Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on Flamingoes)

“The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherche curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.” —Danish novelist Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), Out of Africa (1937)

The image accompanying this post, of flamingoes in West Coast National Park, South Africa, was taken on Jan. 1, 2000, by flowcomm.

Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on Sorrow and Storytelling)

“I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.” —Danish novelist Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), quoted by Bent Mohn in “Talk With Isak Dinesen,” The New York Times Book Review, Nov. 3, 1957

At least one of Dinesen’s works, Out of Africa, might be viewed in light of her explanation about making sense of sorrow. The memoir was born out of grief over her relationship with adulterous husband Baron Bror Blixen; the death of lover Denys Finch Hatton; and even the loss of the farm in Kenya she had come to cherish. (One of its most quoted lines, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” is deceptively simple; the verb, while indicating ownership, is in past tense, already signaling dispossession.)

(The image accompanying this post is from the Oscar-winning movie adaptation of Out of Africa, with Meryl Streep as Dinesen and Klaus Maria Brandauer as Baron Blixen. Robert Redford, unpictured, played Finch Hatton.)

Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on Sorrows and Stories)

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”—Danish author Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), quoted in Hannah Arendt., The Human Condition (1958)

Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on the ‘Difference Between God and Human Beings’)

“The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast....Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.” —Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

This Day in Literary History (McCullers and Dinesen Meet Miller and Monroe)

February 5, 1959 – At the request of a writer she had come to admire, the Baroness Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), Carson McCullers held a luncheon at her home in Nyack, N.Y., that brought together the Out of Africa memoirist with America’s reigning sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, and Monroe’s husband, Arthur Miller.

A former colleague who has remained my great friend more than 20 years later introduced me to Nyack. In certain ways, this Rockland County village reminds me of my hometown, Englewood, N.J.—a community accessible to New York City by public transportation, multicultural, overwhelmingly Democratic in politics, and enjoying something of a downtown revival in recent years.

Yet, for all of Englewood’s galleries, Nyack has an even more powerful arts presence. Residents of the village have included not only McCullers, but also realist painter Edward Hopper, playwright Charles MacArthur and his wife Helen Hayes, and Rosie O’Donnell. The plethora of beautifully preserved Victorian homes are an artistic asset all by themselves.

I noticed on the Web that a link to the McCullers Center in town – presumably, the novelist’s longtime home – is no longer active. I hope that the home is still operating. If those walls could only talk!

For starters, I’d love to hear the voices from this particular encounter. I first became aware of this grand summit of celebrated female misfits when I read First Encounters: A Book of Memorable Meetings, a 1994 collection of vivid color drawings and accompanying essays that originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, created by the husband-and-wife team of Edward and Nancy Caldwell Sorel. The 1975 Virginia Spencer Carr biography of McCullers, The Lonely Hunter, filled in the details.

At a joint meeting of the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters in January 1959, McCullers not only had the chance to meet the Danish writer whose African tales she had admired for years, but also fulfill one of the latter’s wishes: to meet Monroe. Even the particular dietary requirements of “Tanya” (the English name by which Dinesen wanted to be known) – oysters, white grapes, and champagne – proved to be only a temporary obstacle.

At the dinner, the normally loquacious McCullers yielded the floor to her wraithlike foreign guest, who related a story that her Southern-born host later claimed was used verbatim in Dinesen’s collection Shadows on the Grass two years later. Monroe had her own tale to relate – her hilariously misguided attempt to whip up the kind of homemade noodles that her mother-in-law used to make in “the old country”.

Later, McCullers would claim that she played a record, whereupon the three women danced together on top of her black marble dining table—an account that Miller disputed, given the frail condition of the hostess and her 80-something-pound, wrinkled foreign guest.

No matter—what was true was that Dinesen compared the American actress to a lion cub in her vitality and innocence, and that, in Miller’s summation of the relationship between his wife and his hostess, “there was certainly a natural sympathy between the two women who lived close to death.”