She was born Karen Dinesen in 1885, although she used different names and lived in vastly different places throughout her life. Tanne, Tania, Isak Dinesen was brought up on her family’s estate in Denmark, went to Switzerland and France for her education, then moved to a coffee farm in British East Africa with her aristocratic Swedish husband. She landed back home at the now-dilapidated Dinesen estate in Jutland 20 years later, by which time she was known as either Karen or Tania Blixen. She was also snobbishly fond of being called the baroness, although she was long divorced from the Swedish baron. The farm had been lost and despite her family money, she was personally almost penniless—at least until she published her internationally bestselling memoir Out of Africa in 1937, using the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. 

As I wrote earlier, the book details her time on the coffee farm in what is now Kenya and repeated failing efforts to make it pay. It’s anecdotal, telescoping almost 20 years into a series of stories about the Kikuyu people who worked on the farm, Somali servants, her fellow expatriates, safaris–there are far too many lions killed for my taste–and their efforts to farm coffee at an altitude where it belonged no more than she did. Along the way, Dinesen fails to mention the name of her Swedish husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Fenicke, who ran the farm for a decade, and hints broadly at her love affair with the aristocratic Denys Finch Hatton without quite saying the words. 

Finch Hatton was played by Robert Redford in the movie version of Out of Africa, while Meryl Streep played Dinesen, and it’s worth noting that the film was made 50 years after the book was published. Dinesen’s memoir has now been in print for almost 90 years. This has led me to question why some books last and others don’t, which ones should, and whether titles that disappear are more likely to be forgotten because of their dated style or content.

I read Out of Africa after falling down a Scandinavian rabbit hole that has taken me into burrows far from hygge. Well, I broke my ankle this past winter, so I’m not walking the Camino any time soon. Reading is something I can do, and my father’s family is Swedish. So my Scandi dive took me from a book about a Swedish-Canadian ornithologist to Out of Africa—Dinesen was the ornithologist’s cousin—and eventually to Ernest Hemingway, who portrayed Bror von Blixen as the Great White Hunter in his famous short story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” 

One of the things I find astonishing about Isak Dinesen, as I’ll call her here, is how consistent she remained throughout her life. According to her biographer Judith Thurman, she spent her final years working up short story ideas she’d sketched out as a teenager, and her interests, attitudes, and writing remained firmly 19^th century until her death in 1962. She was a proud and unquestioning colonial in Kenya during the last gasp of empire, and I find Out of Africa appallingly racist. Some academics think so too, although many others excuse Dinesen and her memoir as products of their times, and point that out that she treated the Kikuyu farmhands on her coffee plantation better than many other settler landholders. 

Yet there’s this direct quote: “One can always impress a Native by wasting more time over a matter than he does himself, only it is a difficult thing to accomplish.”

And: “The Kikuyu are adjusted for the unforeseen and accustomed to the unexpected. Here they differ from the white men, of whom the majority strive to insure themselves against the unknown and assaults of fate. The Negro is on friendly terms with destiny, having been in her hands all his time; she is to him, in a way, his home, the familiar darkness of the hut, deep mould for his roots. He faces any challenge in life with great calm. Amongst the qualities he will be looking for in a master or a doctor or in God, imagination, I believe, comes high on the list… 

“To this characteristic in my people, I myself owed my popularity…”

Then there’s this: “To white people there is something vexatious and mortifying in this state of mind of the Natives… (T)hey do not thank you, and they bear you no malice, and even should you want to, you cannot do anything about it. It is an alarming quality; it seems to annul your existence as an individual human being, and to inflict on you a role not of your own choosing, as if you were a phenomenon in Nature, as if you were the weather.”

I hated transcribing that, even though the last quote bleeds irony through Dinesen’s complaint that “the Natives” do what they can to annul her. Overall, it’s characteristic of a book that portrays African people through generalizations rather than as individuals, looking down on them in the process. Every single Kikuyu person faces challenges with great calm? Lives on friendly terms with destiny? Wastes time? Looks for a master? It’s desperately condescending and horribly racist. I also found it telling that Dinesen believes white men have a majority impulse towards something, pointing out that there are reckless exceptions.

She probably means reckless aristocratic exceptions, of whom she approved, since Dinesen was also a snob. She very much liked the fact that her lover Denys Finch Hatton was the younger son of the 13^th Earl of Winchilsea, and that her other close friend in Africa, Reginald Berkeley Cole, was the youngest son of the Viscount Cole.

Berkeley Cole, by the way, enjoyed drinking champagne in the woods of Dinesen’s farm at 11 o’clock in the morning, his servant standing behind him to refill his glass. “Once, as he was taking leave of me, and thanking me for his time on the farm, he added that there had been one shadow in the picture, for we had been given coarse and vulgar glasses for our time under the trees. ‘I know, Berkeley,’ I said, ‘but I have so few of my good glasses left, and the boys will break them when they have to carry them such a long way.’ He looked at me gravely, my hand in his. ‘But my dear,’ he said, ‘it has been so sad.’ So afterwards he had my best glasses brought out into the wood.”

So Berkeley Cole is given his individuality, and it’s an indelible picture; make of it what you will. It also lies at the core of what I’ve been thinking about: how observed detail is far superior to generalization. It’s sharp, it’s satisfying, it feels true.

I saw more of this sort of detail in a memoir written by Dinesen’s ornithologist cousin Louise de Kiriline Lawrence that I reviewed earlier. She came from the same class of Scandinavian aristocrats and was less then a decade younger than Dinesen, yet de Kiriline Lawrence shows none of the racism that pocks her cousin’s work. That’s one reason I reject the argument of her many defenders that Dinesen was merely a product of her class and era. De Kiriline Lawrence portrays people in her book as individuals, and she’s not the only one of Dinesen’s contemporaries who does.

