Out of Africa - Love, Freedom and the Savagery of Civilization

Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), author of Out of Africa, with brother on Kenya farm

If you, like me, enjoy paying tribute to your favorite authors by visiting where they used to live or seeing the landscapes that inspired them, a wonderful resource is a book entitled Literary Trips: Following in the Footsteps of Fame, Editor Victoria Brooks, 2000.

It’s not a bad way to spend your time when you’re not writing but looking to keep inspired.

I don’t know why I’m such a fan of doing this, but I’ve been to Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house in Salem, Massachusetts, and I’ve seen the moors that inspired Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, to name a few.  And although I know that so much of writing happens inside the imagination, I scrutinize the houses and the furniture, the grounds and the landscapes, as if there’s some magic that I can imbibe and take away with me that will make me a better writer.

This time I was inspired by the famous movie–Out of Africa starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford– based on the biography of the author, Karen Blixen, a woman who came to Africa to marry a Baron, but who ended up also falling in love with a big game hunter, starting a coffee plantation that failed, and when her lover was killed tragically in a plane crash, returning to Norway, where she took the pen name Isak Dinesen.

I came to Karen Blixen’s house because I loved her writing, her stories, but I also loved THE STORY OF HER CAREER.  Her literary career didn’t begin until 1934, when she was 49 years old, after she returned to Norway.  Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was rejected by numerous publishers in Europe before it was published in New York and went on to receive the Book of the Month Award.  Yeah!  She went on to write her memoirs–her second book–which inspired the film Out of Africa.  Yeah!   And then she wrote a slew of other stories, which eventually won her a Pulitzer Prize.  Yeah!

Wouldn’t you just love that to be your story???

I wanted to see this woman’s house.  I wanted to walk in her back yard.  I wanted to imagine myself living there–and yeah, I can hear what you’re thinking–as if I were the star of that Hollywood movie.

Front of Karen Blixen's house in Africa

Her life was both grand and tragic.  I suspect that it was the years she lived in Africa that influenced her to write great literature.  Once she left Nairobi, she never went back, but Africa was never far from her thoughts.

When I first read her memoir, Out of Africa, published in 1937, I was awe struck by her opening line, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” Back then I tried to imagine those hills in the distance and how it would feel to gaze on their majesty everyday.

In Nairobi, when I stood in Karen Blixen’s back yard, I gazed into the distance and stared at those hills, hardly believing I was actually there.

Rear view of Karen Blixen's house

Famous view of the Ngong Hills, as seen from Karen Blixen's backyard

I imagined that no matter what had happened to her when she lived in that house–the death of her lover, the destruction of her coffee plantation, the news that she’d contracted a near deadly disease (syphllis)–all stuff of great drama, the hills remained a constant for her.

In truth, she’d written that she loved those hills and she was heard to say that if people could move mountains, those were the ones she would have taken with her back to Norway.

I love knowing that and knowing that I was there.

Karen Blixen’s house is a tourist stop, and you can see why when you traipse through rooms half filled with authentic period furniture and half filled with props from the movie that was donated from the film.

Oh, she was a pretty fair writer, too. You can’t walk through the house unescorted, which is a problem for me because the tour guide goes much too fast.   I can’t absorb my surroundings that quickly, and I like to examine everything and imagine myself in each room, imagine how her day would be, and then how I would live each day in each room.  So I’m always the laggard on every tour.

Maybe someday, people will tour through my house and imagine my life, then read my story, Wild Point Island.  Sit in awe and wonder at the words I’ve written.

Maybe.

A girl can dream, can’t she?

What People Read a Hundred Years Ago

        I write commercial fiction.  Paranormal romance.  At times I catch a look, a smirk, an “Oh, really,” when I announce that fact.  I suppose that some people want to ask me, “Well, why don’t you write real literature, you know, like what they made us read in school?”


Now, don’t get me wrong, my favorite novel of all time is Wuthering Heights.  I adore Jane Eyre.  And I am an American Lit major.  Plus I’ve read every Shakespearean play.  Well, almost.  But, still I can appreciate that people enjoy commercial fiction. 

Which leads me to share what I discovered a few months ago, approximately six months ago, when Anne Trubek, author of  A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses published an essay in the New York Times Book Review called, “What Muncie Read.” Maybe she had an axe to grind.  Maybe she wanted to prove that all the high brows in today’s society who bemoan the fact that the readers of today read too much fluff and can’t compare with the readers of, say, 100 years ago, who supposedly read pure literature—are dead wrong.  

Anne Trubek has evidence to support her claim. 
  
It seems that Frank Felsenstein, a historian at Ball State University, discovered several unmarked boxes on a shelf in the Muncie Public Library—crumbling ledgers and notebooks, which identified every book checked out of the library from November 1891 to December 1902.  


         Felsenstein and colleagues began cataloguing the records.  What emerged is now considered “one of the few authoritative records of American reading.”


         So what were Americans reading at the turn of the century? 

         Great literature?  


         I have to admit that I wanted to know.  Because I had sold my first novel, and it was not a great work of literature.  Because Wild Point Island was commercial fiction, a paranormal Romance, I needed justification.  Even though the reader reviews were calling it a page turner, I couldn’t help but wonder that if my book had been published back in 1891, how would it have fared among the population of Muncie, Indiana?

    Overall, here are some of the startling statistics from the records:


--Fiction was preferred over non-fiction, accounting for 92% of the books read in 1903.  


--Women read romances.


--Kids read pulp fiction.


--White-collar workers read mass market titles.  


--The most popular author read during that time period was Horatio Alger, famous for his rags to riches novels.  Five percent of all books checked out were by him, which meant that the readers back then preferred feel good, happy ending stories.   (Since 50% of books sold today are romance novels,  not much has changed.) 


--Louisa May Alcott is the only author who was widely read back then who can be considered both literary and popular.  Her novel Little Men was actually more popular than Little Women because both boys and girls read it.  The other authors who were most often checked out are today unknowns.  


--Comparatively speaking: the number of times an author was checked out:


   Charles Dickens: 672 times


   Walter Scott: 651 times


   Shakespeare: 201 times


   Henry James' longer novels: 0 times


   Walt Whitman's poetry: 0 times


   Francis Marion Crawford (Here novels were set in Italy and the Orient): 2,120 times 


(Would the Muncie townspeople have enjoyed a novel set on a mythical island off the coast of North Carolina like Wild Point Island?  Maybe.)


   
    Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,: 149 times (even though it was banned in some libraries back then)


--Some other books which were banned from the Muncie library included Karl Marx and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.


--Blue-collar workers were slightly more likely to check out the so-called “classics” because the white-collar workers already had them in their houses.


As to whether people had more time to read in those days, in the 1920’s the Lynds, authors of Middletown: A Study in American Culture, surveyed business-class women about reading: “I would read if only I had the energy and quiet,” one said.  “I just read magazines in my scraps of time,” the other said.


Some things never change.  People still complain today about the lack of time to relax and do the things they want to do.  


My conclusion:  The people of Muncie, Indiana, were remarkably like the people of today.  They preferred to read the "fluff" over the "classics."


If I lived at the turn of the century and were a writer, my novel Wild Point Island would have done just fine.   


If you would like to see a list of the most popular books that were taken out way back when, here is the link: http://whatmiddletownread.wordpress.com/ 


Wild Point Island is available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.   I can be reached at www.katelutter.com   I also write a weekly exotic travel blog called Hot Blogging with Chuck at www.katelutter.blogspot.com