Between Two Worlds

The Age

Saturday January 20, 2007

Janine Burke

From the depths of dark Denmark to African safaris, Janine Burke follows in Karen Blixen's footsteps.

I HAD just missed George Clooney. According to Josephine Thangwa, curator of Nairobi's Karen Blixen Museum, "Everyone comes here." Clooney was on his way to Darfur to plead for aid in war-torn Sudan.

Karen Blixen's former home, 15 kilometres from Nairobi, was the site for Out of Africa, starring Meryl Streep as Blixen and Robert Redford as her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, and based on Blixen's evocative memoir of the same name. Released in 1985, it won a clutch of Oscars, including best film.

Strolling up the long drive, across the lush green lawns towards the gracious grey-stone manor with its view of the Ngong Hills, I felt I was walking into the movie.

Blixen's life was certainly dramatic. Born in Denmark, she arrived in Africa in 1913, with her husband, Count Bror von Blixen-Finecke. Their plan to farm cattle was shelved in favour of the potentially more lucrative coffee harvest. It was a disastrous mistake.

The property is spectacular and Karen immediately fell in love with it, describing it as "a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance either; it was Africa distilled up through 6000 feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent."

But so high it was unsuitable for growing coffee. The crop failed year after year and even when it was capable of producing a harvest, the returns were minimal. The most plaintive note in Karen's letters home to her family, who were also her backers and creditors, is her consistent belief that the farm could be saved.

Early safaris were the Blixens' honeymoon, a brief period of shared happiness, when Karen discovered that she relished hunting. Some of the most intense passages in Out of Africa describe the hunt. Late in life she boasted: "When I first came out to Africa I could not live without getting a fine specimen of each single kind of African game."

In 1914, Karen was diagnosed with syphilis, the result of Bror's philandering, and she travelled home to Denmark for treatment. Arsenic injections were prescribed but did not effect a cure. The disease was tricky, usually returning with full force decades after the initial infection.

Karen was luckier than most. Though over the years she endured a host of hideous symptoms, she did not succumb to madness or paralysis. Her illness roused a fighting spirit - and her taste for irony, perversity, paradox and extremes. Appalling snob that she was, Karen announced that although it might sound "beastly . . . the world being as it is, it was worth having syphilis in order to become a 'Baroness'."

Her home, originally known as Mbogani House (Swahili for "in the forest"), is a restful place that she elegantly decorated. Following Kenyan independence from British rule in 1963, the Danish government bought Mbogani House and 15 hectares of land, donating them to the National Museums of Kenya. A group of Danish expatriates living in Kenya, led by Tove Hussein, began lobbying the government to establish a museum.

Hussein had arrived in Nairobi in 1968 as an aid worker. In those days, she recalls, Nairobi was "like a village. You could walk from one end of the town to another."

Hussein was fascinated by Blixen's life. But, in post-colonial Africa, she encountered difficulties raising money to preserve the home of a European aristocrat. Then "Hollywood came to Kenya", as Hussein notes. Universal Studios, which made Out of Africa, paid for the house's restoration. The studio also donated many of the furnishings and clothes made or sourced for the film.

Robert Redford's portrayal of Finch Hatton is far from the real man who was tall, thin and bald, the son of an earl, an Oxford graduate, witty and elusive, adored by all who knew him and a redoubtable hunter. Karen met Finch Hatton in 1918 at Muthaiga Country Club, the watering hole of the white Kenyan elite, and the most fabulously atmospheric place I have ever stayed.

Designed like an English gentleman's club and surrounded by vast, manicured grounds, Muthaiga remains an oasis of charm and comfort in rough-and-ready Nairobi. High tea is served every day at four and there is even a stuffed lion in the hall.

Muthaiga was the right place to seduce Finch Hatton, famous as it was for hosting grand dinners as well as the riotous parties and reckless amours of the White Mischief set. Even Edward, Prince of Wales, who visited the colony in 1928, conducted an affair there.

Karen pursued Denys with guile, charm and persistence until he finally succumbed. She and Bror had divorced, and Denys moved into Bror's old room, leading Karen to declare, "I have never been as happy in my life" because she was in the company of the "most wonderful being on earth". Yet when Denys departed, either to visit family in England or to go on safari, she slumped into depression, often retiring to bed for weeks.

By 1929 the farm was in such deep financial trouble that, against Karen's wishes, the family company decided to sell. Denys had left her - solitary and self-contained, he was unwilling to help shoulder her problems. Following the sale of the property, and while preparing to return to Denmark, Karen heard that Denys had been killed when his light plane crashed. In her grief she tried to commit suicide after his funeral.

Rungstedlund, Karen's family home, built around 1680, was originally an inn with a farm attached, on the coast road from Copenhagen to Elsinore. Shakespeare set Hamlet at Elsinore's Kronborg Castle, though the Bard never went there. A big, two-storey, L-shaped building, Rungstedlund is surrounded by 16 hectares of fields and woods and today is the Karen Blixen Museum.

In the warm months, the air is alive with birdsong. Swallows arrive in the spring after their long journey from Africa and there are woodpeckers, jackdaws, chaffinches and robins.

During the long northern winter, when it is light for only three hours, Rungstedlund is a bleak and solemn place, covered with snow. It faces the shimmering blue Sound, the narrow stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. From Karen's modest study at the front of the house, the Swedish coast can be glimpsed.

Karen had returned to her mother's home, disgraced, bereft and exhausted. But in that caring, stable environment, where she was relieved of the farm's tremendous pressures, she began to write. With a determination fuelled by her catastrophes, she completed Seven Gothic Tales, a collection of sexy, dark and witty stories published in 1933 to acclaim, especially in the US.

Though Tales was published under her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen, her next book, Out of Africa, came out in 1937 under her own name. Ernest Hemingway believed it should have won her the Nobel prize.

Marianne Asmussen, the museum's dynamic director, thought carefully about "how to tell the story of a storyteller", because Karen's life provided "two very different cultural viewpoints". The differences between Kenya and Denmark are extreme, indicative of Karen's own personality. I understand why she escaped to Africa, to somewhere romantic and unpredictable, a place both heartbreaking and inspiring.

It was a necessary journey, but so was going home, where she became a writer.

© 2007 The Age

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