Life Sentences (24 page)

In his youth Hamsun also spent some time in Chicago as a cable car conductor, but he never earned the concluding -e or achieved movie-star status either. Rockne was killed in an airplane crash at the age of forty-three, while Hamsun survived TB, success, disgrace, and confinement to die a very old man, though writing still, at ninety-two. After his trial, he grew even more obscure despite the runoff from his Nobel glory; because Knut Hamsun was the perfect Nordic Nazi, a self-made man who came out of the back-mountain farms of northern Norway seeking to be recognized and praised; who
ruthlessly achieved his goals (his Nobel Prize book,
The Growth of the Soil
, was a perfect Blood and Struggle novel, admired by Germans generally but by Goebbels most significantly), yet a success who was fated to have most of the people he appreciably affected eager to forget him: a wish that was, until recently, largely realized in Allied countries. The English language, in particular, turned its back on him (as he did to it) even before the Norwegians did.

Now Norway has a museum devoted to Hamsun’s work, not as a spiritual guide or patriot but as a writer of certain prudently selected books, beloved by schoolchildren and a credit to Norway. This shrine has been established in Hamarøy, a small town fastened above the Arctic Circle where Hamsun could be said to have “grown up,” though it would be hard to find anyone more “on the go” than he. Both institutions will no doubt be careful to distinguish the honorable literary hero from the dishonorable Quisling, perhaps through the use of separate display cases and stern warning labels. A larger-than-life bronze statue was put in place at the same time to remind us of Hamsun’s steadfast defense of his German loyalties and his resolute defiance of the war crimes court. No one will be able to display the gold medal the Nobel hung around the author’s neck, because Hamsun disgraced the prize by regifting it to Joseph Goebbels, himself a great creator of fictions. Back in Oslo, meanwhile, the twenty-seven volumes of Hamsun’s collected works are scheduled to appear, complete enough to smother any critical objections under a crowd of pages and a crush of words.

I read
The Growth of the Soil
in high school, as many other Americans did. I remember that it opened like a child’s primer, and that I much preferred Ole Edvart Rølvaag’s
Giants in the Earth
. I think I thought it less mannered, less “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Rølvaag was also born a Pedersen. Perhaps there were too many Pedersens among Norwegians in either native or adopted country, and the writers sought, as a defense against anonymity, a name that was less ubiquitous and of their own assignment. In any case, Hamsun believed one’s name to be of great importance, especially his own;
consequently his authorial self suffered many revisions before he got it right. Upon a frosted windowpane he wrote his childhood name and then protected it from teasing erasure with snarls the way a dog might warn the household door. For his first publication he admitted to being Kn. Pedersen. Subsequently he altered the spelling of Knud Peders
e
n to Knut Peders
o
n in order to shed some Danish tarnish. Next his signature was lengthened to Knut Pederson Hamsund, though the newcomer, let in like a cowbird to the nest, muscled Pedersen out for good. For a time he spelled himself, more Germanically, Knut Hamsunn. Because of a printer’s error that pleased him, Hamsun let the n fade, and the dropped d rest.

During the portentous opening of
The Growth of the Soil
an initially nameless man appears on a wilderness path. The creature represents a semiprimal person who calls himself Isak. He will pry stones out of the earth, hoe the cleared land, take for himself a woman worthy of his hulk and education. We are immediately led to understand that this man, simple and crudely hewn as he is, shall persevere through every hardship; but what we may not immediately realize is that Isak is Man the way God should have made Adam: the way Nature wants him to be; moreover that, in another sense, Isak is Hamsun, who has also dug for his dinner, mostly by living in remote rooms and in a landscape of words. Hamsun also appears as God in the guise of a wanderer who pulls a few providential strings when required. It is Hamsun’s favorite role, to observe his hill of ants as if they were a hill of ants. Among the many writers whose central subject is their image in the public glass, Hamsun is perhaps the most loyally devoted to his task. And when he confesses his faults, he is always coldly proud.

Knut Hamsun was born in poverty and raised in servitude. He was sent to work for an uncle who would pay for his keep, and whose palsy made the child’s unexpectedly fine penmanship of considerable use. Hamsun saw much to read in the size, shape, and condition of hands, and his were frequently whacked for copying mistakes. His interest in the words themselves also arrived early, and he must have
felt, in this sort of upper-class manual labor, both its similarity to the tailor’s trade his father pursued, and its difference from the art that his hands were already itching to emulate. Hamsun would later sometimes falsely laud this unpretentious life—falsely because he knew he was utterly alien to it, was a slacker about his tasks, and dimly ashamed of his connection to them. As if he were avoiding recruitment, he attempted to run away, and attacked his own leg with an ax, not the best method if you intend to travel. Hamsun even romanced the idea of suicide. When he dreamed, he dreamed of stories written on the sky, of Hamsun’s glory waving in the wind of the world’s attention. His parents had no way of understanding such ambitions, and he would never be able to say, with any success, “Look, Mom and Dad, look at what I’ve done.” So he would cut them out of his life, along with most of his siblings, one of whom he would sue much later for assuming Knut’s adopted surname.

It is a habit of relatively unmodernized nations to allow their publics to be instructed by poets and writers. Citizens are proud of their “giants,” often worship them immoderately, and are personally encouraged by their words to embrace cockamamie beliefs. The wreath of wisdom is not wasted on composers, who are said, instead, to have sublime or deep feelings; but it is thought to fit many a writer’s furrowed brow and their highly developed sense of importance. In Europe’s northern climes, the myth of the honest, simple peasant at his plow, suffering many a setback to be sure, but resolutely plodding on, was, in structure if not in participants, the same as a fable of Aesop or a Satire of Horace. We all know the latter’s about the country mouse and the city mouse. Something like it was being enacted on literary stages all over Europe during the years preceding World War I. At first, Hamsun was that country mouse who rejected his poor and simple origins for the wine and women, the glory and connections of the city. In Horace, the city mouse complains of his friend’s food, while the country mouse feels threatened by the city and scampers back to his farms and barns well before getting his tail nipped or his whiskers singed. But this was not to be Knut’s fate.
Unlike the country mouse, he did not learn his lesson in one go; he would get repeatedly lured by the presence of publishers, fleshpots, and gambling casinos, and repeatedly spurned, burned, and sent home broke.

The society of the country mouse is manageably small, and its organization is advertised as simple; but the world is complex and this mouse’s response to its challenges is naive. In country mouse’s community everybody knows everybody, it is commonly said, as if that were desirable; however, all fall prey to the busybody whose nose is alert for scandal, and since scandal is essential to any kind of life, minutiae will do: you may be blamed for the cut of your hair, how late your lights shine, the name of your pony. The family is everything and everyone’s social position; equally secure is the domination of religion, the rule of the patriarch, and the fisted grip of place: little town, little crime—small town, small mind; there is considerable social cruelty to accompany custom’s subjugations, since every whisper is a roar in a village.

Throughout our present world, tribalism has become a dangerous and crippling handicap, like a harelip that refuses repair. In the small town that fiction loves to imagine, everyone’s similarities of look, taste, and opinion will make them neighbors of the mind, comfortable about who is next door. But that’s why the community’s parochialism continues to grow, and its distrust of strangers deepens. There is the reliability of routines to be admired, and the tyranny of tradition to be feared. The country mouse, the boast is, lives in harmony with nature, yet his life is a war against harsh climates and their extremes, and in front of many problems he exhibits a passive fatalism. Indeed, unlike the working city mouse, who is often merely a cog in a distant machine, he has a close relation to the soil, his implements, and all the celebrated fruits of his labors; however, he has little leisure, his nose has worn out its grindstone, and his eyes are as narrow as a needle’s. The mice of haystack and barnyard know what’s what, what’s right and what’s wrong; however, they receive their moral clarity through dogmatism and bigotry. The self-sufficient
tillers of the soil want desperately to be independent of the city’s sort of world and end being merely indifferent to it, while their own community squelches freedom the way it juices fruit.

The country mouse can brag of the miles he has walked, the muscles he has made, the stoicism he shows toward pain, but he can heal only the skinned knees of childhood, not the calamities of adults; his frame is customarily thin and undernourished; of illness he has no solid information, no skilled assistance, no supportive institutions. But then, this animal fears, more than any avalanche or sudden freeze, not facts which he imagines are always in front of his face, but the onset, like an epidemic, of the new, the unexpected—scientific ideas and their invisible instruments.

Hamsun’s own ambivalence was as regular and evenhanded as a metronome. Moved by a sense of his worth that was nevertheless wholly unearned, Hamsun would seek verification of his superiority from those elitist hedonists who had money, lived in the city, went to the theater, and worked in editorial offices. To get noticed he played the braggart and buffoon, but he would be followed, his entire life, by the curse of the self-taught: the embedded belief that he was inferior, a fake, an academic outsider, for there would be holes in his education (as good as it was, considering circumstances), and sometimes these holes were larger than the subject. This was the ground of his intense hatred for intellectuals; and even the Nobel Prize, which would seemingly buy him membership in any academy whose bell he wished to push, could not cover up the narrow spotty character of his tutelage or obscure his origin, since Hamsun was one of those plants whose roots tended to lie in full view as though they were voracious crawling vines.

For a period he might seem charming, even interesting, to the literati living it up in Oslo or in Copenhagen, but eventually he would be deemed a clown, a country bumpkin, a flashy parvenu, who waved money he had cadged from trusting publishers in front of the world’s face, expecting it to feel the breeze; so that after each embarrassment an angry and chagrined Hamsun would gallop off
to anyplace that didn’t know him. He already had “a runaway’s personality,” and felt an alien from the moment he was first slapped on the behind—
ein Fremder unter Fremden
, as Rilke, another wanderer, put it—a stranger among strangers. Moreover, he was comparing his early awkward efforts to write with those of the local masters—Ibsen, Bjørnson, Lie—only to suffer shameful results. Still, Hamsun’s humiliations were mostly those of personality, not character, since he possessed an arrogance whose engine was powered by public attention, and located in the rear of the machine.

As a stripling, Hamsun had already been a farm boy, store clerk, shoemaker’s apprentice, sheriff’s secretary, ditchdigger, peddler, salesman, and teacher. He felt he had been scorned in neighboring countries as well as in his own, and later that feeling would apply to every nation except Germany, where a generous publisher appears to have immediately welcomed him; where his sales would always be strong; and where its step and his temper were in time. His obligatory poor boy’s voyage to America was too much like the job-to-job and hand-to-mouth existence he suffered at home, but he did find opportunities to represent Norwegian culture to American audiences. This more appropriate occupation led to a commission that brought him back to the United States two years later, and furnished him material for one of his earlier books,
On the Cultural Life of Modern America
, a sour diatribe, already typical in its antimaterialist sentiments and hatred of democracy. An earlier biographer of Hamsun, Robert Ferguson, remarks that: “America pleases him not. Not its politics, not its language, not its women, not its sensationalist press, not its crass materialism, not its analphabetism, not its literature, not its painting, nor yet its theatre.” Economically, Hamsun uses one dislike to drum upon the head of another: “Instead of founding an intellectual élite, America has established a mulatto stud-farm.”

Hamsun was more than a living encyclopedia of distasteful traits, for traits need be mentioned only once, like the length of a nose; whereas our principal biographers (Ingar Kolloen and Robert Ferguson)
must bravely repeat the occasions when they are displayed. Hamsun, it seems, had pejorative names for every creature that he felt he outstripped, which was most of them—the native Lapps in particular. He grew quickly sick of old people, even when he became one; regarded tourists with disdain; mistrusted intellectuals of every mental elevation; was a practicing misogynist, detesting just those women he most desired. He hated whole nations, especially if they spoke English, or anybody who belonged to the urban working class, and held in contempt all forms of public life. Perhaps to support his irrational view of mankind, he made acting on whims a habit, however inconvenient his impulses were to others. He drank himself into a hospital and a state of shakes; lied right and left—to publishers particularly, to women he wanted to ride, to publishers he wanted to diddle. He squandered his first wife’s fortune at the gaming tables but gambled less with his own money. He was treacherous with his literary rivals, and bad mouthed them whenever he had the public’s ear. He shirked his family responsibilities, disappearing for long periods, especially if one of his wives was about to give birth, and frequently pulled up his and his family’s stakes, moving them about against their will, but at his humor.