Produced by Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected.
KNUT HAMSUN
_MR. ALFRED A. KNOPF
has been appointed the sole authorized
American publisher of_
KNUT HAMSUN
_The following books are now ready_:
HUNGER
GROWTH OF THE SOIL
SHALLOW SOIL
DREAMERS
PAN
WANDERERS
_The following are scheduled for later publications_:
CHILDREN OF THE TIME [Spring, 1923]
VICTORIA
THE VILLAGE OF SEGELFOSS
BENONI
ROSA
Knut Hamsun
_by_
Hanna Astrup Larsen
_Editor "The American-Scandinavian Review"_
New York
Alfred A. Knopf
Mcmxxii
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
_Published, October, 1922_
Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York.
Bound by the H. Wolff Estate, New York.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_The author wishes to acknowledge her debt to The
American-Scandinavian Foundation for the Fellowship which
enabled her to study the works of Hamsun in Norway during
the winter of 1920-1921._
Contents
The Wanderer:
Early Life in Norway 3
From the Wheatfields to the Fishing Banks 20
The Author of _Hunger_ 32
The Poet:
His Own Hero 45
The Hero and the Heroine 58
God in Nature 76
With Muted Strings 89
The Literary Artist 104
The Citizen:
Holding Up the Mirror to His Generation 119
Growth of the Soil 148
The Wanderer Arrived 163
Portraits
Knut Hamsun _Frontispiece_
Photo by Wilse
Hamsun as a Young Man 38
From a drawing by Erik Werenskiold
Knut Hamsun 86
From a painting by Henrik Lund
Hamsun and His Family 134
Photo by Wilse
THE WANDERER
EARLY LIFE IN NORWAY
Knut Hamsun has become identified in our minds with the lonely figure
that recurs again and again in his earlier books, the Wanderer who is
for ever outside of organized society and for ever pays the penalty
of being different from the crowd and unable to conform to its
standards. That this lonely creature is really himself in a certain
period of his life we know from the testimony of his own works.
Yet this vagabond and iconoclast sprang from the most conservative
stock of Norway. He is the descendant of an old peasant family in
Gudbrandsdalen, one of the interior mountain valleys in the heart of
the country.
Gudbrandsdalen is a region of proud historical traditions. There,
nine centuries ago, King Saint Olaf struggled to foist the new
religion on a stiff-necked race of pagans, and not far from Hamsun's
birthplace one of the oldest churches in Norway proclaimed his
victory. There, six centuries ago, the Scotch invader Sinclair was
annihilated with all his force when "the peasants of Vaage and Lesje
and Lom their whetted axes shouldered," as the ballad tells us, and
the story is still cherished, still repeated to every traveller. In
this as in other secluded valleys in Norway a peasant aristocracy
developed, a hard, strong race, intensely proud of its family and
land, looking on any one who had been less than three generations in
the neighborhood as an interloper, and scorning the classes of people
who were not rooted to the soil by inherited homesteads. For the
Norwegian roving blood is strangely tempered by a passionate
attachment to inherited land, a trait that is perhaps a salutary
safeguard against the national restlessness. Artistic handicrafts
flourished in the valley. In the Open Air Museum at Lillehammer we
may see them even now, marvellous creations of hammered iron,
tapestries picturing scenes from the Bible, wood carvings in mellow
colors and with a Renaissance exuberance of design overflowing even
the commonest kitchen utensils, all of a rich yet disciplined beauty
as if built on age-old artistic traditions and standards.
Hamsun counted among his forefathers many of the artistic craftsmen
who set their stamp of culture upon their community. His father's
father was a worker in metals. The arts did not bring wealth to those
who practised them, however, and his parents at the time of his birth
were in straitened circumstances. He was born, August 4, 1859, in
Lom, in one of the small well-weathered houses which look so bleak
and insignificant against the mighty Gudbrandsdalen uplands. When he
was four years old his family removed to the Lofoten Islands,
Nordland, in an effort to better their fortunes.
Two strains may be traced in Knut Hamsun's personality. By virtue of
his blood and birth he had his roots in a community characterized by
an unusually firm and solid culture based on centuries of tradition,
and this heritage we shall find coming out in him more and more in
his later years. The moralist and preacher who wrote "Growth of the
Soil" is a true scion of the best old peasant stock. Through the
impressions of his childhood and early youth he became affiliated
with the volatile race of Nordland, a people as alien from the
heavier inland peasant as if they lived on different continents. The
fishermen who play with death for the wealth of the sea and depend
for their livelihood on the caprices of nature do not easily harden
into traditional moulds. Childish and improvident, witty and
sentimental, often fond of the melodramatic, simple and yet shrewd,
superstitious but brave beyond all praise, the native of Nordland is
a type unlike every other Norwegian. Wherever he may roam, he will
yearn for the wonderland of his youth. It is from this Nordland type
that Hamsun has created his Wanderer hero, and it was from the nature
of Nordland with its alternations of melting loveliness and stark
gloom that he drew his poetic inspiration.
