Too Close to The Sun

The life and times of Denys Finch Hatton - by Sara Wheeler

Jonathan Cape:           £18.99

Isak Dinesen herself is said to have admitted that she sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the gift of storytelling, and syphilis was the price she paid, the Faustian seal on the exchange. Dinesen’s genius was the invention of herself in Out of Africa and much of the passionate unhappy love affair with Denys Finch Hatton, that held its place somewhere between truth and fiction.  It was a love story best served by his dying. 

In Too Close to The Sun, Sara Wheeler, already the author of four books, including the acclaimed biography Cherry: A life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard. determined to eke out the truth about Finch Hatton whose liaison with Dinesen (Karen Blixen) was immortalised in Out of Africa.  It may well be that the world never would have remembered Dinesen’s fabled lover but for her heart-breaking book, and Wheeler has provided not only an insight into the character of Finch Hatton but also into one of the last untold stories of the First World War and the horrors of the East Africa campaign.  No one who has ever tasted Africa will fail to be influenced by Wheeler’s writings.

Just who was this tall, balding, restless aristocrat who became the elusive hero of Dinesen’s poetic memoir?  There is no one alive who remembers him.  He left no diaries and only a few short letters.  He is only an engine of literary myth, yet through Out of Africa and Beryl Markham’s West with the Night he has somehow become the iconic romantic figure millions remember.  Wheeler follows Finch Hatton faithfully on his journey of self-realisation until he finally found some kind of purpose.  But sadly it was too late.

After a dazzling career at Eton and Oxford, Denys Finch Hatton sailed in 1910 for East Africa - still very much the land of the pioneer.  His father was the thirteenth Earl of Winchelsea and the eighth earl of Nottingham, and he witnessed at first hand the marginalisation of his class when agricultural interests were overtaken by economic modernisation.  Not surprisingly he looked for and found a new world in Kenya where the colonial overspill gave him both freedom and insecurity - powerful magnets for the irresolute adventurer.  Somehow, in less than a quarter of a century, he became one of the key figures in the mythic story of the British settlers in East Africa and found himself in that short time involved in the horrors of an almost unknown old-fashioned war that was fought with bayonets and nineteenth century smoking guns in vast expanses of unmapped bush.  His legendary affair with Isak Dinesen,  at that time the Baroness Blixen, only took place during the last decade of his life.

Although Sara Wheeler delves into Finch Hatton’s love affairs with Karen Blixen, struggling for survival on her doomed coffee farm in the Ngong Hills, and the pioneering aviatrix Beryl Markham, it is her commentary on the British colonial era, and later her descriptions of wilderness life in East Africa, that really bring this biography to life.  Although white man’s medicine was still widely revered most Africans correctly judged their new “rulers” suspiciously.  This was a vast and sultry land, newly opened only for the white man’s benefit.

Finch Hatton met the then Karen Blixen, known as Tania, at a dinner at the Muthaiga Club on the outskirts of Nairobi in 1918.  She was thirty-three and two years older than him.  Elspeth Huxley described her as a person “full of magnetism and restless energy, like a benign witch.”  She was still married to the Danish Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, but she never hid the fact that she was not in love with him.   Although a respected hunter he was a renowned womaniser and hopelessly irresponsible with money.  Early in the marriage he infected Tania with syphilis (it was endemic among the Maasai and generally known that he was sleeping with their women).  The following year, 1919, Finch Hatton developed a fever, stayed at the Blixen farm, and shortly afterwards invited her alone on safari.  Bror Blixen soon started introducing Finch Hatton as “my good friend and wife’s lover”.  Neither, before they found each other, had found a companion in Kenya sophisticated enough to share the lyrical landscape, the people, the tropical nights, literature and music. “Tania recognised that her relationship with Denys depended on mutual freedom, which really meant his freedom ...”  This freedom would eventually destroy the harmony of that relationship because of her possessiveness.  Six years later Finch Hatton, now thirty-seven, discovered his vocation and looked for work as a white hunter.  A  despairing Tania realised that she was living only for her lover’s visits.  Violent mood swings ricocheted  from suicidal despair to elation.

By 1929 an anguished Finch Hatton realised that he could no longer tolerate Tania’s emotional demands.  By then he had become one of Kenya’s most efficient safari leaders, taking the Prince of Wales on two separate journeys.  He also determined to buy his own plane (eventually a custard-yellow Gypsy Moth), and was one of the first to realise that the photography of wild animals in their natural surroundings was a far more sensible alternative to the massacre of game - particularly from cars.  Eventually, mainly through Finch Hatton’s persistent efforts, hunting by car in East Africa was forbidden. National Parks are now established in all three East African territories.

There is speculation in Sara Wheeler’s biography that Beryl Markham was pregnant by Finch Hatton when she refused to fly with him in his Gypsy Moth on that fateful day in 1931, when he crashed and killed himself.  Nevertheless, only the day before, he had left Tania on the Blixen farm, saying he would be back the following Thursday in time to have lunch with her.  Two others also refused to fly with him, causing Tania later to comment on “the shadow of destiny, which Denys himself had felt the last days at Ngong ...”

In this sensitive biography Sara Wheeler has told us a tragic love story set against the magical background of early British Africa.  She has also unavoidably corrected the grossly inaccurate portrait of Finch Hatton, portrayed by Robert Redford in Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-winning film Out of Africa.