is one of taste, graced with a visual and a spiritual largesse. In East Africa, Finch Hatton and Bror Blixen were two of the greatest white hunters of their era. While their passion for hunting was admired and shared by Karen Blixen, itwas imperative to her that husband and lover be not merely adventurers but aristocrats to the core. She was obsessed with “brilliant breeding” and the style that went with it, and her unalloyedly aristocratic values provide the key both to her choice in male companionship and to her attitudes to the Africans and the continent itself. In the film, as in the memoirs, the Africa “she knew” takes the fanciful shape of an ally in her battle against the corrupting of the patrician spirit. Resigned to her unrequited passion for Bror’s brother, Blixen embarked in 1914 for “parts unknown.” She was aware that in marrying Bror on arrival in Kenya she would be trading her money for a title and a man she could not love. But she so reviled the bourgeoisie that the exchange seemed a fair one. Likewise, at her divorce from Bror, it was the possibility of having to forgo the Baroness in her name that caused Blixen the greatest dismay. In her view, the frank materialism of Europe’s merchant class had cramped the more high-minded ways of the upper- class elite. This bourgeois encroachment was far less advanced in Kenya, but she recoiled from every sign of it. If sectors of settler society ostracized her (parBy the eighties, the once-sprawling British empire had been whittled down—if one excepts Hong Kong—to one hundredfifty thousand colonial subjects dotted about on some two hundred islands. . . the merest confetti of empire. ticularly during the First World War) because they doubted her loyalty to the British Crown, Blixen, for her part, kept aloof from the “small” settlers, the shopkeepers and the clerks of empire. Property—as an expression of spirit—was to take precedence over profit. She scraped together a sense of belonging by holding to an aristocratic idea of Africa, with her farm, elevated in altitude and spirit, as the distilled essence of that idea. Her coffee estate was a financial calamity partly through ill luck, but also, it must be said, because she was at heart a good aristocrat and a poor entrepreneur. J ^U x e n was won over to Kenya because it had the power to palliate her ache for a vanishing aristocratic age. For her, Africa was ah escape from modern Europe and, paradoxically, for that very reason, she was blind to it as anything more than a stage of European history. It was a vast game reserve where the values of the ancien regime could live on. The aristocratic inhabitants of this world were not only the imported earls and baronesses but the Africans themselves: “Here were Lord Delamere and Hassan, Berkeley Cole and Jama, Denys Finch Hatton and Bilea, and I myself and Farah. We were the people who, wherever we went, were followed, at a distance of five feet, by those noble, vigilant and mysterious shadows.” An illuminating comparison can be made with Evelyn Waugh, who visited Kenya in 1931—the very year Blixen’s sojourn in the colony was to end. Waugh anticipates Out of Africa by characterizing the settlers “as fellow-victims of the megapolitan culture of Northern Europe” and shows abundant sympathy for the attempt “to recreate Barsetshire on the equator,” to revive a withering English squirearchy by transplanting it to African soil. Blixen’s writing came to echo this elegiac note, but she was more selectively sympathetic toward the settlers, scorned Waugh's style of jingoism and, with it, his almost exhibitionist racism. Clinton St. Quarterly 5 C a n d a c e Bie n e m a n
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