I wrote recently about falling down a Scandinavian rabbit hole. In fact, I’ve been reading my way into multiple burrows, picking up old books and thinking about once-famous lives and adventures, some of them wounded and raw. 

Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a Swedish Canadian ornithologist and writer.

Her cousin Karen Blixen—pen name, Isak Dinesen, the Danish writer of Out of Africa who once sat at home waiting for her Nobel Prize in literature. 

Ernest Hemingway, who got the Nobel when Blixen didn’t, and who fictionalized her ex-husband in one of his most famous short stories.

Many years ago, I saw the movie made of Out of Africa that starred Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, who played Blixen’s lover Denys Finch Hatton. I think it was on TV in the 90s, and I remember being bewitched by the scenery. It was filmed near the coffee farm in the Ngong Hills in Kenya that Karen Blixen had helped run for almost 20 years, starting in 1914. She moved there from Denmark to marry her fiancé, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Fenicke. Karen Blixen was herself an aristocrat taking a bash at the colonies, and she stayed until the farm grew so unprofitable it had to be sold. After returning to Denmark, she published Out of Africa in 1937, and watched it become a worldwide bestseller. 

Reading it this month, I was astonished at how racist the book is. I could barely get through it. Threw it across the room several times. Some critics feel this way too, but many excuse Blixen by saying she lived and wrote within the context of her times, and in fact treated African people better than many of her colonial contemporaries. 

But here’s the thing: what got me started on Karen Blixen was reading about her cousin Louise, who led an equally adventurous life. Louis de Kiriline Lawrence lived in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, and divided the rest of her life between Sweden, Denmark and Canada. Through all this, she seemed to understand that people are individuals, not unelected representatives of a country or a race. This made her very unlike Karen Blixen. Even Blixen’s admiring biographer Judith Thurman notes that she played with the lives of the African people who worked on her farm the way a child plays with her dolls. 

So here’s what my recent reading made me think about: literary racism, what writers notice about people and what they don’t, and how books grow dated: things that strike me as inextricably tied.

I started down this rabbit hole by reading Woman, Watching, Merilyn Simonds’s biography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, whose mother was Blixen’s first cousin. Simonds writes that she was born Louise Flach, the daughter of an aristocratic Swedish family. Louise grew into a determined young woman who became a Red Cross nurse during the First World War and married an aristocratic Russian army officer. She went with him to the far north of Russia, where he fought the Bolsheviks as an officer in the anti-communist White Russian army, and was executed after his generals surrendered. Louise ended up spending five years in Soviet Russia during and after the revolution, an emigrated to Canada in 1927 as a traumatized young widow. She was hired as head nurse to the Dionne quintuplets, and later retreated to a cabin in the woods of northern Ontario, where she spent the rest of her very long life studying birds and writing books. 

Such an astonishing life. I wanted to read more about Louise and her family, although I didn’t leap directly to Blixen. Instead I got a copy of Another Winter, Another Spring: A Love Remembered, a memoir Louise spent 40 years writing and rewriting about her life before she emigrated to Canada. The story is detailed and loving, and reveals far more about her aristocratic Swedish childhood and Russian adventures than Simonds, whose book focuses on the years Louise spent birding in Canada. 

And here begins my inquiry into writing that feels stylistically musty. 

I’m well-pickled in reading Shakespearean English, and it is with great pleasure that I peruse the charming work of our dear Miss Jane Austen, and truly I find the unmeasured and immeasurable prose of our fevered headlong Mr. Dickens to be a wonderful species of theatre (although it is also true that after reading too much Dickens of an evening, your poor servant’s dreams grow so monstrously vivid she can awaken with a shout). 

Their English is antique, and we accept that. But I find it harder to read mid-20th century writers currently falling out of fashion or, like Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, being given another look by biographers such as Simonds. The problem is, their vocabulary and diction remind me of some of the people I knew when I was young and they were old, often very old. Many of them were prosing, flowery, slow to get to the point, prone to gloss over things they found unpleasant and sometimes cloyingly sentimental. I thought of them condescendingly as fussy old dears, and at some unconscious level, this shared vocabulary made it hard for me to read Another Winter, Another Spring.

On top of this, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence isn’t a stylish writer. Of course, English wasn’t her first language, and she mainly used it to try to interest North American publishers, writing and rewriting her book until she finally produced something they would accept in 1977 when she was 83 years old.

Unfortunately, it ends up reading like an article in a mid-century woman’s magazine. Louise never found a unique voice, and I can’t help putting part of the blame for this on publishers. They wanted blandness from women writers at the time, a romantic and unchallenging approach they thought would sell to women readers–and in fact her memoir sold fairly well. Generationally, I’m the probably wrong audience. Perhaps it will take another few decades for a reader to accept mid-20th century diction as antique and read writers like Louise de Kiriline Lawrence the way I read the Victorians: for their stories, their insights, the historical milieu they portray, and in Louise’s case, for her insights into early Soviet Russia. 

Because, if you push past the style, a few things stand out. Louise comes across as remarkably stubborn—pig-headed feels about right—yet she seems neither arrogant nor entitled, and is psychologically acute about the feelings of ordinary people tossed around by the Russian revolution. This includes people tossed around by her aristocratic husband, Gleb, who fought a series of losing battles as an officer in the White Russian army. He rouses a sleeping farmer “mercilessly,” she writes, and orders him to harness his horse to drive them to the next village. She shows us that the farmer can’t refuse her husband’s desperate and unreasonable order, seeing the poor man not as a mere peasant available for use, but as an individual. “The muzhik, his jovial round face fringed with a shaggy beard, rode sideways upon his lean pony, his sheepskin coat falling like a mantle over its rump.” 

Throughout her memoir, de Kiriline records precise details about people from all backgrounds. She sees their unique natures, and reading her alongside Karen Blixen, it soon becomes clear that Blixen doesn’t. Blixen tends to write about people generically and without much psychological penetration. This ends up being a factor not only in the different but equally dated feel of Out of Africa, but also in her racism. 

Despite this, Karen Blixen—Isak Dinesen—is technically a much better writer than her cousin Louise. Like Louise, she wrote in English, although it wasn’t her first language either. 

“I had a farm in Africa,” she opens her book, “at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”

Clean prose. I read that first paragraph and felt certain it would be a good book. Yet since I’d already read Judith Thurman’s 1982 biography, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, I also knew that the opening line wasn’t true. 

Karen Blixen didn’t “have” a farm in Africa. Her wealthy Danish family had bought a large parcel of land that had been appropriated by the colonial British, and the farm was run at first by her husband, the charming and dissolute Baron von Blixen-Fenicke. When he was fired by her family, she took charge of the farm and seems to have worked hard at it, although she employed a manager to run the day-to-day.

Karen Blixen never mentions Bror Blixen by name in the book and only writes about “my husband” a couple of times. However, the spendthrift baron was integral to the farm and its eventual failure. He also bonked every woman in sight and gave Karen Blixen a case of syphilis that permanently ruined her health. Since Thurman wrote about that too, I initially suspended criticism at the fudged first sentence and decided to enjoy the prose. 

Then I got to page twelve, where Blixen writes about the Somali community in Nairobi. 

“The Somali women had dignified, gentle ways, and were hospitable and gay, with a laughter like silver bells.”

Every single one of them?

That’s when I sat thinking about racism in writing; about the lack of precision being racist, easy generalizations being racist, and how recording people’s individuality is a mark of respect and shared humanity. Also good writing. Blixen’s early description of the Somali women isn’t an exception but one of long series of generalizations about “the Kikuyu” and “the Masai” throughout the book, and I can’t accept the apologies of modern critics who believe her racism was simply a marker of the times. 

Many of Blixen’s contemporaries wrote about life more truly than she did, and with greater psychological penetration. Her cousin Louise was less than ten years younger than she was and came from the same aristocratic Scandinavian background. Yet for all her purple prosing, Louise wrote about people as individuals, and this left me thinking about the difference between a dated style and dated content, and wondering which type of writing, in the end, is likely to last. 

More next time. 

Lesley Krueger’s most recent novel is Far Creek Road. You can order it here.