“A Winter’s Tale: Karen Blixen in America”
Project Supervisor:
Thomas Wisniewski, Ph.D, Lecturer on Comparative Literature
Project Overview:
I am applying to the Summer Humanities and Arts Research Program (SHARP) in connection with a documentary film of literary history that I am currently researching and writing, which would benefit from the work of an undergraduate research assistant during Summer 2023. Titled “A Winter’s Tale: Karen Blixen in America,” it will be made by the Danish film company Zentropa and shot on location in Copenhagen, in New York City, and at Harvard. I would like to collaborate with an undergraduate research assistant to work on gathering archival sources for the film and contributing to the screenplay. To give the program a clear sense of the project, I will first summarize the film’s narrative arc and then address its connection to Harvard’s campus, curriculum, faculty, and students. I will then detail the research and pedagogical approach to be taken, including the preliminary work that needs to be done. In closing, I will state the importance and potential impact of the project.
“A Winter’s Tale: Karen Blixen in America” opens in media res when Karen Blixen briefly escapes in 1942 from the Nazi occupation of Denmark to travel to Stockholm with the express purpose of sending off, via her contacts at the British Embassy, the English-language manuscript of her second book of fiction, Winter’s Tales, to Random House in New York. With a note of desperation as if it were sent in a message-in-a-bottle across the wartime Atlantic, she writes: “I can sign no contract and I can read no proofs. I leave the fate of my book in your hands.” Much to her delight, when Blixen learns of the book’s publication only after the war, Random House has issued an Armed Services edition printed specially for American soldiers stationed in Europe. The film then moves back in time to the writing of Blixen’s first book, Seven Gothic Tales, published in the US in 1934, which makes a transatlantic splash under her nom de plume, Isak Dinesen, by which she is known to this day. It then moves forward to the writing of “Babette’s Feast,” published serially in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1950, which shows the popularity of this Danish writer in American periodicals of the period, alongside contemporary writers including Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost. We see how the publication and circulation of these stories endeared the Baroness Blixen to her American readers, following on the heels of Out of Africa (1937), which Truman Capote called “one of the most beautiful books of the twentieth century” and for which Ernest Hemingway, upon winning the Nobel Prize in 1954, remarked that it should have gone to his fellow nominee, “that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”
Following the decades of a Danish writer publishing her work in English in America comes the climax of the film near the end of her life: Blixen’s 1959 American tour, set into motion by the Ford Foundation, which was making a film series about the world’s greatest living writers. Fighting a lifetime of illness from syphilis and arsenic poisoning, proceeding against the express wishes of her doctors, and staving off death to make her first, and what was to be her last, journey across the Atlantic, the Baroness travels from Copenhagen to New York City in the winter of 1959, subsisting on an aristocratic diet born of necessity: white grapes, oysters, and champagne. There, she gives the “On Mottoes of My Life” address at the annual dinner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where she is introduced to Carson McCullers and invited to lunch at the novelist’s home in Nyack, New York, in the company of Arthur Miller and his then wife Marilyn Monroe. Among other appearances, seeing these social occasions gives us a sense of Blixen’s popularity in the city, and the film quotes from several newspapers and magazines of the period, including a cartoon in the New York Times Book Review that shows two poets at a Greenwich Village café, who remark: “Did you catch Isak Dinesen at the Y?”
Following Blixen’s New York success, the film then moves to Harvard, where on the chilly evening of February 20, 1959, introduced by the then Chair of Comparative Literature, Harry Levin, Blixen performs two tales from memory for a spellbound audience: “A King’s Letter” and “The Wine of the Tetrarch.” The film closes with Blixen’s return to Denmark, where we can see that at last she has attained the long-awaited recognition from her native country, given to her in America decades previously when, as her own evocative, aging voice as heard on an archival recording, reminds us: “I first came over the Atlantic in the form of a book called Seven Gothic Tales.” A quiet death in her sleep occurs three years later, in September 1962, and our closing shot is that of snow falling over her tombstone on the pastoral grounds of Rungstedlund, the old manor inn and family home where she was born and died, with a quotation from the last line of “Babette’s Feast.”