At the very time when Hamsun was spending his childhood in the
Lofoten Islands, Jonas Lie, the literary discoverer of Arctic
Norway, wrote his idyllic little story "Second Sight" in which he
has really delineated a "Wanderer" type, his hero being a gifted
Nordland lad who is set apart from ordinary people by his strange
mental malady and who, wherever he goes, feels himself an alien. In
this book, written at a time when not even fixed steamship routes
united Nordland with the southern part of the country (railroads are
even yet unknown), Jonas Lie has given us a classic description of
the country in its virgin state of isolation. It gives the key to
that mysterious, extravagant strain which belongs to the Nordland
type, and throws light on the sources from which Hamsun drew his
hero.
The words that to other people convey only commonplaces become
magnified in the Nordland mind accustomed to the ecstatic moods of
nature, Lie tells us. Fish to a Nordlanding means Lofoten's and
Finmarken's millions, an infinite variety, from the spouting whales
that penetrate our fjords driving huge masses of fish like a froth
before them, to the tiniest minnow. When he speaks of birds, the
Nordlanding does not mean merely an eatable fowl or two, but a
heavenly host, billowing in the air like white breakers around the
bird crags, shrieking and fluttering and filling the air like a
veritable snow-storm over the nesting-places. He thinks of the
eider-duck and the tystey; the duck and the sea-pie swimming in fjord
and sound or perched on the rocks; the gull, the osprey, and the
eagle sailing through the air; the owl moaning weirdly in the
mountain clefts--a world of birds. A storm at sea to him means sudden
hurricanes that sweep down from the mountains and uproot
buildings--so that people at home often have to tie down their houses
with chains--waves rushing in from the Arctic Ocean fathoms high,
burying big rocks and skerries in their froth and then receding so
fast that a ship may be left high and dry and be smashed right in the
open sea; hosts of brave men sailing before the wind to save not only
their own lives but the dearly bought boatload on which the lives of
those at home depend.
"There in the North popular fancy from mythical times has imagined
the home of all the powers of evil. There the Lapp has made himself
feared by his sorceries, and there at the outermost edge of the
world, washed by the breakers of the dark, wintry grey Arctic Ocean,
stand the gods of primitive times, the demoniacal, terrible, half
formless powers of darkness against whom even the Æsir did battle,
but who were not entirely vanquished before St. Olaf with his
cruciform sword 'set them in stock and stone.'--The terrors of nature
have created an army of evil demons that draw people to them, ghosts
of drowned men who have not been buried in Christian earth, mountain
titans, the sea _draug_ who sails in his half boat and in the winter
nights shrieks terribly out on the fjord. Many a man in real danger
has perished because his comrades were afraid of the draug, and we of
second sight can see him.
"But even though the overwhelming might of nature bears down with
oppressive weight on everything living along that dark, wintry,
frothing coast, where nine months of the year are a constant twilight
and three of these are without even a glimpse of the sun, so that
people's minds become filled with fear of the dark, yet Nordland also
possesses the opposite extreme in its sun-warmed, clear-skied,
scent-filled summers with their endless play of infinitely varied
colors and tints, when distances of seventy or eighty miles seem to
melt away so that we can shout across them, when the mountain clothes
itself in brownish green grass to the very top--in Lofoten to a
height of two thousand feet--and the slender birch trees wreathe the
tops of the hills and the edges of the mountain clefts like a dance
of sixteen-year-old white-clad girls, while the fragrance of
strawberries and raspberries rises to you through the warm air as you
pass in your shirt sleeves, and the day is so hot that you long to
bathe in the sun-filled, rippling sea which is clear to the very
bottom.
"The learned say that the intensities of color and fragrance in the
far North are due to the power of the light which fills the air when
the sun shines without interruption day and night. Therefore one can
not pick so aromatic strawberries and raspberries or so fragrant
birch boughs in any other clime. If a fairy idyl has any home, it is
certainly in the deep fjord valleys of Nordland in the summer. It is
as though the sun were kissing nature so much more tenderly because
they have such a short time to be together and must soon part again."
Jonas Lie's description, which I have taken the liberty to quote in
abbreviated form, gives a picture of the surroundings in which Hamsun
spent his boyhood. It would have been impossible to find any spot in
the world more suited to nourish the fancy of an imaginative,
impressionable boy. Lonely as he was, he had little to interest him
or occupy his mind except what he could find for himself out of
doors. He was put to work herding cattle, and spent long dreamy hours
alone revelling in the loveliness of the light Nordland summer. It
was then he laid the foundation for his habit of roaming alone in the
woods and fields, and there he gained that intimate, tender knowledge
of nature which appears in his works. In telling of his childhood,
Hamsun says that the animals and birds became his friends. He speaks
also of the deep impression which the sea made upon him. His uncle's
house, where he spent some of his boyhood, was built above the ocean
stream, Glimma, which rushed over a rocky bottom, sometimes one way,
sometimes another, according to the tide, but always in motion.
Beyond it lay the open sea.
The sharp contrasts of nature, its alternations between darkness and
light, are reflected in the temperament of the Nordland people who
are easily swung from one extreme to another. Underneath the
brightness and levity there is a consciousness of superstitions that
are felt sometimes as dark and sinister forces waiting to drag men
away from the light into the gloomy void where the evil powers reign.
The boy Knut Hamsun's nature was like a sensitive stringed instrument
vibrating to the faintest breath of nature's moods, and we find in
his works the nervousness, the quick transitions, and the swinging
between extremes of exaltation and despair which belong to the
Nordland type. While the brightness predominates, the gloom is also
present, especially in his earliest, most personal works.
The years he spent with his clergyman uncle were not happy. The uncle
had no idea of how to handle a highstrung boy, and his method of
education consisted of many lickings, much hard work, and few hours
for play. So lonely and dreary was the boy's life that he found his
chief amusement in roaming about in the cemetery, spelling out the
inscriptions on crosses and slabs, making up stories about them, and
talking to himself, or listening to the wind rustling in the grass
that grew tall on neglected graves. Occasionally the old weather vane
on the church steeple would let out a terrible shriek when the wind
veered. It sounded like "iron gritting its teeth against some other
iron." Sometimes he would help the old grave-digger in his work, and
he had strict injunctions on what to do if bits of bone or tufts of
hair worked their way out to the surface. They were to be put back in
place and decently covered. Once, however, he ventured to disobey
the gravedigger and take with him a tooth which he thought he could
use for some little object he was fashioning. In the short story "A
Ghost" in the collection "Things that Have Happened to Me," where he
draws this dismal story of his childhood, he tells how the dead owner
appeared to him and threatened him at intervals for years afterwards,
even after he had left the house of his uncle and was living with his
parents, where he shared a room with his brothers and sisters. The
apparition froze him with fear and tortured him so that he was often
tempted to throw himself in the Glimma and end it all. Of the effect
that this incident had upon him he writes: "This man, this
red-bearded messenger from the land of death, did me much harm by the
unspeakable gloom he cast over my childhood. Since then I have had
more than one vision, more than one strange encounter with the
inexplicable but nothing that has gripped me with such force. And yet
perhaps the effect upon me was not all harmful. I have often thought
of that. It has occurred to me that he was one of the first things
that made me grit my teeth and harden myself. In my later experiences
I have often had need of it."
In view of the high position clergymen hold in Norway, and especially
considering the prestige attached to the official class fifty years
ago, it seems odd that a clergyman's nephew, an inmate of his house
for years, should have been slated for a shoemaker, but evidently
there was no money with which to send Knut to school, and perhaps his
mental gifts were not of the caliber to promise that he would fit
easily into any one of the usual professional niches. After his
confirmation, which is the Norwegian boy's entrance to manhood, he
was therefore apprenticed to a cobbler in the city of Bodö on the
mainland. In his own mind, however, he was quite determined that he
was to be a poet, and it was while working for the cobbler that he
published his first literary venture, a highly romantic poem called
"Meeting Again." This was followed by the story "Björger, by Knud
Pedersen Hamsund," a gloomy, introspective tale of an orphaned
peasant boy and a lady of high degree who died for love of him--a
foreshadowing of the motif in "Victoria." In spite of its immaturity,
its absurdity even, the story, according to the judgment of critics
to-day, shows flashes of Hamsun's peculiar genius. Alas, there were
no critics wise and sympathetic enough to see its promise at the
time, if indeed any critics read it. The book was printed by the
nineteen-year-old author at his own expense, paid for by his
hard-earned savings, and was bought by a few people in Bodö, but
hardly circulated beyond the confines of the city.
Naturally the cobbler's bench could not long confine his
restlessness, and, after a short experience as a coal-heaver on the
docks of Bodö--where his eye-glasses attracted amused attention as
out of keeping with his work--Hamsun set out on the wanderings that
were to last full ten years. He taught a little school, was clerk in
a sheriff's office, and crushed stones on the road.
The experiences of this period were the foundation of his two novels
"Under the Autumn Star" and "A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings,"
bound in the English edition under the common title "Wanderers."
Written many years later from the standpoint of an elderly citizen
who leaves his home in the city to revisit the haunts of his youth
and play at being a vagrant laborer once more, they give his
adventures in the softening light of retrospect. A touch of personal
description may be found in the lines, "I taught myself to walk with
long, tenacious steps. The proletarian appearance I had already in my
face and hands."
