Winter’s Tales
On Isak Dinesen, twentieth-century Scheherazade.
The author of these unforgettable tales is hidden in two layers of disguise. The first is a pen name that might lead the unsuspecting to think this modern Danish master — “Never heard of him” — was a man. The second is a life on the big screen that has obscured her achievement as one of the most enchanting writers of the twentieth century.
Her real name was Karen (Dinesen) Blixen, and she wrote two loose versions of her life story, first in Out of Africa (1937) and again in Shadows on the Grass (1960). The 1985 film of the former introduced millions of moviegoers to Blixen — played by Meryl Streep — as a baroness in colonial Kenya, a woman who fell in love with aloof men and told exotic tales over long, quiet dinners at her farm “at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” That she grew coffee and had a penchant for unfortunate liaisons was quite clear; that she was an artist of extravagant gifts was not.
Although she wrote poetry and a treatise On Modern Marriage while in Africa, her literary career began in earnest upon her return to Denmark in the early 1930s. Curiously enough, her first literary success was in America, where Seven Gothic Tales became a sensation as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1934. In that book, and in the even more haunting Winter’s Tales, Dinesen carved out a distinctive niche in modern letters.
Like the lord in “Sorrow-Acre,” the reader of Dinesen always seems “to be walking, and standing, in a kind of eternity”— a timelessness we recognize as the realm of the storyteller.
Writing in a stately, distinctive English (she translated her works back into her native tongue for their Danish publication), Dinesen created an atmosphere that blended the abiding steadiness of the fairy tale with the heightened psychic sensitivities of Gothic themes. The apprehension that her style creates is complemented by what might be called the intrinsically foreign, at times even otherworldly, nature of her settings. Like the lord in “Sorrow-Acre,” one of the eleven pieces collected in Winter’s Tales, the reader of Dinesen always seems “to be walking, and standing, in a kind of eternity” — a timelessness we recognize as the realm of the storyteller.
One of the author’s very best tales, “Sorrow-Acre” has at its core a brutal bargain the lord makes with a woman whose son is being held on suspicion of having committed a crime. To win her boy’s liberty, the old woman must, with her own hands, mow a large field in a single day. From this simple premise, and in less than forty pages, Dinesen weaves a tale that is breathtakingly wise in its illumination of innocence and experience and in its understanding of the “salvation and beatification” that tragedy supplies to human lives. From a small, circumscribed plot of land, and from the eternal human plots of necessity, desire, and fate, Dinesen harvests a vision of existence that is unflinching and revelatory in its truth and beauty.
Other stories in Winter’s Tales relate, with similar magical effect, the progress of an author’s despair, the masquerade of an ardent lover, the dreams of a child, and the longing of a king. Suffused with both the ominous darkness and the glad promise of folktales, they are polished to a gem-like brilliance by this modern master’s singular finesse.
