Knut Hamsun

by Hanna Astrup Larsen

The author of "Hunger," who a few years earlier had described the purgatory prepared for the young genius who is struggling to get into print and to live on the proceeds of his work, did not have to go far afield for the caustic sting with which he scourged the people who make themselves broad in the inner courts of journalism and literature. In "Editor Lynge" he parodied the vaunted power of the press. In "Shallow Soil" he painted a picture of the small geniuses who pose on street corners and in cafés and bask in the popular admiration that is liberally bestowed on even the thinnest rinsings from the wine-glass of genius. The little poets and artists regard themselves as divinely exempted from all the sordid but necessary work of the world, and believe their own slight productions are sufficient excuse for a parasitical life in vice and idleness. There is Öien who is so exhausted after squeezing out of his brain a few small prose poems that he has to be sent to a sanitarium at the expense of his friends, and there is Irgens, the only one who seems actually to bring forth a real book occasionally, using his privilege as a poet to live on the bounty of friends whom he is playing false in the most dastardly way. With them is a crowd of idlers and revellers whose chief ambition is to find some one who will pay for their next meal.

As a contrast to this despicable coterie Hamsun has not raised up a real genius like his own alter ego in "Hunger," but two young business men whom he uses to point the moral of regular work and contact with actualities as the great salvation of modern civilization. The keynote is struck in the opening chapter with a finely-etched picture of the awakening city, when Irgens with waxed mustache and patent leather shoes is strolling home from a night of debauch and finds Ole Henriksen, alert and clear-eyed, already at his desk in his father's big office on the dock, and fortunately able to spare the ten krone bill which the poet needs.

Ole Henriksen and his friend Andreas Tidemand, in their moral cleanliness, their modesty and chivalry, their loyalty to each other and generosity to their friends, are not unlike the ideal young business hero of American novels, but they are afflicted with the cult of genius which was prevalent in their country at the time. They like to be seen dining at the Grand with poets and painters and actors, and gladly assume the privilege of paying the bills for the crowd, while, with a simplicity that borders on gullibility, they allow the one his wife and the other his fiancée to be decoyed away from them by the enterprising poet Irgens. Hanka Tidemand, a really sweet and chaste nature, has accustomed herself to the rôle of sympathizing with genius, and when she gives herself to Irgens it is almost with a sense of being a pious burnt-offering on the altar of his poetry. Aagot, a fresh, pretty country girl, one of Hamsun's brightest and youngest heroines, is dazzled by the glamour of the literary circle into which she is introduced, and becomes the poet's next victim. Hanka awakens to a realization that it is her husband whom she loves and returns to him. Aagot, with less stamina, is completely demoralized, and Ole Henriksen shoots himself rather than survive the old Aagot, the innocent Aagot, whom he had loved.

"Shallow Soil" is perhaps to a greater extent than any of Hamsun's other works based on certain local conditions and phases of development in his own country. The cult of pseudo-genius which it ridicules is not so prevalent among us that its satire can come home to us as it did to the author's countrymen. The book will always appeal, however, by virtue of its literary qualities. The critic Carl Morburger calls it Hamsun's most finished literary masterpiece. The subtle delineation of character, the vividness in the portrayal of contrasting personalities, and the fresh, natural tone save it from the sententiousness into which a novel with so evident a purpose would have fallen in the hands of a lesser artist.

The two friends Ole Henriksen and Andreas Tidemand, who are chosen to illustrate the mental and moral tone acquired from practical work, are both merchants. It is the occupation which, next to husbandry, makes the greatest appeal to the author's imagination. He does not, however, tell us much of the achievements of his heroes. His idea of the merchant's business as the life-giving artery of a district is not developed until many years later in the wonderfully ramified pictures of whole communities, usually with a Nordland background, in which the trading magnate nearly always occupies the centre of the stage.

In "Pan" we first encounter the great Mack family which pervades the Nordland novels. Edvarda's father, the master of Sirilund, is something of a fop with his diamond shirt studs and his pointed shoes among the boulders, and rather more of a villain, a man to whom the neighborhood pays its tribute of wives and maidens as a Zulu tribe to its chieftain, but for all that a small superman by whose brains the community exists. In "Dreamers" (1904) we see at close range his still greater brother Mack of Rosengaard, who hovers like a fairy-tale in the background of the other books. But Mack of Sirilund is one of the characters that Hamsun has not been able to leave, and, fourteen years after the publication of "Pan," we meet him again in "Benoni" (1908) and "Rosa" (1908). He is a providence and a small god to the simple people of the neighborhood. Whatever else falls, Mack stands impregnable as a rock. His existence among them is an earnest that somehow the world will go on, even if the fishing fails, and boats are lost at sea. Whoever has no money goes to Mack for credit, and who has money entrusts it to him; for banks are distant and mysterious institutions, Mack is real and near. His business is in fact built on the small sums thus put at his disposal, but he never deviates from his attitude of conferring a favor upon the lender. His self-possession, his elegance of dress, his polish of manner are unfailing. There are ugly pages in Mack's history, ruined homes, and neglected children who have the blood of the Macks in their veins, but it is part of the man's mastery that, although every member of his household knows of his orgies, he can yet command respect—and Ellen the chambermaid loves him. The description of Mack's erotic adventures, in spite of the humor Hamsun lavishes on the subject, occupies an uncomfortably large amount of space in these books, but they serve the author's purpose of throwing into relief the power of the man who, in spite of everything, remained a ruler by divine right. When his scandals became too rampant, his daughter Edvarda, then in one of her religious moods, attempted to remove the cause of offense and stirred up a revolt among her father's trusted people. Mack went to bed and simulated illness, but the confusion resulting from the absence of his directing hand was such that everybody was glad to restore the old order and have Mack at his desk again.