There is a lingering tenderness in the author's treatment of these
years which would indicate that at the time of writing he looked back
upon them almost with regretful longing. We do not find the smallest
trace of the acrid bitterness which he put into the short stories
from his American experiences or into the account of his struggles to
gain a foothold in Christiania. The roving life without fixed
habitation or routine had its charms for him and it gave him an
opportunity to be much out of doors. Strong and capable as he was,
the manual labor in itself held no terrors for him, and he was
rather proud of his inventive skill. "Under the Autumn Star" recounts
a number of small technical triumphs, chief among which was a
marvellous saw for cutting timber on the root--an actual invention of
Hamsun's. Not many years ago he replied in answer to a question in an
enquête that the proudest achievement of his life was the invention
of this saw, in the practicability of which he still had faith,
although I believe it has never been perfected for actual use.
During the time when he ate and slept with servants and tramped the
road with other day laborers, while observing the upper class from
the vantage point of his own obscurity, Hamsun garnered a full sheaf
of those curious and startling incidents by means of which he keeps
his readers in a constant state of surprise. Meanwhile he did not
forget his old ambition to become a poet. He felt the need of an
education, and gradually worked his way southward to Christiania,
where he entered the University.
The experiment was not a success. At that time the University was
much more than now under the influence of old academic traditions,
and did not welcome the rustic in search of knowledge as cordially as
perhaps it would have done to-day. Moreover, the former cobbler and
road-laborer was uncouth in his manner, bursting with loud-voiced
opinions, and by no means filled with the proper reverence for
authority. He soon realized that he was a misfit in University
circles, and gave up the attempt in disgust. Of more benefit to him
was a trip to the continent which he was enabled to make. After his
return he went back to his old life on the road, but his intellect
was more and more reaching out beyond the humble work by which he
earned his living. Finally he made his escape and took passage to
America.
FROM THE WHEATFIELDS TO THE FISHING BANKS
In the early eighties, when Hamsun started out for America, the tide
of Norwegian immigration was at its height. Not only were thousands
and thousands of young men and women going across the sea to try to
better their worldly status, but America had come to be looked upon
as a spiritual as well as an economic land of promise. The poets,
Björnson, Ibsen, Kielland, Jonas Lie and others were busy sending
their heroes and heroines over there to find expansion of life or
perhaps to come back and be the fresh, salty stream in the back
waters of Norwegian narrowness and prejudice. We need only call to
mind Lona Hessel in "Pillars of Society." Knut Hamsun had, of course,
read these books, and when he started out for the New World he did
not go merely as an immigrant to seek his fortune. He hoped to find
those larger opportunities for leading his own life and using his
gifts which the poets had been telling him about. He had bruised
himself on Old World littleness; quite naturally he looked to the New
World for bigger visions, ampler spaces, and a saner estimate of a
man's worth. In this he was destined to be sorely disappointed. And
yet some of the things he sought, and even more those he learned to
value later in life, were there, but he failed to find them.
His dream of being a poet was still alive in him, and when he came to
his countrymen in the Middle West he announced to a friend that he
was going to write poetry for the Norwegian people in America. To one
who knows the Middle Western settlements, there is something pathetic
in this youthful ambition. God knows that if any one needs a poet it
is the immigrant who is torn violently from his contact with the
spiritual life of the old country and has not yet taken root in the
new, but the Hamsun of that day had no message which his emigrated
countrymen cared to hear. Like other immigrants they were absorbed
in the task of building a new community, and when this work left them
any leisure they preferred to sing the old songs and dream the old
dreams of the fjælls and fjords. Immigrants are generally very
conservative, and cling with all the fibres of their affection to the
old melodies. They have little ear for any new voice that lifts
itself among them. But the Middle West has never at any time had much
use for the dreamer and visionary, and in Hamsun's day it was more
than now a country of absorption in material things by as much as it
was nearer pioneer times.
Hamsun soon found that in order to make his living he would have to
work hard under conditions more distasteful to him than his old
roving life in Norway. For a while he cherished a hope that he might
be able to make his way in some manner more suited to his mental
equipment. He came under the influence of a Norwegian writer and
clergyman, Kristoffer Janson, of Minneapolis, who tried to make a
Unitarian minister of him. But the faith that tries to modernize
religion by eliminating its mystery could not long hold the
imagination of one who sees mystery as the very life and essence of
religion. In the diatribes on American intellectual life published
after his return to Norway he paid his respects to Unitarianism in an
essay on Emerson. He cared little for the Concord philosopher. Of the
American poets he "could bear to read" certain parts of Walt Whitman,
Poe, and Hawthorne, while he referred to our most beloved poet as
"the somnolent Longfellow." In Minneapolis he tried to express his
unflattering views on American literature in lectures, and hired
Dania Hall for the purpose, but Americans of Scandinavian extraction
are extremely quick to resent any attack on their adopted country,
and refused to listen to him.
When we remember how sober and well draped was the verse of our great
New England poets, we can hardly wonder that it failed to satisfy the
young author who, a few years later, was to lay bare every quivering
nerve of his being in "Hunger." Nor can we wonder that a young
immigrant, forced to work hard in rough surroundings, should not
have discovered the finest flowers of American culture. It is more
remarkable that he who was destined to write the great epic of the
pioneer farmer in "Growth of the Soil" should have failed utterly to
see the real elemental soundness and vigor of the pioneer community
in which he found himself, and that he should never have had his eyes
opened to the many obscure Isaks toiling on Norwegian farms in the
Middle West. Yet this too can easily be understood when we remember
how he thirsted for the richer, subtler life of an old community and
how little his thirst had yet been satisfied.
