Introduction
SHE WAS BORN Dinesen on April 17, 1885, and christened Karen Christentze. Her family called her “Tanne,” which was her own mispronunciation of Karen and a nickname—forever diminutive—that she disliked. She subsequently took or acquired other names: Osceola, her first pseudonym; Baroness von Blixen-Finecke, by her marriage to a Swedish cousin; Tania and Jerie to her white and black African familiars, respectively; Isak, “the one who”—with a certain noble perversity—“laughs.” Her admirers often called her after her own characters or imaginary incarnations. To a childhood playmate she was “Lord Byron.” To her secretary she was the old battle horse, Khamar. To various literary disciples she was Pellegrina, Amiane, or Scheherazade. In Denmark, when she was elderly, she was spoken of and to almost universally as Baronessen, the Baroness, in the third person, according to feudal usage. The name on her tombstone is Karen Blixen.
These names had their own etiquette, logic, and geography. They were separate entrances to her presence, varying in grandeur and accessibility. But the name “Dinesen,” unmodified either by a sexual or a Christian identity, was that idea of herself and her origins which the child carried with her into old age. It expressed what she considered essential in her life: the relation to her father, to his family, to a sense that they were a tribe—a stamme, in Danish—a rootstock. When she reclaimed the name Dinesen in middle age to sign her fiction with it, it was a gesture typical of her spiritual economy. It was also the storyteller’s love of fate.
1
Either/Or
Morality is three-quarters of life, and sex is one-half of morality.1
1
ISAK DINESEN was born to two people who embodied very different attitudes to life. The Westenholzes, her mother’s family, were exemplary bourgeois. The men of the family were traders, self-made millionaires; rich by their own adroitness, hard work, and frugality. The women were high-minded and accomplished. They were also—which was rarer—passionate feminists and noncomformists, converts to the Unitarian Church. But while it was an immensely vigorous family, it was not a vital one. Their energies went into practical or abstract projects, and mostly toward their own moral excellence. Life was like a long and costly mortgage to them; they were debtors in relation to existence, slowly paying off their souls.
The symmetry is not perfect, for her father’s people were by no means a band of decadents or esthetes, nor were they titled. But where the Westenholzes were urban, literate, and squeamish, the Dinesens were country people—affable and lavish—and cousins to the greatest noblemen in the kingdom. The men tended to be virile and opinionated, the women elegant and pretty, and by Westenholz standards somewhat “frivolous and shallow.”2 They did not feel bound to leave a mark upon the world but had an aristocratic confidence of their place in it: a sense that “existence itself was obviously inherited”3—with no moral liens. Their hands were free. Isak Dinesen remembered them to have, and felt she had inherited, “a great, wild joy at being alive.”4
From her childhood Isak Dinesen saw the two families as antitheses, one infinitely alluring, the other infinitely problematic. She steadfastly claimed that she was “not like”5 her mother’s family and that they disliked her. She rebelled at their contempt and fear of the erotic, and at the relentless surveillance that had enforced it, depriving her childhood of its rightful charge. In this revolt, the central drama of her life, her father was an ally and an inspiration. While he lived, which was not long, he rescued her from the Westenholzes physically, and after his death he continued to act as the emissary of life’s dangerous powers. Indeed, where Isak Dinesen uses the word “life” it is often synonymous with the word “father.”
3
Copyright © 1982 by Judith Thurman
Preface copyright © 2022 by Judith Thurman
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: Letters from Africa: 1914–1931 by Isak Dinesen, ed. by Frans Lasson, trans. by Anne Born, copyright © 1981 by the University of Chicago Press; Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, copyright © 1938 by Random House, Inc.; Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen, copyright © 1934 by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc.; Winter’s Tales by Isak Dinesen, copyright © 1942 by Random House, Inc.; Tanne, Min Søster Karen Blixen by Thomas Dinesen, copyright © 1974 by Gyldendal; My Sister, Isak Dinesen by Thomas Dinesen, trans. by Joan Tate, copyright © 1975 by Michael Joseph, Ltd.; Titania: The Biography of Isak Dinesen by Parmenia Migel, copyright © 1967 by Random House, Inc.; Notater om Karen Blixen by Clara Selborn, copyright © 1974 by Gyldendal; Romance for Valdhorn by Ole Wivel, copyright © 1972 by Gyldendal; Pagten by Thorkild Bjørnvig, copyright © 1974 by Gyldendal; The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen’s Art by Robert Langbaum, copyright © 1964 by Random House, Inc.; Gyldendal has granted permission to quote from letters by Mrs. Westenholz, Wilhelm Dinesen, Ingeborg Dinesen, Mary Bess Westenholz, and Ea Neergaard. Torben Dahl has granted permission to quote from letters written by Ellen Dahl and Knud Dahl. The estate of Robert Haas and Random House, Inc., provide permission to quote from letters written by Robert Haas.
