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She was the girl who lost it all – the father, the husband, the farm and the love of her life – but won it back by writing about it. KAREN BLIXEN chose not to take her own life and against all odds she survived the syphilis she got from her husband – but died from undernourishment. Marianne Juhl tells the spectacular story of the Danish author who became world famous for her novel Out of Africa.

huNtINg foR A LIfE

karen blixenSCANDINAVIAN LEGENDS

In and out of Africa

Bror and Karen Blixen as big game hunters in 1914.

In 1912, shortly before her 28th birthday, Blixen fulfilled what was the only requirement made of a woman in the upper-class society of the day: she became engaged. The lucky man was her second cousin, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, a Swede and the third son in an aristocratic family from the southernmost Swedish province of Skåne. As Bror was neither the oldest son nor the first in line to inherit the family estate, Count Mogens Frijs, uncle to both Karen and Bror, suggested they try their luck in British East Africa. There they could buy a farm and Bror could make use of the years he had spent – albeit with only limited success – studying agriculture.

Young Bror was a less than avid scholar. He had a much greater affinity for hunting and horse-racing, parties and female compa-ny than he ever demonstrated for the school bench. After Karen’s family had provided the necessary capital, Bror left for Africa and bought the farm in 1913. Karen followed a few months later, and in January 1914, they were mar-ried in Mombasa.

n my prison my heart sings of wings, only of wings.” So begins one of the melan-choly poems Blixen penned

in her youth. With this in mind, it is easy to understand what an intoxicating sensation of joy it must have been for her, not only to flee from her prison in Den-mark, but also to escape to the majestic landscapes of Africa and the spontaneity with which the natives lived their lives there.

“Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assur-ance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the

n April 10, 1931, Karen Blixen sat down at the desk on her farm in the Ngong Hills in Kenya to write the most important letter of her life. It was one week before her 46th birthday and 17 years after she first came

to the country and the people whom she had grown to love with all her heart. Now, however, her coffee plantation was bankrupt and had been sold. Karen had spent the past six months toiling to gather in the final harvest and trying to secure the prospects for her African helpers. Her own future was a black hole.

“Dear Tommy,” she wrote to her brother, “to me it would seem the most natural thing to disappear with my world here.” The only tiny ray of hope was to finish the book she had been working on for some time. Would her brother support her financially until it was completed? If he was unable to do so, she assured him it was of little consequence and concluded her letter with the words, “I know that I can die happily, and if you are in doubt, let me do that.”

If you look at the first chapters of the story of Blixen’s life, it is easy to understand why the sense of loss crops up time and time again in her work.

When she was just 10 years old, she lost her beloved father. He committed suicide. We don’t know why – only that it came as a terrible shock to everyone in the family.

When, at the age of 29, she married the Swedish baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke and settled with him in British East Afri-ca (which a few years later would become Kenya), it would not be long before her doctor in Nairobi broke the next shocking news. The illness that had been tormenting her was not some unknown tropical disease: it was syphilis.

That startling diagnosis and the experiences of Bror Blixen’s unfaithfulness that follow in its wake tore their marriage apart. When her relationship with her husband was at its lowest ebb, she met the English officer and big-game hunter Denys

Finch Hatton. Before long the two of them were embroiled in a passionate affair. But Blixen was to lose Hatton, too. In 1931, his little Gypsy Moth biplane crashed in flames in Kenya. Even if there was much to suggest that the initial ardor in their relation-ship had cooled by this time, she nevertheless lost a close and much-loved friend in the most dramatic of circumstances.

She received the news of Hatton’s plane crash shortly before learning she must leave the coffee farm in the Ngong Hills that she had spent 17 years of her life running and fighting for – first with Bror, and later alone. The enterprise had finally been declared bankrupt and sold by order of the court. As a result, Blixen was forced to bid farewell to her beloved Africa, the African people whom she described as “the great passion of my life” and her own free, Bohemian lifestyle. Losing the latter was undoubtedly the greatest loss of all.

When Blixen was finally compelled to return to Denmark, she was ruined. With no husband, no children and no education, she had to move into her childhood home with her mother. Her sal-vation was the unfinished manuscripts she had stowed in her baggage as the ship sailed from Mombasa. Even so, at the time they represented only the faintest glimmer of hope.

aren Christentze Dinesen was born in 1885 at Rung-stedlund, a country house on the shores of the Öre-sund Sound just north of Copenhagen. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, came from a land-owning family,

was commissioned as an officer and fought in several wars. For a time, he lived as a hunter among Native Americans in Wisconsin before returning to Denmark in 1881 to marry and settle down as a country squire.

On her mother’s side, Blixen came from a line of well-to-do merchants, and her maternal grandfather, Regnar Westenholz, served as Denmark’s Minister of Finance in his latter years.When Blixen’s father hanged himself in 1895, he left behind a

wife and five children aged one to 14. Blix-en was the second-oldest child, 10 years old and completely devoted to her father, who had already begun to take her with him on his hunting trips. From now on, however, the children would be brought up by their mother, grandmother, maiden aunt, nanny and governess. As an adult, Blixen would often refer disparaging-ly to this fiercely religious and rigidly Victorian bevy of women who presided over her childhood as the “Rungstedlund Ladies’ Regiment.”

“Before the girls grew up,” her brother Thomas Dinesen recalled in his memoirs, “it was extremely rare to hear any men-tion of a boy by name at Rungstedlund – except, of course, for those in the immedi-ate family.”

ven as a young girl, Blixen ex-hibited a strong need to create her own world in this strait-laced female environment. She

began to write and illustrate her own poems, plays and stories at an early age.

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Blixen was forced to bid farewell to her beloved Africa, the African people and her own free Bohemian lifestyle.

After they purchased the farm in British East Africa, Bror and Karin Blixen moved into the spacious house there. Here they pose in front of the fireplace in the living room.

In the US for the first time in 1959, Blixen enjoyed breakfast with playwright Arthur Miller, actress Marilyn Monroe, and author Carson McCullers in the latter’s home in Nyack, New York.

Top left: Blixen shows her new car to her mother Ingeborg Dinesen. Above: Blixen in Africa in 1930 together with her servant Juma, two years before she was forced to sell the farm. Left: Denys Finch Hatton, English officer and big game hunter who died in a plane crash in 1931.

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morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be,” she wrote in the first pages of her memoirs Out of Africa.

It came as no surprise, therefore, when she later confessed in a letter to her sister that she would always choose the life of the Greek goddess Diana over that of Venus. In another of her youth-ful poems, she had already eulogized the short-skirted goddess of hunting and her unfettered existence – the same life that she herself could now live in Africa, far away from bourgeois Den-mark and its blinkered perceptions of a woman’s role and her place in society.

Of course, it was a less comfortable life than she would have enjoyed if she had chosen to be lady of the manor in Denmark. Very much so. It was backbreaking work, especially when War World 1 spread to Africa and made everything in the country much more complicated.

But Blixen didn’t want a life of leisure. She had no desire to sit staring at the four walls of her home, experiencing life second-hand through the achievements of her husband. She wanted to play an active part in life and achieve something herself.

t was in 1926 that the first rumblings of discontent were heard from the family investors. After several more years of poor coffee harvests, Blixen was finally forced to relin-quish the farm for which she had been solely responsible

since her divorce from Bror Blixen in 1925.This was the catalyst for the three longest letters she ever

wrote from Africa to her brother and confidant, Thomas. The letters were a relentless diatribe against the contemporary role of women in general and Rungstedlund’s strict stewardship of it in particular.

“But isn’t it frightful that honorable people can allow some-one to grow up – merely because they belong to the female sex – without learning anything at all?” she asked her brother, him-self a trained engineer. Blixen could not and would not live on love alone, even if she described her affection for Hatton as “an indescribable happiness.”

“I must be myself,” she continued, “be something in myself, have, own something that is really mine, achieve something that

is mine and is me, in order to be able to live at all. ... Ah, do you think, do you think, Tommy, that I can still ‘become something,’ and that I have not thrown away all the chances life has offered me? ... I think I can work longer and get less tired than most people ... and I really believe that I have developed an unusual degree of fearlessness.”

hese last words show a self-insight that those who became acquainted with Blixen later in her life could readily confirm. She possessed tremendous strength of will and power of endurance – not least over the

frightful physical pains that wracked her for 20 years, as the large doses of mercury that were used at the time to treat syphi-lis all but destroyed her body. And she had courage, too: she was not easily intimidated. As she herself wrote elsewhere on the way women react to adversity, “they don’t bend, they break.”

And she was close to the breaking point when the farm was sold in 1931. She toyed with the idea of suicide on more than one occasion during this time. She had already mentioned the pros-pect to Thomas in 1926 but finished her letter by confessing, “I want so terribly to live, I want so terribly not to die.”

Nevertheless, in 1931, she wrote to a Danish friend to say that she would give herself six months. If she couldn’t make a go of anything within that time, she would put an end to her life.

