Nom de Plume (19 page)

She later explained that her decision to publish under a pseudonym was not unlike how her father “hid behind the pseudonym Boganis. . . . [It was to] express himself freely, give his imagination a free rein. He didn't want people to ask, ‘Do you really mean that?' Or, ‘Have you, yourself, experienced that?'” She decided to use her maiden name, Dinesen, and chose the first name Isak, meaning “laughter” in Hebrew. (In the Old Testament, Isaac was born to Sarah when she was quite old; his birth seemed almost like a miraculous prank by God.) The name reflected Karen's comic spirit and her love of humor, particularly irony. It was an element in her work, even in the “tragic” stories, that was never given its proper due by most critics. Also, as an author who “gave birth” to her first book at the age of forty-nine, she was a late bloomer herself; the name was apt.

When she completed her manuscript in 1933, she took it first to London, where a family friend arranged a luncheon for her. Karen was introduced to an American-born publisher, Constant Huntington of the British firm Putnam's. She charmed him and asked if he would be willing to read her work. When she mentioned that it was a collection of short stories, he threw up his hands and refused even to look at it. “A book of short stories by an unknown writer? No hope!” he said. She returned home angry and despondent, almost ready to give up. But one of her mottoes in life was: “Often in difficulties, never afraid.”

She made use of a contact from her brother Thomas—an American author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who lived in Vermont. She mailed her the manuscript, hoping something might come of it. Fisher immediately recognized its value and passed it along to her neighbor, the publisher Robert Haas, who accepted it, taking a big chance on an unknown European writer. (When Random House bought the firm owned by Haas and his partner, Harrison Smith, the company acquired not only Isak Dinesen but other prominent authors, including Jean de Brunhoff and William Faulkner.) Haas considered the deal a labor of love, and imposed two conditions before publication: that the book include a foreword by Fisher, a distinguished figure whose name might generate some good publicity; and that he not pay an advance until at least a few thousand copies had been sold. Dinesen agreed to his terms, but wrote to Fisher to express concern regarding authorship. “I don't want the book to come out under my own name,” she wrote, “and at the same time I don't want people to know that it is myself who has written it, even though that is not a serious problem in America!—I'm going to have to find a name to publish it under.”

When
Seven Gothic Tales
was published in January 1934, it was a critical and commercial success. (Dinesen's first check from Haas, for $8,000, arrived that Christmas.) Upon seeing that the book had met with such great acclaim, Constant Huntington wrote a letter to Haas, praising the book, pleading for the author's address, and—oh, the audacity—insisting that he (and Putnam's) publish the British edition. Dinesen was amused. “He had met me as Baroness Blixen,” she recalled later, “while Mr. Haas and I had never seen one another. Huntington never connected me with Isak Dinesen.” Putnam's released the work in England in September 1934.

The persona “Isak Dinesen” made the author a figure of mystery in the literary world. Rumors swirled about the true identity of this “slender, pale, large-eyed, middle-aged Danish woman,” as a critic would later describe her. They said she was really a man, or “Isak” was a woman, or argued that the author was a collaboration between a brother and sister. He or she was a recluse. A nun. Actually French, not Danish. And so on.

In “The Dreamers” (the penultimate story in
Seven Gothic Tales
), the character Pellegrina Leoni, an alter ego of sorts for Dinesen, implores another character to lose himself: “Be many people,” she says. “Give up this game of being one. . . . You must, from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of. I feel, Marcus—I am sure—that all people in the world ought to be, each of them, more than one, and they would all, yes, all of them, be more easy at heart.” This reflected the author's desire to escape her own self. For her, the willful expanse of identity was a path that led away from suffering, from the daily sorrows that trapped her.

A passage in the story “The Old Chevalier” seemed to express Dinesen's need, after so much loss, to overturn the circumstances of her life and start anew: “Reality had met me, such a short time ago, in such an ugly shape, that I had no wish to come into contact with it again,” she wrote. “Somewhere in me a dark fear was still crouching, and I took refuge within the fantastic like a distressed child in his book of fairy tales. I did not want to look ahead, and not at all to look back.”

