Karen Blixen and Winter’s Tales  

Karen Blixen —  I prefer this name to her real name Isak Dinesen — was apparently shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1955. Since this can only have been for her fictional output, her ‘tales’, this is difficult to countenance today. Contemporary Danes these days seem to find Karen Blixen more of an embarrassment than anything else because of her shocking political incorrectness. But even people like myself, for whom this is more a plus than a minus, find the attitude of the 1955 Nobel committee hard to understand. Blixen’s ‘tales’ have flashes of brilliance like the flight of a kingfisher but are all too often long-winded and incoherent, while many of them leave a very disagreeable taste in the mouth. Karen Blixen does have one major work to her credit, her masterly romanticised autobiography Out of Africa, one of the half dozen or so best autobiographies I have ever read, taking its place, for me, alongside Spender’s World Within World and even Rousseau’s Confessions. Out of Africa is a unique record of a vanished society that, if not quite the lost paradise as she envisaged it, amply deserved to be remembered. Apart from being a gripping narrative with fascinating main characters both black and white, Out of Africa  has many extremely perceptive observations on the human condition and its central doctrine of ‘being true to yourself and embracing your destiny’ is one I wholeheartedly endorse. Admittedly, if you are interested in what really happened out in the highlands of Kenya during the Edwardian era, Out of Africa does need to be read in tandem with Judith Thurman’s Life of Karen Blixen which is almost as distinguished a biography as Out of Africa is an autobiography. But I don’t intend to say anything more about that book or that period of Karen Blixen’s tumultuous life; I want to concentrate on the much later Winter’s Tales that I’ve only recently come across.
         Karen Blixen was brought up in the stultifying ambiance of Danish Lutheranism and, as a teenager, revolted violently against it — in thought at least if not yet in deed. As the son of a Methodist missionary and pupil at a ‘faith’ boarding school in this country, I can certainly relate to her predicament, as I can to her subsequent enthusiastic engagement with Africa. (I spent an idyllic childhood in the Gambia and had no white friends at all until I was sent back to England at the age of eleven.) Although Kingswood School had its good points and I didn’t personally get on too badly there, I found the guilt-ridden religiosity repulsive and it put me off Christianity for most (though not quite all) of my life. The founder of the school, John Wesley, had the merit of opposing slavery at a time when hardly anyone else did, but, in his prescriptions for the education of children, he reputedly stated “You must break the spirit of the child”. ‘Shades of the prison-house that close around the growing boy’ (Wordsworth).   
        The adolescent Karen Blixen reacted intellectually to her environment much as I did by retreating into some sort of intellectual ‘paganism’ which was brought to Scandinavia in her time by the critic, Georg Brandes, one of the first people to discover and applaud Nietzsche. Paganism spectacularly clashes with Christianity in two areas above all: sex and self-esteem. Sex for the Puritans was, most regrettably, needed to keep the human species going, but was inherently disgusting and above all must not be enjoyed. And as for ‘self-esteem’, this was the sin of pride, the most deadly of all the sins. Instead of Christ’s “I came that mankind might have life and have it more abundantly”, the Christian message as propagated by the latter-day Protestant Churches was “I came that you should all know sin, and the self-sacrifice that atones for it”.      
        It is easy enough to celebrate paganism as an antidote to the life-denying ethos of latter-day Christianity — so long as you operate from a safe distance. As Bertrand Russell points out in his History of Western Philosophy, there were plenty of ‘born-again’ pagans during the Italian Renaissance, men who lived life to the full, relishing sex and fighting as long as it was not too dangerous, but who also appreciated art, music and philosophy. But can one really make out a moral case in favour of such people, or indeed for the larger than life figures from the ancient Graeco-Roman era as described in Plutarch’s Lives ?
        Nietzsche makes about as good a case for paganism as can be made on the basis of ‘living more abundantly’ compared to the tedium and hypocrisy of 19^th century bourgeois respectability. But he was honest, or rash, enough to accept as part of the package not only ‘struggle’ but a certain amount of aristocratic violence combined with contempt for women and so-called feminine qualities. One issue that is never discussed in the ‘new paganism’ of today is human sacrifice which, along with infanticide, was widely practised in pre-Christian societies. One or two pagan apologists have argued that Christianity perpetuated the principle of human sacrifice in a more insidious, and thus more dangerous, form — you sacrifice not your life but your animal desires and needs. It is notable than people brought up in a devout environment, as both Karen Blixen and T.E. Lawrence were, often turn out to be masochists even or, above all, after they claim to have utterly rejected Christian humility and breast-beating. Karen Blixen, so headstrong and rebellious for her time as a young woman, undoubtedly had a strong masochistic element connected to her life-long sufferings from syphilis which she came to see almost as a blessing — and which she contracted from her contemptible husband incidentally. In her later work and to some degree her later life after she returned to Denmark, this ‘pride in suffering’ as a source of inner strength and creativity becomes more and more prominent and she comes quite close to endorsing the very attitudes that, as an adolescent, she so vigorously rejected. Tu vicisti, O Galilaei.  
