IN 1938 I VISITED some friends who have a fine bookstore in Charleston. The first evening they asked if I had read Out of Africa, and I said I hadn't. They told me it was a beautiful book and that I must read it. I turned my head away and said I was in no state for reading, since at the time I was just finishing my novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I had imagined that it was a book about big-game hunting and I do not like to read about animals killed just for sport. All during the weekend there were references to Out of Africa. On Sunday, when I was leaving, they very quietly put Out of Africa in my lap, without words. My husband was driving so I was free to read. I opened to the first page:
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the daytime you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful and the nights were cold.
The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent. The colours were dry and burnt, like the colours in pottery. The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe; it did not grow in bows or cupolas, but in horizontal layers, and the formation gave to the tall solitary trees a likeness to the palms, or a heroic and romantic air like full-rigged ships with their sails clewed up, and to the edge of a wood a strange appearance as if the whole wood were faintly vibrating. Upon the grass of the great plains the crooked bare old thorn-trees were scattered, and the grass was spiced like thyme and bog-myrtle; in some places the scent was so strong, that it smarted in the nostrils. All the flowers that you found on the plains, or upon the creepers and liana in the native forest, were diminutive like flowers of the downs—only just in the beginning of the long rains a number of big, massive heavy-scented lilies sprang out on the plains. The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.
We started driving in the early afternoon and I was so dazed by the poetry and ttuth of this great book, that when night came I continued reading Out of Africa with a flashlight. I kept thinking that this beauty and this truth could not go on, but page after page I was more enchanted. At the end of the book, I knew that Isak Dinesen had written a great dirge of the Continent of Africa. I knew that sublime security that a great, great writer can give to a reader. With her simplicity and "unequalled nobility" I realized that this was one of the most radiant books of my life.
The burning deserts, the jungles, the hills opened my heart to Africa. Open to my heart, also, were the animals and that radiant being, Isak Dinesen. Farmer, doctor, lion hunter, if need be. Because of Out of Africa, I loved Isak Dinesen. When she would ride through a maise grassland, I would ride with her. Her dogs, her farm, "Lulu," became my friends, and the natives for whom she had such great affection—Farsh, Kamante, and all the people on the farm—I loved also. I had read Out of Africa so much and with so much love that the author had become my imaginary friend. Although I never wrote to her or sought to meet her, she was there in her stillness, her serenity, and her great wisdom to comfort me. In this book, shining with her humanity, of that great and tragic continent, her people became my people and her landscape my landscape.
Naturally, I wanted to read her other works, and the next book I read was Seven Gothic Tales. Instead of the radiance of Out of Africa, the Tales have a quite different quality. They are brilliant, controlled, and each gives the air of a deliberate work of artistty. One realizes that the author is writing in a foreign language because of the strange, archaic quality of her beautiful prose. They had the quality of a luminous, sulphuric glow. When I was ill or out of sorts with the world, I would turn to Out of Africa, which never failed to comfort and support me—and when I wanted to be lifted out of my life, I would read Seven Gothic Tales or Winter's Tales or, much later, The Last Tales.
About two years ago, the Academy of Arts and Letters, of which I am a member, wrote to me that it had invited Isak Dinesen as an honorary member and guest. I hesitated to meet her because Isak Dinesen had been so fixed in my heart, I was afraid that the actual would disturb this image. However, I did go to the dinner and at cocktail time when I met the Academy's president, I asked of him a great favor. I asked if I could sit near her at the dinner party. To my astonishment and joy he said that she had wanted to sit with me, and so the place cards were already on the table. He also asked me how we should address her since her name was the Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke. All I could say to him was that I was not going to call her "Butch" at the first meeting. I said, "I feel the best thing is 'Baroness,' so I will call her 'Baroness,'" which I did until we were on a first-name basis and she asked me to call her Tanya, which is her English name.
