Hunger

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS HUNGER

Knut Hamsun was born in 1859 to a poor peasant family in central Norway. His early literary ambition was thwarted by having to eke out a living—as a schoolmaster, sheriff 's assistant, and road laborer in Norway; as a store clerk, farmhand, and streetcar conductor in the American Midwest, where he lived for two extended periods between 1882 and 1888. Based on his own experiences as a struggling writer, Hamsun's first novel,
Sult
(1890; tr.
Hunger
, 1899), was an immediate critical success. While also a poet and playwright, Hamsun made his mark on European literature as a novelist. Finding the contemporary novel plot-ridden, psychologically unsophisticated and didactic, he aimed to transform it so as to accommodate contingency and the irrational, the nuances of conscious and subconscious life as well as the vagaries of human behavior. Hamsun's innovative aesthetic is exemplified in his successive novels of the decade:
Mysteries
(1892),
Pan
(1894), and
Victoria
(1898). Perhaps his best-known work is
The Growth of the Soil
(1917), which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1920. After the Second World War, as a result of his openly expressed Nazi sympathies during the German occupation of Norway, Hamsun forfeited his considerable fortune to the state. He died in poverty in 1952.

 

Sverre Lyngstad, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at New Jersey Institute of Technology, New-ark, New Jersey, holds degrees in English from the University of Oslo, the University of Washington, Seattle, and New York University. He is the author of many books and articles in the field of Scandinavian literature, including
Jonas Lie
(1977) and
Sigurd Hoel's Fiction
(1984), coauthor of
Ivan Goncharov
(1971), and cotranslator of Tolstoy's
Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth
(1968). Among his more recent translations from Norwegian are Knut Faldbakken's
Adam's Diary
(1988), Sigurd Hoel's
The Troll Circle
(1992) and
The Road to the World's End
(1995), and Knut Hamsun's
Rosa
(1997). Dr. Lyngstad is the recipient of several grants, prizes, and awards, and has been honored with the St. Olav Medal by the King of Norway. He is currently preparing a critical study of Knut Hamsun's novels.

PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by Rebel Inc. 1996
This edition with new introduction and notes published in
Penguin Books 1998

Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Sverre Lyngstad, 1996, 1998

All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hamsun, Knut, 1859-1952.
[Sult. English]
Hunger/Knut Hamsun; translated by Sverre Lyngstad.
p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)

eISBN : 978-1-101-14402-2

INTRODUCTION

WHEN THE anonymous
Hunger
fragment—substantially Part Two of the novel—appeared in the Copenhagen journal
Ny Jord
(New Earth) in November 1888, it set off a flurry of conjectures as to who could have produced such an extraordinary piece of writing. The favorite was Arne Garborg (1851-1924), well known for having depicted poverty among rural students in Kristiania (now Oslo) five years earlier. But Garborg's novel
Bondestudentar
(1883; Peasant Students), written in the spirit of naturalism, had an explicit social tendency that set it apart from the newly published piece.

A Norwegian newspaper (
Verdens Gang
) soon revealed the identity of the author, while stating, mistakenly, that he was living in America. Hamsun, who had wanted to retain his anonymity until the book was completed, now found himself famous overnight and a welcome guest in the drawing rooms of Copenhagen's intellectual luminaries. He was invited to lecture on America under the auspices of the Copenhagen Student Association and earned praise from Georg Brandes (1842-1927), the eminent critic. It was the latter's brother, Edvard Brandes (1847-1931), editor of the daily
Politiken
, who had “discovered” Hamsun and persuaded Carl Behrens (1867-1946) to publish the
Hunger
fragment in his journal,
Ny Jord
. Hamsun decided to expand the lectures into a book,
Fra det moderne Amerikas Åndsliv
(1889;
The Cultural Life of Modern America
, 1969), which forced him to postpone work on
Hunger
. The complete text appeared only in 1890.

The success of Hamsun's first novel recalls the instant fame that came to Dostoyevsky in 1846 with the appearance of
Poor Folk
, which ushered in the Natural School in Russian literature. The Danish author and critic Erik Skram called the publication of
Hunger
“a literary event of the first rank,”
¹
and a distinguished Norwegian critic, Carl Nærup, wrote in 1895 that it had laid “the foundation of a new literature in Scandinavia.”
²
It was translated into German the same year, into Russian in 1892. The first English translation had to wait until 1899. Many critics consider the novel to be Knut Hamsun's best, though he went on to write twenty more in a literary career that had begun much earlier and exceeded seventy years.

By the time the fragment came out in 1888, Hamsun had served a literary apprenticeship of more than ten years and experienced life on two continents. That life, never an easy one, was often marked by severe hardship. Born to an impoverished peasant family at Garmotrædet, Lom, in central Norway in 1859, Knut Pedersen, to use his baptismal name, had a difficult childhood. In the summer of 1862, when Knut was less than three years old, his father, a tailor, moved with his family to Hamarøy north of the Arctic Circle, where he worked on the farm Hamsund, which belonged to his brother-in-law, Hans Olsen. From nine to fourteen Hamsun was a sort of indentured servant to his uncle, since the family was financially dependent on him. The boy's beautiful penmanship made him particularly valuable to his uncle: Hans Olsen suffered from palsy and needed a scribe for his multifarious business, from shopkeeper to librarian and postmaster. The uncle treated Knut rather cruelly; he would rap his knuckles with a long ruler at the slightest slip of the pen. On Sundays the boy had to sit indoors reading edifying literature to Olsen and his pietist brethren, while his friends were outside waiting for him. No wonder Knut loved tending the parson's cattle, which allowed him to lie on his back in the woods dreaming his time away and writing on the sky. Very likely, these hours of solitary musings far from the tyranny of his uncle acted as a stimulus to young Hamsun's imagination. His schooling, starting at the age of nine, was sporadic, and his family had no literary culture. However, the library at his uncle's farm may have provided a modicum of sustenance for his childhood dreams.

During his adolescence and youth Hamsun led a virtually nomadic existence, at first in various parts of Norway, later in the United States. After being confirmed in the church of his native parish in 1873, he was a store clerk in his god-father's business in Lom for a year, then returned north to work in the same capacity for a merchant at Tranøy, not far from his parents' place. There Hamsun seems to have fallen in love with the boss's daughter, Laura. It is uncertain whether the young man was asked to leave because of his infatuation with Laura, or because of the bankruptcy of Mr. Walsøe in 1875. In the next few years he supported himself as a peddler, shoemaker's apprentice, schoolmaster, and sheriff 's assistant in different parts of Nordland. After the failure of his literary ventures in the late 1870s, the school of life took the form of road construction work for a year and a half (1880-81).

Hamsun's dream of becoming a writer had been conceived at an early age, amid circumstances that gave him no choice but to fend for himself. If ever a writer can be said to have been self-made or self-taught, Hamsun was one. Not surprisingly, the two narratives published in his teens,
Den GÃ¥defulde
(1877; The Enigmatic One) and
Bjørger
(1878), were clumsy and insignificant. The former is an idyllic tale in the manner of magazine fiction, in a language more Danish than Norwegian. The latter, a short novel, was modeled on Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's peasant tales of the 1850s. In 1879, with the support of a prosperous Nordland businessman, E. B. K. Zahl, Hamsun wrote another novel, “Frida,” which he presented to Frederik Hegel at Gyldendal Publishers in Copenhagen. It was turned down without comment. The manuscript of this story—which was dismissed by Bjørnson (1832-1910), Hamsun's idol, as well—has been lost. Bjørnson suggested he become an actor. Thus, in early 1880, shortly after his twentieth birthday, the first period of Hamsun's literary apprenticeship came to an end.

The 1880s were marked by hard physical labor and renewed literary efforts. During the period he was employed in highway construction, he made his debut as a public lecturer. His next decision was not unusual for a poor, ambitious Norwegian in the 1880s: to emigrate to America. However, Hamsun's ambition was not chiefly to improve his fortune; instead, he foresaw a future for himself as the poetic voice of the Norwegian community in the New World. However, the dream quickly foundered, though the lecturing activity continued. To support himself he worked as a farmhand and store clerk, except for the last six months or so of his two-and-a-half years' stay, when he was offered the job of “secretary and assistant minister with a salary of $500 a year” by the head of the Norwegian Unitarian community in Minneapolis, Kristofer Janson (1841-1917).
³
This was Hamsun's first significant encounter with an intellectual milieu. While he did not share Janson's religious beliefs, he clearly enjoyed browsing in his well-stocked library. But his stay was cut short: in the summer of 1884 his doctor diagnosed “galloping consumption,” and in the fall of that year Hamsun returned to Norway, apparently resigned to die. He was twenty-five years old. His illness turned out to be a severe case of bronchitis.
⁴

Back in Norway, Hamsun's endeavors to support himself by writing stories, articles, and reviews for the newspapers, while working on a “big book,”
⁵
brought only a meager harvest financially, despite a considerable amount of publishing activity. Worthy of mention is his article on Mark Twain in the weekly paper
Ny illustreret Tidende
(New Illustrated Gazette) in March 1885, important because by a compositor's error the “d” in his name, Hamsund, was left out. The young aspiring writer adopted this spelling of his name for the rest of his life.

After a couple of years in Norway, at times in severe want, he returned to America, but now for purely economic reasons: to finance his literary ambition. From New York he wrote to a friend in Norway that it had become “im possible” for him at home.
⁶
However, the challenges posed by America were still formidable Only toward the end of his two-year stay, after supporting himself as a streetcar conductor in Chicago and a farm laborer in the Dakotas, was he able to turn his attention to literature. Having returned to Minneapolis in the fall of 1887, he delivered a series of lectures there during the winter of 1887-88. These lectures, which dealt with such literary figures as Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Bjørnson, Ibsen, and Strindberg, demonstrate Hamsun's painfully acquired familiarity with the literary culture of his time. By July 1888 we find him in Copenhagen. In a brief sketch of his early life recorded in 1894 he says he “hid on board a day and a half”
⁷
when the ship reached Kristiania, bypassing the city that had so bitterly frustrated his literary dreams.