Picked-Up Pieces (23 page)

Her soul finds flattery, too, in the company of her revolutionary countrymen—Herzen, Bakunin, Luginin. Dostoevsky by this time is not even a liberal. And before she begins this diary, she has committed herself to younger lovers. Dostoevsky tells her, “You fell in love with me by mistake.” But there is evidence in her diary that he did, once, perform for her the lover’s essential service: he shook her up. “I hear about F[yodor] M[ikhailovich]. I simply hate him. He made me suffer so much, when it was possible not to suffer.” And “As I remember what happened
two years ago, I begin to hate D[ostoevsky]. He was the first to kill my faith.” Yet a proud otherworldliness is perhaps what they shared. Though he accuses her, when she first refuses to sleep with him, of a “utilitarian attitude,” in the end, in the last entry in the diary, all passion useless, she talks teasingly, in a vein dear to his heart: “I said that I was going to become a holy woman, that I would walk through the Kremlin gardens in Moscow in my bare feet, telling people that I was having conversations with angels.”

In fact, she married, in her middle years, a much younger man who was, strangely, an ardent devotee of Dostoevsky—the critic and
littérateur
V. V. Rozanov. He grew to hate her. Her later life has the flavor of
The Possessed
. After parting with Dostoevsky, she opened a village school that the authorities closed on the grounds that she bobbed her hair, never went to church, and had consorted abroad with revolutionaries. Six years after marrying Rozanov, she fled with a young lover; when this neo-Salvador spurned her, she denounced him to the police as a revolutionary. Her husband, whom she refused to divorce, likened her to Catherine de Medici and claimed to have found a perfect description of her in Dostoevsky’s
The Insulted and Injured:
a woman who “looked upon everyone with impartial severity, like the abbess of a medieval convent,” yet whose “sensuality was such that even the Marquis de Sade might have taken lessons from her.… In the very heat of voluptuousness she would suddenly laugh like one possessed.” Dostoevsky wrote the description first; then he met Polina.

KNUT HAMSUN

H
UNGER
, by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly. 232 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967.

O
N
O
VERGROWN
P
ATHS
, by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Carl L. Anderson. 176 pp. Paul S. Eriksson, 1967.

Coincidence, of the rather amiable kind it amused Knut Hamsun to record, marks the simultaneous publication in the United States of his first novel,
Hunger
, and his last book, a memoir entitled
On Overgrown Paths. Hunger
was written by a starving young man in the late 1880’s and finally published, after serialization, in 1890, when Hamsun was thirty-one;
On Overgrown Paths
was written by a disgraced old man, held accused of treason, in the late 1940’s and was published in 1949, when Hamsun was ninety. Sixty years and a career that included a Nobel Prize lie between them, yet the books are similar, and are beautiful in the same way. They are laconic, brutal, joyous, and not quite formless. Their literary freshness flows from a positive human quality of, to give it a negative name,
defenselessness
. The “I” of both accounts has scorned all systems, has formed no alliances, not even with a woman; Hamsun’s wife, though she shared his ordeal of ostracism and harassment after the war, is virtually absent from the pages of
On Overgrown Paths
. The ratty boarding houses of
Hunger
and the various institutions of Hamsun’s internment and, for that matter, the hunter’s hut occupied by the hero of his novel
Pan
are all temporary shelters
unregretfully shed by a spirit intent upon the inner play of mood, a rapt yet detached spirit to whom pain is merely one of the many winds that tug and shift the soul. Such lucidity approaches madness; in the absence of all other armor, a carapace of willful eccentricity must be grown. As a young transient in this country, Hamsun began to spit blood, and countered the diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis by riding on top of a locomotive from Minneapolis to New York, gulping fresh air all the way. The cure worked; but the same headlong stubbornness also led him to support the Nazis to the end, writing, upon Hitler’s death, “He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.” At the very outset of his career, the young Hamsun undertook a lecture tour attacking the living great writers of Norway, culminating in a verbal assault upon Ibsen while Ibsen sat glowering in the front row. Hamsun was always more enthusiastically admired in Germany and Slavic Europe than in Norway itself. Of American writers, he resembles Hemingway in his estrangement from the cultural establishment, in his proud follies, in his cauterization of prose style, in the impression of lightness and transparency his pessimism produces. By this analogy,
On Overgrown Paths
is like
A Moveable Feast
—a return, after troubled middle years spent pursuing “depth” with a puerile ideology, to an instinctive youthful allegiance to surfaces and moments.

Hunger
, first published in English in 1899, is flattered by its new translation and by its two introductions. In one, the Yiddish writer I. B. Singer describes, with an emphatic generosity that may surprise younger literary generations, Hamsun’s importance to his own: “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 belonged to that select group of writers who not only interested a reader but virtually hypnotized him.” The other introduction, by the translator, Robert Bly, sensitively points up the novel’s paradoxical affirmation: “The hero of
Hunger
obeys the unconscious, and remains in hunger, despite suffering, until he has lived through what he must, or learned what he had to. What seems to us catastrophe, his spirit experiences as secret victory. His anarchic inability to support himself is experienced by his spirit as obedience.”
This first-person narration compresses into a few months the ten years (1879–1888) Hamsun spent in extreme poverty—sporadically relieved by laborers’ jobs and immigrations to the United States—in Oslo, then called Kristiania. The nameless hero seeks to make his living by writing grandiose newspaper articles that, on the rare occasions when one is accepted, each earn him about three and a half dollars. The action moves from one five-kroner windfall to the next—an article is bought, a waistcoat is pawned, a grocery clerk errs in making change, an editor or acquaintance unexpectedly proffers a loan. Between these financial peaks are long, not unhappy troughs of emptiness:

He is unable to organize his thoughts into any plan of enterprise or escape:

His external actions, his contacts with human society appear ludicrously antic and whimsical; he spouts frenzied nonsense to strangers on the street, he attracts and then rejects a prostitute called Ylayali, he prays to and then curses God, he refuses to beg from those who might succor him. When he is miraculously granted money, he squanders it on a rich meal he instantly vomits, or gives it away to an uncomprehending old cake peddler, or hurls a ten-kroner note in the face of a landlady who has ceased to expect anything. Though the physical humiliations of starvation are fascinatingly, grindingly detailed and the hero ostensibly yearns for a respectable, normal existence (“What a marvellous sensation to be sitting in a human house again and to hear a clock tick, and to talk with
a spirited young girl instead of with myself!”), his self-realization lies with “the joyful insanity hunger was.”

Finally he accepts, without premeditation, employment on a Russian freighter bound for Cadiz, and
Hunger
ends.

On Overgrown Paths
—a journal Hamsun kept from his arrest, on May 26th of 1945, for treasonous activities during the German occupation, to his conviction and sentencing, on Midsummer Day of 1948—shows that his willingness to embrace isolation and deprivation had survived a life of success. The prose is still swift, fitful, immediate, innocently quick to feed on trifles: “These are trifles I write about, and trifles that I write.… All prisoners can only write about the eternally everyday occurrences and wait for their doom.” But we are all prisoners. “We are all guilty. We are legion in our guilt.” We are all doomed. “Now and then there is also some one of us who dies; it cannot be avoided, but it does not make much impression on us who remain. We follow the white coffin with our eyes, but when the hearse has driven away, we turn back to ourselves again.” Hamsun is apathetic, tranquil. “I am weary of myself, have no wishes, no interests, no pleasures. Four or five senses in torpor and the sixth sense [he is deaf] snatched away.… I have attained the condition of certain Orientals: the necessary silence. I do not even talk to myself any more, having got out of that bad habit.… It is three years today since I was arrested. And here I sit. It has not mattered to me, not bothered me. It has gone by as though merely one more event.”

Of the several hospitals and nursing homes where he is incarcerated, only a psychiatric clinic shatters his calm of resignation. He is unable, in this memoir, to describe his months there except by allusive fragments: “Domination over a living being, regulations lacking mercy and tact, a psychology of blank spaces and labels, a whole science bristling defiance. Others can endure that sort of torture; that is no concern of mine. For my part, I could not. Which the psychiatrist ought perhaps to have understood. I was in good health; I was turned into jelly.” Only in his letter to the attorney general about this experience does Hamsun rant, and seem to deserve the official judgment of him as a person with “permanently impaired faculties.” His defense, when he presents it in the form of a courtroom statement, is coherent and almost adequate: his crimes were confined to a few newspaper articles urging Norwegians not to waste their lives in futile resistance; he constantly interceded with the Germans, even with Hitler himself, for the lives of Norwegian resistance fighters; he never belonged to the Nazi Party; he scorned fleeing his native land to Sweden or England; he was captivated by the promise that Norway would occupy a high place in Hitler’s Germanic empire. In short, he stands defenseless, having based his actions upon the premise that Norway was defenseless. One reads this section of the book, and the prefatory description of Hamsun’s trial, with some sympathy for the predicament of governments confronted with politically aberrant great writers, and with a feeling that the Norwegian government exacted less suffering from Hamsun than the United States government did from Ezra Pound, though both eventually settled upon a factitious mental incompetence.

As Bly points out, Hamsun, the son of a farmer, unschooled and for years indigent, was alienated from the bourgeois Europe that believed in progress and social reform. His years of hunger had left him with few expectations of human society; even his lovers, such as Glahn and Edvarda in
Pan
, are whimsical and cruel. He responds only, and is ever alert, to nature—the torrential, unanswerable nature within and beyond man. “Here are only cropped hills without a flower bed. The weather is biting, the wind almost always blows; but nearby are trees and woods with songbirds aloft and all sorts of creeping things on the ground. Oh, the world is beautiful here too, and we are to be very grateful for being in it. How rich the colors are here in the very rocks and the heather, how incomparable the forms in the bracken! And the taste of a piece of wall
fern that I found is still good on the tongue.” We find him unaged, in these valedictory pages, his appetites still undisciplined (“But completely contrary to my good intentions to ration my reading, I fell voraciously on Topsøe’s book and devoured it in one gulp”), his conversations still quixotic—talking with a lady at a bus stop, the elderly Hamsun rips off his jacket and lays it in the snow for her to sit upon. He is still fond of outcasts and still able, in the depths, to attract women who wish to minister to him and with whom he grows impatient. Irascibility remains the sign of his independent genius. Of his poetry, he admits it lacks tenderness: “And it was not only tenderness that was lacking but all too many other things as well, the whole kit and caboodle.” Lacking the kit and caboodle of civilized prejudice, he was able to confront experience direct, and to convey it magically. Toward the end of this book of therapeutic jottings, his thoughts revert to his confirmation and first communion: