Karen Blixenwhat a beautiful crystalline name. Even though we haven’t read a single line written by you, we know her from the famous Sidney Pollack film My Africawhich triumphed at the Oscars in 1986, exactly forty years ago, in which Meryl Streep gave her a face and a voice. Since then, in our imagination, Karen has taken on the features of a great actress: beautiful, elegant and with blue eyes.
And we already understand how this type of epic film is a splendid Hollywood illusion. The greatest homage and, at the same time, the greatest deception for the historical memory of Karen Blixen. She makes us see her as sunny, but in those African years, during her relationship with Denys Finch-Hatton, played by Robert Redfordher appearance must have been very different.
The true story of Karen Blixen
First of all his eyes were dark and intensewhich is strange for a Dane: anything but blue. Furthermore, the royal Blixen was already in very poor health, skeletal, intoxicated by mercury which she took thinking of curing the syphilis that her famous husband had brought her as a wedding gift. Even her love story with the legendary Denys must have unfolded in a very different way from how the film tells it. It wasn’t such a romantic and equal relationship. Denys was an elusive man, intolerant of any exclusivity and any deep involvementnot at all willing to let himself be possessed. She chased him and he escaped, remaining absent for long periods.
Danish author Karen Blixen (1885- 1962) photographed in Copenhagen in 1959. (Getty Images)
As for business, the plantation was not a heroic undertaking, but a management disaster that Karen’s maternal family, the much despised bourgeois merchants, had subsidized. And so My Africa, the book that she wrote and from which the film was very freely based, it is not the chronicle of a lost Eden, but the attempt to transform a personal and business failure into an epic. Oh, what a disappointment, some will say. But no, not at all: in reality the real life of Karen, who was born Karen Christentze Dinesen, is even more exciting than the cinematic fiction.
One twin is not as good as the other
Rossella Pretto tells us about it in her book Karen Blixen. Courage, love and ironypublished by Ares. When twenty-eight-year-old Karen reaches her future husband, Baron Bror, in Kenya on December 2, 1913, many things have already happened to her. His father Wilhelm, a globetrotting adventurer involved in politics, he hangs himself when she is only nine, leaving her “trembling and disoriented”struggling with the narrow views of her mother’s very bourgeois family. She falls in love with a real Prince Charming: her second cousin, Baron Hans von Blixen-Finecke, one of the most admired bachelors of the moment, an excellent horseman, introduced into the right circles which she also frequented. Too bad Hans isn’t interested in her.
The writer in 1930 on her farm near Nairobi.(Photo by Apic/Getty Images)
«Karen was attracted by a full and overwhelming masculinity, by the charisma and exploits of that boy who achieved success everywhere. His twin brother, Bror, was less gifted but had a great deal of brazenness and a reputation for being dissolute, as well as a waste of money. Karen decided that she would marry him” says Rossella Pretto. What a terrible idea, marrying the twin of the man you love but who doesn’t love you, knowing full well his flaws. «What Bror brought as a dowry was certainly not money. Bror proposed adventure, a taste for freedom and discovery, courage, audacity, his virility so driven that it could set a girl’s heart on fire. Together they would have built a future where there was room for everything except the impossible” comments Pretto. Where? In a distant and exotic place where you can start a different and non-banal life.
In reality, Bror had come to Africa to take possession of a 700-acre estate that the Westenholzes, Karen’s despised maternal family, had purchased to raise cows. But once there – in addition to immersing himself in amazing safaris – he changed the property to a decidedly larger one for the cultivation of coffee. Except he didn’t know how coffee was grown, nor what soil was suitable for growing it. He took a blunder. Which, however, was not immediately clear. «In the beginning, Karen worked very hard to make her marriage work with the man she had chosen against the wishes of her family. Bror was never a present and attentive husband. But at least the first year, it was a continuous discovery for Karen and the two seemed to get along well.” Then “Bror the impudent, the misguided entrepreneur, who incurred debts and hid to escape creditors, Bror the presumptuous, bold and shameless, Bror with whom Karen had planned a free life, that Bror after a year already had syphilis lodged in her veins.”
Karen Blixen, one step away from the Nobel Prize
Within a short time the great dream was shattered. In pain, Karen began to take the terrible remedies available at the time: the arsenic-based Salvarsan, the mercury pills. But he had a formidable intuition. He would later say that «the moment he discovered he had contracted syphilis, he imagined making a pact with the devil to be able to distill his life into a story. Then joking with her brother Thomas, she said that syphilis was an acceptable price for becoming a baroness, a title she did not abandon even after the divorce.”
The English aristocrat Denys Finch-Hatton, Karen Blixen’s great love. He died in Africa in 1931. (Photo by Apic/Getty Images)
There is a courage of truth and a courage of lies: Karen possessed both. After the farewell from Bror, the inevitable failure of the plantation, the tragic death of his beloved Denys who crashed his two-seater Gipsy Moth in a take-off accident which also immediately took on a heroic dimension, Karen returns to Denmark and writes the most famous of her great booksa diary of his experience on African soil. She will come close to receiving the most prestigious of prizes: «There is a rumor that Ernest Hemingway, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, said on that occasion that he would have been happier if the coveted recognition had gone to other writers: Karen Blixen, for example» says Pretto. “He never got it, Karen, not because he didn’t deserve it, but because he was Danish, crazy. The judges were in fact cautious in showing interest or favoritism towards the Scandinavians.”
Oysters, white grapes and champagne
Syphilis or not, Karen writes intensely and if she can’t write she dictates and travels, elegant, brilliant, a smiling skull, always aided by psychostimulants. It weighs 35 kilos. When she goes to the United States she is invited «to the most glamorous lunches in the city with Truman Capote or the photographer Cecil Beaton; Gloria Vanderbilt and director Sidney Lumet. He attended a cocktail in his honor organized by John Steinbeck and went to breakfast with Count Rasponi and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, his Italian publisher. She went to the Metropolitan to hear Callas and attended Verdi’s Macbeth accompanied by the writer Carl Van Vechten. The writer Carson McCullers invited her to a breakfast which also included Arthur Miller and his wife Marilyn Monroe. He served oysters, white grapes and champagne, as well as a soufflé, as the Baroness liked.”
The cover of the book by Rossella Pretto, Karen Blixen. Courage, love and irony, (Ares editions).
He had trouble swallowing anything elseafter the gastrectomy operation linked to the damage that arsenic and mercury had caused her, and in any case Even champagne was terrible for her, but she drank it anyway. “The Baroness said of Marilyn that she radiated both infinite vitality and incredible innocence.”
The intellectual and the actress will close their eyes forever in the same yearrecalls Rossella Pretto with a slightly bitter smile, after both had managed to transform a life of pain into a timeless myth. Karen “died of malnutrition on September 7, 1962. He was not afraid even in the face of death. After all, she had always been his guest.”