Bringer of Tidings

By : Aage Henriksen

To begin with, when visiting Karen Blixen, one might occasionally feel the urge to say: "why don´t we just have a nice, cosy time?" But one never did get round to saying it and one never did have a nice, cosy time, because there was nothing easy-going about Karen Blixen. She embodied radiance and fire and vague promises, and deadly boredom, woe and scorn, but in both her strengths and her weaknesses she was alert, dry and resonant as a crystal.

That is how she was, eleven years ago, when I first met her; that is more or less how she must have been throughout all her years as a writer. She had put behind her the hopes and the inclinations of which life, for most of us, is composed, but this did not leave her any more reconciled to herself. Her passions had branched out and taken on other, hitherto unknown, forms and by this time she was living, visibly and publicly, in those regions which ordinarily one only ever dreamed of frequenting. For this reason she evoked indefinable memories - of forgotten promises or dangers or oversights. To begin with, being in Karen Blixen´s company seemed to be one long feeling of déjá-vu, often agonizingly magnified to the point of total confusion.

This disquiet was not reciprocal and naturally it did not last long, for after mental upheaval comes fatigue and reflection. It was a part of Karen Blixen´s fate in later life that she should pass unaltered through a series of spiritual friendships which progressed in waves, like fierce passions, abrupt in their rise and fall; friendships which changed the lives of the other people involved.

Quite spontaneously and, to begin with, imperceptibly, in her company the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds grew fluid, encroaching as she did from both sides. What had previously been solid ground in one´s mind began under her influence to shift and form into figures and faces. Desires and possibilities never before encountered loomed in the mind and worked their way to the surface. With just such creative power did she move when she let her personality shine through. For the most part, however, she approached one from the outside and otherwise: with demands to be regaled and pleased or, if nothing else, then at least to be recognized for what she was: far out of reach in reputation, rank and age. And if even that could not be done then one might at least admit that she was the loneliest soul in the world, that she did not have one single friend in the whole of Denmark who would lift a finger for her. And when all the interminable woes had been recited, when one had given up hope and finally made to take one´s leave, she might say mournfully: "with someone like me you have to have infinite patience".

Her personality struck at the heart like some irreparable hurt. So utterly forsaken could she seem. But she could not stand pity and met its overtures with all the coolness and stoniness of so much glass and wall. No matter what lengths one went to in an effort to present oneself as charming and understanding it would all be reduced to pathetic inconsequentialities - "that´s very sweet of you" - consumed in an instant by the great flame. Under no circumstances did she intend to take the road back to propriety and respectability. Caught between her need for people and the dismissal of the modest entertainment one was capable of providing one could easily lose one´s bearings. Because she was also intoxicating and in her company one even began to find oneself interesting. One could, then, be lured into wanting to get through to her in that very spot she occupied in plain view of everyone; and then only once the situation had got quite out of hand and one had run under one´s own steam into the inevitable débacle. In all the years when I was a regular visitor to Rungstedlund I was given more than one opportunity to spare a comradely thought for Shakespeare´s Malvolio, who got it all so horribly wrong.

One got it wrong, but one got it wrong to a degree and on a scale beyond anything one had ever experienced before. At first one might well have managed to go far wrong all by oneself, but as the situation grew more complicated she would lend a hand, setting up stories. Bitter personal experience had put Karen Blixen on intimate terms with a particular boundary in life: that which separates our dreams, our desires and our weaknesses from the awareness of what others know and think of us. The signal may not be clear, but the boundary is. Strangers are most definitely not welcome in these regions, but Karen Blixen now moved freely in them. And she was practised, one might say artful, in the ways of being human; she was well-acquainted with the aimless longings invoked by her persona as they flowed, almost sleeping still, into the broad daylight of everyday life. At the right moment - she knew when - she would wake the sleepwalker and draw his attention to his nightclothes and rumpled hair. At that instant, when the consciousness of other eyes suddenly grows in one, a great deal of green wood can be burned away and delicate threads snap. But on that same threshold one can also learn the art of losing face and letting it go, since the line between the inner and the outer worlds is, after all, also the point at which the citizenship of two worlds may be acquired.

