Out of Africa Book

I once had a crush on Karen Blixen, at the shores of Rungstedlund.

Travelling my life like Odysseus the mythical Mediterranean seas, I found myself in front of a majestic house on a strip of Danish coastline, some ten years ago, and in the company of my lively bunch of toddlers, aged approximately 4, 2.5 and 0.5 years. While I walked reverently in the footsteps of Karen Blixen, studiously scrutinising every single letter and photograph on display in the exhibition, my family ran wild outside, enjoying the closeness to the sea and the summer breeze, and a café just on the waterfront. A perfect set up. When I reluctantly left the museum, I carried with me a book bought in the gift shop, the only one by Blixen I had not borrowed in my local library because I wanted to own it myself.


My copy of Out Of Africa carries a sticker with the silhouette of Karen Blixen and a label of “Karen Blixen Museet Rungstedlund”. It also tells me that I paid 140 Danish crowns for it, marked in pencil inside the cover.


What you experience intensely becomes part of who you are. It changes your perception of the world and makes you different. When I read Karen Blixen’s stories, her biography, her letters, and now - finally - after a ten year long odyssey of reading other books - her Out Of Africa, something touches me deep inside, and I feel her happiness, sadness, excitement, boredom and disappointment almost physically. I don’t know why that is really. Maybe it has something to do with the Scandinavian heritage taken on a joyride into the big, big world? Maybe it has to do with her accepting that she was different, a stranger within her own environment, but still deeply engaged in it? That she was willing to sacrifice a lot to live according to her own rules, and never stopped fighting for what she considered worthwhile, however hopeless the fight seemed against conventions and world history in general?


She knew about her own flaws and prejudices, and weighed them against others, creating lucid comparisons between different people at a time when Europeans tended to see natives in Africa as mere tools or backdrop. Her language and behaviour are aristocratic in a way that reminds me of Virginia Woolf. It is a charming vanity, as she does not hide it at all.


What about the book itself, what did it add to my idea of Karen Blixen? It gave me the shivers, and a strong feeling of respect for her honest account of life in a country that works with completely different codes of conduct, myths and traditions.


When she describes how she starts writing during a drought, filling loose papers with stories, her servant comes in and doubts the success of her ambition, comparing her drafts to the heavily bound volume of the Odyssey she has in her possession. The European mind now smiles inwardly and thinks that it of course is hard to compete with Homer, but that is not the angle of the reflection of Blixen’s servant. He is worried that her book consists of loose paper, whereas the Odyssey is bound, sturdy, impressive, heavy. The conclusion is that Blixen’s work would be equally impressive if she managed to get it printed in hardcover, an expensive endeavour, but feasible!


Her literary soul is disclosed in every day-to-day reflection she makes. An old Danish adventurer, who comes to live and die on the farm, is compared to The Ancient Mariner or The Old Man and The Sea. A lion hunt turns into a Greek tragedy with all actors dead in the last act. A discussion of The Merchant Of Venice with her Somali servant Farah gives the Shakespearean story a new twist. All the time, the capability to read reality from different angles shines through. Karen Blixen understands not only the strangeness of the Kikuyu, Masai and Somali, but also of the French and Scottish missionaries, the English District Commissioner and the Scandinavian big game hunters. Hers is a universe apart, on a farm, in the Ngong Hills.


In her beautiful descriptions of a lifestyle lost forever, a European coffee plantation reality in Kenya during the Great War and Depression era, Karen Blixen captures the idea of global citizenship by taking traditions for what they are: inherited culture. Her own culture forbids her to talk too freely of her most passionate love during those years: her relationship to Denys Finch Hatton is never explained fully, never analysed with the sharp intelligence she is capable of in all other respects. But it can be sensed in her compulsive need to start sentences with “Denys and I”, followed by a simple anecdote. “Denys and I”, repeated over and over, establishes a connection that must have made her feel joy long after she lost her one true, wild love, and her farm as well.


As I read her letters first, it made me start when I saw the casual line in the novel, describing in shortest possible manner a long correspondence and pressure on Karen to give up her life:


“My people at home, who had shares in the farm, wrote out to me and told me that I would have to sell.”


And she did, eventually. She moved back to Denmark and spent her last years, in frail health, in that beautiful environment where I eventually made her acquaintance (figuratively speaking, of course), writing and dreaming of Africa:


“They [people who dream] know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will.”


To me, it seems that Karen Blixen was a lucky woman, to be able to live according to her dreams for a long time, to enjoy great love, and to be able to sit down and write an opening line of unforgettable beauty:


“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

And I had a crush on Karen Blixen, at the shore of Rungstedlund...