![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In her frail last years, on her one trip to the United States, she went out of her way to meet Marilyn Monroe, and recently has herself become a movie heroine, as played by Meryl Streep in the stately adaptation of ''Out of Africa.'' Since her death in 1962 - the cause of death was given as ''emaciation'' - the many-named woman known to the world as Isak Dinesen has been the subject of a number of biographies, including a truly excellent one by Judith Thurman, from which I have drawn most of the following clues. She relished what she called ''the sweetness of fame'' and the company of the great and glamorous she received in her native Denmark and while traveling elsewhere the attention due a celebrity. WHEN the Book-of-the-Month Club offered ''Seven Gothic Tales,'' by Isak Dinesen, as its selection for April of 1934, its newsletter said simply, ''No clue is available as to the pseudonymic author.'' But even then, with some detective work by the newspapermen of Denmark, this utterly obscure author was emerging into the spotlight as one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century, a woman who had ''style'' as well as a remarkably grave and luminous prose style, and whose works as they followed her veiled debut seemed successive enlargements of her dramatic persona. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |