Between “Hunger” and “Growth of the Soil” lies the time generally
allotted to a generation, but at first glance the two books seem much
farther apart. One expresses the passionate revolt of a homeless
wanderer against the conventional routine of modern life. The other
celebrates a root-fast existence bounded in every direction by
monotonous chores. The issuance of two such books from the same pen
suggests to the superficial view a complete reversal of position. The
truth, however, is that Hamsun stands today where he has always stood.
His objective is the same. If he has changed, it is only in the
intensity of his feeling and the mode of his attack. What, above all, he
hates and combats is the artificial uselessness of existence which to
him has become embodied in the life of the city as opposed to that of
the country.
Problems do not enter into the novels of Hamsun in the same manner as
they did into the plays of Ibsen. Hamsun would seem to take life as it
is, not with any pretense at its complete acceptability, but without
hope or avowed intention of making it over. If his tolerance be never
free from satire, his satire is on the other hand always easily
tolerant. One might almost suspect him of viewing life as something
static against which all fight would be futile. Even life's worst
brutalities are related with an offhandedness of manner that makes you
look for the joke that must be at the bottom of them. The word
_reform_ would seem to be strangely eliminated from his dictionary,
or, if present, it might be found defined as a humorous conception of
something intrinsically unachievable.
Hamsun would not be the artist he is if he were less deceptive. He has
his problems no less than Ibsen had, and he is much preoccupied with
them even when he appears lost in ribald laughter. They are different
from Ibsen's, however, and in that difference lies one of the chief
explanations of Hamsun's position as an artist. All of Ibsen's problems
became in the last instance reducible to a single relationship--that
between the individual and his own self. To be himself was his cry and
his task. With this consummation in view, he plumbed every depth of
human nature. This one thing achieved, all else became insignificant.
Hamsun begins where Ibsen ended, one might say. The one problem never
consciously raised by him as a problem is that of man's duty or ability
to express his own nature. That is taken for granted. The figures
populating the works of Hamsun, whether centrally placed or moving
shadowlike in the periphery, are first of all themselves--agressively,
inevitably, unconsciously so, In other words, they are like their
creator. They may perish tragically or ridiculously as a result of their
common inability to lay violent hand on their own natures. They may go
through life warped and dwarfed for lack of an adjustment that to most
of us might seem both easy and natural. Their own selves may become
more clearly revealed to them by harsh or happy contacts with life, and
they may change their surfaces accordingly. The one thing never
occurring to them is that they might, for the sake of something or some
one outside of themselves, be anything but what they are.
There are interferences, however, and it is from these that Hamsun's
problems spring. A man may prosper or suffer by being himself, and in
neither case is the fault his own. There are factors that more or less
fatally influence and circumscribe the supremely important factor that
is his own self. Roughly these fall into three groups suggestive of
three classes of relationships: (1) between man and his general
environment; (2) between man and that ever-present force of life which
we call love; and (3) between man and life in its entirety, as an
omnipotence that some of us call God and others leave unnamed. Hamsun's
deceptive preference for indirectness is shown by the fact that, while
he tries to make us believe that his work is chiefly preoccupied with
problems of the second class, his mind is really busy with those of the
first class. The explanation is simple. Nothing helps like love to
bring out the unique qualities of a man's nature. On the other hand,
there is nothing that does more to prevent a man from being himself than
the ruts of habit into which his environment always tends to drive him.
There are two kinds of environment, natural and human. Hamsun appears to
think that the less you have of one and the more of the other, the
better for yourself and for humanity as a whole. The city to him is
primarily concentrated human environment, and as such bad. This phase of
his attitude toward life almost amounts to a phobia. It must be
connected with personal experiences of unusual depth and intensity.
Perhaps it offers a key that may be well worth searching for. Hamsun was
born in the country, of and among peasants. In such surroundings he
grew up. The removal of his parents from the central inland part of
Norway to the rocky northern coast meant a change of natural setting,
but not a human contact. The sea must have come into his life as a
revelation, and yet it plays an astonishingly small part in his work. It
is always present, but always in the distance. You hear of it, but you
are never taken to it.
At about fifteen, Hamsun had an experience which is rarely mentioned as
part of the scant biographical material made available by his reserve
concerning his own personality. He returned to the old home of his
parents in the Gudbrand Valley and worked for a few months as clerk in a
country store--a store just like any one of those that figure so
conspicuously in almost every one of his novels. The place and the work
must have made a revolutionary impression on him. It apparently aroused
longings, and it probably laid the basis for resistances and resentments
that later blossomed into weedlike abundance as he came in contact with
real city life. There runs through his work a strange sense of sympathy
for the little store on the border of the wilderness, but it is also
stamped as the forerunner and panderer of the lures of the city.