How can one think of a radiant being? I had only seen a picture of her when she was in her twenties: strong, live, wonderfully beautiful, and with one of her Scotch deerhounds in the shade of the African jungle. I had not thought visually about her person. When I met her, she was very, very frail and old but as she talked her face was lit like a candle in an old church. My heart trembled when I saw her fragility.
When she spoke at the Academy dinner that evening, something happened which I had never seen there before. When she finished her talk, every member rose to applaud her.
At the dinner she said she would like to meet Marilyn Monroe. Since I had met Marilyn several times, and since Arthur Miller was at the next table, I told her I thought that could be very easily arranged. So, I had the great honor of inviting my imaginary friend, Isak Dinesen, to meet Marilyn Monroe, with Arthur Miller, for luncheon in my home.
Tanya was a magnificent conversationalist and loved to talk. Marilyn, with her beautiful blue eyes, listened in a "once-upon-a-time-way," as did we all. Tanya talked about her friends Berkley Cole and Dennis Finch-Hatton. She talked always with such warmth that the listeners didn't have to try to interrupt or change her marvelous conversation.
Tanya ate only oysters and drank only champagne. At the luncheon we had many oysters and for the big eaters several large souffles. Arthur asked what doctor put her on that diet of nothing but oysters and champagne. She looked at him and said rather sharply, "Doctor? The doctors are horrified by my diet but I love champagne and I love oysters and they agree with me." Then she added, "It is sad, though, when oysters are not in season, for then I have to turn back to asparagus in those dreary months." Arthur mentioned something about protein and Tanya said, "I don't know anything about that but I am old and I eat what I want and what agrees with me." Then she went back to her reminiscences of friends in Africa.
It was a great delight for her to be with colored people. Ida, my housekeeper, is colored, and so are my yardmen, Jesse and Sam. After lunch everybody danced and sang. A friend of Ida's had brought in a motion picture camera, and there were pictures of Tanya dancing with Marilyn, me dancing with Arthur, and a great round of general dancing. I love to remember this for I never met Tanya again. Since writers seldom write to each other, our communication was infrequent but not vague. She sent me flowers when I was ill and lovely pictures of her cows and her darling dog in Rungsted Kyst.
When I was asked to go to lecture at the Cheltenham Festival in England last year, I wrote Tanya and asked if she could possibly join me in London. I received a letter from Clara that she not only could not come to London but she could scarcely move from room to room. Soon afterward, I read that this most radiant being had died.
In London, Cecil Beaton called me and said he had spent an afternoon with Tanya two weeks before her death. He invited me to tea. I went to Cecil's extraordinary house. The walls of the sitting room were black velvet and there was a magnificent orange portrait of Cecil by Bebe Berard, whom I loved very much, and who died about a decade ago. In that setting I could see vivacious Tanya with her delicate gestures, drinking champagne instead of tea, enchanting her listeners, enjoying her tales of long ago. I can imagine that she would have enjoyed the chic of the decor.
Cecil said that he was in Denmark two weeks before her death and had called Tanya. He told her he had an appointment in Spain. Tanya said then, "Well, that means, Cecil, I will never see you again and it makes me very sad." Thereupon, Cecil broke his appointment in Spain. Before he had time to hire a car to go to Rungsted Kyst, she called back and said, "Cecil, we have always been such good friends and I hate to have our friendship end on such a disappointing note." Cecil said, "I am just leaving for Rungsted Kyst, and I shall see you this afternoon." Tanya met him at the door, and the driver, seeing her, took off his hat and gave her a full bow from the waist. Cecil asked if she was suffering and she said that the drugs they had given her were sufficient and that she was in no pain. Cecil gave me copies of the last photographs of her: aged and exquisite, she was among her beloved possessions, portraits of her ancestors, the chandeliers, and the beautiful old furniture. Clara wrote me later that she was buried under her favorite beech tree near the shore of Rungsted Kyst.
[Saturday Review, March 16, 1963]