conical ochre-colored straw hat that again shadows her extraordinary eyes. As she strolls through the newly-arranged Etruscan figures, pottery and jewelry, she seems as remote as they from the ordinary gallery-goers who are pattering through. She walks slowly, very erect, and stopping to gaze lingeringly at those details that please her.
DINESEN
How could they get that blue, do you suppose? Powdered lazuli? These animals are delightful, aren’t they. I love all animals. I have a huge dog in Denmark, an Alsatian, he’s enormous. I take him walking. If I survive him I think I shall get a very small dog—a pug. Though I wonder if it’s possible to get a pug now. They used to be very fashionable. Look at the lions on that sarcophagus. How could the Etruscans have known the lion? In Africa it was the animal that I loved the most.
INTERVIEWER
You must have known Africa at its best. What made you decide to go?
DINESEN
When I was a young girl it was very far from my thoughts to go to Africa, nor did I dream then that an African farm should be the place in which I should be perfectly happy. That goes to prove that God has a greater and finer power of imagination than we have. But at the time when I was engaged to be married to my cousin Bror Blixen, an uncle of ours went out to Africa big-game hunting and came back all filled with praise of the country, so Bror and I made up our minds to try our luck there, and our relations on both sides financed us in buying the farm. From my first day in Africa, I loved the country and felt at home. East Africa, then, was really a paradise, the “happy hunting-ground” of the Red Indians. I was very keen on shooting in my young days, but my great interest all through my many years in Africa was the African natives of all tribes, in particular the Somali and the Masai. They were beautiful, noble, fearless and wise people. Life out there was, I believe, rather like 18th England: one might often be hard up for cash, but life was still rich in many ways, with the lovely landscape, dozens of horses and dogs and a multitude of servants.
INTERVIEWER
I suppose that you began to write seriously there?
DINESEN
No, I really began writing before I went to Africa, but I never once wanted to be a writer. I published a few short stories in literary reviews in Denmark, when I was twenty years old, and the reviews encouraged me but I didn’t go on—I don’t know, I think I had an intuitive fear of being trapped. Also, when I was quite young, for a while I studied painting at the Danish Royal Academy, then I went to Paris in 1910 to study with Simon and Ménard but I did little work. The impact of Paris was too great; I felt it was more important to go about and see pictures, to see Paris in fact. I painted a little in Africa, but every time I’d get to work someone would come up and say an ox has died or something and I’d have to go out in the fields. But yes, I did write there to entertain myself and told stories constantly to the natives, all kinds of nonsense: they loved it. I'd say “Once there was a man who had an elephant with two heads,” and right away the natives would say, “Oh? Yes, well, Mem-sahib, how did he find it, and how did he manage to feed it,” or whatever. They loved such invention. I delighted my people there by speaking in rime for them, they have no rhyme, you know, had never discovered it. I’d say things like “Wakamba na kula mamba”—“The such-and-such a tribe eats snakes” which in prose would have infuriated them, but amused them mightily in rime. Afterwards they’d say, “Please, Mem-sahib, talk like rain,” so then I knew they had liked it, for rain was very precious to us there. Oh, here’s Miss Svendsen. She’s Catholic, so she went off today to hear a special cardinal. Now we’ll go buy some postcards. Hope there is one of the lions.
SVENDSEN
Good morning.
DINESEN
Clara, you must see the delightful lions, then we’ll go get some postcards and go for lunch.
Postcards are found, a taxi is summoned, umbrellas opened, the party runs for taxi, drives off through the rainy Borghese Gardens.
SCENE THREE
The Casino Valadier is a fashionable restaurant in the Gardens, just above the Piazza del Popolo, and commands a fine view of Rome. After a brief glimpse of the rain-grayed city from the flooded terrace, the party goes into a brocaded room, with considerately shaded girandoles, brightly-colored carpets and pictures, etc.
DINESEN
I’ll sit here so I can see everything. (Lights cigarette.)
INTERVIEWER
Pleasant place, isn’t it?
DINESEN
Yes, very pleasant, and I recognize it. I was here in 1912. Every now and again here in Rome I recognize very vividly a place I’ve visited then. (Pause) Oh, I shall go mad!
INTERVIEWER
(Startled.) What is it?
DINESEN
Look how crooked that picture is!
(Indicates blackened portrait across room.)
INTERVIEWER
I’ll straighten it. (Goes to it.)
DINESEN
No, more to the right.
INTERVIEWER
Like this?
DINESEN
That’s better.
(Two solemn gentlemen at table beneath portrait indicate bewilderment.)
SVENDSEN
It’s like that at home. So much traffic passes, and I have always to straighten the pictures.
(Waiter takes order, luncheon is served.)
DINESEN
I’ll have a cigarette now. Do you mind if we just stay here for a while? I hate to change once I’m installed in a décor I like. People are always telling me to hurry up, or come on and do this or do that.
INTERVIEWER
I think you must be Southern at heart.
DINESEN
Could be. Once when I was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope and there were albatrosses, people kept saying “Why do you stay on deck? Come on in,” they said, ”it's time for lunch” and I said “Damn lunch,” I said “I can eat lunch any day, but I shan’t see albatrosses again.” Such wingspread!
INTERVIEWER
Tell me something about the writing of Seven Gothic Tales.
DINESEN
(Laughing.) I just happened to write them.
INTERVIEWER
How did you happen to write them in English?
DINESEN
Well, it was quite natural to do so. I had been seeing only English people in Africa really, I had spoken English or Swahili for twenty years—after all, I was partly schooled in England, and I don't know, I had begun to think in English.
INTERVIEWER
Oh, yes, and I wanted to ask you about your father.
DINESEN
He was in the French army, as was my grandfather. After the Franco-Prussian War, he went to America and lived with the Plains Indians in the great middle part of your country. He built himself a little hut and named it after a place in Denmark where he had been very happy as a young man—Frydenlund. He hunted animals for their skins, and became a fur-trader. He sold his skins mostly to the Indians, then used his profits to buy them gifts. A little community grew up around him, and now Frydenlund is, I believe, the name of a locality in the state of Wisconsin. When he returned to Denmark, he wrote his books. So you see, it was natural for me, his daughter, to go to Africa and live with the natives, and after, return home to write about it. He also, incidentally, wrote a volume of his war experiences called Paris Under the Commune.
INTERVIEWER
Can you tell me your plans: what are you writing now?
DINESEN
A tremendously long novel made up of connected short tales: about two hundred of them. Also a little book called Anecdotes of Destiny. I should like for them both to appear in the Autumn of 1957, if I finish them in time.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever write poetry?
>DINESEN
I did as a young girl.
INTERVIEWER
What is your favorite fruit?
DINESEN
Strawberries.
INTERVIEWER
Do you like monkeys?
DINESEN
Yes, I love them in art: in pictures, in stories, in porcelain, but not in life, they somehow look so sad. They make me nervous. I like lions and gazelles.
SCENE FOUR
On the parapets of the central tower of the Castle of Sermoneta, perched on a hill, amidst its clustering town, about an hour and a half south of Rome. Below, the Pontine plain stretches green and gold to the sea, bathed in bright afternoon sunlight. The party has been seeing remains of 14th Century frescoes as well as graffiti scratched on the walls by Napoleonic soldiers. Now they shade their eyes to see tiny figures miles below working in the bean-fields and the peach orchards.
INTERVIEWER
I think it curious that practically no critic nor reviewer in either America or England has pointed out the great comic element in your works. I hope we might talk a little of the comic spirit in your stories.
DINESEN
Oh, I’m glad you mention that! People are always asking me what is the significance of this or that in the tales—“What does this symbolize? What does that stand for?” and I always have a difficult time making them believe that I intend everything as it’s stated. It would be terrible if the explanation of the work were outside the work itself. And I do often intend a comic sense, I love a joke, I love the humorous. I often think that what we most need now is a great humorist.
INTERVIEWER
What humorists in the English language please you?
DINESEN
Well, Mark Twain, for example. But then all the writers I admire usually have a vein of comic spirit. Writers of tales always do, at least.
INTERVIEWER
Who are the writers of tales that appeal to you, or with whom you feel a kinship?
DINESEN
E.T.A. Hoffman, Hans Andersen, Barbey d’Aurévilly, La Motte Fouqué, Chamisso, Turgenev, Hemingway, Maupassant, Stendhal, Chekhov, Conrad, Voltaire ...
INTERVIEWER
You’ve read them all!
DINESEN
I am really three thousand years old, and have dined with Socrates.
INTERVIEWER
Pardon?
DINESEN
(Laughing and lighting a cigarette.) Because I was never told what I must read or what I mustn’t read, I did read everything that fell into my hands. I discovered Shakespeare very early in life, and now I feel that life would be nothing without him. One of my new stories is about a company of actors playing The Tempest, incidentally. I love some of the Victorian novelists no one reads anymore: Walter Scott for instance. Oh, and I like Melville very much, and the Odyssey, the Norse sagas—Have you read the Norse sagas? I love Racine, too.
INTERVIEWER
I remember your observation on the Norse mythology in one of the Winter’s Tales.* It’s very interesting to me, incidentally, how you have chosen the tale for your form.
DINESEN
It came natural to me. My literary friends at home tell me that the heart of my work is not the idea, nor the mood, but the tale. Something you can tell. Like one can tell Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves but one could never tell Anna Karenina.
INTERVIEWER
I should be most interested to know a little of how you work; for instance, how such a tale as The Deluge at Norderney took shape. It seems so ordered and inevitable, yet on study one is amazed at the design, of the tales-within-the-tale.
DINESEN
(Smiling mischievously.) Read it, read it, and you’ll see how it’s written.
EPILOGUE
For epilogue here, it is well to append an extraordinary passage from the manuscript of the novel Albondocani on which the Baroness has been working for some time. It deals with the enigmatic and inexplicable nature of the story-teller’s art. An old woman who earns her living by story-telling is speaking:
“With my grandmother,” she said, “I went through a hard school. ‘Be loyal to the story,’ the old hag would say to me, ‘Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story.’ ‘Why must I be that, Grandmother?’ I asked her. ‘Am I to furnish you with reasons, baggage?’ she cried. ‘And you mean to be a story-teller! Why, you are to become a story-teller, and I shall give you the reasons! Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.’
“Who then,” she continues, “tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal, and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all—where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier, and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page.”
______
(*“And I have wondered, while I read,” says the young nobleman in Sorrow-Acre, “that we have not till now understood how much our Nordic mythology in moral greatness surpasses that of Greece and Rome. If it had not been for the physical beauty of the ancient gods, which has come down to us in marble, no modern mind could hold them worthy of worship. They were mean, capricious and treacherous. The gods of our Danish forefathers are as much more divine than they as the Druid is nobler than the Augur.”)
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