Naked On The Shore

The effect of the statement was not just the pandemonium that broke loose in the convention hall itself. Across the continent millions of radio listeners (including great numbers of Canadians, like myself) felt the euphoria of hearing a wholly unexpected stratagem outlined in the crisp Missouri voice of the beleaguered President. It was the stratagem of attack, of a supreme and cool disregard for the odds. In fact, when the dismayed and angry Congressmen assembled for their unheard-of brief pre-election session later in the summer, little happened. But the initiative was never lost.

Truman had one other major creative plan, much larger and equally aggressive, in his fight to retain the kingdom that foes and sometime friends were trying to take away from him: the whistle-stop campaign. While Governor Dewey was flying back and forth across the United States to mass rallies and uttering sonorities that would not rock the boat, Truman made hundreds of stops by train to greet crowds that steadily swelled as the campaign progressed-warm, friendly crowds that responded to Truman's intimate speaking style and his relentless attacks on congressional apathy and the smug self-satisfaction with which he claimed the big interests were backing his opponent. He was able to make millions of people feel that somehow his cause was their cause, as to a substantial degree it undoubtedly was.

Even so, Drew Pearson had drawn up in readiness his forecast of the members of the Dewey cabinet; four days before the election Life Magazine published a photograph of the "next President," that is, Thomas E. Dewey, traveling by ferry boat across San Francisco Bay. On election night, the new Univac machine began forecasting a Truman victory; engineers and announcers anxiously conferred, and apologized for the machine's malfunction! Even when at midnight Truman was far more than a million votes ahead, one of the three or four best-known national commentators kept insisting that he was sure to lose. A Chicago paper carried the headline of Dewey's victory in the early-morning hours even as the man who couldn't lose was losing past recall. In fact, Truman got a greater proportion of the total vote than Roosevelt had got in 1944: he had over 300 of the votes in the Electoral College, and he had carried a Democratic majority into Congress with him.

Truman was 68 when he left the Presidency-still vigorous, still intensely interested in human affairs. He survived his Presidency by 20 years. He returned to his old home in Independence where one further Ulyssean act climaxed the last phase of his life. He obtained the funds to build a library in the centre of the town, to contain millions of public papers from the White House, thousands of private papers, books on history and politics, especially on the Truman era, and colorful murals. And he continued far into his 80s to rise at dawn and to take the 6 A.M. walks that during his Presidency had astonished and exasperated the reporters.

Ulyssean women, too, in public careers, especially in the arts or in the humane professions or in hereditary sovereignties, have innumerable times been left naked on the shore. There is something intensely moving in the sight of older women who begin the process of resuming their personal odyssey through the courage of simply holding on in the face of failure. The great achievement, however, is to begin new creative enterprises that are highly personal and idiosyncratic, no matter how small and timid at first. Among the many women who illustrate the Ulyssean ideal is the Danish novelist, Isak Dinesen, in private life the Baroness Karen Blixen.

Karen Dinesen, as she was known before her marriage, was born in 1885, into a family of wealthy Danish merchants with highly placed political connections. Her father, who committed suicide when Karen was ten, was a brilliant and versatile man with a marked literary gift, which, however, he was reluctant to develop. Because Karen and her father had had a special rapport, his death affected her more than it did the three older children. She showed early talents for writing poetry, small plays, and stories, and a distinct ability to draw portraits in charcoal. She studied briefly in Paris, and upon return to Denmark began to be published in literary magazines. Thus far her life was bounded by a warm family circle and by the pleasant artistic activities of well-to-do Danish people in the early 1900s.

In 1913 Karen married a Danish aristocrat, Baron Bror von BlixenFinecke, a year younger than herself. The marriage produced two immense and potentially catastrophic changes in her life. One was her husband's decision to emigrate to Africa where he wanted to buy land for a coffee plantation. The couple left for Mombasa in German East Africa in December, 1913, built a house, hunted lions, and in time bought a farm of 800 acres, chiefly to raise coffee. The other event was that Karen contracted a venereal disease from her husband that forced her return to Denmark for treatment before she had completed even a year in Africa. By that time the war was on; the progress of the ship was slow; and even when Karen reached Denmark she lost still further precious time by trying to make arrangements for treatment while concealing the situation from her mother, a kind woman but a typical Victorian. There were no miracle drugs in those days. The best that Karen could do was to halt the advance of the disease; for the rest of her life complications remained to harass her physically. What the episode did to her emotional system can be imagined. She was a glowing, warmhearted girl, none of whose many photographs taken at the time give any inkling of the inner agony she must have known.

She returned to Africa, where in 1921 she and Bror Blixen separated, and for ten years she managed the farm alone as owner of the Karen Coffee Company, helped from time to time by her younger brother, Thomas, who had always been particularly close to her. Still, his visits could only be for a few weeks at a time. Management of this large African plantation was a lonely, burdensome job, relieved by Karen's remarkably sensitive and warm understanding of the African people who worked on the farm, and of the neighboring Masai and the Kikuyu, whose respect for her was shown in the title they gave her: "The Lioness."

Friends and relatives occasionally came out from Denmark to try to ease her loneliness. She needed all the loyalty and company she could command: the coffee market was falling apart in the postwar years; as her markets closed, her debts rose. By the late 1920s it seemed impossible that she could save the farm, or indeed any personal assets. In the midst of constant gloom and worry, three facets of her world filled her life with a certain'beauty. One was her relationship with her native Kenyans and her undoubted simple joy in much of African daily life. Another was that she had begun to fill the long, lonely evenings on the plantation by writing stories again and she had high hopes of being published again in the Danish magazines. The third was a kind of personal miracle: she met an Englishman, a leader of safaris, whom she rapidly learned to cherish as a close intellectual friend and someone dear to her as a person. Denys Finch-Hatton was the son of the Earl of Winchelsea and Nottingham, a radiant, handsome man then in his late 30s who had had a classical education at Eton and Oxford, loved music, and was a first-class athlete and pilot.

In him, Karen Blixen found the companion to whom she could read her stories and test out her ideas. Life must have taken on fresh hope for her in the late 1920s. Perhaps the coffee market would right itself, after all; perhaps her manuscripts, now in the mail to Denmark, would give her a new sphere of creative life; perhaps in time her relationship with Denys would develop into something even deeper and more lasting than dear friendship.

But Poseidon, or some other vindictive god, was to end Karen Blixen's brief journey on fair seas. The Danish journals returned her manuscripts: Denmark was not interested in what she had to write at this stage. The coffee markets collapsed: by late spring, 1931, Karen was certain that she had lost everything-even the sale of the house and plantation could not pacify her creditors. And on May 8, 1931, Denys Finch-Hatton flew his Gipsy Moth from the farm, saying that he would be back the following Thursday. Karen was waiting for him, but the plane never arrived. It had crashed on the flight from Mombasa to Voi, and Denys was killed.

Karen Blixen was now 46. She was sensitive to the needs and, far more, the rights of the native people, and had seriously considered heading a movement to guarantee greater fairness and justice to the native Africans; she would have done so had not financial disaster overtaken her. She could have recouped much of her loss by selling her farm to developers who would carve it up and dispossess the native people who trusted her, but she refused to do so. (In the end this was the fate of her native friends and retainers, anyway.)

Now everything seemed lost. She had lost her plantation, and was in fact destitute. She had failed to regain entry to the literary world of the Danes, and thus to a second career. She had lost Denys Finch-Hatton, opening a wound so deep that 30 years later she was still in symbolic ways in her life remembering him, treasuring him. She was, in truth, naked on the shore.

She could at least go home-that is, to her mother's home-and she had in addition the support and affection of her brother Thomas. When Karen's ship reached Marseilles on August 19, 1931, he was at the wharf to greet her. Her first act was to look ahead, not back-except for essential books and manuscripts, she unpacked nothing from her African trunks and boxes for 13 years. She then made an early and heroic decision: she asked Thomas (who had had his own family for more than five years) to support her for two years while she stayed at her mother's house and wrote in English, for an English market, the stories that throbbed in her mind. She did this, even though there was no publisher standing by.

