Knut Hamsun

by Hanna Astrup Larsen

In "The Last Joy" Hamsun discusses modern education as it affects women. Ingeborg Torsen has been put through the mill of normal school together with a class of girls, some richer, some poorer than herself, but all intent on graduation and a position where they can put other girls through the same mill. She was educated away from the simple, healthy life of her mother and became a teacher without interest in her work, while her thwarted longing for marriage and motherhood became perverted into morbid desire. In his estimate of the so-called advancement of woman Hamsun reaches some of the same conclusions as Ellen Key, but in his preoccupation with the physical side of sex he fails to see what Ellen Key always insists on, that motherhood consists not only in bearing but in rearing, and that teaching is a profession which more than any other gives women who are not mothers an outlet for the moral qualities of motherhood. He fails to remember also that women as well as men may burn with the pure fire of a thirst for knowledge. Nevertheless, as a satire of a certain phase in the woman movement, when any other work was considered superior to that of the home, Hamsun's attack contains a kernel of bitter truth.

Hamsun and His Family
Photo by Wilse

As the only real aristocracy Hamsun sees the big landed proprietors who ruled over their little world as kings. He does not idealize the origin of the great families, but thinks that from pride and will power an [aristocracy] may develop, provided there is money. "But it must be wealth, not pennies. Pennies are only to coddle the race and protect it from wet feet." In "Children of the Age" (1913), and its big two-volume sequel "Segelfoss City" (1915) we follow the decline of a big family who once owned all the land that Segelfoss city was standing on. The first Willatz Holmsen was a lackey who acquired money somehow and built a palace. The second Willatz Holmsen acquired culture. He added white columns to the palace and filled it with books and works of art. With him the rapid economic rise of the family reached its height. The third acquired personal distinction and a sense of noblesse oblige which his failing fortune could not support. The lieutenant, as he is called, whose life we follow in "Children of the Age," is a proud, lonely figure, unable to confide to any one that a Willatz Holmsen might not be able to do all that was expected of him, and mortgaging his house rather than disappoint any one who looked to him for funds. The fourth is a musician. He is an aristocrat in his personal habits and in his sense of obligation, but he has lost his father's gift of command because he has no longer the old faith in the divine right of his family to rule. He can knock down an impudent workman, but he can not quell by his mere presence as his father could. Democracy has seeped into his tissues. He still flings gifts about in a lavish way as the Holmsens have always done, but he avoids occasions where he would hold the centre of the stage, and is at the same time a little hurt that he is not a wonder and a fairy-tale to the people as his father and mother were. He has the modern self-doubting habit of mind, and is glad to resign the position of leadership to the new man, the captain of industry, Holmengraa. Willatz Holmsen the fourth is, both in his fine, generous personal character and in his real genius as a musician, an illustration of Hamsun's theory that wealth in several generations will produce culture of heart and mind, but the young man's development carries him inevitably away from Segelfoss, and the brilliant career which is foreshadowed for him falls outside the frame of the story. As village potentates the Holmsens have had their day. Their dynasty is ended.

"King Tobias," as Holmengraa is called, appears in a golden cloud of romance. He is a peasant's son who has acquired a fortune in South America and comes back to his native place, turning the sleepy little village into a small city overnight. His ships bring grain from the Baltic; his mills grind day and night; he cuts timber; he establishes a telegraph station, and has work and money for everybody. But Holmengraa comes in contact with a new power which he is not strong enough to resist, that of the rising proletariat. His men read the "Segelfoss Times" which tells them that all the world rests on their toil, that they are wage slaves, and their employer is an extortioner. They make larger and larger demands; they become insolent and scoff at King Tobias who has now sunk to be plain Tobias to them. Unfortunately Holmengraa, who is a modest, fine-fibred man and very sympathetically drawn, has his weakness. Like the great Mack, he is unable to leave the girls alone, but he has not Mack's brazen assurance, and his position is gradually undermined. It is found that his fortune is not so great as first supposed, and his day is short.

