Too Close to the Sun (22 page)

Was there any point in continuing to invest in Kenya, either? In December 1917, Allied forces in East Africa had finally pushed the Germans out of their own territory. It was therefore demoralizing to hear that the wily von Lettow had sneaked back in and was fighting his way north. The Rovuma River marked the boundary between German and Portuguese territory. “Von Lettow has now recrossed the Rovuma and is again in GEA!” Denys wrote angrily to Kermit. “If van Deventer [the commander in chief appointed to replace Hoskins] was not a Boer this would certainly procure him the very choicest raspberry; but I suppose he will be allowed to blunder on, ably assisted by Sheppard, his Chief of Staff, until Lettow takes Nairobi, unless the defeat of Germany in Europe puts an end to hostilities in BEA [Kenya]. As Smuts gave van Deventer a KCMG [Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George] for allowing Lettow to escape south of the Rovuma the least he can do now is to procure him a Grand Cross of the British Empire for letting him escape north of that river again.” Denys’s contempt for politicians had yielded to bitterness. What had been the point of that endless movement down the hellish, hallucinatory banks of the Pangani? He continued to excoriate Allied leaders by comparing them unfavorably with Woodrow Wilson, the American president, whom he deemed to have been “very satisfactory lately—opinion about the Germans has hardened very much in America for which we ought to be most thankful, as it will serve to brace up what Maxse [Leopold Maxse, the editor of the
National Review
] describes as the Westminster Invertebrates.” Denys viewed politicians with the same contempt that he had for military leaders. There had been talk of a general election in Britain before the end of 1918 and Denys didn’t like the sound of it, especially as hordes of newly enfranchised women voters were to be unleashed at the polls: “What in the name of the Kaiser Lloyd George is plunging England into a general election [for] with 7 million women voters, just at the end of the war is more than I can fathom. Why not get the war over first: but perhaps we shall! Keep well: it must have been nice having your family with you in France. Denys.”

Nine days later, the war ended.

DENYS REMAINED IN CAIRO
until he qualified. He abandoned his plan to return to Europe, perceiving that the weather would be atrocious and the country stupefied, as if awakened from a deep sleep. He needed to assess his affairs in Kenya in order to decide if he was going to stay the course. Recent reports had been bad. In October his friend Lady Colville, a Frenchwoman who had set up a military hospital in her Gilgil hotel, had written with news that Denys’s
duka
at Lemek had been incinerated by Maasai rebels. It was part of a widespread Maasai rebellion. After years of peremptory treatment by Nairobi civil servants, the Maasai had refused to accept an attempt to conscript their
moran.
^*23
Their objection was met with machine-gun fire. Parties of Maasai proceeded to pillage European and Indian-owned stores in their reserve, cut telegraph lines, and generally spread terror. People were killed on both sides, settlers along the boundary applied for police protection, and their Kikuyu laborers started to desert. The
moran
had again greased their spears when the panicky administration dispatched Delamere to negotiate peace. Denys had lost stock, including hides and skins, to the value of over £5,000. He blamed the administration, which had, he reported to Kermit, “again shown itself in typical colours by stirring up trouble with the Maasai in the most senseless manner…. I trust that we shall be able to obtain compensation eventually…but you may be certain that the Maasai will not be keen to pay up; and Government having now probably got the wind right up will try to shirk responsibility in their usual manner.” He continued to wonder if there was any future for him in Africa. “As things are pretty messed up in BEA I shall probably settle to get out as soon as possible,” he said.

In this spirit, Denys and Billea returned to Kenya, retracing the route they had taken seven months earlier. “The Nile played up quite according to the guide books as regards game,” Denys recorded. “I saw four lots of elephant at different times, one very big herd: and one morning we came across a lot crossing the river, about 20, and one young bull had got swept down below a proper landing place and could not get out, and as we passed by he drowned and sank before our eyes.” He recovered his strength, which had been sapped by the long series of infections, and felt much better in the warmth of southern Sudan, which he had always found to be a “comfortable climate.” At Rejaf he hired a cook, “a real Swahili ruffian of the old safari type with a huge black beard; his name he gave as Hamisi, but I notice his associates call him Simba, on account of his mane no doubt. He devils chicken
à merveille
and is an expert baker, so I intend to retain him if he will bear with me.” Hamisi stayed with Denys for eleven years, and in the end gave his life for him.

At Rejaf, Denys was also joined by his old friend Chevallier Kitchener, elder brother of the more famous Herbert and now the second earl.
^*24
Kitchener senior had served in Manipur and Burma in the 1890s and was sent to East Africa in 1915, “though in what capacity nobody knows,” Meinertzhagen had remarked. Denys had soldiered with him, as had Cranworth, who admired him. Even Meinertzhagen was intrigued by him, despite complaints that the colonel “emits hot air by the cubic yard.” Denys referred to him as “Old Kitchener,” and he was indeed seventy-two, which was old enough to be tackling the hundred-mile trek through dangerous bush to Nimule. But he was game, arriving at Rejaf equipped with a camp bed, blankets, a shotgun, two tins of
petit beurre
biscuits, and a set of false teeth. “It was just as well that I had a certain amount of stuff and a couple of chairs with me,” Denys told Kermit. Having reached Nimule, dentures intact, the party proceeded to the eastern shore of Lake Albert, whence the next leg, to Masindi Port at one end of Lake Kyoga, entailed “furious wiring, relays of porters and an old motor lorry which took us the last 30 miles on the iron rim of one back wheel.” At Masindi they boarded the
Speke,
an old rust bucket that barged her way through the reeds obstructing the shallow waters of Lake Kyoga, depositing the party at the mouth of the Victoria Nile, where they transferred to the
Stanley
and voyaged south to the railhead at Namasagali. There, on January 26, 1919, they picked up the Nairobi newspapers and read about the death of Teddy Roosevelt. “I am very sorry,” Denys wrote immediately to Kermit. “It is a great loss for the right cause just now when the next three or four years will demand much clear thinking of the leaders of civilisation, and I know how much it must mean for you.” The papers were full of the government’s Soldier Settler scheme, which, in order to stimulate closer settlement, was offering land grants in the Protectorate to men who had served. “You ought to take up some and come out and settle here,” Denys finished his condolence letter to Kermit. “…I feel that your wife would like BEA, but I am never quite sure of it as a country for white women and children.”
^*25
Denys’s attitude to women was typical of his generation. But it was a generalized view. In his personal relations, he was never attracted to submissive women.

DENYS ARRIVED BACK
in Kenya three months after the war ended. Von Lettow had learned of his defeat when one of his
askaris
ambushed a British motorcyclist carrying dispatches with details of the armistice. A special clause had been written into the armistice giving von Lettow a month from November 11 to surrender, as the architects of the Peace knew that it might take that long to find him. The Germans had received no information from the outside world for a year, and von Lettow assumed that his side had won the war. It was inconceivable to him that both the eastern and the western fronts had collapsed. “All our troops, native as well as Europeans, had always held the conviction that Germany could not be beaten in this war,” he wrote later. But on November 25, with the remnants of a brimless sun hat on his head and a long beard touching his chest, he stood under a limp Union Jack at Abercorn, near the toe of Lake Tanganyika, and ordered his 155 officers and 1,168
askaris
to lay down their arms in the sheeting African rain. They were Germany’s only undefeated army.

I
N THE LAST YEAR OF WAR, THE WEATHER HAD COLLUDED IN THE MISERY
of the Protectorate when drought and famine overtook the land. The waters sank, a flaky mold settled over the Rift, and at night a burning wind blew the sulfuric exhalations of Lake Elmenteita across the plains. Many Africans died, and the living followed old caravan routes to the next fouled water hole. Monkeys came down from the trees, antelope trekked along the horizon in sad lines, and muddy tongues lolled from carcasses on every hillside. Rinderpest killed most of the cattle, and those that survived were gobbled up by ravenous game. Only the vultures grew fat. “The sun rose and sank in a blinding heaven, and under its hideous presence all sensitive life trembled and shrank,” Llewelyn Powys wrote. In October 1918, Spanish flu, a calamitous pandemic, swept through East Africa, destroying those the drought had spared.

