SILENCE WILL SPEAK: A Study in the Life of Denys Finch Hatton and His Relationship with Karen Blixen

by Errol Trzebinski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1978

No one in this country would be at all interested in the life of the Hon. Denys Finch Hatton if it had not happened to impinge romantically on that of one of the distinctive writers of our century, lsak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) was an artist. Her husband, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, was a Danish roustabout who gave his wife syphilis, lost her family's money in a coffee plantation in Kenya, then divorced her for a prettier and, one assumes, more phlegmatic young woman named Cookie, and the life of a white hunter, as was Finch Hatton. Denys, from his birth in 1887, was adored by everybody: mother, older brother and sister, Eton and Oxford friends, WW I comrades, Kermit Roosevelt, and that Prince of Wales who ended up as Duke of Windsor. He was a member of the shining generation who earned their haloes at last in the cemeteries of Flanders, and his death in a plane crash near Nairobi in 1928 left his friends with a sense of waste--and Karen Blixen desolate. . . . Mrs. Trzebinski, an Englishwoman married to a Polish architect in Kenya, has uncovered a biographical vacuum. She has labored patiently and resourcefully to fill it, out of what she describes as an obsession with this dashing but obscure character. But the structuring has been a problem. We have here a full biography of Finch Hatton, the merest sketch of the Baron, and a great deal of Karen. It is not satisfactory; Finch Hatton is not a particularly sympathetic figure, for all his charm, and the book does not stand alone.

Pub Date: March 1, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1978

Categories: NONFICTION