Isak Dinesen - Winters Tales

Isak Dinesen is the pseudonym of Karen Blixen, born in Denmark in 1885. After her marriage in 1914 to Baron Bror Blixen, she and her husband lived in British East Africa, where they owned a coffee plantation. She was divorced from her husband in 1921 but continued to manage the plantation for another ten years, until the collapse of the coffee market forced her to sell the property and return to Denmark in 1931. There she began to write in English under the nom de plume Isak Dinesen. Her first book, and literary success, was Seven Gothic Tales. It was followed by Out of Africa, The Angelic Avengers (written under the pseudonym Pierre Andrzel), Winters Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny, Shadows on the Grass and Ehrengard. She died in 1962.

ALSO BY Isak Dinesen

Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard
(including Babettes Feast)
Last Tales
Out of Africa
Seven Gothic Tales
Shadows on the Grass

First Vintage International Edition, July 1993

Copyright 1942 by Random House, Inc.
Copyright renewed 1970 by Johan Philip Thomas Ingerslev

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,
and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by
Random House, Inc., New York, in 1942.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dinesen, Isak, 18851962.
[Vinter-eventyr. English]
Winters tales/Isak Dinesen. 1st Vintage International ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79182-5
1. Dinesen, Isak, 18851962 Translations into English.
I. Title
PT8175.B545V513 1993
839.81372dc20 92-50615

v3.1

T HREE-QUARTERS of a century ago there lay in Antwerp, near the harbour, a small hotel named the Queens Hotel. It was a neat, respectable place, where sea captains stayed with their wives.

To this house there came, on a March evening, a young man, sunk in gloom. As he walked up from the harbour, to which he had come on a ship from England, he was, he felt, the loneliest being in the world. And there was no one to whom he could speak of his misery, for to the eyes of the world he must seem safe and fortunate, a young man to be envied by everyone.

He was an author who had had a great success with his first book. The public had loved it; the critics had been at one in praising it; and he had made money on it, after having been poor all his life. The book, from his own experience, treated the hard lot of poor children, and it had brought him into contact with social reformers. He had been enthusiastically received within a circle of highly cultivated, noble men and women. He had even married into their community, the daughter of a famous scientist, a beautiful young woman, who idolized him.

He was now going to Italy with his wife, there to finish his next book, and was, at the moment, carrying the manuscript in his portmanteau. His wife had preceded him by a few days, for she wanted to visit her old school in Brussels on the way. It will do me good, she had said, smiling, to think and talk of other things than you. She was now waiting for him at the Queens Hotel, and would wish to think and talk of nothing else.

All these things looked pleasant. But things were not what they looked. They hardly ever were, he reflected, but in his case they were even exactly the opposite. The world had been turned upside down upon him; it was no wonder that he should feel sick, even to death, within it. He had been trapped, and had found out too late.

For he felt in his heart that he would never again write a great book. He had no more to tell, and the manuscript in his bag was nothing but a pile of paper that weighed down his arm. In his mind he quoted the Bible, because he had been to a Sunday School when he was a boy, and thought: I am good for nothing but to be cast out and be trodden under foot by men.

How was he to face the people who loved him, and had faith in him: his public, his friends and his wife? He had never doubted but that they must love him better than themselves, and must consider his interests before their own, on account of his genius, and because he was a great artist. But when his genius had gone, there were only two possible future courses left. Either the world would despise and desert him, or else it might go on loving him, irrespective of his worthiness as an artist. From this last alternative, although in his thoughts he rarely shied at anything, he turned in a kind of horror vaccui; it seemed in itself to reduce the world to a void and a caricature, a Bedlam. He might bear anything better than that.

The idea of his fame augmented and intensified his despair. If in the past he had been unhappy, and had at times contemplated throwing himself in the river, it had at least been his own affair. Now he had had the glaring searchlight of renown set on him; a hundred eyes were watching him; and his failure, or suicide, would be the failure and the suicide of a world-famous author.

And even these considerations were but minor factors in his misfortune. If worse came to worst, he could do without his fellow-creatures. He had no great opinion of them, and might see them go, public, friends and wife, with infinitely less regret than they would ever have suspected, as long as he himself could remain face to face, and on friendly terms, with God.

The love of God and the certainty that in return God loved him beyond other human beings had upheld him in times of poverty and adversity. He had a talent for gratitude as well; his recent good luck had confirmed and sealed the understanding between God and him. But now he felt that God had turned away from him. And if he were not a great artist, who was he that God should love him? Without his visionary powers, without his retinue of fancies, jests and tragedies, how could he even approach the Lord and implore Him to redress him? The truth was that he was then no better than other people. He might deceive the world, but he had never in his life deceived himself. He had become estranged from God, and how was he now to live?

His mind wandered, and on its own brought home fresh material for suffering. He remembered his father-in-laws verdict on modern literature. Superficiality, the old man had thundered, is the mark of it. The age lacks weight; its greatness is hollow. Now your own noble work, my dear boy Generally the views of his father-in-law were to him of no consequence whatever, but at the present moment he was so low in spirits that they made him writhe a little. Superficiality, he thought, was the word which the public and the critics would use about him, when they came to know the truthlightness, hollowness. They called his work noble because he had moved their hearts when he described the sufferings of the poor. But he might as well have written of the sufferings of kings. And he had described them, because he happened to know them. Now, that he had made his fortune, he found that he had got no more to say of the poor, and that he would prefer to hear no more of them. The word superficiality made an accompaniment to his steps in the long street.