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Article Excerpt
Documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads.
--Virginia Woolf, Orlando (65)
AGNESE "GOT INTO HER HEAD the notion that she looked like Milord Byron, of whom so much is talked ... [for] she used to dress and ride as a man, and ... write poetry" (Seven Gothic Tales 174). As the dueling, cross-dressing heroine of Isak Dinesen's "The Roads Round Pisa," Agnese della Gherardesci is a character whose trespass into the masculine role of the Byronic poet represents an authorial fantasy dear to Isak Dinesen. As the trouser-clad Baroness, who managed her African farm from the back of a very tall horse and later as a pseudonymous "male" poet in her own right, Dinesen, like Agnese, entertained the notion that she too resembled Lord Byron. A self-professed storyteller resistant to the idea of becoming a bit of printed matter, Dinesen was both attracted and repulsed by the nineteenth-century construct of the author as cultural figure that reached its zenith in the cult of character that Byron inspired at a time when reading Byron, or reading about Byron, became its own literary industry.
What literary theorists call Byron's "self-fashioning"--his talent for conflating author and character, life and art--is reproduced in interesting ways by Karen Blixen's highly theatrical approach to her own public persona, which she understood as a series of masks, beginning with her aristocratic, male pen name. "Not by the face shall the man be known, but by the mask," declares Kasparson, one of several masquerading characters in Dinesen's "The Deluge at Norderney" (Seven Gothic Tales 75). Such may also be the case for the post-Byronic author. By always leading with a mask, Dinesen was able to unmask, through her fiction, a kind of self-knowledge that complicates normative definitions of identity writ large or what the literary biographer takes to be his or her subject. My purpose, here, is not to sensationalize or expose either Byron's or Dinesen's efforts at self-mythologizing in the mean-spirited posture of a "tell-all" gossip or in the name of the biographer's sometimes over-assuming sympathy, but instead to honor the self-conscious and deliberate irony with which both George Gordon and Karen Blixen intentionally set out to make a problem out of literary biography through their respective strategies of dealing with fame and the discursive self.
In his dedication to Thomas Moore, Esquire, printed as the introduction to two of the four sets collected works of Byron in Dinesen's library at Rungstedlund, Byron resigns himself to serving the pleasure of a readership that likes to discover the author as the true villain of a text. "Be it so" he writes, "if I have deviated into the gloomy vanity of 'drawing from self the pictures [i.e. personages, or characters] arc probably like, since they are unfavorable, those who know me are undeceived, and those who do not, I have little interest in undeceiving.... I must admit Childe Harold to be a very repulsive personage; and as to his identity, those who like it must give him whatever 'alias' they please" (4:49).
No doubt attracted to the transgressive possibilities of living as an alias, at a young age, Karen Blixen impersonated Milord Byron as part of a "private serial" co-authored with her best friend, Ellen Wanscher, who eagerly took the part of Lady Annabella, Byron's spurned wife (Thurman 44). Karen Blixen's early identification with Byron seemed to offer her a means of resistance against the bourgeois morality that dominated her female-headed household after the suicide of her father, who was himself a kind of self-destructive, Byronic hero. Indeed, of the seven types and prototypes Peter Thorslev ascribes to the Byronic hero, Wilhelm Dinesen embodied at least three: Rousseau's child of nature, when he lived among the American Sioux, Pawnee and Chippewa; romanticism's Satanic hero, when he ranted against the pietism of his day in the ambulatory conversations he had with his nine year old daughter; and finally, the "hero of sensibility," or "the gloomy egoist," when he penned his own pastoral, self-exploration, Boganis, or Letters from the Hunt, which would influence both his daughter's expatriate wanderings and her own ambitions towards authorship (Thorslev 35; Thurman 16, 27).
Yet, if the reticence of Dinesen's memoir Out of Africa is any measure, Dinesen, as the author of fiction or non-fiction, was no "gloomy egoist" but quite the reverse. Rather than inherit romanticisms self-indulgence from Wilhelm or Byron before him, Dinesen selectively drew from these two iconic aristocrats a theory of selfhood that resisted the constraints of what her narrator in "Copenhagen Season" dubs "that dubious being, the individual" (Last Tales 253). (1) Rather, the aristocratic title the Baroness held in common with "Baron Byron" symbolized for her a model of identity in which the aristocrat was understood to be actually "walking, talking, riding, dancing, as the personification of his [or her] name" under no delusions (unlike the poor liberal individual) of his or her own celebrated uniqueness (Last Tales 252).
