Life Sentences (26 page)

Hamsun employs symbols too—shoes, slipper, shot-off toe, dogs by the half dozen, bird feathers—that he stirs around through his tale like ice cubes in the punch their appearance is expected to land.

Hamsun also lived according to the clichés which cling to the art of writing: that it is a solitary occupation requiring hours of absorbing and profound meditation; that it asks for patience during dispiriting periods of sterility, requires continuous vigilance against the vanities of the self, as well as a ruthless indifference to the matters of ordinary life when they chance to interfere; it tells him to trust in his genius, yet retain an almost naive acceptance of inspiration when it arrives. As a specifically Norwegian writer, he would be expected to challenge received opinion and the aesthetic efforts of his predecessors; he would defy tradition, whereupon tradition would award him
for it. Ibsen’s outrages were expected of him; writers were supposed to send their works to scout out country customs and, by attacking them, to initiate change. Both writers and their readers lived as much upon scandal as the fishermen on their fiords, and adored the exposure of shocking thoughts and feelings as much as the public nakedness they pretended to deplore.

Early in his career Hamsun made much of his attachment to purely aesthetic ends, and certainly his interest is not in the social realism of many of his contemporaries; but his intentions aren’t artistically pure either, and conceal the behavioral excuses his writings create for him, the personal vendettas they provide, as well as the other rearrangements of reality that suit his purposes. “Language must possess all the scales of music. The writer must always, unfailingly, use a word that pulsates, that conveys a thing, that can wound the soul so it yelps.” Hamsun also likes to boast about his scruples as an artist, but in the twenty-eight years between
Hunger
and
The Growth of the Soil
, he wrote twenty-six books. How many of these could have been
Madame Bovary
? Later on his publisher will remark, “During the course of the last seven years he [Hamsun] had written over 1,500 book pages.” Translation, of course, is always an element that must be apologized for in the estimation of any literary work. Each language has its own musical scales and its own syntactical and rhetorical structures. As far as I can tell, Hamsun’s principles are most steadily upheld by those ideological loyalties that express his embattled sense of himself. When you write in frenzied bursts, in such amounts, there can be little time for prolonged concern about art or even the graces of daily life. His private estimate accompanied the manuscript of
The Road Leads On
(about yet another vagabond lover), and was more accurate: “Some good stuff and some garbage, just as in every book.”

Hamsun’s dislike of democracy seemed, for much of his life, to be a cranky possession of his own; but the rise of Hitler to power in Germany changed that.

All over Europe little schools of disappointed people appeared,
prepared to follow the führer’s lead in malice, ruthlessness, and noise. Here was a leader who resembled Hamsun in his simple origins, his maniacal ambition, his artistic genius, and for the ordinary world his contemptuous disdain—a figure in whose shadow he might walk without seeming merely a second shade. The defeat of the Germans by the beastly English in World War I was as unhealed a wound for Hamsun as it was for most German citizens.

In a Festschrift to celebrate Hamsun’s seventieth birthday (1929), German praise was overwhelmingly present: Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Jacob Wassermann, and Stefan Zweig were among the many who complimented him then and regretted it later. In honor of the day, Max Reinhardt staged one of Hamsun’s plays and it enjoyed an impressive run. Half a million copies of
Hunger
were in print. Germany loved him close up as well as from a distance. When Hamsun visited in 1931, his hotel room was filled with flowers, letters, and gifts. Irritating journalists pursued his touring party, but by their persistence made it clear that Hamsun was still news. While his entourage traveled through southern Germany, Hamsun hummed and smiled. However, the moment they arrived in Milan his mood changed, and during supper at the station he tried to straighten the prongs of the forks; noisily complained he couldn’t decipher their maker’s mark; and then attacked the spoons.

The smell of power is more seductive than musk and more damaging than first- or secondhand smoke. Initially Hamsun’s life story had been merely disgusting; it now grew grimly dismal as he falls in with the quislings, jockeys for political position, and supports the German occupation of his country even when it begins its reign of terror there, arresting gentiles as well as Jews. His public utterances weren’t nutty the way Ezra Pound’s were, and had a weight in his country whose heft the American poet could only imagine. Hamsun takes his prestige and his fame to see the führer; then in that presence pleads the cause of his countrymen—commendable if his concerns weren’t so callously selective. But the leader wants to talk literature, not politics, and is quickly made to regret his agreement
to meet with the argumentative novelist. Hamsun has no influence after all: after all those words, that accumulated pile of work, those impressive sales and badges of honor. Nor did Hamsun’s diatribes against the English defeat the hated islanders. Nor did the realization that he could not rescue a single citizen from the Nazi camps and their deadly chambers alter his attitudes. After the war, when legalized revenges were being undertaken, Hamsun’s wife, Marie, who surpassed his Nazi sympathies in fervor (her children’s books were also a success in Germany), though hating her husband only as thoroughly as he her, was convicted of treason and sentenced to two years in prison; but Hamsun, in an exercise of national hypocrisy, was hustled away into a psychiatric hospital and the company of doctors who were expected to find a kink in his crock and an excuse to save the state from an embarrassing trial. At the end of their investigations, however, the patient had to be pronounced healthy for his age, sound of mind, and competent in his dealings with the world.

The trial would be Hamsun’s finest moment. Every step in the proceedings justified, once again, and before the public, the worth of his dearest beliefs. He stood alone, as his memorial statue in winter will, its shoulders only colder because of the opposing gale.

Retired to his farm, Hamsun was neither a country mouse nor a rodent exiled by his city. Some years before, he had settled on being the squire who owns the barn, though presently down on his luck, what with all those penalties demanded by the state. And it was the barn’s cats that killed the rats. As for the afterlife’s awards: “I have never been attracted to the honour that might come with big bronze statues of me in Norway’s towns. Quite the opposite: each time I have thought of these posthumous statues, I have wished I could benefit from their value now—bring on the cash!”

In order to prepare private citizens for the military, a humiliating and painful bullying is generally prescribed. Its aim is to inculcate obedience and create callousness. Leaders must be resolute and heartless, prepared to send any enemy “to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly,” as the führer demanded. Next a campaign of denigration of the chosen opponent is undertaken. This is designed to reduce the humanity of the enemy, and to prepare a social web of support for behavior that is basically cruel, immoral, and normally disapproved. It strengthens every aspect of one’s plans if the society that you represent brings to the project a tradition of paternal domination and abuse, reaching from the family (in Germany’s case) to the kaiser and its final station, God. Deep feelings of injury, inferiority, and large reserves of resentment—the fresher the better—are nearly essential. Any widespread unhappiness within your country can then be directed at the scapegoat selected, by every available instrument of indoctrination and propaganda. If the enemy can be enticed to return fire, that will help solidify the nation’s resolve. Since a saw’s cut is painful either way it moves, the soldier knows that it is safer to risk death at the front rather than execution in the rear. A general sense of uneasiness helps, as if you knew someone were watching where you walked, reading your mail, and overhearing
your talk. This atmosphere of anxiety can be sustained when the agents of power are pitiless. The master craftsmen of the Third Reich, whose state-of-war posture is so painstakingly studied in this superb but disheartening history of bad behavior, had set their sights upon Poland at the time the third and final volume of Richard Evans’s masterwork begins (The
Third Reich at War
, 2009, source of the following quotations), and had made all the necessary preparations I have just enumerated.

Although preserving the purity of the bloodline is a commandment of tribal behavior, the Germans had expanded its meaning to include concerns about inner strength as well as physical health and racial genetics. Now the blood
in
the bloodline, not just its course, could be studied, and this gave to the most primitive of superstitions a scientific appearance. Dressed in laboratory coats, euthanasia could also be embraced. The Poles, like the mad, the ill, the old, and others at the edge of death, were incapable of a full-fledged human life. They carried disease, lived in filth, were born almost too stupid to breathe; their incompetence was as catching as the lice they bore; they should be confined to the muddles they made and their ignorance encouraged. Germany’s earnest efforts to rub out any influence Polish intellectuals might have on their society, by removing them from their own lives, seem odd when dealing with such a presumably dumb bunch.

The novelty of the war that was beginning with the German attack in September 1939—aside from the journalistically popular concept of blitzkrieg—was its unusual aim: not the defeat of another army but the destruction of a population. From Germans already living in Poland the SS formed militias of men whose grievances with the indigenous population reached murderous levels with astonishing ease, and bands of “red legs” of this sort, obeying only the orders of their hearts, began organized shooting parties. The size of the payback for alleged Polish atrocities was 4,247 on October 7; by November, in Klammer, two thousand had been added; near Mniszek ten thousand more Poles and Jews of every age and sex were shot at the
edges of the gravel pits that were to serve for their graves; in a wood near Karlshof, eight thousand more were massacred. The cleansing continued, picking up speed as efficiencies improved. Finding so many murderers among ordinary people had not proved difficult. Moreover these unconscionable activities were not the result of a long harsh military campaign and disappointing losses, but were available for use the moment the war began, with its immediate, immoderate, and overwhelming victories.

The German army, when it began to do its part, specialized in burning any village in which the least resistance was encountered. The SS, as well as regular police, were initially disposed to carry out the murder of specific persons instead of the anonymous many, and to be singled out might be a victim’s only victory. This slaughter was ameliorated (the comforting phrase cannot be read without a grimace) when the authorities recognized that Germany had a serious need for workers, with so many men gone from their jobs and away for the war. Every available body was then rounded up and sent off as a labor replacement wherever those were needed in the Fatherland. The “recruitment” of foreign labor was a considerable preoccupation of German bureaucracy during the entire war, and eventually included putting to work prisoners of war from both fronts. Many a Polish house was emptied or a village stripped of its population, so that looting and pillaging became a military habit, and the rape of women almost an invitation. The greed of many in the high command was as huge, and as frankly bragged of, as Falstaff’s pride in his belly. Hitler wanted to establish a museum of stolen property in his hometown of Lenz. Göring desired to display his art as he did his hunting trophies, above the many sofas furnishing his numerous
schlosses
.

This great war was not one war but many, fought in different places, under different circumstances, and at different times; but the German troops remembered to bring with them to new encounters the bad habits formed when they invaded Poland. Their behavior was still able to produce surprise. “Where is the traditional German
sense of honour,” wrote one inhabitant of occupied Athens. “They empty houses of whatever meets their eye. In Pistolakis’ house they took the pillow-slips and grabbed the Cretan heirlooms from the valuable collections they have. From the poor houses in the area they seized sheets and blankets. From other neighborhoods they grab oil paintings and even the metal knobs from the doors.” Of course, the pillowcases became bags for bearing off heirlooms, while the knobs, if metal, were needed back home. Looting was rarely random among the officer class.

Like a monstrous babe born from the brow of Rabelais, this war was only a few months old and already it had become a major crime against humanity. The German government, noticing that too much booty was escaping the clutches of the state, simply announced in October of 1939 that it had acquired for its own use the contents of the entire store. Acquisitions then began in earnest. The army took over farms and anything else that might supply food; universities lost their scientific instruments; every iron object, length of copper or zinc downspout, steel girder, tin saucepan, and—yes—doorknob was scooped up, melted down, and sent to work in the mills of the Reich. “Even the Warsaw Zoo’s collection of stuffed animals was taken away.” There appeared to be a bounty on Polish priests, who were deported, incarcerated, shot. Schools were closed and their equipment destroyed. Businesses were commandeered and landed estates requisitioned. As the winter grew harsh, the German police borrowed the Poles’ sheepskin coats if they saw a serviceable one pass in the street. In town after town, the names of the avenues and alleyways were replaced. In sum, everything Polish was banned, burned, stolen, eaten, removed, imprisoned, or deported, and sooner or later entire populations were slaughtered far more carelessly than cattle.