Chapter I: Front Matter

HUNGER

by KNUT HAMSUN

Translated from the Norwegian by GEORGE EGERTON

_With an introduction by Edwin Bjorkman_

This PG edition is based upon the eighth printing, published in September 1921 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. This edition is a bowdlerised version of the original 1899 translation, also by George Egerton.

Knut Hamsun

Since the death of Ibsen and Strindberg, Hamsun is undoubtedly the
foremost creative writer of the Scandinavian countries. Those
approaching most nearly to his position are probably Selma Lagerlöf in
Sweden and Henrik Pontoppidan in Denmark. Both these, however, seem to
have less than he of that width of outlook, validity of interpretation
and authority of tone that made the greater masters what they were.

His reputation is not confined to his own country or the two
Scandinavian sister nations. It spread long ago over the rest of Europe,
taking deepest roots in Russia, where several editions of his collected
works have already appeared, and where he is spoken of as the equal of
Tolstoy and Dostoyevski. The enthusiasm of this approval is a
characteristic symptom that throws interesting light on Russia as well
as on Hamsun.

Hearing of it, one might expect him to prove a man of the masses, full
of keen social consciousness. Instead, he must be classed as an
individualistic romanticist and a highly subjective aristocrat, whose
foremost passion in life is violent, defiant deviation from everything
average and ordinary. He fears and flouts the dominance of the many, and
his heroes, who are nothing but slightly varied images of himself, are
invariably marked by an originality of speech and action that brings
them close to, if not across, the borderline of the eccentric.

In all the literature known to me, there is no writer who appears more
ruthlessly and fearlessly himself, and the self thus presented to us is
as paradoxical and rebellious as it is poetic and picturesque. Such a
nature, one would think, must be the final blossoming of powerful
hereditary tendencies, converging silently through numerous generations
to its predestined climax. All we know is that Hamsun's forebears were
sturdy Norwegian peasant folk, said only to be differentiated from their
neighbours by certain artistic preoccupations that turned one or two of
them into skilled craftsmen. More certain it is that what may or may not
have been innate was favoured and fostered and exaggerated by physical
environment and early social experiences.

Hamsun was born on Aug. 4, 1860, in one of the sunny valleys of central
Norway. From there his parents moved when he was only four to settle in
the far northern district of Lofoden--that land of extremes, where the
year, and not the day, is evenly divided between darkness and light;
where winter is a long dreamless sleep, and summer a passionate dream
without sleep; where land and sea meet and intermingle so gigantically
that man is all but crushed between the two--or else raised to titanic
measures by the spectacle of their struggle.

The Northland, with its glaring lights and black shadows, its unearthly
joys and abysmal despairs, is present and dominant in every line that
Hamsun ever wrote. In that country his best tales and dramas are laid.
By that country his heroes are stamped wherever they roam. Out of that
country they draw their principal claims to probability. Only in that
country do they seem quite at home. Today we know, however, that the
pathological case represents nothing but an extension of perfectly
normal tendencies. In the same way we know that the miraculous
atmosphere of the Northland serves merely to develop and emphasize
traits that lie slumbering in men and women everywhere. And on this
basis the fantastic figures created by Hamsun relate themselves to
ordinary humanity as the microscopic enlargement of a cross section to
the living tissues. What we see is true in everything but proportion.

The artist and the vagabond seem equally to have been in the blood of
Hamsun from the very start. Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he used his
scant savings to arrange for the private printing of a long poem and a
short novel produced at the age of eighteen, when he was still signing
himself Knud Pedersen Hamsund. This done, he abruptly quit his
apprenticeship and entered on that period of restless roving through
trades and continents which lasted until his first real artistic
achievement with "Hunger," In 1888-90. It has often been noted that
practically every one of Hamsun's heroes is of the same age as he was
then, and that their creator takes particular pain to accentuate this
fact. It is almost as if, during those days of feverish literary
struggle, he had risen to heights where he saw things so clearly that
no subsequent experience could add anything but occasional details.

