by Kerry Bolton
Poor Eleseus, all set on end and frittered away. Better, maybe, if he’d worked on the land all the time, but now he’s a man that has learned to write and use letters; no grip in him, no depth. For all that, no pitch-black devil of a man, not in love, not ambitious, hardly nothing at all is Eleseus, not even a bad thing of any great dimensions.
Something unfortunate, ill-fated about this young man, as if something were rotting him from within . . . the child had lost his roothold, and suffered thereby. All that he turns to now leads back to something wanting in him, something dark against the light.[216]
Eleseus represents that type which becomes predominant in the “Winter” phase of a civilization, when the city and money form the axis of living; where the peasant and the artisan emigrate from the country to the city and become either part of the rootless, alienated proletarian mass or a part of the equally rootless bourgeois. The same contrast that Hamsun dramatized was examined several years later by Spengler in his seminal study of cultural morphology, The Decline of the West:
Beginning and end, a peasant cottage and a tenement-block are related to one another[217] as soul and intellect, as blood and stone. . . . Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhibited waste of country.[218]
Hamsun concludes with Geissler, the district official who had once come on behalf of the State to measure the worth and boundaries of Isak’s land, and then to buy the copper mine from Isak, regretting the impact the mining had had upon the village, offering this observation to Isak’s younger son Sivert who had stayed with the land, which encapsulates Hamsun’s worldview and moral of the story:
Look at you folk at Sellanraa,[219] now; looking up at blue peaks every day of your lives; no new-fangled inventions about that, but field and rocky peaks, rooted deep in the past—but you’ve them for companionship. 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. There’s you Sellanraa folk, in all this, living there. Field and forest, moors and meadow, and sky and stars—oh, ’tis not poor and sparingly counted out, but without measure. Listen to me, Sivert: you be content! You’ve everything to live on, everything to live for, everything to believe in; being born and bringing forth, you are the needful on earth. ’Tis not all that are so, but you are so; needful on earth. ’Tis you that maintain life. Generation to generation, breeding ever anew; and when you die, the new stock goes on. That’s the meaning of eternal life. What do you get out of it? An existence innocently and properly set towards all. What do you get out of it? Nothing can put you under orders and lord it over you Sellanraa folk, you’ve peace and authority and this great kindliness all round. That’s what you get for it. You lie at a mother’s breast and suck, and play with a mother’s warm hand. There’s your father now, he’s one of the two-and-thirty thousand. What’s to be said of many another? I’m something, I’m the fog, as it were, here and there, floating around, sometimes coming like rain on dry ground. But the others? There’s my son, the lightning that’s nothing in itself, a flash of barrenness; he can act.
My son, ay, he’s the modern type, a man of our time; he believes honestly enough all the age has taught him, all the Jew and the Yankee have taught him; I shake my head at it all. But there’s nothing mythical about me; ’tis only in the family, so to speak, that I’m like a fog. Sit there shaking my head. Tell the truth—I’ve not the power of doing things and not regretting it. If I had, I could be lightning myself. Now I’m a fog.[220]
Hamsun explicitly identified the peasantry as the well-spring of a healthy culture, the embodiment of those ever-relevant values that contrast with the values of decay represented by the city, the bourgeois, proletarianization, urbanization, and industrialization:
A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and, withal, a man of the day.[221]
In the August Trilogy,[222] as in Growth of the Soil and elsewhere, Hamsun had taken up the concerns of encroaching mechanization and cosmopolitanism, epitomized by the US, and instead championed traditional values, such as those of localism and the rural. Nelson remarks that Hamsun was espousing an agrarian, anti-capitalist conservatism that was becoming popular among the literati in both Europe and America.
Quisling & Hitler
With such views forming over the course of decades, and achieving wide acclaim, Hamsun’s support for Quisling and for the German occupation of Norway during World War II, is consistent and principled within his historical and cultural context.
Hamsun disliked the British as much as the “Yankees” and the Bolsheviks. He had been appalled by the British war against the Boers, which he would surely have regarded as a war by a plutocratic power against an entire folk who epitomized a living remnant of the type portrayed by Isak in Growth of the Soil.[223] He had also alluded to the “Jews”[224] as harbingers of modernism and cosmopolitanism.
In contrast to Britain, the US, and the USSR, National Socialist Germany claimed to champion the peasantry as the eternal wellspring of a healthy culture, very much in keeping with Hamsun’s views in Growth of the Soil and elsewhere. This is why the National Socialists saw Hamsun as a fellow-traveler.
In 1933 Walther Darré, a widely recognized agricultural expert, had been appointed Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, and also had the title “National Peasant Leader.” Goslar was named the “National Peasant City,” and pageants were held to honor the peasantry. Practical measures to deal with the crisis on the land were enacted immediately, including the Hereditary Farm Law, which protected the peasantry from foreclosure and ensured the family inheritance.[225]
Alfred Rosenberg, the primary National Socialist philosopher in Germany, had already paid tribute to Hamsun in his seminal Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), with specific reference to Growth of the Soil, as expressing the “mystical-natural will” of the peasant better than any other living artist:
No one knows why, with great effort, the farmer Isak cultivates one piece of land after another in god-forsaken regions, or why his wife has joined him and gives birth to his children. But Isak follows an inexplicable law. He carries on a fruitful quest out of a mystical primal will. At the end of his existence he will certainly look back in astonishment at the harvest of his activity. Growth of the Soil is the great present day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal primordial form. Nordic man can be heroic even behind the wooden plow.[226]
Such was the background when in 1934 Hamsun wrote an article, “Wait and See,” in which he attacked the opponents of National Socialist Germany and asked if a return of Communists, Jews, and Heinrich Brüning to Germany were preferable. In 1935 he sent a greeting to Der Norden, the organ of the Nordic Society, supporting the return of the League of Nations mandate, Saarland, to Germany, and from the start supported Germany privately and publicly wherever he felt able.[227] Hamsun and his wife Marie remained particularly close to the Nordic Society, which was avid in promoting Hamsun’s works.[228]
In April 1940 the Germans occupied Norway after the British had on several occasions breached Norwegian neutrality, including mining Norway’s territorial waters, against which the Norwegian Government impotently protested.[229]
In 1933, former Defense Minister Vidkun Quisling had established his own party Nasjonal Samling (National Unification). Hamsun had formed a good impression of Quisling since 1932, and wrote in support of Nasjonal Samling’s electoral appeal in 1936 in
the party newspaper Fritt Folk. His wife Marie was the local representative of the party.[230]
Ironically, Quisling, whose very name became synonymous with “traitor,”[231] was the only politician who had campaigned before the war for a strong defense capability, and was particularly pro-British, having been honored by the British Government for looking after British interests in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, where he had been the principal aide to the celebrated Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, who was directing the European Famine Relief to Russia in 1921, with Quisling serving as Secretary for the relief organization.[232]
Quisling sought an alliance of Nordic nations, including Germany and Britain, in what he called a “Northern Coalition” against Communism.[233]
The only strong resistance against the German invasion came from a garrison commanded by an officer who belonged to Quisling’s party. The King and government quickly fled, leaving Norway without an administration or any voice to negotiate with the Germans.[234] Quisling, like Marshal Pétain in France, and many other figures throughout Europe who were to be branded and usually executed as “traitors,” stepped in to fill the void as the only political figure willing to try and look after Norwegian interests under the occupation. He declared himself “minister-president,” but because he was not a pliant tool he did not enjoy the confidence of the German military authorities. He was soon forced to resign in favor of an administrative council under German control, but eventually regained a measure of authority.[235]
Meanwhile, Hamsun urged Norwegians to rally behind Quisling so that some form of sovereignty could be restored. He described Quisling as “more than a politician, he is a thinker, a constructive spirit.”[236]
Hamsun’s longest wartime article appeared in the German-language publication Berlin-Tokyo-Rome in February 1942, where he wrote: “Europe does not want either the Jews or their gold, neither the Americans nor their country.”[237]
Despite Hamsun’s pro-German sentiments, he championed the rights of his countrymen, including those who resisted the German occupation. He attempted in intercede for the writer Ronald Fangen, and many others, who had been arrested by the Gestapo.[238]
In 1943 Hamsun and his wife accepted the invitation of Goebbels to visit Germany. Goebbels wrote of Hamsun as being “the embodiment of what an epic writer should be.” Hamsun was equally impressed with the Reich Minister and sent Goebbels the Nobel medal he had been awarded, which Goebbels accepted as Hamsun’s “expression of solidarity with our battle for a new Europe, and a happy society.”[239]
While in Germany, Hamsun met Hitler, which did not go well, as Hamsun took the opportunity to condemn the military administration of Norway which had rendered Quisling powerless. They parted in an unfriendly manner.[240]
However, Hamsun continued to support Germany, and expressed his pride when a son, Arild, joined the Norwegian Legion of the Waffen SS.[241]
In 1945 several strokes forced Hamsun to quiet his activities. But upon Hitler’s death Hamsun defiantly wrote a tribute for the press:
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. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally felled him. Thus might the average western European regard Hitler. We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.[242]
