SOURCE: "Isak Dinesen: An Appreciation," in The Southern Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, March, 1966, pp. 297-314.

When you have read Out of Africa you will have learned a great deal about Isak Dinesen. There remains a certain amount of mystery, however. She centers her attention on the African aspects of the farm. Even the account of that down-at-the-heels, fugitive actor Emmanuelson, which seems at first to be an episode concerning the Baroness and her European guest, turns out to be primarily a comment on the Masai, those natives who were at once both aristocrat and proletarian, and therefore capable of recognizing and sympathizing with tragedy. But, although the Natives and the African world appear under special scrutiny, and it is upon these that the intensity and the illumination of her nostalgia falls, the picture of a young Danish woman of noble birth becomes increasingly complete with every page. She seems to be alone, save for an occasional visitor, and one wonders how this came to be.

Her maiden name was Karen Christence Dinesen; she is sometimes called, and sometimes has signed herself Tanya. She was born in Denmark, April 17, 1885, and in 1914 she married the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, her second cousin, who was also a cousin of the King of Denmark. Before that she had studied to be a painter, in Paris and in Rome. She wrote a little comedy for marionettes—just when, I don't know. It was not published, I think, until 1960, and then only in Danish. From the world of Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, she went with her husband to British East Africa, which later became the Kenya Colony; there her family had bought for her a coffee plantation. In 1921, after a divorce from the Baron, she took over the management of the plantation. In 1931, the year of the Depression, she was forced to sell the farm because of financial losses, and she returned to Denmark, to her family home of Rungstedlund, where she died at the age of seventy-seven, September 7, 1962. Her father, "an officer in the Danish and French army," was also once for three years a trapper in Minnesota; the Indians there gave him the name of Boganis, which he used as a pseudonym to sign his book about these adventures. This was in 1872. His Indians were the Pawnee and the Chippewa.

Out of Africa, Mr. Wescott says in his Images of Truth, is her only "truthful" book, that is to say, the only book of hers which is not fiction. To this must be added the volume called Shadows on the Grass (English edition, 1960), which consists of four stories or sketches which become marvellous footnotes to the first work. It is hardly just to call them footnotes. They are properly a part of Out of Africa, and the reader who comes to them without knowing Out of Africa will lose a great part of their value and poignancy. This book is illustrated not only by photographs of Isak Dinesen, but by line drawings and paintings from her hand of a number of her people at the farm. Her training in Rome and Paris was not wasted.

We learn in Out of Africa that she began to write on the farm to lessen the loneliness. What she wrote on the sheets which Farah thought could never be brought together into anything solid, like a real book with blue covers, was published in 1934 as Seven Gothic Tales. In these she returns to Europe, to a world of infinite conversation. The scene is almost purely European, except for the framework, or setting, for the story told in "The Dreamers." Here the setting is aboard an Arab dhow as it approaches Mombasa. It carries a wandering Englishman and a Mohammedan storyteller. Yet even here the story which is told is of Europe, and the teller is the Englishman. In all these tales, it seems to me, there are many things, many ways of thinking, which she learned at the farm. If she observed Africa with the eyes of a European, she also remembered Europe with a wisdom not unrelated to the wisdom of the Kikuyu, and it becomes a fascination to trace the interweaving of thought between these two books.

Out of Africa was written in Denmark. She spent seventeen years in Africa. The book is written at a great distance in time and space from its scene and its events. It has been filtered through memory, and suffused with longing. "'Tis more than love that looketh on / What it no longer hath." I am quoting from a poem by Elizabeth Daryush. The book partakes therefore of the quality of fiction, not because it is untrue, but because it is the result of the creative method of which Henry James spoke, to distinguish it from the method of the reporter. Details which have been filtered through the memory have more truth in them than facts in general because they carry an emotional content; because they are the essential things to be remembered.

When I again read Out of Africa after a very long time this was what struck me more sharply than before, this immense nostalgia for what was gone, and the awareness of change. For the change had begun around and about Nairobi even before Karen Blixen left the farm. In "The Dreamers," which is one of the Seven Gothic Tales, Mira, the Arabian story-teller, says, "I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart." Change was not easy to love when what was being changed was the park of Africa, the forest within view of her house into the suburbs of Nairobi.

In the autumn of 1963 I was talking with an Englishman, a man in his eighties, who had come out to Canada many years before, and had been living for a long time in British Columbia. He had a brother in Africa—this is the story of the British Empire, this dissemination of families. He said that his brother had experienced no trouble with the Natives so far; he lived in Kenya, and there he was on good terms with the Natives. His brother had, in fact, a coffee plantation about twelve miles out of Nairobi. He had bought it from a Baroness, about 1931. My friend had not heard of Baroness Blixen, but his brother surely must have known whose acres he bought, for in 1951, when Bernardine Kielty visited the farm, although it had become in part a suburb of Nairobi, it was called Karen Estates, and Karen House was the center of it. It is pleasant to think that in 1963, at least, the descendants of Isak Dinesen's friends, the Kikuyu, were friends with the new occupants of the farm.

When Dinesen says, in the person of the Arabian, Mira, "to love God you must love a joke," I seem to hear the laughter of the Kikuyu of which she tells us in Out of Africa, their "shrill delight in things going wrong." They expected not the reasonable of God, or of Fate, but the impossible, the imaginative, the unexpected. They expected Him to act in a large way, and without regard for their personal convenience. She relates this feeling of the Kikuyu to the latter part of the Book of Job. I don't know whether her deep understanding and empathy—if we hesitate to call it sympathy—with the Kikuyu was a natural thing to her, and a part of her own disposition and training, but I have a feeling that she learned some of this fortitude and gallantry from the Natives of Africa. Perhaps also some of it from the thinking of the Arabs, which had filtered into the tribal thought of many Africans. The old Kikuyu women who had walked many miles to her house for a gift of tobacco on a day when she had no tombacco for them, laughed uncontrollably at the joke on themselves, and for a long time after, when they met her, they said, "Do you remember, no tombacco, Msabu? Ha, ha."

When the bad days came on the farm, and Kinanjui was dead, and her great friend Denys Finch-Hatton was dead, with the lions pacing or lying above his grave, and she had come to the end of her courage, she asked for a sign from the Powers of the universe. Then came that battle between the white cock and the chameleon, when the cock snatched the tongue from the mouth of the chameleon, leaving it more than disarmed—leaving it doomed, unable to catch the insects which were its food. She was frightened, this woman who had faced lions. Farah brought her tea at the stone table before the house.

"I looked down on the stone and dared not look up, such a dangerous place did the world seem to me. Very slowly only, in the course of the next few days, it came upon me that I had had the most spiritual answer possible to my call…. The powers to which I cried had stood on my dignity more than I had done myself, and what other answer could they then give? This was clearly not the hour for coddling, and they had chosen to connive at my invocation of it. Great powers had laughed to me, with an echo from the hills to follow the laughter, they said among the trumpets, among the cocks and chameleons, Ha, ha."

Whether learned from the Natives of Africa or the peasants and pastors of Denmark, courage can do no more than this. Whoever said that the universe was a safe place for Man? Jehovah did indeed make some promises to some special people, and Kamante, after he became a Christian, put a little faith in them—not too much. He talked a good deal about setting his heel upon the serpent's head; when the serpent appeared it seemed better to call for help and have it shot. After all, as he remarked, it was on the roof, an inconvenient spot in which to set his heel.

Though Out of Africa was written in Denmark the Seven Gothic Tales, her first book, was for the most part written in Africa. In these she dreamed of Europe, and to Dinesen in Denmark the memory of writing the Seven Tales must of necessity have been a part of her experience on the farm. When in Out of Africa she wrote of Farah's women and their wonderful clothing—ten yards of material to a single dress—and when she quoted Baudelaire (I think it is Baudelaire) on how their bodies moved under all that drapery, was she not remembering The Old Chevalier, and his comments on the dress of women in her own story of that name? When she wrote the words of the Old Chevalier, was she not writing with Farah's women under her eyes?

Neither the Tales nor Out of Africa could be what they are, unless their author had seen each world through the eyes of the other. And probably it would be true to say that you could not have a full appreciation of Dinesen without reading at least the Seven Gothic Tales as well as Out of Africa. But Out of Africa remains for me, and for most of us, her best book. This is not merely, I think, because we like to know that it is "true"—and she vouches elsewhere for its complete factual truth—and because it is personal, but because it is simpler, closer to the bare bone of what she wanted most to say. It is about the things that mattered most to her, the problems projected upon the people and things nearest to her, nearest in every way. God knows it is not a simple book in the sense of being simpleminded. It is more simple in structure, more economical in thought and language than any of the Tales. There is less of that elaborateness with which she amused herself in the lonely evenings on the farm. It is almost completely objective.

