Open Writing

“I had a farm in Aaffrica … “

The author of the book identified by this famous phrase was an enigmatic, complex woman who enjoyed considerable success as an author, and whose memory, literary and personal, lingers, bringing a sense of sadness and loss. A member of the Swedish aristocracy by marriage, she had a literary output of varying quality. She used several different pen names during her writing career and published 17 books and stories, some written in a difficult Gothic style resembling the early editions of Grimms Fairy Tales. Perhaps these had been read to her as a child and became a permanent part of her mental landscape.

However, the book she’s most famous for, and with which she is most frequently associated, is “Out of Africa” the lyrical memoir of the years she spent in Kenya between 1914 to 1931, which she wrote using the name of Karen Blixen. This was a contraction of her full title, Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, nee Dinesen, and is the name by which she is most widely known. She also wrote a number of other works using the pseudonym Isak Dinesen in memory of her father, who hanged himself when she was nine when he was diagnosed with syphilis, and whose death had a permanent effect on her psychic understanding of life.

Karen appears to have had a fondness for names, perhaps as a shield to cover her true identity, and her earliest works were written under the name of Osceola, possibly in memory of a chief of an American Seminole Indian tribe with whom her father had lived for some years. Karen may have felt there was a connection; it’s the only link to explain her choice.

To her family and friends she was known as Tania, and early photographs show her as an attractive, sturdy, ‘girl-next-door’, eager to take on the adventure of life in a new country. But as she grew older, her appearance became more and more exotic, and Richard Avedon’s famous 1960s fashion photograph shows her wrinkled and frail, with eyes enormous dark pools in a startlingly white face.

Since earliest childhood Karen had written stories and plays for the family, and in many of the plays she cast herself as “Pierrot” – the artist who accepts the blame for what goes wrong. Traditionally, Pierrot suffers from deep melancholy, in effect taking the sorrows of the world on his shoulders. There’s certainly a strain of melancholy in “Out of Africa”, but one suspects that this might be more a dramatic device from which to hang the story, than the series of tragic events she depicts.

Nevertheless, “Out of Africa” [pub 1937] “Letters from Africa” [pub 1914-1931], and a later Kenyan memoir “Shadows on the Grass” [pub 1960], brought Karen fame and fortune. Later it was made into a blockbuster film with Meryl Streep in the title role, co-starring with Robert Redford. It received several Oscar nominations. Her “Seven Gothic Tales” [pub 1934] and collections of short stories including the famous “Babette’s Feast”, also sold well. This last was made into the third of her successful movies.

Within the first year of arriving in Kenya in 1914 and not long after her marriage to her Swedish cousin Bror von Blixen-Finecke, she discovered to her horror and great sorrow that she had contracted syphilis from him. Bror was the love of her life, but he viewed marriage in a very different light and was openly promiscuous. There are several views as to whether Karen was actually infected or whether she used this as a device in her complex attempts to create a mysteriously unknowable persona; either inventing or linking her condition to stories heard in her childhood about her father’s death.

But it is incontestable that she was extremely ill for some years, and returned to Denmark several times for treatment. When she was first diagnosed, the doctors prescribed the heavy metals arsenic and mercury the only treatment available in Nairobi for her condition in 1915. She continued taking arsenic for years as a tonic against recurrent syphilis.

During Bror’s frequent absences on safari and also as a member of Lord Delamere’s military force fighting the Germans in East Africa, Tania’s friendship with the English aristocrat Denis Fitch-Hatton grew increasingly intimate. She came to depend on him and his friend Berkeley Cole for company and mental stimulation. Some accounts of her life say she was pregnant twice by Finch-Hatton, but miscarried each time. But there’s no doubt that she was desperately lonely living on her isolated coffee farm and suffered from panic attacks and a general malaise. She regarded Finch-Hatton and Berkeley Cole as two of the most important elements of her life in Africa.

After Berkeley Cole’s death from blackwater fever and Bror’s second marriage, came the heartbreak of Denis’s death in a light aircraft crash. Losing heart with this final blow, the difficulties of running the farm on her own, together with her ill health and increasing indebtedness to the bank pushed her into a forced sale. To her life-long regret the farm was sold and she left Africa for ever and returned to Denmark.

For some years she’d complained about an increasing lack of feeling in her legs, and towards the end of her life she suffered from intense stomach pains and an inflamed mouth and throat. But despite this, she continued to write, producing several outstanding collections of tales, two well-known memoirs, and establishing a successful speaking career. She received two nominations for the Nobel Prize and was invited on a lecture tour of America 1959. In New York she was feted by the newspapers …“in more glowing terms than Charles Dickens’ tour a century before”. She became internationally acclaimed and New York high society covered all the costs for her hotels and travel. Notables, including Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe visited her in her hotel suite, while “the Nobel Laureate, the author Pearl Buck, travelled two days to meet her”.

“The high-profile tour did not conceal that the author was ill. She spent part of her three months in the United States on intravenous infusions, and …weighed less than eighty pounds and ate almost nothing. Her hosts offered oysters, grapes, and champagne – foods she could keep down – but even these she ignored in favour of entertaining the assembled guests. Through a variety of hints, confidences, and declarations, she told intimates that she suffered from syphilis”.

Some years before her death, with the collaboration of her siblings, the Rungstedlund Foundation was established. It is located on the family estate of the same name, parts of which date back to 1680, and was opened as a museum in 1991. The suburb of Karen in Nairobi is named after her as it is where she made her home and operated her coffee plantation. When the property was purchased in 1914, locals warned that the farm was too high to grow coffee, and several of the most effective scenes in the movie “Out of Africa” depict the difficulties she experienced with trying to establish her plantation. The final collapse of the venture took place with the onset of the world-wide Depression in 1931, and not, as depicted in the movie, in the early 1920’s. She died in 1962 at the age of 77 …”apparently from malnutrition”