Post-War Persecution
Membership in Quisling’s party was declared a criminal offense and Hamsun’s sons Tore and Arild[243] were among the first of 50,000 Norwegians to be arrested as “Nazis” (sic) or as “collaborators.”[244] Marie and Knut were arrested a few weeks later. Due to his age, at 86, Hamsun was sent to a hospital rather than to a prison, although the stress and treatment struck considerably at his still quite good health. He was defiant and stated to the authorities that he would have assisted the Germans more if he could.[245]
He was sent to an old folk’s home where he was a popular guest. However, prosecuting Norway’s leading cultural figure, like America’s dealings with Ezra Pound, was an awkward matter. Consequently, Hamsun spent 119 days in a psychiatric clinic. The psychiatrists found in him, as in the characters of his novels, a complex interplay of traits, but the most prominent of all they described was his “absolute honesty.” The conclusion was that Hamsun was not insane but that he was mentally impaired. Hence, what Ferguson calls “an embarrassing situation,” given that Hamsun was “first and foremost [Norway’s] great writer, their national pride, a loved and admired and never quite respectable ancient child,” was dealt with by concluding that his support for Germany could be put down to “senility.” This was the party line taken up by the press throughout the world.[246]
Hamsun’s post-war autobiographical book On Overgrown Paths, written amidst the threats of prosecution and the interrogations, shows him to be perfectly lucid. Although deaf and going blind, Hamsun retained his mental faculties impressively, along with a certain fatalism and humor.[247]
Although the Attorney General opted not to proceed against Hamsun, the Crown wished to try him as a member of Nasjonal Samling. To Hamsun the action at least meant that he was being officially acknowledged as of sound mind. He was fined 425,000 kroner.[248]
With ruinous fines hanging over them, the Hamsuns returned to their farm Norholm.[249] On appeal the fine was reduced to 325,000 kroner,[250] his persistence and courage in speaking on behalf of imprisoned Norwegians under the German Occupation being a mitigating factor. Tore was also fined, and his brother Arild was jailed until 1949 for his membership of the Norwegian Legion. Marie Hamsun was released from jail in 1948.[251]
Although On Overgrown Paths was published in 1949 and became an immediate best seller,[252] Hamsun ended his days in poverty on his farm. He died in his sleep on February 19, 1952.
When Robert Ferguson’s biography appeared in 1987, he wrote that although Norway is especially keen to honor its writers, “Hamsun’s life remains largely uncommemorated by officialdom.”[253] However, two decades later, in 2009:
In Norway, the 150th birthday of Knut Hamsun will be celebrated by theatrical exhibitions, productions, and an international conference. One of the main squares of Oslo, located just beside the national Opera, will henceforth bear his name. A monument will finally be erected in his honor. One might say that the Norwegians have just discovered the name of their very famous compatriot. Recently, a large number of towns and villages have named squares and streets for him. At the place where he resided, in Hamaroy, a “Knut Hamsun Center” will officially open on August 4th, the day of his birth. On that day, a special postage stamp will be issued. Yet Knut Hamsun was denounced and vilified for decades by the Norwegian establishment.[254]
Hamsun’s defiant commitment to Quisling and to Germany during the war was a logical conclusion to ideas that had been fermenting and widely read and applauded over a period of half a century. Yet when it came time to act on those ideals, of fighting materialism, plutocracy, and communism, for the restoration of rural and peasant values against the encroaching tide of industrialism and money, Hamsun’s fellow countryman reacted with outrage. Hamsun, unlike some of the pre-war supporters of National Socialism or Fascism, for better or for worse, never did compromise his values.
Ezra Pound
“A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.”
—Ezra Pound[255]
EZRA LOOMIS POUND, 1885–1972, heralded as “a principal founder and moving spirit of modern poetry in English,”[256] was born in a frontier town in Idaho, the son of an assistant assayer and the grandson of a Congressman.
He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1901 and in 1906 was awarded his MA degree. He had already started work on his magnum opus, The Cantos. An avid reader of Anglo-Saxon, classical, and medieval li
terature, Pound continued postgraduate work on the troubadour musician-poets of medieval Provence.
Pound scholar and biographer Noel Stock was to write that Pound, when introduced to the works of Dante and of the troubadours, “wanted to devise a means of entering into the Middle Ages so as to bring them to bear upon the present,”[257] at an early stage being skeptical about the path of “progress.”
In 1908 Pound traveled to Venice. There he paid $8.00 for the printing of his first volume of poetry, A Lume Spento (With Tapers Quenched).
Pound then went to London to meet W. B. Yeats and became a dominant figure in Yeats’s Monday evening circle, serving for a time as Yeats’s secretary. He quickly gained recognition in London with the publication in 1909 of his poem Personae which caused a “small but definite stir.”[258] He came into contact with The English Review, which was publishing the works of D. H. Lawrence and the author, painter, and critic Wyndham Lewis. In 1911, Pound launched his campaign for innovative writing in The New Age edited by the guild socialist A. R. Orage. For Pound the new poetry of the century would be “austere, direct, free from emotional slither.” In considering Pound’s association with T. S. Eliot, another “Rightist,”[259] Stock writes:
