Books: Anecdotes from Scheherazade

ISAK DINESEN by Judith Thurman; St. Martin's; 495 pages; $19.95

When Ernest Hemingway awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he informed the committee that there was another author more deserving: "That beautiful writer Isak Dinesen." It was not one of Papa's displays of calculated modesty. The Danish baroness Karen Blixen, who hid under a series of pseudonyms, did deserve the prize she never received. Other rewards came: public adulation, critical respect, worldwide royalties. But as Poet Judith Thurman makes clear in her scrupulous and elegant biography, the baroness also suffered tribulations that force weaker souls to despair or madness. "All sorrows can be borne," she declared, "if you put them into a story," and most of her 77 years were spent transmuting the tragic into the anecdotal.

Karen Dinesen was nine when her beloved father hanged himself. The aristocrat had been an adventurer and writer in his youth; along the way he contracted syphilis. The symptoms, combined with an inborn melancholia, undid him. His life haunted Karen's. The imaginative, brilliant child read her father's account of his travels with American Indians, written under the Chippewa name Boganis. Her literary career began with a play entitled The Revenge of Truth; when she was 22, her first published tale was signed Osceola, the name of a Seminole chief.

A child of both centuries, Karen embodied the strictures of the old and the morale of the new. She obeyed a series of mottoes: "It is necessary to sail, it is not necessary to live"; "Be bold. Be bold. Be not too bold." Another, often repeated, writes Thurman, was that the final word as to what you are really worth "lies with the opposite sex." That value was assayed in a series of lifelong flirtations, romantic failures and a doomed marriage to her cousin Bror Blixen. The couple quixotically exchanged Bror's family farm in Denmark for acreage in Kenya. Coffee growing, the young groom announced, was the only thing that had any future. He had wholly discounted his wife's genius.

Africa warmed the Nordic strains of Karen's life and art. She began to tell stories to her tribal servants. The feudal relationship took on the characteristics of a folk tale. When she read poetry, a tribesman begged her to "talk like rain some more." As she invented stories, her listeners came to regard her as a kind of Scheherazade, a role, Thurman points out, in which "the challenge of seduction was heightened by the perils of failure."

The farm and the marriage rapidly deteriorated. In 1914, Bror, a notorious womanizer, infected Karen with syphilis. In the future it would affect her spine and cause her incalculable agonies. Initially, though, it was sexual jealousy that provided the sorrow. After the divorce, there seemed little to hold the baroness in Africa—except Denys Finch Hatton. A romantic British figure out of a silent movie, he was a World War I veteran, pilot, expatriate and gentleman farmer. She became pregnant by him and miscarried. Four years later the lovers quarreled ferociously. A few days afterward, Denys died in a plane accident near Nairobi. There seemed nothing left of Karen's life but recollected griefs: she decided to put them between cloth covers.