Out of Africa: Taking the Africans out of ‘Africa’

Tags

Colonial Africa, Colonial Kenya, colonialism, Denys Finch Hatton, Iman, Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Meryl Streep, Movies I Love, Out of Africa, Racial Issues, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack

Out of Africa (1985, dir. Sydney Pollack) is a wonderful film in many ways. It’s one of those movies that draws me in any time I run across it on cable. But its depiction of colonial Africa leaves a good deal to be desired.

The film is loosely based on Karen Blixen’s memoire of life in Kenya in the 1920s, Out of Africa (written under the pen name of Isak Dinesen). Consequently, the film is not truly a depiction of colonial Kenya so much as it is a depiction of Blixen’s memoires about colonial Kenya. As a result, we have to recognize that the film’s view of Africa is at two removes from history, since it is showing the Africa of Blixen’s memories more than the Africa of history. At least, it claims to be about Blixen’s memoire, although it substantially deviates from the book, as I pointed out in my previous post.

The book is, at a fundamental level, about the contrast between European and African society, and the movie tries to capture that by showing the exoticism of African’s wildlife, scenery, and peoples. The cinematography is at times breath-taking and lyrical. But while the film successfully captures some of Africa’s beauty, it does a much less effective job of capturing African culture. Where Blixen’s book spends a good deal of time exploring her relationship with various Africans and her efforts to make sense of their society, the film’s focus on the relationship between Blixen (Meryl Streep), Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer), and Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) means that much of the heart of the book gets crowded out.

The major African characters in the film are all taken from the book. Her loyal aide Farah, her young cook Kamante Gatura, and the Kikuyu chieftain Kinanjui are all prominent characters in the memoire. In fact, they are all far more important characters in the book than they are in the film, especially the latter two. Nearly a fifth of the book is devoted to Blixen’s reminiscences about Kamante, and Kinanjui gets a whole chapter. Farah does not get his own section like the other two, but is a constant presence in many of her anecdotes.

Farah was an exceedingly important figure on her coffee farm, handling much of the daily management of the estate and becoming a major confidant. Blixen describes their relationship as a “creative unity”. She describes Kamante’s efforts to get married, and makes frequent references to his comments about various unusual situations. (When a brush fire breaks out nearby, he tells her that she had better get up because “God is coming.” After she points out that it is only a brush fire, he comments that he thought he would be on the safe side, just in case it actually was God.) Kinanjui is a complex figure, wise, proud, and somewhat vain, whose support was vital to her getting the workers she needed for the farm. What makes the book such excellent reading is the way that all the characters emerge clearly as human beings.

Blixen and Kinanjui in the film

Unfortunately, none of these characters emerge strongly as people in the film. Farah (Malick Bowens) appears frequently, but rarely shows himself to be anything more than an obedient servant. Kamante (Joseph Thiaka) features in several scenes regard his sore-covered legs, which Blixen persuades him to get treated at a Nairobi hospital. One of the more memorable scenes involves a conversation in which the two of them discuss Kamante’s leg as if it has its own will; sadly this scene seems to be an invention of the screenwriter Kurt Luedtke. Kinanjui (Stephen Kinyanjui) acts primarily an opponent of Blixen’s plan to educate the Kikuyu, although he eventually changes his mind. This too seems to be Luedtke’s invention.

The film does not permit Kamante and Kinanjui to be real people in their own right. Whereas Blixen and Finch Hatton are permitted to grow and develop as people, Kamante and Kinanjui only grow and change in reaction to Blixen’s actions. We are not allowed to see their personal conflicts or even the moment when they change their minds and agree to Blixen’s wishes; in both cases, they simply show up and demonstrate that their thinking has changed. Whereas the historical Farah and Kamante had wives and children, in the film they are apparently single, because their personal lives are unimportant.

The real Kamante Gatura

The film wishes to portray Blixen’s benevolent paternalism (maternalism?) toward the Africans around her. In several scenes she is shown giving medical help to the Kikuyu (something Blixen actually did a good deal, although she admits she had only a first aid course for training). She wants to educate her Kikuyu (and persuades the missionary she recruits to hold off on evangelizing his students). When she has to sell the farm, her last struggle is to arrange a new home for the tribe that will be displaced when her farm is developed. To a considerable extent, the film uses its named African characters to demonstrate her benevolent generosity. She persuades Kamante to get his leg treated over his initial resistance, and she persuades Kinanjui that literacy would be a valuable skill for his people.

Because the film is more interested in using Africans to demonstrate the cinematic Blixen’s character than in accurately capturing the real Blixen’s experiences with them, Luedtke resorts to inventing scenes that didn’t happen, so that he can show off her character. Most of the more notable scenes with Kamante and Kinanjui are not based in her writings, as far as I can tell. So too is the scene at the end of the film in which Farah expresses his devotion to her (she tells him that she will go ahead of him and light a fire to guide him to her, an odd thing to tell a man who will be staying behind to take care of his family). Kinanjui’s opposition to her school also seems to be an invention. So rather than letting the real characters say what they actually said, we are given Hollywood ideas of what Africans would say to a white woman they have come to love because she’s so benevolent.

(As an aside, another memorable scene at the end of the film is also a Hollywood invention. Although Blixen did persuade the British government to provide the Kikuyu tribe with land, she did not do it by creating a scene by publicly embarrassing the incoming governor and impressing his wife.)

Disguising Colonialism

All of this is emblematic of a wider problem with the film, which is that it has little interest in exploring the negative impact of colonialism on the Africans. In the film, Finch Hatton is worried about the loss of wildlife and untouched land, which is accurate, but he has no such concern for the native peoples. If you watch the film closely, in fact you will see that he is quite condescending toward the natives. He has a black servant that he never speaks to, and tells Blixen to ignore the man entirely. He casually mentions the man’s death later in the film as if he doesn’t care that the man has died. Finch Hatton also asserts that the Masai are incapable of thinking about the future; they die if they are put into prison because they cannot understand that they will ever be let out. He makes a similar comment that animals have no sense of time. While the film presents these comments as a profound insight, as an observation that Africans and animals live in the moment, what Finch Hatton is actually doing is saying that Africans are more like animals than humans mentally (a point reinforced by the fact that both the Kikuyus and the animals are fascinated by his gramophone). One might defend this as representing an historically accurate way that some Europeans viewed Africans, but in the film these comments are offered as examples of his wisdom, not as a way to suggest he looks down on the Africans. (And at his funeral, Blixen briefly sees a glimpse of Finch Hatton’s dead Masai servant, suggesting that this servant, much like Murron in Braveheart, was supernaturally loyal to him, despite his condescension and apparent disregard.)

The theme of African devotion to white superiors runs through the film. In addition to Finch Hatton’s Masai servant, the European Berkeley Cole has a Somali servant Mariammo (Iman) who is also revealed to be his lover; he says that he “thinks” she likes him (one would hope so; otherwise he’s basically been raping her). Farah and Kamante are both devoted to Blixen and want to go to Europe with her when she leaves. Since both men were actually married, the film has subtly stripped away their families in order that they can regard Blixen as a substitute wife or mother. The Kikuyu workers never express any emotion more negative than a certain wariness of Blixen, a wariness that dissipates once they realize she’s a good person.

Iman as Mariammo

What is especially problematic here is that the film makes few efforts to show us what these white characters did to earn the devotion of their servants; it’s just taken as a given. The film never contemplates the possibility that this devotion might be a calculated strategy of self-interest, in which a lower status person chooses to serve a more powerful person as way of getting employment, shelter, legal protection, or whatever else might be needed. Instead, Africans just seem to love their benevolent colonial masters. Mariammo seems content to be treated as Cole’s servant instead of being acknowledged publicly as his de facto wife.

What makes this so frustrating is that the memoire takes a very different attitude toward its African characters. Blixen recognized that the relationship between Europeans and Africans was complicated. She discusses the fact that Africans are slow to trust Europeans and often dislike speaking to them. She contrasts the native justice system favorably to the British system, which allows a man to kill his native servant without punishment. She discusses the fact that the colonial authorities repeatedly tried to suppress the native Ngoma dances out of fear that they will encourage resistance to colonial authority. So it’s not that Blixen herself was oblivious to these issues; the film mostly chooses to remove these elements from her story.