In his later books Hamsun has glorified any kind of work that has to
do with practical realities and is done with a will. In his youth he
learned by his own experience the deadening, brutalizing effect of
toiling under the lash. He was initiated on the wheatfields of North
Dakota, where production was carried on with swarms of day laborers.
In the winter, on the grip of a Chicago street car, he suffered the
hardships of long hours and low pay for uncongenial work. Finally he
plumbed the lowest depths he was fated to know when he spent some
miserable seasons on a fishing-smack off New Foundland.
Reminiscences of these years are found in a few short stories and
sketches scattered through various volumes of his works. "Woman's
Victory" a story in "Struggling Life" (1905) is based on his
experiences in Chicago, and is prefaced by a paragraph which gives a
vivid picture of this phase of his American adventures. It begins: "I
was a street car conductor in Chicago. First I had a job on the
Halstead line, which was a horse car line running from the centre of
town to the cattle market. We who had night duty were not very safe,
for there were many suspicious characters passing that way at night.
We were not allowed to shoot and kill people, for then the company
would have had to pay compensation. However, one is seldom wholly
devoid of weapons, and there was the handle of the brake which could
be torn off and was a great comfort. Not that I ever had need of it
except once.
"In 1886 I stood on my car every night through the Christmas
holidays, and nothing happened. Once there came a big crowd of
Irishmen out of the cattle market and quite filled my car. They were
drunk and had bottles along. They sang loudly and did not seem
inclined to pay, although the car started. Now they had paid the
company five cents every evening and every morning for another year,
they said, and this was Christmas, and they were not going to pay.
There was nothing unreasonable in this point of view, but I did not
dare to let them off for fear of the company's 'spies' who were on
the watch for lapses on the part of conductors. A policeman boarded
the car. He stood there for a few minutes, said something about
Christmas and the weather, and jumped off again when he saw how
crowded the car was. I knew very well that at a word from the
policeman all the passengers would have had to pay their fares, but I
said nothing. 'Why didn't you report us?' asked one of the men. 'I
thought it unnecessary,' said I, 'I am dealing with gentlemen.' At
that there were some of them who began to laugh, but others thought
I had spoken well, and they saw to it that everybody paid."
The author's North Dakota experiences are the subject of several
short stories. "Zacchæus" in the collection "Brushwood" (1903) gives
a vivid picture of life on Billibony farm, where work began at three
in the morning and went on at a nerve-racking speed until the stars
came out at night, and the only comic relief was the serving up to
Zacchæus of his own finger in the stew. Yet Zacchæus who treasured
this severed member of himself, and the cook who played the gruesome
trick because Zacchæus had laid hands on his sacred "library"
consisting of one old newspaper and a book of war songs, these were
human compared to the creatures described in the sketch "On the
Banks" in "Siesta" (1897). Never before or since has Hamsun drawn a
picture of such stark and unrelieved hideousness as this description
of eight men who were herded together on the boat regardless of race
or color, whose chief pleasure was maltreating the fish they caught,
and whose obscene talk and lewd dreams rise from the crowded
forecastle like a loathsome stench. To the man of nerves and
imagination who tells the story, the horror of the situation was
deepened by the consciousness of the hostile powers of nature lying
in wait out there on the sea which closed around him everywhere and
of the unseen monsters in the deep trying to hold what is their own
while the men tug frantically at the nets. This sense of being
surrounded by hostile forces is very unusual with Hamsun, who
generally loves to dwell on the friendliness of nature.
With these months on the fishing banks, the cup was full. Hamsun made
up his mind that his wanderings must end and his real work begin, no
matter at what cost. He took passage home on a Danish steamer, and
came to Christiania in 1888, determined to make his way by writing.
He was not wholly unknown in the editorial offices of the city. He
had been back in Norway between the years 1883 and 1886, when he had
attempted to give lectures on literature, though not with much more
success than that which attended his efforts in Minneapolis. During
his second sojourn in the United States he had written some
correspondences to Norwegian papers.
Before beginning his serious literary work, Hamsun threw off at white
heat a book entitled "Intellectual Life in Modern America" (1889). It
is full of prejudice and misinformation: arraignment of American
culture after following resplendently attired servant girls on the
street and listening to their conversation (just as Kipling did);
moralizings about the divorce evil based on the stories in
sensational newspapers without the slightest knowledge of good
American home-life; condemnation of our art museums and opera houses
as temples of Mammon, and much more of the same kind. Yet the
scathing satire of the book, though biased, does not always miss its
mark. Hamsun's shrewdness had penetrated to the weakness of American
civilization, its externalism, its materialism, its dryness and
shallowness. We may also admit that his American experiences fell in
a period of little intellectual vitality, when the great New
Englanders had been relegated to school declamations, and the modern
quickening of liberal thought was yet far distant.
