Knut Hamsun

by Hanna Astrup Larsen

There is an idyllic beauty about the first chapters of the book, but "Growth of the Soil" is not primarily an idyl. It is the story of human achievement centering in Isak's intense, never-ceasing effort to subdue the small part of the earth which he has taken for his own. It is almost as though he were really the first man without the accumulated resources of civilization behind him. He sleeps under the rock until he has completed a sod hut which gives him shelter against the cold and rain, and by and by a window is added to let in the daylight. In the course of time the sod hut gives place to a real house of logs, and the sod hut can be left to the animals. One day Inger disappears leaving Isak feeling very lost and lonely, but presently she comes back leading a cow, an event so great and wonderful that they spend their first wakeful night discussing it. Isak can hardly believe that the cow is theirs, but he makes the retort courteous by bringing a horse for his contribution. As for goats and sheep, they are already a little herd. The meadows yield grass, the grain ripens for harvest. Everything grows and thrives, grain, animals, human beings. There is a fruitfulness, a teeming, a bringing forth of everything that lives on the earth and by the earth. It is like looking on at a bit of the creation of the world. And there are Biblical parallels too with the man who came across the moor with a bag of bread and cheese and became the patriarch of a countryside.

Isak's strong, unused brain is developed by the necessity for helping himself. He invents various clever contrivances. He learns how to plan his work and fit one task into another so that every month of the year is utilized to the utmost advantage. He sows and reaps and mows; he threshes the grain on a threshing-floor of his own construction and grinds it in a mill which he has also made. He fells and trims the logs for his house, cuts them in a saw-mill which he has made with infinite effort and cogitation, and fits them together in the expert fashion which he has learned by studying the methods used in the village. The foundation has been laid of stones from his own land, lifted with his own brawny strength. An especially huge stone or an unusually big piece of timber put in its place is to him as real a triumph as the honors and emoluments of the world are to the more sophisticated. Isak revels in his work, and his powers grow with his tasks. He is a happy man.

The contrast between Isak's absorption in his work and the lazy, discontented apathy of the industrial laborers in "Segelfoss City" is, of course, evident. In the same manner the upbringing of his boys is contrasted with the education of children who are put through the usual school routine. While the latter are mere passive recipients of a knowledge which is thrust upon them from the outside without regard to their needs, the boys in the wilderness are allowed to develop naturally and from within. Every bit of knowledge that they acquire comes in response to the necessity for meeting a practical situation. They are stimulated by their father's example, as they are allowed to help him, and they exert their small brains to give the right answer when he asks their advice in all seriousness. Hamsun here returns to the subject of the transplanted country boy which has engaged his interest from the publication of "Shallow Soil," and allows the elder of Isak's boys, Eleseus, to attract the interest of a visitor who takes him to town and puts him in an office. The result is that the boy wilts like an uprooted plant. He is not bad, he is simply futile. He has lost interest in country pursuits without having any marked [ability] that would insure him a career in the city, and he has been imbued with the idea that it would be a step downward for him to go back from his poorly paid office job to the work of the farm. When he comes home, he tries hard to please his father, for he is a good, affectionate lad, but he has lost the poise of those who have stayed on the land. He has been infected by the restlessness of those who have no resources in themselves, but are for ever running about to have their emptiness filled by the drippings from other people's lives—from newspapers, moving pictures, street corner gossip. Sivert, the younger brother, stays at home, and it is he who continues to build on the foundation laid by the father.

The people in the wilderness have not had their minds made a sieve for the happenings of the outside world and have not inhaled the mental atmosphere that has been breathed again and again by millions of people. Their imaginations are fresh and strong, and they have time to live to the full in whatever happens to them. From every experience they draw the utmost that it contains of joy or sorrow. There is stillness and breadth of vision. Everything has its appointed place, and though human beings in their flightiness may stray from their orbit, the great forces that dwell in nature draw them back and hold them.