The book she wrote, Seven Gothic Tales, was finished within the two-year period. Karen went herself to London to urge the claims of the Tales, without success, and she returned, surely close to despair. Then her good angel, her brother, as certain of his sister's creative genius as Vincent Van Gogh's brother was of his, was able to make a contact through the American novelist, Dorothy Canfield, with the American market. The result was publication in the United States. (Its publisher could not resist it, but predicted that it would not sell.) Early in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and the author, under the name of Isak Dinesen, was famous in England and America. The following year, when the Danish translation was published, celebrations were held in her honor in Copenhagen. Two years later, with the publication of her account of her life in Africa, Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen's fame was secure.

Karen Blixen died in September, 1962, at 77. To the end of her long fife she continued to produce stories, articles, and taped interviews. In spite of fragile health she traveled much, steadily developed her admirable gifts as a gardener, entertained friends from among the African people who visited her, and encouraged young writers and artists. Her photographs in the later years are filled with warm smiles.

In his foreword to Clara Svendsen's biography of Dinesen, Frans Lasson gives a poignant glimpse of the author's inner life. He rema k that Svendsen, who was Karen Blixen's secretary, had for years watched her, each night before going to bed, open the door to the yard, pause, then go to "Ewald's Room," so called because it had once been occupied two centuries earlier by the great Danish poet of that name. Finally, Clara Svendsen asked Karen Blixen what this invariable ritual meant. She explained that the door looked toward Africa, and that she went into Ewald's Room to look at the map of her African plantation. Frans Lasson adds that Blixen did not say that in the same room, always standing on the windowsill by her desk, and never mentioned by her, was the portrait of Denys Finch-Hatton. And Lasson suggests that all this expressed Blixen's longing for wings, her faithfulness to things living now only in the realm of her mind, and the unhealed wounds that enabled her to enrich her writing through her suffering.

Just as forces of circumstance or whatever passes for fate in our time can deal out crushing blows against Ulyssean people, often when their hopes are high and prospects bright and fair, so also powers and events wholly outside their control can rescue them when the situation looks lost beyond recall. The intervention of these beneficent strokes of fortune really takes nothing away from the Ulyssean recovery: the intervention simply creates a new potential, which it is up to the individual to exploit or not.

Examples of this benign interference by outer forces abound, but two illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can make the point vividly. One was the case of George Frideric Handel; the other, a much less well-known episode from the life of Cardinal Newman. In both cases, forces beyond their personal control had halted, and in fact almost immobilized, these creators, both in their later maturity-Handel was in his mid-50s, Newman well past 60. In both cases good fortune intervened to provide a possibility of recovery, which both men seized.

Handel was living in London in the early 1700s, where he had achieved an enormous success as a composer of Italian-style operas. Crowds packed the opera theatres to hear his musi6; he was a great favorite at court; and his creative powers seemed inexhaustible. Handel needed all his genius, because his appearance and manners were unprepossessing. He was grossly stout, awkward, often uncouth, imperious, and difficult to deal with. This unattractive outer personality, however, partly concealed a noble inner spirit. He had many enemies in the envious musical world of London in the 1730s, one of them the formidable Prince of Wales; these he could handle, but not the tidal wave of financial failure and debt that swept down upon him when the London audiences abandoned their interest in Italian opera and deserted his theatres. He wrote with his usual abundant creativity-what was said of Saint-Sa6ns many years later could have been said with equal truth of Handel: that he was throughout his life like a great flowering and ever fruitful tree-but the market was gone. Simultaneously his health failed-the worst blow was a paralyzing stroke from which he slowly recovered after a rest cure in France.