Themes of truth and deceit are everywhere in Dinesen's fiction. In “The Deluge at Noderney,” the opening story of
Gothic Tales
, a cardinal explains the virtues (and power) of masquerade: “The witty woman, Madame, chooses for her carnival costume one which ingeniously reveals something in her spirit or heart which the conventions of her everyday life conceal; and when she puts on the hideous long-nosed Venetian mask, she tells us, not only that she has a classic nose behind it, but that she has much more, and may well be adored for things other than her mere beauty. So speaketh the Arbiter of the masquerade: ‘By thy mask I shall know thee.'”

Isak Dinesen's lauded debut was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, with a print run of fifty thousand copies—an astonishing number at the time. The BOMC newsletter ran an announcement, along with a simple notice: “No clue is available as to the pseudonymic author.” On March 3, 1934, the
New York Times
posted the selection in its “Book Notes” column: “
Seven Gothic Tales
, by a European writer who uses the pen name of Isak Dinesen, is to be the Book-of-the-Month Club choice for April. Smith & Haas will publish it, with an enthusiastic introduction by Dorothy Canfield.” Five weeks later, John Chamberlain, a columnist for the newspaper's “Books of the Times,” wrote that he was unimpressed by the selection: “[W]e found it impossible to get interested in Isak Dinesen's
Seven Gothic Tales.
 . . . We are willing to grant the eerie light in the book, and the slanting beauty of phrase, but the predicaments of the characters leave us cold. If you prick Mr. Dinesen's people, they do not bleed.”

Regardless, it was a hit, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher's introduction to
Seven Gothic Tales
encouraged a sense of intrigue about the author's identity. She proved a great advocate for the book, writing, “I am so much under its spell (it feels exactly like a spell),” and also letting the reader know that the material did not fit easily into any familiar genre or literary movement. “The person who has set his teeth into a kind of fruit new to him,” Fisher wrote, “is usually as eager as he is unable to tell you how it tastes. It is not enough for him to be munching away on it with relish. No, he must twist his tongue trying to get its strange new flavor into words, which never yet had any power to capture colors or tastes.”

Devour the book, she urged, but claimed she could offer no insight into who had written it: “I can't even tell you the first fact about it which everybody wants to know about a book—who is the author.” Fisher continued, cryptically: “In this case, all that we are told is that the author is a Continental European, writing in English although that is not native to his pen, who wishes his-or-her identity not to be known, although between us be it said, it is safe from the setting of the tales to guess that he is not a Sicilian.”

But Isak Dinesen was perhaps the shortest-lived pseudonym in literary history. The book had created such a stir that the Danish press immediately set out to learn the author's real identity, and, following a tip that “he” was in fact a “Danish lady,” reporters from the newspaper
Politiken
found her. At the end of April, Smith and Haas announced formally that Isak Dinesen was Baroness Blixen of Rungstedlund. A week later, the competition began among Danish publishers to acquire translation rights to her book. She decided to undertake the job of translation herself, a practice she would follow from then on—writing most of her stories first in English, then in Danish. But these were never direct translations; she would rewrite as well, even changing the endings to create original stories for a different audience.

Seven Gothic Tales
(or
Syv Fantastiske Fortaellinger
) was published in Denmark in September 1935, when Dinesen was fifty (the same age at which her father committed suicide). The critical reception was decidedly harsh. Her work was dismissed as too artificial, too perverse, too shallow, too elitist, and too foreign. One young reviewer criticized the book on many counts, noting that “[t]he erotic life which unfolds in the tales is of the most peculiar kind.” In the end, he wrote, “There is nothing . . . behind [the author's] veil, once it is lifted.”

Some critics were annoyed by Dinesen's decision to write first in English—an apparent breach of etiquette—and by the fact that her breakthrough had occurred in the United States rather than her homeland. To avoid offending them again, subsequent books were issued simultaneously in Danish and English—or first in Danish. Also, she reserved her pseudonym only for books that came out in North America; in Denmark she reverted to Karen Blixen—perhaps in an attempt to prove her “authenticity” and appeal to national pride. Still, she never felt that she achieved enough popularity in Denmark, certainly not compared with the adulation she received abroad. In the United States, she had an impressive roster of admirers. Truman Capote yearned for a movie adaptation of “The Dreamers,” with Greta Garbo in the lead role. Ralph Ellison, Pearl Buck, and Marianne Moore loved her work. Orson Welles said that he considered Dinesen superior to Shakespeare. William Maxwell praised Dinesen as “the most original, the most perceptive, and perhaps the best living prose writer.” Eudora Welty called her “a great lady, an inspired teller of her own tales, a traveler, possessed of a learned and seraphic mind.” Carson McCullers was also a fan. “When I was ill or out of sorts with the world,” she said, “I would turn to
Out of Africa
, which never failed to comfort and support me.” In 1957, Dinesen was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; other member inductees that year included John Dos Passos, Flannery O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, and W. S. Merwin. Meanwhile, at home, Dinesen confided to a friend, “Lately, I have had the feeling in Denmark of being under suspicion, almost as if I were on parole.”