This documentary project is connected to two undergraduate seminars that I am teaching in Spring 2023: Comparative Literature 97, an introduction to the field for new concentrators, which will feature two weeks on literature and cinema, including the work of Karen Blixen, and Comparative Literature 102Y: “Literary Biography and Documentary Film.” Because I anticipate that the curricular connection to this project will build a sense of intellectual community among students enrolled in both seminars, and because my description of the latter course in the catalogue gives special emphasis to the work of the author in question, I will quote from it in full:
What is the relation between literary biography and documentary film? What might the life of a writer tell us about the work? To explore these questions, we will study the writing of a range of authors in tandem with documentaries made about their lives. Each week will pair the viewing of a documentary film with selections from the sources on which it is based, including several award-winning literary biographies. As we challenge the intentional fallacy, we will analyze the cinematic technique with which the film is made and the literary evidence from which it draws. Selections of fictional and nonfictional texts featured in the documentaries will frame our seminar discussions. A centerpiece of the course will be the work of Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen, a Dane who wrote primarily in English, whose memoirs will be read alongside her short fiction and compared to the feature films and documentaries made about her life and her writing. To that end, the seminar will offer students the opportunity to collaborate on, and contribute original research to, a new documentary film about Blixen’s 1959 transatlantic tour, including her legendary trip to New York and Boston.
To that end, the documentary will involve students at all phases of its production: the research process, the filming, and the post-production. I anticipate that students will be interviewed and filmed during class. The documentary will also shoot locations that Blixen visited herself and will alternate between the past of 1959 and the present of today; contemporary interviews will be interwoven with archival sound and video. A series of interviews will feature Harvard faculty, including Professor James Engell, Blixen scholars—Professor Susan Brantly, Catherine Lefebvre, and Blixen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Judith Thurman—and the actress Meryl Streep, who played Blixen in Out of Africa, a commercial success in 1985. The second half of the documentary will be shot on location in buildings on Harvard’s campus, including interviews in offices in Dana-Palmer House, the Barker Center, and the Fogg Large Lecture Room, where Blixen spoke to College students on February 20, 1959, upon the invitation of the former Dean of the Radcliffe Graduate School, Bernice B. Cronkhite.
Because the documentary narrates a piece of literary history that is also a small part of Harvard’s history, I am confident that the project will generate intellectual community among faculty colleagues and students and will lead to a lasting impact on campus, preserved in the form of a documentary film whose trace will not be soon erased. The work is interdisciplinary, in that it combines literary history with cinema, and truly transatlantic, in that both the subject of the film and its production are a Danish-American collaboration. The project intersects with several fields in the Arts & Humanities at Harvard that faculty are currently researching and teaching—in particular, in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature: world literature, travel literature, literary history, translation studies, and literature and cinema. The film, more broadly, is a public humanities project; given the worldwide prestige of Zentropa, it will have a wide distribution on both sides of the Atlantic, as it recovers and narrates a piece of a literary past of interest to readers in Denmark, the United States, and many other parts of the world.
The documentary is therefore a work of cultural and literary history. Because the afterlife of Blixen’s writing is inextricably linked to her lived experience of migration and self-translation as well as her transnational reception, the project will contribute to deepening scholarly and popular understanding of this Danish writer’s legacy by incorporating her work into disability studies, migration studies, and contemporary debates on the hotly contested canon of global Anglophone and world literature—in particular, literature written across national cultures by authors who write bilingually, in self-translation, and in English as a foreign language. The urgency for a global approach to literature is given special prominence among such prose stylists who choose to write in a language not natively their own. Studying Karen Blixen’s early- to mid-twentieth- century fiction gives us insight into the work of one of the century’s most significant yet neglected writers. Of the sources to be featured in the documentary—manuscripts, public readings, and radio recordings—many provide evidence of Blixen’s capacity to convey orality in language through the voice of the storyteller, both fictional and real. To that end, the documentary examines Blixen’s life and work through the eye of a biographer focused on her subjectivity as refracted through her literary sensibility, her private self, and her public persona, as can be understood from primary sources, including television and sound recordings, memoirs, diaries, and the many drafts, typescripts, rewritings, and self-translations from the archives.
Opportunity for the Fellow:
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gather primary sources documenting Karen Blixen’s 1959 tour to New York and Boston (letters, photographs, newspapers, magazines, sound and video recordings, and ephemera held in the New York Public Library, the YMHA Poetry Center, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at Harvard: Radcliffe, Widener, Houghton, and the Woodberry Poetry Room)
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compile bibliography and organize sources for filmmakers
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create a slideshow of archival photographs to be used in the film
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liaise with Zentropa in Copenhagen to request permissions for quotations and for reproductions of images, video, and sound
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research questions for interview subjects
Mentoring plan: Throughout the summer, the student will work independently and will be regularly in touch on campus and in person with the project supervisor (Thomas Wisniewski) and on Zoom with the project’s Danish collaborator (Catherine Lefebvre) as well as with producers at Zentropa in Copenhagen. Regular in-person meetings will be scheduled, during which the student will have the chance to answer questions and give updates on his/her/their work. Skills acquired will include conducting archival research; doing documentary writing and editing; gaining research experience in literature and cinema; and working closely with a leading filmmaker in Denmark.
Selection Criteria:
An excellent writer knowledgeable of literature with an interest in documentary film. Reading knowledge of Danish would be helpful, but not required.