Karen’s great-grandfather on the side of her mother, Ingeborg, was a ship baron and one of the wealthiest men in Copenhagen. Her father, Wilhelm, came from a family of major landowners. After the Franco-Prussian War, he traveled to America, where he spent time among Indians who gave him the name “Boganis,” meaning hazelnut. He later published a book, Letters from the Hunt, using Boganis as a pseudonym, which was Karen’s first encounter with a nom de plume. She was the second of five children, raised in a puritanical household, and easily her father’s favorite; they had a close, confiding relationship that seemed to exist in its own private, obsessive realm, outside the rest of the family. But in 1895, a month before Karen’s tenth birthday, Wilhelm hanged himself at the age of fifty. She never forgave him for abandoning her. She was left, as she would later say, with an abiding terror “of putting one’s life into, and abandoning one’s soul to something that one might come to lose again.”
Even at a young age, Karen knew the depths of sadness. She struggled to find a secure place within her competitive family and used her rich fantasy life as a frequent means of escape. She wrote thoughtful, world-weary plays, essays, stories, and poems and kept a diary. Her mother was strict, forbidding the children to enter certain rooms of the house without permission and refusing to intervene in sibling squabbles. “Whoever is angry must absent himself from the public spaces, and from the stairs and corridors, so long as the anger lasts,” she decreed. (Crying aroused neither Ingeborg’s sympathy nor any gestures of maternal comfort.)
At fourteen, Karen fell in love with Shakespeare, marveling at the epic scale of his romances and tragedies. She read widely: Stendahl, Chekhov, Voltaire, Conrad, Turgenev, Hans Christian Andersen, and poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was passionate about art and at eighteen was accepted at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen. The following year, in 1904, Karen began to write what she called “Likely Stories,” which revealed even then her predilection for the gothic and fantastical. Her favorite poet was Heinrich Heine, and she often recited these lines from his Buch der Lieder: “You haughty heart, you wanted it like this! / You wanted to be happy, infinitely, / Or infinitely wretched, haughty heart, / And now you are wretched.”
At the Royal Academy, she met someone who would become her first reader (apart from her family) and literary mentor: Mario Krohn, a young intellectual whose father was a museum curator. She spent a lot of time with Krohn, though her affection for him seems to have been largely platonic. (He died of tuberculosis in 1922.) With his encouragement, she sent her stories to the editor of Denmark’s most prestigious literary journal, who responded to one piece by calling it “too broad and a little too artistically contrived, and the whole tone too hearty and simpleminded. It is also too long.” Yet he recognized her talent and decided to accept one of the stories, “The Hermits.” She would publish two more stories in the journal, all under the pseudonym “Osceola.” This she’d borrowed from an unlikely source: her father’s German shepherd. It was a name that Wilhelm had borrowed from a leader of the Seminole Indians in Florida. Osceola had led his tribe’s resistance when the American government tried to remove the Seminoles from their land, and he died in prison a few months after being captured.
Before giving birth to Isak Dinesen, Karen Dinesen would have to meet the man who would become her husband: her Swedish second cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, a distant cousin of King Christian of Denmark. (Bror had a twin brother, Hans, whom Karen was in love with, but he was not interested in her.) Bror, who pursued her assiduously until she relented, was handsome and gregarious. Karen did not find him compelling or even intelligent. Her family was not impressed, either. Bror was inept with money, a fact that would have disastrous consequences for the couple later on. Still, their early years together were fairly happy, and when Bror’s uncle suggested, “Go to Kenya, you two,” they did.
In 1913, the Blixens set off for what was then British East Africa, setting up a 4,500-acre coffee plantation called the Swedo-African Coffee Company, twelve miles from Nairobi. (Eventually they would own 6,000 acres.) Bror was giddy at the financial potential of the business. Never mind that he knew nothing about growing coffee. Nor did he consider fluctuating coffee prices or realize that locusts, droughts, acidic soil, and the elevation of the land made it inhospitable for his ambitious endeavor, and destined it to fail. “The land was in itself a little too high for coffee,” Karen recalled with typical understatement in Out of Africa, “and it was hard work to keep it going; we were never rich on the farm. But a coffee-plantation is a thing that gets hold of you and does not let go, and there is always something to do on it: you are generally just a little behind with your work. . . . Coffee-growing is a long job.” But in Africa she had found a spiritual home, and she described the thought of ever leaving as “Armageddon. After that—nothing.”
In addition to her own elegiac memoir—with its famous opening line (“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills”) and notable omissions (not much mention of her husband, and only a platonic rendering of her lover, the hunter Denys Finch Hatton)—many accounts of her years in Africa have been written elsewhere: the decline of the plantation; the pileup of financial debt; her contracting of syphilis (from which she never recovered) from her philandering husband in the first year they were married; the breakdown of her marriage; her relationship with Finch Hatton; and so on. Those years, by turns enchanting and filled with frightening adversity, had a profound impact. “When I was a young girl,” she recalled later, “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.”
