Mendofleur

It is always a little difficult to write about someone you treasure. There is always the problem of objectivity. So forgive me if I seem a little biased in this post, but this writer and this woman is, without question, my favorite.

I did not discover Isak Dinesen with the film, Out of Africa. I was introduced to her about six months earlier in a college English class. English was my major, and we were required to take seminars focusing on various writers. This particular class focused on the genre of the short story. I had not read many in the past, as I had focused my fiction interests on the novel. There were four authors, if my memory serves me well, and Isak Dinesen was one of the four. The professor introduced her as Danish, a writer whose stories were written as a story within a story or many stories within one main theme, similar to a series of Chinese boxes, one inside the other, a complexity of tales that were fantastic and often surreal. I am uncertain about this next memory, whether I used this description or perhaps it was my professor’s, but that reading her stories were a bit like reading fairy tales, the adult version. I was hooked. After I finished the class, I went on to read all of her fiction (short stories) as well as criticism and numerous biographies and letters over several years. I still, to this day, would have to say I am completely in awe of this woman’s mind as well as her ability to surmount all the difficulties in life she faced.

She is not one of those writers that appeals to everyone. I gave my brother a copy of Winter’s Tales, and he said he simply could not even finish one story. I think it might have been the surreal quality of her writing. Although, she is not easy to read, the rewards are indeed great. Most know of her through the film Out of Africa. I suppose this is a decent way of becoming introduced, but there is so much more to glean from her life and her fiction. I used to walk around reciting various quotes from her books that came to me in flashes….”a person is made known to himself through his name, “being is so much more than doing, “always we fail because we are too small.” The quotes align with where one is in life in terms of struggles or goals. These thoughts have always been transforming and memorable, like a tune in your head that cannot be blocked.

Then I began watching the film, over and over again, much to my children’s dismay until it became a family joke. The phrases began in my head again, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills, “I happen to be a good storyteller, “We are just out of coffee, would you care for a cup of tea?, “I had always known loneliness.” And so it would go for days on end until I repeated another viewing of the movie.

So what can be so captivating about Isak? This adopted name means “one who laughs”. That was a fact later known, but I liked the idea of it. She was actually born Karen on April 17, 1885 and died on September 7, 1962. Her parents were largely mismatched, and Karen identified with her father and his side of the family. Her mother’s side was bourgeois, high-minded and accomplished. Her father’s side manifested those glorious traits of personal freedom, something that would have appealed greatly to Karen. I think she gleaned a little of the best in both. Her father committed suicide when Karen was very young, and this loss affected her throughout her life. Karen was one of five children. She had two brothers and two sisters. All the girls were raised with feminist principles and nonconformity, two values that would explain some of Karen’s own adult standards. She is the only one that left home when she married Bror Blixen and officially became a baroness in her life and on her farm in Africa. It is her courage and her ability to continually reinvent herself amidst the adversity of her life that I find remarkable and valuable. (In this she was similar to Florence Broadhurst, but I think their ethics and principles were vastly different). She actually did not start writing and publishing her fiction until she lost her coffee plantation in Africa and had to return to Denmark. It was there she opened all those magic boxes in her mind and started telling her far-reaching tales.

This photo is Dinesen’s family home that she returned to after leaving Africa. It is in Rungstedlund, not too far from Copenhagen, Denmark.

Sometimes one is not sure Isak’s description of her life is fact or fiction. She could always tell a marvelous tale, and I would guess some of the embellishments were second nature to her descriptions. I think there is a little of both in the final analysis. But what always rings true to me are her deep values, the philosophy she strives to explain, how life can be common or life can be great. It all depends on how a person molds the clay they have been handed. She seems to think that life is best showcased in its polar opposites. The peasant seems to define a way of life that has both value and rich and varied meaning. At the other end of the spectrum, one needs to look at the aristocracy and view how well they carry the values and narratives of their past. Of course one could argue on many of these points, but to understand Dinesen’s point of view is to accept a certain higher ethic and standard that in our current modern world we find hard to imagine.

I realize I could write reams of thoughts about her and would love to, but this post is to introduce you to someone hopefully new or not immediately recalled, and then find a space on your bookshelf or in your mind for a woman who lived in a way that was both worthy and different and illuminating. I think I will end with a few of my favorite ideas and quotes by and about her.

“Freedom and happiness are inner states, and that it is impossible to lay down rules for what produces them.”
Letters From Africa 1914-1931

“The rule is always the same: what you wish for you shall have.” (“She believed that ideal is stronger than nature–change does not occur as a result of violence or technical sophistication, but by the virtue of the human capacity to wish and endeavor.”)
On Modern Marriage and Other Observations. This article taken from one written as an afterword by Frank Egholm Andersen and translated by Susan Petersen.

Isak believed that whatever fate befalls us, we should accept and embrace it. “The lesson is that each thing that happens to us, good or bad, is a blessing. We must learn to see it that way, take from it everything it has to give in the way of experience, and then let it go; for it is only by letting go that we turn it into a blessing, a contribution to the grand design of life.”
Isak Dinesen’s Art: the Gayety of Vision by Robert Langbaum.

“Africa gave her the chance to achieve that enormous expansion of sympathy, that ability to love and reconcile opposites, which makes her work remarkable.”
Gayety by R. Langbaum

And last…..
“It is because Isak Dinesen had courage–both courage in the ordinary sense and the existential courage to be one’s self and to follow the logic of one’s own nature–that her life and work are all of a piece: that she was able to write stories distinguished by the courage that in art we call style, and to create a life and personality as audacious, extravagant, surprising and, yes, as shocking, too, has her stories.”
Gayety by R. Langbaum