LIKE MANY, DENYS RETURNED
to heavy financial losses. But, even as he was counting his own personal cost of war, Africa won him back. Although he was drawn home to England by family ties and an appetite for culture until the end of his life, the feral energy of the tropics was an antidote to the postwar twilight of the West. Denys emerged from the war with an MC (Military Cross), as well as a Pip (the 1914–15 Star medal), a Squeak (the 1913–18 Campaign medal), and a Wilfred (the 1914–18 Victory medal). But he found little to celebrate, and no solace in the sentimental pronouncements of British newspapers. “They are at peace,” went Laurence Binyon’s poem “For the Fallen,” now quoted ceaselessly; “it is only for ourselves that we have to be sorry.” Denys had never believed in the romance of war, even before eight and a half million died. As for the Treaty of Versailles—supposedly drawn up to ensure the end of all wars—he considered it the Peace that passeth all understanding. This was prescient, as the peace was phony.

Before the rains, Denys went up-country to inspect his land. Most farms had fallen into dilapidation, forcing owners to start again. The managers of the three main banks cooperated with generous loans, nobody paying much attention to petty details such as interest rates. Everyone on the Uasin Gishu Plateau in the Rift Valley, including Denys, invested in flax. With the resourcefulness of true pioneers, the settlers never tired in their pursuit of new crops or industries. Sweet potatoes, pawpaw, bee-keeping, trout farming, the manufacture of chemical pulp for paper production—all featured in their laborious roster of experiments. They were determined to get ahead on their own terms. “Among the white community of the Protectorate, a unanimous opinion prevails that the psychological moment is near for cutting the umbilical cord that still connects us with India,” an editorial in the
Leader
announced. (In particular, they wanted to abandon the rupee in favor of the pound.) For the majority, life in the bush was as physically grueling as it had always been. Many women spent their evenings dosing the children with paraffin and digging jiggers out of their toes with safety pins. Some lived in squalor. Nellie Grant described a visit to her neighbors the Harrieses, a Welsh couple, in about 1921: “When you sat down to a meal, you had to push Muscovy ducks off the Chippendale chairs. A hatch was opened between kitchen and living room and an indescribable, utterly horrible stench belched forth, followed by the food. The Harrieses’ bedroom, a large rondavel, was shared between the marital bed and a large, probably five-hundred-egg, incubator. The roof above was lined with a tarpaulin to keep the incubator, not the Harrieses, dry.” Nellie herself started at Kitimuru, her farm at Chania Bridge (now Thika), with nothing, fetching her groceries from Nairobi in an oxcart. And she, the niece of the first Duke of Westminster, had been brought up in mansions in which a man was employed just to clean the oil lamps and Nellie tobogganed down oak staircases on tea trays.

Back in Nairobi, Denys sold the Parklands house and rented a cottage on the grounds of Muthaiga; as Delamere was looking for a pied-à-terre, they took it on a joint tenancy. A neat stucco building with its own small garden, it overlooked the golf course, the newly acquired ox-drawn lawn mower, and the women strolling the grounds under their parasols. Denys rarely went unnoticed. “Lots of women were in love with him…at least eight…absolutely adored him,” Cranworth wrote. He created around him a sea of excitement in which he floated with loglike calm. But one admirer was about to disperse the competition, at least temporarily.

KAREN BLIXEN WAS TWO
years older than Denys. Her family nickname was Tanne, and in Africa she was Tania to her English friends. Both her grandfathers were Jutland landowners; her mother came from a family of Unitarian bourgeois traders, while her father was an aristocrat. Disjunction is fertile ground for snobbery. Tania and her four siblings grew up in Rungsted, a fishing village on the coastal road between Copenhagen and Elsinore, in North Zeeland. On one side the family home nestled into the beech woods, and on the other it overlooked the waters of Øresund and, on a clear day, the Swedish coast. In the winter, fishermen walked over the ice to Sweden. Tania’s father had lived as a trapper with Native Americans. He went home to a career as an army officer and a member of Parliament, sitting as an Independent with leftish inclinations. Then he hanged himself in a Copenhagen boardinghouse. Nobody knew why. Tania was nine.

When Denys met Tania, she was thirty-three. She had deep-set dark eyes, a beak nose, and abundant chestnut hair, and her face was sometimes beautiful and at other times all wrong. In old age she said, “One of the things in my life I have been unhappy about is that I was not better looking than I actually was. On the other hand, one of the things I have been pleased about is that at least I was as good looking as I actually was.” One settler noted her “strange beauty”; another, Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck, said “she was no great shakes to look at.” All her life, Tania struggled to be thinner. At times she seemed almost weightless, incorporeal as an El Greco figure. She loved clothes, and stopped off in Paris on her way to Africa to stock up on couture gowns. In the twenties, she kept a mannequin at Pacquin’s and later, when she became a writer, she dressed her characters in finery, like peacocks. Elspeth Huxley described her as a person “full of magnetism and restless energy, like a benign witch,” and also noticed that her makeup was usually “all awry.” Tania was the kind of woman who lied about her age (Denys thought she was five years his junior); not a crime, just silly. She received no formal education until she was seventeen, and that was at art school. But she spoke several languages.

As a young woman, she had fallen in love with Baron Hans Blixen-Finecke, one of her hard-living Swedish second cousins. He wasn’t interested, and Tania ended up with his twin, Bror. She never tried to hide the fact that she was not in love with Bror. A feckless charmer, he was muscular and moonfaced, with fair hair and pale blue eyes. After graduating from agricultural school, he managed a dairy farm on the family estate, but it was not his métier. He was hopelessly irresponsible with money and had the constitution of a cart horse: well into middle age, he could drink a bottle of gin at night, rise at dawn, and hunt all day. Beryl Markham, who traveled with him, said that he went about for years with enough malaria in his system to kill ten men. Known to his friends in Africa as Blix, he was an immensely respected hunter, and although Beryl said he was “never significantly silent,” he was modest to the extent that he made molehills out of mountains. He is often cited as the model for Hemingway’s white hunter Robert Wilson in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In all likelihood that honor went to Philip Percival, a sportsman with whom Blix later went into partnership in a safari firm; but the point is, Wilson could have been Blix, and Blix could have been Wilson. He and Hemingway were friends. When Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954, a year in which Karen Blixen had been tipped to get it, he said in an interview on the day of the announcement, “I would have been happy—happier—today if the prize had gone to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen [Tania’s pen name],” elaborating privately to a friend later that “Blickie is in hell and he would be pleased if I spoke well of his wife.”

When Tania and Blix announced their engagement, in 1912, her family viewed the union with misgivings. Tania, however, a victim of the Scandinavian claustrophobia so remorselessly described by Ibsen, yearned to escape provincial Denmark. “How desperately she longed for wings to carry her away!” her brother Thomas wrote of her teenage years. She and Blix decided to farm rubber in Malaya. But when an uncle returned from a safari in Kenya enthusing over that country’s potential, they switched continents. Her family put up the money for a seven-hundred-acre dairy farm, and Blix went ahead to get started. Their plans were laid, according to Thomas, “without any petty attention to detail.” In September 1913, Blix sent his fiancée a thirty-page blood-spattered safari journal in which he revealed that he had sold the dairy farm and bought a forty-five-hundred-acre coffee plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills, twelve miles from Nairobi and, at six thousand feet, a little higher. The settlers had decided that coffee was a crop with unlimited potential. (“Gold meant coffee,” Blix wrote home.) Africans were not allowed to queer the pitch. When a group of enterprising Chaga planted coffee in the foothills of Kilimanjaro, European farmers were furious. British settlers rushed to support their German neighbors, the matter was debated in the House of Commons, and the hapless Chaga were ostracized from their markets. Blix, meanwhile, had acquired one of the largest coffee plantations in the country, and the deal he cut also included land of about the same size near Eldoret. It was impossible for him to know that his farm at Ngong was too high, the soil too acidic and the microclimate too dry, and, above all, that the cold winds sweeping down from the hills at night meant it was no place for a coffee farm. As the crop takes four or five years to bear, it was to be a painfully protracted lesson. But at the beginning of 1914 Tania packed crystal, a French clock, an exercise machine, and a pair of Scottish deerhounds called Dawn and Dusk, and sailed to Africa. In her short story “The Dreamers,” written years later when her African dream had been shattered, the narrator describes a journey of his own. “I was on my way from the North, where things were cold and dead, to the blue and voluptuous South,” he said.

Blix rowed out to meet his fiancée’s ship wearing a
terai
hat
^*26
as limp as a wilted frond, and they spent their first night at the Mombasa Club in the company of von Lettow, who had made friends with Tania on the voyage. The next morning, the Blixens were married. Their witness was Prince Wilhelm of Sweden, a friend of Blix’s, who had come out on safari. When the proud husband took his bride to their home, a modest brick bungalow among wild figs and lilac-flowering Cape chestnuts, twelve hundred field hands lined up to welcome her. Karen Blixen’s love affair with Africa began. She felt, she wrote later, like “a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.”