by Kerry Bolton
Mussolini’s creative idea was grand, and it has had an international effect: it revealed a possible form for the combating of Bolshevism. But this form arose out of imitating the enemy and is therefore full of dangers: revolution from below . . .[174]
Yeats, like other members of the literati who were suspicious of mass movements of any form, had the luxury of not subjecting his ideals to the sobering necessities of a practical political struggle to save civilization from communism and capitalism, which is what O’Duffy and others around the world were then trying to accomplish.
But it is not the role of the troubadour to carry out political campaigns, but to maintain the remnants of High Culture amidst the vulgarity of what the Hindus call the Kali Yuga. And in this task, Yeats never wavered.
Knut Hamsun
KNUT HAMSUN, 1859–1952, has had a decisive impact on the course of twentieth-century literature, both in Europe and America, yet for decades he was little discussed let alone honored even in his native Norway.
Ernest Hemingway tried to emulate him, as did Henry Miller, who called Hamsun “the Dickens of my generation.” Thomas Mann wrote, “never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one so worthy of it.” Hermann Hesse called Hamsun his favorite author. Admired by H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, and Bertolt Brecht,[175] Hamsun always enjoyed a great following not only in Germany but particularly in Russia, where he was lauded especially by Maxim Gorky. Despite his politics, Hamsun continued to be published in the USSR, influencing such Bolshevik luminaries as Aleksandra Kollontai and Ilya Ehrenburg.[176]
Origins
Hamsun was born Knud Pedersen to an impoverished peasant family of seven children on August 4, 1859. His father was a farmer and a tailor; his mother was descended from Viking nobility. Hamsun had a hard upbringing on his uncle’s farm, where he was sent when he was nine. But his uncle also ran the local library, which gave him the chance to begin his self-education.[177]
He left his uncle’s farm in 1873, and over the next few years worked at a variety of jobs—laboring, teaching, and doing clerical work—as he journeyed widely.[178]
America
At 18 Hamsun published his first novel called The Enigmatic One (1877), a love story. He then paid for the publication of another novel Bjørger (1878). But acknowledgment as a writer was a decade away, as there was then little interest in his peasant tales.
In 1882 Hamsun traveled to the United States, joining the great Norwegian emigration to that country. Between numerous jobs he was able to get some newspaper articles published and began a series of lectures on authors among the Norwegian community.[179] From this early start, Hamsun wrote as an observer of life. He was the first to develop the novel based on the psychology of characters. Hamsun wrote of what he saw and felt, particularly identifying with the workers and the tramps. But he was soon disillusioned with America, despite his initial wonder, and he expressed his disgust with American life in articles for Norwegian newspapers[180] upon his return.[181]
In the first sentence of his first article on America[182] Hamsun described the country as “the Millionaires’ Republic,” a reference to the manner by which elections are based on money,[183] and where the “diseased and degenerate human raw material stream every day from all over the world.” Alluding to principles that are today familiarly called “the American Dream,” Hamsun states that the immigrant is soon disappointed when “the principles do not deliver what they promise.”
He was skeptical about the fetishism of liberty upon which the American ethos is founded, stating that it is in practice not so much a matter of having “liberty” as “taking liberties.”[184] The purpose of being American is to fulfill a “carnivorous, satiating existence, with the ability to afford intense sensual pleasures . . .”[185]
What now seems particularly prescient, Hamsun, in criticizing the “machine lust” of Americans, alludes with a mixture of amazement and abhorrence to having even eaten an egg “from a Brooklyn egg factory” (Hamsun’s emphasis),[186] perhaps something that might have seemed pathological for a youthful Scandinavian of country stock.
Hamsun’s next article for the Aftenposten centered on New York and focused on the vulgarity of American city-dwellers in comparison to those in Europe, e.g., their loudness and their lack of etiquette.[187] “New Yorkers know little about literature or art.”[188] The theatre is popular but the “level of dramatic art is so low.”[189]
Hamsun’s first major literary work came in 1888, when he succeeded in getting a short story, which was to form part of his novel Hunger, published in a magazine. The story gained him access to the literary scene in Copenhagen. Hamsun became a celebrity among younger intellectuals. He was invited to lecture before university audiences.[190]
He was commissioned to write a book on America in 1889, setting aside the completion of Hunger. The result was The Cultural Life of Modern America,[191] based on his second trip to the US in 1886, which had been prompted by his desire to make a literary mark for himself there.[192]
By 1888 he was so repelled by the US, that he took to wearing a black ribbon in sympathy with four German anarchist immigrants who had been sentenced to death for the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago.[193]
He left a departing message, giving a two-hour lecture on the cultural vacuity of America.[194]
Despite his destitution upon settling in Copenhagen, he wrote to a friend: “How pleased I am with this country. This is Europe, and I am European—thank God!”[195]
It was two lectures on America at the University of Copenhagen that formed the basis of The Cultural Life of Modern America. Richard C. Nelson remarks of Hamsun’s particular disgust, which might to many readers seem completely relevant to the present time: “In particular he was offended by the exaggerated patriotism of Americans, their continual boasting of themselves as the freest, most advanced, most intelligent people anywhere—boasting from which the foreigner could not escape.”[196]
Hamsun attacked the crass materialism of the US. He despised democracy as a form of despotism, abhorring its leveling nature and mob politics. America is a land where the highest morality is money, where the meaning of art is reduced to its cash value. He also expresses his misgivings about the presence of Africans in the US. The Civil War is described as a war against aristocracy by Northern capitalists. He writes: “Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud farm.”
Literary Eminence
Hamsun resumed writing Hunger after his musings on America, publishing the novel in 1890. It has been described as one of the great novels of urban alienation. Like much of his writing, it is partly autobiographical. It centers on a budding young writer trying to fend off poverty, wandering the streets in rags, but in some odd way enjoying the experiences despite the hardship. Through an act of will the character maintains his identity.
This was perhaps the first novel to make the workings of the mind the central theme. It was a genre he was to continue experimenting with over the next ten years. Contra orthodox psychological theories, Hamsun held that a diversity of separate personality types within the individual is a desirable state of being. He wrote of this in regard to his aim for literature: “I will therefore have contradictions in the inner man considered as a quite natural phenomenon, and I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic.[197]
Hamsun’s next great novel was Mysteries,[198] virtually a self-portrait. One reviewer described Hamsun as expressing “the wildest paradoxes,” a hatred of bourgeois academics and of the masses. The principal character, Nagel, is presented by means of free-flowing, stream of consciousness thought associations.[199]
Here Hamsun identifies himself as “a radical who belongs to no party, but is an individual in the extreme.”[200] The book caused an uproar among literary circles, but it sold well.
Having o
utraged the literary establishment, Hamsun next set about critiquing the younger coterie of writers as arrogant and talentless wastrels, whom he represents in Shallow Soil[201] as “a festering sore on the social organism of the Norwegian capital,” in the words of Professor Josef Wiehr.[202]
Here Hanka Tidemand, a liberated and modern woman of the type detested by Hamsun, finds her true nature back with her hard-working husband and children, after an affair with an artist. On the verge of divorce, she realizes her mistaken course when she sees her children. Here Hamsun sets out his constant theme of rediscovering one’s roots in the simple life, in family, and in children. The well-meaning Mr. Tidemand has his wife Hanka leave after she is seduced by one of the bohemian parasites.
[Tidemand’s] regard for the individual liberty of his wife amounts really to a fault. He fails to see, however, the grave danger which is threatening Hanka and believes to be promoting her true happiness in according her perfect freedom. His devotion to her never ceases, and when she at last repents, he makes reconciliation easy for her. . . .
Hanka is evidently the product of a misdirected striving for emancipation; she seems to acknowledge no duty except the duty to herself.[203]
The Kareno trilogy of plays (At the Gates of the Kingdom, Evening Glow, and The Game of Life, 1895–1896) expresses Hamsun’s growing anti-democratic sentiment in the character of Ivar Kareno, a young philosopher who states: “I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.”[204]
By now, Hamsun had become a celebrity, cheered in the streets by crowds although he despised the attention, but several decades away from being honored with a Nobel Prize.
Growth of the Soil
Growth of the Soil is a remarkable book for those who have a yearning for the timeless in a world of the superficial and the transient. Published in 1917, it was the work that was cited when Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.
This is the world of a rough, coarsely-featured farmer, Isak, and a woman, Inger, who happened to come from across the valley and stay with him to raise a family and help him work the land, raise goats, grow potatoes and corn, milk the cows and goats, make cheese, and subsist at one with nature. Isak and Inger are archetypes of the peasant, the antithesis of the New Yorker and the archetypical “American” described in Hamsun’s essays on the US.
The sense of a day-by-day participation in eternity lived by Isak and Inger is captured, juxtaposing their lives with the grain they sow and the earth they till, as part of a single rhythm that has existed for centuries:
For generations back, into forgotten time, his fathers before him had sowed corn, solemnly, on a still, calm evening, best with a gentle fall of warm and misty rain, soon after the grey goose flight. . . .
Isak walked bareheaded, in Jesu’ name, a sower. Like a tree-stump to look at, but in his heart like a child. Every cast was made with care, in a spirit of kindly resignation. Look! The tiny grains that are to take life and to grow, shoot up into ears, and give more corn again; so it is throughout all the earth where corn is sown. Palestine, America, the valleys of Norway itself—a great wide world, and here is Isak, a tiny speck in the midst of it all, a sower. Little showers of corn flung out fanwise from his hand; a kindly clouded sky, with a promise of the faintest little misty rain.[205]
The woman as mother is the highest of peasant values, and indeed of the fulfillment of women, in antithesis to the “liberated woman” that was becoming evident in Hamsun’s time as a symptom of a culture’s decay, a type already described by Hamsun in Shallow Soil and elsewhere.
The rearing of children is the purpose of Being of the wife and mother, as much as that might be sneered at now, but as Spengler noted, there is nothing more important than the continuation of a family lineage, generation after generation, and one might add—interestingly—the same values hold as true for the aristocrat as for the peasant; there is nothing more dreadful than being the last of a family’s line. Hence, we see something of this feeling described by Hamsun: “She was in full flower and constantly with child. Isak himself, her lord and master, was earnest and stolid as ever, but he had got on well, and was content. How he had managed to live until Inger came was a mystery . . . now, he had all that a man can think of in his place in the world.”[206]
The feeling is described by Oswald Spengler in The Hour of Decision:
A woman of race[207] does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but a mother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and a distraction, but of many; the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire, in the feeling that barrenness is the hardest curse that can befall a woman and through her the race . . .[208]
This is precisely the type of woman that Inger represents: “She was in full flower, and constantly with child . . .” Spengler continues: “A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors.”[209]
This organic conception of family, an instinct during the “Spring” and “Summer” epochs of a civilization, becomes atrophied during the “Autumn” and “Winter” epochs, as Spengler aptly terms the morphological phases of a culture; which is of course the situation today, and was becoming apparent during Hamsun’s time. The culture-problem addressed by Hamsun in Shallow Soil, where the “emancipated woman” leaves her family, is described by Spengler:
The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations. The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting from his own and other lives the maximum of amusement—panem et cicenses. The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties towards family, nation, and State.[210]
Hamsun addressed a matter of land ownership and purchase, as it had been the habit of the tillers to simply stake out a plot of land and work it, without thought as to how and where to purchase it. Amidst the cycles of struggle, drought, crop failures, births of children, and crop recovery, and the contentedness of Isak and Inger and their family amidst it all, an official calls upon them one day to enquire as to why Isak never bought the land.
Buy, what should he buy for? The ground was there, the forest was there; he had cleared and tilled, built up a homestead in the midst of a natural wilderness, winning bread for himself and his, asking nothing of any man, but working, and working alone.[211]
The district sheriff’s officer finally calls by, looking at the vast tracts of tilled land, and asking why Isak had never come to him to purchase it. Soon after a bit of verbal sophistry, Isak begins to see how the official must be correct. Asking about “boundaries,” Isak had only thought in terms of how far he could see and what he could work. But the State required “definite boundaries,” “and the greater the extent, the more you will have to pay.” To all of this, Isak could only acknowledge with “Ay.”[212]
From there, the simple life of Isak and Inger is confronted with a bureaucratic muddle, with questions on the money-value of the land, its waters, the potential for fishing, and the possibility of ores and metals.
Then civilization reaches Isak and Inger in the form of the telegraph (which becomes a metaphor for “civilization”) which is to go through his land, and for which he would be paid to maintain the lines.[213] Furthermore, copper is discovered in the hills Isak owns.[214] But despite the money that now comes to Isak,
he remains always a peasant, still toiling, knowing that is who he is and not wanting to be anything else:
Isak understood his work, his calling. He was a rich man now, with a big farm, but the heavy cash payments that had come to him by a lucky chance he used but poorly; he put the money aside. The land saved him. If he had lived down in the village, maybe the great world would have affected even him; so much gaiety, so many elegant manners and ways; he would have been buying useless trifles, and wearing a red Sunday shirt on weekdays. Here in the wilds he was sheltered from all immoderation; he lived in clear air, washed himself on Sunday mornings, and took a bath when he went up to the lake. Those thousand Daler—well, ’twas a gift from Heaven, to be kept intact. What else should he do? His ordinary outgoings were more than covered by the produce of his fields and stock.[215]
The copper mine, under Swedish ownership, encroached increasingly, much to the distress of the villagers. Eleseus, Isak and Inger’s eldest son, having spent much time away, had returned ruined by civilization, improvident:
