Odd Jobs (40 page)

Karen Christentze Dinesen was born in April of 1885, in a manor house near the coast fifteen miles north of Copenhagen. Her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, the younger son of a Jutland landowner who had once travelled through Italy with Hans Christian Andersen, was a soldier, an adventurer, and a writer; his epistolary memoir,
Letters from the Hunt
, ranks as a minor classic of Danish literature. Karen’s mother, Ingeborg, came from a family of wealthy traders and merchants; hard-working, with social views both liberal and prudish, the family had attempted to discourage her liaison with the rakish, countrified, somewhat aristocratic Dinesens. Ingeborg, though reserved and domestic by nature, had travelled, spoke several languages, and described herself as a “free-thinker” and a “bookworm of the most gluttonous sort.” She married Wilhelm in 1881 and within five years was the mother of three daughters, of whom Karen, nicknamed “Tanne,” was the second; two more children, both sons, followed in the next decade. Tanne was her father’s favorite and confidante; all the greater the blow, then, to the little girl when Wilhelm, whose careers in both politics and literature had taken discouraging turns, and who had a history of restlessness and “soul-sickness,” committed suicide, by hanging, shortly before Tanne’s tenth birthday.

Karen grew up, in the strongly feminine company of her mother and sisters and servants and aunts, as the family fantastic, who from the age of ten or eleven concocted plays that were performed within the domestic circle, the children and their friends taking the parts of Columbine and Harlequin, Blancheflor and Knight Orlando. Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens held a carved and gilded pantomime theatre, and the stock figures of the commedia dell’arte and the emotionally charged artifice of masks and masquerades ever fascinated Isak Dinesen. As a child, she drew and painted, expertly and copiously, and several times in the course of her spotty education escaped her mother’s house to study art. But like most upper-class girls she was being prepared principally for marriage, and except for excursions to improve a foreign language was kept sheltered and close to home. In adolescence she became obsessed with the figure of her dead father and the notion that his ideals and romantic spirit had descended into her. When, in her early twenties, she published
a few tales in Danish magazines, it was under the pen name “Osceola.” Osceola was the name of Wilhelm’s dog, with whom the father and daughter used to take their walks; the name came from that of a Seminole chief born to an English father and a Creek mother. This allusion to a disparate parentage declares an allegiance to her father; he had travelled in America, written admiringly of the American Indians, and published under the pseudonym of Boganis, another Indian name. In 1934 Isak Dinesen explained to a Danish interviewer that she had taken a pen name “on the same grounds my father hid behind the pseudonym Boganis … so he could express himself freely, give his imagination a free rein.… In many things I resemble my father.” And when, in early 1914, at the near-spinsterish age of twenty-eight, she married, it was to a Swedish aristocrat, her cousin Bror Blixen, who like her father was restless, impractical, and cavalier. Though he was to be an unfaithful husband, he gave her two wedding gifts faithful to her fantastic sense of herself: he made her a baroness, and he took her to Africa.

Baroness Blixen’s time in Africa—1914 to 1931—has been much written about, most splendidly by her. Her main memoir,
Out of Africa
, published in 1937, has been called the greatest pastoral romance of modern times; it is a severely smoothed account of seventeen bumpy years, her prime as a woman, spent coping with a recalcitrant and ill-conceived coffee plantation, with her rich Danish relations as they reluctantly financed this losing venture, with an errant and often absent big-game-hunting husband and then a lover (also a big-game hunter) even more elusive, and with a painful and persistent case of syphilis contracted from Bror in the first year of their marriage. From the standpoint of her writing, two crucial developments might be noted. In British East Africa, English became her daily language; and in the person of her handsome, Etonian, Oxonian lover, Denys Finch Hatton, she for the first time encountered a fully involving intellectual partner, a brilliant and playful stimulant to her own intelligence and story-teller’s gift. “When I was expecting Denys,” she wrote, “and heard his car coming up the drive, I heard at the same time, the things of the farm all telling what they really were.… When he came back to the farm it gave out what was in it; it spoke.” She liked to think of herself as Scheherazade, and in Denys she met her Sultan. In the Kenyan Highlands she encountered two societies, the African and the white settlers’, colorfully imbued with the notions of honor, fatalism, and daring that had always attracted her. Many of the nineteenth-century exotics of
Gothic Tales
are based, in fact, upon originals
met in the semifeudal colonial society, simultaneously raffish and posh, rough and luxurious, around Nairobi.