A fine and rarely seen film about Handel's life, produced in Great Britain in 1947, shows in an especially moving way Handel's bachelor life in those lonely and bankrupt days, shadowed by the menace of the debtors' prison. Except for isolated walks at times when the streets were empty, the composer remained in the house, which somehow he had been able to retain, brooding over the dark turn of events-naked on the shore. Then an extraordinary event occurred that was outside his control. Late one summer morning a delegation' of three men arrived from the Duke of Devonshire to ask Handel to prepare a work for a charitable performance. Almost indifferently the composer asked if they had a theme in mind. Rather nervously the leader of the delegation suggested that something involving the New Testament had been discussed. The effect upon the hitherto indifferent, almost somnolent composer was remarkable: "Do you mean," he asked, "the life of our Lord?"

This was what they did mean, and Handel, accepting the commission, shut himself into his workroom, saw no one but the women who placed his food at the door, and wrote the oratorio, The Messiah, in 25 days. He was in the grip of a magnificent creative obsession; many times tears flooded his eyes. To his servant he made the famous statement about what was to be the immortal Hallelujah Chorus, "I did think I did see Heaven before me, and the great God himself." He was then age 57, and from the long crisis of terrible financial loss and physical and social desolation, which had lasted many months, he had derived a new masterpiece-to be followed by still others in his late years.

John Henry Newman's experience is a fascinating parallel of seemingly utter failure, intervention by a wholly unexpected event, and creative exploitation of the new circumstance by a Ulyssean adult. Before he was 50, Newman was famous as one of the leaders of the new Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England. The idea of restoring much of the ancient, beautiful ritual that had been lost in Puritan days in the Church of England, and of restoring some of its Catholic beliefs and practices, had created so great an upheaval that its leading spokesman became celebrated, hated, and adored. He was the author of a famous hymn; an awesome controversialist and sought-after speaker; a popular and brilliant priest and don.

Then Newman, for reasons that would be irrelevant to enter into here, became a Roman Catholic. At once the whole tenor of his fife changed. The huge audience he had once commanded in the dominant Anglican world now left him; at the same time he found a cold welcome among Roman Catholics, notably and specifically at Rome itself, where he had expected to receive at least generous respect from Pius IX and the cardinals. All that he gained instead was the headship of a group of Oratorian Fathers in the provincial city of Birmingham.

Then came a succession of prospects from outside forces and imaginative ideas of his own which he hoped would advance the cause of Roman Catholicism in Great Britain and restore much of his shattered influence in the prestigious circles of thought: the offer of a bishopric, mysteriously withdrawn after he had accepted it and had bought the robes; the appointment to the rectorship of a so-called Catholic University of Ireland, which involved him in a period of intense travel and organization in Ireland, only to find a chimera; the prospect of a Catholic hall at Oxford, of which he would be the rector: this was Newman's own plan and dream, a plan defeated by his enemy within the Church, Cardinal Manning, also an Anglican convert.

In whatever direction Newman looked he was blocked. With all his great gifts, and in spite of his former fame, he had come, so it seemed, to a complete dead end. It was about this time that Newman wrote in his journal that he could hardly bear to get up in the morning; the day stretched before him already dreary and defeated. He was, in fact, naked on the shore.

Then occurred the mysterious interposition of the gods. Newman, who had been neglected for so long, was suddenly and angrily attacked by Charles Kingsley, one of the most noted Protestant writers of the day, for his desertion to the Roman Catholics, for his insincerity, for his opportunism, for his jesuitry. Kingsley's attack also extended to the church Newman had espoused. What was Newman to do with these searing and highly personal onslaughts? Turn the other cheek and let them pass? But this would be both masochistic and provocative to further attacks. Write two or three letters to The Times and responding letters to the magazine that had published Kingsley's initial paper? But responses in article form to original polemics never carry the weight of the original; and they die with the temporary nature of nearly aft journalism.