One thing, at least, must be set down to Hamsun's credit. He did not,
like many lesser writers from across the sea, fall into the cheap and
easy task of ridiculing the simple people of the frontier or making
fun of his own countrymen in their uncouth efforts to Americanize
themselves. His shafts were always aimed at that which passes for the
highest in American civilization. Here as in his later onslaughts on
Ibsen and Tolstoy, his audacities loved a shining mark.
There are only a few scattered references in the book to the
Norwegian immigrants in this country, and these are full of
sympathetic comprehension of their difficulties. This fact, however,
has not prevented "Intellectual Life in Modern America" from being a
stumbling block and an offense to Americans of Norwegian extraction.
It has been one of the main factors in preventing for many years the
recognition of his genius among them.
In this connection I recollect the first and only time I have seen
Knut Hamsun. It was in 1896, on my first visit to Norway, when I met
him at the home of my relatives, and I can well remember how my own
youthful prairie patriotism resented his attacks on the country my
parents had made their own. As I think of him at this distance of
years, with tolerance for his views on America, with charity for
other things not acceptable to the staid household of which I was a
member, I remember him as a man of distinguished presence, still in
the flush of young manhood. He was distinctly of the fair, virile
type met in the eastern mountain districts where he was born, tall,
broad-shouldered, with a particularly fine profile and well-shaped
head which he carried in a regal manner. He was then at the height of
his early fame.
THE AUTHOR OF "HUNGER"
Knut Hamsun, like more than one other Norwegian genius, won his first
recognition in Denmark, where he spent a few months after his return
from the United States. Edvard Brandes, at that time editor of the
Copenhagen daily "Politiken," has told a story of a young Norwegian
who one day presented himself at the office with a manuscript. The
editor was about to refuse it on the ground of unsuitable length,
when something in the appearance of the stranger made the refusal die
on his lips. It was the shabbiest, most emaciated figure that had
ever crossed the editorial threshold, but there was something in the
pale, trembling face and the eyes behind the glasses that moved the
editor in spite of himself. He took the manuscript home with him and
began to read it. As he read the story of the starving young genius,
it dawned on him with a sense of shame that the writer was probably
at that moment without the means of subsistence. Hastily he enclosed
a ten krone bill in an envelope, addressed it to the place the
unknown author had given as his residence, and ran to the station to
mail it. Then he returned and read on to the last paragraphs, where
the hero is stealthily crawling up to his room, afraid to rouse a
wrathful landlady, and is moved to a delirium of joy by the receipt
of a letter containing a ten krone bill sent him by an editor--ten
kroner being the highest pitch of opulence to which Hamsun ever
carries his hero.
In telling the coincidence that same evening to a Swedish critic,
Axel Lundegård, who has published the story, Brandes spoke of how the
manuscript had impressed him. "It was not only that it showed talent.
It somehow caught one by the throat. There was about it something of
a Dostoievsky."
"Was it really so remarkable?" asked Lundegård. "What was the title
of it?"
"Hunger."
"And the author?"
"Knut Hamsun."
"It was the first time I heard the name Knut Hamsun," writes
Lundegård, "and the first time I heard the phrase 'something of a
Dostoievsky' used about any of his books. Since then it has become a
commonplace, but applied to the first production of a young author by
a critic not at all given to over-enthusiasm, it was a tribute."
Through the influence of Edvard Brandes the manuscript, which
contained the first chapters of the book "Hunger," was placed with a
new radical Copenhagen magazine, "New Soil." This was in 1888. The
story was anonymous, but it attracted attention by its exotic
brilliance of style and by the intensity which up to that time had
been unknown in Northern literature. Rumors of its authorship were
current, and were confirmed when, in 1890, the book "Hunger" burst
upon a startled Christiania and made its author instantly famous.
In the intervening time Hamsun had gained some notoriety in his own
country by the publication of "Intellectual Life in Modern America."
Although he had thus trumpeted forth his failure to find any stirring
of the intellect whatever in the great American republic, the
Norwegian critic Sigurd Hoel attributes the style of "Hunger" to
American influence. It had a daredevil humor, a dash and verve, and a
feeling for effect that certainly had no precedent in the respectable
annals of Norwegian literature.
"It was the time when I went about and starved in Christiania, that
strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon
him,"--so runs the oft-quoted first sentence in "Hunger." There is no
reason why it should have been Christiania. It might as well have
been the American brain market, New York, or any other city where men
and women try to sell the product of their brains and learn that
their finest thoughts and highest efforts are not of the slightest
consequence to anybody. Hundreds of men and women have fought the
fight to which he has given classic expression. They will recognize
his astonishment as it dawned upon him that although he had "the best
brain in the country and shoulders that could stop a truck," there
was no place for him in the great machine that ground food for the
dullest and stupidest. They will know the bending of the neck and the
sagging of the spirit, the hysterical swinging between absurd pride
and shameless grasping at any opportunity, the agonized striving to
catch the eye and ear of an indifferent world by strained and
overwrought work, the impotent sense of never being able to begin the
fight on equal terms.