There is bigness and simplicity in their joys and sorrows and even in their sins. When Inger kills her hare-lipped baby to save it from the suffering she has endured because of the blemish in her own face, the story of how she buries the little body in the baptismal robe of her firstborn and puts a cross on the grave is profoundly touching. Her real grief and repentance, her meek submission to punishment and her thankfulness that her life is spared, Isak's grief and unfailing love, his loneliness and longing for her return from prison, all these belong to people who meet life without evasion or subterfuge.

While Inger's crime is raised to the level of tragedy, the story of the girl Barbro who kills her two children in pure wantonness and is acquitted in the new "humane" spirit after a parody of a trial, is a hideous, sordid tale. Hamsun here contrasts the people who live among the great realities, accepting the consequences of their deeds, with those who have learned to play tricks with life and cheat the Goddess of Justice. This to a certain extent justifies the inclusion of Barbro's story in the book, although it mars the big epic lines of the rest by its rather journalistic attacks on criminal procedure and satire of a certain type of "advanced" woman who espouses Barbro's cause. It was, as a matter of fact, an outgrowth of some polemical articles with the keynote "Hang them!" which Hamsun wrote in the Norwegian press, when the growing slackness in the treatment of women indicted for child murder had roused his indignation. Ugly as the story is, it ends on the note of optimism which runs like a golden vein through "Growth of the Soil." There is a hint that Barbro and her lover, the hard, grasping farmer, as they marry and settle down to till the soil, may be reclaimed by their work in harmony with the beneficent forces of nature. There is a suggestion that nature is great enough to absorb even the vicious and take them into her service.

Isak himself, a tiller of the soil by the grace of God, is the one person in the book who never deviates from the straight course. He is immutably rooted in the eternal verities. As the story progresses, his figure grows until it assumes a certain grandeur. He draws from his humble work a deep and gentle comprehension. There is forgiveness in him and strength to raise up what life has shattered. Isak has his oddities, but they light up his character like sunbeams playing over the face of a rock. How inimitable, for instance, the story, told with Hamsun's gift of comicality without malice, of how Isak brings home a mowing-machine, the first seen in the neighborhood; of how he drives solemnly sitting on the machine in his best winter suit and hat, as befits the importance of the occasion, although the sweat is running down his face; how he swells under the admiration of his womankind, and how he pretends that he has forgotten his spectacles, because, in fact, he can make neither head or tail of the printed instructions. When fate plays him the trick of letting the spectacles slip out of his pocket, although the boys pretend they do not see it, Isak is conscious that he is perhaps being punished for his overweening pride.

Isak's superstitions always take the form of thinking that when he does what is required of him, fate will be merciful. His dim religious sense, drawing all the small things of life in under the shelter of a great fundamental rightness which rules the world and in some mysterious way takes cognizance of his affairs, reminds me of "Adam Bede." Isak never read any book except the almanac and could not formulate his thoughts on religion, but he feels God in the loneliness, under the starry heavens, and in the might of the forest. He meets God one night on the moor and does not deny that he has also met the devil, but he drives him away in Jesu name. When the children grow large enough to ask questions, he can not teach them anything out of books, and the Catechism is generally allowed to repose on the shelf with the goat cheeses, but he tells them how the stars are made and implants the dream in their hearts.

An act which has something of an almost priestly function is the sowing of grain. That newfangled fruit, the potato, could be planted by women and children, but grain, which meant bread, had to be sown by the head of the house, and Isak went about his task devoutly as his forefathers had done for hundreds of years, sowing the grain in Jesu name. Twice Hamsun repeats the description of Isak sowing, and it is like a picture by Millet. With head religiously bared, he walks in the setting sun, his great beard and bushy hair standing round him like a wheel, his limbs like gnarled trees, while the tiny grains fly from his hands in an arch and fall like a rain of gold into the ground.

It is difficult at this time to say how future generations will judge "Growth of the Soil." We are still too near the events that made it to us an epochal book. It would be easy to pick flaws, and I have already mentioned what seems to me its most serious fault, the inclusion of an arid waste of discussion on child murder and its punishment. It would be easy, too, to say that its purpose was too patent, its sermon too direct. Nevertheless, the very simplicity and bigness of this purpose make it susceptible to artistic treatment, and I think there can be no question but that Hamsun has produced a great piece of literature which will stand the test of time.