Books in Brief: Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun

Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, by Robert Ferguson (Farrar, 488 pp., $30)

I first read the novels of the Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner Knut Hamsun in the halcyon days just before World War II. Those novels, especially Growth of the Soil and Hunger, have become revivified for me by Robert Ferguson’s outstanding biographical study. It is astonishing to think that this is the first substantial biography of Hamsun in English; it is destined to remain the best such study in any language for many years to come. We know practically nothing about Hamsun in this country—that he spent some of his early years here, returning eventually to Norway to become perhaps the dominant shaper of modern European literature. One can go through the latest of many oversized studies of Hemingway, for example, and yet find no reference at all to the influence that Hamsun had on the famous Hemingway style. Hamsun was also indifferently received in England, and was, in turn, icy in his extreme disenchantment with the English. It is indeed in the whole matter of Hamsun’s obsessive prejudices and even hatreds that Robert Ferguson’s biography makes the most shocking revelations. I have learned here that Hamsun was granted an audience with Adolf Hitler at a particularly crucial point in the War, and that he would later publish the most pandering type of necrology on the death of the dictator. In short, Hamsun was Norway’s Ezra Pound, and then some. Ferguson is eminently objective in coming to terms with this terrible and dark side of Hamsun, but just as eminently refuses to discredit on that account alone the great body of Hamsun’s writings. Moreover, Hamsun himself came to a kind of accommodation with his own past in the mellowing of a very long life. His last book, On Overgrown Paths (1949), is an extended meditation that is full of melancholic wisdom and a touch of self-mockery. Ferguson’s book reconciles us to the knowledge that Hamsun himself attained so late—almost too late: that it was only when Hamsun had ceased to describe the essential simplicities of life that he lapsed into gross error and presumption.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, by Robert Ferguson (Farrar, 488 pp., $30)

I first read the novels of the Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner Knut Hamsun in the halcyon days just before World War II. Those novels, especially Growth of the Soil and Hunger, have become revivified for me by Robert Ferguson’s outstanding biographical study. It is astonishing to think that this is the first substantial biography of Hamsun in English; it is destined to remain the best such study in any language for many years to come. We know practically nothing about Hamsun in this country—that he spent some of his early years here, returning eventually to Norway to become perhaps the dominant shaper of modern European literature. One can go through the latest of many oversized studies of Hemingway, for example, and yet find no reference at all to the influence that Hamsun had on the famous Hemingway style. Hamsun was also indifferently received in England, and was, in turn, icy in his extreme disenchantment with the English. It is indeed in the whole matter of Hamsun’s obsessive prejudices and even hatreds that Robert Ferguson’s biography makes the most shocking revelations. I have learned here that Hamsun was granted an audience with Adolf Hitler at a particularly crucial point in the War, and that he would later publish the most pandering type of necrology on the death of the dictator. In short, Hamsun was Norway’s Ezra Pound, and then some. Ferguson is eminently objective in coming to terms with this terrible and dark side of Hamsun, but just as eminently refuses to discredit on that account alone the great body of Hamsun’s writings. Moreover, Hamsun himself came to a kind of accommodation with his own past in the mellowing of a very long life. His last book, On Overgrown Paths (1949), is an extended meditation that is full of melancholic wisdom and a touch of self-mockery. Ferguson’s book reconciles us to the knowledge that Hamsun himself attained so late—almost too late: that it was only when Hamsun had ceased to describe the essential simplicities of life that he lapsed into gross error and presumption.