As a boy of eighteen, when working in a tiny coast town as a cobbler's
apprentice, he ventured upon his first literary endeavors and actually
managed to get two volumes printed at his own cost. The art of writing
was in his blood, exercising a call and a command that must have been
felt as a pain at times, and as a consecration at other times. Books
and writing were connected with the city. Perhaps the hatred that later
days developed, had its roots in a thwarted passion. Even in the little
community where his first scribblings reached print he must have felt
himself in urban surroundings, and perhaps those first crude volumes
drew upon him laughter and scorn that his sensitive soul never forgot.
If something of the kind happened, the seed thus sown was nourished
plentifully afterwards, when, as a young man, Hamsun pitted his
ambitions against the indifference first of Christiania and then of
Chicago. The result was a defeat that seemed the more bitter because it
looked like punishment incurred by straying after false gods.
Others have suffered in the same way, although, being less rigidly
themselves, they may not, like Hamsun, have taken a perverse pleasure in
driving home the point of the agony. Others have thought and said harsh
things of the cities. But no one that I can recall has equalled Hamsun
in his merciless denunciation of the very principle of urbanity. The
truth of it seems to be that Hamsun's pilgrimage to the bee hives where
modern humanity clusters typically, was an essential violation of
something within himself that mattered even more than his literary
ambition to his soul's integrity. Perhaps, if I am right, he is the
first genuine peasant who has risen to such artistic mastery, reaching
its ultimate heights through a belated recognition of his own proper
settings. Hamsun was sixty when he wrote “Growth of the Soil.” It is the
first work in which he celebrates the life of the open country for its
own sake, and not merely as a contrast to the artificiality and
selfishness of the cities. It was written, too, after he had definitely
withdrawn himself from the gathering places of the writers and the
artists to give an equal share of his time and attention to the tilling
of the soil that was at last his own. It is the harvest of his ultimate
self-discovery.
The various phases of his campaign against city life are also
interesting and illuminating. Early in his career as a writer he tried
an open attack in full force by a couple of novels, “Shallow Soil” and
“Editor Lynge”, dealing sarcastically with the literary Bohemia of the
Norwegian capital. They were, on the whole, failures--artistically
rather than commercially. They are among his poorest books. The attack
was never repeated in that form. He retired to the country, so to speak,
and tried from there to strike at what he could reach of the ever
expanding, ever devouring city. After that the city, like the sea, is
always found in the distance. One feels it without ever seeing it.
There is fear as well as hatred in his treatment of it.
In the country it is represented not so much by the store, which, after
all, fills an unmistakable need on the part of the rural population, as
by the representatives of the various professions. For these Hamsun
entertains a hostile feeling hardly less marked than that bestowed on
their place of origin, whither, to his openly declared disgust, they are
always longing. It does not matter whether they are ministers or actors,
lawyers or doctors--they are all tarred with the same brush. Their
common characteristic is their rootlessness. They have no real home,
because to Hamsun a home is unthinkable apart from a space of soil
possessed in continuity by successive generations. They are always
despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily,
and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge
of life on a large scale. Greatness is to them inseparably connected
with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing
but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's
ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of
judgment are not their own.
From what has just been said one might conclude that the spirit of
Hamsun is fundamentally unsocial. So it is, in a way, but only in so far
as we have come to think of social and urban as more or less
interchangeable terms. He has a social consciousness and a social
passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of
no greater man than his own Isak of “Growth of the Soil”--a simple
pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth
personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak
passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, “with the grain
flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands,” he pictures it
deliberately in the light of a religious rite--the oldest and most
significant known to man. It is as if the man who starved in
Christiania and the western cities of the United States--not
figuratively, but literally--had once for all conceived a respect for
man's principal food that has colored all subsequent life for him and
determined his own attitude toward everything by a reference to its
connection or lack of connection with that substance.
Taking it all in all, one may well call Hamsun old-fashioned. The
virtues winning his praise and the conditions that stir his longings are
not of the present day. There is in him something primitive that forms a
sharp contrast to the modernity of his own style. Even in his most
romantic exaggerations, as in “Hunger” and “Mysteries,” he is a realist,
dealing unrelentingly with life as it appears to us. It would hardly be
too much to call his method scientific. But he uses it to aim tremendous
explosive charges at those human concentrations that made possible the
forging of the weapons he wields so skilfully. Nor does he stop at a
wish to see those concentrations scattered. The very ambitions and
Utopias bred within them are anathema to his soul, that places
simplicity above cleanliness in divine proximity. Characteristically we
find that the one art treated with constant sympathy in his writings is
that of music, which probably is the earliest and certainly the one
least dependent on the herding of men in barracks. In place of what he
wishes to take away he offers nothing but peace and the sense of genuine
creation that comes to the man who has just garnered the harvests of his
own fields into his bulging barns. He is a prophet of plenty, but he has
no answer ready when we ask him what we are going to do with it after we
have got it. Like a true son of the brooding North, he wishes to set us
thinking, but he has no final solutions to offer.