Blixen’s work to be film

Press, 15 May 1985, Page 34

Blixen’s work to be film

By

ANDREW HILL

of Reuters

through NZPA Nairobi Rain fell on the Ngong hills, west of Nairobi, on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Karen Blixen, one of the finest white writers in the region. The author would have approved of the weather. “I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain on the Ngong,” the author once wrote of the four peaks where her doomed coffee farm and most famous work, “Out of Africa,” were located. There were no formal celebrations here of the anniversary of her birth in Denmark, but the American stars, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, are making a film of her book not far from the Ngong hills under the director, Sydney Pollack.

The Nairobi suburb where the film crew has erected facades of 1930 s Nairobi — the railway station, the shops, and the post office — is named Karen after the woman who once lived there.

It is a smart residential area with large houses, many from the 1930 s settler period with long driveways and tall gum trees. Linousines await their next trip to the nearby race track or the manicured golf course of the Karen Country Club.

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills,” run the opening words of “Out of Africa.” “We grew coffee on my farm. We were never rich, but a coffee plantation is a thing that gets hold of you and does not let you go.”

The book chronicles the development of Blixen’s farm, her relations with the Masai warriors and Kikuyu tribesmen who lived on and around it, shooting safaris, and the growth of Nairobi.

It does not tell of her marriage to her noble Swedish cousin, Bror von Blixen Finecke, in Mombasa in 1914, of how his loose living infected her with syphilis, or of her love for an English nobleman, Denys Finch Hatton (played by Redford.) She was divorced from

Bror in 1925 and continued to try to rescue the coffee farm from financial collapse. But the love of her life, Finch Hatton, died when he crashed his small plane in 1931 and she returned to Denmark the same year.

The book is regarded as a jewel in the literature that emerged from the period. Her evocation of landscape and her relations with her servants — notably Kamante, whom she took in when he was sick and trained to be a master chef — are quoted as being among her best writing. She started writing on her return to Denmark, still suffering from venereal disease, and her work drew acclaim. In 1959 she was honored at a luncheon given by the American writers Arthur Miller and Carson McCullers and the actress, Marilyn Monroe.

Her first book was “Seven Gothic Tales,” a collection of short stories under the pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. Isak means in Danish “the one who laughs.” Dinesen was her maiden name. The tales had been devised while in Kenya to maintain Finch Hatton’s fickle interest in her.

Finch Hatton was a pilot, playboy, and intellectual — a tall, dashing figure on the lawns of the Muthaiga Club where the white settlers gathered to sip pink gin before dinner or a party. Nairobi society is probably better chronicled in “White Mischief," by James Fox, a finely researched book into the hedonism, adultery, drugs, and dissipation of the settlers’ Kenya that ended with the society killing of Lord Errol in 1941.

Other books include the story of Beryl Markham, a girl who grew up barefoot in Kenya and hunted lions with tribesmen before becoming a racehorse trainer and a pilot who in 1936 was the first person to fly the Atlantic solo from west to east.

Ernest Hemingway is reputed to have called her book “West With the Night” a “bloody marvellous work I wish I had written.”

The upsurge of interest in East Africa’s colonial history — “White Mischief’ will be filmed and a docu-

mentary on Markham will be screened on United States television this year — follows on the world-wide ptsuccess of “Jewel in the S Crown,” a British television series from Paul Scott’s quartet of novels on the Raj’s India. But those looking for a whiff of colonial scandal will not find it in “Out of Africa,” which is a lyrical, " pastoral collection of memories written by a woman \ who regarded the natives > with wonderment as “noble ; savages.” “If I know a song 1 i of Africa, will it ever know a song of me,” she mused, •/“ believing that although Africa had left an indelible «■ impression on her, she '■? would never change the - African. Her life amid the vast beauty of Africa was, she said: “The existence of a person who had come from — a rushed and noisy country to a still one, a country so lovely as if contemplation of it could in itself make «n you happy all your life.”