Hamsun likes to portray the patrician type to which Mack belonged by inherited instincts, but he also enjoys seeking out those tough-fibred people who are not descendants but become ancestors. Among them Mack's partner Benoni occupies the first place. Hamsun's playfulness has never been more delightful than when he traces the evolution of Post-Benoni, who carries the King's mail, to Benoni Hartvigsen and B. Hartvigsen, then to B. Hartwich, the partner of Mack and the husband of the great man's niece, Rosa. A big hairy creature, full of physical vim, strutting and vainglorious, wearing two coats to church in summer to show that he can afford it, boasting of his house and his furnishings patterned on Mack's, Benoni is with all his absurdities sound at the core. He has a childlike goodness and freshness that seems drawn from some unspoiled well of humanity. Benoni has his reverses. Occasionally his divinity and patron Mack finds it necessary to thrust him back into the nothingness from which he has drawn him, and people begin to call him plain Benoni again. Then his strutting waxes feeble for a while, but he soon rebounds and rises higher than before. It is almost unfair that his fallen fortunes are repaired by the ridiculous transaction of selling a mineral mountain to a mad Englishman for a fabulous sum; we feel that Benoni is quite capable of retrieving his losses by his own efforts; but this is a part of the melodramatic strain which belongs to Nordland, the country of sudden fortunes. When, in the last chapter of "Rosa," the young wife, in the dignity of her first motherhood, gently takes the reins of the household, we feel that Benoni in the future will prance with spirit, but with discretion too. Benoni and Rosa with the "prince" in the cradle are firmly rooted in their environs and have the power of growth. In such people Hamsun sees the future. They are the human stuff that endures.

In contrast to Benoni we have Rosa's first husband Nikolai Arentsen. He too is of humble birth, but while Benoni stays in the place where he has vital contacts, Nikolai pushes himself into a class where he will never be assimilated. Benoni applies his naturally good brain to wrestling with the problems near at hand, those of the fish and the sea. He is engaged in the productive work of helping to haul in the harvest of the deep. Nikolai learns a great many things by rote. He studies law and comes home to practise in his native place. At first he does a thriving business on the easily stimulated mutual distrust of primitive people, but when they learn that it costs more to go to law than to make up their quarrels, their distrust is turned on the lawyer. His income soon dwindles to nothing, and the small world in which he has really no necessary function goes on without him. He has entered one of the professions that Hamsun calls sterile.

Hamsun frequently contrasts two brothers one of whom has stayed close to the soil while the other has tried to work his way into a supposedly higher sphere. In "Segelfoss City," there is L. [Lassen] who is unmade from a good fisherman and not completed to a bishop, while his brother Julius who has stayed in his natural environment and become a shrewd hotel-keeper has at least some contact with the realities. In "Growth of the Soil" Sivert on the farm is contrasted with Eleseus in the office, and always to the advantage of the former. In "Women at the Pump" there is a similar pair of brothers. Abel, the younger, a sweet-tempered, sturdy urchin with a natural pride in killing snakes, has had to shift for himself and make his own decisions almost from the day he left the cradle, and has developed into a fine young man. When the time is ripe, he slips naturally into the place in the community where he belongs, as the helper of an old blacksmith who needs a pair of young arms and a bright young face in the smithy. Within a short time Abel is the mainstay of the family. Frank, the elder, has been put through school and has learned a number of languages which, whether living or dead, will always remain dead to him. He is one of the children who are being "prepared for farming, fishing, cattle-raising, trade, industry, family life, dreams and religious worship" by learning "the number of square miles in Switzerland and the dates of the Punic wars" and similarly vital facts. He "knew nothing of red outbursts, he never rose to the skies or fell down again, never went to the bottom or floated up. He never exposed himself to anything and had nothing to avoid. Instead of getting out of a scrape, he never got into one. Cleverly done, meagrely done. God had prepared him for a philologist."

It seems curious that Hamsun the poet should never have reminded Hamsun the sociologist that dreams have an intrinsic value, that the aspirations which carried Frank and Eleseus and the future Bishop Lassen out from their homes were in themselves a moral asset inasmuch as they stimulated not only those who went out but also those who stayed behind and had their horizons opened by contact with the outside world. It is almost as though he denounced the circulation of blood between the country and the city as bad in itself. The reason is, of course, that he has in mind certain standards and valuations which he combats as wrong and false. He ridicules the self-delusion of those who imagine they are educated because they have learned a number of things which they can repeat from books, and who suppose that "culture" consists in certain inherited or acquired customs that have nothing to do either with beauty or distinction, but are simply an absence of the marked, the characteristic, the splendid, or the primitive,—all that which is neither high nor low, but everlastingly on the same dull grey level of respectability. He derides those "whose hands are so sick that they can do nothing but form letters" and who think there is something superior about that "slave's work" writing. "It is finer to write and read than to do something with your hands, says the upper class. The lower class listens. My son shall not till the earth from which everything that crawls subsists; let him live on other people's work, says the upper class. And the lower class listens. Then one day the roar awoke, the roar of the masses. The masses have themselves learned the arts of the upper class; they can read and write. Bring here all the good things of the earth, they are ours!"