Word: blixen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Beryl, as everyone called her, spent money when she had it and ran up bills when she did not. In important matters, which meant clothes and horses, she went first-class. She had women friends -- Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) was an early protector -- but she liked men better. Her maternal instinct was fitful at best, and her appetite for casual sex made uproarious disarray of her marriages. Blixen once wrote of her own husband Bror (who became Beryl's occasional bedmate) that "he looked down benevolently and lasciviously upon womankind and had been raised to believe that the entire world...
...question has been raised whether Markham's memoir could have been her own work, given her lack of formal schooling. Biographer Lovell's convincing answer is yes. The scholar and legendary white hunter Denys Finch Hatton, Blixen's great love and one of Beryl's many, had helped Markham make up much of the education she had missed. Though her good friend, the aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, strongly influenced her writing, chronology shows that the work could not have been his. Her third husband, a failed writer named Raoul Schumacher, did some useful editing, but despite embittered...
...figure played by Meryl Streep was a woman of action. In fact, the writer was a great solitary who tried to work out every moral conflict at her desk, in tales, letters or learned analyses. In 1923-24, for example, she made her famous and tortured marriage to Bror Blixen and her doomed affair with Denys Finch Hatton the subjects of a brief, piercing look at Eros from the inside. Scrutinizing the relation of morality to marriage, she concluded that the two are parallel but rarely converge, and that George Bernard Shaw was right when he said that confusing them...
...Denys Finch Hatton, aristocrat, aviator and athlete, war hero and white hunter. She is, when we meet her, Isak Dinesen, storyteller. But before that she was Baroness Karen Blixen, who in 1913-14 exchanged family money for a title, a farm in Kenya and the 17 years of experience that, distilled to its essence, would form the basis for one of this century's truly singular literary compositions, Out of Africa...
...eloquent biographer, Judith Thurman, puts it, Finch Hatton "was so precious that he is mentioned sparingly" in the book. He is there as a man who comes and goes at the wayward bidding of his own enigmatic spirit. But at least he is present. Dinesen's husband Bror Blixen, the amiable decadent who brought the writer to her great subject, is never mentioned at all. With his debts and his womanizing and, ultimately, his syphilis, he is too coarse for the rarefied atmosphere she created...