The Man Whom Women Loved: The Life of Bror Blixen, by Ulf Aschan (St. Martin’s, 238 pp., $15.95)
The worst thing about The Man Whom Women Loved is the silly title. The saddest is that Bror Blixen didn’t himself write the book. Like Isak Dinesen, whom he married, and Beryl Markham, whom he loved (one of many), he wrote first-rate prose: imaginative, witty, and evocative. Ulf Aschan, his godson and biographer, makes wonderful use of the Blixen letters that survive; one wishes there were more. From the early 1910s to the late 1930s, Blixen was a legendary figure in East Africa: coffee planter, white hunter, trailblazer, explorer, philanderer—“a merry cheerful man who was always in a good mood.” He also had an inner steel: he doesn’t shoot a charging elephant at ten feet, because he knows it’s a mock charge. (Beryl Markham, standing at his side, certain that this is her last moment, is understandably cross.) Cheerfulness abounds. Sometimes he’s like a cheeky schoolboy. You can almost hear him ask a cannibal in the Congo, “Sir, which part of the human body is the most tasty?” His question is brushed off. But some beers later, as the tribal chief is leaving, he comments genially: “The best part is actually the one you’re sitting on.” Blixen was a wanderer, a rolling stone. He left Africa in the late Thirties and died a few years later, back home in Denmark, in a motor accident. A host of friends mourned him, among them most of his mistresses and at least one ex-wife, who regretted ever after having left him in, may we say, well-deserved pique. She blew it when he proposed a safari for three: himself, his wife Cockie, and his mistress Eva. Choose one of us, said Cockie. He chose the other woman and Cockie lost “the love of my life.” The warm, bright memories of the friends of the man everyone seems to have loved breathe spirit into Ulf Aschan’s chronicle. A book for Africa buffs.
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