After returning home to Denmark, however, she followed her loyal brother’s earnest entreaties to complete the stories she began in Africa. As she had written them in English, the lan-guage that had become her new mother tongue in Africa, she contacted publishers in Britain and the USA but was met by one refusal after the other.

hen fate, which otherwise had so often struck Karen Blixen with unpredictable and undeserved mis-fortune, suddenly smiled upon her. Her aunt Mary Westenholz had an American friend, the writer Doro-

thy Canfield. The two knew one another through the Unitarian Church to which the Westenholz family belonged and which was a major movement in the USA at the time.

Karen Christentze Dinesen is born at Rungstedlund, north of Copen-hagen

1885 Makes her debut as an author with a short story, The Hermits, in the Danish journal Tilskueren

1907

1912The coffee plantation is sold by order of the court after several years of financial crisis. Denys Finch Hatton dies in a plane crasch, aged 44. Karen Blixen sails from Mombasa to Marseilles, where she is met by her brother Thomas Dinesen, who accompanies her back home to Denmark

Meets the English aristocrat and mili-tary pilot Denys Finch Hatton at a dinner party in Nairobi

Aunt Mary asked Canfield to put in a good word for Karen Blixen’s stories with her own publisher, Robert K. Haas, at the highly regarded Random House company. At first he was unsym-pathetic, but after renewing her appeal, Canfield persuaded him to take a chance on publishing the stories of this unknown Danish author.

n April 9, 1934, Seven Gothic Tales was published under the pseudonym that Blixen herself had cho-sen, Isak Dinesen. Now it was no longer good fortune that came to the aid of the almost 50-year-old author:

it was the reviews from the big American newspapers. In New York Herald Tribune Books, a relieved Karen Blixen could read, “Seven Gothic Tales is a literary phenomenon: a masterpiece of English prose ... it has the air of happy accident that marks a work of genius.”

It was still a long journey to the worldwide fame that Blixen’s writing enjoys today. But the youthful dream of achieving

“something that is mine and is me” had taken the first step toward becoming reality. Her literary debut proved she had a talent for writing. Years of youthful depression, intoxicating experiences in Africa, the roller-coaster emotions of romance and the loss of the farm had given her something to write about. As she wrote in Ib and Adelaide, the story of the downcast Adelaide who, when rejected by her beloved Ib, makes her way to the cemetery to cry lest anyone should see her weeping in the street:

“She sat on the grave for a long time, resting in the one kind of happiness still possible to her: avowing to the whole world that she was a human being who had lost all.”

Blixen hit it big in 1937, when her memoir Out of Africa was published in England and one year later, in the US. She died peacefully in 1962, in her home at Rungstedlund in Denmark.

MARIANNE JUHl is a danish scholar and journalist living in copenhagen. she is the author of several books, including Diana’s Revenge: Two Lines in Isak Dinesen’s Authorship in 1985, and provides the content for the Karen Blixen museum web site. mariannejuhl@webspeed.dk

Becomes engaged to her second cous-

in, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke of

Näsbyholm Manor in Skåne, Sweden

1918 1931 1932

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She confessed to her sister that she would always choose the life of the greek goddess Diana over that of Venus.

Karen’s father, Wilhelm Dinesen, hangs himself in a boarding house in Copenhagen

Travels with her sister to Paris to

study at art school 19

10

1913

Bror Blixen travels to British East Africa (now Kenya). A newly established family business with Karen Blixen’s uncle as chairman of the board provides the capital to purchase a coffee plantation

Arrives in Mombasa and is married to

Bror Blixen the same day. A few months

later, Karen Blixen is diagnosed as suffer-

ing from syphilis

1914

1895

Karen and Bror Blixen are divorced. Bror Blixen later remar-ries, this time to Cockie Birkbeck

1925

After a year’s intense work, her first book Seven Gothic Tales is completed, and the work of finding a publisher begins

Seven Gothic Tales is published in New York under the pseu-donym Isak Dinesen. It is chosen as Book of the Month, and a large print run is ordered. The follow-ing year it appears in Denmark under the title Syv fantastiske fortællinger

1934Visits the US for the first time. Delivers a lecture to the National Insti-tute of Arts and letters

Karen Blixen dies, aged 77, at home on September 7. She is buried in the park at Rung-stedlund, which today houses the Karen Blixen Museum

1962

Out of Africais published in England and is selected Book of the Month in the US the following year

1959

Out of Africa opens in New York with Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen, Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton and Klaus Maria Brandauer as Bror Blixen

1985

1937

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