Too Close to the Sun (23 page)

Before she met Denys, Tania spoke scathingly of the English (“I find that nation quite, quite unbearable”), favoring everything French on the unarguable grounds that the French were more stylish than their Anglo-Saxon neighbors. The settlers were a poor lot, she thought, especially the wives, and apparently there were not more than ten “decent” women in the country. Her empathy with the Kikuyu and the Somalis, on the other hand, was so strong that she felt they were “like brothers,” though in reality she did not perceive Africans as equals so much as human extensions of the landscape. In general, she liked ordinary working people, and she liked aristocrats. She wasn’t at all keen on the ones in between. “If I cannot be with the aristocracy or the intelligentsia, I must go down among the proletariat,” she wrote. Her fiction is crowded with nineteenth-century noblemen and their ancient retainers. The feudal setup of the African farm appealed to her imagination, and she once remarked that her life at Ngong was very much as it would have been in Denmark in 1700. In her allegiance to the romance of myth, she was, in a way, fatally addicted to the past. But her affection for Africa was genuine. Through the vicissitudes of her life at Ngong, her voluminous letters sing with the joy she found in the pure highland air. It was a metaphorical purity as well as a literal one, as Africa, to Tania, was unpolluted by the norms of Danish society. “The Danish character,” she wrote, “is like dough without leavening.” Africa supplied the yeast. It was untrammeled, dangerous, and closer to nature. When Blix took her on safari, he taught her to use her own Mannlicher Schoenauer .256 magazine rifle fitted with a scope, and she spoke of the “ecstasy” of hunting. She liked sweep and grandeur, and later imbued her tales with it (often with little substance beneath the glittering surface). And she loved the theater of Africa, as exemplified in the drama of a lion kill or the spectacle of a row of Kikuyu warriors erect in front of her house, oiled torsos hung with ornaments, spears ready.

Blix was not an intellectual. “My fingers itched to hold a weapon rather than a book,” he said. Tania remarked privately that he didn’t know if the Renaissance came before or after the Crusades. But neither was he the boor often portrayed. His own letters reveal how deeply he responded to the African landscape. A hunter to his bones, he wandered for months through the forests of Uganda and the Congo, as well as Kenya and Tanganyika. In many ways, he conveys the beauties of Africa on the page more persuasively than Tania. He was grateful to have seen the continent in its pristine state. “So far,” he wrote as he set off for Lake Kivu, “the tourist has not discovered it, and I would like to see it in its undisturbed glory, before railways and air routes have arrived, before luxury hotels and nightclubs have grown up like poisonous fungi—before it’s been tarnished and made ugly by a civilisation which is unable to let things well enough alone.” He developed farsighted ideas about the role of education in Africa, and his opinions of the rights of indigenous peoples indicate a refined sensibility—refined, at least, relative to his peers. He was also a connoisseur of the female assets of each tribe. He wrote admiringly of the softly rounded bodies of the Marua, the chiseled features of the Somalis, and the oblong skulls of the Wamba, which, being bent slightly backward, meant they could “sleep on one’s shoulder without causing cramp.” Blix loved life, and lived it hard; it is difficult to dislike people who put fun above prudence, as something in all of us wants to hang the school fees and the opinions of the neighbors. But there is often a dark side that admiration conveniently discards. In Blix’s case, it was syphilis. Early in the marriage, he infected Tania. It was endemic among the Maasai, and everyone knew that he was sleeping with Maasai women. Like most sexually transmitted diseases, syphilis can make some individuals infectious despite an absence of outward symptoms, and Blix was apparently never ill, at least not at this stage. But Tania was sick. In the summer of 1915, she went home to consult a venereologist—not the most auspicious moment to travel overland through France and Belgium. She had already been treated with mercury tablets in Nairobi, and now was subjected to Salvarsan, an unpleasant arsenic-based medication. By the time Tania returned to Africa, she believed that she was no longer infectious, and the evidence indicates that she was right, though it was not a result of her medication, as she supposed. The primary symptoms of syphilis normally arrest themselves, and patients frequently develop enough of an immune response to be noninfectious. Her later clinical history makes it clear that she continued to harbor viable spirochetes somewhere in her body—that she still had syphilis, in other words, and was simultaneously infected but not infectious. The mercury tablets had poisoned her system and introduced health problems that never left her. But she made a good psychological recovery from the onslaught, and was still hoping for a child. She felt “extraordinarily sure” that she would have one. Despite everything, she was astonishingly loyal to her husband—it is one of the most likable things about her—and she was emotionally loyal to him till the end. “If I should wish anything back of my life,” she said in old age, “it would be to go on safari once again with Bror Blixen.” He had the same effect on other women. His second wife said, after his death, that he had been a wonderful, unfaithful husband and the best lover she had ever had (and she had a few), and that she deeply regretted leaving him. “If it did not sound so awful,” Tania wrote home from the farm some years later, “I might say—that to me, the world being what it is—it was worth having syphilis to become a baroness.” In fact, she was more human than this preposterous remark suggests. When she was dying, she told a sister-in-law that fame as a writer was no match for the normal female life she had renounced.

Tania returned to the Protectorate early in 1917. Heavy rains fell that season, and the coffee flowered like a cloud of chalk. The blossom smelled bitter. Then a drought came and the berries withered. But she kept going. It was a lean landscape at Ngong. “It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent,” she said. In March, the Blixens moved to a stone bungalow called Mbogani (“house in the woods”). It had been built by a Swede in 1912, and came with several handsome pieces of Scandinavian furniture. The dining room and the study were paneled in mahogany and the floor was mahogany parquet, except in the hall, where it was covered in protective linoleum. It was a dark house, but it was cool and the rooms were still and silent save for the rustle of the wind in the frangipani. Tania was happy to be back, despite the fact that she had been accused of harboring German sympathies. It was an unfair charge, as she had undertaken valuable supply work for the Allies, traveling many miles on foot with a team of oxen. The Dinesens were anything but pro-German. Tania’s father and grandfather had both fought the Prussians over North Schleswig, and her brother Thomas had been quick to abandon his country’s neutrality and join up for the latest war, serving at Amiens as a private in the Quebec Rifles. All suspicion vanished on December 21, 1918, when it was announced in the
Leader
that Thomas had been awarded the Victoria Cross.
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In February 1919, the Blixens gave a shoot, and Denys was among the twenty guests. He had not seen Tania for ten months. It had recently rained, and the Ngong Hills, previously burned like a doormat, had turned emerald. Denys developed a fever and stayed on to recover. Tania was delighted. “I don’t think I have ever met such an intelligent person before,” she told her mother. She was in awe of Denys’s learning and the guileless charm with which he deployed it. He began to teach her Latin as he got better, and they sat on the stone bench outside her house talking about painting and music until the hills turned black. Although she sometimes went with Blix on safari, she was more often alone at the farm, and Denys walked in on her solitude. His personality was like a light that flooded her life. Tania wrote home describing him as “one of the old settlers,” a group in which she considered one found “a much better type” than one did among the later arrivals. She was especially impressed by the fact that his father was an earl. “I think it is great good fortune for a country to have a class of people who have nothing other to do than follow their own bent,” she said. If she had a son, she decided, she would send him to Eton. This would be preferable to the boringly egalitarian system in Denmark, where everyone grew up “in the same restricted conditions.” In her vision of the world, the aristocracy exemplified freedom from the stifling moral code of the “bourgeois” society represented by her mother’s family.

TWO OR THREE WEEKS
after renewing their acquaintance, Denys invited Tania on safari. For ten days it was to be just the two of them (with the usual squadron of servants). There was no need for subterfuge. Blix was happy for his wife to experience the freedom he enjoyed, and delighted that she had chosen such an agreeable partner. He had often drunk with Denys at the Norfolk and now started introducing him as “my good friend, and my wife’s lover.” They had a certain amount in common, temperamentally, but whatever it was that they shared, Blix had more of it. If Denys was a free spirit who believed in living for the moment, Blix was the same thing taken to its logical conclusion. Denys tempered his behavior with concern for the well-being of others. Blix had little time for such niceties. The dilemma between going and staying did not trouble him. If he felt like going, he went. It was an attractive option, but the cost fell to others. As for Tania, she had no moral qualms, and had already had an intimate friendship with another Swedish baron, Eric von Otter, an ascetic individual who was a student of Islam. (Blix didn’t mind Otter at all, but he was bored to tears by all the Islamic talk. In the end, he banned any mention of Mohammed between the hours of twelve and four.) Tania’s position in the settler community was awkward. Denys accepted her for what she was. Through all the years they were together, she usually remembered that she had to accept him for what he was.

They went to the hunting grounds of Mount Kenya and followed the whirr of green parrots to the edge of the camphor forest that lay between the timber and the bamboo. At night, after the pink sifting clouds had passed over the camp, a boy filled paraffin tins at the water hole and prepared the canvas bath while Hamisi marinated impala fillet in the oven he had sunk and boiled spur fowl bones for the thin, peppery bouillon that Denys liked. After dinner they talked of books, returning to the parables of the spiritual journey at the heart of all great literature. Tania’s conception of God was interchangeable with the notion of destiny—a kind of universal force that directed one’s life. God puts in an appearance in most of her stories, and one of her collections is called
Anecdotes of Destiny.
Before they found each other, neither she nor Denys had a companion in Kenya with whom they could discuss such matters. In addition, they shared a passion for Africa. Tania was part of Denys’s deepening contact with Kenya, and her lyrical response to the landscape and the people attracted him. They sat for many hours as the shadows of the porters moved silently between tents and thorn trees stood sharp against the sky. The tropical night, she wrote, was like a Catholic cathedral compared with the Protestant skies of northern latitudes—not a bad setting for the heady, in-filling euphoria of nascent love. After all she had been through, she was alone with a man she adored. Five years later, she said that she had fallen deeply in love with Denys when they first met, and that it was not the yielding tenderness so often described—it was like being struck with a blacksmith’s hammer. As for him, he relished the company of an attractive woman as well as the opportunity to talk about books and philosophy. Denys was half sportsman and half poet, and Tania brought the poetic to the fore. And when she was passionate she rose like a wild spirit.

A few weeks after the safari, Denys was guest of honor at Billea’s wedding, and Tania accompanied him. The groom, magnificent in a gold Somali robe, bowed down to the ground in welcome and performed a ceremonial sword dance, “all wild with the desperado spirit of the desert.” Tania was ushered into the bridal chamber, where the walls and bed were hung with ancestral embroidery and the dark-eyed bride sat stiff with silks, amber, and fear. Afterward, Denys and Tania made plans: they would go down the Nile from Cairo. Tania was blissful. To consummate her happiness that year, the harvest on the farm was good. The big coffee drier lumbered through its rotations and the beans were taken out in the middle of the night, the cobwebs of the great dark hangar illuminated by lines of hurricane lamps. Later the coffee was hulled, graded, sorted, and packed in sacks, twelve to the ton, that were sewn up with a saddler’s needle before being loaded onto wagons and drawn by oxen to Nairobi. Once the harvest was in, the Blixens left for Europe. In September 1919, Denys also sailed home. He wanted to buy into a London-based firm that was setting up trading schemes in Abyssinia. It was a risky idea, but none of his other ventures were yielding revenue. Flax had collapsed, he had got out of coffee, and nothing had come of the cotton proposals. Crops refused to grow on a farm he had acquired between Rongai and the Mau summit, and his cattle were dead. Something had to be done. Unlike Delamere, who succeeded in Kenya through hard work, Denys had so far treated his schemes as gambles. Now he was thinking ahead. He decided to return to London to raise capital. There was no more talk of selling up. A more mature emotional outlook led him to seek longer-term projects requiring viable finance and sustained work, rather than merely putting his money on red or black. He was still dabbling in commercial projects, but the Abyssinian scheme, besides having a future, allowed him to explore a new area of Africa, and to expand and enhance his relationship with the continent. As for his romance with Tania: they met briefly in London that autumn, then they were to be parted for two and a half years.