Before he reached those heights, he had tried life as coal-heaver and
school teacher, as road-mender and surveyor's attendant, as farm hand
and streetcar conductor, as lecturer and free-lance journalist, as
tourist and emigrant. Twice he visited this country during the middle
eighties, working chiefly on the plains of North Dakota and in the
streets of Chicago. Twice during that time he returned to his own
country and passed through the experiences pictured in "Hunger," before,
at last, he found his own literary self and thus also a hearing from the
world at large. While here, he failed utterly to establish any
sympathetic contact between himself and the new world, and his first
book after his return in 1888 was a volume of studies named "The
Spiritual Life of Modern America," which a prominent Norwegian critic
once described as "a masterpiece of distorted criticism." But I own a
copy of this book, the fly-leaf of which bears the following inscription
in the author's autograph:

"A youthful work. It has ceased to represent my opinion of America.
May 28, 1903. Knut Hamsun."

In its original form, "Hunger" was merely a sketch, and as such it
appeared in 1888 in a Danish literary periodical, "New Earth." It
attracted immediate widespread attention to the author, both on account
of its unusual theme and striking form. It was a new kind of realism
that had nothing to do with photographic reproduction of details. It was
a professedly psychological study that had about as much in common with
the old-fashioned conceptions of man's mental activities as the
delirious utterances of a fever patient. It was life, but presented in
the Impressionistic temper of a Gauguin or Cezanne. On the appearance of
the completed novel in 1890, Hamsun was greeted as one of the chief
heralds of the neo-romantic movement then spreading rapidly through the
Scandinavian north and finding typical expressions not only in the works
of theretofore unknown writers, but in the changed moods of masters like
Ibsen and Bjornson and Strindberg.

It was followed two years later by "Mysteries," which pretends to be a
novel, but which may be better described as a delightfully irresponsible
and defiantly subjective roaming through any highway or byway of life or
letters that happened to take the author's fancy at the moment of
writing. Some one has said of that book that in its abrupt swingings
from laughter to tears, from irreverence to awe, from the ridiculous to
the sublime, one finds the spirits of Dostoyevski and Mark Twain
blended.

The novels "Editor Lynge" and "New Earth," both published in 1893, were
social studies of Christiania's Bohemia and chiefly characterized by
their violent attacks on the men and women exercising the profession
which Hamsun had just made his own. Then came "Pan" in 1894, and the
real Hamsun, the Hamsun who ever since has moved logically and with
increasing authority to "The Growth of the Soil," stood finally
revealed. It is a novel of the Northland, almost without a plot, and
having its chief interest in a primitively spontaneous man's reactions
to a nature so overwhelming that it makes mere purposeless existence
seem a sufficient end in itself. One may well question whether Hamsun
has ever surpassed the purely lyrical mood of that book, into which he
poured the ecstatic dreams of the little boy from the south as, for the
first time, he saw the forestclad northern mountains bathing their feet
in the ocean and their crowns in the light of a never-setting sun. It is
a wonderful paean to untamed nature and to the forces let loose by it
within the soul of man.

Like most of the great writers over there, Hamsun has not confined
himself to one poetic mood or form, but has tried all of them. From the
line of novels culminating in "Pan," he turned suddenly to the drama,
and in 1895 appeared his first play, "At the Gates of the Kingdom." It
was the opening drama of a trilogy and was followed by "The Game of
Life" in 1896 and "Sunset Glow" in 1898. The first play is laid in
Christiania, the second in the Northland, and the third in Christiania
again. The hero of all three is Ivar Kareno, a student and thinker who
is first presented to us at the age of 29, then at 39, and finally at
50. His wife and several other characters accompany the central figure
through the trilogy, of which the lesson seems to be that every one is
a rebel at 30 and a renegade at 50. But when Kareno, the irreconcilable
rebel of "At the Gates of the Kingdom," the heaven-storming truth-seeker
of "The Game of Life," and the acclaimed radical leader in the first
acts of "Sunset Glow," surrenders at last to the powers that be in order
to gain a safe and sheltered harbor for his declining years, then
another man of 29 stands ready to denounce him and to take up the rebel
cry of youth to which he has become a traitor. Hamsun's ironical humor
and whimsical manner of expression do more than the plot itself to knit
the plays into an organic unit, and several of the characters are
delightfully drawn, particularly the two women who play the greatest
part in Kareno's life: his wife Eline, and Teresita, who is one more
of his many feminine embodiments of the passionate and changeable
Northland nature. Any attempt to give a political tendency to the
trilogy must be held wasted. Characteristically, Kareno is a sort of
Nietzschean rebel against the victorious majority, and Hamsun's
seemingly cynical conclusions stress man's capacity for action
rather than the purposes toward which that capacity may be directed.

