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Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) - pseudonym of Knut Pedersen |
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Norwegian novelist, dramatist, poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. Knut Hamsun's most famous novels include Sult (1890, The Hunger), an intense story of a starving writer, which has attracted readers since its publication. Before and during World War II the author embraced the Nazi ideology. This separated Hamsun from other intellectuals and writers who supported the Soviet Union and Stalin. After the war Hamsun was consequently ostracized as a traitor. If one only had something to eat, just a little, on such a clear day! The mood of the gay morning overwhelmed me, I became unusually serene, and started to hum for pure joy and for no particular reason. In front of a butcher's shop there was a woman with a basket on her arm, debating about some sausage for dinner; as I went past, she looked up at me. She had only a single tooth in the lower jaw. In the nervous and excitable state I was in, her face made an instant and revolting impression on me —the long yellow tooth looked like a finger sticking out of her jaw, and as she turned toward me, her eyes were still full of sausage. I lost my appetite instantly, and felt nauseated. When I came to the main market square, I went over to the fountain and drank a little water. I looked up: ten o´clock by the Church of Our Saviour. (from Hunger: A Novel, translated from the Norwegian and with an afterword by Robert Bly, introduction by Paul Auster, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 7) Knut Hamsun was born in Lom in the
Gudbrandsdalen Valley in
central Norway, the fourth son of Peder Petersen, a skilled itinerant
tailor, and Tora (Olsdatter Garmotraedet) Pedersen. When Hamsun was
three the family moved to the town of Hamarøy, some 100 miles north of
the Arctic Circle. There Peder Petersen took charge a farm, owned by
his brother-in-law Hans Olsen, who ran the village library and post
office. Olsen became a
victim of paralytic illness and claimed that the Pedersens owed him
money. Hamsun was not allowed to play with the other children but he
started to work for Olsen, keep the post office accounts, chop wood and
help him in numerous ways, to pay the debt. If Hamsun made a mistake in
writing, Olsen would rap his knuckles with a long ruler. On Sundays he
read books for his uncle and his pietist brethren. (Knut Hamsun, Novelist: A Critical Assessment by Sverre Lyngstad 2005, p. 2) Later Hamsun returned in his
works to his ill treatment and his merciless taskmaster. During this period Hamsun turned to books to relieve his feelings of loneliness. Apart from occasional attendance at a travelling school, he had no other formal education. In 1873 Hamsun ran away to Lom, where he was employed as an apprentice in a shop, and fell in love with the shop owner's daughter. He returned to Hamarøy in the following year, and held various jobs. With his friend he wandered in Nordland and Tromssa as a peddler and tramp. His first work of fiction, Den gaadefulde (1877), appeared under the name of Knut Pedersen Hamsund – he was eighteen years old. In 1884, after meeting Mark Twain and writing an article on him, a printer's error dropped the final 'd' on Hamsund. Hamsun accepted his new, accidentally born name. For the next year Hamsun taught school in Vesterålen, and
published his second novel, Bjørger (1878). With the support
of a wealthy merchant, Erasmus Zahl, he wrote in Hrdanger the novel Frida.
For his disappointment, it was in Copenhagen rejected by the publisher
Frederik Hegel. When he asked help from Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
(1832-1910), the older writer advised him to think of a career as an
actor. In 1878 Hamsun moved to Christiania (now Oslo), where he lived
in poverty. For some time he supported himself as a highway
construction worker. Between 1882 and 1884 he wandered in the United
States. Returning to Oslo, Hamsun continued his literary career without much success. From 1886 to 1888 he again traveled in the United States, where he worked as a streetcar attendant in Chicago and a farmhand in North Dakota. In Minneapolis he gave lectures. Hamsun was considered eccentric by Norwegian immigrants, but the Unitarian minister and writer Kristofer Janson allowed Hamsun to use his large library. This sojourn produced Fra det moderne Amerikas aandsliv (1889), a satirical description of America and its spiritual life. Hamsun made his breakthrough in 1890 with The Hunger,
a story about a young writer on his own, unable to find work, starving
and homeless in Christiania. Although his clothing, prospects, and
health fail, he guards his dignity (often comically) and pencil stubs.
