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Written Lives, by Javier Marías

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Excerpt: Isak Dinesen in old age

The true image of Isak Dinesen was, for a long time, that of a ghostly old lady, elegant and deeply enigmatic, until the cinema replaced it with the excessively romantic and rather drippy image of a long-suffering, colonial aristocrat. Not that Baroness Blixen did not have romantic and aristocratic tendencies, but it would be fairer to say that she played at it, at least she did once she became Isak Dinesen, that is, once she began to be published under that and other names, and returned to Denmark after her long, unsuccessful years in Africa. "We wear masks as we grow older, the masks of our age, but the young…think that we are the way we look. But that is not the case."

When, in 1959, she made her first visit to America, the country where her books had achieved most success and been received with most interest, she was preceded by endless rumours and mysteries: she is, in fact, a man; he is, in fact, a woman; Isak Dinesen is actually two people, brother and sister; Isak Dinesen lived in Boston in 1870; she's from Paris really; he lives in Elsinore; she spends most of her time in London; she's a nun; he's very hospitable and welcomes young writers as his guests; she's rarely seen and lives like a recluse; she writes in French; no, in English; no, in Danish; no, in… When she finally made her appearance at the numerous parties to which she was invited and at the packed public readings where she told her stories entirely without the aid of notes, they discovered that she was a frail, eccentric old lady, deeply lined and with matchstick-thin arms, all dressed in black, with a turban on her head, diamonds in her ears and large amounts of kohl around her eyes. Despite this, the legend continued, albeit along more concrete lines: according to the Americans, she lived on a diet of oysters and champagne, which was not quite true, for she also consumed prawns, asparagus, grapes and tea. When Isak Dinesen expressed a desire to meet Marilyn Monroe, the novelist Carson McCullers managed to arrange this, and, at a famous lunch, the three women shared a table with Arthur Miller, the husband par excellence, who, surprised by the Baroness's eating habits, asked which doctor had prescribed this diet of oysters and champagne. They say that America has never seen the like of the scornful look she gave him: "Doctor?" she said. "The doctors are horrified, but I love champagne and I love oysters and they do me good." Miller went on to make some comment about protein, and it seems that the second scornful look she gave him will also never be seen again on American soil: "I don't know anything about that," came her reply, "I am an old woman and I eat what agrees with me." The Baroness got on much better with Marilyn Monroe.

The truth is that Isak Dinesen lived mainly at Rungstedlund, her childhood home in Denmark, and was obliged to lead a very sedentary life due to her many ailments, the most enduring of which had nothing at all to do with age but with the syphilis she had contracted after a year of marriage to Baron Bror Blixen, from whom, after much vacillation, she was eventually divorced. This husband was the twin brother of the man she had loved from girlhood, and bonds formed through a third party are perhaps the most difficult to break.

Having syphilis obliged her, early on, to renounce sex, and seeing that there was no help to be had from God and bearing in mind how terrible it was for a young woman to be denied "the right to love", Isak Dinesen promised her soul to the Devil, and he promised her, in return, that everything she experienced thenceforth would become a story. That, at least, is what she told a non-lover - she was twice his age and three times as intelligent - the Danish poet Thorkild Bjørnvig, with whom she made a strange pact when she was sixty-four and whom she dominated and kept in a state of complete subjugation for four years. She enjoyed frightening this non-lover with her abrupt changes of mood, her calculated surprises, her charm and her disconcerting but always persuasive views. On one occasion, she startled him with this explanation of the nature of her being: "You are better than I am, that is the problem," she told him. "The difference between us is that you have an immortal soul and I do not. It is the same with mermaids and water sprites, they do not have one either. They live longer than those with immortal souls, but when they die, they disappear totally and without a trace. But who can entertain and please and transport people better than a water sprite when she is present, when she plays and enchants and makes people dance more wildly and love more ardently than they normally do? She will disappear and all that she leaves behind is a streak of water along the floor."

When this poet (whom she urged to leave both wife and child in order to spend long periods "creating" in her house in Rungstedlund) proved inadequate to the task (as was nearly always the case), the Baroness would grow angry and mistreat him, as she would when he dared to express any reservations about her own writings. But Isak Dinesen was never constant and, after some enormous row, she was capable of behaving perfectly charmingly at their next meeting, as if nothing had happened, even congratulating her non-lover on his incorruptible critical sense. Such transformations were typical of her, and the poet Bjørnvig tells how, one night, for reasons that escaped even him, Isak Dinesen flew into a rage and was transformed into a decrepit, gesticulating fury, shrivelled up with anger, and leaving him feeling wretched and paralysed. Afterwards, when the poet had returned to his room, the Baroness slipped in and sat down on the edge of his bed: now, however, she looked radiant, transfigured, as lovely as a seventeen-year-old. Björnvig confessed that had he not personally witnessed the transformation, he himself would not have believed it possible.

The Baroness also provided this non-lover and her friends with moments of enormous pleasure, enchantment and reverie. On one occasion, and in the middle of a delightful evening, she got up and left the room. She came back a little later carrying a revolver, which she held levelled at Björnvig for quite some time. According to him, he was not in the least taken aback by this because, in the state of perfect happiness in which he found himself, death would not have mattered. Needless to say, Bjørnvig did not publish anything during the four years that this rapture lasted.

Isak Dinesen claimed to have poor sight, yet she could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away, and could see the new moon when it was not yet visible. When she saw it, she would curtsy to it three times, and, she claimed, you must never look at it through glass, because that spelled bad luck. She played the piano and the flute, preferably Schubert on the first and Handel on the second, and in the evenings, she would often recite poems by her favourite poet, Heine, and sometimes by Goethe, whom she detested, but nevertheless recited. She loathed Dostoyevsky, although she admired him too, and was a stalwart of Shakespeare. She would frequently quote these lines by Heine: "You wanted to be happy, infinitely happy or infinitely wretched, proud heart, and now you are wretched."

According to those who looked into them, her kohl-lined eyes were full of secrets, they never blinked and remained fixed on whatever they were looking at. Isak Dinesen's father had committed suicide when she was ten years old, and she had told stories ever since she was a child. Her younger sister would sometimes plead with her as she climbed wearily into bed: "Oh, Tania, not tonight!" In her old age, on the other hand, her hosts or her guests would beg her to tell them stories. She would occasionally oblige, like someone making a gift. Every Thursday, she would have supper in the company of a little boy for whom she had purchased a suit appropriate for the occasion: he was the son of her cook, and she had discovered him one night spying on her while she dined alone. She liked to be provocative, but always in a gentle and ironic way, as when she expressed doubts about absolute democracy, fearing for the fate of the elite: "There should always be a few who are versed in the classics." She claimed to live her life according to the rules of classical tragedy and would have brought up the children she never had to do the same.

In the end, she spent several months of each year in a clinic, and the rest, as always, at Rungstedlund, where she died peacefully on 7 September 1962, having listened to Brahms during the evening. She smoked incessantly until the end of her life, which she departed at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried at the foot of a beech tree she herself had chosen, on the Rungsted coast. According to Lawrence Durrell, she would have shot a fond, ironic glance at anyone daring to mourn her death. "I am, in fact, three thousand years old and have dined with Socrates."

Isak Dinesen made these words her own: "There is no mystery in art. Do the things you can see, they will show you what you cannot see."