No. What was needed was a book that would give real substance to Newman's defence of himself and his conduct, and which would be read long after he, Kingsley, and the other polemicists were dead. It took Newman seven weeks of intensive work to write a reply to Kingsley that was to become one of the most famous statements in the world of theological debate, yet a book well within the range of the average intelligent person: the Apologia pro Vita Sua. Like Handel, Newman often wept as, standing at the wooden lectern on which he wrote most of the Apologia, he carried forward his brilliant and eloquent defence of himself and of the Roman Catholic Church. He must have wondered whether his will power and creative generativity were sufficient for the work. He was, after all, 65 years old-"retirement age," in twentieth century terms.

In fact, Kingsley had been the unwitting rescuer of Newman from utter defeat. The Apologia, with its fire and zest and artistry, was a triumph, read and acclaimed everywhere. Without Kingsley, it would never have been written-but then, without Newman, it would only have been another humdrum treatise ultimately gathering dust on the shelves of pious Victorian homes. Nor did Newman, to the end of his very long life at age 89, lose his ability to think originally and write creatively. (His career was unexpectedly crowned by the Cardinal's cap when he was 78.) The bright, quick mind, with its sensitive humor, mature irony, simplicity of enthusiasm over human projects, and its tender faith, can be said to have remained Ulyssean until the day of Newman's death in 1890.

"But then," says the inevitable cynic of those Ulysseans, "what options had they?" If they had no choice, it was because of their essentially life-loving and striving natures, always open to the presence and possibility of creativity. To contradict the cynic, they indeed had other options, important options chosen by innumerable older adults just as much today as formerly.

One choice is self-pity-"Who has known such woes as I have known?": one can make a career out of this, and many have. Everyone knows of someone who by personal mistakes or, much oftener, the injury and blockage of external fate, has not written the novel, conducted the orchestra, created the business, bought the long-dreamed-of house, visited Scandinavia, painted the portraits as he or she had hoped to do, and whose reaction has been immobilizing self-pity. (Who, on the other hand, had more excuse for self-pity than the remarkable modem Ulyssean Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose brilliant books were forbidden publication by his Church up to his death and in the years preceding John XXIII-but who wrote them anyway?)

Another option is to live more cautiously; play it safe; move back into the comforting conventions of routine life. There is a basis of good sense and reason here, and of human practice. Even the Ulysseans in terrible misfortune are first saved by routine. If you are Thomas Carlyle, and you discover that a housemaid has unwittingly burned the just-completed manuscript of your History of the French Revolution, in the writing of which 20 cartloads of books have been employed, you undoubedly feel crushed. For the time being it may be the routine that saves you-the cup of tea, the usual walk, the familiar companionship of a dear friend. But because you are Carlyle, and a Ulyssean, you rewrite the history. If you are the painter, Eug6ne Delacroix, keeping also a journal fine enough to be published years later and read by thousands of people since, and if you leave one complete year of the journal in a Paris cab one night, and never recover it, you can never rewrite the entries. One piece of creative work done over a whole year is permanently missing. The world of small routines will save you, as it saves years of life of lonely and desolate women in their late years-but because you are Delacroix and a Ulyssean, you recommence the journal.

The routines of conventional living can heal and save. However, they can and do engulf and enslave. Worse, there are also the demonic conventions that wait for all who have suffered terrible reverses and sorrows: alcoholism, drug addiction, cruelty to other people and oneself, sustained bitterness.

Sometimes the type of creativity evoked by the depths of disaster is not what Maslow called "special talent creativity," but "self-actualizing creativeness"-how the Ulyssean person responds in his or her personal life to the blows of Fate. A provocative example of this is the life of the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, who at her death on November 24, 1%0, was the last surviving sister of the Tsar Nicholas II, murdered with his entire family at Ekaterinbourg in 1917, ending the 300-year Romanoff dynasty. After the revolution the Grand Duchess Olga and some other members of the royal fan-Lily escaped to Paris and other western capitals.

The fleeing nobility and former ministers had certain critical choices to make. If they had enough money (few had), they could try to maintam the illusion of temporary exile in some villa or resort in Italy or France. If they had not, they could seek some kind of dignified work, or as in many cases, any kind of work. Ideologically, the exiles could continue to live in the vanished world of Imperial Russia. Or they could, while preserving loving contacts and memories, -look toward a world from which Imperial Highnesses had vanished.

