KNUT HAMSUN AND HIS NOVELS OF NORWEGIAN LIFE
The prize of 1920 has been awarded:
Hamsun, Knut, Norway, born 1859: “for his monumental work, _The
Growth of the Soil_.”[125]
It was characteristic of a type of journalism in the United States
that the announcement of the Nobel award in literature for 1920, to
Knut Hamsun, should have been featured in a digest of news thus: “The
Horse-Car Conductor Who Wins the Nobel Prize.” A passing incident
in the life of this author--a few months of service on street cars
in Chicago--but they loom large in minds that cherish trivialities.
His works in fiction and drama, more than twenty-five in number,
have been translated into a score of dialects; he is an outstanding
and unique figure in the literary life of to-day; his development of
personality and fame vies in interest with the challenging quality of
his writings. Few authors have been so self-revelatory as he has been
in his plays and novels. Except for statistical facts and side lights,
to be found in other sources, one can make almost a complete picture
of his background, his early struggles and revolts, his innate poetry
and growing idealism, by reading in succession _Hunger_, _Mysteries_,
_Pan_, and _Munken Vendt_, followed by _Dreamers_, _Benoni_, _Children
of the Age_, and _Growth of the Soil_.
Although Knut Hamsun’s parents were of peasant stock, the boy, born
August 4, 1860, at Lom, in Gudbrandsdalen, in eastern Norway, inherited
strains of artistic craftsmanship. His grandfather was a worker in
metals (sometimes called a blacksmith) but fortunes were low and, when
the lad was four years old, the family moved from the Gudbrandsdalen
mountain valley to the Lofoden Islands, Nordland. Here, amid wild,
awesome scenery and simple fisherfolk with sordid tasks, the youth
grew to young manhood. For a time he lived with an uncle who was a
preacher, of the state church; he was a severe man. In his short
story, “A Spook,” Hamsun recalls those days with their floggings and
work and hours of escape to the cemetery or the woods.[126] Before he
could satisfy his cravings for an education, he was apprenticed to a
shoemaker in Bodö, in Nordland. He managed to get his first writings
published; in 1878 appeared the serious poem, that showed appreciation
of the glowing colors and wild aspects of nature, _Meeting Again_,
and the story _Björger_ with the pseudonym, Knud Pederson Hamsund.
While there were interesting bits of autobiography, this initial
fiction was imitative of Björnson and has not been revived by its
author among his books.
[Illustration:
_By courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc._
KNUT HAMSUN]
Restless and unwilling to spend his days at Bodö as a shoemaker, he
worked for a short while as coal heaver, and later as road-maker and
school-teacher and sheriff’s assistant. Then, like so many Scandinavian
youths, he decided to emigrate to America. Some of these earlier
experiences are recalled in his novels, _A Wanderer Plays on Muted
Strings_ and _Under the Autumn Star_ (in the English edition united as
_Wanderers_). In the United States he drifted from one occupation to
another and covered a wide range of pursuits as street-car conductor,
farm laborer, clerk in grocery store and lecturer. He cherished
hopes of literary chances in this country but the lack of them, and
the misfortunes that came upon him, made him bitter for a time,
in retrospect. Those who recalled him on the Halstead street-car
line in Chicago, and later on a cable line, affirmed that he had “a
perpetual stare into the horizon,” that he was “out-at-elbows” and
had small volumes of classic poets sticking out of his pockets.[127]
They add that he would forget to ring the bell for passengers or
would fall over their feet in his reverie. One is skeptical of such
detailed memories of famous men. In the summer of 1885, he was back in
Christiania, doing some journalistic work and lecturing. Hanna Arstrup
Larsen in her authoritative study of Knut Hamsun[128] says that he had
been at the University of Christiania, before he went to America; but
that he found he was a misfit and went back to his “old life on the
road.”[129]
In 1886, says Professor Josef Wiehr,[130] he returned to the United
States as correspondent for _Current Events_ (_Verdens Gang_) but
he was obliged to undertake manual work to get a living wage; for a
time he was with a Russian fishing vessel off the Newfoundland banks.
For about a year he was secretary to Kristoffer Janson, a Norwegian
clergyman in Minneapolis; he was then twenty-eight years old, and had
been working on a farm in North Dakota. He wanted a chance to lecture
in Minneapolis on literary topics but his ambitions were unrealized
and he left America with some bitter feelings and the manuscript
of his satirical book, _The Spiritual Life of Modern America_ (or
_Intellectual Life in Modern America_), sometimes entitled _Of American
Culture_. In a copy of this book, owned by Edwin Björkman, Hamsun
wrote an inscription, dated 1905, thus, “A youthful work. It has ceased
to represent my opinion of America.”[131] He scoffs at “American
patriotism, engendered by means of tinfifes”; he asserts, “There is
an enormous gap in American liberty, a chasm which is kept open by
the thick-headed democracy”; he finds no cultural life but coarse
materialism and “prudishness” and “self-satisfied ignorance.”[132]
The book justifies a critic’s comment that it is “a masterpiece of
distorted criticism.”[133] His short story, “Woman’s Victory,” in the
collection, _Struggling Life_, is based on his experiences in Chicago;
in the Preface, he tells of his life as car conductor. “Zacchæus,” in
the collection, _Brushwood_ (1903), is reminiscent of the days upon the
North Dakota farm.
In Copenhagen, on his return from America, he enlisted the interest
of Edward Brandes, then editor of a daily newspaper there. Through
his influence, place was found for the manuscript of _Hunger Sult_ in
a Copenhagen magazine, _New Soil_, in 1888, to appear anonymously;
two years later it came out as a book, with the author’s name on the
title-page. It was immature and subjective, but it gripped readers
everywhere by its sincerity and whimsicality. Miss Larsen makes a true
criticism of this book when she says it is “without beginning and end
and without a plot but it has a series of climaxes.” Antithetical
to such passages of poetic and dramatic power there are pages of
naturalism that cause a revulsion of emotion and seem to some readers
an insult to taste. It is absolutely true and relentless; perhaps,
as Professor Wiehr suggests, “By the production of this work, Hamsun
sought to free his mind from terrible memories of the past that were
haunting him” (p. 13). Two years later the same mixture of poetic high
lights and crass realism characterized _Mysteries_. Johan Nagel is the
restless hero who falls in love with Dagny Kielland, daughter of the
pastor, and meets with tragic experiences and suicide. Like his author,
“Nagel is at odds with life” and finds peace only in nature. Like
Hamsun he tries vainly to adapt himself to conventions of society and
becomes embittered. “The Hamsun ego,” as Miss Larsen calls the _motif_
of these earlier tales, recurs in _Editor Lynge_, the drama, _Sunset_,
and _Pan_ (1894). Lieutenant Glahn, the hunter in this last book,
is happy in his hut and outdoors but is proudly unhappy in contact
with humanity; the tale ends in tragedy. Edvarda, the woman of this
story, is erotic and capricious to the point of disgust yet she has a
pathetic element in her nature.
_Victoria_ shows an advance away from the “Hamsun ego” of revolt and
naturalism towards that of poetry: Johannes, the hero, the miller’s
son, is in harmony with nature; even loss in love cannot blight his
soul. There are sentences of poetic diction in this novel and in
_Munken Vendt_ (1902), the dramatic poem which embodies the character
of a lovable, simple vagabond. One recalls the words of Edwin Björkman,
in the Introduction to his translation of _Hunger_; “The artist and the
vagabond seem equally to have been in the blood of Hamsun from the very
start.”[134] Before he attained to the second type of novel--the less
subjective and more idealistic group--(if idealism may be so expanded
in meaning) Hamsun wrote a trilogy of plays, beginning with _At the
Gates of the Kingdom_ (1895) with Kareno, a philosophical student
and writer, as hero, and a wife of sexual domination. The author’s
tenets about life and government are voiced by Kareno in this drama
and _Life’s Play_, ten years later in setting; the third in the cycle,
_Sunset_ (1898) shows Kareno at fifty, full of scientific doubts and
reactions from earlier aspirations for liberty and truth. The author
indulges his satire against professional “moralists” in these plays;
sometimes, he indulges, also, his unvarnished frankness of sensual
portrayals, and his lack of deference for old age. The play, _In the
Grip of Life_, was translated by Graham and Tristan Rawson and issued
in 1924 (Knopf). The women in his plays are, generally, animalistic, or
erotic, lacking diversity in types.
With the appearance of _Children of the Age_ (or _Children of the
Times_) in 1909, followed by _Segelfoss Town_ and _Growth of the Soil_,
the reader of persistent interest in Hamsun realized that the author
had orientated himself, that he was “finding his place” in literature.
