Witchcraft
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Titania Parmenia Migel (Michael Joseph 50s) There is a scene in Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night in which an old woman begins to tell a story. Wraithlike, sibylline, wizened as a monkey, she is filmed, as I re- member, sitting at a dinner-table staring into a glitter of cut glass. In the context of a film not otherwise without its Isak Dinesen echoes ('Solitaire is the only thing in life which de- mands absolute honesty' is one of the old lady's oracular pronouncements), this crystalline moment has always suggested to me a conscious act of homage, more at least than a nod of recognition from the Scandinavian wizard to the Scandinavian witch.
The witchlike characteristics were, it is clear from Parmenia Migel's biography, carefully calculated. First the question of names, always a touchy point with witches : christened Karen Dinesen (but always called Tanne or Tania), she wrote as Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen, Osceola, Pierre Andrezel. Osceola, the earliest pseudonym, dates from 1907 when her first two stories were published. It was the Red Indian name of her father's dog—Indian because Wilhelm Dinesen, after fighting in the Franco- Prussian war, had lived for two years as a kind of hermit in Wisconsin. Wilhelm Dinesen committed suicide. His daughter, both during her years in Africa and in her glittering old age as the seer of Rungstedlund, got much satisfaction out of choosing last resting-places for herself: '"Has Clara shown you my grave?" was the question most frequently asked of the visitors who came from far away.'
For much of her life Baroness Blixen was a chronic invalid, with the chronic invalid's power of survival. Apart from the Osceola stories, her career as a writer—and a best-seller and an instant classic—effectively began in 1934, when she was almost fifty. Seven Gothic Tales and Winter's Tales are not merely timeless : clearly they were written out of a vast, unsentimental nostalgia for her own lost health, for the father who had betrayed her by killing himself, for the landscape she grew up in. Her childhood was nineteenth cen- tury; when she went to Paris as an art student in 1910 she managed entirely to by-pass any acquaintance with non-academic painting; from 1913 to 1931 were the African years. If one ever wonders how she contrived to keep Freud, Marx and the other great twentieth century in- fluences out of her work, the explanation is in the chronology.
In Africa, she achieved the European impos- sibility of a feudal paternalism : she loved the natives (Out of Africa uses the word con- stantly, without uneasy later overtones of patronage) because they were independent but also because they were hers. Imperiousness, clearly, became a habit. Back at Rungstecllund, the old house halfway between Copenhagen and Elsinore, she kept her mother's friends sternly banished so that she could write in peace. And after the war—in which, at one time, she had Jewish refugees camping in the kitchen and Nazi troops in the garden—the role of capricious, generous, wayward despot was fixed. Young Danish writers, at first willing courtiers, drifted away or were found guilty of betrayal. Even when her weight was something under five stone, and she was sur- viving on a uniquely aristocratic and impracti- cal diet of champagne, grapes and oysters, her incessant expeditions to Rome or Paris or New York were royal progresses, occasions greedily planned and exhaustingly sustained by a resolute if flagging entourage.
Parmenia Migel's book is clearly written out of love and loyalty, by a friend from these last years. The images it creates, however, are not exactly lovable: the grande dame, on a trip from Africa, putting up at the Carlton in London with 'her own exotic blackamoor' in tow; the endless need to astonish, or to be astonished; the whimsicalities and conceits. Clearly Baroness Blixen, apart from playing the star in her own life, was happy to act anyone else clear off the stage—like luckless Pearl Buck, whom she had expressed a wish to meet, who travelled three hours to New York for the occa- sion, and was never allowed to get a wonderful or wise word in edgeways.
The photographs suggest a stoical elf. There's one with Marilyn Monroe, and an ineffably coy one in pierrot rig. Denys Finch-Hatton, her quintessential romantic Englishman, looks like a Georgian poet manqué; earlier photographs of aunts and cousins suggest Chekhovian long- ings. But it was the iron-whimmed Baroness who lived on into the 1960s, talking to friends, to animals, on the radio, incessantly talking. After Suez, I remember a Danish friend who made the pilgrimage to Rungstedlund telling me the Baroness didn't feel quite so attached to the English. Not because of Suez itself, but because of how we treated 'poor Anthony.'
This patient biography doesn't make one love her; but who needs to love witches? Re- reading her stories, after a few years' gap, I'm always slightly afraid that this time the spell won't hold, that the ornate, precise, sprung style will have begun to fade. (Stevenson, a far greater writer, in some moods works a similar charm, and re-readings of The Pavilion on the Links or The Suicide Club aren't approached in this hesitant mood.) But fears that there may after all be something slightly bogus about the Baroness seldom survive her opening para- graphs. Try this for an opening sentence :
'Count Augustus von Schimmelmann, a young Danish nobleman of a melancholy disposition, who would have been very good-looking if he had not been a little too fat, was writing a letter on a table made out of a millstone in the garden of an osteria near Pisa on a fine May evening of 1823.'
Or this : 'Upon the corner of a street in Elsinore, near the harbour, there stands a dignified old grey house, built early in the eighteenth century, and looking down reticently on the new times grown up around it . .
What's instantly apparent is the total con- fidence of the tone of voice. Isak Dinesen wrote like an autocrat, about a world Of masks, masquerades, disguises, noblemen, peasants, beggars, opera singers, impresarios, old ser- vants, great cooks, young poets, sailors, ghosts. She didn't create characters, as such, any more than character is part of the make-up of Rumpelstiltskin, or of the seventh son of a seventh son. In a story like the legendary Sorrow-Acre, the anonymous old peasant must kill herself doing an impossible day's work, and the anonymous old aristocrat must watch her do it. Destiny, the fairy-tale, the writer as auto- crat set the task, and the characters are allowed no human power to interrupt it.
The theory behind the grand manner is locked firmly into the books. In The Cardinal's First Tale there's an elaborate, ironic defence of the story as story, the 'divine art,' against the new (nineteenth century) literature which 'for the sake of the individual characters . . . and in order to keep close to them and not to be afraid, will be ready to sacrifice the story itself . . .' With this goes her whimsical but entirely consistent view of God as the great joker, the ultimate enemy of finality and per- fection, who 'has no more created a season of a year, or a time of day, than he wishes for something quite different.' Man tries to fix and hold; God disorders. The story-teller, in this exalted context, holds the stakes and sets the rules of the game.
It's the austere, authoritarian conception of a writer whose distrust of democracy, in art even more than in life, was preposterous, brac- ing and complete. ('With democracy, we seem to give up all ideals that are higher than those that can be reached. . . .') And although her manner invites plagiarism, and on occasion in her own last stories was pushed right up to the limit of self-indulgence, the substance is more resistant. Characteristically, she may be said to have chosen not only her grave but also (in A Consolatory Tale) her own epitaph : 'a deep and dangerous little figure, consolidated, alert and ruthless, the story-teller of all the ages.'
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