So earnest was Dinesen's interest in Byron, Oedipal and otherwise, (Ah, to be "for a few hours Lord Byron himself!") that the problems and pleasures of being Lord Byron add up to a pair of romantic bookends that frame Dinesen's full body of work (Carnival 332). In her first publication in 1934, Byron, or Byron imitators, are present in three of Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, while more than forty years later, in the posthumously published collection, Carnival, Byron appears as the main character of "The Second Meeting," which is Dinesen's final, printed tale. It was last worked on in 1961, prior to Dinesen's death the following year. Editor Frans Lasson observes that "although it is to a certain extent a fragment, ['The Second Meeting'] will be for a great many readers the final, moving meeting with Karen Blixen, the storyteller" (Carnival ix). In dramatic fashion, "The Second Meeting" is also Isak Dinesen's final, moving meeting with Byron, or put in more therapeutic terms, her final, moving meeting with a fictive projection of herself as Byron.
The literal second meeting staged in Dinesen's final tale is between Lord Byron and Pino the puppeteer, who resembles the otherwise inimitable Byron to the point of being his twin. In anticipation of various reencounters with destiny--the kind that doubles always find their way into--at their first meeting, on one of those "full-moon nights on Malta" (Carnival 328), Pino manages to save the life of Lord Byron. He accomplishes the rescue by secretly taking Byron's place in a rendezvous with a maiden whose rogue brothers are lying in ambush to kill the rake poet (Carnival 329). Despite the disguise of Byron's clothes, secured through the Lord's trusty valet, the brothers are not fooled by the resemblance. Humored by his effort at impersonation, they spare the courageous Pino on condition of a ransom, which a grateful Byron dutifully pays: one gold sovereign to his blackmailers and one to his brave double. This second, fortuitous sovereign launches Pino's famous puppet theater, which has made him a full-blown celebrity all over Italy. Now fourteen years later, Dinesen's tale opens with Pino explaining to Byron how a second meeting functions as an indispensable narrative principle, valuable to puppet plays and biographies alike, for a second meeting is necessary if the poet's life is to become "a story" ready for transmission and amenable to repetition and consumption.
Whether or not Dinesen's protagonist, the artist figured as puppeteer, intends this second meeting to generate the kind of serial reproduction or "branding" of the author as cultural hero, which Byron himself managed in his illustrious career is a matter of central interest in Dinesen's final tale. Whether or not Dinesen's protagonist, the artist figured as puppeteer, intends this second meeting to generate the kind of serial reproduction or "branding" of the author as cultural hero, which Byron himself managed in his illustrious career is a matter of central interest in Dinesen's final tale for it was written with Dinesen's mortality in full view, at a time when her artistic legacy was a matter of critical debate. Reproducing this self-reflective mood, "The Second Meeting" begins with Byron's death dearly inscribed on the narrative horizon. In contrast to Dinesen's consistently anti-realist aesthetic, the tale opens matter-of-factly, with an uncharacteristic amount of ironic weight placed on the authorized facts of Byron's highly publicized life. The tale depicts Byron's final leave-taking from Italy and the circumstances surrounding his decision to board the Hercules, sail to Greece and join the revolutionaries in their cause--a heroic plot indeed, had he not died of rheumatic fever shortly after landing. Dinesen's narrator reconstructs Byron's contemplative mood before departing: "Twice, in the belief that he was shaking the dust of Italy off his feet for good, he had gone on board, and twice a fierce wind or a dead calm had made him turn to shore again. He had sent away his companions, he was alone in the empty Casa Saluzzo" (Carnival 327). According to Byron's loyal valet, the Hercules actually suffered three failed departures (Eisler 726); but for the sake of the symmetry of Dinesen's tale, twice he boards his destiny, and twice he disembarks.
Functioning in the guise of the curious reader, or critic, Pino invades Lord Byron's privacy in the name of securing "that sacred thing: a second meeting" (Carnival 328). The puppeteer confesses to an apprehensive Lord Byron:
I have indeed come to make an inventory, ... I am going to turn [your life] into a story. That is what a second meeting does. It is the story's touchstone, the last curve of the parenthesis, which...
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