Linguistically she disproves Jespersen's theory that truly bilingual people never become great writers in either language. She grew up learning French and English, by preceptors, as well as her mother tongue of Danish. I mean that she was tutored in these languages, while, presumably, she drank in Danish with her mother's milk. But I can detect practically nothing of the foreigner in her use of English, and she surely is a master stylist. She does ungrammatically misuse lay for laid, and so do many English speaking persons. And she does invent words, which have an odd and delightful sound, as for instance, instead of salvaged she invents salved, with slightly medicinal overtones. Almost all her work exists in both English and Danish. Some of it, I think, was translated into Danish by her secretary, Clara Svendsen. I cannot imagine that anyone but Dinesen herself translated any of it into English. Very likely the scholarship of Mr. Robert Langbaum (The Gayety of Vision, Random House, 1965), can identify which work was written first in which language. Certainly none of it which I have read in English bears the stamp of being a translation. This alone is an extraordinary achievement.

The style is that of the storyteller. The voice is quiet. The rhythm is the long easy one of an unhurried narrative, spoken aloud. It almost has the long easy lope of a runner across a great plain. It never, that I can remember, becomes breathless. What she tells us of the beginning of her stories, how she told them to Denys Finch-Hatton, herself seated cross-legged on the floor like Scheherazade, makes this observation easy to arrive at; but I think one would come to that observation anyway without difficulty. You have only to read a page of it aloud, and you might begin with page 43 in the Modern Library Edition of Out of Africa, where in three paragraphs she gives us a poem about the rain, except that it is in prose, true prose, and not in verse, either scannable or so-called free.

The structure of this book at first seems casual and accidental—just sketches, strung together as her fancy pleased. On a second look we see that it is really not so. The fact that we can pick from it, like plums from a pudding, at almost any page, an anecdote, an epigram, a fine phrase, tempts one to think that it is loosely put together. The progress of the book, which is roughly that of a progress through time, intensifies the nostalgia, the affection which Dinesen felt for the farm. She looks more and more closely at what she will come to lose, at what she has lost. The book ends as a tragedy, almost a five act tragedy, but it is also triumphant. She sums up this strange feeling of triumph in a short bit in the chapter she calls "From an Immigrant's Notebook." The short bit is called: "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me," and it is to the house that she is speaking, to begin with. But she says this too, of the things and people on the farm, remembering a year of drought: "You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong Farm. That bad time blessed us and went away." And in the end she says, "My life, I will not let you go except you bless me, but then I will let you go."

Upon consideration one says, this is a very sad book surely; and yet its sadness is equalled only by its joy. For Dinesen as for Colette, sorrow, pain, joy, were all great treasures of experience, all to be valued, perhaps equally. Colette said, during her last illness, when the pain from arthritis was constant, "Par chance, j'ai douleur." Fortunately, I suffer. As if she said, "I still feel; therefore I still live."

Dinesen is like Colette in this appreciation of the experience of being alive, unlike her in her great concern with the metaphysical, and unlike her in the long narrative rhythm, which makes every episode into a recounting, a story told, not an action presented en scène; on stage. If you wish an example in contrast of the extraordinary ability of Colette to present her subject en scène, you might consider the opening of almost any chapter in The Other One (La Seconde) by Colette, scenes which usually begin with a voice, the speaker unnamed, for the moment, so that you mentally prick up your ears, turn your head and listen, being there in person as audience. Or remember the first words in the first story in My Mother's House (La Maison de Claudine)—"Where are the children?" Or think of the child in the garden at nightfall seeing through the window in the safe circle of the lamplight, a hand, her mother's hand, moving back and forth, the middle finger capped with a silver thimble. The immediacy is poignant. In Dinesen, we hear the voice of the narrator, and the remoteness of the subject is poignant.

When Seven Gothic Tales was first published in this country the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen was a great mystery, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, writing the introduction to this book, apparently did not know whether the author was a man or a woman. Mrs. Fisher was almost equally mystified by the stories, in their quality of being unclassifiable. Her praise was rapturous, although she endeavored to speak like a Vermonter in her last sentence, when she said: "It will be worth your while to read them." The English edition of Out of Africa appeared under the signature of Karen Blixen, and from then on the pseudonym remained as a kind of décor, which did not attempt to conceal anything. However, she remained for a long time a mystery in this country, and when she did appear in person, in 1959, finally, she caused a good bit of a sensation. She was much photographed for the news magazines, and her fragile, elegant, heavily wrinkled face with the great luminous eyes reminded the reviewers and interviewers of spells and enchantments. One article about her began with a quotation from her story, "The Old Chevalier."

"I myself," said the Old Chevalier, "do not think I could really love a woman who had not, at some time or another, been up on a broomstick." In her last years she lived almost exclusively on raw oysters and champagne, and she was so frail that she did not move about without the supporting arm of an escort. And if, Mr. Wescott reported, that arm failed her for any reason, she simply sank to the floor. But she was no great weight to lift again.

She came to this country to raise funds for the future of Rungstedlund, which she planned to leave to the state as a bird sanctuary, and also as a sanctuary for certain literary memories beyond her own life, because the Danish poet Ewald had once lived there, before her time. "I hear his steps," she said, "as he wanders from room to room."

Her visit to this country was not a lecture tour but a tour of storytelling, and she did not range very far from New York, no farther than to Washington and to Cambridge, I believe. Mr. Wescott accompanied her a part of the time, and he reported that the story which she told most often was that of the King's letter. It is the second story in Shadows on the Grass, and it is called "Barua a Soldani." It takes about forty-five minutes to read aloud. The first time he heard her tell it he had the impression that she was inventing word by word as she spoke. After that, since she told it in almost exactly the same words each time, he realized that she had memorized it. Perhaps in the writing it had memorized itself for her, or perhaps she had told it many times before she wrote it down, thus putting a high finish on it in the time-honored manner of true folk tale tellers. It is a fine story, and I will not spoil it by trying to retell it in a reduced form.

The first story in Shadows is the story of Farah, her Somali servant, who was with her for almost eighteen years, walking, she says, five feet behind her, a vigilant shadow; or, on a safari, handing her a gun, or, on the farm, managing her household and her finances. Leaving him, when she left the farm for Denmark, was like losing her right hand.

In this account of Farah she has a good deal to say about the time-honored relationship between servant and master. This theme of the felicitous relationship between servant and master runs through all her work. It is an essentially feudal point of view; it belongs to a time gone past. I cannot think of this point of view in Dinesen as condescending or—crime of crimes, as undemocratic—because of her profound appreciation of what the master owes the servant, that is, for all that for which the master is truly indebted to the servant. The servant takes pride in the relationship equally with the master. This attitude of hers is part of an aristocratic turn of mind. It is this quality of mind that must have suggested to her that a letter from the King might have a curative power. It is moreover a part of her metaphysics of the universe, a metaphysic of relationships, in which opposites are paired, and become one.

In what she has to report of Africa, it is natural to find this master-servant relationship in existence continually. She was the lady of the manor, the healer, the director, the European. Her devotion to her servants is always accompanied by her realization of the beauty and strangeness they brought into her life. Indeed, she speaks of this at length at the very beginning of her story of the farm. In the Tales—[Seven Gothic Tales or Last Tales]—when she is writing of an invented world, a world of fantasy in the highest form, the theme underlies some of her strongest and finest stories—"Sorrow Acre" is a most notable example—and almost all these stories are removed from us, backward in time by a generation or so, if not father. In Africa she found herself moved backward in time in her actual living. She might not find in Africa today that paradisiacal relationship. In the United States she would find it but rarely; but one can hardly consider the history of Europe (the literary history) without brushing against it in one form or another. Don Giovanni and Leporello, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are the literary descendants of Arthur and his Knights, Charlemagne and his Peers.

One should not let oneself be put off by a remark which Dinesen is quoted as having made during a conversation: "If I were rich I think that slaves would be the great thing to have." She also said, at the same time, "I do believe in democracy, although I think it has been misused." She understands quite well that the age of the slave owners is past—she would not have it any other way—and she writes of it as a part of the past.

Another major theme of Dinesen's which fascinates her almost as much as the feudal lord and servant theme, is that of the disguise, the assumed role, the form-changing, and, what is in itself a form of the assumed role, the power of vicarious experience. This theme turns up constantly in the Tales, more than in the "true" stories, and it assumes most devious and changing aspects, as indeed one might expect it to do. "Sorrow Acre" is a combination of these two major preoccupations of her imagination. I don't know whether it is absolutely the finest of her Tales, but it is probably the most haunting, and certainly as characteristic a piece of work as one could find. It is from Winter's Tales.

