“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”
From ‘Out of Africa’ by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
I guess most people know about Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke through the film ‘Out of Africa’. Certainly if I try and conjure her up, my first mental image is of Meryl Streep sitting beside Robert Redford gazing into an African sunset. However it was not until she was literally ‘out of Africa’ that Blixen’s second career as a writer began.
Karen Blixen started writing when she returned to Denmark in the early 1930s, after the death of her lover Dennis Finch Hatton and the failure of her coffee farm. Her first collection of stories, ‘Seven Gothic Tales ‘ was written in English and initially published in America. I’ve just read one of them - ‘Supper at Elsinore’.
The plot centres around the three children of an aristocratic Danish family during the Napoleonic Wars. The daughters are beautiful and sensitive and the son is wildly handsome, adventurous and brave. He persuades his uncle to buy him a ship which he puts at the disposal of the Danish Government as a privateer. When the war is over he returns home and becomes engaged to be married, but on the day of his wedding he disappears. There are rumours of him becoming a pirate, a slave owner and eventually being hanged but he is never seen again. No one wants to marry the sisters of such a scandalous character and the girls leave their ancestral home and go to Copenhagen.
Many years pass by and when the sisters are old ladies, a family servant who still lives in their old home comes to find them and says she has seen their brother. They return to the house and as they start eating supper the door opens, their brother comes into the room and sits at the table with them. He tells them that the dreadful rumours are true. He has been a pirate, he has been married five times and eventually he was hanged in Havana. Blixen describes the scene at the table - the siblings all look the same now in old age - their heads like skulls - and the man at the table is a ghost.
The stories in “Seven Gothic Tales’ are deeply strange and they owe something to Blixen’s love of ‘Tales from the Arabian Nights’ and the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson. I like to imagine her sitting on the verandah at her farm in the Ngong Hills, whisky in hand, jazz on the gramophone and a copy of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ on her knee.
‘Seven Gothic Tales’ were begun just as the African period of her life was coming to an end. Her lover Dennis had died in a plane crash and life was temporarily without meaning. She must have been wondering what the future would bring and as she herself wrote later “God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road….”
There was a Dinesen tradition of story telling and Karen writes to her brother, "I have begun to do what we brothers and sisters do when we don't know what else to resort to, I have started to write a book. ... I have been writing in English because I thought it would be more profitable.”
The stories are all set in a mysterious ‘before time’ and by cloaking them in a sort of velvet curtain of historicity Blixen gives herself a freedom that a modern setting wouldn’t. Margaret Atwood points out* that there’s difference between what the French call contes - tales which are ‘told’, i.e. in an oral tradition - and which may leave reality behind as the teller embroiders the tale - and nouvelles - stories which are rooted in reality. Scheherazade tells tales to save her own life and the success of ‘Seven Gothic Tales’ restored Karen Blixen’s fortunes, gave her a new purpose and a reputation when everything that went before had been lost.
Against everyone’s advice she published under her maiden name of Dinesen and added the first name ‘Isak’. That’s the name of the unexpected and very late child of the Biblical Sarah. I wonder if that’s how she felt about the stories? Creativity and childlessness? There are things to say about that one day.
By the time Karen Blixen died in 1962 aged 77 she had lived many lives. She had seen privilege and hardship, failure and success, bitter betrayal and passionate love. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature but died before the prize was awarded and both her homes in Kenya and Denmark are now museums.
*In her introduction to the Folio edition.
A dessert for a ghost.
Of course there is a strong tradition of ghosts at Elsinore! I wonder what the sisters served as a pudding ? Did the ghostly brother eat any of it? Were his sisters so engrossed in his story that they didn’t touch their food? Anyway it’s a fun thing to think about. What would you serve a ghostly dinner guest?
Coffee isles flottantes.
Coffee as a nod to the farm in the Ngong Hills and the cloudy softness of an isle flottante so as not to weigh down the ghostly digestion…
I made a coffee crème anglaise with 4 large yolks, 2tbs caster sugar and 300ml full fat milk plus a couple of tablespoons of double cream and 45ml of cold espresso coffee. Then I made a meringue mixture with the egg whites, a dash of vinegar, half a teaspoon of cornflour and 70g caster sugar. When the meringue mix was glossy and stiff, I poached tablespoons of it in a pan of mixed water and milk which was at the gentlest simmer - about 3 minutes each side. I put everything to chill before assembling. You could make some caramel to drizzle over it or you could cheat like me and use maple syrup.
Definitely insubstantial enough for any incorporeal visitors.
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose…
To an Athlete Dying Young (extract and as read by Meryl Streep in the film ‘Out of Africa’)
A.E. Houseman (1859 - 1936)
