[In the following essay, Coles summarizes the major action and themes in Hunger, concluding with a short history of Hamsun's literary career and political struggles.]

On February 19, 1952 a man of 93 died near Grimstad, Norway. He was a writer, indeed one who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. He was also at the time of his death an officially recognized traitor, allowed by his nation to live out his last years at home only because of the “permanently impaired faculties” that advanced age was supposed to have caused. Now, fifteen years later, Knut Hamsun's first novel, Hunger, has been translated into English by the American poet Robert Bly; and at the same time we are offered a translation by Carl Anderson of the last writing Hamsun did, while a prisoner and forced inmate of a mental hospital between 1945 and 1948.

Some lives are themselves epics, and Hamsun's was an epic life, as long and rich and defiantly unique as anything he wrote. He was born Knut Petersen, the son of a faintly aristocratic mother and a father who farmed for a living, but loved to recite legends and walk endlessly in the woods. When the boy was four his parents took him north, from a valley in central Norway to the region near Bodö, way up the coast, in true Nordland, where a growing child must come to terms with nights that last a month and summers that must seem like much more than a prize, or even a form of reparation and reconciliation—perhaps like a passionate act of atonement by a God who can stay sullen and aloof only so long. Hamsun's family settled on another farm called Hamsund, hence the name Knut Petersen later assumed. Neither the mother nor the father was anxious to send their son to school. Instead, he worked on the land, worked with a shoemaker, and began to write.

At twenty Hamsun had finished a short novel called Frida. He took it to Oslo—then called Christiana—and failed to secure a publisher. He returned to a rooming house in the capital city, and nearly starved to death. Eventually he left for the countryside. He spent what seemed like his last bit of energy looking for anything “physical” to do. He had had enough of thinking and putting ideas to word. He worked as a farm hand and he worked on the roads. At twenty-three he left for America, where like many of his countrymen he sought out the plains of the middle west. He lived in Wisconsin, in Minnesota, worked in lumberyards, became an auctioneer. He was always on the move, and never with much money. In time he became desperately ill with tuberculosis, and returned to Norway, supposedly to die. He recovered and resumed his marginal existence in Oslo.

Still thinking of himself as a writer, still unable to write, still a proud, eccentric, willfully isolated young man he returned to America in 1886, at twenty-seven. I suppose it can be said that his mind was unsettled; certainly his body was incredibly restless. He made for Chicago, where he worked as a streetcar conductor. He went to North Dakota and harvested wheat. For a while he was a barber. In 1888 he thought of working as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks, something he had once before done for three years; but he was homesick at last and that year returned to Europe—first to Copenhagen, then Oslo. In Denmark he began working on Hunger. In Norway he wrote—apparently in a frenzy—a book called The Cultural Life of Modern America. In some respects it is like Kafka's Amerika, full of sly, humorous irony, and at heart a fanciful, extravagant work of the imagination rather than a literal description of anything “American” that Hamsun experienced. He had lived close to our soil, and came to know our late 19th-century life very intimately and concretely; yet the New World seemed to stir his mind in the direction of private imagery and extraordinary metaphor.

In 1890, when Hamsun was thirty-one, Hunger was published. He would never again be unknown. Robert Bly tells us that Hamsun's style in his first novel was somewhat similar to Hemingway's—curt, almost severe, and to the point. Others have claimed that America's raw, nervous and informal life comes across almost miraculously in Hamsun's Norwegian prose. Yet the novel's plot and its central character also manage to evoke Russians like Gogol and Dostoevsky, and such contemporary European (“existentialist”) writers as Camus and Sartre. Hamsun seems to have drawn upon the best of two continents, and the result is a work of art that is still forceful, still provocative, and not in the slightest “out of date.” In point of fact, Hunger is a “fashionable” novel, all taken up with “our” concerns and discoveries—the world's injustice as it affects the individual, the unconscious and its various workings, the question of what is psychologically “normal” and what is socially permissible.

Hunger is one nameless man's narrative, his description of what it is like to live on the extreme edge of life, without a supply of food that can be taken for granted, and without the friendship or love of anyone. Right off, the suffering man announces that “all of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania”; and much later, when he has had enough of both starvation and the city, he takes a job on a ship and describes himself as he “straightened up, wet from fever and exertion, looked in toward land and said goodbye for now to the city, to Christiania, where the windows of the homes all shone with such brightness.” The hero is apart at the beginning. He continues to keep people at arm's length, no matter how closely he watches them. At the end he goes away, out of the way, a long way off.

Hamsun was always an uncompromising outsider. In Hunger he showed he could even stand outside himself. If the city is full of the comic, the preposterous and the fake, the mind of its half-wretched, half-indulgent observer emerges as no less ridiculous and pitiable. Though the narrator of Hunger reminds one of Raskolnikov or even Kafka's K, Hamsun is neither as strict and serious as Dostoevsky nor as incurably forlorn as Kafka. He does seem to have a pilgrimage in mind for his hero, or at the very least some serious travelling. Perhaps it is a mistake to try to find in Hunger the quests we have made. The Hamsun who wrote Hunger might have had Piers Plowman in mind, or the strange and bizarre events that can be found in almost any medieval chronicle of a soul's “way.”

In 1893 Hamsun published Mysteries, in many respects a sequel to Hunger. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux have announced that an English translation of Mysteries is on the way.) Again there is a stranger, now given the name of Nagel. Again he observes everything, particularly himself. Again the reader is forcibly confronted with a character's resourceful capacity to deceive both himself and the “outside” world. Before Pirandello, before Freud, before the self-conscious 20th century began, Hamsun was obsessed—and systematically so—with the nature of illusion. He did not take man's psychological life for granted, nor did he simply allude to the terror, the vagaries and the caprices of the mind's daily life. Deliberately and carefully—as if he were one of today's psychologists or psychiatrists—Hamsun examines (through Nagel and the people he manages to confuse, puzzle and torment) all sorts of familiar subjects: the child in man; the motive that hides other motives; the power of a shrewd and willing observer both to anger a person and lay bare his most ingrained and self-sustaining conceits.

In 1894 the Norwegian public had to deal with an avalanche of Hamsun. New Ground and Editor Lynge were published, neither of them “great” books, and both of them totally unlike the two novels that had previously appeared. From portraits of very particular, very unusual and very inward individuals Hamsun turned to devastating and scornful descriptions of social cliques. In Editor Lynge, Oslo's politicians are relentlessly exposed as mean, calculating, dishonest. In New Ground the city's literary “set” is subject to withering ridicule. Hamsun fixes upon “artists” and “thinkers” every stereotype they so often use to brand businessmen or members of the “petit bourgeoisie.” Fake, pretentious, calculating, and self-serving “intellectuals” are contrasted with mere workers, mere shopkeepers. Let other authors turn their biting satire on the greedy, hypo-critical mercantile class, and the aspirants who serve it. Hamsun scorned the scornful, the nervously “aware” and the proudly “enlightened”—who score points on one another rather than make money, and who can be as showy and snobbish and fiercely competitive as the most successful of burghers. These two books ordinarily might be ignored, certainly in any account of Hamsun's significant artistic successes. Yet they give an important clue to his way of looking at politics and society, and if they do not “explain” his later pro-Nazi statements, they at least show how uncongenial his mind was to a rising “liberal” or “progressive” intellectual and political tradition—and therefore how susceptible he might have logically become in later years to the powerful military alternative of Nazi fascism. A man who at 35 saw rot and scandal in the “best” of the Western world, and who even then was living his own, proud and intensely private life, could much later flinch not at all when Hitler called for more purges and bloodbaths.

Also published in 1894 was Pan, a contrast to Hamsun's twin effort at social criticism. (An excellent English translation by James McFarlane was made available ten years ago.) Pan is a love story in the Nordic tradition, full of sadness and tenderness, passion and disappointment—and finally, that threesome of separation, search and death. Hamsun is done with Oslo. He places his heroes up North, in a fishing village. The sea, the forest, the weather figure prominently. The movement is away from the inward, the private, and toward Nature. At the same time there is an ironic new interest in groups of people, in contrast to a person. I suppose one can say the hero of Pan is a “repressed” Victorian; he takes women for granted, seems to want to use them rather than respect their particular desires and needs. They are “objects,” a term still used by some psychiatrists to describe a person who is wanted and sought.

In Victoria, his next novel and a companion piece to Pan, Hamsun also describes a youthful love affair. Johannes, the suitor, is again brusque, uncouth and distant—but poetic. He desires a rich man's daughter—perhaps to marry his native poetry to some firmly established way of life. What Johannes wanted, Hamsun achieved. He gradually became a well-to-do, insistently private man whose lyric inspiration was to be shared with the world only out of a writer's need. No longer was he hungry or jobless, and if he remembered the wild sea and the inviting forests of his youth, he largely forgot the social and economic injustice he had occasion to see firsthand for so long. Now the odd spirit moved and the cloistered pen obliged. “Causes” were ignored—and with them all of Norway's intellectuals. Plays appeared and a number of short stories and poems were written. He travelled all over the world and described what he saw and felt while living in various places. He wrote several gentle and witty novels, and it has to be noted that their characters are no longer poor, hungry, desperate or even very young and uncertain about life. Indeed, by 1915, he had completed a two-volume portrayal of a rich and powerful family whose rural, aristocratic ways can no longer survive modern, technological society. Hamsun feared what would happen when the various “classes” of people are less firmly ordered and separated. With Growth of the Soil (1917) he even gave up trying to understand that kind of “social change.” His concern is now with the land, with man the tiller and lonely pioneer who lives in an essentially timeless and constant world. Factories, political upheavals, scientific achievements for the good and the bad—none of them has anything to do with the bleak, inhospitable and unpeopled terrain described by the increasingly patrician man-of-letters.

Hamsun's chief public was in Germany. He was relatively ignored in England and America. Unlike Strindberg he payed little attention to contemporary events, and unlike Munch he lost his early interest in the mind's hard and sometimes terrible struggle for day-to-day coherence and “sanity”—though Munch's barren landscapes are perhaps parallels to Hamsun's later works. Germans responded to his unashamed romanticism, more than his own countrymen did. In Norway he was admired and respected as a world-famous writer; but he made no effort to be loved by his fellow citizens, who reportedly found him personally austere and in a flash capable of being pitilessly derisive.

Like Ezra Pound he became a traitor, though for different reasons and in a very different way. He committed himself briefly and severely to “the new order.” There was none of Pound's furious, apocalyptic writing. Certainly he did not share Pound's economic and ideological “justifications” of fascism. He welcomed Hitler, but he constantly interceded with him for captured members of the Norwegian resistance. He was over eighty when the Nazis came—and a famous man quietly living out his last few years. To many Norwegians his words of support for the Germans were but a final proof of his “reactionary” style of life and his “irrelevant” books. When the war ended he was arrested, jailed, and in keeping with our century's enlightenment, sent off to be queried and observed by a collection of nurses, social workers and, of course, psychiatrists.

All the while—from 1945 to 1948—he wrote down his thoughts and experiences. He was nearing 90, and eventually the doctors would tell a court that he should be let go because he was a “person with permanently impaired faculties.” He was found guilty, heavily fined, and sent home to die. He lived on, though; and in 1949 published what he modestly called “trifles,” all of them written by a man under the constant “examination” of doctors. We now have those trifles in English; they are a series of vivid, keen reflections, and they have been translated with real tenderness by Carl Anderson. Hamsun's title for this last book is On Overgrown Paths, and its haunting self-scrutiny justifies the author's right to claim that not only was he always “sane,” but considerably more intelligent and subtle of mind than his observers. Of course Hamsun never cares to argue with his jailors or doctors. He lets his words show his moods, his sadness, his detachment, his occasional wry humor, his open conversational intimacy with Death. One sees again how stupid, vulgar or evasive it is possible for doctors and lawyers and judges to be. Hamsun wants justice, and certainly preferred explicit condemnation to the humiliating and absurd treatment he received at the hands of his psychiatrists—who took “four months to affix learned labels to every conceivable state of mind I might have been in.” In this, his last testament, he resumes a long abandoned self; once again he is pointing out how insulting and humiliating people can be to other people. No one has done a better job of documenting the simple-minded, abusive and condescending questions a breed of psychiatrists can ask and inflict on their patients.

