Book Review : Hamsun Biographer Looks Beyond Fascist Tendencies

Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun by Robert Ferguson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $30; 314 pages)

The first time I can recall hearing the name of Knut Hamsun was during an interview with Henry Miller, who told me that the Norwegian novelist and playwright was among his favorite authors. Later, I learned that my favorite author, Isaac Bashevis Singer, flatly declares that “the whole modern school of fiction in the 20th Century stems from Hamsun.”

In fact, Hamsun and his work animated and inspired a pantheon of 20th-Century writers: Andre Gide, Boris Pasternak, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorki, H. G. Wells, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Rebecca West, Ernest Hemingway. And yet, as Robert Ferguson readily concedes in his superb new biography of Hamsun, “If they’ve heard of him at all, people tend to know two things about Knut Hamsun: that he wrote ‘Hunger’ and that he met Hitler.”

Hamsun was among the first literary superstars of the 20th Century: winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize, successor to Ibsen as the grand old man of Scandinavian letters, the pride (and poet laureate) of newly independent Norway. But Hamsun, a self-styled iconoclast and a resolute eccentric who built a career and a fortune on purposeful outrageousness, simply immolated himself and his reputation on the funeral pyre of the Third Reich.

He was an early and ardent supporter of fascism, a willing propagandist not only for the Quisling regime in occupied Norway but for Hitler himself, and he continued to lionize his sorry hero even after Hitler’s suicide: “He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations,” Hamsun wrote on the very eve of the surrender of occupied Norway to the Allies. “He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism which finally felled him. . . . We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.”

Hamsun was nearly 90 when he wrote those words, and--like Ezra Pound--he was spared a trial on charges of treason on the grounds that he was mentally enfeebled. But Ferguson, who is otherwise a highly sympathetic biographer, does not forgive or excuse Hamsun’s political aberrations: “The unfortunate fact is that Hamsun was demonstrably not senile during the period in question,” Ferguson concludes. “In fact, Hamsun’s fascism was a genuinely held political conviction.” Still, Ferguson encourages us to look behind and beyond Hamsun’s shameful politics and the scandals of his old age, and he allows us to see a man of eccentric charm, ironic humor, and--above all--profound literary genius.

‘Another Consciousness’

“ ‘Hunger,’ ” Ferguson writes, “is one of the great novels of urban alienation, on a par with Kafka’s ‘Castle’ and Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes From the Underground.’ ” And he observes of Hamsun’s novel “Mysteries”: “More than any comparable work of the last hundred years, perhaps even more than Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ it gives us a sensation of being actually and physically close to another consciousness, close enough to hear it whirring and ticking, to register sudden explosions of light within it, and consuming surges of darkness and obscurity.”

Ferguson offers an illuminating critical reading of Hamsun’s oeuvre, but “Enigma” is no brittle work of textual criticism. The book is a biography of impressive depth and authority and Ferguson’s engaging narrative draws on his own sound scholarship. The author studied Norwegian language, history and politics to complete his book--the first full-length biography of Hamsun in English--and we are treated to wholly fascinating asides on such diverse subjects as the two rival strains of the Norwegian language, the creation of Norway’s royal house, the exploits and ordeals of 19th-Century Scandinavian immigrants in America and the bitter literary skirmishes in turn-of-the-century Scandinavia.

Above all, “Enigma” is the wholly absorbing story of Hamsun himself--his considerable and enduring work, his passions and prejudices, his strange and tragic fate. He was a raw talent out of the Scandinavian hinterland, a self-taught and self-made man, a wanderer who sought his fortune in America but who was drawn back to his native land by a sense of destiny that would later express itself as a romantic attachment to the Nordic soil--and a perverse hatred of cities, tourism, feminism, democracy and all things English.

Adopted Surname

As we discover in “Enigma,” Hamsun’s life was the stuff of a novel. Born Knut Pedersen, he adopted the name of his native village--and later brought a lawsuit to prevent his younger brother from calling himself by the same surname. As a young man, he shamelessly promoted himself and his early work by delivering a series of public attacks on the most prominent literary figures of the time, including the revered Ibsen, who once attended one of Hamsun’s notorious lectures and sat defiantly in the front row; Hamsun (who once adopted the pseudonym “Ego”) was unfazed.

His sojourn in America prompted the writing of a book “crackling with irrational prejudices”--”On the Cultural Life of Modern America”--that includes an ad hominem attack on Walt Whitman (“He can write, of course, but he cannot feel”) and various examples of Hamsun’s capability for “adolescent crudity”: “Instead of founding an intellectual elite,” he wrote, “America has established a mulatto stud-farm.”

Throughout his life, Hamsun alternately pursued and ran away from celebrity. He was tormented by anonymous letter writers accusing him of miscellaneous sexual exploits; Ferguson suggests the earlier letters were the work of a woman novelist who imagined that she had been spurned by Hamsun after a passionate love affair, and the later ones were written by Hamsun’s own wife. He “developed an erotic passion for light--sunlight, torches, flares, even humble daylight,” and he was once discovered by his landlady staring at the curtains of his room, which he had set afire. He refused to allow the use of italic type in his books: “Italic,” he complained, “is a repulsive Franco-American nonsense. . . . “

A Cranky Fascist

He was so moved after meeting Goebbels that he sent the Nazi propaganda minister his Nobel Prize medal as a keepsake--and yet he managed to antagonize Adolf Hitler during a ceremonial visit with the Nazi dictator, a remarkable scene that forces us to admire even this cranky old Fascist. “We are talking to a brick wall,” Hamsun commented in Norwegian to the interpreter, who left the remark untranslated.

“Hamsun’s passionate faith in the value of the unknown, the irrational, the mysterious in life . . . was a genuine part of his everyday approach to life,” Ferguson tells us. When his daughter fell ill, “Hamsun held her body for long periods against his naked chest, and claimed that it was the animal warmth of his body that had saved her life.” He habitually wore a supposedly health-promoting zinc belt called a Reiersenbelt, and he was among the first Norwegians to undergo psychoanalysis: “It was a characteristic expression of Hamsun’s openness where theories of the mind and the nature of the workings of consciousness were concerned.”

Ferguson expertly interweaves the rich biographical narrative with an illuminating discussion of Hamsun’s struggles and achievements as a writer, and he captures the powerful but unsettling linkages between Hamsun’s life and work. “The real stuff was crackling and sparkling away in his head all the time now, jangling and flashing through his nerves,” Ferguson writes.

“To ward off the intolerable and insoluble problems and fears of real, daily life, he wrote constantly. . . . It was as though he had stopped running, and, turning around, held out the cross of Art against whatever demon of failure or perfectionism that had been pursuing him through the years and . . . the inner and outer forces that combined with such calm efficiency to prevent his ever achieving his goal--the book of himself, the single act of extraordinary self-revelation of which he knew he was uniquely capable.”

Clearly, Ferguson is an impressive stylist in his own right, and “Enigma” is simply a pleasure to read. When Ferguson writes of the demonic muse that haunted Hamsun throughout his life, we glimpse something profound about the creative act of writing, and we come very close to the exalted emotion that every writer feels--or hopes to feel. Indeed, the highest praise I can bestow on Ferguson’s work is to declare that “Enigma” is one of the most moving, inspiring and exciting books on the subject of writing that I have ever encountered.