Themes of truth and deceit are everywhere in Dinesen’s fiction. In “The Deluge at Noderney,” the opening story of Gothic Tales, a cardinal explains the virtues (and power) of masquerade: “The witty woman, Madame, chooses for her carnival costume one which ingeniously reveals something in her spirit or heart which the conventions of her everyday life conceal; and when she puts on the hideous long-nosed Venetian mask, she tells us, not only that she has a classic nose behind it, but that she has much more, and may well be adored for things other than her mere beauty. So speaketh the Arbiter of the masquerade: ‘By thy mask I shall know thee.’”
Isak Dinesen’s lauded debut was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, with a print run of fifty thousand copies—an astonishing number at the time. The BOMC newsletter ran an announcement, along with a simple notice: “No clue is available as to the pseudonymic author.” On March 3, 1934, the New York Times posted the selection in its “Book Notes” column: “Seven Gothic Tales, by a European writer who uses the pen name of Isak Dinesen, is to be the Book-of-the-Month Club choice for April. Smith & Haas will publish it, with an enthusiastic introduction by Dorothy Canfield.” Five weeks later, John Chamberlain, a columnist for the newspaper’s “Books of the Times,” wrote that he was unimpressed by the selection: “[W]e found it impossible to get interested in Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales. . . . We are willing to grant the eerie light in the book, and the slanting beauty of phrase, but the predicaments of the characters leave us cold. If you prick Mr. Dinesen’s people, they do not bleed.”
Regardless, it was a hit, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s introduction to Seven Gothic Tales encouraged a sense of intrigue about the author’s identity. She proved a great advocate for the book, writing, “I am so much under its spell (it feels exactly like a spell),” and also letting the reader know that the material did not fit easily into any familiar genre or literary movement. “The person who has set his teeth into a kind of fruit new to him,” Fisher wrote, “is usually as eager as he is unable to tell you how it tastes. It is not enough for him to be munching away on it with relish. No, he must twist his tongue trying to get its strange new flavor into words, which never yet had any power to capture colors or tastes.”
Devour the book, she urged, but claimed she could offer no insight into who had written it: “I can’t even tell you the first fact about it which everybody wants to know about a book—who is the author.” Fisher continued, cryptically: “In this case, all that we are told is that the author is a Continental European, writing in English although that is not native to his pen, who wishes his-or-her identity not to be known, although between us be it said, it is safe from the setting of the tales to guess that he is not a Sicilian.”
But Isak Dinesen was perhaps the shortest-lived pseudonym in literary history. The book had created such a stir that the Danish press immediately set out to learn the author’s real identity, and, following a tip that “he” was in fact a “Danish lady,” reporters from the newspaper Politiken found her. At the end of April, Smith and Haas announced formally that Isak Dinesen was Baroness Blixen of Rungstedlund. A week later, the competition began among Danish publishers to acquire translation rights to her book. She decided to undertake the job of translation herself, a practice she would follow from then on—writing most of her stories first in English, then in Danish. But these were never direct translations; she would rewrite as well, even changing the endings to create original stories for a different audience.
Seven Gothic Tales (or Syv Fantastiske Fortaellinger) was published in Denmark in September 1935, when Dinesen was fifty (the same age at which her father committed suicide). The critical reception was decidedly harsh. Her work was dismissed as too artificial, too perverse, too shallow, too elitist, and too foreign. One young reviewer criticized the book on many counts, noting that “[t]he erotic life which unfolds in the tales is of the most peculiar kind.” In the end, he wrote, “There is nothing . . . behind [the author’s] veil, once it is lifted.”
Some critics were annoyed by Dinesen’s decision to write first in English—an apparent breach of etiquette—and by the fact that her breakthrough had occurred in the United States rather than her homeland. To avoid offending them again, subsequent books were issued simultaneously in Danish and English—or first in Danish. Also, she reserved her pseudonym only for books that came out in North America; in Denmark she reverted to Karen Blixen—perhaps in an attempt to prove her “authenticity” and appeal to national pride. Still, she never felt that she achieved enough popularity in Denmark, certainly not compared with the adulation she received abroad. In the United States, she had an impressive roster of admirers. Truman Capote yearned for a movie adaptation of “The Dreamers,” with Greta Garbo in the lead role. Ralph Ellison, Pearl Buck, and Marianne Moore loved her work. Orson Welles said that he considered Dinesen superior to Shakespeare. William Maxwell praised Dinesen as “the most original, the most perceptive, and perhaps the best living prose writer.” Eudora Welty called her “a great lady, an inspired teller of her own tales, a traveler, possessed of a learned and seraphic mind.” Carson McCullers was also a fan. “When I was ill or out of sorts with the world,” she said, “I would turn to Out of Africa, which never failed to comfort and support me.” In 1957, Dinesen was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; other member inductees that year included John Dos Passos, Flannery O’Connor, Mary McCarthy, and W. S. Merwin. Meanwhile, at home, Dinesen confided to a friend, “Lately, I have had the feeling in Denmark of being under suspicion, almost as if I were on parole.”
