Out of Africa - The Movie

In keeping with my recent 'trip' to Africa via Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, I watched the film Out of Africa starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford and directed by Sydney Pollack. I wanted to see again the scenery, fashions, and herds of wild animals that the two authors experienced. 

It is a lovely, lush movie. The background music gives it the same dreamy atmosphere that I felt in reading Dinesen's Out of Africa. (And I realized I should have been reading her words with a Danish accent!) There is more information in the film about her life taken not only from her other writings but two other books: Isak Dinesen - The Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman (which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-fiction) and Silence Will Speak: A Study of the Life of Denys Finch-Hatton and His Relationship With Karen Blixen (1977) by Errol Trzebinski.

More so than the books, the movie shows the harshness of the British Colonial rule, the harm that comes from trying to Europeanize native peoples, and the greed of the big game hunters. 

But that aside, there are some beautiful scenes of graceful giraffes, lions on the hunt, and the lay of the land from the air. I could almost feel the heat of the sun.

And I loved how even in the middle of the all that wilderness, tea was served atop tables adorned with white cloths and fresh flowers. So civilized.

For the time being, though, I am finished with visiting Africa. That is until Maa Ramotswe reappears in the next Alexander McCall Smith tale of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

West With the Night by Beryl Markham

West With the Night is quite an exciting tale or really series of tales made up of Beryl Markham's reminiscences of her life in Africa as a young girl, a pilot, and a horse trainer. 

She came to Kenya from England with her family when she was four. Her mother left soon after their arrival, but Beryl stayed on with her father where she grew up as wild as the country in which she was living. 

According to her story, as a child she hunted with the natives, was attacked by a lion and a baboon (which she killed), learned about horse training from her father, and when he left for Peru when she was just 17, Beryl made the trip from their farm near Nakuru to Molo on horseback alone to work for a stable there.

She learned to fly and used her airplane to scout elephant herds for hunters. Oddly enough, the one safari leader that she writes about is Blix, or Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who was married to Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) who wrote Out of Africa about her experiences working a coffee plantation in Kenya. Blix is never mentioned in Out of Africa, but Ms. Markham writes about him affectionately. I am not sure if their relationship was ever more than professional (and it doesn't matter). 

Out of Africa captures the atmosphere of the author's experiences and is written with just a bit of distance between the author and reader. I felt as if the Blixen was telling her story from behind a protective scrim. 

West With the Night, however, certainly puts the reader in the middle of the action. There is a heart-stopping horse race, an escape from sure death by a charging bull elephant, a record of the author's tribulations on a 6000-plus mile flight with Blix from Kenya to London, and the story of her feat of being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from East to West.

Ms. Markham's style of writing is very vivid and, although apparently there was some question at the time as to the authorship of the book, it doesn't matter who wrote it as the prose is beautiful and clear.

It was a good idea to read these two books one right after the other as the tribal names and strange place names stayed in my mind. Although both women knew each other, I found it intriguing that neither one mentions the other one.

Both books offer a fascinating look at a life that would not appeal to most women. I for one would be out of there at the first sighting of a spider as big as my fist or the first roar of a hungry lion in the night. And let's don't even talk about the dirt.

But bless both of these women for having the guts to see things through and then to share their experiences so beautifully with those of us who prefer to experience dangerous adventures from the comfort and safety of an armchair.

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

While reading Out of Africa I couldn't help picturing Karen Blixen (writing as Isak Dinesen) sitting at her desk in watery Denmark putting her memories of heat-seared Africa down on paper by the light of a kerosene or gas lamp. The book is one long letter to a lost love. Each page is tinged with wistfulness and sadness.

Blixen arrived in Kenya with her husband in 1914. She was 29 years old. They settled "at the foot of the Ngong Hills" to begin life as owners of a coffee plantation. They soon separated (he is never mentioned in the book) but Ms. Blixen stayed on and worked the farm for twelve years. Some years she was successful, other years not so much.

When the hard times only get harder, she is forced to sell the farm and moves back to Denmark.

The book is not a day-by-day account of her life there. It is more a collage of stories of crops, oxen, plows, weather, tribal ways, wild beasts, European visitors, rain, native dances, mountains, plains, costumes, wind, grasses, thunder, missionaries, injuries, and deaths.

I would have lasted maybe three minutes in the face of it all.

The depth of her love for Africa and the loss she feels upon having to leave haunts each page. She writes beautifully, weaving her memories and tales with such an obvious affection. It is a wonderfully complex account of a woman and her love affair with a wild and dark continent.

Wild Kingdom

When I finished reading Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) written about her twelve years as a young woman in Kenya trying to make a success of her coffee plantation,  I moved right on to West With the Night by aviator Beryl Markham. 

Ms. Markham's experiences with Africa were quite different. She moved to Kenya from England with her parents when she was four. Her mother moved back home almost immediately and Beryl stayed with her father who turned his purchased land near Nairobi into a successful enterprise of grain mills and saw mills.

Ms. Markham's style is very matter-of-fact. She recounts flying trips, surviving a lion attack, and hunting wild boar with two Masai in a clean, although at times lyrical, prose.

