Wednesday 17 November 2010

Bliss was it in that dawn


Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa features on my list of all-time favourite non-fictions. Blixen, who originally wrote under the pen-name name of Isak Dinesen, was a Danish writer, a marvellous teller of stories, including some in the Gothic genre. But she is still best known for her memoir of her life on her farm in what was then British East Africa, now Kenya.

Published in 1937, it opens so evocatively- “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills”, proceeding as a wonderful retrospective on her time as a coffee planter, both before, during and after the First World War. I was intrigued to discover that on the way out she voyaged on the same ship as Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a soldier on his way to take command of the troops in German East Africa, now Tanzania.

Both, in their separate ways, were to become the stuff that legends are made on: Lettow-Vorbeck as one of the great German soldiers (he’s another of my heroes!), a field commander and guerrilla leader of genius: Blixen as an icon of single-minded female determination, a survivor against all odds. They had a common interest in horses, Lettow-Vorbeck later writing to her asking to send some of her best stock. Unfortunately by this time the war had intervened.

Blixen was to meet other remarkable people, the most remarkable of whom in my view was Denys Finch Hatton (if you’ve seen the movie based on the book he is played by Robert Redford). Finch Hatton in so many ways was the last of the adventures and buccaneers who built the British Empire. A scion of one of the best connected English families, he was educated at Eton and Oxford before he came out to Africa at the age of twenty-four, the same age I am now, and stayed for the rest of his life. He was a professional hunter, but he was so much more- an intellectual, a flyer and a lover, a man of highly refined feelings, the passion of Blixen’s life.

In the early 1930s he took her flying in his De Havilland Gypsy Moth, an experience she describes in the book as the “most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm.” Blixen wrote to her brother of Finch Hatton that “to love the ground he walks upon, to be happy beyond words when he is here, and to suffer worse than death many times when he leaves.” In May 1931 he left forever, killed when his Gypsy Moth crashed at Voi airport. He was buried in accordance with his wishes in the Ngong Hills, where his brother later erected a memorial with a line from Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner – “He prayeth well, who loveth well both man and bird and beast.”

In so many ways Out of Africa describes, in transporting prose, a vanished world, a better world, a more heroic world. It’s a time in which I could see myself, a time when there yet more worlds to conquer. Bliss it must have been in that dawn to be alive, but to be young would have been very heaven. By the time Blixen left it was over- the pioneers were gone, the game was gone, the land was gone. In came the awful Happy Valley crowd, as mediocrity and tedious bourgeois decadence walking hand in hand!

19 comments:

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  2. What comment did I make about Kate Middleton? She is as far removed from the Happy Valley set as is possible to imagine.

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  4. I know the twenty-first century is a step too far but someday you might just be able to enter the twentieth.

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  6. haven't read the book but the movie was my all time favorite. I watched many times and remember every detail of it. Spectacular! Ana which you like better, movie or book? Your review is good for both:-)

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  7. Ana, I would have put it this way:

    "Bliss it must have been in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and privileged would have been very heaven."

    :-)

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  8. @ Adam, Do you think that prince charels has led a happy life ? The young prince sees through all the hypocrisy of all the Royal poop and will follow his instincts.

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  9. I have seen the movie, and loved it, but haven't read the book. I still remember the poignant lines the narrator spoke at the close of the film, when Blixen bade her final farewell to Africa. Beautiful writing, and very moving.

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  11. Yun yi, the book is richer, more lyrical, but that's inevitable. But I think the movie complements it very well, and the performancea of both Streep and Redford were outstanding.

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  12. CI, yes, of course, I could not possibly deny that. All I will say, though, is that Blixen, despite her temporary marriage to a baron, had quite a hard struggle.

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  13. @ana, my favorite lines of the movie are:
    "If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"

    The last line of the movie is also unforgettable.
    Usually in fairy tales princes go after princesses, in this movie, Karen went after Denys. Redford looked stunning and really was a beauty to die for (Well, if I were straight.lol)

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  14. Anastasia

    I sure hope that I do not incur your wrath with this one.

    My problem with Out of Africa has been, as with Ernest Hemingway in his ‘The green hills of Africa’ that both display a kind of “romanticism” with Africa, a picture of “virtual reality” as the modern IT people describe it but the real picture of Africa always was Mugabe, Kenyatta, Idi Amin and probably the worst of the lot, Tubman of Liberia who should have known better but then tried to “outdo” all the others.

    Hemingway also wrote a smaller book; speaking from memory I think it was called ‘My African Safari’ about his hunting trip in company with his wife. It was good writing; as you know he was a master of dialogue and made the reader felt like he was actually sitting with them round the campfire at night. But it was the mythical Africa, not the real one.

    Africa has never been a pretty picture and never will be. It was a good movie [I agree with what you say about Streep and Redford’s acting] but the romanticism was light years away from reality.

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  15. Ike, of course not! The people you mention are all bad but they are, of course, well after Blixen's time. I do agree that there is a spot of romanticism or nostalgia, if that's the right word, in her writing, though I take it to be essentially an honest account of her own particular experience.

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  16. Now I finished reading book (with jumping over some passages about some native figures which I did not care much about). I found it is so much different from the movie, in book, Blixen shew much more love to the land, and natives' life.
    Do you know that that Berly Markham was a close friend of Blixen? I read somewhere that Markham once dined in Blixen's house in the farm, together with Finch Hatton (and with Prince of Wales)? It must be a wonderful dinner party with all these adventurous people.

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  17. Yes, I did. I would have loved to have been there. :-)

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