The Mortgaged Heart (36 page)

The function of the artist is to execute his own indigenous vision, and having done that, to keep faith with this vision. (At the risk of sounding pontifical I use the words "artist" and "vision," because of the sake of accuracy and to differentiate between the professional writers who are concerned with different aims. ) Unfortunately it must be recognized that the artist is threatened by multiple pressures in the commercial world of publishers, producers, editors of magazines. The publisher says this character must not die and the book should end on an "up beat," or the producer wants phony dramatics, or friends and onlookers suggest this or that alternative. The professional writer may accede to these demands and concentrate on the ball and the bleachers. But once a creative writer is convinced of his own intentions, he must protect his work from alien persuasion. It is often a solitary position. We are afraid when we feel ourselves alone. And there is another special fear that torments the creator when he is too long assailed.

For the parallel function of a work of art is to be communicable. Of what value is a creation that cannot be shared? The vision that blazes in a madman's eye is valueless to us. So when the artist finds a creation rejected there is the fear that his own mind has retreated to a solitary uncommunicable state.

I believe that this communication is often dependent on time, for it is difficult for the many to catch the tune of something new. I think of James Joyce's long, embattled years against publishers, prudery, and finally international piracy. Or we can think of Proust's Jovian patience and faith in the magnitude of his own labors. Sometimes communication comes too late for the part of the artist that is mortal. Poe died before he saw his vision shared. Before retreating into his madness Nietzsche cried out in a letter to Cosima Wagner, "If there were only two in the world to understand me!" For all artists realize that the vision is valueless unless it can be shared.

At the same time, any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, "I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive."

It seemed to me after my first experiences that the theatre was the most pragmatic of all art media. The first question of ordinary producers is: "Will it get across on Broadway?" The merit of a play is a secondary consideration and they shy from any play whose formula has not been proved a number of times.

The Member of the Wedding
is unconventional because it is not a
literal
kind of play. It is an
inward
play and the conflicts are inward conflicts. The antagonist is not personified, but is a human condition of life; the sense of moral isolation. In this respect,
The Member of the Wedding
has an affinity with classical plays—which we are not used to in the modern theatre where the protagonist and antagonist are present in palpable conflict on the stage. The play has other abstract values; it is concerned with the weight of time, the hazard of human existence, bolts of chance. The reaction of the characters to these abstract phenomena projects the movement of the play. Some observers who failed to apprehend this
modus operandi
felt the play to be fragmentary because they did not account for this aesthetic concept.

This design was intuitive. Each creative work is determined by its own chemistry; the artist can only precipitate the inherent reactions if he approached the work subjectively. I must say I did not realize the proper dimensions of this play, the values of the unseen qualities involved, until the work had taken on its own life. An uncanny aspect of creation is that the artist approaches his destiny (or the destiny of his work) circuitously and only when the chemistry is sufficiently advanced does he realize the dimension of his work. I know that was my experience in writing
The Member of the Wedding.

I foresaw that this play had also another problem as a lyric tragicomedy. The funniness and the grief are often co-existent in a single line and I did not know how an audience would respond to this. But Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, and Brandon de Wilde, under the superb direction of Harold Clurman, brought to their fugue-like parts a dazzling precision and harmony.

Some observers have wondered if any drama as unconventional as this should be called a play. I cannot comment on that. I only know that
The Member of the Wedding
is a vision that a number of artists have realized with fidelity and love.

[
Theatre Arts,
April 1950]

Winter's Tales,
by Isak Dinesen. New York:

Random House. 313 pages. $2.50.

I
N THE WORLD
of nature, a sudden variation of type is an event of greatest interest to scientists, who call the result of this phenomenon a "sport." In the world of literature a similar mutation has no definitive name, but it is a rare and wonderful occurrence and such a book is not soon forgotten. In the year 1934 a literary sport of this type was a book by an unknown European writing under an assumed name. The book was a collection of stories so entirely unique in their very intention that among contemporary works they had a strangely anachronistic effect; the book was reminiscent of nothing written in this century, and to make analogies and comparisons one had to think back to Boccaccio, or perhaps to the German romantics. For to begin with, the author had reverted to a medium of expression that in these days is almost obsolete, the most ancient and the purest form of fiction: the tale.
Seven Gothic Tales,
by Isak Dinesen, is a group of exquisite, weird, almost strangely brilliant stories; their appearance marked the debut of an extraordinary talent.

The second book by Isak Dinesen followed about four years later, and those who had expected a similar performance were surprised, but hardly disappointed.
Out of Africa,
a book concerning the years that the author lived on a coffee plantation in British Kenya, is a simple and tender personal document, written with a controlled and elegiac severity altogether different from the dark Gothic recklessness of the tales. Meanwhile, the identity of the author had been revealed; Isak Dinesen is the pen name of a Danish woman, who writes in English.

Winter's Tales
is in suite with her first book. Traditionally, the tale has a dual purpose: to delight and to point a moral. Isak Dinesen unquestionably fulfills the first of these requirements. She is lavish with the use of the tale-teller's chief stock-in-trade, the delight of astonishment. Masquerade, trickery, swift twists of fortune are only the cruder kinds of astonishment. The real surprise is in the writing itself: the unexpected, slightly archaic word combinations, the tightrope grace of the sentences themselves. She writes of the green beech forests in Denmark in the month of May, or of a young scribe looking out into the snowy Parisian night beneath the shadow of Notre Dame—and immediately the image has come alive within the matrix of its proper atmosphere.

The second purpose of the tale, the moral point, may need some explanation. For the morality of the tale is odd and arbitrary, having little or no relation to ordinary everyday ethics, and determined solely by the tale-teller himself. In the true tale the characters are bound in the end to get what is coming to them; however, the justice is an etratic justice. Thus in the first story of this new collection, "The Sailor-Boy's Tale," the young protagonist rescues a falcon caught in the rigging of a mast, and because of this action he is later spared punishment for a murder he has committed. The tale-teller assumes the responsibility of God, and grants to his characters a moral freedom accountable only to the author himself. And furthermore, he ensures the characters the necessary worldly power to use this freedom; therefore, the characters of the tale are traditionally the aristocratic and the royal, if not in the flesh. Isak Dinesen writes of foot-loose travelers, of despots and a king, and of "that fascinating and irresistible personage, perhaps the most fascinating and irresistible in the whole world: the dreamer whose dreams come true." It is this quality of headlong freedom and recklessness that gives to the characters of
Winter's Tales
their suave and often crazy charm.

Each of these eleven tales is a graceful and finished story. "Sorrow Acre," perhaps the best, deals with the tyranny and defeat of an old lord by a victim more powerful than he. "Peter and Rosa" is an idyll of two young dreamers. "Alkmene" tells of a slightly mad young girl who went to town to watch a public execution. However, there is no story in
Winter's Tales
of quite the same freakish brilliance as the best
of the
Seven Gothic Tales.
Perhaps this slight sense of disappointment is due to the fact that, having already once entered the imagination of Isak Dinesen, as a traveler enters a foreign land, the delight of surprise on a return visit is not too keen. But by any standards, except the precedent that Isak Dinesen has set for herself, these are tales of the highest excellence.

C
ARSON
M
C
C
ULLERS

[
The New Republic,
June 7, 1943]

I
N
1938 I
VISITED
some friends who have a fine bookstore in Charleston. The first evening they asked if I had read
Out of Africa,
and I said I hadn't. They told me it was a beautiful book and that I must read it. I turned my head away and said I was in no state for reading, since at the time I was just finishing my novel
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
I had imagined that it was a book about big-game hunting and I do not like to read about animals killed just for sport. All during the weekend there were references to
Out of Africa.
On Sunday, when I was leaving, they very quietly put
Out of Africa
in my lap, without words. My husband was driving so I was free to read. I opened to the first page:

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the daytime you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful and the nights were cold.

The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent. The colours were dry and burnt, like the colours in pottery. The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe; it did not grow in bows or cupolas, but in horizontal layers, and the formation gave to the tall solitary trees a likeness to the palms, or a heroic and romantic air like full-rigged ships with their sails clewed up, and to the edge of a wood a strange appearance as if the whole wood were faintly vibrating. Upon the grass of the great plains the crooked bare old thorn-trees were scattered, and the grass was spiced
like thyme and bog-myrtle; in some places the scent was so strong, that it smarted in the nostrils. All the flowers that you found on the plains, or upon the creepers and liana in the native forest, were diminutive like flowers of the downs—only just in the beginning of the long rains a number of big, massive heavy-scented lilies sprang out on the plains. The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.

We started driving in the early afternoon and I was so dazed by the poetry and ttuth of this great book, that when night came I continued reading
Out of Africa
with a flashlight. I kept thinking that this beauty and this truth could not go on, but page after page I was more enchanted. At the end of the book, I knew that Isak Dinesen had written a great dirge of the Continent of Africa. I knew that sublime security that a great, great writer can give to a reader. With her simplicity and "unequalled nobility" I realized that this was one of the most radiant books of my life.

The burning deserts, the jungles, the hills opened my heart to Africa. Open to my heart, also, were the animals and that radiant being, Isak Dinesen. Farmer, doctor, lion hunter, if need be. Because of
Out of Africa,
I loved Isak Dinesen. When she would ride through a maise grassland, I would ride with her. Her dogs, her farm, "Lulu," became my friends, and the natives for whom she had such great affection—Farsh, Kamante, and all the people on the farm—I loved also. I had read
Out of Africa
so much and with so much love that the author had become my imaginary friend. Although I never wrote to her or sought to meet her, she was there in her stillness, her serenity, and her great wisdom to comfort me. In this book, shining with her humanity, of that great and tragic continent, her people became my people and her landscape my landscape.

Naturally, I wanted to read her other works, and the next book I read was
Seven Gothic Tales.
Instead of the radiance of
Out of Africa,
the
Tales
have a quite different quality. They are brilliant, controlled, and each gives the air of a deliberate work of artistty. One realizes that the author is writing in a foreign language because of the strange, archaic quality of her beautiful prose. They had the quality of a luminous, sulphuric glow. When I was ill or out of sorts with the world, I would turn to
Out of Africa,
which never failed to comfort and support me—and when I wanted to be lifted out of my life, I would read
Seven Gothic Tales
or
Winter's Tales
or, much later,
The Last Tales.

About two years ago, the Academy of Arts and Letters, of which I am a member, wrote to me that it had invited Isak Dinesen as an honorary member and guest. I hesitated to meet her because Isak Dinesen had been so fixed in my heart, I was afraid that the actual would disturb this image. However, I did go to the dinner and at cocktail time when I met the Academy's president, I asked of him a great favor. I asked if I could sit near her at the dinner party. To my astonishment and joy he said that she had wanted to sit with me, and so the place cards were already on the table. He also asked me how we should address her since her name was the Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke. All I could say to him was that I was not going to call her "Butch" at the first meeting. I said, "I feel the best thing is 'Baroness,' so I will call her 'Baroness,'" which I did until we were on a first-name basis and she asked me to call her Tanya, which is her English name.