Her situation, when at the age of forty-six she was at last compelled to return to Denmark, might be described as ignominious. Her marriage long ended, her farm bankrupt and sold to a real-estate developer, her lover recently dead in the crash of his airplane, her body tormented by the complications of
Tabes dorsalis
, she was received into her mother’s household as a prodigal daughter, a middle-aged adolescent. Setting up shop in her father’s old office, she picked up notebooks and ideas she had been toying with for ten years, while in Africa. Her method of writing was one of accretion, of retellings and fresh inspirations flowing one into the other. She wrote in English and placed her tales in the previous century for the same reason, she said, that she took a pseudonym: “Because … only in that way did I become perfectly free.” The manuscript of
Seven Gothic Tales
was ready by the spring of 1933 but, rich and strange and free as it was, met difficulty getting into print. Several English publishers rejected it; Thomas Dinesen, however, had befriended an American writer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and sent his sister’s manuscript to her in Vermont. Miss Canfield was impressed, and urged the book in turn upon her neighbor, Robert Haas, a publisher whose firm later merged with Random House. He published the book in January of 1934, with an introduction by Miss Canfield that memorably begins, “The person who has set his teeth into a kind of fruit new to him, is usually as eager as he is unable to tell you how it tastes.”
^‡
The new fruit met critical acclaim and, unexpectedly, commercial success as well. The Book-of-the-Month Club printed fifty thousand copies, and was to select books by her five times in the future. This Danish woman who had lived among the English had her breakthrough in the United States, and a special warmth continued to exist between Isak Dinesen and her American audience. Not only were her American royalties much the most munificent, but the reviewers treated her without the note of cavil and suspicion often heard in England and Denmark. When at last the wraithlike author visited the United States in 1959, she told a Danish reporter, “When I compare the American and Danish reviews of my first book I cannot help but think how much better I have been understood and accepted in America than in Denmark.”

That same year, she spoke to another interviewer with what he reported as embarrassment of
Seven Gothic Tales
. It was “too elaborate,” she said, and had “too much of the author in it.” Now Pauline Kael has taken the occasion of the Meryl Streep movie to tell us, with her customary verve and firmness, that Isak Dinesen’s “baroque stories are lacquered words and phrases with no insides. Some seem meant to be morality tales, but you never get the moral. And the supernatural effects in them aren’t connected to any spirituality—they’re a display of literary armature, of skill. As author, she’s the teller of the tale; nothing is presented more passionately than anything else—she seems to refuse to draw from her own experience.… ‘Seven Gothic Tales’ are a form of distraction; they read as if she had devised them in the fevered atmosphere of all-night debauches.” This verdict echoes the prim censoriousness of the young Danish reviewer Frederick Schyberg, who wrote when the book was new, “There are no normal human beings in
Seven Gothic Tales
. The erotic life which unfolds in the tales is of the most highly peculiar kind.… There is nothing, the reviewer finds … behind [the author’s] veil, once it is lifted.”

Well, as Dorothy Canfield Fisher advised fifty years ago, “Take a taste, yourself.” Enter a deliciously described world of sharply painted, dramatically costumed heroes and heroines posing, with many a spectacular gesture and eloquent aria, in magnificent landscapes maintained as a kind of huge stage set. This operatic Europe, like opera itself, would call us into largeness. One character is “hurt and disappointed because the world wasn’t a much greater place than it is,” and another says of himself at a moment of crisis, “Too small I have been, too small for the ways of God.” Although Isak Dinesen’s leisurely and ornate anecdotes, which she furnishes with just enough historical touches to make the stage solid, have something in them of the visionary and the artificial, they are not escapist. From the sweeping flood of the first story to the casual and savage murder of the last, they face pain and loss with the brisk familiarity of one who has amply known both, and force us to face them, too. Far from hollow and devoid of a moral, the tales insistently strive to inculcate a moral stance; in this, her fiction suggests that of Hemingway, who thought well enough of her to interrupt his Nobel Prize speech with a regret that she had not received it. Both authors urge upon us a certain style of courage, courage whose stoic acceptances are plumed with what the old Cardinal, in the first Gothic Tale, calls “divine swank.” Dinesen even called this quality “
chic
,” ascribing it to the costumed Masai warriors
who, “daring, and wildly fantastical as they seem,… are unswervingly true to their own nature, and to an immanent ideal.” She also admired, in Africa, the Muslims, whose “moral code consists of hygiene and ideas of honor—for instance they put discretion among their first commandments.”