When
Out of Africa
was published in 1937, it, too, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. With its lovely, straightforward prose, not the least bit baroque or decadent, and with no questionable subject matter, the memoir elicited a positive critical response in her homeland. Grounded in the story of a land and its people, it was “realistic” rather than fantastical. In Denmark she called the book
Den afrikanske Farm
(
The African Farm
); for the American edition, she'd chosen the title
Ex Africa
, but Robert Haas persuaded her to use
Out of Africa
instead. Dinesen insisted that it be published on the same day in the United States, Scandinavia, and England, rather than releasing first to Danish readers and then elsewhere—a request her publisher resisted because of the logistics. “America took me in when I could not even make the publishers in Europe have a look at my book,” she explained, “and the American reading public received me with such generosity and open-mindedness as I shall never forget. I was delighted with the reviews of the American critics. I feel the deepest gratitude toward you all.” She worried (however irrationally) that delaying American publication might convey the impression that she had lost interest in her fans there or no longer valued them. Despite the case she'd made, her request was denied, thus preserving a schism in her literary identity that could not be made whole: living as one persona abroad and another at home.

Out of Africa
was praised by
Time
magazine as “a restrained, formalized book, which has little in common with her first book.” She captured the African landscape, its people and animals “with the eye of a painter and a novelist.” The
New York Times
called the book “rare and lovely,” and praised its “penetration, restraint, simplicity and precision which, together, mark the highly civilized mind, and that compassion, courage and dignity which mark civilization, in the best sense, in the human heart.”

It must have annoyed Dinesen that a book by her former husband came out at the same time—also a memoir of Africa, published by Knopf.
Time
magazine was scathing in its review: “By comparison with his former wife's volume, 50-year-old Baron von Blixen-Finecke's
African Hunter
is little more than a handbook for big-game hunters. . . . Baron Blixen-Finecke does not care much for natives. Now married to an adventurous, pretty, 29-year-old Englishwoman, he remembers his first wife (Isak Dinesen) for one incident, when she flew unarmed at two lions that had attacked an ox, lashed them into the jungle with a stock whip.” (Bror would marry a third time and die in a car crash in Sweden in 1946.)

On May 10, 1943, Dinesen's third book,
Winter's Tales
, was published in the United States. (It had come out in Denmark a year earlier.) This, too, was sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a huge success. Despite having been unmasked seven years earlier, Dinesen still had a seductive aura of intrigue, one that cast her as imperious and remote. William Maxwell noted that although “Isak Dinesen” was “now generally known to be the pen-name of a Danish woman . . . the Baroness herself is still something of a mystery. The facts concerning Baroness Blixen supplied by her publishers are definite enough; there just aren't many of them.” And when the
New York Times
columnist Orville Prescott reported the publication of
Winter's Tales
, his piece, with its dramatic opening, read more as if he were writing about a witch than an author: “In Denmark lives a baroness, a strange and grandly gifted woman who by some odd chance has strayed into the twentieth century from distant regions beyond time and space. . . . A serene and frosty genius, she is an artist of précieux and impeccable talent who scorns the conventional, the direct and the clearly understandable. A writer, she forsook her native Danish tongue and has written her books in an English of such coldly glittering beauty she has hardly a living rival as a literary stylist. Her books are signed Isak Dinesen.” Prescott proclaimed the arrival of another book from this enchantress as “rather like a nightingale singing in a boiler factory, like a phoenix materializing in Union Square on May Day.” He may as well have been referring to the author herself when he said that
Winter's Tales
was “aloof and separate from every world that ever was.”