Few, however, have dared to follow the experiment to the uttermost
ends of destitution. Few have explored the abysses of suffering
through which Hamsun leads his hero. At one time he tried to bully a
poor frightened cashier into stealing five öre (a little over a cent)
from the cash drawer so that he could buy bread with it. Another time
he refused the offer of an editor to pay him in advance for an
article not yet written. Once he suddenly decided to beg the price of
a little food from some big business man whose name had suddenly come
into his head with the force of an inspiration, and persisted,
humiliating himself to the depths, holding his ground till he was
practically thrown out. Another time, when he himself had starved for
days, he pawned his vest to get a krone to give a beggar. It is just
such absurdities and inconsistencies that people commit when the
starch of everyday habits has been washed out of them.
He keeps back nothing in his story. He even relates with grim humor
an encounter with a girl of the streets who in pity offers to take
him home with her although he has no money, while he simulates virtue
to conceal his abject state: "I am Pastor So-and-so. Go away and sin
no more." But his realism does not consist merely in dragging out
into the light the acts that others commit in the dark. One need not
be a genius to do that. No, he plumbs below action, below even
conscious thought and feeling, to those erratic impulses that would
make criminals or maniacs of us all if we followed them, not only the
great overmastering passions that have their place in the Decalogue,
but all the fitful whims and inconsequential trifles that influence
conduct. It is as though the delirium of hunger had released all that
which is usually controlled by will or custom. Sometimes, when he has
starved for days, he can feel his brain as it were detaching itself
from the rest of his personality, going its own way, manufacturing
idiotic conceits, which he knows to be idiotic, but can not stop. Yet
all the time his other consciousness is sitting by, holding the pulse
of his delirious imagination and recording its antics.
The light, whimsical touch rarely fails him, but occasionally there
are passages of a sombre and thrilling pathos, as the following: "God
had thrust His finger down into the tissue of my nerves and gently,
quite casually, disarranged the fibres a little. And God had drawn
His finger back, and behold, there were shreds and fine root
filaments on His fingers from the tissue of my nerves. And there was
an open hole after the finger which was God's finger and wounds in my
brain where His finger had passed. But when God had touched me with
the finger of His hand, he left me alone and did not touch me any
more."
Once he cursed God. He had begged a bone of a butcher under pretense
of giving it to his dog, and hid it under his coat until he came to a
doorway where he could take it out and gnaw it. But the noxious bits
came up again as fast as he could swallow them, while the tears
streamed from his eyes, and his whole body shook with nausea. Then he
screamed out his imprecations: "I tell you, you sacred Ba'al of
heaven, you do not exist, but if you did I would curse you so that
your heaven should tremble with the fires of hell. I tell you, I have
offered you my service, and you have refused it, and I turn my back
on you forever, because you did not know the time of your visitation.
I tell you that I know I am going to die, and yet I scorn you, you
heavenly Apis, in the teeth of death. You have used your power over
me, although you know that I never bend in adversity. Ought you not
to know it? Did you form my heart in your sleep? I tell you, my
whole life and every drop of blood in me rejoices in scorning you
and spitting on your grace. From this moment I renounce you and all
your works and all your ways; I will curse my thought if it thinks of
you and tear off my lips if they ever again speak your name. I say to
you, if you exist, the last word in life or in death--I say
farewell." But the imp of irony, which in Hamsun is never far away,
is peeping over his shoulder as he writes, and the blasphemies are
hardly cold on the page before he tells himself that they are
"literature." He is conscious of forming his curses so that they read
well. This outburst stands alone in his works. It is as though in
"Hunger" he had once for all rid himself of all the accumulated rage
and agony of his youth. They never come again.
The book is without beginning and end and without a plot, but it has
a series of climaxes. Each section describes some phase of hunger and
its attendant sufferings: the physical deterioration and weakness,
the rebellion of spirit, the hallucinations, the shame and
degradation. When the strain becomes intolerable, the tension
suddenly snaps with the receipt of five or ten kroner, and then
Hamsun instantly removes his hero from our sight. We never see him in
the enjoyment of this comparative opulence, but when the money is
gone, we meet him again beginning the old struggle, though each time
weaker and more unfit to take up the fight. He never achieves
anything; his small successes in occasionally selling a manuscript
never lead to anything. The book is a record of defeat and
frustration which have at last become inevitable because something in
himself has given way. Even his strange love affair with the girl
whom he calls Ylajali ends in baffled disappointment.
Finally Hamsun simply cuts the thread of the story by letting his
hero ship as an ordinary seaman in a boat that is going to England.