He was still defying society, “the group,” still disclaiming belief
in democracy, but he had gained “a social vision.” In method
characteristic of many novelists, he has chosen a family, with strong
racial traits, the family of Willatz Holmsen, for the expression of
his sociological ideas. The despotic, anxious Willatz III, a retired
Lieutenant, is a character that lingers in memory; he is vitally real
in his relations with his wife, of higher social rank, and with his
son, the musicianly boy; he is dramatic and pathetic in his defiance
of Tobias Holmengraa, the industrial “king” from South America. The
last days of stubborn pride and loneliness are scenes of artistic
fiction. _Segelfoss Town_, written before _The Growth of the Soil_,
but translated afterwards by J. S. Scott (Knopf, 1925), continues the
story of this family and the departure of Holmengraa, after a financial
collapse, leaving behind his daughter, Mariane, half Mexican in blood,
who marries the commercial “leader of the small town. Segelfoss Town
has been called a ‘Norwegian Main Street.’” There is much irony and
reiterated sordidness in the tale. The telegraph operator, Baardsen, is
a daring, strong character.
In the Introduction to _Dreamers_, W. W. Worster (New York, 1922) calls
_The Growth of the Soil_ Hamsun’s “greatest triumph.” It is the _one_
book thus far appearing in American edition, that seems to win wide
reading. It is localized in setting, objective in theme, and universal
in human appeal. Isac (or Isak) is a convincing character of elemental
type. He symbolizes man, when face to face with nature. Inger is a
coarse Lapp woman in her physical nature yet she seeks expression for
finer feelings, even as she strangles the third baby girl that would
bear, through life, the mother’s curse of a hair lip. “Back to the
soil!” is the message of this masterpiece of Norwegian fiction. It has
a large group of Norwegian characters, and a challenging tone regarding
many moral issues, but it maintains artistic unity.
That Knut Hamsun has grown steadily in literary skill, that he has
written novels of vigor and photographic effects, cannot be denied.
That he has a philosophical attitude towards humanity and the driving
forces behind society (especially as applied to Norway), is also
evident. His self-education, his persistence, and his assimilated
judgment, together with caustic wit and grotesque humor, are other
qualities that must be accounted to his credit. On the other hand, he
is often slothful and diffuse in structure and offensive to æsthetic
minds because of his stress of sexual impulses and his coarseness.
He does not condone immorality but he seems indifferent to its
existence. In his personal convictions, however, he realizes the need
of a basic morality. Says Professor Wiehr: “It is just this absence
of ‘the triumph of a moral idea’ which will stand most in the way of
any popularity of Hamsun’s works with the great majority of American
readers.” Other explanations of Hamsun’s attitude towards Christianity
and “constructive ideas” are given in this excellent study by Professor
Wiehr.[135] He thinks that his countrymen, and “all backward nations,”
are in a much better position to follow his advice than the millions
that populate the countries leading the world in industries. Some
critics affirm that Hamsun’s compatriot, Johan Boyer, in his condensed,
dramatic novels, _The Great Hunger_, _The Last of the Vikings_, _A
Pilgrimage_, and _The Emigrants_ is more gifted as a novelist and
shows more evidences of idealistic vision. In his personal life,
Hamsun has revealed the traits of the wanderer, “vagabond” if you
will, combined with the deep-rooted love of home and devotion to his
countrymen in their industrial needs and their educational struggles.
He is not an optimist but he advocates persistent work and the
preservation of spiritual freedom and courage.
FOOTNOTES:
[125] Inscription with the Nobel Prize Award in Literature, 1920.
[126] _Knut Hamsun: His Personality and His Outlook upon Life_ by Josef
Wiehr, _Smith College Studies in Modern Languages_, Vol. III, Nos. 1
and 2, pp. 2, 3.
[127] _Literary Digest_ 67: 35, November 20, 1920.
[128] _Knut Hamsun: A Study_ by Hanna Arstrup Larsen, Knopf, New York,
1922.
[129] _Ibid._, p. 19.
[130] _Knut Hamsun: His Personality and His Outlook upon Life_,
Northampton, 1922.
[131] Introduction to _Hunger_ by Knut Hamsun, translated by Edwin
Björkman, New York, 1920. By permission of Alfred A. Knopf.
[132] _Knut Hamsun: His Personality and His Outlook upon Life_ by Josef
Wiehr, Northampton, 1922, pp. 8, 9. By permission of Prof. Wiehr.
[133] Introduction to _Hunger_, translated by Edwin Björkman.
[134] _Hunger_, translated by George Egerton, New York, 1920. By
permission of Alfred A. Knopf.
[135] _Knut Hamsun: His Personality and His Outlook upon Life_ by Josef
Wiehr, Northampton, 1922.