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Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke
Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke in Kenya, 1918.
Born	17 April 1885 Rungsted, Zealand, Denmark
Died	7 September 1962 (aged 77) Rungsted, Zealand, Denmark
Occupation	Writer
Notable work(s)	Out of Africa, Seven Gothic Tales, Shadows on the Grass, "Babette's Feast"
Influences William Shakespeare

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works both in Danish and in English. She is best known, at least in English, for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. In Denmark she is best known for her works Out of Africa (Danish Den afrikanske Farm) and Seven Gothic Tales (Danish Syv fantastiske Fortællinger).

Biography

Early years

Karen Dinesen was the daughter of writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen and Ingeborg Westenholz, and the sister of Thomas Dinesen. She was born into a Unitarian bourgeois family in Rungsted, on the island of Zealand, in Denmark, and she was schooled in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome.

She began publishing fiction in various Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola, the name of the Seminole Indian leader, possibly inspired by her father's connection with American Indians. From August 1872 to December 1873, Wilhelm Dinesen had lived among the Chippewa Indians, in Wisconsin, where he fathered a daughter, who was born after his return to Denmark. Wilhelm Dinesen hanged himself in 1895 when Karen was nine after being diagnosed with syphilis.

Life in Africa

Karen Blixen Museum, Kenya

In 1913 Karen Dinesen became engaged to her second-cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, after a failed love affair with his brother. The couple moved to Kenya, where in early 1914 they used family money to establish a coffee plantation, hiring African workers, predominantly the Kikuyu tribespeople who lived on the farmlands at the time of their arrival. About the couple's early life in Africa, Karen Blixen later wrote,

"Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!"

The two were quite different in education and temperament, and Bror Blixen was unfaithful to his wife. She was diagnosed with syphilis toward the end of their first year of marriage, which although eventually cured (some uncertainty exists), created medical anguish for years afterwards. The Blixens separated in 1921 and were divorced in 1925.

During her early years in Kenya Karen Blixen met the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and after her separation she and Finch Hatton developed a close friendship which eventually became a long-term love affair. Finch Hatton used Blixen's farmhouse as a home base between 1926 and 1931, when he wasn't leading one of his clients on safari. He died in the crash of his de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane in 1931. At the same time, the failure of the coffee plantation, due to the worldwide economic depression and the unsuitability of her farm's soil for coffee growing, forced Blixen to abandon her beloved farm. The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Blixen returned to Denmark, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Life as a writer

On returning to Denmark, Blixen began writing in earnest. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was published in the US in 1934 under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. This first book, highly enigmatic and more metaphoric than Gothic, won great recognition, and publication of the book in the UK and Denmark followed. Her second book, now the best known of her works, was Out of Africa, published in 1937, and its success firmly established her reputation as an author. She was awarded the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat (a Danish prize for women in the arts or academic life) in 1939.

During World War II, when Denmark was occupied by the Germans, Blixen started her only full-length novel, the introspective tale The Angelic Avengers, under another pseudonym, Pierre Andrezel; it was published in 1944. The horrors experienced by the young heroines were interpreted as an allegory of Nazism.

Her writing during most of the 1940s and 1950s consisted of tales in the storytelling tradition. The most famous is Babette's Feast, about a chef who spends her entire ten-thousand-franc lottery prize to prepare a final, spectacular gourmet meal. The Immortal Story, in which an elderly man tries to buy youth, was adapted to the screen in 1968 by Orson Welles, a great admirer of Blixen's work and life.

Blixen's tales follow a traditional style of storytelling, and most take place against the background of the 19th century or earlier periods. Concerning her deliberately old-fashioned style, Blixen mentioned in several interviews that she wanted to express a spirit that no longer exists in modern times, that of destiny and courage. Indeed, many of her ideas can be traced back to those of Romanticism. Blixen’s concept of the art of the story is perhaps most directly expressed in the story "Cardinal’s First Tale" from her fifth book, Last Tales.

Though Danish, Blixen wrote her books in English and then translated her work into her native tongue. Critics describe her English as having unusual beauty, great skill, and precision. Her later books usually appeared simultaneously in both Danish and English. As an author, she kept her public image as a charismatic, mysterious old Baroness with an insightful third eye, and established herself as an inspiring figure in Danish culture, although shunning the mainstream.

Blixen was widely respected by contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote, and during her tour of the United States in 1959, the list of writers who paid her visits included Arthur Miller, E. E. Cummings, and Pearl Buck. She also met actress Marilyn Monroe in 1959. She was admired by the patron Pauline de Rothschild of the Rothschild family.