I am glad I am reading the books back to back as they both share a geography and time frame that helps keep strange tribal and place names familiar.

Like Ms. Blixen, Ms. Markham has a quiet respect for the wild beasts with which she shares the land. Here, in comparison to a passage from Out of Africa, is Ms. Markham's take on the wild kingdom. She is flying her plane back to Nairobi from delivering an oxygen tank to a doctor in an isolated mining camp:

Between Magadi and Narok I watched a yellow cloud take shape beneath me and just ahead. The cloud clung close to the earth and grew as I approached it into a swaying billow that blunted the sunlight and obscured the grass and mimosa trees in its path.

Out of its farthest edge the forerunners of a huge herd of impala, wildebeest, and zebra plunged in flight before the shadow of my wings. I circled, throttled down and lost height until my propeller cut into the fringe of the dust, and particles of it burned in my nostrils.

As the herd moved it became a carpet of rust-brown and grey and dull red. It was not like a herd of cattle or of sheep, because it was wild, and it carried with it the stamp of wilderness and the freedom of a land still more a possession of Nature than of men. To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told - that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

Out of Africa, Out on Safaris

I am almost finished reading the mesmerizing Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen which recounts her years spent on her coffee plantation near Nairobi. I will review it in detail soon, but here is a sample of her style of writing. To her, a safari was a trek out into the country, not a hunt. It is all one paragraph, just as she wrote it:

Out on the Safaris, I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished. I had seen a herd of Elephant traveling through dense Native forest, where the sunlight is strewn down between the thick creepers in small spots and patches, pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown. I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the Giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. I had followed two Rhinos on their morning promenade, when they were sniffing and snorting in the air of dawn, --which is so cold that it hurts in the nose, -- and looked like two very big angular stones rollicking in the long valley enjoying life together. I had seen the royal lion, before sunrise, below a waning moon, crossing the grey plain on his way home from the kill, drawing a dark wake in the silvery grass, his face still red up to the ears, or during the midday-siesta, when he reposed contentedly in the midst of his family on the short grass and in the delicate, spring-like shade of the broad Acacia trees of his park of Africa.

Out of Africa and West With the Night

Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen

I now find myself in possession of two books with African ties:  a hardcover edition of Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen and a Kindle edition of West With the Night by Beryl Markham. 

Karen Blixen was born in Denmark in 1885. She wrote under the name of Isak Dinesen. Out of Africa (1937) is a memoir of her years in Kenya where she moved in 1913 with her husband. They established a coffee plantation near Nairobi. They divorced in 1925 and after selling the plantation in 1931, Blixen returned to Denmark where she lived until her death in 1962.

It was during her latter years in Denmark that she wrote Out of Africa and her famous short story Babette's Feast, both of which were made into movies.

Beryl Markham

Beryl Markham was born in England in 1902 but moved to a farm in Kenya with her family when she was four years old. On the farm she developed a love of horses and became the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya. That wasn't her only first. She is credited with being the first woman to fly solo west-to-east across the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to fly non-stop from England to North America.

Her memoir of that flight in 1936 and her experiences growing up in Kenya was published as West With the Night (1942). She lived in the United States for a while then moved back to Kenya where she became a successful horse trainer. She died in Nairobi in 1986.

Both women knew each other and both had affairs with big-game hunter and pilot Denys Finch Hatton. The ever-handsome Robert Redford portrayed him in the 1985 film version Out of Africa opposite Meryl Streep's Blixen.

I recently purchased the Modern Library Edition of Ms. Blixen's memoir at a thrift shop for $1. The Markham memoir just happened to be the $1.99 Kindle Deal this morning. (Those deals are becoming dangerous to my pocketbook!) I am looking forward to reading both.

First Lines

"Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk."

Sinclair Lewis: Elmer Gantry (1926)

Picture: AP

There is a fun photo feast in the online edition of the UK newspaper The Telegraph. Here, according to culture editor Martin Chilton, are thirty of the great opening lines in literature. Some familiar, some not. The best part is seeing the wonderful photos of the authors paired with the covers of their books.

Of course there are Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice) and Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities), but also Jean Rhys (The Wide Sargasso Sea) and Ken Kesey (One Few Over the Cuckoo's Nest).  I was especially taken with the above black and white photograph of Sinclair Lewis sitting at his typewriter dressed in a suit and tie. I guess the photo was not taken on Casual Friday.

Therefore, not to be outdone by The Telegraph, here is a sampling of first lines from books on my own shelves:

"Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight -- an upper middle-class family in full plumage."
    ----The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of Ngong Hills."
    ----Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch."
    ----Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

"On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology."
    ----The Once and Future King by T.H. White

"Had one been a Prime Minister there would be every reason for talking of one's first tooth and devoting a chapter or two to its effect upon the history of our times."
    ----Twenty-five by Beverley Nichols

"There were several promising-looking letters in the pile laid on Mrs. James Kane's virgin breakfast-plate on Monday morning, but having sorted all the envelopes with the air of one expectant of discovering treasure-trove, she extracted two addressed to her in hands indicative of either illiteracy or of extreme youth."
    ----Duplicate Death by Georgette Heyer

What first lines are lurking on your shelves?