Recently in Memoir Category

Having read the book, I'd long wondered about the movie Out of Africa.  After all, Karen Blixen's memoir is overly-detailed about her relationships with her servants and maddeningly evasive about the topics that fascinate: her marriage, her love affair with Denys Finch-Hatton, and syphilis.  How could the non-chronological, evocative but not-plot-driven memoir be migrated to the screen?

Having just seen the movie, I can now answer that question: it wasn't.  Whether it could have been is an open question, but plainly Sydney Pollack & Co. did such violence to the book in transplanting Karen Blixen's story to the screen that - in a just world - the two would not share the same title.

Admitting at the outset that the memoir cannot be transposed to the Hollywood movie context without severe alteration, such alteration as was necessary must nonetheless aim to preserve the mysterious, elusive and attractive character of the memoir that remains its abiding power.  Instead, the movie systematically mangled that fragile essence. 

The movie's dialogue is the equivalent of taking a club to Blixen's authorial voice.  Bad in its own right - the dialogue in the movie caused me suffering - it was outright irresponsible as a representation of conversations that could have occurred between Blixen and others in Kenya in 1914.  As a historical matter, Karen and Bror most likely didn't openly discuss their shared syphilis or his philandering.  As a personal matter, straightforward expression like, "I want you to take a place in town" (after Bror seduces another woman) or "I like the way you're honest with me" (after Bror admits that he's dumping all the farm work on her), are absolutely contrary to Blixen's approach to conflict resolution, both in life and in her storytelling. 

But the dialogue is problematic, not because "it didn't happen that way," but because it misleads the audience about the way Karen Blixen related to the people around her and, in the process, kills the very quality of Karen Blixen's story that makes it worth telling.  In her relational approach to others, Meryl Streep's Blixen is a liberated, modern woman; in reality, Karen Blixen was not.  She was an atavistic romantic who idolized the aristocratic values of a century earlier - and she suffered for it, however much her wounds were self-inflicted.  The allure of Karen Blixen's storytelling is the way she refracts her realities through the distortion lens of her aristocratic ideals - and it's precisely that rich and strange distortion that the movie denies its audience.

Karen Blixen was - and is - the stuff of legends, so much so that she managed to preserve herself and Denys Finch-Hatton in a shroud of myth that has endured for seventy-five years and shows little sign of abating.  For this reason, she's a natural for the movie treatment.  That the movie had to refract her reality through the industrial distortion lens of Hollywood sadly diminishes Blixen's bizarre and enchanting legacy.

(Image courtesy of Britannica)

In Black Swan Green, David Mitchell writes, "If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, 'When you're ready.'" (p. 183.)  Funny that creative writing should make the author so vulnerable, but my own experience confirms his observation.  The act of writing a novel, for example, seems to arm everyone around the author, while transforming the surroundings into a battleground where the pen is not mightier than the sword.

I recalled the Black Swan Green quote when reading Too Close to the Sun, Sara Wheeler's biography of Denys Finch-Hatton.  Wheeler is open about her dislike of Karen Blixen, who -- by memorializing her love affair with Finch-Hatton in Out of Africa -- is the only reason anyone recalls Denys Finch-Hatton today.

Wheeler's distaste for Karen Blixen spills over into gratuitous pot shots about her writing: "[Karen Blixen] liked sweep and grandeur, and later imbued her tales with it (often with little substance beneath the glittering surface)."  (p. 125.)  This remark is typical of Wheeler's regard for Karen Blixen, and every time I stumble on another Wheeler's tossed-off, untutored literary judgments, I feel more empathy for Karen Blixen, lying in her coffin, with Wheeler gleefully wielding the stake overhead.

On the other hand, I also feel sympathy for Wheeler.  Her subject, Mr. Finch-Hatton, died without leaving any substantive written record of his existence.  While this silence might be one reason why no one previously published a biography of him (despite the lapse of more than 70 years since his death and Wheeler's biography), Wheeler isn't dissuaded.  She grunts through three years of research, until she comes "to see the lack of material not as a biographical handicap but as a cipher for the unknowability of anyone else's inner life."  (p. 3.) 

In other words, she begins a process of rationalization to stave off the certainty that she's been wasting her time, chasing a phantom.  Thankless task, biography writing.  As thankless, no doubt, as literary criticism.