Читать книгу Knut Hamsun - Hanna Astrup Larsen - Страница 7

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Knut Hamsun, like more than one other Norwegian genius, won his first recognition in Denmark, where he spent a few months after his return from the United States. Edvard Brandes, at that time editor of the Copenhagen daily "Politiken," has told a story of a young Norwegian who one day presented himself at the office with a manuscript. The editor was about to refuse it on the ground of unsuitable length, when something in the appearance of the stranger made the refusal die on his lips. It was the shabbiest, most emaciated figure that had ever crossed the editorial threshold, but there was something in the pale, trembling face and the eyes behind the glasses that moved the editor in spite of himself. He took the manuscript home with him and began to read it. As he read the story of the starving young genius, it dawned on him with a sense of shame that the writer was probably at that moment without the means of subsistence. Hastily he enclosed a ten krone bill in an envelope, addressed it to the place the unknown author had given as his residence, and ran to the station to mail it. Then he returned and read on to the last paragraphs, where the hero is stealthily crawling up to his room, afraid to rouse a wrathful landlady, and is moved to a delirium of joy by the receipt of a letter containing a ten krone bill sent him by an editor—ten kroner being the highest pitch of opulence to which Hamsun ever carries his hero.

In telling the coincidence that same evening to a Swedish critic, Axel Lundegård, who has published the story, Brandes spoke of how the manuscript had impressed him. "It was not only that it showed talent. It somehow caught one by the throat. There was about it something of a Dostoievsky."

"Was it really so remarkable?" asked Lundegård. "What was the title of it?"

"Hunger."

"And the author?"

"Knut Hamsun."

"It was the first time I heard the name Knut Hamsun," writes Lundegård, "and the first time I heard the phrase 'something of a Dostoievsky' used about any of his books. Since then it has become a commonplace, but applied to the first production of a young author by a critic not at all given to over-enthusiasm, it was a tribute."

Through the influence of Edvard Brandes the manuscript, which contained the first chapters of the book "Hunger," was placed with a new radical Copenhagen magazine, "New Soil." This was in 1888. The story was anonymous, but it attracted attention by its exotic brilliance of style and by the intensity which up to that time had been unknown in Northern literature. Rumors of its authorship were current, and were confirmed when, in 1890, the book "Hunger" burst upon a startled Christiania and made its author instantly famous.

In the intervening time Hamsun had gained some notoriety in his own country by the publication of "Intellectual Life in Modern America." Although he had thus trumpeted forth his failure to find any stirring of the intellect whatever in the great American republic, the Norwegian critic Sigurd Hoel attributes the style of "Hunger" to American influence. It had a daredevil humor, a dash and verve, and a feeling for effect that certainly had no precedent in the respectable annals of Norwegian literature.

"It was the time when I went about and starved in Christiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him,"—so runs the oft-quoted first sentence in "Hunger." There is no reason why it should have been Christiania. It might as well have been the American brain market, New York, or any other city where men and women try to sell the product of their brains and learn that their finest thoughts and highest efforts are not of the slightest consequence to anybody. Hundreds of men and women have fought the fight to which he has given classic expression. They will recognize his astonishment as it dawned upon him that although he had "the best brain in the country and shoulders that could stop a truck," there was no place for him in the great machine that ground food for the dullest and stupidest. They will know the bending of the neck and the sagging of the spirit, the hysterical swinging between absurd pride and shameless grasping at any opportunity, the agonized striving to catch the eye and ear of an indifferent world by strained and overwrought work, the impotent sense of never being able to begin the fight on equal terms.

Few, however, have dared to follow the experiment to the uttermost ends of destitution. Few have explored the abysses of suffering through which Hamsun leads his hero. At one time he tried to bully a poor frightened cashier into stealing five öre (a little over a cent) from the cash drawer so that he could buy bread with it. Another time he refused the offer of an editor to pay him in advance for an article not yet written. Once he suddenly decided to beg the price of a little food from some big business man whose name had suddenly come into his head with the force of an inspiration, and persisted, humiliating himself to the depths, holding his ground till he was practically thrown out. Another time, when he himself had starved for days, he pawned his vest to get a krone to give a beggar. It is just such absurdities and inconsistencies that people commit when the starch of everyday habits has been washed out of them.

He keeps back nothing in his story. He even relates with grim humor an encounter with a girl of the streets who in pity offers to take him home with her although he has no money, while he simulates virtue to conceal his abject state: "I am Pastor So-and-so. Go away and sin no more." But his realism does not consist merely in dragging out into the light the acts that others commit in the dark. One need not be a genius to do that. No, he plumbs below action, below even conscious thought and feeling, to those erratic impulses that would make criminals or maniacs of us all if we followed them, not only the great overmastering passions that have their place in the Decalogue, but all the fitful whims and inconsequential trifles that influence conduct. It is as though the delirium of hunger had released all that which is usually controlled by will or custom. Sometimes, when he has starved for days, he can feel his brain as it were detaching itself from the rest of his personality, going its own way, manufacturing idiotic conceits, which he knows to be idiotic, but can not stop. Yet all the time his other consciousness is sitting by, holding the pulse of his delirious imagination and recording its antics.

The light, whimsical touch rarely fails him, but occasionally there are passages of a sombre and thrilling pathos, as the following: "God had thrust His finger down into the tissue of my nerves and gently, quite casually, disarranged the fibres a little. And God had drawn His finger back, and behold, there were shreds and fine root filaments on His fingers from the tissue of my nerves. And there was an open hole after the finger which was God's finger and wounds in my brain where His finger had passed. But when God had touched me with the finger of His hand, he left me alone and did not touch me any more."