Had my fill of Karen Blixen for a long time. Because all the dramatizations I have watched this week about her are based on corny clichés, masquerades, and debatable constructions that cannot stand the passing of time. Anyhow, I have learned from her a lesson in courage to bear in mind. My intention, to share all that as it came to me, like a private investigation.
Well, first of all, for a year, I was waiting for the release of The Pact by Bille August, based on the memoir of the Danish poet Thorkild Bjornvig. So, when I finally found the film on a streaming service, I rubbed my hands. Because Bille has recently released Ehrengard based on a posthumous tale of the Baroness –as Karen always demanded to be addressed. Just in case, I got Thorkild’s memoir, expecting the several questions failed to get a mention.
This mentorship between the Baroness and the young poet was a cause célèbre and helped to build up her dark legend as a witch, matchmaker, and malignant narcissist. But I only have to bemoan another case of unconcealed misogyny according to that era –late forties and early fifties. A mentorship between a celebrated author and a young poetess instead would have never raised an eyebrow. Remember Henry James and Edith Wharton.
And secondly, The Dreamer, the six-part drama series is set in the thirties and follows the Baroness’s return to her childhood home in Denmark after many years in Africa, broke, mentally depressed, and physically sick from years of mercury and arsenic treatment for her syphilis, at the mercy of her family who decides to give her a miserable allowance of 40 kroner to get by, while her younger brother has inherited all the properties after the father suicide because is a man.
Though as nails, she decides to follow her late lover’s advice –the aristocrat Denys Finch Hatton–and write down all the fantastic tales with which she entertained him in Africa. But fearing the rejection of the myopic and prudish Danish literary circles, she becomes a transnational author and writes in English. And thereby it makes a lot of sense, given that such is the language of her beloved references as well. In order to succeed, she goes under the masculine pen name of Isak Dinesen.
And here is the catch! When Seven Gothic Tales is selected in the US as Book of the Month Club, the Danish publishers offer her a deal and a translation entrusted to a very well-paid academic –two thousand kroner. But when she reads the galley proofs, to her bewilderment, she finds one blunder after another. And like a fierce lioness, she decides to translate herself to keep the necessary humor between the lines, a strategy to keep the full power of her prose that will not abandon ever again.
This fascinating biopic is intertwined from the beginning with one of the Seven Gothic Tales, The Dreamers, and evades the simplistic rules of the genre that so much bores me. Moreover, it stops in 1939, right after the passing of her mother, when she sets out by herself in Rungstedlund, the manor-house that healed her.
Thirdly, and lastly, after going through the black legend of her twilight and the lesson in courage of her dawn in the depths of the Great Depression, I should visit again her zenith, the book that we all associate with her, Out of Africa. And in doing so, I have to go back to my late teens, in 1985, and the iconic movie starred by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford to which John Barry added the most corny soundtrack ever.
The conundrum of such experiences revisited are the issues raised. That English aristocrat was filthy rich and had enough money to bail out the farm from debt. So, his lover could stay, and the Kikuyus kept their jobs and not be uprooted to a sordid reserve. Instead, he comes and goes as he pleases like a free spirit. One day appears with an airplane, a Gipsy Moth, which was not precisely a cheap toy. Meanwhile, the storyteller in dire straits demands help from the stingy British over and over, and the only reply she gets is avoiding commitment and stalling after he had been benefiting from her generosity since the Swedish Baron left. What a douchebag!
My private investigation ends with a toast.
During the warm nights of May, while I lived in that bookish bungalow, I used to call my friends to eat pasta and drink red wine in excess under a lush rosebush. All of them, like I did too, watched Out of Africa badly dubbed in Spanish. And we adopted what we thought was the Denys Finch Hatton toast, that is, “por la cándida adolescencia” –or to your understanding– for the naïve adolescence.
Never trust a cheap translation.
The original toast came from the English poem With Rue My Heart is Laden by AE Housman. The exact line is “for the rose-lipt maiden” because, on that safari day Karen shot a charging lioness and while pointing with her rifle, bit her lip until she bled.