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In Isak Dinesen's view. Africa is Nature's pantheon, in which people and animals acquire a kind of equivalence of qualities. A giraffe is "so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plain in long garbs, draperies of morning mist or mirage." Isak Dinesen's mind is not always on Africa and it is very much her own: "I have at times reflected that the strong sex reaches its highest point of lovableness at the age of twelve to 17—to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90." This apparently held for Baron Blixen, whom she divorced after seven years of marriage, when he was 43 and she 36. A notable big-game hunter, the baron served as the model for Hemingway's white hunter in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
A Nobler Race. Though she last saw Africa a quarter-century ago. "Lioness Blixen" has gone on getting scraps of news from "her people," written in fondness, fealty and demotic English. Recently one wrote: "I certainly convinced when I pray for you to almighty God that this prayer he will be stow without fault. So I pray that God will be kind to you now and then." The baroness was touched but melancholy. This old Kikuyu servant had done a year in prison for taking the oath of the Mau Mau.
Mau-Mauism is a tragedy that grieves and baffles Isak Dinesen, but belief in the noble savage is something of a family-heritage. Her father, a venturesome naval captain in the Franco-Prussian War, came to the U.S. after France's defeat, and for three years lived the life of a Pawnee hunter and trapper in Minnesota. He later wrote of his experiences under his Indian pseudonym, "Boganis." Recalls she: "He loved the Indians just as I loved the natives of Africa, and he called them a nobler race than we."
Karen Blixen was born in a Danish literary shrine, Rungstedlund, a rambling, red-tiled house near Copenhagen, overlooking the sea, where-the baroness now lives. Some 200 years ago Denmark's greatest lyric poet, Johannes Ewald, lived and wrote there. At 20 she had some stories published, but was appalled at the thought of being an author, "a piece of printed matter. I wanted to travel, to meet people, to dance." And so she did, until marriage took her to Kenya, and the Depression bankrupted the coffee farm.
He Who Laughs. She went back to Rungstedlund and writing, using the pen name Isak Dinesen. (Isaac means "he who laughs" in Hebrew. Dinesen, her maiden name, signifies the same in Danish.) At 75 she still plays lioness of the manor, with a housekeeper, two maids and a private secretary, though severe illnesses have wasted her away to a moth's wing physique and an unearthly 70 pounds. Apart from fruit, her only nourishment is oysters and champagne. With her dark, luminous eyes and in medieval garb, she looks a trifle like a Danish Dame Edith Sitwell, and a tenacious grande dame she is. Too ill last fall to attend the confirmation of the housekeeper's son, the baroness tape-recorded a speech for the occasion. The master-servant tie is not lightly sundered at Rungstedlund. When the coachman died last year at the age of 90, he had been in the Dinesen service for 65 years.