        Winter’s Tales was apparently Blixen’s favourite literary work. They are not really ‘tales’ in the ‘folk-tale’ sense, but parables. That is, they have, or purport to have, a ‘moral’, a hidden message, which Grimm’s folk tales never do.
        Several of the tales in Winter’s Tales seem almost to have been deliberately sabotaged by their author — I had thought of entitling this essay as The perverseness of Karen Blixen. And they are not so much spoiled for ‘aesthetic’ as for ‘ethical’ reasons. Karen Blixen wrecks tale after tale by making her heroine or hero, whom we start off by sympathizing with or admiring, do something despicable. The tale Peter and Rosa is typical. Set in a grisly parsonage, the teenage hero and heroine (who are cousins incidentally, not brother and sister) dream of another life than Kirke, Kinder, Küche (church, children & cooking). Peter, supposedly destined for the priesthood, has decided to run away to sea and enlists Rosa in his plan to escape. He climbs into her bedroom by a ladder to tell her this ‘secret’ and asks for her help. There is a deep connection between the two teenagers, they are kindred spirits and in typical Dinesen style at her best there is a strong erotic undercurrent in the night encounter but only the very slightest of physical contact. So far, so good, indeed very good. Rosa has a crucial role to play in Peter’s escape planned for the very next day and Peter absolutely counts on her assistance. Instead, Rosa reveals the plan to her father, the parson, the next morning. This is a completely unforgivable action morally speaking and no motivation is given for it except a slight hint of jealousy — for Peter will escape from the suffocating home while she will remain. What eventually happens is that Rosa does accompany Peter (who knows nothing of her betrayal) on a dangerous clandestine trip to the port where a ship is waiting to sail on which he expects to get a berth. But, while crossing the ice, it breaks and they both fall into the water. “They might have saved themselves then, if they had separated and struggled on to the two sides of the crack, but the idea did not occur to either of them.” They drown clasped together, united in death.
        I find the tale repulsive, marred first of all by Rosa’s  betrayal, which is completely out of character, and secondly, by the somewhat facile moral that “true lovers can only be united in death”. This is the last flick of the Puritanical whip, not simply “Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux’ but “There must not be such a thing as a happy love”. Why not? Because we are put on this earth to suffer and that’s what we deserve, all of us, especially the good. Indeed, while they are on this final walk, Peter speaks of the sights he will see in his travels and Rosa says to herself, “Yes, why would he not content himself with such journeys as these? Then we might have been happy?” Well, why the bloody hell not! And you Rosa had to wreck everything! I had expected and hoped that, because of some new twist in the story, Rosa would manage also to leave her home and either join Peter on the ship or wait faithfully for his return in a better place than the wretched parsonage. 
        Blixen doubtless felt she was being clever in avoiding the expected happy ending of fairy stories when the star-crossed lovers are finally united alive — not as floating corpses on the Danish Sound. And in this respect she completely negates one of the chief features of folk tales that she pretends to admire as a genre, namely that in true folk tales, though the hero or heroine suffers, struggles and nearly dies, he or she is always triumphant while villains like Rumplestiltskin or the wicked stepmother are punished, and usually punished very severely. Folk-tales are in fact highly moral but in a completely non-Christian way since Christianity tends towards mercy for the bad and endless tribulation for the innocent. Christianity actually wants human love, profane love, to fail since it competes with ‘love of God’. (The classic study in literature is Manon Lascaut, my favourite French novel.)
        Or, take the tale Alkmene which starts off once again extremely well. A childless provincial parson and his wife take in an orphan child whom they suspect is a cast off from a Copenhagen dancer or actress. The little girl is extremely beautiful but in a strange way and, like all Blixen’s heroes and heroines, is an unsociable dreamer who on one occasion tries to run away to join a band of travelling acrobats. Her foster parents are not so bad but they make a point of prohibiting her from dancing — for obvious reasons. Her only friend is an older boy, Vilhelm, who comes to the parsonage to be tutored by the parson. As he  puts it, “The chief feature of our relation was a deep, silent understanding, of which the others could not know. We seemed both of us to be aware that we were like one another, in a world different from this one.” I myself had a similar sort of relation with someone at an early age and know the intensity and danger of this sort of non-sexual rapport which few authors apart from Blixen have described in modern literature.
