On Broomsticks

"The Old Hall, Fairies by Moonlight; Spectres & Shades, Brownies and Banshees,"
by John Anster Fitzgerald

"Here were the young women of the highest intelligence, and the most daring and ingenious of them, coming out of the chiaroscuro of a thousand years, blinking at the sun and wild with desire to try their wings. I believe that some of them put on the armor and the halo of St. Joan of Arc, who was herself an emancipated virgin, and became like white-hot angels. But most women, when they feel free to experiment with life, will go straight to the witches' Sabbath. I myself respect them for it, and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick."

--Isak Dinesen, from "The Old Chevalier" (Seven Gothic Tales)

Happy feminist Halloween!

Dinesen/Blixen

A few addenda to my post on Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales. I forgot to mention that, although most of the prose is dense and allusive (i.e. good, but not flashy), it does include at least one stop-you-in-your-tracks brilliant quote. It comes from the story The Deluge at Norderney:

"And now abideth liberty, equality, fraternity, these three, but the greatest of these is fraternity."

Of course, my love of this is enhanced by the fact that I'm a total francophile who finds herself stirred by the words liberté, égalité, fraternité...and that I had to memorize 1 Corinthians 13 ("And now abideth faith, hope, charity") in high school. Still. Great quote. I love writers who can put an unexpected twist on old clichés--and it does seem to me that "fraternity" is the greatest of the three qualities, because if you feel fraternity with all human beings you will surely grant them their fundamental rights to liberty and equality.

Also, having just finished Seven Gothic Tales, I decided I should watch Out of Africa. Very interesting to compare the impressions of Dinesen/Blixen given by these two works of art. The author of Seven Gothic Tales is refined, aesthetic, a Baroness from a vanished era. The movie character is intrepid, hard-working, steadily becoming more independent and modern. Though there's some overlap between the two. Dinesen's heroines are often intrepid, and the movie portrays Karen as a lover of art.

I seem to be one of the few people who don't find Out of Africa boring or overrated. Meryl Streep is terrific as always, and though Robert Redford isn't up to her level, he didn't ruin the movie for me. If it had been only about their love story, he would have gotten on my nerves, but because the movie is about Karen's love for Kenya and its people as well as for Denys, it's not so bad. And it must be one of the most visually intoxicating movies I've seen in a long time--now I've got cravings for a new summer wardrobe of safari linen and khaki, and a home filled with dark wood furniture and leather-bound books. (This is probably the wrong response though, since the movie promotes a kind of African Zen, learning to be less materialistic and possessive.)

Image of Meryl Streep from dvdreview.com

Gothic, with a philosophical twist

This painting, "Frederiksborg Castle by Moonlight" (detail) by Danish artist Ferdinand Richardt, looks the way that Dinesen's work feels.

A few days ago I finished Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen (aka Baroness Karen Blixen), a dense and somewhat mysterious book. Dinesen, a Dane who wrote in English, got excellent reviews in Anglophone countries when this book appeared in 1934; yet her countrymen were confused, because Seven Gothic Tales doesn't fit into any literary tradition. It is not "modernist," or modern, at all. The tales all take place in the 1800s, in a world of aristocrats and the artists they patronize. They are moody, refined, and definitely seem to come out of a vanished past.

I mentioned that knowing French is a big help when reading Seven Gothic Tales; German and Italian would be useful too. Plus a knowledge of European high-culture icons from the Renaissance to 1900: Dante, Mozart, Goethe, etc., all get referenced. Dinesen was also very influenced by her Christian upbringing, and often alludes to Bible stories or thinks about them in new ways. Her characters are the kind of people who spend long evenings reading leather-bound books by candlelight, and talk in aphorisms derived from what they have learned.

"Gothic" can imply cheap thrills and melodrama, but the Seven Gothic Tales are reflective and rather nostalgic/elegiac. They go off on tangents, they contain stories nested within other stories, and though some of them contain macabre or fantastical elements, not all of them do. And even the fantastical elements are intended to make you think, not merely to shock you. Indeed, Seven Gothic Tales is about as philosophical as I like to get with my reading--I am not a particularly abstract thinker and don't get much pleasure from reading books and articles of pure philosophical thought. But in Seven Gothic Tales, the philosophical insights are grounded in the narration or in parable form. Some of Dinesen's favorite concerns: God, fate, and the nature of storytelling.

Dinesen's use of a male pen name is interesting to consider in conjunction with how her stories depict male-female relations. Her characters often talk about wanting a world where men are men and women are women, full of essential, mysterious, captivating femininity...a very retrograde attitude. Yet while Dinesen's female characters are often very beautiful and bewitching, they couldn't be described as conventional. She is drawn to old spinster ladies, prostitutes, women of adventure, country girls who dream of revolution.

Oh, and except for "The Dreamers," which partly takes place on a raft off the African coast, there are no other clues that these stories were written by someone who is currently most famous for "having a farm in Africa." Seven Gothic Tales is Continental to the core.

Here are some thoughts on the individual stories:

• The Deluge at Norderney--This novella-ish piece (79 pp) is a classic example of an "Elevator Story," where you find a way to get several people in a room and talking. In this case, a renowned Cardinal, a deluded old lady, her quiet young goddaughter, and a melancholy young man are all in a barn loft trying to escape a flood. A good introduction to Dinesen's style, it is mysterious and allusive, yet there is a sense of a larger design and it's up to you to puzzle it out.
  
• The Old Chevalier--This is the shortest story in the collection, a melancholy reminiscence from an old man. Contains some of the provocative ideas on male-female relations discussed above, and a little macabre shiver at the end.
  
• The Monkey--I'm not sure if the flagrantly fantastical ending of this story actually works. But there's a lot of other good stuff here: an old prioress with a sinister agenda, delicate allusions to homosexuality, a young woman of immense strength and integrity.
  
• The Roads Round Pisa--This story has an involving and somewhat mysterious plot centered around a duel. The climax reveals the connections between everything in a surprising way, although you'd get more out of it if you are able to read Dante's Italian.
  
• The Supper at Elsinore--One of my favorites, a ghost story that is not merely creepy/shocking, but has psychological depth to it. The ghost of a sailor returns to have supper with his two spinster sisters, and the results are slightly unsettling and very believable.
  
• The Dreamers--I'm not sure I understand the African framing device for this story, but as one character says, "It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it." The nested story is also bizarre, but in a good way, and features one of Dinesen's most unforgettable women.
  
• The Poet--For most of its length, this story of an ill-fated love triangle in a provincial town is more reminiscent of 19th-century realistic fiction than of the "Gothic." But at the end, in a deft twist, it becomes a story about the art of storytelling and narrative compared with the unpredictability of real life. A great way to end the collection.
  

Reasons to Know French

I don't know if I'll ever use French in my career, but I have no regrets about majoring in it at college. Oddly enough, one of the greatest benefits of knowing French is that it has made me more able to appreciate the literature of other countries. Many classic authors wrote at a time when it was assumed that all "cultured" people would know some French, and they insert French passages into their novels sans traduction (see what I did there?). Here are some books I have read that make me say "Boy! I'm glad I know French!"

• Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen--This is the book that prompted this post, as I'm reading it right now. Written in 1934, and mostly taking place among European aristocrats of the 1800s, the elegant, dense prose has French aperçus sprinkled throughout. The story "The Deluge at Norderney" ends with a sentence in French that requires you to know what the passé simple of the verb se taire is--in other words, this is not French 101 stuff.
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov--Humbert Humbert tells us he was born in Paris, and he fancies himself a cultured European aesthete, so he throws around French phrases and French dialogue whenever he can. And of course, because it's Nabokov, there must be a punning or a hidden meaning behind all these uses of French.
• The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy--Not as "deep," perhaps, as the other books on this list, but as it's the tale of an American girl in Paris, and was written in the 1950s when "cultured" people knew French, Dundy doesn't bother to translate some of the dialogue. However, it's mostly on a French 101 level.
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy--I actually read this book before I had studied much French, but I remember that Tolstoy's aristocratic characters frequently switch between speaking Russian and French. My copy (the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation) translated the French in footnotes, whereas other editions translate it in the body of the text, contrary to Tolstoy's intentions. I hear that War and Peace has even more French-language passages in it than Anna Karenina does.

Photo by claudecf on flickr: it's a bas-relief above a door in Paris.