Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Hunger, first published in English in 1899, is flattered by its new translation and by its two introductions. In one, the Yiddish writer I. B. Singer describes, with an emphatic generosity that may surprise younger literary generations, Hamsun’s importance to his own: “European writers know that he is the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’ … Hamsun belonged to that select group of writers who not only interested a reader but virtually hypnotized him.” The other introduction, by the translator, Robert Bly, sensitively points up the novel’s paradoxical affirmation: “The hero of Hunger obeys the unconscious, and remains in hunger, despite suffering, until he has lived through what he must, or learned what he had to. What seems to us catastrophe, his spirit experiences as secret victory. His anarchic inability to support himself is experienced by his spirit as obedience.” This first-person narration compresses into a few months the ten years (1879–1888) Hamsun spent in extreme poverty—sporadically relieved by laborers’ jobs and immigrations to the United States—in Oslo, then called Kristiania. The nameless hero seeks to make his living by writing grandiose newspaper articles that, on the rare occasions when one is accepted, each earn him about three and a half dollars. The action moves from one five-kroner windfall to the next—an article is bought, a waistcoat is pawned, a grocery clerk errs in making change, an editor or acquaintance unexpectedly proffers a loan. Between these financial peaks are long, not unhappy troughs of emptiness:

  I kept on going through streets, rambling on with no purpose in mind at all. I stopped at a corner without needing to, turned and went up small alleys without having anything to do there. I just drifted on, floating in the joyful morning, rolling along without a care among other happy people. The air was clear and bright and my mind was without a shadow.

  He is unable to organize his thoughts into any plan of enterprise or escape:

  I could not sit on a park bench by myself or put my foot down anywhere without being besieged by tiny and pointless events, absurd nonsense, which forced itself into my brain and scattered my powers to the four winds. A dog that shot past me, a yellow rose in someone’s lapel, could set my thoughts in motion and obsess me for hours.

  His external actions, his contacts with human society appear ludicrously antic and whimsical; he spouts frenzied nonsense to strangers on the street, he attracts and then rejects a prostitute called Ylayali, he prays to and then curses God, he refuses to beg from those who might succor him. When he is miraculously granted money, he squanders it on a rich meal he instantly vomits, or gives it away to an uncomprehending old cake peddler, or hurls a ten-kroner note in the face of a landlady who has ceased to expect anything. Though the physical humiliations of starvation are fascinatingly, grindingly detailed and the hero ostensibly yearns for a respectable, normal existence (“What a marvellous sensation to be sitting in a human house again and to hear a clock tick, and to talk with a spirited young girl instead of with myself!”), his self-realization lies with “the joyful insanity hunger was.”

  My hair lay on my forehead wet and cold; I sat up on my elbow and looked down at the pillow: wet hair was also lying there in small tufts. My feet had swollen during the night inside my shoes; there was no pain, but I could barely move my toes.

  Toward late afternoon, when it was already beginning to be dusk, I got up and started puttering about the room. I tried walking with short, deliberate steps, careful to keep my balance and spare my feet as much as I could. I was not really suffering, and I didn’t cry; on the whole I wasn’t even sad; I was on the contrary wonderfully at peace—the thought that anything could be any different than it was never once crossed my mind.

  Finally I went out.

  Finally he accepts, without premeditation, employment on a Russian freighter bound for Cadiz, and Hunger ends.

  On Overgrown Paths—a journal Hamsun kept from his arrest, on May 26th of 1945, for treasonous activities during the German occupation, to his conviction and sentencing, on Midsummer Day of 1948—shows that his willingness to embrace isolation and deprivation had survived a life of success. The prose is still swift, fitful, immediate, innocently quick to feed on trifles: “These are trifles I write about, and trifles that I write.… All prisoners can only write about the eternally everyday occurrences and wait for their doom.” But we are all prisoners. “We are all guilty. We are legion in our guilt.” We are all doomed. “Now and then there is also some one of us who dies; it cannot be avoided, but it does not make much impression on us who remain. We follow the white coffin with our eyes, but when the hearse has driven away, we turn back to ourselves again.” Hamsun is apathetic, tranquil. “I am weary of myself, have no wishes, no interests, no pleasures. Four or five senses in torpor and the sixth sense [he is deaf] snatched away.… I have attained the condition of certain Orientals: the necessary silence. I do not even talk to myself any more, having got out of that bad habit.… It is three years today since I was arrested. And here I sit. It has not mattered to me, not bothered me. It has gone by as though merely one more event.”

  Of the several hospitals and nursing homes where he is incarcerated, only a psychiatric clinic shatters his calm of resignation. He is unable, in this memoir, to describe his months there except by allusive fragments: “Domination over a living being, regulations lacking mercy and tact, a psychology of blank spaces and labels, a whole science bristling defiance. Others can endure that sort of torture; that is no concern of mine. For my part, I could not. Which the psychiatrist ought perhaps to have understood. I was in good health; I was turned into jelly.” Only in his letter to the attorney general about this experience does Hamsun rant, and seem to deserve the official judgment of him as a person with “permanently impaired faculties.” His defense, when he presents it in the form of a courtroom statement, is coherent and almost adequate: his crimes were confined to a few newspaper articles urging Norwegians not to waste their lives in futile resistance; he constantly interceded with the Germans, even with Hitler himself, for the lives of Norwegian resistance fighters; he never belonged to the Nazi Party; he scorned fleeing his native land to Sweden or England; he was captivated by the promise that Norway would occupy a high place in Hitler’s Germanic empire. In short, he stands defenseless, having based his actions upon the premise that Norway was defenseless. One reads this section of the book, and the prefatory description of Hamsun’s trial, with some sympathy for the predicament of governments confronted with politically aberrant great writers, and with a feeling that the Norwegian government exacted less suffering from Hamsun than the United States government did from Ezra Pound, though both eventually settled upon a factitious mental incompetence.

  As Bly points out, Hamsun, the son of a farmer, unschooled and for years indigent, was alienated from the bourgeois Europe that believed in progress and social reform. His years of hunger had left him with few expectations of human society; even his lovers, such as Glahn and Edvarda in Pan, are whimsical and cruel. He responds only, and is ever alert, to nature—the torrential, unanswerable nature within and beyond man. “Here are only cropped hills without a flower bed. The weather is biting, the wind almost always blows; but nearby are trees and woods with songbirds aloft and all sorts of creeping things on the ground. Oh, the world is beautiful here too, and we are to be very grateful for being in it. How rich the colors are here in the very rocks and the heather, how incomparable the forms in the bracken! And the taste of a piece of wall fern that I found is still good on the tongue.” We find him unaged, in these valedictory pages, his appetites still undisciplined (“But completely contrary to my good intentions to ration my reading, I fell voraciously on Topsøe’s book and devoured it in one gulp”), his conversations still quixotic—talking with a lady at a bus stop, the elderly Hamsun rips off his jacket and
lays it in the snow for her to sit upon. He is still fond of outcasts and still able, in the depths, to attract women who wish to minister to him and with whom he grows impatient. Irascibility remains the sign of his independent genius. Of his poetry, he admits it lacks tenderness: “And it was not only tenderness that was lacking but all too many other things as well, the whole kit and caboodle.” Lacking the kit and caboodle of civilized prejudice, he was able to confront experience direct, and to convey it magically. Toward the end of this book of therapeutic jottings, his thoughts revert to his confirmation and first communion:

  The pastor put something in my mouth, and afterwards let me sip from a cup. There were many people around who watched, but they restrained themselves and did not smile.

  Why remember that now? I have no earthly use for it and there is no wisdom in it. It uplifts me merely because I am happy and am teeming.

  His memory wanders on, to his “first time in America,” and the sails of his artistry fill, and he embarks upon a fine funny story without a moral—“merely a series of simple experiences from day to day on foreign soil and in a little arid prairie town.” On the last page he remembers a woman’s hands: “Those hands astonished me; they were yellow in complexion, but very soft and fine, never having been used to do anything with, never especially clean, but so beautiful to look at.” The last two phrases tell the tale—“never especially clean, but so beautiful to look at.” Hamsun speaks, still freshly, to us out of the human creatureliness that knows no accountability, no ideal systems. He has not dated; his prose remains tonic. Though convicted of collaboration with a tyrant, he is in literature a democrat, in the spirit of Proust’s prescription:

  The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps, and reveals to us that reality far from which we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable, the reality that we might die without having known and which is simply our life, real life, life finally discovered and clarified, consequently the only life that has been really lived—that life which in one sense is to be found at any time in all men as well as in artists.

  Half-Mad and Maddening

  MYSTERIES, by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Gerry Bothmer. 340 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971.

  Perhaps too furiously, Mysteries struggles to express most of the themes that obsessed the young Hamsun. Like Hunger, it has a half-mad and maddening hero; as in Pan, the hero kills the dog his beloved cherishes; as in Victoria, he saves someone from drowning and regrets it. First published in Norway in 1892, two years later than Hunger, this novel lacks the weird jubilation of the masterpiece, and denies us empathy with the principal figure, Nagel, who, neither impoverished nor a writer, seems in his perversity merely a prankster. He arrives abruptly in a small Norwegian coastal town, creates an air of capricious wealth, defends the town scapegoat against the town bully, falls in love with the town beauty, proposes marriage to the local spinster, astounds and affronts several gatherings of the local bourgeoisie, sheds money, spouts words, and attempts suicide, not always unsuccessfully. The laconic formal control that usually imposes crystalline dignity on Hamsun’s brutal vision here slackens; the plot abounds in false hares, unsolved mysteries, and editorial digressions. The atmosphere is heavy with emotional energy that expends itself, lightning-like, in mere display. The trolls of the subconscious infest not only the characters but the narration. Nevertheless, there are some remarkably harrowing moments, frequent streaks of brilliant fancy, and always a presiding vitality. Not many books published in 1892 could make us as uncomfortable as this one.

  Love as a Standoff

  VICTORIA, by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Oliver Stallybrass. 170 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

  This short novel dates from 1898, when Hamsun, though no longer young as a man, was still rather young as a writer. Perhaps Hamsun always wrote a young man’s books. He was one of modern literature’s great fresheners; his loyally to the elemental, his impatience with Ibsenian social moralizing, and his expressed determination to “grant the individual soul its due” contributed to the great liberation of artistic energy in the generation succeeding his and elicited gratitude from writers as different as H.G. Wells and Thomas Mann. To mention Mann, however, and to think of Mann’s own naïveté, his disarmingly material curiosity and his blunt little inventories of furniture and weather, is to remind ourselves of a certain broad, balanced, educated humanism that cannot be included in the considerable list of Hamsun’s virtues.

  Victoria seems young in its proximity to the fabulous, in the magical edge of its quick imagery—“over by the sluice the water fell sheer, like a brightly colored fabric hung out to dry.” Or “Again the weeks and the months went by, and spring returned. The snow had gone: the distant roar of liberated waters gave the illusion of coming from the sun and the moon.” The novel also seems young in its air of disconnectedness, of being partly hidden from the author as well as from us, of being the residue of an emotional experience more than a re-creation of one. The hero, Johannes Møller, is a miller’s son (Møllerens Sønn). We meet him walking and thinking, “bursting with ideas”—“When he grew up he would work in a match factory. It would be pleasantly dangerous, and he could get sulfur on his fingers so that nobody would dare to shake hands with him.” He dreams of the future, has for friends the trees and the birds and the stones in the granite quarry, and is, of course, in love with Victoria, the daughter of the Castle, the manor house near the mill. As children, they play and flirt, but as social unequals. Well, Johannes leaves home and becomes, guess what, a writer. His frenzied habits of work—every night from the evening church bells to dawn, despite the complaints of the insomniac next door—sound very like those of the hero of Hunger. Except that Johannes is a success, critical and commercial, from the start. He returns home educated, famous, and a man. Meanwhile, Victoria, to save the sagging Castle fortunes, has had her troth plighted for her to a caddish toff called Otto. Victoria and Johannes hold several hot-and-cold conversations establishing their love on a firmly star-crossed basis. As a consolation prize, she offers him, at her engagement party, their mutual friend little Camilla, whom our hero once saved from drowning (as a nature expert, he is amphibian; “I know the shoals,” the dripping boy modestly avers), and to whom he now (and this is an honest Hamsun touch) takes enough of a shine, true love notwithstanding, to plight his troth. But, just then, what should happen but that Otto should go hunting, and—you know how sloppy caddish toffs are with guns; please don’t let me spoil the story for you. Suffice to say that the lovers stay star-crossed and tuberculosis intervenes to keep the book brief.

  If the plot sounds quaint and somewhat mechanically Tristan-and-Iseultish, it may be that Hamsun was masking a personal experience still puzzling to himself. Like Edvarda in Pan, Victoria compulsively humiliates her rustic admirer at parties. Party scenes seem to operate for Hamsun as a point of painful reference, in contrast to nature walks: love is made outdoors and destroyed indoors. Behind the vivid, cruel, hectically flushed women of his parties stands some bitter recollection. In Victoria, Hamsun suddenly digresses: “Watch any woman in profile when she drinks. Let her drink from a cup, a glass, anything you care to mention, but watch her in profile. It’s a terrifying sight, the act she puts on. She purses up her mouth, dips only the extreme edge in the drink, and gets desperate if during the performance anybody notices her hand.” Though mutilated, as it were, by the jerky action of the puppet-theatre plot and by the pained reticences of Hamsun’s memory, Victoria lives in each fragmentary glimpse of her, from the flighty but gracious child to the dying woman, still mostly a child, who writes Johannes a magnificently pathetic letter of farewell. Victoria adds a small portrait to literature’s gallery of 19th-century women, those hapless creatures denied all rights but the right to be adored, those poor properties assigned an exclusively sexual value and given only a black market to trade it on—those
scapegoats of romanticism, those saints of intrigue and dreaming who lived only in books, those oppressed innocents whose one method of protest was self-destruction.

  The pride of these women, their defiant perversity and desperate gaiety, Hamsun can depict. But he is dealing here with an attenuated case. Whereas Madame Bovary, borrowing some iron from her bourgeois captors, did jimmy her way out and become for a moment that dark, sensual apparition who alarms Léon in Rouen, Victoria stands helpless and stares. The obstacles between the lovers drop away: Otto and Camilla vanish; the debt-ridden Castle and its paternalistic proprietor go up in smoke. Still, Johannes and Victoria do not move toward each other but preserve a silence one is tempted to call stubborn. They are Romeo and Juliet without the Nurse, without the night of love. The action of the book is their few conversations—they have none, except as children, that we do not overhear—and when she breaks silence for the last time, most fully, the book ends.