So village dynasties rise and fall. At last comes one that is not too fine-grained or sensitive. Theodor Jensen with the sobriquet "paa Bua" (in the store) is a selfmade man like Benoni, apparently slighter and frothier, more of a parody, but in reality possessed of a harder and more slippery cleverness than that of the expansive Benoni. Theodor rises out of the most malodorous surroundings, but, like Benoni, is himself sound, on the whole. The village laughs at his airs, his rings, his scarf pin made of a gold coin, his absurd pretensions; but little Theodor has what the former dynasties lacked, a faculty for meeting every situation as it arises. He has pluck and shrewdness and is not entirely lacking in generosity. He builds a big store, and all the affairs of the village revolve about him. He extends credit, and servant girls are divided into two classes, those who have credit at Theodor's and those who have not. He brings the world to Segelfoss: silk dresses, canned goods, store shoes, fireworks, a theatrical troupe—everything that can be named. In a year of depression, when everybody was in a funereal frame of mind, Theodor bethought himself of tomb-stones, and presently the graveyard blossomed out with a sudden forest of slabs and crosses with "Rest in Peace" and "Loved and Missed" on graves that had been neglected for a quarter of a century. Theodor knows what the people want. The future is his.

Hamsun has a kindness for this merry privateer and enjoys blowing the wind that swells little Theodor's sails, but underneath the froth and sparkle there is a bitter didactic purpose in this book. It shows the reverse side of modern progress, when a backward community learns to use the material conveniences of the age without any corresponding mental advancement. The workingmen have learned to make demands, but while they refuse to yield the old submission to authority, they have not learned any sense of responsibility to their own conscience, and therefore grow more and more lazy and inefficient. The women forget to cook and sew while they buy flimsy readymade clothes at the store and feed their families on food that is bought ready cooked and chewed and almost digested. Neither men nor women know what to do with their leisure, and general demoralization is the result.

"Segelfoss City," with its dying aristocracy, its captain of industry, and its spoiled working class, is a miniature mirror of the modern world as Hamsun sees it. In the same category belongs his last book, "Women at the Pump" (1920), but there the deterioration is more complete. The events recorded are only a grey dribble from a leaky town pump. "People in big cities have no idea of standards and dimensions in the small towns," so runs the opening paragraph. "They think they can come and stand in the market-place and smile and be superior. They think they can laugh at the houses and the pavements, indeed they often think so. But do not old people remember the time when the houses were still smaller and the pavements still worse? And there at least C. A. Johnson has built himself a tremendously big house, a perfect mansion. It has a veranda below and a balcony above and scroll work all the way around the roof.... The small town too has its great men, its solid families with their fine sons and daughters, its immutableness and authority. And the small world is absorbed in its great men and follows their career with interest. The good small town folk are really acting to their own advantage in doing this; they live in the shelter of authority, and it is good for them."

What indeed would the little town have been without Consul Johnson? What glory would there have been in life without his silk hat and his rotund face beaming on the crowds as they make way respectfully? When the story opens, the village is assembled to watch the departure of his steamer, the Fia, for foreign waters. While they wait, the women at the village pump, standing with buckets filled and hands under their aprons, are discussing a great event that happened six or seven years ago, but is still undimmed in memories not over-burdened with weighty affairs. It was the day when "Johnson on the Dock" was made consul, and everybody who came into his store was treated with sweet cakes and a drink. Since then other consuls had sprung up like mushrooms; there was "Barley-Olsen" and Henriksen at the Works, but Consul Johnson's glory outshone that of all others, and his scandals only gave an added nimbus to his name. The measure of difference between Hamsun's earlier books and "Women at the Pump" may be seen in the distance between the really magnificent reprobate Mack and the flabby Consul Johnson, a man who has become a village magnate by the accident of owning the only store in the neighborhood. But village dynasties rise and fall, and the Johnson dynasty seems tottering, when it is saved by the consul's young, aggressive, thoroughly modern son, Schelderup, who suddenly comes home and raises the house of Johnson to its old glory. The consul's day is over, however, and it is pathetic to see him shrink back into the obscurity from which accident had drawn him. In his fall he appeals to us as never before, and Hamsun makes us feel that the foolish old man is, in his innermost nature, better than the hard-headed son.