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Grinning at the Devil

In my university English literature seminar group, we used to complain about historical fiction that suffered from ‘The Bakelite knob problem’. It read like an antiques catalogue, full of unintentionally hilarious descriptions of everyday things. Yet while the Bakelite knobs and corset fastenings of history can be over-imagined in historical fiction, psychological difference is often overlooked. There are endless historical stories with proto-feminist heroines, politically correct heroes and bigoted, moustache-twiddling villains.

Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 but set a hundred years earlier, doesn’t feature any distracting Bakelite knobs. Dinesen’s past is not full of furniture: it is an operatic stage-set of budding forests and frozen seas, jagged mountains and dusty roads. Treading the boards is a cast of characters with a pre-Freudian psychology as remote and alien from us as the mysterious creatures that scuttle in darkness across the ocean floors. The past is not another country: it is a different world.

Seven Gothic Tales is an apt title. All tales must have a teller, and Dinesen’s seven separate tales – all long, some long enough to be novellas – have multiple storytellers. There are tales within tales within tales, each opening on to the next like a series of Russian dolls. The themes are Gothic: doomed love affairs; the inevitability of fate; super natural forces.There are gloomy monasteries, ghosts, violent murders and bizarre plot twists including a nun who transforms into a monkey. But if you are looking for horror, this is the wrong book for you. There are very few blood-curdling screams here and a complete absence of cellars or instruments of torture: in Dinesen’s hands, the Gothic is

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In my university English literature seminar group, we used to complain about historical fiction that suffered from ‘The Bakelite knob problem’. It read like an antiques catalogue, full of unintentionally hilarious descriptions of everyday things. Yet while the Bakelite knobs and corset fastenings of history can be over-imagined in historical fiction, psychological difference is often overlooked. There are endless historical stories with proto-feminist heroines, politically correct heroes and bigoted, moustache-twiddling villains.

Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 but set a hundred years earlier, doesn’t feature any distracting Bakelite knobs. Dinesen’s past is not full of furniture: it is an operatic stage-set of budding forests and frozen seas, jagged mountains and dusty roads. Treading the boards is a cast of characters with a pre-Freudian psychology as remote and alien from us as the mysterious creatures that scuttle in darkness across the ocean floors. The past is not another country: it is a different world. Seven Gothic Tales is an apt title. All tales must have a teller, and Dinesen’s seven separate tales – all long, some long enough to be novellas – have multiple storytellers. There are tales within tales within tales, each opening on to the next like a series of Russian dolls. The themes are Gothic: doomed love affairs; the inevitability of fate; super natural forces.There are gloomy monasteries, ghosts, violent murders and bizarre plot twists including a nun who transforms into a monkey. But if you are looking for horror, this is the wrong book for you. There are very few blood-curdling screams here and a complete absence of cellars or instruments of torture: in Dinesen’s hands, the Gothic is more an atmosphere. With its macabre spectacles and heightened emotions Gothic fiction can sometimes be dismissed as unreal and bombastic. Yet behind the grand edifice of the Gothic castle is there not a sort of reality? Don’t we all experience thwarted passions, dashed hopes and howling despair? By elevating suffering into something beautiful, the Gothic provides us with a safe space in which to wallow in misery. Fantasy and excess take the edges off life’s worst aspects. In ‘The Dreamers’, a storyteller asks his listeners, ‘What is a man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?’ This statement is both depressingly true and ridiculous. Here we can safely indulge in a penchant for melodrama, and revel in the glorious absurdity of it. Isak Dinesen was born Karen Dinesen to a wealthy family, in Denmark, in 1885. Her beloved father committed suicide when she was 10. In her twenties she fell madly in love with one of her cousins. He rejected her so she married his twin brother. Karen’s second-best husband made her a baroness, took her to Kenya, where they started a coffee plantation, and infected her with syphilis in the first year of their marriage. The coffee plantation was a long-drawn-out disaster, as related in her well-known memoir Out of Africa. By 1931 Baroness Blixen’s marriage had failed, the business had failed, and she was suffering excruciating pain from the syphilis and the poisonous mercury used to treat it. And her lover, an upper-class Englishman and big-game hunter, had just been killed in a plane crash. Karen returned to Denmark and moved back in with her mother.She was disgraced and debilitated, but she did not despair. She wrote. For Karen, a life well lived was a courageous life. And her brand of courage was a magnificent, swaggering bravado in the face of death, like the Charge of the Light Brigade. Seven Gothic Tales was soon complete – written in English, on the grounds that there was a bigger market for English-language books than Danish ones. It was rejected by publishers until one of Karen’s brothers introduced her to the American writer Dorothy Canfield, who loved the book and persuaded an American publisher to take it on. Karen insisted on the pen name Isak Dinesen, though it’s not quite clear why. Perhaps she thought a pseudonym would give it an aura of mystery. Seven Gothic Tales was nominated for the Book of the Month Club and became an instant bestseller. At the age of 49 Karen Blixen was a surprise literary star. And I think it is surprising that the book was so popular. The writing is hypnotically beautiful but also strange, difficult and puzzling. The stories demand careful, attentive reading. I confess that some of the tales left me utterly baffled the first time I read them. I don’t just mean that I couldn’t perceive the moral of the stories, I mean that I couldn’t actually understand the plots. Why was the young soldier so desperate to get married? Why did the old prince challenge his young friend to a duel? I had to reread the stories and search between the lines for clues. In ‘The Monkey’, a young man arrives at a convent to seek advice from his aunt, who is the Prioress. The nuns have picked up on gossip: they know he is involved in a scandal. They ‘had learnt to connect it somehow with those romantic and sacred shores of ancient Greece which they had till now held in high esteem’. No doubt readers in 1934 readily understood that ‘Greece’ was a veiled reference to homosexuality, but it was less immediately obvious in forthright 2018. However, the opacity of the Tales didn’t put me off. It was delicious and tantalizing. I wanted to read slowly, savouring each story and teasing it apart. When I finally interpreted the stories I felt like a detective discovering whodunnit. Dinesen’s merciful lack of plucky feminist heroines forces us to consider instead the psychology of being a woman living – and often accepting – a horribly constrained life. Sex is fraught with the dangers of childbearing and potential violence. One tale centres on an elaborately planned off-stage rape. In another, an Amazonian woman fends off a potential rapist and knocks his teeth out but later marries him. There is no happily ever after, as Dinesen’s own life so amply proved. Those women who remain spinsters have a different set of problems. In ‘The Supper at Elsinore’, two wealthy unmarried sisters en counter the ghost of their brother, who disappeared on the morning of his wedding many years ago and became a pirate. Since then the sisters have lived chaste, blameless lives. They attend a dinner party where the discussion turns to whether or not the guests would like to have wings. One male guest remarks that men call women angels, and they put a woman on a pedestal ‘on the one inevitable condition that she must not dream of, must even have been brought up in absolute ignorance of, the possibility of flight’. They are weighed down by their cumbersome clothes, their long hair and men’s ‘difficult and painful laws’. Men are compared to useful prose, but women to poetry. Their sole raison d’être is to be ‘lovely’. The spinsters do not disagree. It is important to them to be lovely. Why then haven’t they married? Perhaps they are doing penance for their brother’s misdeeds. Perhaps no one but their brother will ever be good enough for them. Perhaps they are idealists, and ‘to them the first condition of anything having real charm was this: that it must not really exist’. This being a Gothic tale, the sisters are doomed from the start. The key to their beauty is that their faces bear ‘a generic resemblance to a skull’; they are destined to experience a living death. It is the two living women who are truly the ghosts in this story. In ‘The Deluge at Norderney’, floodwaters sweep in around a coastal resort. While most of the holidaymakers escape, a group of three aristocrats, led by a heroic priest, swap places with four peasants trapped on the upper floor of a barn. The boatmen promise to return to collect them at dawn. By the light of a single candle, as the water rises and rises, the aristocrats spend the night drinking gin and telling their own bizarre tales. Finally the priest speaks. He reveals that he is not who he pretends to be at all; the real priest died that morning. ‘I have lived long enough, by now, to have learned, when the devil grins at me, to grin back,’ the imposter says. As dawn breaks the flood-water starts to lap around the characters’ feet. Acting your part to perfection – and going out in style – is more important than leading a dull, honest life. Dinesen certainly lived up to that statement. She was an aristocrat and a Writer with a capital W. At the end of her life, skeletal and suffering, she put on her furs and her jewels and went on a tour of America where she socialized with Marilyn Monroe. In the Book of the Month Club newsletter that launched Seven Gothic Tales into bestseller status, Dorothy Canfield wrote, ‘The person who has set his teeth into a kind of fruit new to him, is usually as eager as he is unable to tell you how it tastes.’ You’ll have to try it yourself. So why don’t you? Be brave. Grin at the devil. Take a bite.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Kate Tyte 2018


About the contributor

Kate Tyte worked as an archivist for over ten years, some of them at the Royal College of Surgeons and the Natural History Museum. She now lives, teaches and writes in Lisbon.

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