The film touches on these issues only briefly and obliquely. At Cole’s funeral, Mariammo is forced to stand outside the fence around the graveyard. When Blixen tries to get the British government to provide for the Kikuyu, Blixen comments that ‘we’ have taken their land from them. At first glance this seems a rather enlightened comment, until you consider that the reason Blixen can hire the Kikuyu for her farm is that she herself (and her husband Bror) are the ones who dispossessed this tribe of their land. Her benevolence is shown by the fact that, having taken the Kikuyu’s farmland, she is willing to pay them to help her farm it and worries about what will happen when she leaves.

The film is not entirely blind to the power imbalance between Africans and Europeans; it simply doesn’t want to call any serious attention to it. It does at least acknowledge the way Europeans dispossessed Africans of their lands and turned them into servants. Cole’s relationship with Miriammo speaks volumes about the treatment of Africans, but it speaks quite softly.

But the most effective way the film does this lies in a subtle but repeated theme of the challenge of communication between Africans and Europeans. Finch Hatton and his servant do not speak to each other, and he tells Blixen to ignore the man. Mariammo has no dialogue (so the film has literally deprived her of her voice), and Blixen briefly contemplates speaking to the woman at the funeral but chooses not to. No one in the film, even Cole, explicitly acknowledges the reality of the relationship. The servants in the Muthaiga Club bar do not speak to Blixen, and are reluctant to acknowledge her drink order at all. Blixen speaks to Kinanjui only through a translator, because he “has no British”. Only Kamante and Farah have significant speaking roles, and both call her Msabu, indicating their subservience; when Farah finally does speak her name, it only because she orders him to do so as they are parting. In all of this, the film subtly emphasizes that Africans and Europeans could not speak openly and honestly to each other as equals, but only as master and servant. Only Blixen is able to bridge that gap, and even then only briefly at the end of the film.

A Different Kind of Power Imbalance

It’s not that Sydney Pollack wasn’t thinking about inequality in this film. It’s that he’s more interested in gender inequalities than racial ones. Once the decision was made to focus on Blixen’s romance with Finch Hatton, it was natural to develop this into a ‘woman’s film” by focusing on other issues relevant to women in the 1980s, namely sexual liberation, the ability to work, and equal treatment socially, all three of which are addressed in the film. At the start of the film, Blixen is at the end of a pre-marital love affair when she untraditionally proposes to Bror (he wryly asks her “are you sure you’re not being too romantic?”). Later, after Bror and she separate, she starts another unconventional love affair with Finch Hatton, but is dissatisfied that he will not permanently commit to her and ultimately she breaks it off. So she is presented in some ways as a sexually liberated woman, but one who longs for the security of a conventional marriage after her failed marriage.

The film also shows her working on the coffee farm right alongside her workers, planting trees, processing the beans for roasting, bagging up the roasted beans, and so on. She frequently leads her workers in tasks such as repairing the dikes. In Hollywood tradition, this demonstrates her genuineness, because she is a lower class worker at heart, even if she’s actually a woman of money and leisure.

At the start of the film, when she arrive in Nairobi, she makes the mistake of walking into the Muthaiga Club’s bar, which is a male-only space, and she is immediately rebuked and forced to leave. In real life, this is a nonsensical scene; a woman of Blixen’s social standing and training would have known that she didn’t belong there, but in the film it acts to remind viewers that this was a period when women were explicitly excluded from many spaces. At the end of the film the men of the club invite her in for a going-away drink, as a sign that they have come to have respect for her. Again, in the context of her day, this is a false note; the men would have seen themselves as respecting her since in both scenes, the men all stand up when she enters the room, which was a standard gesture of courtesy to a woman at the time. So the purpose of the scene is to vindicate her hard work and virtue.

However, at the same time, the film works to undermine Blixen in subtle ways. When she arrives in Africa, she is scared of the natives and at one point tries to literally shoo them away. Although she knows how to hunt (at the start of the film she is participating in a shooting party), and although the historical Blixen went on safaris with her husband before she met Finch Hatton, in the film, Finch Hatton is the one who teaches her how to hunt. But when she is charged by a lioness, she manages to shoot it herself, impressing Finch Hatton. She needs Finch Hatton’s protection, but not completely. So while the film ignores the racial imbalances in colonial Kenya, it explores the gender imbalances.

Blixen shooting the lioness

And it does this by injecting gender in a way that Blixen never does in the memoire. In the book, she makes almost no reference the fact that she’s a woman (and, given that she was using a male pen name, it might have been odd if she had). So, in a way, the film colonizes Blixen’s memoire the way the Europeans colonized Kenya, taking her story as its own and exploiting it for its own purposes rather than respecting hers.

 

Want to Know More?

Out of Africa is available on Amazon.

If you want to read something about colonial Kenya and the race issues there, Colonial Kenya Observed: British Rule, Mau Mau and the Wind of Change is the memoires of a provincial administrator who lived in Kenya the whole time Dinesen was there. Communal Labor in Colonial Kenya: The Legitimization of Coercion, 1912-1930looks at the labor system that Dinesen benefitted from on her plantation. It is rather pricy, however.

Out of Africa: Wonderful Movie, Fuzzy History

Tags

Bror Blixen, Colonial Africa, Colonial Kenya, Denys Finch Hatton, Isak Denisen, Karen Blixen, Meryl Streep, Movies I Love, Out of Africa, Robert Redford

After the unmitigated silliness of Reign, I was in need of something to remind me that our country can actually tell good stories. So I went from the ridiculous to the sublime and opted for Out of Africa (1985, dir. Sydney Pollack). Has there every been a more perfectly-delivered line than “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills”, especially when delivered by Meryl Streep? (She reportedly practiced her accent by listening to recordings of Isak Dinesen reading her stories.) The cinematography is truly breath-taking, especially in the scene with the biplane. As a romance, the story is almost perfect, the performances are brilliant, and unsurprisingly it won 7 Academy Awards.

The film is, of course, based on Out of Africa, the memoir of Isak Dinesen,  the pen-name of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke about her 17 years running a coffee plantation outside Nairobi in Kenya. And by ‘based on’ I mean ‘very loosely based on’. Unlike the movie, the book is not a simple narrative. It has five sections in which she reflects on various facets of her time in Africa, but in no particular order and without a strong chronology. Much of the book is a reflection on people she has met, both her experiences with Africans and the Europeans she met, and in many ways the book is a study of the contrasts between the two cultures.

(The title of the book and film, incidentally, is usually thought to be a reference to a phrase from the Roman author Pliny, Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, meaning “There’s always something new coming out of Africa”. The sentiment itself goes back to Ancient Greece. However, the direct reference is to a poem she wrote by that name.)

From this collection of stories, screenwriter Kurt Luedtke extracted material about Blixen’s romantic relationships and some of the more dramatic incidents, added material from Blixen’s later work, Shadows in the Grass, and a good deal of fact and speculation from Blixen’s life to weave a story that emphasizes Blixen’s romantic relationship with Denys Finch Hatton.

Karen Blixen in Africa

Right off the bat, two major details of the film demonstrate that it is not closely based on the book. First, the book makes only a single passing reference to Blixen’s husband, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, without even mentioning him by name, whereas Bror has a very substantial role in the film, being played by Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Bror comes off quite poorly in the film, as a womanizing cad who leeches off of Blixen financially. That may be true, but he was more than that. He was an extremely skilled hunter and was renowned for his abilities as a safari guide. Beryl Markham (about whom more below) described him as the greatest of the “white hunters”, praising his ability to shoot a charging buffalo while discussing what drinks to have back at camp, and Ernest Hemingway was impressed enough with Bror that he based a character in one of his stories on Bror. While Blixen clearly loved Finch Hatton, at the end of her life she said that the thing she longed for most was another chance to go on safari with Bror (who had died in a car crash in the 1940s).

Bror

Second, and rather more jarring, the book makes no clear mention of the romantic relationship between Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, played of course by Robert Redford. She speaks adoringly of him, and says that he used her farm as a base for his various safaris and journeys, but discretely passes over whatever sexual elements their relationship had. So the more explicitly romantic sections of the film are substantially Luedtke’s additions rather than part of the book the movie is ostensibly ‘based on’.

Denys Finch Hatton

The Film’s Chronology

The relevant dates for Blixen’s life in Africa are quite clear. She emigrated to Africa in 1914, where they purchased a coffee plantation. She returned to Europe in 1915 to seek treatment for the syphilis she contracted from Bror, and returned to Africa the next year. She met Finch Hatton in 1918, close to the end of the war, and soon after he completed his pilot training. In 1921, she and Bror separated and by 1922, she and Finch Hatton had begun sleeping together (although this could have started two years earlier). She divorced Bror in 1925, by which point she and Finch Hatton had been living together quite openly. When the Great Depression hit and drove down the price of coffee, the family corporation that owned her farm forced her to sell it. As this was being finalized in 1931, Finch Hatton was killed when his plane crashed.

Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen

However, in typical Hollywood fashion, the chronology of the film is quite vague, confused, and compressed. Blixen arrives in Africa in 1913, a year too early, and meets Finch Hatton immediately. Then the war comes, and her interest in Finch Hatton slowly develops. Then she is diagnosed with syphilis and returns to Denmark. The war ends in 1918. When Kenya achieves full Crown Colony status in 1921, she and Finch Hatton kiss for the first time; the same evening, she tells Bror to move out. After this, the film loses all sense of time. Finch Hatton moves in, he takes her flying (having learned to fly the day before), they have sex for the first time, she and Bror divorce, and she and Finch Hatton quarrel about marrying and break up. Then the coffee factory burns down, she sells the farm, and Finch Hatton is killed. The uninformed viewer could be forgiven for assuming that her relationship with Finch Hatton really only lasted a year or two, rather than the 9 years it actually lasted, and that she left Africa perhaps in 1923 or 24, since none of the characters age perceptibly.

The effect of all these chronological distortions is to give the viewer the sense that she turned to Finch Hatton romantically only after her marriage had irretrievably broken down because of Bror’s personality. The reality seems to have been more complex. By 1920, she was already deeply interested in Finch Hatton because she began to see herself in competition with Bror for Finch Hatton’s attention. When she asked Bror to move out, her goal seems to have been to teach him a lesson, not to initiate a permanent separation, but then she began sleeping with Finch Hatton, and a reconciliation with Bror probably became impossible.

Robert Redford as Finch Hatton

The Economics of the Farm

The decision to farm coffee at Ngong was a bad one, because the climate was not really suitable for coffee. The farm took five years to mature and bear coffee, and while the Great War drove up the price of coffee, over the 1920s, the price of coffee dropped, so that the farm was never truly profitable. Additionally, the Kenyan economy was vulnerable to fluctuations in the currency that disastrously increased the amount the Blixens owed on the farm.

The film depicts Bror as sponging off of his ex-wife and suggests that he constantly asked her for money. The reality was more complex. By the early 1920s, it was clear that the farm was unprofitable, and Bror pressured her to sell the farm to take advantage of a jump in land prices. He had sunk all his own money into it, and selling the farm would have given him a profit and untangled their finances. Blixen refused to sell, however, which left Bror dependant on her even after the marriage had ended, because she controlled his investment. Bror was a bad businessman, but he recognized that walking away from the farm was the wiser option, and Blixen refused to accept this. In the later 1920s, Finch Hatton sunk a good deal of his own money into the farm, which is how she was able to keep the farm afloat for so long, but the film fails to acknowledge this.

In the film, the thing that triggers the sale of the farm is a fire that destroys the coffee factory. The coffee factory did burn down once, but much earlier, and was rebuilt. The scene where Kamante wakes her to tell her about the fire actually happened, but he was telling her about a brush fire, not a fire on her property. Instead, what forced her to sell was impersonal economic factors that would have been hard to address on-screen, so the fire is a reasonable invention to dramatize the crisis.

Colonial Decadence

By concentrating so tightly on the romance, the film glosses over another issue. The European community in Kenya in the 1920s and 30s was notoriously libertine. Somewhat north of Nairobi was the Wanjohi Valley region, home to the so-called “Happy Valley set,” who became rather infamous for their extra-marital affairs, open marriages, drug use, and other scandalous behavior.

One well-publicized Happy Valley affair ended with the murder of the 22^nd earl of Erroll, possibly by the 11^th Baronet Broughton, the husband of Erroll’s lover Diana.  Another member of the group, the Countess de Janzé, attempted the murder-suicide of herself and her lover in a Paris train station. (Rather emotionally unbalanced, she reportedly gained access to Erroll’s corpse at the morgue, and kissed and masturbated over it.) A third member of the group got Prince George, the duke of Kent, addicted to morphine and heroin. (There’s actually a whole film about the Happy Valley set, White Mischief; perhaps I’ll tackle it on this blog.)

Blixen was not a member of the Happy Valley set, but when you watch the film you can see hints of the sexual goings-on in the period. At the start of the film she married Bror after a failed love affair with his brother. Blixen meets Baron Delamere (who was a member of the Happy Valley set) right after her arrival in Nairobi; he’s in the middle of telling a joke about bestiality. Bror was unfaithful to her and gave her syphilis soon after they were married. The film acknowledges this and shows her dealing with the sickness, but it presents her as having been cured, when in fact it’s far from clear that she was cured. Later in life she suffered from symptoms that have usually been attributed to the disease, although one biographer, Doctor Linda Donelson, has disputed this (and Blixen never developed the mental degeneration associated with the disease). Although they did not marry, Blixen and Finch Hatton lived together on a semi-regular basis and she is thought to have miscarried at least one and perhaps two children of his.

Klaus Maria Brandauer as Bror

Finch Hatton maintained a relationship with Beryl Markham (an important figure in the history of aviation, as well as a noted memoirist). In 1924, Markham aborted what was believed to be Finch-Hatton’s baby. Later she had an affair with Prince Henry, the duke of Gloucester, before apparently returning to Finch Hatton as his relationship with Blixen was winding down. So what the film presents as a traditional monogamous romance (despite the lack of marriage) may have been, at least from Finch Hatton’s side, an open relationship; he seems to have been involved with both Blixen and Markham at the same time. (He impregnated Blixen in 1922, Markham in 1924, and Blixen again possibly in 1926.)

In the film, Markham has been replaced with a young ingénue named Felicity, who fumblingly asks Blixen for sexual advice. Toward the end of the film, Blixen becomes jealous of Finch Hatton’s friendship with Felicity, but her concerns about the friendship are presented as being somewhat irrational. Given that most of the people in the film are real people, this substitution is probably due to the fact that Markham was still alive in 1985.

On the surface it seems absurd that Redford is playing someone with the quintessentially British name of Denys Finch Hatton as an American. Reportedly he originally planned to play him with an appropriately British accent; however Pollack evidently disliked the result, because after shooting a few scenes, he told Redford to use his regular accent.

The film also leaves out Blixen’s friendship with Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Lettow-Vorbeck was a German soldier who met Blixen on a steam liner while they were traveling. They became life-long friends. When the First World War broke out, Lettow-Vorbeck took command of the German forces in German East Africa, recruited a very large force of native soldiers, and fought the British ferociously, inflicting far higher casualties on them than he took. He only surrendered at the end of the war. As a friend of his, the Danish Blixen and her Swedish husband were naturally suspected of supporting the Germans during the war, which may have left Bror feeling obligated to fight for the British. In the film, the only hint of this whole issue is when Felicity asks Blixen if she supports the British; Blixen seems offended by the question.

A Final Thought

The film ends with a mournful quote by Blixen, “If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plains quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

When her farm was sold, it was bought by a developer who turned it into a subdivision of the sprawling Nairobi. He named the subdivision Karen in her honor. The making of Out of Africa revived Kenyan interest in Blixen. Her house, which was quite dilapidated, was repaired, and the furniture used in the film was donated to establish a museum in the house. Both the house and Finch Hatton’s grave have become tourist attractions as a result.

Finch Hatton’s grave now

So in a way, the answer to her question is “yes, Africa knows a song of Karen Blixen.”

Correction: An earlier version of this essay identified the colonial-era murder victim as the 22nd Earl of Atholl; he was actually the 22nd Earl of Erroll.

Want to Know More?

Out of Africa is available on Amazon.

You should read Isak Dinesen’s wonderful memoire, Out of Africa: and Shadows on the Grass. You just should. Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storytelleris a prize-winning biography of this important writer. You might also consider Linda Donelson’s Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: Karen Blixen’s Untold Story. Finally, since I mentioned Beryl Markham, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention her West with the Night, which has been called one of the best memoires ever written. She lived a remarkable life in her own right and deserves some attention.