Take this: In the far north of Russia during the revolution (she led an amazing life) de Kiriline Lawrence moved into an apartment in Archangel with her first husband, an officer in the anti-communist White Russian army. “I was thrilled with our first real home,” she writes. “The bedroom windows looked out upon the tree-lined Troitsky Prospekt and the living room face a walled-in garden, now at the beginning stages of autumnal decline…

“The house had been left in the care of a servant, Dunya, a homely, colourless woman with a hard thin-lipped mouth and flinty pale eyes. Her hair, combed into a knot at the top of her head, was drawn so tightly back that the wrinkles of her forehead disappeared.

“Sour and exceptionally lazy, Dunya regarded our presence as a distinct nuisance foisted upon her and the master’s premises under the duress of a political edict. All my efforts to make friends with her foundered miserably.”

Dunya is not written as an example of all Russians. In fact, De Kiriline Lawrence seems to have liked most of the Russians she met, whether army officers, servants or small farmers. But despite her dislike, she noticed that this particular woman drew her hair back so tightly that the wrinkles on her forehead disappeared. 

Technically, de Kiriline Lawrence is not as good a writer as Dinesen. She’s observant and sympathetic, but as a stylist she’s prone to cliché. “Flinty eyes.” “Autumnal decline.” “Distinct nuisance.” Her prose can feel mundane; shrewd but neither deep nor merciless. I wonder if this pedestrian approach is what puts her memoir in danger of disappearing, despite the excellent job done by Merilyn Simonds in resurrecting her ornithological work in the biography, Woman, Watching. 

Meanwhile Dinesen remains effortlessly in print, an elegant writer for all her racism. And while I don’t believe in either banning writers or cancelling them—that’s the last thing I believe—most books gradually fall out of notice. Wouldn’t it be nice if all racist works could fall quickly and silently onto the back shelves of university libraries, only pulled out to be studied for what they reveal about the years in which they were written?

Yet that’s not what seems to happen. If the writing is good stylistically, most readers blink at the content, and bob along contentedly on top of the prose for a surprisingly long time. As of today, Out of Africa has 41,807 ratings on the fan review site Goodreads, with the latest review posted yesterday. (In Thai.) Louise de Kiriline Lawrence’s memoir, Another Winter, Another Spring, has 14.

This brings me to Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” I picked it up after reading speculation that the Great White Hunter in the story based on Dinesen’s husband, Bror von Blixen. He’s called Robert Wilson here, and he takes a rich American named Francis Macomber out on safari in Kenya, along with Macomber’s beautiful and dissatisfied wife, Margot. Blixen earned his living leading safaris after he left the farm, and Hemingway was among his clients, so it seems likely Blixen was the model, especially given the guide’s Scandi colouring.

“Wilson,” writes Hemingway, “was about middle height with sandy hair, a stubby mustache, a very red face and extremely cold blue eyes with faint white wrinkles at the corner that grooved merrily when he smiled… (Margot Macomber) looked away from his face at the way his shoulders sloped in the loose tunic he wore with the four big cartridges held in loops where the left breast pocket should have been, at his big brown hands, his old slacks, his very dirty boots and back to his red face again. She noticed where the baked red of his face stopped in a white line that marked the circle left by his Stetson hat that hung now from one of the pegs of the tent pole.”

From this I got a better picture of Bror von Blixen than I did from the any of the photographs I’ve seen. There’s also this: Wilson brought a cot on safari that folded into a double bed so he could provide extra services to his female clientele. It’s the type of detail you can’t make up, and I presume it’s something Hemingway noticed about Blixen, who was notoriously promiscuous and gave Karen Dinesen a case of syphilis that ruined her health. 

The story turns on the fact that Francis Macomber initially runs in terror from a lion he’s supposed to shoot. Wilson has to shoot it for him, and that night Wilson and Margot have sex, coming together out of disgust at the cowardice shown by Francis. The next day, Francis finds his cojones and kills a buffalo or two. Filled with bravado, he seems ready to divorce Margot. She knows it, and realizes that a divorce will leave her without much money or social standing at a time when she feels a little too old to land another rich husband. The name in the title of the story is Francis Macomber, and many critics call it the coming-of-age tale about a spoiled man-child who belatedly grows up. To me, it’s a keen psychological portrait of a trophy wife getting older. At the climax of the story, while again stalking lions, Margo fires a shot that kills her husband. The prose grows ambiguous. The shooting could be an accident, although it probably isn’t, and Wilson gives Margot instructions that are both nebulous and precise about the way to explain away the shooting to the authorities, mainly so his safari business doesn’t go under.

For writing like this, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and is still read widely. Meanwhile, Karen Dinesen sat waiting fruitlessly for the Nobel jury to call, and Louise de Kiriline was left to enjoy scientific honours. So maybe if you’re exceedingly precise and psychologically illuminating, your work can last for a very long time, even if your prose has its annoying Hemingway-esque quirks. Maybe if your prose is a little prose-y, you disappear despite the valuable content. And maybe books by the imprecise generalizer Isak Dinesen, which are already regarded with less enthusiasm than they were during her lifetime, will eventually make their way to the back shelves of university libraries. Maybe.

I end up hoping that good prose won’t ultimately override objectionable content. But I’m also afraid that it might.

Lesley Krueger is the author of Far Creek Road.