Knut Hamsun

Contents


The Wanderer:

Early Life in Norway 3

From the Wheatfields to the Fishing Banks 20

The Author of _Hunger_ 32

The Poet:

His Own Hero 45

The Hero and the Heroine 58

God in Nature 76

With Muted Strings 89

The Literary Artist 104

The Citizen:

Holding Up the Mirror to His Generation 119

Growth of the Soil 148

The Wanderer Arrived 163




Portraits


Knut Hamsun _Frontispiece_
Photo by Wilse

Hamsun as a Young Man 38
From a drawing by Erik Werenskiold

Knut Hamsun 86
From a painting by Henrik Lund

Hamsun and His Family 134
Photo by Wilse




THE WANDERER


EARLY LIFE IN NORWAY

Knut Hamsun has become identified in our minds with the lonely figure
that recurs again and again in his earlier books, the Wanderer who is
for ever outside of organized society and for ever pays the penalty
of being different from the crowd and unable to conform to its
standards. That this lonely creature is really himself in a certain
period of his life we know from the testimony of his own works.
Yet this vagabond and iconoclast sprang from the most conservative
stock of Norway. He is the descendant of an old peasant family in
Gudbrandsdalen, one of the interior mountain valleys in the heart of
the country.

Gudbrandsdalen is a region of proud historical traditions. There,
nine centuries ago, King Saint Olaf struggled to foist the new
religion on a stiff-necked race of pagans, and not far from Hamsun's
birthplace one of the oldest churches in Norway proclaimed his
victory. There, six centuries ago, the Scotch invader Sinclair was
annihilated with all his force when "the peasants of Vaage and Lesje
and Lom their whetted axes shouldered," as the ballad tells us, and
the story is still cherished, still repeated to every traveller. In
this as in other secluded valleys in Norway a peasant aristocracy
developed, a hard, strong race, intensely proud of its family and
land, looking on any one who had been less than three generations in
the neighborhood as an interloper, and scorning the classes of people
who were not rooted to the soil by inherited homesteads. For the
Norwegian roving blood is strangely tempered by a passionate
attachment to inherited land, a trait that is perhaps a salutary
safeguard against the national restlessness. Artistic handicrafts
flourished in the valley. In the Open Air Museum at Lillehammer we
may see them even now, marvellous creations of hammered iron,
tapestries picturing scenes from the Bible, wood carvings in mellow
colors and with a Renaissance exuberance of design overflowing even
the commonest kitchen utensils, all of a rich yet disciplined beauty
as if built on age-old artistic traditions and standards.

Hamsun counted among his forefathers many of the artistic craftsmen
who set their stamp of culture upon their community. His father's
father was a worker in metals. The arts did not bring wealth to those
who practised them, however, and his parents at the time of his birth
were in straitened circumstances. He was born, August 4, 1859, in
Lom, in one of the small well-weathered houses which look so bleak
and insignificant against the mighty Gudbrandsdalen uplands. When he
was four years old his family removed to the Lofoten Islands,
Nordland, in an effort to better their fortunes.

Two strains may be traced in Knut Hamsun's personality. By virtue of
his blood and birth he had his roots in a community characterized by
an unusually firm and solid culture based on centuries of tradition,
and this heritage we shall find coming out in him more and more in
his later years. The moralist and preacher who wrote "Growth of the
Soil" is a true scion of the best old peasant stock. Through the
impressions of his childhood and early youth he became affiliated
with the volatile race of Nordland, a people as alien from the
heavier inland peasant as if they lived on different continents. The
fishermen who play with death for the wealth of the sea and depend
for their livelihood on the caprices of nature do not easily harden
into traditional moulds.