A Norwegian Dostoyevsky, Gone to Seed

Who says that great writers have to be great human beings? Norway’s Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) won the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, and during the Nazi occupation of his country during World War II, Hamsun was an ardent supporter of the fascist politician Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), an army officer who ran the country from 1942 until the end of the war. Quisling was known as “Norway’s Hitler.” Hamsun also loved the real Hitler, describing him in 1945 as a “warrior for mankind … a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.” In 1943, Hamsun even sent his Nobel Prize medal as a gift to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.Hamsun grew up in Hamarøy, a town in the county of Nordland, Norway, so far north that it is above the Arctic Circle. In travels to big cities in search of humble jobs, including a couple of discouraging tours of America, Hamsun was the archetype of the alienated young writer. In his landmark 1890 novel “Hunger” (“Sult”), Hamsun offered a stark account of a quasi-insane young writer’s impoverished sufferings in the city of Kristiania (now called Oslo). André Gide praised Hamsun as a Norwegian Dostoyevsky, and the innate Northern existentialism of “Hunger” struck a chord with many other writers, from Franz Kafka to Henry Miller.To understand how a major writer could go so morally wrong, it is useful to have the welcome new translation by Sverre Lyngstad of “Growth of the Soil” (Penguin Classics, 328 pages, $13), the 1917 novel which impelled the Nobel Prize committee to give Hamsun the prize. Hamsun wrote other novels — including 1894’s “Pan” — which recount the destiny of a single character, usually a hapless traveler or stranger, with savagely uncompromising and unidealized fervor. His later novels described groups of characters intertwined with nature with the kind of murky symbolism and benighted humanity that has won Nobel Prizes for a number of overrated novelists.“Growth of the Soil,” one of these later works, tells of a peasant, Isak, and his harelipped wife Inger, who strangles her infant daughter after she is born with her own harelip. Their life is narrated with Olympian disdain, but occasionally a kind of grudging admiration peeps through the irony: “Two lonely people, ill-favored and all too lusty, but a boon to each other, to the animals, and to the earth!” Hamsun juxtaposes scornful comments about Isak’s “dense naiveté” with sibylline observations like “The years pass quickly, do they? Yes, for the one who is growing old.” “Growth of the Soil” is as gloomy as anything written by the Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck, and yet a posturing preface to the new edition by the American poet Brad Leithauser bizarrely likens “Growth of the Soil” to “Robinson Crusoe,” because both books supposedly extol “husbandry.”Clearly, misunderstandings remain about “Growth of the Soil,” as well as about Hamsun and his work in general. To some degree, “Growth of the Soil” is a Norwegian anticipation of the phrase “Blut und Boden” (blood and soil) by the German author Walther Darré, often used by Hitler to assert that “pure-blooded” Germans have the exclusive right to occupy “German” soil. French fascists in World War II would also embrace the mythology of the soil; The Nazi collaborator Marshal Pétain said, “La terre ne ment pas!” (“The soil does not lie!”) This tragic historical context makes a lucid and transparent new English translation of “Growth of the Soil” urgent, since the 1920 translation by W. W. Worster, available online, is terribly dated.Yet the new translation by Mr. Lyngstad has its own problems. With the lumpy, bruised prose rhythms of a non-native English speaker, the Penguin Classics translation has a cranky, pedantic air, such as when a “brooding ptarmigan” is repeatedly referred to; the 1920 translation refers to a “grouse,” a more recognizable term for non-ornithologists. Likewise, Mr. Lyngstad describes Inger as wearing “pattens,” whereas synonyms like “clogs,” “sandals,” and “overshoes” are more comprehensible for English readers. A homemade remedy is described as “old people’s theriac” instead of “cure-all” or “panacea.”Such missed opportunities for clarity are particularly striking in a self-contradictory novel in which, after describing his protagonist Isak with some irony as a “margrave” (Germanic noble) and a “water troll,” Hamsun depicts him as transfigured by the novel’s end: “Everything grows here, man and beast and fruit of the soil. Isak sows. The evening sun shines on the grain, which radiates from his hand in a circle and sinks like a spray of gold into the ground.” Hamsun’s brutalist, antiheroic, yet glorified view of peasants is akin to 19th-century French landscape painters like Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet; “Growth of the Soil” is a paradoxical version of Millet’s “Angelus” for nature mystics, depicting the farmer with both reverence and irony.Hamsun’s paradoxes remain — and not just his genuine love for Hitler and Nazism, which make the anti-Semitism of writers like Ezra Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline pale by comparison. Norway has resolved to come to cautious terms with its most famous, and most disgraced, writer. In time for his 150th birthday, a Knut Hamsun Center will open in a village near Hamarøy in August 2009, designed by the celebrated firm Steven Holl Architects. Originally commissioned in 1994, the center ran afoul of much remaining controversy — there is still no street named after Hamsun in Norway — yet the harsh, stubbornly rural design by Steven Holl looks apt to evoke this powerful, totally uningratiating writer. If only Hamsun’s own later writings, not to mention his life, were as neatly defined and explicable.Mr. Ivry last wrote for these pages on the Hungarian-born pianist András Schiff.

A Norwegian Dostoyevsky, Gone to Seed

A Norwegian Dostoyevsky, Gone to Seed

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