        Then, the author sees fit to completely ruin the story by making both Vilhelm and Alkmene do something contemptible which, to boot, seems totally out of character. Vilhelm, whose father is the local squire, gets a peasant girl pregnant, the baby dies and the mother is married off post-haste to suppress the scandal. It is not so much the act itself as Vilhelm’s completely casual and cold-blooded attitude to the whole affair that repels, indeed he admits to “feeling a grudge against girl, as if it were she who was at fault”. This is the lord-of-the-manor society that Blixen on occasion claims to admire! Alkmene learns of this affair but doesn’t exactly condemn him, only says he will go to hell, a strange remark for a pagan. A little later she begs him to take her on a secret outing to Copenhagen as there is something she especially wants to see. It is not a ballet or an opera performance as we might well expect  but …a public execution! Moreover, the reason she gives is a ‘Christian’ one, in the worst sense. She says that the “sight of the man’s death will hold them [the spectators] from becoming like him”. And follows this up with the typical Puritan conclusion that we are all more or less murderers anyway — “Who can say of himself ‘Of this deed I could never have been guilty?’ ”
        From this point on it is impossible to have any sympathy for these two individuals. On the return voyage after the execution Vilhelm makes the equivalent (and a better equivalent) of a declaration of love and proposal of marriage by saying he had always thought that “we would keep together all our lives, Alkmene”. She replies, “It is too late to speak of these things now.” And so it turns out. And there is worse to come. Alkmene inherits a vast sum of money friom an unknow source but does nothing with it and, much later in life, Vilhelm finds that his erstwhile kindred spirit and ‘fairy child’ lives alone on a remote farm with her foster-mother and has become a miser.
        I find such a tale utterly demoralizing and literature should never be demoralizing. Inasmuch as it has a moral, the moral of Alkmene is a mixture of perverted paganism and perverted Christianity: we’re all as bad as each other and innocence doesn’t last. A Danish critic at the time spoke of the ‘mature wisdom’ of these tales; I see nothing in them but moral defeatism which is the reverse of Blixen at her best.
        There is, however, one tale which is striking, the only positive one, and it is aptly entitled A Consolatory Tale. It is a ‘tale within a tale’, a device Blixen employs quite often and which I find irritating, since it is a story told by one author to another. It is a parable with a hidden message that I cannot quite fathom but which sounds as if it is both true and important. (A Zen koan almost.) The tale could have come from the Arabian Nights, in other words it is much more like a genuine folk tale, not a 20^th century pastiche. Nasrud-Din, a Persian prince, like the historic Caliph Haroun of Baghdad, goes about Teheran in the disguise of a pedlar, a labourer or a beggar. His purpose is partly frivolous but partly serious: he wants to find out what the ordinary people think about the government and, above all, its prince. The prince’s ministers, afraid that he may be attacked or kidnapped, follow him about in secret but what causes real alarm is something quite different. It is reported to the court that a youth who looks exactly like Nasrud-Din, even down to a mole he has on his cheek, has taken to disguise himself as a beggar who sits somewhere just inside the city walls. The Prince and a companion search everywhere for this Döppelganger  and eventually come across him. The beggar (who is maybe not really a beggar) has a real beard exactly like the false beard the prince uses as a disguise, and the prince’s companion who is the narrator of  the tale, says “He [the beggar] was in no way like the daring and dangerous conspirator whom I had expected to meet.” On the contrary, “I do not remember to have set eyes on a more serene human physiognomy.” The beggar naturally recognizes the prince at once and, on being questioned, admits that the passers-by do indeed think he, the beggar, is the prince Nasrud-Din in disguise. The interchange between the prince and the beggar flows this way and that with the beggar generally getting the better of it. The situation is extremely interesting from a psychological point of view: this is perhaps the only tale where Blixen has successfully embedded the very modern anxiety about ‘identity’ with one of the oldest of all literary genres, the folk-tale. And there is even a ‘good’ ending. For the Prince decides, “I shall no longer walk about the town in disguise”. (But then an ironic epilogue follows to give a last twist.) This brilliant tale and certain scenes in the others make Winter’s Tales after all worthy of Karen Blixen, the 20^th century Danish would-be ‘wise-woman’.      SH 18/08/2025