Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  One could define it as the morality of a romantic anarchist rebelling against modern, industrialised society, which he sees as a threat to individual sovereignty. The imprecations against ‘progress’ and the automatisation of humanity – what, in a subsequent book, Miller would call the ‘air-conditioned nightmare’ – are not very different to those hurled by Louis-Ferdinand Céline in those same years, in books similarly full of insults against the inhumanity of modern life, or Ezra Pound, for whom ‘mercantile’ society meant the end of civilisation. Céline and Pound – like Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach – believed that industrial society was synonymous with decadence, a deviation from certain exemplary standards that the West had achieved at certain moments in the past (Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance). This reactionary glorification of the past would throw them into the arms of fascism. This did not happen to Miller because he does not make his frontal assault on modern society in the name of an ideal, extinct or invented civilisation, but rather in the name of the individual, whose rights, whims, dreams and instincts are, for Miller, inalienable and precious values. These values, for him, are close to extinction, and they must be celebrated as loudly as possible before they are flattened by the implacable steam-rolling force of modernity.

  His posture is no less utopian than that of other maudit writers who waged war against much-hated progress, but it is more sympathetic and, in the end, more defensible than that of those who became Nazis thinking that they were defending civilisation or tradition. Miller’s furious individualism kept him safe from that danger. No form of social organisation and, above all, of collective life is tolerable to this rebel who has left his job, his family, and all types of responsibility because they represented for him different forms of slavery. He has chosen to be a pariah and a drop-out because, leading this kind of existence – despite the inconveniences and the hunger he suffers – is the best way of preserving his freedom.

  It is this conviction – that living the life almost of a beggar, with no obligations and with no respect for any of the established social conventions, is freer and more authentic than being caught up in the horrid swarm of alienated citizens – that makes ‘Henry’, the incurable pessimist about human destiny, a humorous person who enjoys life and is, in a certain way, happy. This unusual mixture is one of the character’s most original and attractive features, and the greatest delight in the novel, since it makes the atmosphere of frustration, amorality, abandon and filth in which the story takes place seem tolerable, pleasant and even seductive.

  Although to talk of ‘story’ in relation to Tropic of Cancer is not quite exact. It would be better to talk of scenes, pictures, episodes, disconnected and without a precise chronology, brought together only by the presence of the narrator, who is such an overwhelming egotistical force that the other characters are reduced to blurred extras. But this disconnected form is not gratuitous: it corresponds to the narrator’s character, it reflects his incorrigible anarchy, his allergic reaction to any type of organisation or order, the supreme arbitrariness that he confuses with freedom. In Tropic of Cancer, Miller achieved the difficult balance between the disorder of spontaneity and pure intuition and the minimal rational and ordered control that any fiction requires for it to be persuasive (because although fiction deals more with instincts and passions than with ideas, it must always appeal first to the intelligence of its readers before appealing to their emotions). In later books this was not the case, and for that reason many of them, despite containing memorable episodes and flashes of brilliant writing, are tedious, too amorphous to engage the reader. In this novel, however, the reader is captivated from the first sentence, and the spell does not break until the end, with the blissful scene by the Seine.

  It is a fine book, and its somewhat naïve philosophy touches us. Of course no civilisation can sustain such intransigent and extreme individualism, unless it is prepared to go back to the days when men held clubs and grunted. But, even so, we still feel nostalgia as we read this summons to total irresponsibility, to the great disorder of life and sex that preceded society, rules, prohibitions, the law…

  Lima, August 1988

  Seven Gothic Tales

  The Tales of the Baroness

  Baroness Karen Blixen de Rungstedlund, who signed her books with the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, must have been an extraordinary woman. There is a photo of her, in New York, alongside Marilyn Monroe, when she was just a scrap of a person, consumed by syphilis, and it is not the beautiful actress but the wide, ironic and troubled eyes and the skeletal face of the writer that steals the photo.

  She was born in Denmark, in a house on the seashore between Copenhagen and Elsinore, which is today very like her imaginative and surprising personality: an enclave of plants and exotic birds. She is buried there, in the middle of the countryside, under the trees that witnessed her first steps. She was born in 1885, but gave the impression of having been educated a century earlier, the century that began in 1781 and ended with the Second Empire in 1871, that she called the ‘last great age of aristocratic culture’. Almost all her stories take place between those years. She was spiritually a woman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although, as she confessed in a radio interview towards the end of her life, her friends suspected that she was ‘three thousand years old’. She never set foot in a school; she was educated by astonishing governesses who, at twelve, had her writing essays on Racine’s tragedies and translating Walter Scott into Danish. Her upbringing was polyglot and cosmopolitan; although she was Danish, she wrote most of her work in English.

  She began writing stories and tales as a child, but her literary vocation came late; her vocation as an adventurer came precociously early. She inherited both from her father, the very engaging captain Wilhelm Dinesen, who, after a perilous military career, fell in love with the native peoples of North America and went to live among them. The Indians accepted him and baptised him with the name of Boganis, which he put on the cover of his memoirs. He ended up hanging himself when Karen was ten years old. As befitted a baroness, she was married very young to a lazy and sickly cousin, Bror Blixen, and they both went to Africa to plant coffee in Kenya. The marriage did not go well (the mal français that devoured the life of Isak Dinesen was caught from her husband) and ended in divorce. When Bror returned to Europe, she decided to stay in Africa and manage the seven-hundred-acre estate on her own. She did this for a quarter of a century, in a stubborn fight against adversity. Her life on the African continent, which became an integral part of her, and whose people and landscapes were transformed by her irrepressible imagination into a unique vision, is beautifully captured in Out of Africa (first published in 1937 in Europe and 1938 in the United States).

  While she was an agricultural pioneer, fighting against plagues and floods and administering her coffee estate, in the first decades of the century, Baroness Rungstedlund had no urgency to write. She merely scribbled in notebooks sketches of what would become some of her future stories. She was more attracted by safaris, expeditions to remote areas, getting to know the tribal peoples, having contact with Nature and with wild animals. The primitive surroundings, however, did not prevent her having a refined cultural life, which she organised herself, through her reading and through her contact with some curious representatives of the culture of Europe who appeared in those parts, like the mythical Englishman Denys Finch-Hatton, an Oxford aesthete and adventurer, with whom Karen Blixen maintained an intense emotional relationship. One can imagine them discussing Euripides or Shakespeare after having spent the day hunting lions. (It is not surprising, for that reason, that the only writer that Hemingway always spoke of with unreserved imagination was Isak Dinesen.) The isolation of that African plantation and the narrow circle of European expatriates that she frequented in Kenya explains to a large degree the kind of culture that so surprises the reader of Isak Dinesen. It is not a culture that reflects its age, but rather ignores it, a deliberate anachronism, something strictly personal and extra
neous, a culture dissociated from the great movements and intellectual preoccupations of its time and from the dominant aesthetic values, a very singular re-elaboration of ideas, images, sights, forms and symbols that come from the Nordic past, from family tradition and an eccentric education, full of references to Scandinavian history, English poetry, Mediterranean folklore, African oral literature and the stories and way of narrating of the Arab jongleurs. A formative book in her life was the Arabian Nights, a forest of stories linked by the narrative cunning of Scheherazade, who was the model for Isak Dinesen. Africa allowed her to live, in an almost uncontaminated way, within a capricious culture, outside tradition, created for her own personal use. This culture shapes her world, and helps to explain the originality of the themes, the style, the construction and the philosophy of her stories.

  Her vocation as a writer came about after the bankruptcy of her coffee estates. Despite the fact that the price of coffee kept going down, she, with characteristic temerity, carried on with the crop until she was ruined. She did not just lose her estate, but also her Danish inheritance. It was, she recalls, at that time of crisis, when she realised that her African experience was coming inevitably to an end, that she began to write. She wrote at night, fleeing from the anguish and business of the day. In this way, she finished the Seven Gothic Tales, which appeared in New York and in London after being rejected by several publishing houses. She would later publish other collections of stories, some of very high quality like the Winter’s Tales, but her name would always be associated with her first stories published in that collection, which remains one of the most dazzling literary achievements of the twentieth century.

  Although she also wrote a novel (the forgettable The Angelic Avengers), Isak Dinesen was, like Maupassant, Poe, Kipling or Borges, essentially a short-story writer. The world she created was the world of the story, with all the resonance of unbridled fantasy and childlike enchantment that this word implies. When one reads her it is impossible not to think of the book of stories par excellence, the Arabian Nights. In her stories – as in the Arabian Nights – the passion most commonly shared by all the characters is, alongside putting on disguises and changing identity, that of listening to and telling stories, evading reality in a mirage of fictions. This tendency reaches its apogee in ‘The Roads Round Pisa’, when the young Agnese della Gherardesca (dressed as a man) interrupts the duel between the old prince and Giovanni to tell the prince a story. This vice for fantasy gives the Seven Gothic Tales, like Scheherazade’s stories, a Chinese box structure, stories that burst out of stories or dissolve into stories, among which the main story, hiding and revealing itself an ambiguous and elusive masked ball, is told.

  Whether they take place in Polish abbeys in the eighteenth century, in nineteenth-century Tuscan inns, on a hayloft in Norderney about to be submerged by a deluge or in a burning night on the African coast between Lamu and Zanzibar, among cardinals with sybaritic tastes, opera singers who have lost their voice or storytellers like Mira Jama in ‘The Dreamers’, who had had his nose and ears cut off, Isak Dinesen’s stories are always deceptive, full of secret and elusive elements. Of course it is difficult to know where they begin, and what the real story is – among all the entwined stories that the enthralled reader meanders through – that the author wishes to tell. This main story gradually emerges, obliquely, as if by chance, against the backcloth of a profusion of adventures that sometimes remain disparate or on other occasions, as in the disconcerting ending of ‘The Dreamers’, become fused into a single, coherent narration.

  Artificial, brilliant, unexpected, bewitching, almost always beginning better than they end, the stories of Isak Dinesen are, above all else, extravagant. Nonsense, absurdity, grotesque or improbable details always break into the narrative, on occasion destroying the dramatic intensity or the delicacy of a scene. This tendency was much stronger than she was, an untameable habit, in much the same way that others might be drawn to laughter or to melodrama. One must always expect the unexpected in the tales of Isak Dinesen. She saw the essence of fiction as being its lack of verisimilitude. In ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’, the perverse and delicious Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag says as much to the Cardinal as they are speaking surrounded by the waters that will doubtless swallow them up, when she expounds her theory that God prefers masks to the truth since he knows that ‘truth is for tailors and shoemakers’.23 For Isak Dinesen, the truth of fiction was the lie, an explicit lie, so well constructed, so exotic and precious, so excessive and attractive, that it was preferable to truth. What the prince of the Church argues in this story – ‘be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic’24 – could well be the definition of the art of Isak Dinesen. In this definition, however, we would need to specify our notion of the fantastic, a concept that, because of its excess and extravagance, cannot neatly be included in our conception of reality. We would need to exclude the supernatural variant of the fantastic because, in these stories, although a dead person – the privateer Morten de Coninck in ‘The Supper at Elsinore’ – comes from hell in order to dine with his two sisters, the fantastic, despite its excesses, always has its roots in the real world, as in the theatre or in the circus.

  The past attracted Isak Dinesen because of the memory of her childhood, the education she received and her aristocratic sensibility, but also because the past is unverifiable; by situating her stories one or two centuries in the past, she could give free rein to the anti-realist passion that drove her, to her love of the grotesque and of arbitrariness, without feeling coerced by the present. What is curious is that the work of this author, who had such a free and eccentric imagination, who just before her death boasted to Daniel Gilles that she had not the ‘slightest interest in social questions or in Freudian psychology’ and whose only ambition was to ‘invent beautiful stories’, should appear in the thirties, when narrative in the West revolved maniacally around realist descriptions: political problems, social issues, psychological studies, local sketches. For that reason André Breton considered that the novel suffered from a kind of realist curse and expelled it from literature. There were exceptions to this narrative realism, writers who barred themselves from this dominant tendency. One of these writers was Valle Inclán; another, Isak Dinesen. In both, the tale becomes a dream, madness, delirium, mystery, a game, poetry.

  The seven Gothic tales of the book are all admirable; but ‘The Monkey’ is the one that best expresses her playful, refined, exquisitely wrought world, with its twisted sensuousness and unbridled fantasy. It is difficult to sum up this delightful jewel of a story in a few words. In a few pages, very different stories are told that are subtly interrelated. One of these is the intense struggle between two formidable women, the elegant Prioress of Closter Seven and the young, wild Athena, whom the Prioress wants her nephew to marry, employing to this end both licit and illicit methods, such as love philtres, deceit and rape. But the indomitable Prioress meets a will as inflexible as her own in the young giant Athena, who has been brought up wild in the woods of Hopballehus, who does not have the slightest qualm in knocking out two of the gallant Boris’s teeth with a punch and wrestling with him, almost to the death, when the young man, encouraged by his aunt, tries to seduce her.

  We will never know which of the two women wins in this contest because this story is abruptly interrupted just at the point where the reader is about to find out, by another story that, until then, had been stealthily sliding along, like a snake, underneath the earlier tale: the relationship between the Prioress of Closter Seven and a monkey, which had been given to her by her cousin, Admiral von Schreckenstein, on his return from Zanzibar, to which she was very attached. The violent appearance of the monkey – it comes into the Prioress’s room by breaking her window, gripped by a fever that can only be sexual – when the Superior of the convent is about to spring her trap by forcing Athena to accept Boris as her husband, is one of the greatest moments of storytelling in the whole of literature. It is a hiatus, a sleight of hand
, as brilliant as the carriage journey through the streets of Rouen that Emma and Léon take in Madame Bovary. We guess at what happens inside that carriage, but the narrator never tells us: he insinuates it, lets us guess, fuelling the imagination of the reader with his loquacious silence. A similar hidden fact structures this intense moment in ‘The Monkey’. The clever description of the episode is full of superfluous detail and is silent about the essential point – the guilty relationship between the monkey and the Prioress – and, for that reason, this unspeakable relationship resonates and takes shape in the silence with as much or more force as the incredible scene witnessed by the terrified gaze of Athena and Boris. At the end of the tale, the sated monkey jumps onto a pedestal supporting the marble bust of the philosopher Immanuel Kant: this is quintessential Isak Dinesen, an example of her delirious craft.

  Entertainment, amusement, diversion: many modern writers would be annoyed if they were reminded that these are also the responsibility of literature. When the Seven Gothic Tales appeared, fashion demanded that a writer should be the critical conscience of society or explore the possibilities of language. Commitment and experimentation are very respectable, of course, but when a fiction is boring, nothing can save it. Isak Dinesen’s stories are sometimes flawed, sometimes too precious, but never boring. In this she was also an anachronism: for her, telling a tale was a form of enchantment, and boredom had to be avoided by any means – suspense, terrifying revelations, extraordinary events, sensationalist details, unlikely apparitions. Fantasy can suddenly submerge a story in a sea of other stories or else causes it to take a more unlikely direction. The reason for all these juggling acts is to surprise the reader, and this she never fails to do. Her tales take place in an imprecise realm, which is not the objective world, but nor is it the world of the fantastic. As happens also in Julio Cortázar’s best stories, her reality draws from both these worlds and is different to each of them.