Recently, inspired by watching Out of Africa again, I started reading the stories of Isak Dinesen, alias, Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, whose life on the coffee plantation in Kenya, at “the foot of the Ngong Hills,” from 1913 to 1931 is the subject of Sydney Pollack’s great film.

One of the stories from the collection she published almost 30 years after leaving Africa – Shadows on the Grass – is a particularly fine example of a genre of writing which is just about extinct: the portrait.

The story called “Farah” is, she says, the “Portrait of a Gentleman.”  It’s a vivid, loving and elegiac tribute to the Somali Muslim, Farah Aden, who served as her major-domo for the entire 18 years of her stay in Kenya.

Reading the story was such a rich and satisfying experience I started to think about the unique features of the portrait and what we’ve lost in not creating them, and making do instead with its nearest contemporary equivalent: the interview.

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Probably the biggest difference between the portrait and the interview is the conceit of objectivity.  The interview likes to pretend it’s objective, whereas the portrait doesn’t even bother.  The portrait is clearly as much about the writer’s stance in relation to the subject as it is about the subject.  Yet, as Picasso noted, truth enters where art is, not where objectivity is:

We all know that Art is not truth.  Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.

In the sense that it makes art of a subject’s life, the portrait may therefore be truthful in a way an interview is not.  One is almost-but-not-quite non-fiction; the other, almost-but-not-quite fiction.

Not only does a portrait involve the relation of writer to subject, it relies on it.  The success of a portrait like Dinesen’s relies on the psychical “distance” between writer and subject.  It has to be just right: not too close, not too great.  The writer has to care deeply about the subject and retain their detachment.

The portrait also does something the interview only gestures at.  It locates the subject in a variety of contexts, and in each case we, the readers, learn something new.  Dinesen locates Farah, for example, within his Somali race, within his religion, within his profession, within his person, within the arc of her life, within her home:

When Farah first took service in my house, or first took my house into possession … it was no common contract which was set up, but a covenant … to the ever greater glory of the house.

I was riveted, in particular, by Dinesen’s observations on the characteristics of the Somali people, and the details she selects about his physical person.

Here she is on Farah’s “attitudinizing,” a trait that Arabs share, she says, with Icelanders:

The same ravenous ambition to distinguish themselves before all others and at any cost to immortalize themselves through a word or gesture.

At the same time, Farah has a kind of pre-Fall creatureliness:

The qualities with which he served me were cheetah or falcon qualities.

And what she calls at one point, a lack of Gemütlichkeit, illustrated so amusingly in the episode in which the Kikuyu Chiefs want to discuss the dress she wore the night the Prince of Wales visited the farm:

As now the old Chiefs and I in our talk together had got on to that very pleasant theme of my frock, I wanted to hear more of what they thought about it.  But at this moment Farah stepped on to the stage … He looked approving but stern.  He was not insensitive to popularity, but he was resolved on keeping the Kikuyu in their place, and me in mine … “Now these Kikuyus have said enough about this frock …”

This latter turn of phrase – what she calls his “partiality for the demonstrative adjective: ‘This Arab horse dealer offers you this horse at this price’ – we are told is an ancient Egyptian usage, and his voice, a typical Somali one:

… low, guttural, with a two-fold ring to it, for it was friendly but lent itself excellently well to a particular contempt or scorn.

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As funny and sensitive as her observations of Farah’s race and person are, Dinesen’s portrait reaches new heights when she observes his religion.  Her beautiful, poetic mind responds to Islam.  She characterises it as the religion of submission or acceptance, and not merely acceptance, but acceptance “with rapture.”

In contrast to many modern Christian ideologies, Islam does not occupy itself with justifying the ways of God to man; its Yes is universal and unconditional.

She thinks of Farah as one of the “communion of yes-sayers,” one who surrenders and consents.

As Job’s laments are not silenced by expositions of the justice and mercy of God, but it is before the revelation of God’s greatness that the complainer surrenders and consents, the Prophet surrenders and consents: “God is great.”

In the same way, she says, did Farah respond when news was brought that half his camels had perished and that Denys Finch-Hatton (Dinesen’s great love) had been killed: “God is great.”

The final satisfying aspect of a portrait is that it allows the writer to measure the impact the subject has had on his or her own life.  And Dinesen rises to the challenge of acknowledging the long loyal years of Farah’s service, never so great as when she was losing the farm, when “he lifted up me and himself to a classic plane …”

No friend, brother or lover, no nabob suddenly presenting me with the amount of money needed to keep the farm, could have done for me what my servant Farah did then.  Even if I had got nothing else for which to be grateful to him – but that I have got, and more than I can set down here – I should still for the sake of these months, now, thirty years after, and as long as I live, be in debt to him.

Bring back the portrait, I say!

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