Born August 4th 1859 as Knut Pedersen in Lom in the Gudbransdalen valley of central Norway.
Died February 19th 1952 in Nørholm.
Born August 4th 1859 as Knut Pedersen in Lom in the Gudbransdalen valley of central Norway.
Died February 19th 1952 in Nørholm.
Writers who are truly original do not set out to fabricate new forms of expression, or to invent themes merely for the sake of appearing new. They attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity, by daring to give everything of themselves, their most secret thoughts and idiosyncrasies.
Knut Hamsun’s genius is totally a product of self-searching and introspection. This became immediately apparent in his first novel, Hunger. People do not love alike; neither do they starve alike. Knut Hamsun took the basic human experience of hunger and made it such a highly individualistic sensation that everything common dropped away from it. The hero is a literary neophite, highly nervous, virtually bordering on madness.
In Hamsun’s work we see the city of Christiania, we feel its physical and spiritual climate, Hamsun mentions names of streets and buildings, but at the same time the reader realizes that the hero is as far removed from his surroundings as if he were in a foreign land.
His hunger can be said to be entirely antisocial. He is starving, not because he cannot find a job in the city or on the farm, but mainly because he is obstinately determined to live from his writing although he is just a beginner. He is hungry both for bread and for inspiration. He is lonely, not because he cannot make friends, but because he has no patience for others. He suffers the shame of those who must rise above their fellow creatures or perish.
Hamsun’s hero, is, in substance, a suicide, although he does not actually kill himself. Hamsun’s heroes wrangle with fate. In a sense the hero of Hunger wages a hunger strike against destiny. He seems to say: ‘Either give me inspiration or I’II take my life and frustrate your schemes...’ But destiny neither provides him with the inspiration nor allows him to die. He is constantly saved by some temporary deliverance. An editor prints an article or a sketch and the hero is paid a few kroner.
Then the ordeal begins all over again ...
The book ends with Hamsun’s hero signing on as a crewman on a freighter bound for the seven seas.
Hamsun himself visited America twice in the 1880s and worked as a farmhand in North Dakota and as a streetcar conductor in Chicago. He even wrote a book at that time, The Cultural Life of Modern America in which he sharply vilified this country. In later years he recanted his views.
The suicidal character of Hamsun’s hero - all the heroes of his earlier novels are one and the same person - comes out in his masterpiece, Pan. Lieutenant Glahn in Pan is as lonely as the hero of Hunger. Glahn has settled somewhere in a hamlet at the edge of a forest in northern Norway without any practical purpose - simply to be alone. He eats on what he can shoot with his gun. He has no friends besides his dog, Esop. He talks to himself, to the dog, to the trees, and to the sea. He lives in a kind of pantheistic exultation that can go over at any moment into depression, In fact, he exists in a state of perpetual despair. His God, nature, is indifferent, neutral towards good and evil, and frequently cruel. One speaks to it, but it remains silent. Its acts are ambiguous and therefore meaningless. When Glahn falls in love with Edvarda the young daughter of the merchant Mack, this love is doomed from the start. Knut Hamsun is a master at describing both great love and the contrariness that often accompanies it. Glahn and Edvarda wage a sexual war. The ambition of each is to drive the other insane. The novel ends with Glahn committing suicide in India.
Fictional heroes who are estranged from their environment seldom emerge lifelike. With most writers, such heroes are mere shadows, or, at best, symbols. But Hamsun is able to portray both the environment and the alienation, the soil and the extirpation. His heroes have roots even though they cannot be seen. The reader never knows precisely how they have become what they are, but their existence is real all the same.
Hamsun’s favourite hero is a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, rash, good-natured, with no plans for the future, always anticipating some happy chance, yet at the same time resigned and melancholy.
Hamsun’s hero is frivolous in word and deed. He speaks to people as he would to a dog or to himself.
Hamsun is less popular in the United States than in Europe, but European writers know that he is the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect, his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism.
The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat’.
Hamsun was perhaps the first to show how childish so-called grownups are. His heroes are all children, as romantic as children, as irrational, and often as savage. Hamsun discovered even before Freud did that love and sex are a childs game.
Hamsun belonged to that select group of writers who not only interested a reader but virtually hypnotized him. In pre World War I Russia, hosts of readers awaited each of Hamsun’s new books with impatience. The same held true in Germany, and in all of north, east and central Europe.