One got it wrong, but this one did because there was reality to be found in a relationship with Karen Blixen, although not in the way, or in the circumstances one might originally have imagined. One still had plenty of reason to be grateful, but that gratitude had to take a new tack. Fancies, illusions; great, golden reflections in which one´s hopes and dreams got the wrong end of the stick, were Karen Blixen´s gift to her friends. And gifts they were; huge, glossy fruits, bitter to eat, but full of goodness. It is just such generosity which Sophus Claussen sighs for in his poem, Midsummer, when he exclaims:

The Angels of Light have fallen from Grace
and are no more.
Has Faery Tale a coal-black Angel
perchance in store?

That fact is that in illusions there are always two paths which open up, with the result that seducer and redeemer can often be hard to tell apart and, on occasion, may even be one and the same person. One path follows the old, familiar course of passion: out the way, towards honour and ownership, while the other path runs against the stream, heading towards the source; the path to perception, leading back and inward to the passions from which the misapprehensions stemmed.

Such personal experience of Karen Blixen could open one´s eyes anew to her writing and promote insight into this unique oeuvre´s spellbinding and repellent ambiguity. Its hallmarks - illusion, religious phantasmagoria - are suddenly plain to see. Just as a brilliant parody can relay the inspiration of a lost original, so, in Karen Blixen´s tales, the ultimate, divine potential of mankind is preserved as a reflection and a caricature of the world of sensuality and of passion. Consequently, rapture and dread mingle bewilderingly within the reader as he travels across the lunar landscape of these tales.

In an age when mankind is diminishing in stature while its extrinsic power is on the increase, it is a joy to have known someone like Karen Blixen, who had the power and authority to get to the heart of other people and open the door onto the perils and undying hopes of an inner world. One might be daunted by her, but it was impossible to feel any bitterness towards her or, in all truth, to regret any part of one´s relationship with her. It smacked too much of necessity. And in spite of all her failings she was a great and valiant human being, thoroughly conversant with pain and as uncompromising as a ritual, with herself as well as with others. It was like meeting the seductress of legend, the wild and ruthless Kundry. And, like another Kundry, in her life and her work she brought tidings of the holy grail, which an overly ingenious age ought to be capable of apprehending.

It also mattered greatly to her that she should be appreciated for her singular and ambivalent nature. She was forever at pains to be regarded as someone who lived outside the bounds of the prevailing norms and values. In public she vehemently persisted in stressing the privileged aspect of her lot in life, doggedly playing a large and strenuous part the funny side of which was not altogether lost on her. But within a narrower circle she was just as likely to present herself as a humiliated outcast, living a life beyond laws and rights - a life which she found it necessary to warn her friends against. In this frame of mind she tended to resort to words and expressions which it would be impractical to quote here, since they have become outmoded and would give the wrong impression. But in later years she dropped her veils, one by one, to disclose, in her own fashion, her enigmatic personality. One particular trait provides a good illustration of this.

Most conversations with Karen Blixen which did not have to do with the most immediate and harmless of topics, confined themselves to her standard repertoire - the three or four-hour syllabus arrived at by adding together all of the interviews given by her over the past twenty-five years and deducting the repetitions. To begin with she rarely exceeded these limits, but if, just once in a while, she did bring her entire personality to bear and direct it straight at one, this was always accompanied by an astonishing little ceremony. She would lift her mantilla or her shawl and draw it across her mouth and the lower half of her face. Thus masked, she would then listen and talk. This was no more surprising than plenty of other things and I never found occasion to ask the reason for it. One evening some years later, when many things seemed to be going wrong for me, she asked me to tell her about myself; indeed, she put the strongest imaginable pressure on me. And I did, in fact, make a start, but then lost the thread momentarily, on happening to look up. For in the gloom of the green room the lower half of her face shone brightly as a silver salver held up to the light. And some years later again, on the front cover of her book Shadows on the Grass, she published a picture of herself standing on one leg with the light falling across the lower half of her face, thereby depicted in the same manner as the dangerous, all-powerful women of her tales.
1962
Aage Henriksen is Professor Emeritus in Nordic Literature at the University of Copenhagen and was a close friend of Karen Blixen.
The article was published in The Divine Child and Other Essays, 1962

Translated by Barbara Haveland