The narrator, Pontus, wanders through the streets of the city – "this
singular city, from which no man departs without carrying away the
traces of his sojourn there." (Hunger, translated from the Norwegian by George Egerton, London: Leonard Smithers and Co., 1899, p. 1)
Eventually his high-minded articles – now and then
purchased by
newspapers – become incomprehensible even to his own fevered thoughts.
There is nothing sentimental in his fasting – it is his own more or
less nihilistic choice. He sells articles to the local paper, and meets
a young woman, who is frightened of his impetuosity. '"Well, upon my
soul!"
I blurted out, "now you shall just see," and I flung my arms violently
around her shoulders. I was mortified. Was the girl out of her senses?
Ha! Then I would, by the living . . . No one should say of me that I
was backward on that score. The creature was possessed by the devil
himself! If it were only a matter of going at it, well . . . " (Ibid., p. 233) Losing
his hair in clumps and unable to keep down his hard-won meals, the
narrator finally gets a job as a deckhand on a Russian ship bound for
England. "He fasts. But not in the way a Christian would fast," wrote
Paul Auster in his introduction to Hunger. "He is not denying
earthly life in anticipation of heavenly life; he is simply refusing to
live the life he has been given. And the longer he goes on with the his fast, the more death intrudes itself upon his life." (Hunger, 2008, p. ix) The Hunger expressed similar
modernist tendencies as Edvard Munch's famous painting The Cry
(1893), which did not derive from nature but from introspection,
rejecting the notion of objective reality. The Hunger has been
called the first modern road novel. As a type the young writer, who
bears some resemblance to Dostoevsky's
Underground Man, can be seen a predecessor to Charles Chaplin's famous
screen character, the invincible vagabond, or Henry Miller's narrator
in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.
Henning Carlsen's film adaptation from 1966 mostly shows Pontus's
doings outside, but there are much point-of-view shots. The
cinematographer Henning Kristiansen also used the overexposed effect
introduced into the movies by Last Year in Marienbad (1961). The novel became an immediate sensation, and established
Hamsun as a writer of note. Encouraged by this, he criticized in his
lectures such idols as Henrik Ibsen
and
Leo Tolstoy. Mysterier (1892)
allowed Hamsun present his contempt for democracy and his admiration of
the Nietzschean superman. The mysterious protagonist has several
identities, he has no fixed personality. He comes from nowhere and then
disappears, commits suicide. In Hamsun's drama Ved Rigets Port (1895, At the Gate of the Kingdom) the Nietzschean hero Ivar Kareno expresses his belief in "the born leader, the natural
despot, the great commander, the one who is not chosen but who elects
himself to mastery over the hordes on the earth." (Modernism: The Lure of Heresy by Peter Gay, 2008, p. 410) Pan (1894), written in the form of a hunter's diary, was a pantheistic story about escape from urban civilization. Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, the hunter, falls in love with a woman who rejects his advances. Hamsun wrote the book during the years which he spent in Paris (1893-1895). Victoria (1898) is Hamsun's only full-heartedly romantic book, a love story. It was written at the beginning of his marriage with Bergljot Gopfertin, a 25-year old woman, who had separated from her Austrian husband. Hamsun named his daughter Victoria, born in 1902, after the novel. The social gulf between the two young protagonists, Johannes, the miller's son, and Victoria, the daughter of the lord of the manor, appears uncrossable but they don't stop loving each other. At the end Victoria writes a letter to Johannes from her death bed. Bo Widerberg's film adaptation of the novel, which was shown in Cannes in 1979, was a failure mostly because of poor dubbing. During 1900 Hamsun lived in Finland, writing a long play. He associated with such Finnish cultural figures as Albert Edelfelt, Akseli Gallén-Kallela, Juhani Aho, Alexander Slotte, Jean Sibelius, and Robert Kajanus. Hamsun's active social life and heavy drinking with Finnish artists annoyed his wife. From Finland Hamsun continued his travels to Russia, and the Near East, and settled then in Copenhagen. During this journey, Hamsun developed a great respect for the Islamic work, which he expressed in the play Drottning Tamara (1903). Its basic message is that Christians and Muslims can live in harmony and