Even after her marriage ended, she continued to manage the farm on her own. At the time, this was certainly an odd way for a woman of her class to live, but it was a testament to her attachment to the land and its people. “Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams,” she said.
Partly because of the collapse of the coffee market, she was eventually forced to sell the plantation and return to Denmark. The decision broke her heart. “I was driven out of my house by the fear of losing it,” she wrote. “When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”
The painful losses she endured—of her farm, of her beloved horses and dogs, of Finch Hatton (who died in a plane crash in May 1931)—drove her back to Denmark and to writing.
“I really began writing before I went to Africa,” she told the Paris Review in an interview six years before her death. “But I never once wanted to be a writer.” (That single-minded devotion to process—the ardor for writing itself, rather than the vanity of having written—is, of course, the mark of a true writer.) She had done some writing in Africa as well; two of the stories in Gothic Tales, believed to be “The Dreamers” and “The Old Chevalier,” were written there. She wrote them while trying to distract herself from the distressing problems of the farm. “One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue,” she said years later. In Africa she refined her skills as a storyteller: “I had the perfect audience,” she told the Paris Review. “White people can no longer listen to a tale recited. They fidget or become drowsy. But the natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds. And all kinds of nonsense. I’d say, ‘Once there was a man who had an elephant with two heads’ . . . and at once they were eager to hear more. ‘Oh? Yes, but Memsahib, how did he find it, and how did he manage to feed it?’ or whatever. They loved such invention.” In a 1957 interview with the New York Times, she
insisted, “I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller.” Some would dispute that assessment. When Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954, he said that he would have been “happy—happier—today” if it had gone instead to “that beautiful writer, Isak Dinesen.”
When she returned to Denmark from Africa, in 1931, she was a lost soul. Even her identity was in tatters; she’d lost her title as baroness after Bror remarried in 1929 and found a new Baroness Blixen. Though Karen was often accused, perhaps unfairly, of being a vain snob, she did cherish her title and was angry and indignant when she was stripped of it. People continued to call her the Baroness in later years, which surely pleased her. But at that point, she didn’t know what to call herself. And at forty-six years old, she was destitute, forced to move back to her mother’s home. (In a 1986 essay, John Updike, an admirer of Dinesen’s work, described her return at that time as “ignominious,” noting that she was received into the household as “a prodigal daughter, a middle-aged adolescent.”) In a letter that year, Karen told her brother Thomas, “I have wondered whether I could learn to cook in Paris for a year or two, and then perhaps get a post in a restaurant or a hotel.” She also suggested that she could take care of “mad people.” Fortunately, she set her ambitions elsewhere, confiding to Thomas, “I have begun to do what we brothers and sisters do when we don’t know what else to resort to—I have started to write a book.” She decided to write in English because it had been her primary language in British East Africa, and she was comfortable with it; and because she believed that potentially, an English-language book would reach a larger audience and be more profitable. (She was right.)
The book she was writing became Seven Gothic Tales. She said later that she used the word tale after Shakespeare, or “in the naïve view of a child or primitive who sees a story as neither tragic nor comic but marvelous.”
Of course, Karen needed to support herself as she wrote, so she asked Thomas to finance her for two years, promising that by the end of this time she would become independent. Writing from her family’s estate, Karen felt the presence of her father once again. After all, he had gone to America and lived with the Plains Indians, then returned to Denmark to write his books. “So you see, it was natural for me, his daughter, to go off to Africa and live with the natives and after return home to write about it,” she explained to the Paris Review.
Biographical events intersected in other ways. Not long after the farm was sold to a Nairobi real estate developer, Karen had attempted suicide by slashing her wrists. And shortly before her father’s suicide, Wilhelm was told by a doctor that he had a disease “which could only conclude in a dark, helpless future.” (It was most likely syphilis.) “My father’s destiny has, curiously enough, to a great extent, been repeated in my own,” she said.
Three years after the scaffolding of her life collapsed beneath her, Karen would become a published author in England and the United States. She would evolve into Isak Dinesen. The transformation was a struggle, however. (“No one came into literature more bloody than I,” she once said.) In those days—as is true in today’s publishing climate—a short story collection, especially by an unknown author, was not a desirable commodity. Publishing is a profit-driven business, like any other, and story collections aren’t known for being lucrative. Karen’s manuscript was rejected by at least two publishers, including the London house of Faber and Faber, which was then a relatively new (founded in 1929) but prestigious firm.
Karen had been preparing the material that would form Seven Gothic Tales, on and off, for a decade. She later described her process as beginning with a “tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.” She said that she began only with the “flavor” of a tale, and that her characters led her toward their fates—“I simply permit them their liberty,” she explained. (In his 1976 Paris Review interview, John Cheever—speaking not of Dinesen specifically, but of the notion that fictional characters take on identities of their own—dismissed the romantic idea of the author as a passive creative vessel. “The legend that characters run away from their authors—taking up drugs, having sex operations, and becoming president—implies that the writer is a fool with no knowledge or mastery of his craft,” he said.)
In any case, Karen would devote herself fully to writing, well aware of the radical nature of her task. Two decades later, she admitted in a speech that if she had been a man, “it would be out of the question for me to fall in love with a woman writer.” Working away in her father’s old office—which was also the same room where, in the late eighteenth century, Denmark’s greatest lyrical poet of the era, Johannes Ewald, was said to have written—she sat at the Corona typewriter she’d brought home from Kenya, allowing few intrusions into her time and space. She was openly resentful of social interruptions, whether from family or friends; as a result, some visitors who came to the house were put off by her foul mood and deemed her behavior selfish (not an adjective one might have ascribed to a male writer). Her seclusion provided a kind of freedom, psychological if not physical: the permission for her imagination to roam at will, exploring and reaching beyond the bounds of self, mining the material of both her dreaming and her waking life.
She later explained that her decision to publish under a pseudonym was not unlike how her father “hid behind the pseudonym Boganis. . . . [It was to] express himself freely, give his imagination a free rein. He didn’t want people to ask, ‘Do you really mean that?’ Or, ‘Have you, yourself, experienced that?’” She decided to use her maiden name, Dinesen, and chose the first name Isak, meaning “laughter” in Hebrew. (In the Old Testament, Isaac was born to Sarah when she was quite old; his birth seemed almost like a miraculous prank by God.) The name reflected Karen’s comic spirit and her love of humor, particularly irony. It was an element in her work, even in the “tragic” stories, that was never given its proper due by most critics. Also, as an author who “gave birth” to her first book at the age of forty-nine, she was a late bloomer herself; the name was apt.
When she completed her manuscript in 1933, she took it first to London, where a family friend arranged a luncheon for her. Karen was introduced to an American-born publisher, Constant Huntington of the British firm Putnam’s. She charmed him and asked if he would be willing to read her work. When she mentioned that it was a collection of short stories, he threw up his hands and refused even to look at it. “A book of short stories by an unknown writer? No hope!” he said. She returned home angry and despondent, almost ready to give up. But one of her mottoes in life was: “Often in difficulties, never afraid.”
She made use of a contact from her brother Thomas—an American author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who lived in Vermont. She mailed her the manuscript, hoping something might come of it. Fisher immediately recognized its value and passed it along to her neighbor, the publisher Robert Haas, who accepted it, taking a big chance on an unknown European writer. (When Random House bought the firm owned by Haas and his partner, Harrison Smith, the company acquired not only Isak Dinesen but other prominent authors, including Jean de Brunhoff and William Faulkner.) Haas considered the deal a labor of love, and imposed two conditions before publication: that the book include a foreword by Fisher, a distinguished figure whose name might generate some good publicity; and that he not pay an advance until at least a few thousand copies had been sold. Dinesen agreed to his terms, but wrote to Fisher to express concern regarding authorship. “I don’t want the book to come out under my own name,” she wrote, “and at the same time I don’t want people to know that it is myself who has written it, even though that is not a serious problem in America!—I’m going to have to find a name to publish it under.”
When Seven Gothic Tales was published in January 1934, it was a critical and commercial success. (Dinesen’s first check from Haas, for $8,000, arrived that Christmas.) Upon seeing that the book had met with such great acclaim, C
onstant Huntington wrote a letter to Haas, praising the book, pleading for the author’s address, and—oh, the audacity—insisting that he (and Putnam’s) publish the British edition. Dinesen was amused. “He had met me as Baroness Blixen,” she recalled later, “while Mr. Haas and I had never seen one another. Huntington never connected me with Isak Dinesen.” Putnam’s released the work in England in September 1934.
The persona “Isak Dinesen” made the author a figure of mystery in the literary world. Rumors swirled about the true identity of this “slender, pale, large-eyed, middle-aged Danish woman,” as a critic would later describe her. They said she was really a man, or “Isak” was a woman, or argued that the author was a collaboration between a brother and sister. He or she was a recluse. A nun. Actually French, not Danish. And so on.
In “The Dreamers” (the penultimate story in Seven Gothic Tales), the character Pellegrina Leoni, an alter ego of sorts for Dinesen, implores another character to lose himself: “Be many people,” she says. “Give up this game of being one. . . . You must, from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of. I feel, Marcus—I am sure—that all people in the world ought to be, each of them, more than one, and they would all, yes, all of them, be more easy at heart.” This reflected the author’s desire to escape her own self. For her, the willful expanse of identity was a path that led away from suffering, from the daily sorrows that trapped her.
A passage in the story “The Old Chevalier” seemed to express Dinesen’s need, after so much loss, to overturn the circumstances of her life and start anew: “Reality had met me, such a short time ago, in such an ugly shape, that I had no wish to come into contact with it again,” she wrote. “Somewhere in me a dark fear was still crouching, and I took refuge within the fantastic like a distressed child in his book of fairy tales. I did not want to look ahead, and not at all to look back.”
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