Of three subsequent plays, "Vendt the Monk," (1903), "Queen Tamara"
(1903) and "At the Mercy of Life" (1910), the first mentioned is by far
the most remarkable. It is a verse drama in eight acts, centred about
one of Hamsun's most typical vagabond heroes. The monk Vendt has much
in common with Peer Gynt without being in any way an imitation or a
duplicate. He is a dreamer in revolt against the world's alleged
injustice, a rebel against the very powers that invisibly move the
universe, and a passionate lover of life who in the end accepts it as
a joyful battle and then dreams of the long peace to come. The vigor
and charm of the verse proved a surprise to the critics when the play
was published, as Hamsun until then had given no proof of any poetic
gift in the narrower sense.

From 1897 to 1912 Hamsun produced a series of volumes that simply marked
a further development of the tendencies shown in his first novels:
"Siesta," short stories, 1897; "Victoria" a novel with a charming love
story that embodies the tenderest note in his production, 1898; "In
Wonderland," travelling sketches from the Caucasus, 1903; "Brushwood,"
short stories, 1903; "The Wild Choir," a collection of poems, 1904;
"Dreamers," a novel, 1904; "Struggling Life," short stories and
travelling sketches, 1905; "Beneath the Autumn Star" a novel, 1906;
"Benoni," and "Rosa," two novels forming to some extent sequels to
"Pan," 1908; "A Wanderer Plays with Muted Strings," a novel, 1909;
and "The Last Joy," a shapeless work, half novel and half mere
uncoordinated reflections, 1912.

The later part of this output seemed to indicate a lack of development,
a failure to open up new vistas, that caused many to fear that the
principal contributions of Hamsun already lay behind him. Then appeared
in 1913 a big novel, "Children of the Time," which in many ways struck
a new note, although led up to by "Rosa" and "Benoni." The horizon is
now wider, the picture broader. There is still a central figure, and
still he possesses many of the old Hamsun traits, but he has crossed the
meridian at last and become an observer rather than a fighter and doer.
Nor is he the central figure to the same extent as Lieutenant Glahn in
"Pan" or Kareno in the trilogy. The life pictured is the life of a
certain spot of ground--Segelfoss manor, and later the town of
Segelfoss--rather than that of one or two isolated individuals. One
might almost say that Hamsun's vision has become social at last, were it
not for his continued accentuation of the irreconcilable conflict
between the individual and the group.

"Segelfoss Town" in 1915 and "The Growth of the Soil"--the title ought
to be "The Earth's Increase"--in 1918 continue along the path Hamsun
entered by "Children of the Time." The scene is laid in his beloved
Northland, but the old primitive life is going--going even in the
outlying districts, where the pioneers are already breaking ground for
new permanent settlements. Business of a modern type has arrived, and
much of the quiet humor displayed in these the latest and maturest of
Hamsun's works springs from the spectacle of its influence on the
natives, whose hands used always to be in their pockets, and whose
credulity in face of the improbable was only surpassed by their
unwillingness to believe anything reasonable. Still the life he
pictures is largely primitive, with nature as man's chief antagonist,
and to us of the crowded cities it brings a charm of novelty rarely
found in books today. With it goes an understanding of human nature
which is no less deep-reaching because it is apt to find expression in
whimsical or flagrantly paradoxical forms.

Hamsun has just celebrated his sixtieth birthday anniversary. He is as
strong and active as ever, burying himself most of the time on his
little estate in the heart of the country that has become to such a
peculiar extent his own. There is every reason to expect from him works
that may not only equal but surpass the best of his production so far.
But even if such expectations should prove false, the body of his work
already accomplished is such, both in quantity and quality, that he must
perforce be placed in the very front rank of the world's living writers.
To the English-speaking world he has so far been made known only through
the casual publication at long intervals of a few of his books:
"Hunger," "Fictoria" and "Shallow Soil" (rendered in the list above as
"New Earth"). There is now reason to believe that this negligence will
be remedied, and that soon the best of Hamsun's work will be available
in English. To the American and English publics it ought to prove a
welcome tonic because of its very divergence from what they commonly
feed on. And they may safely look to Hamsun as a thinker as well as a
poet and laughing dreamer, provided they realize from the start that his
thinking is suggestive rather than conclusive, and that he never meant
it to be anything else.

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN.