A ‘Hunger’ to Be Heard

It’s been said that Knut Hamsun is a writer’s writer. His name may be unfamiliar to many people, but writers know his work, remember him and read him still. Writers as diverse as Henry Miller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Robert Bly and Thomas McGuane claim him as a guiding master and inspiration.

Hamsun, who was born in Norway in 1859, was an unschooled and complex man, quirky and opinionated, as impassioned in his living and writing as Tolstoy or Conrad. Like Conrad, he traveled, mainly to America, and his early years of menial work contributed to his literary vision and voice.

In 1920, Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature. In the 1930s, he disgraced himself by appearing to support Hitler and his National Socialists. Yet writers forgive him his stupidity and his naivete (even the late Singer, the most Jewish of Jewish writers) because his writing is so resolutely nonpolitical and so full of humanistic genius.

One story has it that Henry Miller and Isaac Bashevis Singer met for the first time at a large gathering in New York City, and upon discovering a mutual love of the works of Knut Hamsun, fell instantly into each other’s arms, embracing as if brothers. Such is the feeling his work inspires.

“Hunger” was Hamsun’s first novel. It was published originally in Norwegian in 1890, and it was for “Hunger” that he won the Nobel Prize. Although he would live to be 93 and write to the very end of his life, Hamsun never would produce a greater work than his intensely psychological drama about a young writer in Christiana (now Oslo) who is so determined to live by his writing, though he is just a beginner, that he almost starves to death in the process.

It was, in fact, Hamsun’s own story.

“Hunger” marked the emergence of a new consciousness in world literature. As Singer has pointed out, in his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, and his use of flashbacks, Hamsun prefigured the existentialists, the minimalists and the moderns. To him, Hemingway owes an unacknowledged debt, as does Faulkner. Voice in fiction changed after “Hunger,” as well as the length of sentences, and the psychological Angst of modern man was forever incorporated into literature.

Truly original writers, Singer has commented while writing of Hamsun, “attain their originality through extraordinary sincerity, by daring to give everything of themselves, their most secret thoughts and idiosyncrasies.”

This was Knut Hamsun’s genius. He revealed the “secret thoughts.” He bared himself to the very nerve ends of his consciousness. “Hunger” is entirely a product of the highly sensitive self-searching and introspection of a man whose life had been excruciatingly difficult up to that point.

Hamsun wrote “Hunger” following a 10-year period in which he himself had endured much suffering. As a young, aspiring writer, he spent the winter of 1879-80 in extreme poverty in the poor section of Oslo, living in a boarding house much like the one described in the last part of “Hunger.”

During the 1880s, he spent two different periods of time in America working on farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In America, he also worked for a while as a barber, and later as a streetcar conductor in Chicago. The Industrial Revolution, which had created an exodus from the countryside to the great cities of Europe, sent hordes of people into the seemingly bounteous arms of America. In reality, many people, like Hamsun, found life as hard here as in Europe, and he ended up going home to Norway, where he would, at last, finish the book he’d been working on for many years. In 1890, when he was 31 years old, he published “Hunger.”

As Robert Bly has remarked, the swiftness and the pungency of the prose in “Hunger” astounded everyone: “It made Norwegian seem like a young language.”

Norwegian novelist Sigurd Hoel said he thought the excitability, the constant slang and the sarcasm of American talk had a lot to do with creating the unique prose of “Hunger.” Hamsun’s time in America contributed a directness, perhaps, to his style, a simpler language, the language of immigrants, that allowed him to strip everything away from a sensation, to see its rawness, as in this passage:

“I began to notice a shameless appetite again . . . it gnawed without mercy in my chest, kept up a strange and silent labor in there. It was like a couple of dozen tiny creatures who put their heads over to one side and gnawed a while, then put their heads over to the other side and gnawed a while, lay for a moment absolutely still, started again, bored their way in without making noise or hurrying, and left behind them empty areas wherever they went. . . .”

“Hunger” is the record of a genius talking to himself--a tortured genius, willing to reveal a demonic side, but nonetheless a brilliant hero: the writer Wedel-Jarlsberg.

Hamsun believed firmly in creating an intelligent hero. There are fewer and fewer instances in modern fiction where it can be said that a genius, such a Wedel-Jarlsberg, or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, narrates the tale.

Wedel-Jarlsberg is the kind of man who, although starving, still thinks of saving face. Like a character out of a De Sica film, his sense of honor is poignantly absurd, causing him to give up the prospect of food rather than appear too desperate. Yet he is a man willing to beg, borrow or steal for his art, though later he will muse on the moral meaning of his actions. (No wonder Henry Miller loved this hero.)

He feels no pity for himself; he knows no limits. He tells the truth to such a degree that he has become a socially unreliable animal.

Wedel-Jarlsberg sells his belongings for money; he is reduced to attempting to pawn the buttons on his waistcoat, as well as his glasses. He goes to terrible extremes. He bites his own finger to pull himself out of a daze caused by lack of food. He boards in cold hovels or sleeps outdoors, always seeking the few kroner to hold him over until he can take his latest essay to a sympathetic editor, the “chief,” who becomes a figure of promise and redemption.

Wedel-Jarlsberg’s essays, though riddled with brilliant ideas, are clouded, the product of a desperately hungry man, a man who looks at his own body, with a festering sore “at the center of his being,” and cries, “My God, nothing to be done!”

At the novel’s end, when the hero boards a ship he has impulsively signed on to as a deckhand, we feel only a momentary relief, for who knows what will happen to Wedel-Jarlsberg, who even at the moment feels his “brain moving nearer and nearer to chaos”?

No writer has more acutely observed the workings of the human mind, or more faithfully reported the progression of separate thoughts--”these minuscule monsters”--in such swift, intense prose. That is the real beauty of “Hunger,” and the reason for reading it.

Yet there are other reasons. Imagine going 24 hours, 48 hours, without food. Imagine sleeping in the woods, or under a bridge. Imagine stealing, trading, selling on the street, having no money to pay for a room, being evicted, spending a night in public housing, or in jail. In “Hunger,” it’s all there. Writers who live in a city where the neighborhoods are full of the dispossessed must see how “Hunger” is a book to be read, and reread, now; how Knut Hamsun not only is a writer’s writer, he also is a writer for everyone, a voice for our times.