She begins this story with a description of the earth of Denmark; she gives us immediately the theme of the peasant and the feudal lord, and she presents this relationship as giving strength to the country, the people, the very earth. The land, the church, the big house, the people appear in this order. She says: "A human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, had been formed by its soil and its weather, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where the existence of the one ceased and the other began."

We are well prepared, by the time the young man Adam appears, for his feeling about the land which he had almost inherited, and for the grief of the old Lord, who had no living issue to inherit that land. The cousin of Adam, the son of the old Lord, had died before reaching manhood. The old Lord has married the destined bride of his son.

We have in the understanding of Adam, who has been abroad, in England, an answer to all the protests that will arise in the mind of a non-feudal reader; that is to say, it is Adam who will realize and resent the seeming blasphemy of the old Lord before he will succumb to his own feeling for the land, and agree with the ultimate action of the old Lord. That action is one of vicarious experience. The son of one of the peasants of the old Lord, an old woman called Anne-Marie, has been accused of arson. The Lord has it in his power to forgive the boy or to send him away to rot in prison, and he has promised Anne-Marie that he will spare her son if she will harvest all alone in the space of one day an acre of rye. He is quite aware that this is one day's work for three men, and he is aware that the labor will certainly kill the old woman. He gives her this great chance to die for her son, which is the great chance that his own life denied him.

She completes her harvest just as the sun dips below the horizon. She is assured by the old Lord that she has saved her son, and she dies. The old Lord, like a kind of spiritual vampire, absorbs into his own spirit the joy of her sacrifice and triumph. I doubt if Dinesen would care to have me use the phrase, spiritual vampire. I think she means to say that even at the cost of being cruel the old Lord has been magnificently kind.

Meanwhile Adam, who is not idly called by this name, remembers the song which the young bride of his uncle has been singing—essentially a love song, and of sexual love. "Mourir pour ce qu'on aime, c'est un trop doux effort." It is too sweet a struggle, to die for what (or whom) one loves. And he thinks: "the ways of life … are as a twined and tangled design … it was not given to him or any mortal to command or control it. Life and death, happiness and woe, the past and the present, were interlaced within that pattern." Then there comes to him a moment in which he feels that he perceives the unity of things. "As the song is one with the voice that sings it, as the road is one with the goal, as lovers are one in their embrace, so is man one with his destiny, and he shall love it as himself."

He terminates with this his quarrel with his uncle the old Lord. He does not depart for America in anger and disillusion, as he had intended. He accepts the old woman's death for what the old Lord meant it, a moment of triumph and sweetness for her, and he accepts his destiny, which is to marry the young bride after the death of his uncle, to remain and carry on the tradition of his land.

Now I read this story without the shock of protest that I first felt, but I hold it at a certain distance from me. I think I understand and credit Dinesen's intention; but I also still feel that no human being is justified in making such a tremendous decision over the life of another, in playing God, in directing destiny. The action of the old Lord, although indicative of the depth of his personal loss, is tyrannical; his assumption of power, to me, blasphemous. None of this invalidates the story as a work of art. We are not required to approve of the conduct of King Lear. We remain quite free to disapprove of the action of the old Lord.

There is in Adam's vision of unity, especially the unity of lovers, a theme that carries us back to Out of Africa. In the Modern Library edition, on page 230, she tells of finding, in company with Denys Finch-Hatton, the carcass of a giraffe on which a lioness was feasting. Denys killed the lioness, and a little later, on that same day before dawn he handed his gun to Karen Blixen so that she might kill the lion which had succeeded the lioness at the feast. She says:

"I was never keen to shoot with his rifle, which was too long and heavy for me … still here the shot was a declaration of love." And this declaration was by no means a declaration from Denys to Karen Blixen. It was the declaration of the hunter to the quarry. The entire passage, with the description of the magnificence of the lion makes this quite clear. She concludes, "should not the rifle then be of the biggest calibre?"

This sort of thinking may have come to her from the Far East.

The idea of the efficacy of the vicarious experience occurs notably in the story of "Alkmene". In this tale Alkmene, a child of unknown and mysterious origin, brought up by good, sober foster parents in the country, a child of gay, imaginative, and alien temperament, destroys her true self in order to become what she believes her foster parents wish her to be. To this end she requests her friend, the young man who is the narrator of the story, to escort her to a public execution. As the unfortunate condemned man loses his head, Alkmene grows very pale, and it is understood that she has herself died vicariously at that moment, and by her own will. Thereafter in the story she speaks of Alkmene in the third person, as of some one who no longer exists. This is too bare an account of the plot. There is also the matter of the girl's devotion to the young man, who, unaware at the time of his true feelings, rejects her. But it is not merely a story of unrequited love.

