An autobiographical element is evident in practically everything that
Hamsun has written. But it is particularly marked in the two volumes
now published under the common title of “Wanderers,” as well as in
the sequel named “The Last Joy.” These three works must be considered
together. They have more in common than the central figure of “Knut
Pedersen from the Northlands” through whose vision the fates of Captain
Falkenberg and his wife are gradually unfolded to us. Not only do they
refer undisguisedly to events known to be taken out of Hamsun's own
life, but they mirror his moods and thoughts and feelings during a
certain period so closely that they may well be regarded as diaries of
an unusually intimate character. It is as psychological documents of the
utmost importance to the understanding of Hamsun himself that they have
their chief significance. As a by-product, one might almost say, the
reader gets the art which reveals the story of the Falkenbergs by
a process of indirect approach equalled in its ingenuity and
verisimilitude only by Conrad's best efforts.
The line of Hamsun's artistic evolution is easily traceable through
certain stages which, however, are not separated by sharp breaks. It
is impossible to say that one stage ended and the next one began in
a certain year. Instead they overlap like tiles on a roof. Their
respective characters are strikingly symbolized by the titles of the
dramatic trilogy which Hamsun produced between 1895 and 1898--“At the
Gate of the Kingdom,” “The Game of Life,” and “Sunset Glow.”
“Hunger” opened the first period and “Pan” marked its climax, but it
came to an end only with the eight-act drama of “Vendt the Monk” in
1902, and traces of it are to be found in everything that Hamsun ever
wrote. Lieutenant Glahn might survive the passions and defiances of
his youth and lapse into the more or less wistful resignation of Knut
Pedersen from the Northlands, but the cautious, puzzled Knut has moments
when he shows not only the Glahn limp but the Glahn fire.
Just when the second stage found clear expression is a little hard
to tell, but its most characteristic products are undoubtedly the two
volumes now offered to the American public, and it persists more or less
until 1912, when “The Last Joy” appeared, although the first signs of
Hamsun's final and greatest development showed themselves as early as
1904, when “Dreamers” was published. The difference between the second
and the third stages lies chiefly in a maturity and tolerance of vision
that restores the narrator's sense of humour and eliminates his own
personality from the story he has to tell.
Hamsun was twenty-nine when he finished “Hunger,” and that was the age
given to one after another of his central figures. Glahn is twenty-nine,
of course, and so is the Monk Vendt. With Hamsun that age seemed to
stand principally for the high water mark of passion. Because of the
fire burning within themselves, his heroes had the supreme courage of
being themselves in utter defiance of codes and customs. Because of
that fire they were capable of rising above everything that life might
bring--above everything but the passing of the life-giving passion
itself. A Glahn dies, but does not grow old.
Life insists on its due course, however, and in reality passion may sink
into neurasthenia without producing suicides. Ivar Kareno discovers it
in “Sunset Glow,” when, at the age of fifty, he turns renegade in
more senses than one. But even then his realization could not be fully
accepted by the author himself, still only thirty-eight, and so Kareno
steps down into the respectable and honoured sloth of age only to
be succeeded, by another hero who has not yet passed the climacteric
twenty-ninth year. Even Telegraph-Rolandsen in “Dreamers” retains the
youthful glow and charm and irresponsibility that used to be thought
inseparable from the true Hamsun character.
It is therefore with something of a shock one encounters the enigmatic
Knut Pedersen from the Northlands, who has turned from literature to
tramping, who speaks of old age as if he had reached the proverbial
three-score and ten, and who time and again slips into something like
actual whining, as when he says of himself: “Time has worn me out so
that I have grown stupid and sterile and indifferent; now I look upon
a woman merely as literature.” The two volumes named “Under the Autumn
Star” and “A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings” form an unbroken cry of
regret, and the object of that regret is the hey-day of youth--that
golden age of twenty-nine--when every woman regardless of age and colour
and caste was a challenging fragment of life.
Something more than the passing of years must have characterized the
period immediately proceeding the production of the two volumes just
mentioned. They mark some sort of crisis reaching to the innermost
depths of the soul it wracked with anguish and pain. Perhaps a clue
to this crisis may be found in the all too brief paragraph devoted
to Hamsun in the Norwegian “Who's who.” There is a line that reads as
follows: “Married, 1898, Bergljot Bassöe Bech (marriage dissolved);
1908, Marie Andersen.” The man that wrote “Under the Autumn Star” was
unhappy. But he was also an artist. In that book the artist within
him is struggling for his existence. In “A Wanderer Plays with Muted
Strings” the artist is beginning to assert himself more and more, and
that he had conquered in the meantime we know by “Benoni” and “Rosa”
which appeared in 1908. The crisis was past, but echoes of it were
heard as late as 1912, the year of “Last Joy,” which well may be called
Hamsun's most melancholy book. Yet that is the book which seems to have
paved the way and laid the foundation for “The Growth of the Soil”--just
as “Dreamers” was a sketch out of which in due time grew “Children of
the Time” and “Segelfoss Town.”
Hamsun's form is always fluid. In the two works now published it
approaches formlessness. “Under the Autumn Star” is a mere sketch,
seemingly lacking both plan and plot. Much of the time Knut Pedersen is
merely thinking aloud. But out of his devious musings a purpose finally
shapes itself, and gradually we find ourselves the spectator of
a marital drama that becomes the dominant note in the sequel. The
development of this main theme is, as I have already suggested,
distinctly Conradian in its method, and looking back from the ironical
epilogue that closes “A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings,” one marvels
at the art that could work such a compelling totality out of such a
miscellany of unrelated fragments.
There is a weakness common to both these works which cannot be passed up
in silence. More than once the narrator falls out of his part as a tramp
worker to rail journalistically at various things that have aroused
his particular wrath, such as the tourist traffic, the city worker and
everything relating to Switzerland. It is done very naively, too, but it
is well to remember how frequently in the past this very kind of
naiveté has associated with great genius. And whatever there be of such
shortcomings is more than balanced by the wonderful feeling for and
understanding of nature that most frequently tempt Hamsun into straying
from the straight and narrow path of conventional story telling. What
cannot be forgiven to the man who writes of “faint whisperings that come
from forest and river as if millions of nothingnesses kept streaming and
streaming,” and who finds in those whisperings “one eternity coming to
an understanding with another eternity about something”?