Knut Hamsun

by Hanna Astrup Larsen

Schelderup brought order into his father's affairs, but into some he brought disorder. He stopped various pensions that were being paid for reasons known to Consul Johnson and sometimes to the women at the pump. Among other drastic steps, he abolished the sinecure at the Johnson warehouse held by the cripple Oliver, and the annual subsidy paid to Oliver's son, the philologist Frank. It is Oliver who is the "hero" of the book; in him "the little town sees itself realized." Oliver was once a sailor with powerful arms, a dashing young blade with a pretty sweetheart and his life before him. He goes away on Consul Johnson's Fia and comes back a wreck. He has lost a leg and has sustained another injury not yet the property of the village gossips: he is unable to become a father. Oliver comes home to take up his life on shore, to fish a little, to lie and cheat his way through life, to starve sometimes, to "find" sometimes the property of others, to marry his old sweetheart Petra as a screen for another man, none less in fact than the great Consul Johnson himself, and to buy back his mortgaged home as the price of her favors to another great man of the village, the member of parliament and future cabinet minister Fredriksen. He lives on the memories of the days when he went to sea and on two events that have happened to him since his return. He has once won a tablecloth in a lottery, and he has once found a derelict ship and sailed it in, a deed which resulted in putting his name in the paper.

There is only one bright spot in the life of this human wreck, who grows physically more repulsive as the years go on. Only one thing unites him in a sweet and natural relation with our common humanity, and that is his love for the children who are not his. Hamsun here takes up an interesting psychological question and arrives at the opposite conclusion from that of Strindberg in "The Father."

He shows that fatherly affection is not a primitive instinct but a growth of habit. Oliver cares for his wife's children while they are small, and when they grow up they love him and have no interest in attaching themselves to their actual fathers. Indeed Oliver's importance in the community grows in the reflected light from his successful children, although the truth about their origin has long since leaked out at the town pump. There is, of course, irony in this, but there is also a certain optimism. In his great novels picturing the life of whole communities, Hamsun has thrown the glamour of his art over a big gallery of insignificant people. Mere puppets for his amusement they seem at first, and yet, as we penetrate more deeply into his work, we feel behind the smile a great sweetness, a broad humanity, and at bottom a faith that life fashions its own ends out of all this human dross and fashions not badly.

Hamsun's social theories will be sufficiently evident from the above recapitulation of the novels in which he is holding up the mirror to his generation. He rebels against all that would cripple individual effort and against all modern standardizing whether it applies to the choice of a profession or to the cut of a garment. The levelling process which, inasmuch as it can not make all great, must achieve equality by making all small, he believes to be a disadvantage for the small, who thus lose an ideal and an element of romance in their lives. He abjures all modern shams and artificiality and particularly the false standard that exalts the white collar job above the work involving a little honest grime. He would like to see his people a nation of farmers and fishermen with an aristocracy of big landed proprietors and brainy business men, but with all the middle class of administrators and clerical workers eliminated. With the latter he would sweep away most professional men and those who hang on the fringes of art and literature. The real genius, the poet by the grace of God, he regards as above and outside of all classes.

These theories, to which Hamsun lends the point of his whimsical, paradoxical extravagance, must be seen against a background of special conditions in a small country with a large number of brain workers proportionally, and with, perhaps, a tendency to over-value what passes for culture. Stated coldly and in detail they are, of course, impracticable. No nation or group of people can detach itself from the complications of modern civilization. Hamsun the sociologist is not on a par with Hamsun the poet. But when he leads us back to the deep, primeval well-springs without which our civilization must wither and die, it is Hamsun the poet who speaks.

GROWTH OF THE SOIL

In "Growth of the Soil" Hamsun has concentrated the message which, in more or less fragmentary form lies scattered through his works: that everything else is small compared with the one essential thing, to be in unison with nature and to work with nature in "a great friendliness." There he preaches with massive reiteration that the salvation of the modern world lies in getting back to the land, and by his poetic treatment he has linked the doctrine with the fight men have waged since the beginning of human life on earth.

Without the artifice of distant time and place, in the midst of modern conditions painted with realism and often with humor, he has created an illusion of the primeval. It is as though Isak, the man without a surname, coming we know not whence, walking through the forest in search of a place where he can begin to till the soil, were the first man in a newly created world. "There goes a path through the forest. Who made it? The man, the human being, the first one who came." He walks all day over the moors in the great stillness, turning the sod occasionally to examine its possibilities, then walks again until night comes. Then he sleeps a while with his head on his arm, and walks again until he finds the right place for himself, and there he makes his first home on a bed of pine needles under a projecting rock.

After this prelude, which has a cadence like the first chapter of Genesis, Hamsun allows us to follow the story of how the shelter under a rock became a farm. There were no banks for lending money to pioneer farmers and no societies for the reclamation of waste land, or if there were, Isak knew nothing about them. He was only one man who met nature alone. After a while a woman came to him out of nowhere and did not leave him again. Inger was hare-lipped, and Isak with his fierce beard and grotesque strength looked like a troll of the forest; for Hamsun has scorned to throw even the glamour of youth and rustic beauty over the pair. They were simply man and woman, brought together by the most elemental needs, working together, helping each other, meeting the demands of each day as they arose, and resting when night fell. The picture of their early days together, their delight in each other and their surprise at all the wonders that happen to them, is full of innocent, primitive charm.