This admiration of the warrior’s code surprises us in a woman. She was a feminist who included within her ideal of the energizing sexual transaction what is heedless and even hostile in the male half of the sexual dichotomy.
^§
The three men she most loved—her father, her husband, her lover—all conspicuously failed to shelter her; and she took their desertions as a call to her own largeness. This call, which reverberates throughout her tales in all their abrupt and sternly mysterious turnings, was, it would appear, more easily heard and understood in the land of Emerson and Whitman than in cozily inhabited England and Denmark. America played the role of Africa for an older Europe: a place of dangerous freedom, of natural largeness and of
chic
, discreet natives. The discretion in Dinesen’s writing, the serene and artful self-concealment even in her memoirs, is an aspect of the personal gallantry which, in the social realm, masked her frightful bouts of pain and debility with the glamorous, heavily made-up, in the end sibylline persona who sought to be entertaining.

The teller of tales would ennoble our emotions and our encounters with a divine fatality. Isak Dinesen wrote that we must take “pride … in the idea God had, when he made us.” She was a theist of a kind (and was much twitted about this by her brother Thomas, a sensible Danish atheist). For there to be “divine swank,” after all, there must be a divinity. She placed these Gothic Tales in the Romantic era, when God, no longer housed in churches and sacred institutions, was thought to be outdoors, in the mountains and sunsets. But even this evaporated divinity appears in the twentieth century too benign to be credible, too bland a guarantor of our inner sense of honor. In “The Dreamers,” the storyteller Mira Jama asserts of God, “To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.” Such a deity feels pre-Christian—a vitality at the dark heart of things. One of the many magical atmospheric sentences in “The Poet” runs, “The stillness and silence of the night was filled with a deep life, as if within a moment the universe would give up its secret.” The brand of stoicism which these tales invite us to share is not dispassionately Roman or of the pleasure-denying Protestant variety; it has Viking intoxication and battle-frenzy in it. Intoxication figures frequently in Isak Dinesen’s work, and mercilessness was part of the story-teller’s art as she construed it: the story must pursue its end without undue compassion for its characters. Combat lies closer than compassion to the secret of
Seven Gothic Tales
, and its exhilaration is their contagious mood.

W
HEN HE BEGAN TO WRITE THIS NOVEL
in mid-December of 1933, John O’Hara was a twenty-eight-year-old, recently divorced journalist distinguished chiefly by the lateness of the hours he kept, the amount of liquor he could absorb, and the number of jobs he had been fired from. He had held and lost jobs with the Pottsville
Journal
, the Tamaqua
Courier
, the New York
Herald Tribune, Time
magazine,
The New Yorker, Editor and Publisher
, the New York
Daily Mirror
, the
Morning Telegraph
, the publicity department of Warner Brothers, the public-relations firm of Benjamin
Sonnenberg, and a fledgling Pittsburgh magazine called the
Bulletin-Index
, of which he was editor for four months. In all of his positions O’Hara showed ability, but some combination of his irregular hours and innate abrasiveness produced an early departure. At
The New Yorker
, according to the “Talk of the Town” head, B. A. Bergman, O’Hara submitted “some excellent pieces—tightly written, graceful, revealing [but] for reasons I never discovered, Ross took a dislike to O’Hara from the day he was hired and rejected every O’Hara piece I turned in.” The “Talk of the Town” job lasted one month.
The New Yorker
, however, was O’Hara’s one area of sustained success, as a free-lance contributor; the editors had taken his first piece in 1928 and, thanks in part to Katharine Angell’s fondness for his work, over a hundred pieces thereafter. In early January of 1934 O’Hara wrote Ross, with typical semi-ingratiating cockiness, “I think it would be nice if you were to have a medal struck, or did something else in the way of commemorating what I believe to be a fact: that in the period beginning 1928 I have contributed more pieces to
The New Yorker
than any other non-staff man.” But
The New Yorker
’s rates were not enough for anyone, let alone a man of O’Hara’s bibulous and increasingly expensive tastes, to live on: he received fifteen dollars for his first contribution and the going rate was ten cents a word, which amounted to a few hundred dollars a year.