Few writers were as imitated as Hamsun.
There were a number of reasons why Hamsun’s star waned. To begin with, he lived too long. It would have been better for him artistically had he flared and gone out, as Byron did. But Hamsun lived past ninety and wrote almost to the very end.
It may sound like a paradox, but the novel that won him the Nobel Prize, Growth of the Soil, marked the beginning of his literary decline.
Hamsun himself had grown disgusted with Hamsunism. He attempted to become an ethical rather than a lyrical writer. He was only partly successful in Growth of the Soil. Everything that followed, The Women at the Well, The Wanderers and other subsequent works were uneven blends of stale romanticism and meagre naturalism.
Hamsuns literary output of the twenties disappointed his admirers and probably him as well.
The second reason was the violent social changes brought about by the two world wars. Hamsun was not the writer for champions of social justice. They sensed within him the eternal pessimist, the scoffer and profaner. During World War II, the eighty-year-old Hamsun was guilty of a most tragic mistake. Nazi critics read into Hamsun, as they had into Nietzsche, support for their ideologies, and Hamsun deceived himself into thinking that Nazism would spell the end of the left-wing radicalism which repelled him. The Knut Hamsun who had kept aloof from the masses and social reformers allowed himself to be taken in by Nazi demagogues.
It was a sad day for many of Hamsun’s followers when a picture of him greeting Hitler appeared in the newspapers. In it, Hamsun’s face reflects shame, while Hitler looks at him mockingly. In Norway, where strong opposition to Hamsun had always existed due to his isolation and his popularity with foreigners, he was quite properly anathematized.
Following Hitler’s defeat, Hamsun’s sons were imprisoned.
But the literary and political errors of his later years cannot erase Hamsun’s colossal role in the literature of the twentieth century, even though he actually wrote his best works in the nineteenth century: Hunger in 1890;
Mysteries in 1892; Editor Lynge in 1893; Pan in 1894; and Victoria in 1898. (In the intervening years, he published a number of plays.)
His novels Benoni and Rosa, published in 1908, were nothing more than variations of Pan. Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in 1920. It is characteristic that upon learning of his prize Hamsun remarked that he would use the money to improve his flower garden. The author of Hunger wasn’t overly concerned about those who were starving because of conditions in postwar Europe.
Was Knut Hamsun’s career nothing more than a great literary quirk?. Far from it, all that is genuine has roots. Hamsun was deeply rooted in his country and in Scandinavian culture. Like many other masters, he was a man before his time.
His scepticism or perhaps it could be called Pyrrhonism - doubting even the doubts - belonged to a later era.
To Hamsun man was nothing but a chain of moods that constantly changed, often without a trace of consistency. Man was, therefore, as strong as his weakest mood. The hero of Hunger doubted the existence of God, yet he prayed to him. He loved, but he belittled this love and all that it stood for. He strove for artistic revelation, yet wasn’t really serious in his approach to art. Doubt, not only the philosophical but the mundane, found in Hamsun its narrator par excellence.
Because he was responsible for a whole school of writing, Hamsun cannot appear as fresh today as he did when he stunned Europe with his content and his style.
It is not Hamsun’s fault, as it wasn’t Byron’s, that he inspired a virtual chorus of imitators, who muddled his literary achievements.
The more original a writer is, the more he is mimicked. Both Byron and Hamsun transformed scepticism into art.
Both expressed the futility of a life that is blind, of a hope without faith, of a fight without purpose.
Both were masters at portraying the abyss of the human emotions.
The first seven pages of HUNGER
All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania - that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him
I was lying awake in my attic room; a clock struck six somewhere below; it was fairly light already and people were beginning to move up and down the stairs. Over near the door, where my wall was papered with old issues of the Morning Times, I could make out a message from the Chief of Lighthouses, and just to the left of that an advertisement for fresh bread, showing a big, fat loaf: Fabian Olsen’s bakery.
As soon as I was wide awake, I took to thinking, as I always did, if I had anything to be cheerful about today. Things had been a bit tight for me lately; one after the other of my possessions had been taken to my ‘uncle’ at the pawnshop. I was becoming more and more nervous and irritable, and several mornings lately I had been so dizzy I had had to stay in bed all day.
Occasionally when my luck was good I took in five kroner or so from one of the newspapers for an article.
It was getting lighter, and I concentrated on the advertisments by the door; I could even read the slim, mocking type face declaring: ‘Shrouds available, Miss Andersen, Main Entrance, to the right.’ That satisfied me for a long time.
The clock below had struck eight before I got up and dressed.
I opened the window and looked out. I could see a clothes line and an open field. Behind them there was some debris
from a burned-down blacksmiths shop which the workmen were just now clearing away. Leaning my elbows on the window sill-I gazed up into the sky. Today would be clear.
The autumn had come. That cool and delicious time of year when everything changed colour and died. Noises were floating up from the streets, tempting me to go out. This empty room whose floor gave a little with every step was like a badly put together coffin; the room had no real lock, and no stove; I usually slept in my socks so they would be a little drier by morning. The only nice thing in the room was a small red rocking chair in which I sat in the evenings, and dozed and thought about all sorts of things.
When the wind was strong, and the street door of the house had been left open, all kinds of weird whines would come through the floor, and out of the walls, and the Morning Times by the door would get tears in it as long as a hand.
I stood up and investigated a little bundle I had over in the corner by the bed, looking for something for breakfast,
but found nothing and went back again to the window.
I thought, God only knows if there’s any sense in my looking for a job any longer! All these refusals, these partial promises, simple noes, hopes built up and knocked down, new tries that ended each time in nothing - these had squashed my courage for good.
The last time, I had tried for a job as a debt collector, but arrived too late; I couldn’t have got together fifty kroner for a bond anyway. There was always one thing or another in the way. I had even tried to join the fire department. A half hundred of us stood there in the entry way sticking our chests out to give the impression of strength and tremendous audacity. A captain walked around inspecting these applicants, felt their muscles, and asked a question or two. He merely shook his head as he walked past me and said I was out because of my glasses.
I turned up again later, without the glasses. I stood there with my eyebrows scrunched up, and made my eyes as sharp as knife ends: he walked past me again, and smiled - he had recognised me. The worst of it was that my clothes were beginning to look so bad I couldn’t really present myself any longer for a job that required someone respectable.
How steadily my predicament had got worse! By now I was so utterly denuded of objects that I didn’t even have a comb left, or a book to read when I felt helpless.
I had spent the entire summer sitting in cemeteries or in the public gardens near the castle, writing articles intended for some newspaper: page after page on almost any subject, filled with odd ideas, inspirations, quirks rising from my restless brain. In desperation I would choose the most outrageous subjects; the pieces would cost me hours and hours of labour, and were never accepted.
When a piece was done I plunged immediately into a new one, and therefore wasn’t very often crushed by an editor’s refusal; I told myself all the time that eventually my luck would turn. And in fact, sometimes when I had luck, and things were going my way, I could get five kroner for one afternoon’s work.
I stood up from the window again, went over to the washstand and sprinkled some water on my shiny trousers to make them look blacker and newer. When I had finished that, I put paper and pencil in my pocket as usual and went out. I slipped down the stairs very quietly so as not to attract my landlady’s attention; my rent had been due a few days ago and I had nothing to pay her with at the moment.
It was nine. The rattle of wagons and hum of voices filled the air - growing into a great orchestra of sound into which the noise of people walking and the cracks of the driver's whips fitted perfectly. The traffic noise on all sides cheered me up immediately, and I began to feel more content and at peace. I had much more to do of course than merely to take a morning stroll in the fresh air. What did my lungs care for fresh air? I was powerful as a giant and could stop a wagon with my shoulders. A rare and delicate mood, a feeling of wonderful light heartedness had taken hold of me. I began examining the people I met or passed, I read the posters on walls, noticed a glance thrown at me from a streetcar, let every trivial occurrence influence me, every tiny detail that crossed my eyes and vanished.
If one only had something to eat, just a little, on such a clear day the mood of the gay morning overwhelmed me, I became unusually serene, and started to hum for pure joy and for no particular reason.
In front of a butcher’s shop there was a woman with a basket on her arm, debating about some sausage for dinner; as I went past, she looked up at me. She had only a single tooth in the lower jaw. In the excitable state I was in, her face made an instant and revolting impression on me - the long yellow tooth looked like a finger sticking out of her jaw, and as she turned towards me, her eyes were still full of sausage. I lost my appetite instantly, and felt nauseated. When I came to the main market square, I went over to the fountain and drank a little water. I looked up: ten o’clock by the Church of Our Saviour
I kept on going through streets, rambling on with no purpose in mind at all. I stopped at a corner without needing to, turned and went up small alleys without having anything to do there. I just drifted on, floating in the joyful morning, rolling along without a care among other happy people. The air was clear and bright and my mind was without a shadow.
For the last ten minutes an old man had been limping ahead of me. He had a bundle in one hand, and was using his entire body to move forward, working with all his strength and yet making very little progress. I could hear him puffing from effort. It occurred to me that I might carry his bundle; but I made no attempt to overtake him. On Graensen Street I met Hans Pauli, who said hello and hurried by. Why should he be in such a hurry? I certainly didn’t plan to ask him for money; in fact I wanted first of all to return to him a blanket I'd borrowed from him a few weeks ago. As soon as I was in better shape I would; the last thing I wanted was to owe a man a blanket; perhaps today, as a matter of fact, I would get an article started on ‘Crimes of the Future’ or 'Freedom of the Will', something like that, something saleable enough so I could get five kroner at least . . .
Thinking about the article, I suddenly felt a strong desire to work on it immediately and drain off my mind. I’d find a good spot in the public gardens and keep on until I had the whole thing done. However the old cripple was still making the same wiggly movements ahead of me in the street. Finally it began to irritate me to have this feeble creature in front of me all the time. His journey evidently had no end; maybe he determined to go to exactly the same place as I and I would have him blocking my view the whole way. In my excited condition I had become convinced that at each crossing he had hesitated. as though waiting to see what direction I would take, and then had taken a stronger hold on his bundle and limped off with all his might to get a head start. I walked on, looking at this tedious creature, and became more and more full of rage at him; it was clear he was destroying my good spirits bit by bit, little by little dragging the pure and magnificent morning down to his own ugliness. He looked like a huge humping insect determined to make a place for himself in the world by force and violence and keep the pavement to himself.
By the time we got to the top of the hill, I wanted no more part of it; I stopped in front of a shop window, and waited till he had time to get away; but when I started again after a few minutes, the man cropped up in front me again: he must have stopped also.
Without thinking, I took three or four quick steps, caught up with him, and slapped him on the shoulder.
He stopped short. We began staring at each other.
‘Can you give me a little something for a glass of milk?’ he said at last, and let his head fall to the side.
Now there was no turning back! I fumbled in my pocket and said, ‘Oh, yes, milk. Hmm. Money isn’t easy to get these days, and I’m not sure how much you really need it.’
‘I haven’t eaten a thing since yesterday in Drammen,’ the man said. ‘I don’t have an 0re and I still can’t find work.’
‘What do you do?’
Well, 'I’m a welt binder.' 'A what?' 'Welt binder. I can also make the whole shoe.'
‘Well that's different,’ I said. ‘Wait here a few minutes, and I'II see if I can't find something for you,
a little something at least.'
I ran down Pile Street where I knew of a pawnshop on the the second floor; It was one I had never been to either. As I went in the main entrance I quickly slipped off my waist-coat, rolled it up and put it under my arm; then I went up the stairs and knocked on the door. I bowed and threw the waist~coat down on the counter.
'One and a half kroner,' said the man.
'Very good,' I answered. 'If it hadn’t begun to be a little to tight for me, I don’t know how I could have parted with it.'
I took the money and went back. Actually, pawning this waist-coat was a wonderful idea; I would still have the money left over for a good fat breakfast, and by evening my piece on 'Crimes of the the Future' would be in shape. Life began immediately to seem more friendly, and I hurried back to the man to get him off my hands.
'Here you go,' I said, giving him one of my coins. 'I’m delighted that you came to me first.'
The man took the money and began to look me up and down. What was he standing there staring at? I got the sensation that he was inspecting my trousers particularly, and I became irritated at his impertinence. Did this old fool imagine I was really as poor as I looked? Hadn’t I just as good as begun my ten-Kroner article? On the whole, I had no fears for the future; I had many irons in the fire.
What business was it of this heathen savage if I helped him out on such a marvellous day?. The man's stare irritated me, and I decided to give him a little lesson before I let him go. I threw back my shoulders and said,
'My dear man, you have got into a very bad habit, namely, staring at a man’s knees after he gives you money.'
