Life Sentences (25 page)

There was nothing funny or fictional about Hamsun’s sufferings, his moments of miserable shame, his frequent disappointments: hadn’t he starved, fruitlessly wandered, been denied his chances to advance in the cultural system, and even been told, by a medico in Minnesota, that he had a galloping case of tuberculosis and didn’t have long to live? The blood he coughed up would prove to be caused by bronchitis, but he preferred to think he had outwrestled the devil.

Leo Lowenthal’s prophetic thirties piece on Hamsun has a fair summary of his subject’s inclinations, which include “the pagan awe of unlimited and unintelligible forces of nature, the mystique of blood and race, hatred of the working class and of clerks, the blind submission to authority, the abrogation of individual responsibility, anti-intellectualism, and spiteful distrust of urban middle-class life in general.”

Hunger
was not Hamsun’s first work, yet it was youthful, full of the immediacy of its material, deliberately limited in its diction, shocking in its depictions, and surprisingly indecisive in its conclusion, as if the text were a length removed from a hose. It is made of a very simple prose, almost as if written by a child. The gait is a little awkward, so the child sometimes seems a toddler. Meanwhile the narrator reads the world the way a tracker reads a trail. The characters jump to conclusions. Moods come and go with the regularity of a toy train. A part is readily taken for a whole, but the whole is simply whatever it is, a noun with its adjective leaning quietly against it. That is: modifications are few and unrefined. Complexities are ignored. Complexities are a human invention, and despised. The basic things of life are prized out of necessity; consequently wisdom about them is seen as savvy. However, the touch of the author is sure when directed to rustic things, and many simple scenes are indelible. That is because objects, acts, ideas are surrounded by so much silence, so much space—like an argument between mutes, like a table that is all top—that their very presence is treated the way a rare visitor to your hut would be: you offer a biscuit; the biscuit is eaten; a few grunts of agreement are exchanged.

The hungry young fellow of the title, famished for food, yes—for sex—yes—but more than these, for recognition, loves to bait strangers with lies, outrageous stories they politely respond to with their own accommodating falsehoods, until both contestants are spiders contributing to a common web; then the knowledgeable instigator suddenly accuses his mark of making things up and forces him to leave in shame and rage; or he follows women, engages in stare-downs, asks them inapplicable questions aimed at puzzling their heads, and then interprets their responses as inviting or meaningful; or in a public place he suddenly exhibits a bizarre walk, emits strange sounds just to turn heads so he can accuse passersby of impolite staring at a poor jobless youth of hidden genius. The text acts in the same way its narrator does. Readers are also to be caught in this web of Hamsun’s devising, and shown up along with everybody
else. In that sense, Hamsun’s prose is splendidly rigged for its work. Other similar routines establish the error that commenced this paragraph, because, though our narrator is young and hungry, he is no one’s fellow.

Paul Valéry’s well-known witticism, offered once to André Breton as you would a smoke, pretended that Valéry could not bring himself to write fiction because he might have to sign for sentences like “the marquis went out at five.” His trepidation is repeatedly justified by Hamsun’s first success—
Hunger
—a novel composed (down every paragraph, over every page) of prose possessing no literary interest whatever: such as “I took the blanket under my arm and went to 5 Stener Street.” This sentence opens a scene (powerful in its context but banal in its construction) during which our penniless protagonist fails to sell his blanket, and thus concludes: “I took the blanket under my arm again and went home.”

John Updike, with his customary acuity, picks a sentence from
The Wanderer
to comment upon that I have grown to prize above all the others, though it is hard to know what help the translators have given Hamsun to reach bathos in a tub no deeper than five phrases, no longer than one line: “Mrs. Falkenberg was standing in the yard: a human column, light in color, standing free in the spacious courtyard, without a hat.” Updike notes that the lady later vanishes in “a haze of rhapsody,” a phrase that is also accurate about most everything in
Pan
. In some later works, like the misnamed novel
The Last Joy
, Hamsun’s pedestrian style slows to the halt that follows a hike.

Hamsun insists on banality because regularity is what recommends the simple life. There are no surprises: none when the leaves turn, none when the snow arrives or dew weighs the morning grass. To escape your consternations, you can always row your boat out to sea and sit upon the slowly rising tide. “Night comes and he does not go home, the next day comes and he does not go home; no, he follows the usual pattern, lets the boat drift, fishes for food, goes ashore, cooks, eats, sleeps. It is incomparable, this wonderful idleness and sloth.”

Humans, alone, are unpredictable: suddenly a randy shepherdess will appear before your hut door, or a hunter from the village rest his gun against a rock you prize. Perhaps a tourist bus will surprise an empty inn, or a Lapp from even farther north materialize upon a mountain path. If you are a penniless wanderer, a fortuitous wad of money may be pressed upon you. The plot can count on what the plot needs to march it from A and B to Z because, in the wings, fortuitous interventions await their moment on the page.

The narrator of
Hunger
treats interior states with the same nominal objectivity and dispassion (even when weeping, throwing up, or cursing) as he does the exterior world, because, to this starveling, “in and out” sit on the same park bench, and even the narrator’s glib falsehoods gain the status of realities in no time. This detachment, even in the middle of an outburst of emotion, and the rapid shifts of mood that torment Hamsun’s narrator, struck reviewers in his time as revolutionary. Shortly, however, they withdrew the credit Hamsun thought his due by recalling the vacillations of Dostoyevsky’s people, whom they had once accused of the same faults, but now praised for displaying real conflicts and rare glimpses of some of the deeper recesses of the psyche. Characters who stayed inside their descriptions were soon called wooden Indians and stereotypes, while those who were obedient to impulse were said to be truer to life.

So are we really like that? Must we be incomprehensible to be free? It seems to me it scarcely matters whether the writer believes or understands this or that, perceives acutely, or feels deeply, or imagines wonderfully; what matters is whether these qualities reach the page. If it is a disordered mind the novelist is portraying, it is not important that the picture meet the approval of a psychoanalyst (who will insist upon a cause), but whether it is convincing in the world established by the text.

The comparison with Dostoyevsky was strengthened in quite the wrong way by a story of Hamsun’s called “Chance,” whose scenes at the roulette table almost necessarily resembled those in the Russian’s novella
The Gambler
. Both men had experience enough in that
squanderous milieu. The German version of the tale drew a charge of plagiarism from one critic.

Neither Ingar Kolloen nor Robert Ferguson goes very far with this incident, which resolved itself mostly by evaporating, although Kolloen tells us that Hamsun, with his characteristic whirligig condition, was himself initially shocked by the resemblances to the point of trying to squelch the piece, yet he later offered “Chance,” unchanged, to his German translator. If he thought that in German the similarities would not show or be seen, he was mistaken. German publishers, who had been clamoring for his work, fell silent and grew remote. Hamsun, according to Kolloen, believed “that one of his fellow Norwegian writers must have fed the critic”—his accuser—“false information.” That is as far, in this severely reduced English edition, as Kolloen is prepared to go, whereas Ferguson is characteristically reflective and, I think, perspicacious: “This suspicion, that his contemporaries and brother writers, as well as the press, were dedicated to the aim of destroying him … gave him a fanatic strength, a determination to triumph over the imagined odds in the stratospheric sense, and by the exercise of his talent alone force the establishment to hail him as a great writer.…”

Hamsun worked from carefully gathered batches of notes to shape short sentences into brief paragraphs. These many small gulps of prose, numbered like chapters, form the procession of anecdotes that make up his books; and his present biographer follows that lead, beginning each section with a teasing headline the way TV’s evening news tries to catch our attention, followed by a lead-in sentence, and the necessary paragraphs with their own entry and exit, then concluding with a dramatic summary that manages to be enigmatic too. Let one example stand for many. While the twenty-year-old Hamsun was trying to survive in the United States, he was kindly given a job by the pastor of a Unitarian Church in Minneapolis. The pastor’s wife was sympathetic to his parlous state, which included being misdiagnosed as a victim of tuberculosis. Bedridden, the young man confides to her his fear that he shall die before ever
having known a woman. Eventually, instead of the hired whore he hopes for, she offers herself. Kolloen’s terseness imitates Hamsun’s manner perfectly, and the one-two punch is powerfully delivered.

Did this action bring the fire department, consume the house, damage his relationship with the husband? We are never told. We aren’t told Hamsun had bronchitis instead of TB either.

Unfortunately, Kolloen is infatuated with this rhetorical device. He employs it to render nearly every section of Hamsun’s life as routinely as if he were slicing a loaf of rye. Eventually, its appearance becomes annoying: “A man walked in and sat at the neighboring table.… Hamsun had been a guest in his house on several occasions.… Now, they pretended not to see each other.… There was good reason for Hamsun to be unsettled by this chance encounter with Erhardt Frederik Winkel Horn. He had been having an affair with his wife.”

The conviction Hamsun has that each man is a mystery (except for English tourists and other objects of his scorn—they are just the stupids we take them for) is rather delightfully played out in
Mysteries
, a surprisingly lighthearted little novel that unpacks like a box of puzzles the inner selves of its characters, yet leaves the puzzles puzzling even after we’ve found a place for all the pieces. I think the reader is supposed to feel that a mystery is what we each ought to strive to be. We are to run away and play hide-and-no-seek in our unconscious.

Three problems: (1) If Hamsun is always working out personal
issues and settling scores in his books, how shall he manage to escape the egocentric predicament? Joyce’s
mememoreme
seems to account for everything. (2) The psyche is a strange unfunny place; it tends, when unveiled, to be ugly, or silly, or dumb, or childish, or really evil. Where do the generosities lie concealed—those virtues too shy to be ordinarily seen? A few acts of benevolence in
Hunger
succeed brilliantly in undermining themselves; that is, they turn out to be not so nice after all. (3) In trying to render the random and the inexplicable, the text may exhibit the paradox of imitative form (Coleridge’s famous caution to Wordsworth that he should not render a dull and garrulous discourser by being dull and garrulous). Hamsun’s stories wander with apparent aimlessness. Why not call several
Wanderers
? He did so.

After
Hunger, Pan
is perhaps the most celebrated of Hamsun’s novels. It also makes allegorical gestures, but its loyalty to its symbolic structure is a bit more devoted. In
Hunger
, the town through which our hero caroms is called Christina (an early name for Oslo), and the text will suggest, on more than one occasion, that its hero’s suffering is Christlike; on the other hand he complains like Job and curses God and in the end simply leaves town. Making a holy mess and then leaving is Hamsun’s principal fictional formula. It always seemed to work in his life.

The principal struggle that
Hunger
depicts is between the body and the ego’s ambitions. Neither God nor his city is an agent of the ensuing suffering. In
Pan
the pain is self-inflicted, too (Pan shoots off his big toe, an old enlistment dodge), with pride and power, as well as the rifle, the punishing instruments. The mythological Pan is a goat god, a hunter of food and a hunter of women, who meets more than his match in a beautiful hard-to-figure out-of-town tease. A tiresome tug-of-war ensues. To this cautionary tale of a god brought low by a woman (as Samson is by Delilah), the spurned lover’s ultimate response is to dynamite part of a mountain down upon an unintended target—his goat-girl mistress who gave generously of herself and loved him without reservations. The book is spotted,
like its high mountain trees, with set “sublimities” during which the identity of the hero and his natural surroundings is alleged. We enjoy bliss as well as suffer its attendant tears. Ferguson, whose viewpoint I have been taught to value, greatly admires this novel, as do many others. “This is a book,” he says, “that reaches effortlessly and deeply into the soul.…” But I am more inclined to share the opinion of a contemporary reviewer: “The new book is characterized by the same cheap phoneyness which has marred so much of what Hamsun has written.” To the main body of this novel is attached a wholly misguided epilogue which I would advise the reader to skip. It kills off the protagonist of the previous text in a place, at a time, and in a manner that run from most unlikely to ludicrous. Critics have extended themselves to justify the existence of this appendage, but it is, like the blindfolded man’s stab at the donkey, pinned far from its intended place. In this instance, the defense maintains, the author has created a purely fictional persona to narrate the work, rather than a man (as in
Hunger)
who must undergo its victimizations. But the distance between the tale and its teller, in Hamsun, is that of the thinnest thread. We can learn from his biographers that this book is a dramatization of one of his courtships, and the incidental characters (as in
Hunger)
are all clippings from his life.