Part 2

When we remember how sober and well draped was the verse of our great New England poets, we can hardly wonder that it failed to satisfy the young author who, a few years later, was to lay bare every quivering nerve of his being in "Hunger." Nor can we wonder that a young immigrant, forced to work hard in rough surroundings, should not have discovered the finest flowers of American culture. It is more remarkable that he who was destined to write the great epic of the pioneer farmer in "Growth of the Soil" should have failed utterly to see the real elemental soundness and vigor of the pioneer community in which he found himself, and that he should never have had his eyes opened to the many obscure Isaks toiling on Norwegian farms in the Middle West. Yet this too can easily be understood when we remember how he thirsted for the richer, subtler life of an old community and how little his thirst had yet been satisfied.

In his later books Hamsun has glorified any kind of work that has to do with practical realities and is done with a will. In his youth he learned by his own experience the deadening, brutalizing effect of toiling under the lash. He was initiated on the wheatfields of North Dakota, where production was carried on with swarms of day laborers. In the winter, on the grip of a Chicago street car, he suffered the hardships of long hours and low pay for uncongenial work. Finally he plumbed the lowest depths he was fated to know when he spent some miserable seasons on a fishing-smack off New Foundland.

Reminiscences of these years are found in a few short stories and sketches scattered through various volumes of his works. "Woman's Victory" a story in "Struggling Life" (1905) is based on his experiences in Chicago, and is prefaced by a paragraph which gives a vivid picture of this phase of his American adventures. It begins: "I was a street car conductor in Chicago. First I had a job on the Halstead line, which was a horse car line running from the centre of town to the cattle market. We who had night duty were not very safe, for there were many suspicious characters passing that way at night. We were not allowed to shoot and kill people, for then the company would have had to pay compensation. However, one is seldom wholly devoid of weapons, and there was the handle of the brake which could be torn off and was a great comfort. Not that I ever had need of it except once.

"In 1886 I stood on my car every night through the Christmas holidays, and nothing happened. Once there came a big crowd of Irishmen out of the cattle market and quite filled my car. They were drunk and had bottles along. They sang loudly and did not seem inclined to pay, although the car started. Now they had paid the company five cents every evening and every morning for another year, they said, and this was Christmas, and they were not going to pay. There was nothing unreasonable in this point of view, but I did not dare to let them off for fear of the company's 'spies' who were on the watch for lapses on the part of conductors. A policeman boarded the car. He stood there for a few minutes, said something about Christmas and the weather, and jumped off again when he saw how crowded the car was. I knew very well that at a word from the policeman all the passengers would have had to pay their fares, but I said nothing. 'Why didn't you report us?' asked one of the men. 'I thought it unnecessary,' said I, 'I am dealing with gentlemen.' At that there were some of them who began to laugh, but others thought I had spoken well, and they saw to it that everybody paid."

The author's North Dakota experiences are the subject of several short stories. "Zacchæus" in the collection "Brushwood" (1903) gives a vivid picture of life on Billibony farm, where work began at three in the morning and went on at a nerve-racking speed until the stars came out at night, and the only comic relief was the serving up to Zacchæus of his own finger in the stew. Yet Zacchæus who treasured this severed member of himself, and the cook who played the gruesome trick because Zacchæus had laid hands on his sacred "library" consisting of one old newspaper and a book of war songs, these were human compared to the creatures described in the sketch "On the Banks" in "Siesta" (1897). Never before or since has Hamsun drawn a picture of such stark and unrelieved hideousness as this description of eight men who were herded together on the boat regardless of race or color, whose chief pleasure was maltreating the fish they caught, and whose obscene talk and lewd dreams rise from the crowded forecastle like a loathsome stench. To the man of nerves and imagination who tells the story, the horror of the situation was deepened by the consciousness of the hostile powers of nature lying in wait out there on the sea which closed around him everywhere and of the unseen monsters in the deep trying to hold what is their own while the men tug frantically at the nets. This sense of being surrounded by hostile forces is very unusual with Hamsun, who generally loves to dwell on the friendliness of nature.

With these months on the fishing banks, the cup was full. Hamsun made up his mind that his wanderings must end and his real work begin, no matter at what cost. He took passage home on a Danish steamer, and came to Christiania in 1888, determined to make his way by writing. He was not wholly unknown in the editorial offices of the city. He had been back in Norway between the years 1883 and 1886, when he had attempted to give lectures on literature, though not with much more success than that which attended his efforts in Minneapolis. During his second sojourn in the United States he had written some correspondences to Norwegian papers.

Before beginning his serious literary work, Hamsun threw off at white heat a book entitled "Intellectual Life in Modern America" (1889). It is full of prejudice and misinformation: arraignment of American culture after following resplendently attired servant girls on the street and listening to their conversation (just as Kipling did); moralizings about the divorce evil based on the stories in sensational newspapers without the slightest knowledge of good American home-life; condemnation of our art museums and opera houses as temples of Mammon, and much more of the same kind. Yet the scathing satire of the book, though biased, does not always miss its mark. Hamsun's shrewdness had penetrated to the weakness of American civilization, its externalism, its materialism, its dryness and shallowness. We may also admit that his American experiences fell in a period of little intellectual vitality, when the great New Englanders had been relegated to school declamations, and the modern quickening of liberal thought was yet far distant.

One thing, at least, must be set down to Hamsun's credit. He did not, like many lesser writers from across the sea, fall into the cheap and easy task of ridiculing the simple people of the frontier or making fun of his own countrymen in their uncouth efforts to Americanize themselves. His shafts were always aimed at that which passes for the highest in American civilization. Here as in his later onslaughts on Ibsen and Tolstoy, his audacities loved a shining mark.

There are only a few scattered references in the book to the Norwegian immigrants in this country, and these are full of sympathetic comprehension of their difficulties. This fact, however, has not prevented "Intellectual Life in Modern America" from being a stumbling block and an offense to Americans of Norwegian extraction. It has been one of the main factors in preventing for many years the recognition of his genius among them.

In this connection I recollect the first and only time I have seen Knut Hamsun. It was in 1896, on my first visit to Norway, when I met him at the home of my relatives, and I can well remember how my own youthful prairie patriotism resented his attacks on the country my parents had made their own. As I think of him at this distance of years, with tolerance for his views on America, with charity for other things not acceptable to the staid household of which I was a member, I remember him as a man of distinguished presence, still in the flush of young manhood. He was distinctly of the fair, virile type met in the eastern mountain districts where he was born, tall, broad-shouldered, with a particularly fine profile and well-shaped head which he carried in a regal manner. He was then at the height of his early fame.

THE AUTHOR OF "HUNGER"

Knut Hamsun, like more than one other Norwegian genius, won his first recognition in Denmark, where he spent a few months after his return from the United States. Edvard Brandes, at that time editor of the Copenhagen daily "Politiken," has told a story of a young Norwegian who one day presented himself at the office with a manuscript. The editor was about to refuse it on the ground of unsuitable length, when something in the appearance of the stranger made the refusal die on his lips. It was the shabbiest, most emaciated figure that had ever crossed the editorial threshold, but there was something in the pale, trembling face and the eyes behind the glasses that moved the editor in spite of himself. He took the manuscript home with him and began to read it. As he read the story of the starving young genius, it dawned on him with a sense of shame that the writer was probably at that moment without the means of subsistence. Hastily he enclosed a ten krone bill in an envelope, addressed it to the place the unknown author had given as his residence, and ran to the station to mail it. Then he returned and read on to the last paragraphs, where the hero is stealthily crawling up to his room, afraid to rouse a wrathful landlady, and is moved to a delirium of joy by the receipt of a letter containing a ten krone bill sent him by an editor--ten kroner being the highest pitch of opulence to which Hamsun ever carries his hero.

In telling the coincidence that same evening to a Swedish critic, Axel Lundegård, who has published the story, Brandes spoke of how the manuscript had impressed him. "It was not only that it showed talent. It somehow caught one by the throat. There was about it something of a Dostoievsky."

"Was it really so remarkable?" asked Lundegård. "What was the title of it?"

"Hunger."

"And the author?"

"Knut Hamsun."

"It was the first time I heard the name Knut Hamsun," writes Lundegård, "and the first time I heard the phrase 'something of a Dostoievsky' used about any of his books. Since then it has become a commonplace, but applied to the first production of a young author by a critic not at all given to over-enthusiasm, it was a tribute."

Through the influence of Edvard Brandes the manuscript, which contained the first chapters of the book "Hunger," was placed with a new radical Copenhagen magazine, "New Soil." This was in 1888. The story was anonymous, but it attracted attention by its exotic brilliance of style and by the intensity which up to that time had been unknown in Northern literature. Rumors of its authorship were current, and were confirmed when, in 1890, the book "Hunger" burst upon a startled Christiania and made its author instantly famous.

In the intervening time Hamsun had gained some notoriety in his own country by the publication of "Intellectual Life in Modern America." Although he had thus trumpeted forth his failure to find any stirring of the intellect whatever in the great American republic, the Norwegian critic Sigurd Hoel attributes the style of "Hunger" to American influence. It had a daredevil humor, a dash and verve, and a feeling for effect that certainly had no precedent in the respectable annals of Norwegian literature.

"It was the time when I went about and starved in Christiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him,"--so runs the oft-quoted first sentence in "Hunger." There is no reason why it should have been Christiania. It might as well have been the American brain market, New York, or any other city where men and women try to sell the product of their brains and learn that their finest thoughts and highest efforts are not of the slightest consequence to anybody. Hundreds of men and women have fought the fight to which he has given classic expression. They will recognize his astonishment as it dawned upon him that although he had "the best brain in the country and shoulders that could stop a truck," there was no place for him in the great machine that ground food for the dullest and stupidest. They will know the bending of the neck and the sagging of the spirit, the hysterical swinging between absurd pride and shameless grasping at any opportunity, the agonized striving to catch the eye and ear of an indifferent world by strained and overwrought work, the impotent sense of never being able to begin the fight on equal terms.

Few, however, have dared to follow the experiment to the uttermost ends of destitution. Few have explored the abysses of suffering through which Hamsun leads his hero. At one time he tried to bully a poor frightened cashier into stealing five öre (a little over a cent) from the cash drawer so that he could buy bread with it. Another time he refused the offer of an editor to pay him in advance for an article not yet written. Once he suddenly decided to beg the price of a little food from some big business man whose name had suddenly come into his head with the force of an inspiration, and persisted, humiliating himself to the depths, holding his ground till he was practically thrown out. Another time, when he himself had starved for days, he pawned his vest to get a krone to give a beggar. It is just such absurdities and inconsistencies that people commit when the starch of everyday habits has been washed out of them.

He keeps back nothing in his story. He even relates with grim humor an encounter with a girl of the streets who in pity offers to take him home with her although he has no money, while he simulates virtue to conceal his abject state: "I am Pastor So-and-so. Go away and sin no more." But his realism does not consist merely in dragging out into the light the acts that others commit in the dark. One need not be a genius to do that. No, he plumbs below action, below even conscious thought and feeling, to those erratic impulses that would make criminals or maniacs of us all if we followed them, not only the great overmastering passions that have their place in the Decalogue, but all the fitful whims and inconsequential trifles that influence conduct. It is as though the delirium of hunger had released all that which is usually controlled by will or custom. Sometimes, when he has starved for days, he can feel his brain as it were detaching itself from the rest of his personality, going its own way, manufacturing idiotic conceits, which he knows to be idiotic, but can not stop. Yet all the time his other consciousness is sitting by, holding the pulse of his delirious imagination and recording its antics.

The light, whimsical touch rarely fails him, but occasionally there are passages of a sombre and thrilling pathos, as the following: "God had thrust His finger down into the tissue of my nerves and gently, quite casually, disarranged the fibres a little. And God had drawn His finger back, and behold, there were shreds and fine root filaments on His fingers from the tissue of my nerves. And there was an open hole after the finger which was God's finger and wounds in my brain where His finger had passed. But when God had touched me with the finger of His hand, he left me alone and did not touch me any more."

Once he cursed God. He had begged a bone of a butcher under pretense of giving it to his dog, and hid it under his coat until he came to a doorway where he could take it out and gnaw it. But the noxious bits came up again as fast as he could swallow them, while the tears streamed from his eyes, and his whole body shook with nausea. Then he screamed out his imprecations: "I tell you, you sacred Ba'al of heaven, you do not exist, but if you did I would curse you so that your heaven should tremble with the fires of hell. I tell you, I have offered you my service, and you have refused it, and I turn my back on you forever, because you did not know the time of your visitation. I tell you that I know I am going to die, and yet I scorn you, you heavenly Apis, in the teeth of death. You have used your power over me, although you know that I never bend in adversity. Ought you not to know it? Did you form my heart in your sleep? I tell you, my whole life and every drop of blood in me rejoices in scorning you and spitting on your grace. From this moment I renounce you and all your works and all your ways; I will curse my thought if it thinks of you and tear off my lips if they ever again speak your name. I say to you, if you exist, the last word in life or in death--I say farewell." But the imp of irony, which in Hamsun is never far away, is peeping over his shoulder as he writes, and the blasphemies are hardly cold on the page before he tells himself that they are "literature." He is conscious of forming his curses so that they read well. This outburst stands alone in his works. It is as though in "Hunger" he had once for all rid himself of all the accumulated rage and agony of his youth. They never come again.

The book is without beginning and end and without a plot, but it has a series of climaxes. Each section describes some phase of hunger and its attendant sufferings: the physical deterioration and weakness, the rebellion of spirit, the hallucinations, the shame and degradation. When the strain becomes intolerable, the tension suddenly snaps with the receipt of five or ten kroner, and then Hamsun instantly removes his hero from our sight. We never see him in the enjoyment of this comparative opulence, but when the money is gone, we meet him again beginning the old struggle, though each time weaker and more unfit to take up the fight. He never achieves anything; his small successes in occasionally selling a manuscript never lead to anything. The book is a record of defeat and frustration which have at last become inevitable because something in himself has given way. Even his strange love affair with the girl whom he calls Ylajali ends in baffled disappointment.

Finally Hamsun simply cuts the thread of the story by letting his hero ship as an ordinary seaman in a boat that is going to England. He leaves the city he had set out to conquer. The city has conquered him. "Out in the fjord I straightened up once and, drenched with fever and weakness, looked in toward land and said good-bye for this time to the city of Christiania, where the windows shone so brightly in all the homes."

THE POET

HIS OWN HERO

The most adequate idea of Hamsun's artistic personality can be gained by reading his early works from "Hunger" to "Munken Vendt" and preferably reading them in the order of their appearance.

Through the medley of characters there emerges a distinct type that can be traced in one after the other of his early books but disappears in the later, more objective, pictures of whole communities. This person is at first always the hero in whom everything centres; later he steps into the background as an onlooker who is sometimes the author's spokesman. He is always a dreamer and one who stands outside of organized society; but this aloofness is not self-sought. On the contrary, he often suffers in his loneliness, and is longing and struggling to come within the circle of human fellowship, but there is something in his own nature which unfits him to be a cog in the common machinery. His pulses are differently attuned from those of other people. The standards by which happiness and success are usually measured mean nothing to him, but he can be lifted to exaltation by the fragrance of a flower or the humming of an insect. He is often a poet, if not in actual production at least in his temperament, and has the poet's responsiveness to things that more thick-skinned people do not notice. An ugly face, a jarring noise can shiver his highest mood like crystal and plunge him to the depths of despair. A sour look or an unkind word or even a trifling mishap--the loss of a lead pencil when he is inspired to write--can cast a gloom over his day. He is full of generous impulses which sometimes take erratic forms and is capable of carrying self-sacrifice to the most senseless extreme, but his nature has never a drop of meanness. He revels in communing with nature and finds pleasure in the society of some lowly friend or simple, loving woman, but any happiness that life may bring him is never more than a momentary gleam. He never lives to his full potentiality either in achievement or in passion. The Swedish critic John Landquist puts the question why we never tire of this oft-repeated Hamsun hero any more than of his Swedish cousin Gösta Berling, and answers that it is because he never gains anything and never turns any situation to his own advantage.

There is no doubt that this constantly recurring figure is Hamsun himself in one incarnation after another. He has pointed the connection by personal description, by reference to his authorship, and once even by the use of his own name. He has to a greater extent than most creative artists drawn for his subjects on his own varied experiences, and though he has of course transmuted them in his imagination, it is clear that he has at least been near enough to the events he records to have lived through them very intensely in his own mind. This is, of course, notably true of "Hunger," which was written at the age of thirty, when his own experiences as a journalistic free lance in Christiania were still fresh in his mind. It is true also of "Mysteries," "Pan," and "Victoria," each one of which corresponds to some phase in his own development. In "Munken Vendt" and "Wanderers" there are reminiscences from his vagabond days, and it is significant of the subjectivity with which he enters into the person of his hero that in the latter he has chosen to make the narrator a man of his own age at the time of writing rather than reincarnate himself in the image of his youth. In the earlier books, on the other hand, the hero is always young, generally between twenty-five and thirty.

The Hamsun ego as the critic of contemporary phenomena, the outsider who is unable to fit himself into any clique or party, appears in Höibro of "Editor Lynge," who is carried over into the drama "Sunset," and in Coldevin of "Shallow Soil." He is absent from all the author's later, more objective, novels, "Dreamers," "Benoni," "Rosa," "Children of the Age," "Segelfoss City," and "Women at the Pump," but we may perhaps find a shadow of him in Sheriff Geissler of "Growth of the Soil," the garrulous wiseacre who "knew what was right, but did not do it."