Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen seems almost to have been born on a stage. She was always theatrical and her father's suicide was theatrical in a way that Dinesen at a very young age appreciated. She learned from an aunt that her father had killed himself because he loved another woman, not his wife. Killing oneself for love was right down the girl Tania's* alley. She had adored her father but his death became the ultimate gesture. Tania had the odd habit as a girl of opening her large brown eyes wide, a trick that she would repeat her whole life and she would later paint kohl around her eyes and put belladonna drops in them so that her pupils were huge and cavernous. Throughout her life she always seems self-absorbed but acting a part which she tailored to the person or condition. The great and final gesture of her father seems to repeat itself in the daughter who starved herself into the grave. As this splendid story of her life unwinds, she appears brittle as though any emotional drama would shatter her but although often teetering on the edge she pulls herself up again and again.Other reviewers have said that they became disenchanted with the megalomaniac Isak Dinesen who had a cruel streak. She did indeed, but her unattractive traits in no way diminish the quality of her work. Underneath the brittleness, underneath the cruelty was a poet's soul. "Out of Africa" reverberates with the strings of a harp.An enormous factor in Tania's life was the syphilis she caught in Africa from her husband Baron Bror Blixen. She became extremely ill and had to return to Denmark to be treated. But she said that catching syphilis was worth being married to a Baron and thus receiving the title Baroness Blixen. She wore her affliction sort of like a dueling scar. Because of the title she was able to blend socially with the upper crust population of Nairobi. Without it they would have ignored her. She and Bror divorced, his massive infidelities sinking the marriage. Bror married again, so awkwardly there were then two Baroness Blixens. But Tania had met Denys Finch Hatton and she didn't care.Denys, the younger son of an English earl was a cultured, charming man of thirty two when Tania first met him. Like so many women, she was bowled over by Deny's charm. Denys had always been a bit worshipped, even at Eton where he had cut a wide swath on the sheer force of his personality. He probably got so used to the universal adulation he received that he may have even expected it. He was selfish but nobody held that against him. His photographs don't do him justice; although prematurely bald he was considered very handsome. What one could not do was tie Denys down. When Tania became too possessive he backed off. He didn't want marriage or a child and was very ungracious with her when she told him she thought was pregnant. He was in England when she sent him a wire about the baby she called "Daniel." He cruelly wired back "Strongly suggest you cancel Daniel's visit." He seemed to have it all, yet were it not for his relationship with Tania and later with the notorious Beryl Markham he would be forgotten today, not having achieved anything noteworthy in his short life to document. I don't like him.Although a snob, Tania felt en rapport with the native population and her servants. They became in a way her sounding board. Farah, her major domo, was a Somali and he served her in several vital capacities until Tania was obliged to sell her farm and return to Denmark. Tania's brother, Thomas Dinesen, stayed at the farm for two years before he was married and he found Tania, who had a fierce temper, a hard person to live with but she also sank into mires of depression. She often did not tell the truth or wove into a situation her own off-beat slant of things. For instance, she was a poor horsewoman and when she could not control her horse long enough to mount it she called on her servants to help. When they couldn't control the horse either, Tania vowed she's never ride again and accused the servants of not loving her. If the housework was done poorly, her minions hated her. A fellow colonialist said people were afraid of Tania, she was so fierce and absolutely determined to get her own way, which she usually did. That observer said he was afraid Tania would shoot someone. Denys called her Titania.It was inevitable that Tania would lose her African farm because the altitude was too high for growing coffee, and frequent droughts baked what crop there was to a crisp. While she was packing, Denys and Tania apparently had a huge row and Denys moved on- right into the arms of Beryl Markham. But fate intervened- Denys' plane, a Gypsy Moth named "Nzige" or Locust in Swahili crashed and Denys died at age 44.The blows of losing Denys, her farm, her beloved servants, the Africans for whom she felt an almost mystical bond, might have felled a lesser person. But Tania was a survivor. She now resembled the emaciated woman which she would be the rest of her life. Syphilis of the spine caused her a great deal of physical agony but she wrote and produced her masterpieces. She had been branded with the disease but her sufferings were like a badge of honor. She was a very complex lady to fathom but this biography is superb and if anybody can explain Tania, Judith Thurman can. Tania may have appeared to have acted in a cavalier manner towards her secretary, Clara, who was very educated as well as being enormously patient. Clara acted like a sounding board, but underneath Clara knew there was at least some affection for her in Tania's strange personality makeup. Even though she had been "exiled" twice, Clara came back as Tania was her "calling."A difficult part of Tania's life for a reader to understand was her platonic love affair in Denmark when Tania was 64 and the poet Thorkild Bjornvig was 32. Tania had a figurative hold on Bjornvig's jugular and she almost strangled him. Although Thornkild was married with a child, Tania insisted on the young man's spending most of his time with her, living in her house. The affair was exceedingly grotesque but for four years Bjornvig could not escape. They had formed a pact in which he would become a great poet through her. She alternately coddled him and vilified him, trying to possess him like she had tried to possess Denys. Finally the pact was broken and Bjornvig was free. Of course the whole sorry mess had a profound effect on Bjornvig's poor wife who felt inferior and when Bjornvig took a mistress Tania endeavored to shatter her life as well.Tania's photographs often show her smiling a crooked smile that is almost a smirk. As though God had played a trick on us for creating us at all. But her writings are sublime. Author Thurman describes "Out of Africa:"... "the serene perfection of the style, the sparseness of details, the attendance of the gods all signal that we have escaped from the gravity of practical questions and have gotten up into a purer element..."*I use the name Tania throughout the review. This was Denys' pet name for her buther family called her Tanne, Africans called her Mrs. Karen and she was also addressed as Baroness Blixen.

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, by Judith Thurman. This literary study, winner of the National Book Award, is, apparently, still the only comprehensive biography of Isak Dinesen, one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Dinesen, who was twice nominated for the Nobel prize, is the author of the compelling memoir, Out of Africa. That terse work established Dinesen as a major twentieth-century writer, was made into the beloved film of the same name by Sydney Pollack. The film, as well as acknowledging that it is based on Dinesen’s memoir, credits Thurman’s biography of the artist as well. Therefore, I finally decided to buy it.Thurman, critic and biographer, won the National Book Award, two foreign literary prizes for her work. The author of Cleopatra's Nose, and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, she is a staff writer at The New Yorker, lives in New York City.I have greatly admired Dinesen over the years, read much of her work, though, unfortunately, now so long ago that I can’t recall which work I read. Unhappily, Thurman’s book sure doesn’t make me want to rush right out and read more Dinesen, perhaps the most damning criticism of any I might level at the biographer’s work. In life and in art, Dinesen reserved her greatest praise for that which was light. Thurman’s book is elephantine, long and heavy, with strong literary emphasis, lots of exegeses of all the author’s work. At the opening of Thurman’s bio, we must struggle through more than 90 pages on the Danish author’s ancestors, family, family life, childhood writings, exposition thereof. The monumental tome goes on for 200 more pages after the Danish author leaves Africa. I think many of Dinesen’s fans would have preferred to meet her on the new African train that took her to her new coffee plantation. In fact, the biographer seems to want to frustrate those of us normal readers who are only really interested in the esteemed author’s Out of Africa period.Mind you, Thurman does give us a little more information about the author’s African days than the near-legendary author does herself. Thurman tells us of the formation of the famous Muthaiga Club, founded by Berkeley Cole, who was to become Dinesen’s good friend. It opened the week Karen Blixen (the author’s actual legal name) arrived. “ It was housed in a mansion of pink stucco and had a golf course, tennis courts, a croquet lawn, stabling for polo ponies, two limousines with drivers, and a chef from Goa. The roster of members read like a sampler of Debrett’s Peerage, and Baron Blixon [Karen’s husband at the time] immediately put down his name. Such a place in a raw country glowed literally and figuratively in the night, stirring the imagination of outsiders. During the twenties Muthaiga came to be called “The Moulin Rouge of Africa,” and it had a number of famous romances and even a shooting or two associated with its name. A handful of titled adulterers, like the Earl of Erroll, the Countess de Janze, and Lady Idina Sackville, who had five husbands, did much to promote its reputation.” I’ve posted a picture of the club below.Thurman also mentions the Danish woman’s often-cited outdoor millstone table, at which many meals and decisions were taken—I’ve also attached a picture of myself at that table below . And Thurman gives us the menu of the meal Tania Blixen, as she was then known, triumphantly served the British Prince of Wales on a visit. “Clear soup, Mombasa turbot served with hollandaise, ham poached in champagne, partridges with peas—the birds brought by the Masai—a pasta with cream and truffles, greens, pearl onions and tomato salad, wild mushroom croustades, a savarin, strawberries and grenadines from the garden.” All this prepared by her native chef Kamante, in a kitchen I have seen, small, primitive, without electricity or running water.Furthermore, Thurman does tell us that one of the only two other women Tania Blixen (as her friends then called her) was Beryl Markham, "who trained Lord Delamere’s racehorses. In the late twenties she began taking flying lessons and would become the first woman mail pilot, the first woman to attempt a solo east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic, and one of the first pilots to use a plane for spotting game. In this capacity, she worked with Bror [ Tania’s ex husband at the time] and Denys [ so famously Tania’s lover], who figure prominently and affectionately in her[Markham’s] memoir, West with the Night. Beryl Markham was then twenty-four…. She was tall, broad-shouldered, and fair, resembling Greta Garbo both in her features and in a restless, pantherine grace of movement. Her private life was a subject of endless gossip…. Denys was then, or had just, or would soon – depending upon one’s informant—have a ‘little walk-out’ with her. Tania could not have been blind to her allure, and it speaks highly for her dedication as a hostess – and her sense of fair play generally—that she still invited her to dinner, placed her beside Denys, and later reported to her mother that Beryl had ‘looked ravishing.’”This is more than Dinesen ever tells the reader about Markham in her own book: she mentions her not at all. And Thurman probably does tell the reader more about Denys Finch Hatton, the noble love of Tania’s life, than Tania ever does in her book. But these little gems I have just given you are BURIED in Thurman’s elephantine nearly 500 page book. So. How patient are you?

I was interested to read about her life as I had seen the film 'Out of Africa' & had read the life of Denis Finch Hatton. I found this book, although very interesting and well written rather boring in places as the author went into too much detail. Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen was an extraordinary peron and makes for very interesting reading. The book does not resemble the film very much but obviously the book is very true to life.

Hard work but rewarding

Such an excellent biography - the one upon which the film "Out of Africa" was based. Marvellous read!

Well researched and written.

Couldn't put this book down. Very informative and sensitive without being sentimental or idealising a very complex and fascinating woman.