Illness and Death

Karen Blixen's grave in Rungstedlund, Denmark

Although it was widely believed that syphilis continued to plague Blixen throughout her lifetime, extensive tests were unable to reveal evidence of syphilis in her system after 1925. Her writing prowess suggests that she did not suffer from the mental degeneration of late stages of syphilis, nor from cerebral poisoning due to mercury treatments. She did suffer a mild permanent loss of sensation in her legs that could be attributed to chronic use of arsenic in Africa.

Others attribute her weight loss and eventual death to anorexia nervosa.^[1]

During the 1950s Blixen's health quickly deteriorated, and in 1955 she had a third of her stomach removed due to an ulcer. Writing became impossible, although she did several radio broadcasts.

In her letters from Africa and later during her life in Denmark, Karen Blixen wondered if her pain was psychosomatic. Publicly she blamed her trouble on syphilis—a disease that afflicted heroes and poets, as well as her own father. Whatever her belief about her illness, the disease suited the artist's design for creating her own personal legend.^[2]

Unable to eat, Blixen died in 1962 at Rungstedlund, her family's estate, at the age of 77, apparently of malnutrition. The source of her abdominal problems remains unknown, although gastric syphilis, manifested by gastric ulcers during secondary and tertiary syphilis, was well-known prior to the advent of modern antibiotics.

Rungstedlund Museum

The Karen Blixen Museum in Rungstedlund, Denmark

Blixen lived most of her life at the family estate Rungstedlund, which was acquired by her father in 1879. The property is located in Rungsted, 24 kilometers (15 miles) north of Copenhagen, Denmark's capital. The oldest parts of the estate date back to 1680, and it had been operated both as an inn and as a farm. Most of Blixen's writing took place in Ewald's Room, named after author Johannes Ewald. The property is managed by the Rungstedlund Foundation, founded by Blixen and her siblings. The property opened to the public as a museum in 1991.

Legacy and works

The Nairobi suburb which stands on the land where Blixen farmed coffee is now named Karen. Blixen herself declared in her later writings that "the residential district of Karen" was "named after me."^[3] And Blixen's biographer, Judith Thurman, was told by the developer who bought the farm from the family corporation that he planned to name the district after Blixen.

Blixen herself was known to her friends not as "Karen" but as "Tania." The family corporation which owned her farm was officially incorporated as the "Karen Coffee Company." The chairman of the board was her uncle, Aage Westenholz,^[4] who may have named the company after his own daughter Karen. However, the developer seems to have named the district specifically for its famous author/farmer, not for the name of her company.

There is a Karen Blixen Coffee House and Museum in the district of Karen, set near Blixen's former home.

Some of Blixen's works were published posthumously, including tales previously removed from earlier collections and essays she wrote for various occasions.

• The Hermits (1907, published in a Danish journal under the name Osceola)
• The Ploughman (1907, published in a Danish journal under the name Osceola)
• The de Cats Family (1909, published in Tilskueren)
• The Revenge of Truth (1926, published in Denmark)
• Seven Gothic Tales (1934 in USA, 1935 in Denmark)
• Out of Africa (1937 in Denmark and England, 1938 in USA)
• Winter's Tales (1942)
• The Angelic Avengers (1947)
• Last Tales (1957)
• Anecdotes of Destiny (1958)
• Shadows on the Grass (1960 in England and Denmark, 1961 in USA)
• Ehrengard (posthumous 1963, USA)
• Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (posthumous 1977, USA)
• Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (posthumous 1979, USA)
• On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (posthumous 1986, USA)
• Letters from Africa, 1914 – 1931 (posthumous 1981, USA)
• Karen Blixen in Danmark: Breve 1931 – 1962 (posthumous 1996, Denmark)

Family

Blixen's great-nephew, Anders Westenholz, is also an accomplished writer, and has written books about her and her literature, among other things.

Quotes

“To be lonely is a state of mind, something completely other than physical solitude; when modern authors rant about the soul’s intolerable loneliness, it is only proof of their own intolerable emptiness.”

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea."

"When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them." – Out of Africa, 1937

See also

• Karen Blixen Museum, Hørsholm, Denmark
• Asteroid 3318 Blixen, named after the author
• Jurij Moskvitin, friend of Blixen
• Banknotes of Denmark, 1997 series

Further reading

• Thurman, Judith Isak Dinesen St. Martin's Press (September 1983) ISBN 0312437382 ISBN 978-0312437381
• Donelson, Linda Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa Coulsong (April 1998) ISBN: O96438938X ISBN 0964389398

References

1. ^ Dr Thomas Stuttaford Let’s all go pear-shaped: In an age of obesity and anorexia it’s vital to understand the best shape and composition for our bodies Times 20 September 2007
2. ^ Karen Blixen's Medical History: A New Look
3. ^ Dinesen, Isak, Shadows on the Grass, from the combined Vintage International Edition of Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, New York 1989, p. 458
4. ^ Thurman, Judith, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, St. Martin’s Press, 1983, p. 141

External links

• Karen Blixen – Isak Dinesen website
• Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen short biography
• The Paris Review Interview
• Karen Blixen Museum, Denmark
• Karen Blixen Museum, Kenya
• A model of Karen's house in Rungstedlund in Google's 3D Warehouse, Denmark
• A model of Karen's farm near Nairobi in Google's 3D Warehouse, Kenya

From Wikiquote

Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak.

Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962) was a Danish author; born Karen Christence Dinesen, she is also known under her pen name Isak Dinesen.

Sourced

• I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.
  • Letter to her mother (26 February 1919)

• There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.
  • Letter to her sister Elle (1923); later published in Letters from Africa: 1914-1931 (1981) edited by Frans Lasson, translated by Anne Born.

• All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
  • As quoted in The Human Condition (1958) by Hannah Arendt. This appears as part of a statement in a 1957 interview where she speaks of a friend's comments about her:
    I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.
    • Interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review (3 November 1957)
  • Paraphrased variant : All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.

• Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 — to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.
  • Shadows on the Grass (1960)

• God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
  • As quoted in obituaries (7 September 1962)

• The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.
  • As quoted in Reader's Digest (April 1964) Variant: I know a cure for everything. Salt water ... in one form or another, sweat, tears or the salt sea.

• It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature — that is the true carnival!
  • Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (1971)

• A fashion always has some meaning. The fashion, or style, of renunciation really meant something then. It was inspired by the war, or it ran parallel to the war, and could not have been conceived without the war... It stood for the will to sacrifice — if the unlimited will to throw away can be called the will to sacrifice. It was arrogant and elegantly cynical — because it is arrogant and elegantly cynical when the symbol of the élite becomes hunger. The superfluous here threw away the necessary quite simply. In its inner essence it was the disdain of death.
  • Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (1979) This has also been abbreviated and quoted as "The will to sacrifice . . . was the disdain of death."

• Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
  • Letters from Africa: 1914-1931 (1981) edited by Frans Lasson, translated by Anne Born.

• I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
  • As quoted in Voices: A Memoir (1983) by Frederic Prokosch

• The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.
  • On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1986)

• Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows that they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
  • As quoted in Journey Through Womanhood: Meditations from Our Collective Soul (2002) by Tian Dayton

Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

• During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.
  • "The Deluge at Norderney"

• God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
  • "The Deluge at Norderney"

• I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch ... and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order ... by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.
  • "The Old Chevalier"

• My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...
  • "The Old Chevalier"

• Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself.
  • "The Old Chevalier"

• What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
  • "The Dreamers"

• The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.
  • "The Dreamers"

Out of Africa (1937)

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills...

• I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.
  • First lines.

• It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent... The views were immensely wide — everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.

• Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.

• In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet.

• White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone.

• There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.

• I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown

• The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key, the minor key, to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word tragedy means in itself unpleasantness.

• People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...

• I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizard, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail.
  Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.

• Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and have remembered that one in the reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and all embroidered over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my arm that it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colors, the duet between the turquoise and the "negre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet. ...I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been supressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves."

• In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To settlers I give this advice: "For the sake of your eyes and hearts, shoot not the Iguana."

Winter's Tales (1942)

• Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
  • "Sorrow-Acre"

• Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.
  • "The Invincible Slave-owners"

• Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
  • "A Consolatory Tale"

Anecdotes of Destiny (1953)

• I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser...

• Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
  • "The Diver"

• Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.
  • "Babette's Feast"

• When later in life they thought of this evening it never occurred to any of them that they might have been exalted by their own merit. They realized that the infinite grace of which General Loewenhielm had spoken had been allotted to them, and they did not even wonder at the fact, for it had been but the fulfillment of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium.
  • "Babette's Feast"

• When soon I sail from here, I may again run into such a storm as the one in Kvasefjord. But this time I shall clearly understand that it is not a play in the theatre, but it is death. and it seems too that then, in the last moment before we go down, I can in in all truth be yours...
  • "Tempests"

• It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told.
  • "The Immortal Story"

Last Tales (1957)

• 'Are you sure,' she asked, 'that it is God whom you serve?'
  The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently.
  'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!'
  • "The Cardinal's First Tale"

• The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
  • "The Cardinal's Third Tale"

• Why, you are to become a story teller, and I shall give you the reasons! Hear then: Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.
  • "The Blank Page"

Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

Unsourced

• Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever...
  • Variants: Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
    I think these difficult times have helped me understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

• When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.

About Karen Blixen

• As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.
  • Ernest Hemingway as quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

• Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.
  • Raymond Carver in Writers at Work (1986) edited by George Plimpton

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Karen Blixen

• Brief biography at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen website
• Karen Blixen Museum (Denmark)
• Karen Blixen Literary Society Online
• Karen Blixen's Kenya