Picked-Up Pieces (24 page)

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:

M
YSTERIES
, 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.

V
ICTORIA
, 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.

Stubborn silence was dear to Hamsun; he fled from publicity, played no games but solitaire, and kept silent during his trial. His laconic style feels engraved upon silence. Speech, and events in general, have a peculiar, exceptional air in his work. It is not merely that the characters do odd things—the hero of
Pan
, asked by the heroine, whom he loves, for the gift of his pet dog, shoots the dog and sends her the body; in
Victoria
, Johannes, needing a pipe cleaner, wrenches a hand from the face of a clock—but that very simple objects hop onto the page with an enigmatic, trollish wink. Victoria halts at a shopwindow and moves away; Johannes spies her and stops at the same window:

How oddly charged and sharp and potent is this little inventory of the inconsequential! Of Johannes’ fiction we are told, “Often, his imagination played crazy tricks on him, obtruding into his book irrelevant conceits which he afterward had to strike out and throw away.” For example, he imagines, “A man is at the point of death, he writes to a friend, a note, a little request. The man dies, leaving this note. It is dated and signed, it has capital letters and small letters, though the writer would die within the hour. Very strange.” Later, when he receives Victoria’s note, he sees that “there were capital letters and small letters, the lines were straight, and she who had written them was dead!” This interest in not merely peculiar circumstances but the
peculiarity of circumstance
deflects his prose
from the path of high seriousness and rounded intention but does give it a continuous quirky life and stabs of unexpected power. In
Victoria
, a long dream is recounted to no immediate purpose but with a concrete wildness given to few dreams in fiction:

Dreamlike also is Victoria’s explanation of why, at the party, she rudely interrupted Johannes’ speech: “All I heard was your voice. It was like an organ, and the power it had over me made me frantic.” In Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
, the heroine relates how as soon as she heard a certain man’s voice she knew she would sleep with him. What is mere confession in a female writer amounts to intuitive genius in Hamsun.

Just as dreams and passionate impulses erupt into our conscious lives, so the flow of this novel is interrupted, at the end, by a gratuitous spate of anecdotes on the topic of love. One of them describes a cuckolded husband who knowingly returns when his wife is entertaining her lover. He knocks, the lover sneaks away, the husband enters, and a strange conversation ensues—a groping amid mutual compassion and deceit. Then:

She screams for the maid, and in the morning describes his proposal as “a very strange attack.” He answers, “Yes, it’s a strain being witty at my age. I’m giving it up.” The entire encounter, in its comic knottiness, in the depths and turns of uxoriousness it reveals, is quite startling, and shows the degree of psychological complexity Hamsun’s strange simplicity could conjure with. Strindberg and Nietzsche were his tutors, but he drew upon the Nordic cultural tradition that underlies the realism of
the sagas, the anti-philosophy of Kierkegaard,
^*
and the films of Ingmar Bergman. Like Hamsun, Bergman loves plain textures and tangled minds, renders details with surreal clarity, indulges a savage streak of fantasy, and sometimes depends ingenuously upon fable and a mysticism of brooks and saplings. Scandinavia, untouched by Hellenism and only lately and lightly submissive to Christianity, sees things in its own slant of sunlight. Platonic precedences do not obtain; the riddle and not the Idea lurks behind phenomena. The wish to “grant the individual soul its due” has roots in an ancient Germanic individualism: the 6th-century
Strategicon
says of German warriors, “Headstrong, despising strategy, precaution, or foresight, they show contempt for every tactical command.” The Viking god of battle, Odin, was the god of inspiration, whether as battle frenzy, intoxication, or supernatural wisdom; Hamsun is a literary Viking whose reliance upon inspiration is his strength and his weakness. Born in a rural valley, by predilection a recluse and a farmer, he belongs in the company of those tanned, clear-eyed truants (the Basque Unamuno, the Algerian Camus, the Egyptian Cavafy, the Russian Tolstoy) who jeer into the classroom of European civilization. A heathen visionary, he sees peculiar particulars that resist being smoothed into plots, exemplary characters, or slogans to live by. The moral of
Victoria
is profferred as “There’s always a catch somewhere,” or “God has fashioned [love] of many kinds and seen it endure or perish.” Such an inconclusive conclusion, a standoff, well caps this intensely static love story, whose characters, though immersed in bookish circumstances, proudly reject the dynamism of characters.