I protect you, you give yourself to me: Karen Blixen's relationship with a poet 30 years younger

Karen Blixen did not hesitate to sit in God's place when she felt she had to.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
27 May 2023 Saturday 22:31
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I protect you, you give yourself to me: Karen Blixen's relationship with a poet 30 years younger

Karen Blixen did not hesitate to sit in God's place when she felt she had to." By the time Thorkild Bjørnvig writes this, towards the middle of his memoir, The Pact, the reader has already accumulated sufficient evidence that Baroness von Blixen-Finecke did indeed like to play god on occasion, but usually what he wanted is to be Mephisto.

Bjørnvig (1918-2004), considered one of the most important Danish poets of his generation, was 30 years old when he met Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen in literature. He had published a few collections of poems, ran a literary magazine, Heretic, had married a librarian, Grete Damgaard, and had a baby with her, Bo. The Baroness, for her part, was over 60, she was already an international celebrity, after the publication of her Memories of Africa. She lived almost year-round in the winter apartment in the gigantic villa of Rungstedlund, north of Copenhagen, and weighed 35 kilos, since her body was depleted by syphilis, the disease that led her father to suicide when she was a child. and which was transmitted to her by her husband, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in Kenya.

After a dinner at the house and an exchange of letters in which the Baroness saw a kind of mystical destiny, a semi-tacit pact was established between the two, the Baroness and the poet. She would give him all her support and protection to become a great author and be able to focus on writing. In return, he would only have to give her his complete trust and devotion. What could go wrong.

The pact. My friendship with Karen Blixen is the book published by Bjørnvig in 1974, twelve years after the death of her benefactor, which comes to Spain for the first time with a translation by Rodrigo Crespo. Barely a year ago, a film version by Bille August was released, with Birthe Neumann in the role of the baroness, although in the cinema it will be difficult for Karen Blixen to have any face other than that of Meryl Streep, who played her in the adaptation of his most famous book.

Although Blixen was friendly with Grete and Bo at the beginning – “he went so far as to say that I behaved with my wife, much more delicate and refined than me, like someone driving nails into a violin”, writes Bjørnvig –, soon She decided that this home-based marriage was an obstacle in the life and career of her protégé, as well as a nuisance, since what she wanted was to have her eternal interlocutor at hand, installed in Rungstedlund, on call " poet's room”, ready to walk around and start talking “about eros, Christianity, animals, the cosmos, war and vivisection”, or to leave on a trip at any time, to London, Stockholm or Venice.

“Have you read the word wife in a good poem?” he asks, making it clear that the bourgeois placidity of marriage is at odds with literary life. The boy also annoyed him: "And you thought you could go out in search of the Holy Grail... with a stroller!"

She never had children with her husband, from whom she separated in Kenya after six years of marriage (but whose surname and noble title she kept) or with Denys Fynch Hatton, the British hunter played by Robert Redford in Out of Africa and , according to Bjørnvig and all the biographers of Karen Blixen, the only person she came to consider on her level.

Like Madame de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, but without the sexual interests of Chorderlos de Laclos's character, since syphilis had put an end to his sexual life when he was very young, the Baroness gives the impression of having used his friend in a loving game for your entertainment, like the author who manipulates her characters.

At the beginning of the pact, in 1951, he insisted on the poet to accept a scholarship for which he did not have much interest in the German city of Bonn. During that stay, Blixen sends another of his young protégés there, Benedictine, whom Bjørnvig never refers to by her name. There, the two begin a chaste romance that took time to consummate, since she was also married to another man and they did not want to betray their partners. “Karen Blixen (…) wanted me to go on an adventure in search of something new, terrible, paradisiacal. To put it briefly: the land was fertilized", the poet realizes, despite the fact that throughout his memoirs he seems to be agreeing with his benefactor, who amuses himself by calling him "irredeemable faint-hearted" and comparing him to a cake that softens when you dip it in the tea.

He also liked to compare him to Hansel, the boy from Hansel and Gretel and used to joke that he kept him locked up fattening him, like the witch in the story.

On one occasion in which Bjørnvig wrote her a letter telling her that she was going to spend Christmas in her own home, “with friends and music and lots of children”, Blixen wrote back with another letter that just said, written in big, beautiful handwriting: "Moron".

Although everything points to the fact that the Baroness had fostered this extramarital relationship, when she found out at a dinner at his mansion that Thornkild and Benedictine were really together, her reaction was "surprisingly violent," he narrates, in a chapter entitled The jealous matchmaker.

The poet had done it all wrong. He had fallen in love seriously, and not in the way she wanted. “It wasn't just a matter of female jealousy, but a radical and devastating anger that seemed like something out of the Old Testament,” says Bjørnvig.

The affair ended tragically when Grete, Bjørnvig's wife, attempted suicide.

But that was not what sentenced the pact between the young poet and the older novelist, but rather. As often happens between writers, what precipitated the end was that one, in this case Karen Blixen, wrote about the other. In 1957, Dinesen published Últimos cuentos. One of them, titled Echoes, is his version in code of what happened with Bjørnvig. The author used fragments of her letters, which were torn and full of Biblical and mythological quotes, and fragments of her conversations. She moves the story to Italy and casts herself as an opera diva, Pellegrina Leoni, who makes a young peasant, Emanuele, her disciple. To teach her "courage," a concept Blixen was obsessed with, she pricks her fingers with a needle and then draws her blood into her mouth, for which Emanuele calls her a "vampire."

Blixen died in 1962 and by then he had not seen Bjørnvig for years, although she sent him a bouquet of red roses with a note when he published a collection of poems.

In the time that their absorbing relationship lasted, he was not able to finish anything, Javier Marías pointed out, when he wrote about the subject in his Vidas escritas, the book in which he outlined biographies of some of his favorite authors.

Dinesen, says Marías, was twice the age and "triple in intelligence" of Bjørnvig, whom he subdued and humiliated but also delighted with great scenes: "On one occasion, and in the middle of a happy evening, he got up and left the room. She returned shortly with a revolver, raised it, and pointed it at the poet for a long time. He did not flinch, according to his own words, because in that state of happiness death would not have mattered.