His head settled back against the wall, and his mouth fell open. Behind the idiotic forehead something was going on, he had concluded that I was trying to trick him in some way and he handed the money back.
I stamped my foot, swore, and told him to keep it. Did he think I intended to go to all this trouble for nothing? When you came down to it, I probably owed him the money, I just happened to remember an old debt, he was looking at a punctilious man, one honourable right down to his fingernails. In short, the money was his ... Nonsense, nothing to thank me for, it was a pleasure. Goodbye.
I walked off. At last I was rid of this painful pest, and could be undisturbed.
I went back up Pile Street and stopped in front of a grocery. The window was crammed with food, and I decided to go in and get something to take along.
‘Some cheese and a French loaf!’ I said, and threw my half krone down on the counter.
‘All of this is to go for bread and cheese?’ the woman asked in an ironic tone. without looking at me.
‘The entire fifty ore,’ I replied, not at all upset.
I took my bundles, said good morning with the most exquisite politeness to the old fat woman, and started off at full speed towards the castle and the public gardens.
I found a bench to myself and began chewing savagely at my lunch. It did me good; it had been a long time since I’d had such a well balanced meal and I gradually became aware of the same feeling of tired peace which one feels after a long cry.
My courage had now returned; it was not enough any longer to write an essay on something so elementary and simple-minded as ‘Crimes of the Future’, which any ass could arrive at, let alone read in history books. I felt ready for a more difficult enterprise, I was in the mood to conquer obstacles and I determined on a consideration in three parts of Philosophical Consciousness. Naturally I’d find a moment to break the neck of some of Kant’s sophistries ...
When I reached to take my writing materials to begin work, I discovered that my pencil was gone,
I had forgotten and left it in the pawnshop: my pencil was still in the waistcoat pocket.
Selected works:
DEN GAADEFULDE, 1877
EN GJENSYN, 1878
BJØRGER, 1878
LARS OFTEDAL, 1889
FRA DET MODERNE AMERIKAS AANDSLIV, 1889 - The Spiritual Life of Modern America
SULT, 1890 - The Hunger - Nälkä
MYSTERIER, 1892 - Mysteries - Mysteerioita
REDAKTOR LYNG, 1893
NY JORD, 1893 - Shallow Soil
PAN, AF LOEITNANT THOMAS GLAHN'S PAPIER, 1894 - Pan, From the Lieutenant Thomas Glahn's Papers - suom.
VED RIKETS PORT, 1895 - At the Gate of the Kingdom
LIVETS SPILL, 1896 - The Game of Life
SIESTA, 1897
AFTENRØDE, 1898
VICTORIA, 1898 - trans. - Viktoria, suom.
MUNKEN VENDT, 1902
I ÆVENTYRLAND, 1903
DRONNING TAMARA, 1903
KRATSKOG, 1903
SVÆRMERE, 1904 - Dreamers - Haaveilijoita
STRIDENDE LIV, 1905
UNDER HØSTSTÆJRNEN, 1907 - Under the Autumn Star
BENONI, 1908 - trans.
ROSA, 1908 - trans.
EN VANDRER SPILLER MED SORDIN, 1909 - A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings in Wanderers
LIVET IVOLD, 1910 - In the Grip of Life
DEN SISTE GLÆDE, 1912 - Look Back on Happiness
BØRN AN TIDEN, 1913 - Children of the Age
SEGELFOSS BY, 1915 - Segelfoss Town
MARKENS GRØDE, 1917 - Growth of the Soil - Maan siunaus
KONERNE VED VANDPOSTEN, 1920 - Women at the Pump
DIKTE, 1921
SISTE KAPITEL, 1923 - Chapter the Last
LANDSTRYKERE, 1927 - Vagabonds - Maankiertäjiä
AUGUST, 1930 - trans. - August, maapallonkiertäjä
MEN LIVET LEVER, 1933 - The Road Leads On
SAMLEDE VERKER, 1936 (17 vols.)
RINGEN SLUTTET, 1936 - The Ring is Closed - Rengas sulkeutuu
PÅ GJENGRODDE STIER, 1949 - On Overgrown Paths
The Cultural Life of Modern America, 1969
Knut Hamsun: Selected Letters. 1879-98, 1990 (ed. by Harald Næss and James McFarlane)
Last Updated - June 5th 2003