When Out of Africa was published in 1937, it, too, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. With its lovely, straightforward prose, not the least bit baroque or decadent, and with no questionable subject matter, the memoir elicited a positive critical response in her homeland. Grounded in the story of a land and its people, it was “realistic” rather than fantastical. In Denmark she called the book Den afrikanske Farm (The African Farm); for the American edition, she’d chosen the title Ex Africa, but Robert Haas persuaded her to use Out of Africa instead. Dinesen insisted that it be published on the same day in the United States, Scandinavia, and England, rather than releasing first to Danish readers and then elsewhere—a request her publisher resisted because of the logistics. “America took me in when I could not even make the publishers in Europe have a look at my book,” she explained, “and the American reading public received me with such generosity and open-mindedness as I shall never forget. I was delighted with the reviews of the American critics. I feel the deepest gratitude toward you all.” She worried (however irrationally) that delaying American publication might convey the impression that she had lost interest in her fans there or no longer valued them. Despite the case she’d made, her request was denied, thus preserving a schism in her literary identity that could not be made whole: living as one persona abroad and another at home.
Out of Africa was praised by Time magazine as “a restrained, formalized book, which has little in common with her first book.” She captured the African landscape, its people and animals “with the eye of a painter and a novelist.” The New York Times called the book “rare and lovely,” and praised its “penetration, restraint, simplicity and precision which, together, mark the highly civilized mind, and that compassion, courage and dignity which mark civilization, in the best sense, in the human heart.”
It must have annoyed Dinesen that a book by her former husband came out at the same time—also a memoir of Africa, published by Knopf. Time magazine was scathing in its review: “By comparison with his former wife’s volume, 50-year-old Baron von Blixen-Finecke’s African Hunter is little more than a handbook for big-game hunters. . . . Baron Blixen-Finecke does not care much for natives. Now married to an adventurous, pretty, 29-year-old Englishwoman, he remembers his first wife (Isak Dinesen) for one incident, when she flew unarmed at two lions that had attacked an ox, lashed them into the jungle with a stock whip.” (
Bror would marry a third time and die in a car crash in Sweden in 1946.)
On May 10, 1943, Dinesen’s third book, Winter’s Tales, was published in the United States. (It had come out in Denmark a year earlier.) This, too, was sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a huge success. Despite having been unmasked seven years earlier, Dinesen still had a seductive aura of intrigue, one that cast her as imperious and remote. William Maxwell noted that although “Isak Dinesen” was “now generally known to be the pen-name of a Danish woman . . . the Baroness herself is still something of a mystery. The facts concerning Baroness Blixen supplied by her publishers are definite enough; there just aren’t many of them.” And when the New York Times columnist Orville Prescott reported the publication of Winter’s Tales, his piece, with its dramatic opening, read more as if he were writing about a witch than an author: “In Denmark lives a baroness, a strange and grandly gifted woman who by some odd chance has strayed into the twentieth century from distant regions beyond time and space. . . . A serene and frosty genius, she is an artist of précieux and impeccable talent who scorns the conventional, the direct and the clearly understandable. A writer, she forsook her native Danish tongue and has written her books in an English of such coldly glittering beauty she has hardly a living rival as a literary stylist. Her books are signed Isak Dinesen.” Prescott proclaimed the arrival of another book from this enchantress as “rather like a nightingale singing in a boiler factory, like a phoenix materializing in Union Square on May Day.” He may as well have been referring to the author herself when he said that Winter’s Tales was “aloof and separate from every world that ever was.”
Winter’s Tales—which was Dinesen’s own favorite of her books—had a rather unlikely path to publication. This collection came out of Denmark in the midst of World War II, by secret diplomatic mails, to America. First Dinesen had traveled with the manuscript to Stockholm, where she visited the American embassy with an odd request: would someone there be willing to carry the manuscript on one of the planes headed for the United States? She was told that only political or other official papers could be transported. Then she went to the British embassy to make the same request. After she provided a few references in high places (including Winston Churchill), the favor was granted and the manuscript was sent to America on her behalf. Along with her stories, Dinesen had enclosed a note to her publisher, indicating that she was unable to communicate further: “I can sign no contract and read no proofs,” she wrote. “I leave the fate of my book in your hands.”
She would have no idea how things turned out until the war ended. “I suddenly received dozens of charming letters from American soldiers and sailors all over the world,” she said later. “The book had been put into Armed Forces Editions—little paper books to fit a soldier’s pocket. I was very touched. They gave me two copies of it; I gave one to the King of Denmark and he was pleased to see that, after all, some voice had spoken from his silent country during that dark time.”
The book was critically well received, though without making the same splash as Seven Gothic Tales. “Many people, I feel sure, will read all eleven Winter’s Tales as I did—as fast as possible in order to have as soon as possible the pleasure of reading them for the second, the third, and, inevitably, the fourth time,” William Maxwell wrote. Still, Dinesen was feeling bored, restless, and frustrated—partly because of the monotony of daily life brought on by the war—and suffered through periods of poor health, due to the syphilis she’d contracted years earlier. She was convinced that she would never produce a novel, but held out hope that she might.
A Frenchman named Pierre Andrézel would do it for her.
Here was yet another persona for Dinesen, at the age of fifty-nine, during the German occupation of Denmark. She had created Andrézel out of boredom, because she felt caged in as herself and wished to toy with a new disguise. The novel, The Angelic Avengers, was (as its title suggests) a thriller. Years later, Dinesen would laugh it off as “my illegitimate child.” She had done it, she insisted, simply to amuse herself. She asked her Danish publisher in Copenhagen for an advance, and for a stenographer to whom she could dictate the novel. Unsure of the story before she began, she wrote by improvising, dictating a little each day. “It was very baffling to the poor stenographer,” she said. It was also problematic: she would begin a session by announcing that a certain character would enter a room, only to be reminded by the stenographer, “Oh dear, he can’t! He died yesterday in Chapter Seventeen.”
When the book came out, Dinesen denied that she had anything to do with it (or with Andrézel), despite a surge of rumors fueled by her own publisher. She said that even if she were the author, she would never admit it. When a friend wrote to say that he’d read the novel and found it “a profound joke,” she replied that she knew who the author was, but refused to reveal his identity until others discovered it for themselves (just as she knew, inevitably, they would).
The novel, which some readers interpreted as an allegory of the fall of Nazism, was published as Ways of Retribution in Copenhagen, in 1944. Although Dinesen refused to claim authorship, it wasn’t long before she was unmasked, again by the pesky press. Dinesen was upset that journalists would not respect her desire to go incognito, a privilege lost to her long ago. The book became a best seller in Denmark (it was reviled by critics) and was published in the United States a few years later. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose it as half of the dual selection for January 1946 (along with Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, by Eric Hodgins). In its announcement, the BOMC remarked that The Angelic Avengers—“a fascinating story of mystery, adventure, and pure young love”—was written in wartime, and that “Pierre Andrézel” was surely a pseudonym, but: “Of whom? There were shrewd guesses, but nobody ever really knew. The author, whoever it is, continues to guard this anonymity. All that has been divulged by him (or her) is a plainly fictitious autobiographical note sent to the American publisher.”
Despite the author’s contention that her latest novel was a bit of an embarrassment, something she had written to have “a little fun,” The Angelic Avengers marked another grand success, selling ninety thousand copies in America. One reviewer wrote that Dinesen was dealing with “somewhat coarser material than in the best of her tales, but dealing with it in such a way that this novel will certainly widen the circle of her readers.”
After the publication of Winter’s Tales and The Angelic Avengers, Dinesen didn’t publish again for more than a decade. In the final years of her life came Last Tales (1958), which she dictated to her assistant and said was written “with a leg and a half in the grave”; two years later came Shadows on the Grass and Anecdotes of Destiny. Her health had steadily worsened, owing to the syphilis. There were periods in which she would rally, but once her decline had begun she was never quite the same. A frail, gaunt figure, weighing less than eighty pounds, Karen was in and out of the hospital. In the morning she took amphetamines, stimulants that caused her to talk compulsively, in an odd, almost trancelike state. At night she swallowed barbiturates to fall asleep. Because of the wasting away of her spine, she was sometimes unable to stand or walk. In those last years she led a fairly isolated life, and in periods of illness she was especially ill tempered, sarcastic, depressed, and paranoid. Her moods, she admitted, were “coal black.”
Dinesen was well aware that she could be as difficult as she was charming. “As long as I live it will be bothersome for you to have to deal with me,” she once told a dear friend. She was a leading contender for the Nobel Prize until her death but never won, a fact that proved an ongoing disappointment. Yet by the time she died, in 1962, she was an international celebrity and her books had been published in twelve languages. When Sydney Pollack’s Academy Award–winning film adaptation of Out of Africa was released in 1985, a new audience was drawn to Dinesen’s work, and there was a resurgence of interest in the author as well. To the end, whether inhabiting Tanne, Karen, Isak, or any of her other se
lves, she believed absolutely that it was her right to assume a pseudonym, and that readers were obliged to respect it. Although her aliases had been promptly uncovered, a friend once wrote of his unknowable, inscrutable friend that “Karen Blixen as a person was always pseudonymous in varying degrees, [and] that she always wanted to be suspected behind her texts but under no circumstances caught.”
In her final months, she grew weaker still, her weight down to seventy pounds. She subsisted on glasses of vegetable and fruit juice, oysters, and biscuits—the few things she could keep down. She could no longer stand without losing her balance, and admitted in a letter to a friend that a doctor had said “that I have all the symptoms of a concentration camp prisoner, one of them being that my legs swell so that they look like thick poles and feel like cannon balls. This last thing is terribly unbecoming and for some reason very vulgar. Altogether I look like the most horrid old witch, a real Memento Mori.” On September 7, 1962, she spent the evening listening to Brahms. That night she fell into a coma and died in her narrow wooden bed. She was buried on the family property under a beech tree.
Five years before her death, an interviewer asked Dinesen whether she had led a happy life. “Yes, and with all my heart,” she replied. “At times I have been so happy that it has struck me as overwhelming, almost as supernatural.” She was asked what, exactly, had made her so happy. “In a way I believe that the only true, sure happiness one can talk about here is the pure joy of living, a sort of triumph simply because one exists.”
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