Again, in the character of the great diva, Pellegrina Leoni, we have both the theme of the disguise and the theme of the vicarious experience operating, and in more than one story. Pellegrina appears first in "The Dreamers," in Seven Gothic Tales, in the story within a story told by the young Englishman who has been her lover, not knowing at that time who she was. He tells the story to Mira, the Arabian, on the dhow approaching Mombasa, which I mentioned earlier. Pellegrina lost her voice in an illness following a fire on stage, and although she did not die then, she had it given out that she had died, since Pellegrina the singer was in fact dead. She wandered incognita thereafter all over Europe, existing as many different personalities, and disappearing whenever the danger of discovery became close. In this story she meets her actual death, also. In Last Tales Dinesen gives us one more of her adventures during the period between the professed death and the actual one. The story is called "Echoes".

In the time of her wanderings, just after she had fled from the young Englishman in order to retain her anonymity, she comes to a village in the Italian mountains, and there she hears a young boy sing with the voice that had once been hers. She becomes his teacher, determined to send back to the world her lost voice, and to make of the boy a great and successful artist. She adores the boy, and he, knowing her to be the great Pellegrina, adores her also. She absorbs him in her will, in her great plans for him, until suddenly, through a clever and symbolic device in the plot, he becomes convinced that she is a witch; and he revolts over her dominion of him. When he runs away from her, she follows him, and he hurls a rock at her.

This is, again, an unjustly bare account of the plot; but this is the essential of it. The vicarious experience this time is for the sake of life, not death. The servant-master relationship has become the teacher-pupil relationship, and the relationship of the enchanter and enchanted. And it is very sad that the beautiful relationship could not continue. But there is more going on in this story than the episode between Pellegrina and the boy with her voice. There is also the story of Niccolo, the fisherman, who once ate human flesh, and his relationship with God, and Pellegrina's ideas about God, which recall the remark by Mira the Arabian.

If we are to believe, as the psychiatrists tell us, that the dreamer himself is all the characters in his dream, those who frighten him as well as those who help him, then even more certainly we can trust that all the characters in a story are in a way the writer himself. Therefore the boy who was in danger of being taken over by the personality of Pellegrina is as much Dinesen's spokesman as is Pellegrina. And it occurs to Pellegrina that she had no right to take over the privilege to which every human creature should be born, that of creating himself, or at least of assisting at the creation of himself. Like the old Lord in "Sorrow Acre," she was taking upon herself a part of the prerogative of God. This intricate story, "Echoes," ends with Pellegrina's quoting to herself the words of Niccolo, the fisherman. "One can take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men. One may allow oneself many things toward Him which one cannot allow oneself toward man. And, because He is God, in doing so one will even be honoring Him."

The theme of God as artist, poet, creator, is constant throughout her work, and of God the aristocrat, the unreasonable, whose ways must not be questioned, for if He were always reasonable, He would be merely human. Shakespeare and Goethe are the Gods of the worlds which they created.

These favorite themes of hers, and others which I have not space to discuss here, reappear together with many characters in story after story, so that it needs an effort, after much reading of her work, to keep the stories, all of them, distinct. They tend to merge, but, when you return from them to reading Out of Africa, you find it illuminated by the stories. After the many tales of actors, the story of the fugitive actor Emmanuelson, in Out of Africa, has a greater significance. You are more aware of her understanding of Old Knudsen and of how he played the part of Old Knudsen, almost to his last breath. Old Knudsen of the farm, and the Cardinal who was in fact a valet, in "The Deluge at Norderney"; the Prioress who was from time to time a monkey; and the old Councillor, in the story called "The Poet," who stumbled, dying, into the world of the poet Goethe and there was safe, as Lear was safe in the hands of Shakespeare, these are all of the same stuff.