learn from each other. In I Æventyrland (1903), a travelogue, Hamsun tells of his visits in Batumi on the Black Sea and in Baku by the Caspian Sea, and concludes: "So we will soon be out of this country. But I will always long for this place. For I have drunk from the River Kura." (Troubling Legacies: Migration, Modernism and Fascism in the Case of Knut Hamsun by Peter Sjølyst-Jackson, 2010, p. 84) When the Scottish writer Eric Linklater visited Batumi decades later he mentioned swarms of flies which filled his bedroom and the hotel restaurant. After divorce in 1906, Hamsun started to work with his first vagabond book, Under høstræjrnen (1907). In 1909 Hamsun married an actress, Marie Andersen; they had two daughters and two sons. Marie Hamsun, who was twenty-three years younger than her husband, depicted her stormy marriage in her books Regnbuen (1953) and Under gullregnen (1959). According to Marie, their two double beds were not "real double beds" set side by side – Hamsun wanted a room of his own and needed privacy, not only to write but to read or smoke a pipe. However, Marie never slept alone, because she had the company of her children when they were young. In 1911 Hamsun left urban literary circles and moved to a farm in Nordland. After the publication of Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil) in 1917, he purchased an estate, Nørholm, in southern Norway. He lived there until his death, dividing his time between writing and farming. Like the American port Robert Frost, Hamsun saw himself both as a farmer and a writer, an artist-hero. The old-fashioned agrarian toil became for him an act of individualism. Growth of the Soil – "sounds like a piece of Nazi propaganda," as Paul Auster said of the book – earned Hamsun the Nobel Prize. The protagonist is Isak, Hamsun's ideal hero, who lives close to the elements. In Hamsun's idyll the human world and nature are united in a strong, mystical bond. "There you are, living in touch with heaven and earth, one with them, one with all these wide, deep-rooted things. No need of a sword in your hands, you go through life bareheaded, barehanded, in the midst of a great kindliness. Look, Nature's there, for you and yours to have and enjoy. Man and Nature don't bombard each other, but agree; they don't compete, race one against the other, but go together." (Ibid., translated from the Norwegian of Knut Hamsun by W. W. Worster, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921, p. p. 243-244) Although Hamsun's feeling for the nature was not merely a Norwegian version of the Teutonic Blut und Boden (blood-and-soil) mystic, his sentiments were broadly shared in Germany, where his novels had a wide readership. Between
the wars Hamsun became a virtual recluse. He took a
stand against socialism, democracy, feminism, and urban life. After a
mental breakdown, he underwent a psychoanalysis with Norway's first
analyst, Johannes Irgens Strømme. Hamsun's writer's block was broken,
and he wrote Landstrykare
(1930), August (1930), and Men livet
lever (1933), which form his Vagabond trilogy. Like his mauthpicece in At the Gate of the Kingdom,
he yearned for a new Caesar. "I would like to express my great
admiration and deep respect for Mussolini – my God, what a guy in this
confused age!" Hamsun said in 1932 to his publisher Harald Grieg,
a Jewish who would later be sent to a concentration camp. (Catastrophes of Redemption: Modernism and Fascism in Norway by Dean N. Krouk, dissertation, 2011, p. 3) Individualism and antipathy to modern Western culture led Hamsun to support the Germans during their occupation of Norway in World War II. "We are all Germans," the author told his countrymen. Hamsun did not develop this attitude overnight – he had sympathized with the German cause in the First World War when public opinion in Norway overwhelmingly favored Britain and France. Also Nietzschean tradition in fascism fascinated him. Hamsun never joined the Norwegian Nazi party, but he wrote a series of pro-Fascists articles. Marie, his wife, was more close to Vidkun Quisling, the puppet head of Norway's occupation government. When Hamsun met in 1943 Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels, he gave Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal as a token of his esteem. These meetings have inspired stories, in which Hamsun is credited with saving Jews from the Nazis. However, the journalist and writer Arne Tumyr has claimed in his biography of the author, that these stories are not true, and that Hamsun only succeeded in infuriating Hitler with his complaints about the conduct of German troops in his home country. Upon hearing of Hitler's death, when the war was over, Hamsun wrote: "I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations." (Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun by Robert Ferguson, 1987, p. 386) This obituary, which was published on May 7, 1945, in the Oslo daily Afterposten, shocked readers. It was no wonder that during the following years Hamsun's books were ignored. On June 14, 1945, Hamsun was taken from his home and brought to the Grimstad hospital. "Never did anyone enter a hospital more fit than I, it's just that I'm deaf!" (On Overgrown Paths by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Sverre Lyngstad, 1999, p. 5) Hamsun was then sent to the Landvik Nursing Home – his wife was imprisoned and sentenced to three years hard labor – and eventually transferred to a psychiatric clinic in Oslo. On February 11, 1946, Hamsun was returnd to Landvik. Because during interrogations Marie had revealed intimate details about their marriage and sexual life, Hamsun refused to see her for four years. In 1947 Hamsun was tried and fined for his opinions. Ignoring the advice of counsel, he refused to pretend that he was senile and showed little remorse. According to Harald S. Naess, editor of Hamsun's published
letters, the author planned to divorce his wife. Hamsun's explanation
of his views and account of his experiences during his trial, På
gjengrodde stier, sold out instantly, and demostrated that his
mental
resources were intact. "Midsummer Day 1948. Today the Supreme Court has
handed down its verdict, and I end my writing," were the final lines of
the memoir. Hamsun did not show any signs of regret. This
work, which
appeared when the
author was ninety years old, was voted in 2017 by NFF (The Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and
Translators Association) the best non-fiction book published after WWII
in Norway. Hamsun died in Nørholm, on February 19, 1952. Since then his reputation has been largely rehabilitated and there is renewed interest in his oeuvre. Hamsun also wrote travel books, essays, and short stories. His dramas were not very successful when they were staged, but Stanislawski is said to have admired Hamsun's work. For further reading: Knut Hamsun by H.A. Larsen (1922); Mein Vater by T. Hamsun (1940); Der Geist in der Despotie by P. de Mendelssohn (1953); Der Regenbogen by M. Hamsun (1954); Introductions to Hunger by R. Bly and I.B. Singer (1967); On Overgrown Paths by K. Hamsun (1967); Knut Hamsun og Amerika by H.S. Naess (1969); Knut Hamsun: en bibliografi by A. Østby (1972); 'Hamsun, Knut' by H.S.N. [Harald S. Naess], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by Jean-SAlbert Bédé and William P. Edgerton (1980); Knut Hamsun by Harald S. Næss (1984); Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun by Robert Ferguson (1987); Knut Hamsun og hans kors by Arne Tumyr (1996); Knut Hamsun, Novelist: a Critical Assessment by Sverre Lyngstad (2005); Knut Hamsun Abroad: International Reception, edited by Peter Fjågesund (2009); Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter by Ingar Sletten Kolloen; translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik (2009); Knut Hamsun: the Dark Side of Literary Brilliance by Monika Žagar (2009); Knut Hamsun og Finland: dokumentar by Bjørn Rudborg (2010); Troubling Legacies: Migration, Modernism and Fascism in the Case of Knut Hamsun by Peter Sjølyst-Jackson (2010); The Nobel Novelist Knut Hamsun during the Nazi Occupation of Norway: the Final Chapter That Was Omitted from Marie Hamsun's Autobiography of Their Life Together by Marie Hamsun (2011); 'Knut Hamsun,' in Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts by William H. Gass (2014); Knut Hamsun: reisen til Hitler by Tore Rem (2014); Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway by Dean Krouk (2017); Knut Hamsun og det norske Holocaust: "Et hvidt Fyrtaarn midt i et grumset Menneskehav" by Ståle Dingstad (2021). Museum: Hamsun Childhood House, 8294 Hamarøy; open mid-June to mid-August. - Some other writers with Nazi sympathies: Louis-Ferdinand Céline Hanns Johst (German), Richard Walther Darré (German), E. E. Dwinger (German), George Sylvester Viereck (American), Lawrence Dennis (American), H. L. Mencken (American), Elizabeth Dilling (American), V.A. Koskenniemi (Finnish), Robert Brasillach (French), Henry de Montherlant (French), Jean Giono (French), Jean Cocteau (French), Alphonse de Châteaubriant (French), David Irving (British) Selected works:
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