Knut Hamsun

by Hanna Astrup Larsen

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.

Into this book Hamsun has introduced a curious parody of the hero, a little wizened cripple who is like a deformed reflection of Nagel. This poor devil carries goodness, meekness, and long-suffering to a point where it merely rouses the beast in the respectable citizens of the small town and draws on himself brutal persecution; but underneath his real goodness there is some abyss of evil which we are not allowed to fathom, but which Nagel understands by a strange intuition. His efforts to warn and save his protegé are unavailing. Unsuccessful too are his efforts to win the confidence of Martha Gude to whom he turns for consolation when Dagny rejects his love. Nagel is an artist nature, and in the latter part of the book he is revealed as a violinist with at least a touch of real genius, but he has been thoroughly disillusioned regarding himself and his art. He will not be one of the swarm of little geniuses or cater to the beef-eaters. Whatever possibilities of achievement still lie dormant in him are completely destroyed by his unhappy love affair.

Written at a time when Hamsun from the lecture platform was carrying on a campaign against the older poets and the established literary standards, "Mysteries" is made the vehicle of many iconoclastic opinions, and Nagel is to a greater extent than most of his heroes made the mouthpiece of the author's views. In long rambling talks, sometimes carried on with himself as sole audience, he attacks Ibsen, Tolstoy, Gladstone, and other great names of the day. In the books immediately following "Mysteries," "Editor Lynge" and "Shallow Soil," Hamsun continues his attacks on the ideals of the day, though in them he directs his blows rather at the small imitators of the great.

The Hamsun hero in his relation to nature appears in "Pan" (1894). Lieutenant Glahn, the central figure of the book, is a hunter who has lived in the forest until he has himself taken on something of the nature of an animal in the look of his eyes and in his manner of moving. He is supremely happy in his hut. His senses are saturated with the warmth of summer days, the fragrance of roots and trees, the soughing of the woods, and the tiny noises of all the things that live in the forest. His spirit rests in the sense that in nature all things go on, tiny streamlets trickle their melodies against the mountainside though no one hears them, the brook rushes to the ocean, and everything is renewed each year regardless of human fates. With the outdoor life comes the primitive love of shelter which we lose in cities; a warm sense of home ripples through his whole being when he returns to his but in the evening, and he talks to his dog about how comfortable they are.

Glahn has found peace in the forest, but this peace is shattered as soon as he comes in contact with his fellowmen. Awkward and uncouth, he is unable to comport himself with dignity even in the little group of merchants and professional men that constitute society in a Nordland fishing village. He is too proud and simple to cope with the caprices of the woman he has fallen in love with, and she soon tires of him. Then Glahn, moved by a childish desire to make her feel his existence even though it be only by a big noise, arranges a rock explosion, and this foolish feat accidently kills the only person who really loves him, the simple woman whom he has met in the forest. Against his misery now nature, which a few weeks earlier was all in all to him, has no remedy.

Between the appearance of "Pan" and "Victoria" (1898) lay a period of productive work resulting in the publication of the dramatic trilogy centering in the philosopher Kareno and a volume of short stories entitled "Siesta." The increasing success of Hamsun's own authorship set its stamp on the next incarnation of his hero, Johannes, the miller's son in "Victoria" who becomes a poet. Johannes is the only one of all his youthful heroes who is fundamentally a harmonious nature and the only one who masters life. The opening paragraph of the book is like a happier reflection of Hamsun's own dreamy, lonely boyhood. "The miller's son went around and thought. He was a big fellow of fourteen years, brown from sun and wind and full of ideas. When he was grown up he was going to be a match manufacturer. That was so deliciously dangerous, he might get sulphur on his fingers so that no one would dare to shake hands with him. He would be very much respected by the other boys because of his dangerous trade." Johannes knows all the birds and is like "a little father" to the trees, lifting up their branches when they are weighed down by snow. He preaches to a congregation of boulders in the old granite quarry, and stands dreaming over the mill dam, following the course of the bubbles as they burst in foam. "When he was grown up he was going to be a diver, that's what he was going to be. Then he would step down into the ocean from the deck of a ship and enter strange kingdoms and lands where marvellous forests were waving, and a castle of coral stood on the bottom. And the princess beckons to him from a window and says, 'Come in!'"

Just as Hamsun's own dreams are echoed in this boyish imagery, so his own authorship in its happiest time when he felt all his powers in full swing, is reflected in the later story of Johannes. Between the rude hunter of "Pan" and the poet of "Victoria" there is a lifetime of development. Johannes is just as impulsive and irrepressible as the other Hamsun heroes he is quite likely to burst into loud song in the middle of the night and disturb the neighbors, if a happy idea strikes him, but he has really found himself in his work. Johannes is loved by the young lady of the manor with a love that is strong enough for death, but not strong enough for life. He loses her, but the loss does not blight his life. The great emotion she has given him remains with him to deepen and enrich his nature and to become the life-sap of his blossoming genius.

Very different from the miller's son and yet of the same family is the happy-go-lucky swain who gives his name to the dramatic poem "Munken Vendt" (1902). It is to some degree reminiscent of "Peer Gynt" both in the verse form and in the chief character; but while Ibsen wrote a bloody satire of the worst qualities in his race, Hamsun has drawn a lovable vagabond. Munken Vendt is a student and hunter whose adventures take place in some Norwegian valley at a period not definitely fixed, but certainly much more romantic than the present. He is something of a poet, is clever but unable to turn his gifts to his own advantage, is clothed in rags but always with a feather in his cap and ready to give away his last shirt, wins sweethearts wherever he goes but fails the woman who should have been his mate, and finally throws away his life in a senseless extravagance of self-sacrifice. There is about Munken Vendt, for all his foolishness, a proud defiance of suffering, a noble pathos, a bigness and elevation of thought, which give his portrait a distinctive place in the Hamsun gallery.

The books I have mentioned here are generally regarded as the most individualistic of Hamsun's works and as those that reveal his personality most intimately. Among them should be counted also "The Wild Chorus" (1904), a slender volume of poems which, with "Munken Vendt," constitute all that he has written in metrical form. While Hamsun is most at home in poetic prose, his poems have a wild, fresh charm and are intensely personal expressions of his views on the two subjects that engage him most deeply: love between man and woman and love of nature.