Whether Out of Africa is her greatest book I am not prepared to state flatly, but I prefer it, still, and so do most readers of whose opinion I'm aware. It is, as I've suggested, her most nearly objective book. In the Tales she seems to move in a world almost purely the creation of her own imagination. In Out of Africa she is meeting directly a world created outside herself and by a greater imaginátion, the last, the final Imagination. I have a feeling that she would not object to this comment. In the Tales there seems to me often a faint note of mockery; it is the voice of Scheherazade seeking to entertain herself, and her listener. It is in the last words of "The Deluge at Norderney," which seem to leave us forever ignorant of the fate of these people in the loft, although we know their triumph which would be impossible without their death. "À ce moment de sa narration, Schéhérazade vit paraître le matin, et, discrète, se tut."

Once this mockery is accepted, the Tales remain as serious as you like, to the point of heartbreak.

There is one more work by Karen Blixen which should be taken into consideration in any total picture of her strange and fascinating genius. She mentions it briefly in Shadows on the Grass, pages ninety-four and ninety-five. This is a Gothic novel to end all Gothic novels, called The Angelic Avengers, and published first to the best of my knowledge in 1944 and almost certainly in Danish. It appeared in English in this country in 1946, under the pseudonym of Pierre Andrézel. The dates are significant, especially in the light of the foreword to the story, which is a quotation from the story itself. Thus:

"You serious people must not be too hard on human beings for what they choose to amuse themselves with when they are shut up as in a prison, and are not even allowed to say that they are prisoners. If I do not soon get a little bit of fun, I shall die."

These are the words of the more rebellious of the two young girls of the story, the more vengeful, righteously, of the two angelic avengers, and she speaks in this fashion at a time when the girls have become aware that they are prisoners, detained by two evil persons, and treated very kindly, like imprisoned canaries, in order to become witnesses unwittingly against the truth, that is, against the evil of their captors. The kindness of these evil people is to be their defense, their moral alibi, against any accusation of evil deeds committed by them earlier.

This is a characteristically devious situation for a story by Karen Blixen. Everyone is pretending. The face of evil is kind, the face of vengeance, is submissive and innocent. No one knows quite who is who, but never fear. The author will untangle everything in due time, evil will be vanquished by grace. The enemy is destroyed by forgiveness. But the book was written, as indicated, to give the author a little bit of fun. It was written in Denmark under the Nazi occupation, and the words quoted give one a little chill along the spine, quite apart from the Gothic tale. "Shut up as in a prison and not even allowed to say that they are prisoners."

She says, in Shadows on the Grass, that when she began the story she had no intention in mind, no idea what form it might take, and that when the Nazi persecution of the Danish Jews began, she abandoned it, having no heart to compete with greater and actual horrors. When the Danish Resistance began to take force, she regained courage, gave the book a happy ending, and published it. For us the book stands as a demonstration of those compelling interests and attitudes which underly all her work, and the very fact that she had no plans at all for the book when she began it, indicates how freely she let those interests take possession.

For the rest,—the story begins with a heroine and a situation so standard that it was long since given over to the most deplorable and innocuous works of fiction. A heroine excessively young and pure, with long golden ringlets, an orphan and a governess in the house of a rich man to his little blind son. The language, though correct, is also pure cliché for a while. It is so good an imitation of the impossibly dull that I almost lacked the courage to go on with it. I would not have read beyond the first chapter except for the knowledge that Andrézel was Blixen, and except for the foreword which warned the reader that this book was a spoof. However, it soon turned out to be much more than that. Somewhere along the line it became a genuine thriller. It remains in my memory as a sort of Christmas pantomime, an allegory of good and evil, truly a fairy tale for adults. It is filled with impossible coincidences; it contains most of Dinesen's favorite tricks, of disguises. The theme of the devoted servant is there, witchcraft is there, the truly noble aristocrat is there; and paradox upon paradox. The reader has only to keep the foreword firmly in mind, and to read on, trusting to the wit and integrity of the author. All will be well in the end.

And this leads me back to the phrase so often employed by commentators on Dinesen—fairy tales for adults. When she leaves the world of fact, as she writes of it in Out of Africa, she becomes closer to her compatriot, Hans Christian Andersen, than to any other writer I can think of, except in a way, to Shakespeare. When one remembers the vast world of fantasy of Shakespeare, his divine disregard for historical fact, for geography, his lighthearted trust, even in his greatest tragedies, in the efficacy of disguise, it is easy to see a relationship with the Gothic Tales.

In conclusion, I return to Out of Africa as my preferred book; I read it with the greater pleasure, and I trust, with the greater comprehension, because of the privilege of having shared in the diversions of her imagination, the Tales.