A vagabond hero

BIOGRAPHY: MICHEAL O'SIADHAILreviews Knut Hamsun - Dreamer and Dissenter: A Biographyby Ingar Sletten Kolloen, translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik, Yale University Press, 387pp, £25

THE NORWEGIAN novelist Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) is largely remembered for two things: for his early novels Hungerand Panas well as The Growth of the Soil(for which he got the Nobel Prize in 1920) and for his outright support for Nazi Germany. This excellent new biography focuses on "where the man and the writer may have crossed paths".

Hamsun, reared in poverty in Nordland in northern Norway, had "252 days of schooling in his entire life". His mother, after her seventh child, suffered bouts of madness which ran in her family. From age nine, he and a sister boarded with a heavy-handed bachelor uncle, resulting in an unhappy childhood. Poverty, a lack of education and a lack of emotional warmth left him with feelings of inferiority. Following spells in labouring, clerical and teaching jobs in Norway, the United States, Denmark and Germany, he finally made his breakthrough in Copenhagen with a piece which would evolve as the novel Hunger.

Being noticed in Denmark ensured success in its ex-colony Norway. Hamsun had discovered Twain, Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo and Zola and Dostoyevsky. He’d also absorbed from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche a belief in heroic individualism. He secured his notoriety lecturing across Norway, railing against the established Norwegian writers. Their protagonists had “governing characteristics” while his were, as he later said, “split and fragmented, neither good nor bad, but both things, nuanced, changeable in mind and action – as undoubtedly I am myself”. Language was “an artistic object” with “each word dazzling like white wings”. Personally invited by Hamsun and placed in the front row, Ibsen listened “unruffled” to two of these packed lectures which berated him.

The novel Hungerwas followed by some 34 works, the last when he was 90. Except for a collection of poems and a small number of plays and travel books, they are all novels.

Both novels Hungerand Pan, which belong to the initial phase, are written in the first person with "vagabond heroes", and his writing displays, as Kolloen puts it, "the impulsiveness of his characters, the richness of their thought processes, abrupt mood swings, explosions of emotion" as well as a remarkable affinity with nature. In his later phase, there is more distance and more characters. His social message opposes urbanisation and embraces rural life. Both phases were extraordinarily popular, selling massive amounts in Norway and abroad, particularly in Germany. His themes fed German Neo-Romantics and the National Socialists, his work proving to be the literary equivalent of Wagner's.

All of his work is an intricate reflection of Hamsun’s personal life. He himself was “a vagabond hero”. A binger and a spendthrift with a gift for borrowing money and getting advances, he was nearly always in debt. Like his heroes, Hamsun was attracted to women who were unavailable; both his wives left marriages to marry him. After his first wife, Bergljot, bore him a daughter, he wanted out. In a bid to win enough money to leave her, he gambled away her fortune in casinos in Ostend. He was soon to seduce the young actress Marie Lavik even though “he was eighteen years her senior, bald-headed and divorced”. Pursued by two men, her husband, Dore, was suddenly hospitalised. Marie wanted to visit him but “Hamsun forbade it”. Her husband died that afternoon.

Hamsun and Marie had four children. Throughout their upbringing, he disappeared for months on end to live in lodging houses or cheap hotels so he could write in peace and with the outsider feeling he had known in his youth. After many moves which uprooted the family, they finally settled on a farm in southern Norway where he mostly wrote in a nearby building. Marie tiptoed through her life facilitating the increasingly irascible and obsessive Hamsun. She wrote fiction for children and young adults but he “forbade” her to write novels for adults. Her frustration resulted in a fractious marriage.

In his preface, the biographer writes that “each of us contains more fateful contradictions than we can ever fathom”. Were Hamsun’s Pan-Germanic ideology and his infatuation with Quisling and Hitler, whom he visited, such a contradiction? Some Norwegians tend to excuse Hamsun on grounds of his age and deafness but clearly he had deep anti-British prejudices from childhood and disliked America. He had a particular affinity with Germany and was enormously popular there.

The great Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset (1882-1949), who had opposed Nazism and lost her son in the resistance, was asked if she expected this of Hamsun. She replied: “Yes, this was exactly what I expected. He has never written about anything apart from his own inferiority complexes, the English nation of shopkeepers and the master race of Germany.”

Undset's judgement may be harsh. Yet Hamsun always had Nietzschean and racist views and he deplored democracy. Black people were "creatures with intestines for brains"; in Russia "one obeys a man who knows how to give a command". In Hunger, a well-known passage describes how old age disgusts him. Like others who chose interiority, for instance Heidegger, he seemed to vault over the daily world of personal relationships to dream of blood and soil and the fate of Germanic people. As Kolloen remarks, "in the 1930s the connection between the aesthetic and the ethical content of his work was more in question but most readers had allowed their love of the former to outweigh any doubts they had about the latter".

After the war, the unrepentant Hamsun was a hot potato for the Norwegian Government. It emerges here that psychiatrists agreed, in order to save embarrassment, to brand him as “permanently mentally impaired” due to a stroke he had suffered. He gave them the lie with his final book describing his treatment.

The author has abbreviated the original two volumes in Norwegian. Inevitably many gems had to be excluded, such as descriptions of Hamsun’s parents’ lifestyle in Gubrandsdal or Gunnar Reiss-Andersen’s ambiguous poetic tribute to Hamsun on his 80th birthday.

This is fine translation of an outstanding biography in which Hamsun’s life and work are beautifully interwoven with understanding and judgement.

Micheal O'Siadhail is a poet. His latest book, Globe, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007