Old Non-Bestseller Review: The Angelic Avengers, by "Pierre Andrézel" (Karen Blixen)

Old Non-Bestseller Review: The Angelic Avengers, by "Pierre Andrézel" (Karen Blixen)

by Rich Horton

Karen Dinesen was born in Denmark in 1885. Her father was wealthy and had a small literary reputation, but he committed suicide when Karen was 9. She made an unfortunate marriage to the Swedish Baron Bror Blixen in 1914, and they opened a coffee plantation in Kenya. Bror was unfaithful and lazy, and by 1921 the marriage had collapsed. Blixen stayed in Kenya until 1931, living since 1925 with the big game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, until he died in a plane crash. After the coffee plantation failed, Karen Blixen returned to her family's home in Denmark, where she remained for the rest of her life, dying in 1962. (She was on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize that year (Steinbeck won) and she may have been chosen had she not died, though apparently the Swedish Academy was worried about showing too much favoritism to Scandinavians. This is an appropriate concern, that seems not to have bothered them with such later controversial picks as Eyvind Johnson. I personally think Dinesen a much more interesting writer than Steinbeck, and I wish she had won the Prize.)

She had written stories for literary magazines as a young woman, published in Danish as by "Osceola", but she doesn't seem to have intended to have a literary career until late in her time in Kenya. Her first book was Seven Gothic Tales, completed in 1933. She wrote it in English (which she primarily spoke while in English-speaking Kenya.) After some difficulty, she found a publisher in the United States (who did not pay an advance!), using the semi-pseudonym Isak Dinesen, which she retained for the rest of her career. (I say semi-pseudonym as after all Dinesen was her maiden name.) Her best known work seems to be her memoir of her time in Kenya, Out of Africa, though its fame must rest in some part on the popular movie. I far prefer her fiction -- especially Seven Gothic Tales, but really all of her works in that mode, including Winter's Tales, Last Tales, Anecdotes of Destiny (which includes "Babette's Feast", also made into a successful film), and Ehrengard. All these are moody, colorful, usually set in the past, and often with a touch of the supernatural. Beautiful work. There was some resentment in Denmark about the fact that her first book was written in English (she published a Danish version as a free translation, with some details changed) and her subsequent work was usually published simultaneously in Danish and English, and it's not clear to me if she wrote in one language and then translated the work, or if she did the writing sort of simultaneously. Her life story is quite interesting, often dark -- marred by her father's suicide, her husband's unfaithfulness, her lover's untimely death, and chronic illness (including syphilis contracted from her husband, and various other medical issues due in part to poor treatment of the syphilis, or so it is believed.) 

In this context The Angelic Avengers, her only full-length novel, is something of an outlier (though it does bear some similarity to her other fiction.) She wrote it during the War, and it was published in Danish in 1944 as Gengaeldesens Veje, and in English in 1946. She seems to have been a bit dissatisfied with it, and she chose a new pseudonym, "Pierre Andrézel". For some time she denied that she had written it, or claimed that she had merely translated a lost French novel. For myself, I found the book at an estate sale quite a while ago, and figured it was worth a shot for a dollar. I had no idea who Pierre Andrézel was, but it looked like the kind of goofy over the top romantic/Gothic fiction I often enjoy. And so it proved to be! I was quite surprised (and somewhat gratified) when I looked up Andrézel to see if "he" had written any other books, and found that "he" was actually one of my favorite writers. I reread it just now, partly in service of the 1946 Project at the recent Worldcon.

The Angelic Avengers is set in the 1840s. A young English girl, Lucan Bellenden, an orphan, has lost her position as a lady's companion, and finds a new one as governess to a blind young boy. She soon grows attached to the boy, and the boy's widowed father begins to pay attention to her. Lucan senses that he may be about to propose, and she has decided she must refuse -- she does not love him. And then she is shocked and embarrassed when instead he suggests she become his mistress. So she runs away.

With no chance of another position without a reference, she can only think to throw herself on the mercy of an old school friend, Zosine, and she ends up at her house, on their mutual 18th birthday. Zosine is happy to see her, and invites her to her birthday ball ... and, shockingly, the ball ends with the revelation that Zosine's father has had to run away to avoid his creditors -- a business venture collapsed terribly. Zosine too is now destitute, with only her father's estranged cousin, Aunt Arabella, and her  old black nurse, Olympia, from Hispaniola (where Zosine was raised.)

(I will add immediately that the portrayal of Olympia, though quite positive in the sense that she is a good person and treated sympathetically, also trades quite broadly on racist stereotypes, and rather diminishes the fact that Olympia was a slave and though she claims to have loved Zosine's father, and had a child of his, was also clearly a victim of sexual predation in that sense.)

Zosine and Lucan need to find another position, and after some difficulty receive what seems a remarkable offer -- to come to France to live with an old English couple, a retired clergyman and his wife. Their duties will be light, primarily to take studies in history and religion from the old man. And so they go, and at first things seem wonderful. The old man, Mr. Penhallow, is very learned and teaches them a great deal. The place, in the Languedoc, is quite pleasant. There are some jarring notes -- the servant boy, Clon, who seems simple minded and apparently has a criminal past, for one. And the housekeeper is somewhat sinister. Finally, the neighboring estate, Joliet, seat of the Baron de Valfonds, has a curious history -- the Baron's family has vowed never to leave their province, ever since his ancestor was murdered during the French Revolution. The two girls do meet some interesting young men -- Baron Thésée, for one; and an Englishman, Noël Hartranft, who seems to fall for Zosine, but who admits he is engaged and will not go back on this promise; plus the handsome young Magistrate, Emmanuel Tinchebrai, who may be a byblow of one of the Valfonds ...

The sense that something is wrong mounts, and the reader will not be surprise to learn that there is a terribly dark secret behind the supposedly idyllic home the girls have been provided. The action turns on them finding a secret letter; on a serious accusation against Mr. Penhallow that seems to be disproved; and on the girls' realization that they are in desperate danger, and soon all hope of escape seems gone ...

It's all terribly melodramatic, of course. The villain(s) are satisfyingly horrible, and the two protagonists are engaging. The motivations are deeply weird in a very old-fashioned way: the attitudes, both religious and as to the proper place of women, are absurd. The romances are a bit thin, to be sure. But if one simply accepts the attitudes as a weird fantasy situation, and reads the novel just for the over the top fun, it's quite entertaining. Definitely not for everyone -- and not as powerful as Dinesen's great "Tales" -- but I liked it. It's sometimes considered fantastical, and certainly there are a few occurrences that can be regarded as supernatural, but I think it's best considered a Gothic historical novel.

(Evidently it was regarded in Denmark as partly a satire/allegory of the German occupation, though Dinesen always denied this.)