He leaves the city he had set out to conquer. The city has conquered
him. "Out in the fjord I straightened up once and, drenched with
fever and weakness, looked in toward land and said good-bye for this
time to the city of Christiania, where the windows shone so brightly
in all the homes."
THE POET
HIS OWN HERO
The most adequate idea of Hamsun's artistic personality can be gained
by reading his early works from "Hunger" to "Munken Vendt" and
preferably reading them in the order of their appearance.
Through the medley of characters there emerges a distinct type that
can be traced in one after the other of his early books but
disappears in the later, more objective, pictures of whole
communities. This person is at first always the hero in whom
everything centres; later he steps into the background as an onlooker
who is sometimes the author's spokesman. He is always a dreamer and
one who stands outside of organized society; but this aloofness is
not self-sought. On the contrary, he often suffers in his loneliness,
and is longing and struggling to come within the circle of human
fellowship, but there is something in his own nature which unfits
him to be a cog in the common machinery. His pulses are differently
attuned from those of other people. The standards by which happiness
and success are usually measured mean nothing to him, but he can be
lifted to exaltation by the fragrance of a flower or the humming of
an insect. He is often a poet, if not in actual production at least
in his temperament, and has the poet's responsiveness to things that
more thick-skinned people do not notice. An ugly face, a jarring
noise can shiver his highest mood like crystal and plunge him to
the depths of despair. A sour look or an unkind word or even a
trifling mishap--the loss of a lead pencil when he is inspired to
write--can cast a gloom over his day. He is full of generous impulses
which sometimes take erratic forms and is capable of carrying
self-sacrifice to the most senseless extreme, but his nature has
never a drop of meanness. He revels in communing with nature and
finds pleasure in the society of some lowly friend or simple, loving
woman, but any happiness that life may bring him is never more than
a momentary gleam. He never lives to his full potentiality either in
achievement or in passion. The Swedish critic John Landquist puts the
question why we never tire of this oft-repeated Hamsun hero any more
than of his Swedish cousin Gösta Berling, and answers that it is
because he never gains anything and never turns any situation to his
own advantage.
There is no doubt that this constantly recurring figure is Hamsun
himself in one incarnation after another. He has pointed the
connection by personal description, by reference to his authorship,
and once even by the use of his own name. He has to a greater extent
than most creative artists drawn for his subjects on his own varied
experiences, and though he has of course transmuted them in his
imagination, it is clear that he has at least been near enough to the
events he records to have lived through them very intensely in his
own mind. This is, of course, notably true of "Hunger," which was
written at the age of thirty, when his own experiences as a
journalistic free lance in Christiania were still fresh in his mind.
It is true also of "Mysteries," "Pan," and "Victoria," each one of
which corresponds to some phase in his own development. In "Munken
Vendt" and "Wanderers" there are reminiscences from his vagabond
days, and it is significant of the subjectivity with which he enters
into the person of his hero that in the latter he has chosen to make
the narrator a man of his own age at the time of writing rather than
reincarnate himself in the image of his youth. In the earlier books,
on the other hand, the hero is always young, generally between
twenty-five and thirty.
The Hamsun ego as the critic of contemporary phenomena, the outsider
who is unable to fit himself into any clique or party, appears in
Höibro of "Editor Lynge," who is carried over into the drama
"Sunset," and in Coldevin of "Shallow Soil." He is absent from all
the author's later, more objective, novels, "Dreamers," "Benoni,"
"Rosa," "Children of the Age," "Segelfoss City," and "Women at the
Pump," but we may perhaps find a shadow of him in Sheriff Geissler of
"Growth of the Soil," the garrulous wiseacre who "knew what was
right, but did not do it."
The typical traits of the young Hamsun hero are found in the highest
degree in Johan Nagel. The central figure of "Mysteries" (1892) is a
reincarnation of the nameless narrator of "Hunger," a few years
older, gentler, but no less erratic, and even more sensitive. There
is about him a great lassitude, an indifference to his own
advancement in life, which might easily be the aftermath of great
suffering and terrible struggles. He seems to have no purpose of any
kind. He steps ashore one day in a small Norwegian seacoast town
simply because it looks so pleasant to a returned wanderer, and there
he remains, startling the inhabitants by his odd manners and freakish
garments. There is an exquisite goodness in Nagel. His attitude is no
longer that of the clenched fist. He tries to win his way into the
fellowship of his neighbors by acts of quixotic generosity--which
another impulse leads him to cover up. He takes infinite pains to
find opportunities of giving pleasure to the outcasts of the
community without letting them know whence the bounty comes. He loves
to decoy a beggar into a doorway and bestow a large sum upon him with
strict injunctions to secrecy. He has in the highest degree the
sweetness and longing for affection which is a leading trait in all
the Hamsun heroes, though least apparent in the youngest of them, the
narrator of "Hunger;" but he has also in a superlative degree their
unfitness for the common affairs of men. Consequently he suffers the
fate of those who would do good as it were from the outside without
being a part of the community for which they would sacrifice
themselves: his efforts fall fruitless to the ground.