What was remarkable about the Grand Duchess Olga and her husband, Colonel Nikolai Koulikovsky, was that they made a Ulyssean decision when she was 66 and he was 67 to go to Canada to farm a property of 200 acres with the aid of their two sons and a couple of elderly servants. The decision was unmistakable in its symbolism. They had chosen for themselves and their sons not the world of yesterday, including intrigues and jealousies of certain royal and ex-royal circles in Europe, but the world of tomorrow in a wholly new country.

At first the venture seemed successful, but as the years passed, Colonel Koulikovsky found it impossible to hire the extra help he needed for his farm; his sons chose new careers; and as his health failed, he and the Grand Duchess moved to a modest house in Cooksville, a small community near Toronto. There was a garden, and Olga made the house charming with many mementos of their former life.

The old servants died, and Colonel Koulikovsky's health steadily deteriorated until he, too, died in 1957. The Grand Duchess Olga was left alone in the Co6ksville house. What was she to do? Although her health was good, she was 74 years of age. She decided not to move, and by living very simply she was able to carry on. She became a familiar figure in the town, shopping and gardening. There was no Russian Orthodox church in Cooksville, and on frequent Sundays Olga made the trip into Toronto to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where after the service elderly members of the congregation and their families and grandchildren would swarm around her to pay their respects to almost the last living member of the Russian Imperial royal family. "Almost," because there was still one other living grand duchess, her sister in London, England, who as it turned out was to die shortly before Olga's own death in November, 1960.

In his biography, The Last Grand Duchess, the Greek journalist Ian Vorres tells that he drove out to Cooksville from Toronto to see if he could interview her for an article. One early autumn day, he found a small, spare woman working in her garden-this was the Grand Duchess Olga. From the beginning Vorres was struck by her ease and graciousness of manner, and by her warm, friendly spirit. He found out that Olga had often been invited to write or permit the writing of her life story, but she had always refused. But the young newspaperman and the elderly grand duchess, then 75, became fast friends; and Vorres was able to persuade her to let him write her life story-fortunately completed before her death.

It was not only Olga's vitality and courage that drew Vorres's admiration, but her sense of humor and her wise humanity. She had seen much and lost much-in the material sense, almost everything. She was, of course, lonely; she could not blot out the past, and history continued to pursue her. She still received letters and occasional visits from former Russian subjects who cherished her as a symbol, and also tiresome intrusions from imposters. Yet there was a modernity in her manner and her way of thought that reflected the new country and new style of life she and her husband had chosen so late in their lives.

In midsummer, 1960, she became ill, and had to enter hospital in Toronto, where the routines tired her and made her unhappy and restless. The medical staff, who became fond of her, were willing to send her home, but there was no one to nurse her in the silent house at Cooksville. Then an elderly Imperial Russian Army officer and his wife, Captain and Mrs. Martemianov, invited her to go with them for "convalescence." They had a small flat above a hairdresser's shop on Gerrard Street East in Toronto. It was there that Olga died on November 24, 1960.

Thirteen years later, also in November, I made a short nostalgic journey across downtown Toronto to visit the site where Olga had last lived and made the following entry in my journal:

From now on, his routine-the café tables he used, the waiters who served him, even the cakes he ate-followed an invariable pattern: breakfast at the Pasticceria del Massimo in Via Masqueda; a call at Flaccorio, the imaginative bookseller and publisherwhose shop is a kind of literary club, and who was the first to encourage him to publish; by mid-day he would be settled in his personal version of an ivory tower, the back room of the Café Mazzara under the only skyscraper in town. I

The brief case opens. It contains, as well as maybe a few cakes from the last café, books, the addiction which made him as great an object of suspicion to his fellow grandees as his great-grandfather had been with his telescopes and comet-finders ... This concentrated reading throughout the day at the Café table (mysterious scribbling) was in a way creative.