Sunday Telegraph
June 22nd 2003
Prince William’s 21st birthday Out of Africa bash and recent disclosure
that he is learning Swahili should have been a wonderful boost for tourism in
Kenya this summer. Current Foreign Office warnings about the high risk of terrorism,
however, mean that anyone inspired to visit Karen Blixen’s farm at the
foot of the Ngong Hills and see where Meryl Streep and Robert Redford cavorted
among the coffee bushes, must postpone the pleasure. Or go to Denmark.
When I arrived at Copenhagen airport, I hurried past the Isak Dinesen Bar and then the Karen Blixen Café to the adjoining railway station where I boarded the next direct train to Helsingor. Fifty minutes later, after a swift journey through the capital and up the coast, I alighted at Rungsted Kyst where a lone taxi waited outside the sleepy suburban station. When the driver deposited me on the gravel in Karen Blixen’s front drive, I was about to pay for my ride with a fifty kroner note when I noticed it had her portrait on it. The driver, mistaking my hesitation for reluctance to hand over so much cash for such a short journey, kindly gave me a tip. “There’s a footpath back to the station through the bird park behind her house. It’s quicker than the road, and more beautiful.”
It is probably appropriate that a writer generally known by two names, Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen, who wrote both in Danish and English, should have two museums dedicated to her memory, on two Continents. Last autumn I had visited the Karen Blixen Museum in the area of Nairobi still known as Karen. Despite dramatically different climates and settings, the two houses feel remarkably similar. Both are surrounded by lovingly maintained gardens, havens of tranquillity amid ever encroaching urban development. When Karen Blixen returned to Denmark most of her possessions were sold at auction so the African museum is mainly furnished with props from the film, donated by Universal Pictures. For some reason much of the filming was done on a set 5 miles away where a replica of her house was specially constructed. Here at Rungstedlund everything is authentic. You can see the old wind-up gramophone given to Karen Blixen by Denys Finch Hatton and the screen she painted depicting the stories she told him in the evenings. The replicas that feature so prominently in the film are in Nairobi. There her rooms have been recreated as well as possible using whatever is to hand, here they have been reverently preserved exactly as she left them when she died in 1962. Every day the rooms are filled with fresh flowers using her vases and copying photographs of the elaborate arrangements she enjoyed devising. Even her most eccentric furnishings - like the lace curtains at the windows in the living room which all trail several feet into the room across the wooden floor – are still in place. It is as if she has only just popped out of the room and in fact the housekeeper who had been with her since 1949 has only recently died.
When Karen Blixen’s father, Wilhelm Dinesen, purchased Rungstedlund in 1879 it was already an historic house with important literary connections. The 18th Century Danish poet, Johannes Ewald, had written some of his finest poems while staying here. Today her study - which looks out past a busy road at the end of her front lawn across the sea to Sweden - is called Ewald’s Room. I had never heard of him, I confessed to a fellow visitor. “He was a far better writer than she was,” she whispered, “but he wrote in Danish, and never had a film made about his life.”
Karen Blixen was born here in 1885 and lived at Rungstedlund until she travelled to East Africa in 1913 to marry her Swedish cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke. For 17 years she ran the farm in Africa until the business folded. Following Denys Finch Hatton’s death in a plane crash, she returned to Denmark in 1931 and started to write. Although she crossed the Atlantic as a celebrated author, she never returned to Africa except in her books. Every evening, she would apparently step outside the front door and gaze into the dark towards the Continent she loved. When she died she left the house and grounds as a bird sanctuary and museum. Funding was precarious until Out of Africa generated worldwide interest in her life and work
The beautifully restored coach-house and stables house a café, bookshop and exhibition centre with such relics on display as a tin of old coffee beans from the Karen Coffee Co Ltd, countless foreign editions of her books and all her childhood exercise books. There is a photograph of Denys Finch Hatton, looking more like Prince Edward than Robert Redford, and one of Karen Blixen with three deerhounds in Africa in which she looks incredibly like Meryl Streep. There is a picture of John Gielgud taken when he visited on his way to play Hamlet at Helsingor just up the road. The only letter on view from Denys consists entirely of driving instructions: “don’t drive fast when the car is cold: the red should be up to the lower edge of the white circle in the thermometer. Don’t force your gears in if you mistake: start again…” Somehow one is not surprised to discover that the reality of their relationship was not quite as romantic as in the film. The couple had actually split up acrimoniously before he died. Karen Blixen clearly had a gift for self-mythologizing, a talent she shared with Denmark’s other great purveyor of fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen.
I took the taxi driver’s advice and returned to the station through the gardens and bird sanctuary behind her house. This took me a long time, not because it was a long way but because it was impossible to rush. Dawdling past the pond with its white wooden bridge and glassy surface reflecting the watery Danish skies, I climbed a slight hill and as I reached the great spreading beech tree under which she is buried, the sun came out bathing the large concrete slab where her name is written in simple capital letters, in a strange green light. Eyed by curious ponies and horses from the Rungsted Rideskole in the neighbouring field, I placed a marble of soil I had brought from the Ngong Hills on the K of Karen Blixen and as I stood up I noticed an obelisk close by commemorating Johannes Ewald. It was similar to the one I had seen on Denys Finch Hatton’s grave. There is a chart at the entrance to the park showing the flight path taken by migratory birds like the swallow and pied flycatcher to and from Africa. How poetical to have created this safe haven for these tiny winged emissaries flying so bravely between her two paradises.
Back at Copenhagen airport, waiting for my own flight home, I bought a cup of Kenyan coffee at the Karen Blixen Café. The airport was busy and the café was crowded so I shared a table with a man who looked so like Robert Redford I nearly asked for his autograph. Then he asked me in Danish to pass him the sugar. It’s a lovely language and perhaps Prince William should learn it. A Train is a tog and a book is a bog. This could add authenticity at his Out of Africa do.
Fact file
The Karen Blixen Museum