To the very end Hamsun could recognize banality, and he described it effortlessly but pointedly: “The professor required me to explain my ‘two marriages’ as he put it.” Well, eventually the doctors “explained” more than his marriages. They brushed aside with medical and psychiatric jargon a complicated, defiant man who right under their eyes wrote mournful, cheerful and loving words. At all times he comes across clear and unafraid. He does not deny his past, or even try to excuse it. The paths he took were overgrown—certainly not as clear-cut as those who “evaluated” and judged him. Long before the Nazis arrived to make murder a “civilized” nation's chief purpose, Hamsun had withdrawn from the world—out of choice, not because his mind was “impaired.” He lived long enough to see his personal prejudices and social fears become accessories to a much larger enterprise—the Nazi armies and crematoria. He died late enough to know that even the valleys and fjords he sought in sanctuary were of no avail. The inner and near-mad world that he first described in Hunger came back to plague him in the late evening of his life. Now madness was fantastically institutionalized; it was everywhere and into everything. Yet, the Hamsun who as a youth virtually made a study of madness, of all that is weird and bizarre, was destined to be unprepared for what happened to Norway and to the world from 1940 to 1945. By the end of the war even Quisling and the Nazis ridiculed him. He was a tragic, broken and discredited man who had not an ounce of dignity left. It seems that it was his accusers and his keepers who gave him back his dignity.

Alex Bolckmans (November 1975)

[In the following essay, Bolckmans focuses on the similarities between Tropic of Cancer and Hunger, contending that Hamsun's work served as a model for Miller's novel.]

About Henry Miller's attitude to Knut Hamsun there can be no two opinions. Miller is a great admirer of the Norwegian. Again and again he has made the point.

In The Books in My Life (1952) he appends a list of “The Hundred books Which Influenced Me Most”—a list which had already been published in French in Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale (1951)—and Knut Hamsun is listed there with the entry “His works in general”. In the introduction to the book, Hamsun is included among those five authors of whom Miller says: “I know I shall never say my last word about them” (p. 15). The others are Emerson, Dostoievsky, Maeterlinck and G. A. Henty. In the body of the book Hamsun's name again occurs several times. When, for example, Miller speaks of his earliest reading, he says emphatically: “Hamsun, as I have often said, is one of the authors who vitally affected me as writer” (p. 40). When he draws up a list of the names of authors who “influenced me as a man and as a writer” (p. 124), Hamsun is one of the select company of twenty-eight names. When he writes there of friends and acquaintances, Hamsun is frequently a point of reference: for example p. 172, or p. 259 where one of his friends mentions certain Hamsun books Miller is unfamiliar with. This prompts him to speak of “a pang of regret”, followed by “a touch of joy” at the thought that there was still so much awaiting him “even if I have to read them in Norwegian!” (As far as I know, Miller's knowledge of Norwegian is minimal, perhaps even non-existent.)

Miller also speaks of Hamsun in his essays. At two points in “Reflections on Writing”, where Miller is attempting an explanation of his own style and technique, one finds Hamsun standing in the company of Nietzsche, Dostoievsky and Thomas Mann (a less motley group, indeed, than that which appears in The Books in My Life):

I began assiduously examining the style and technique of those whom I once admired and worshipped: Nietzsche, Dostoievski, Hamsun, even Thomas Mann, whom today I discard as being a skilful fabricator, a brickmaker, an inspired jackass or draught horse. I imitated every style in the hope of finding the clue to the gnawing secret of how to write. Finally I came to a dead end, to a despair and desperation which few men have known, because there was no divorce between myself as a writer and myself as man: to fail as a writer meant to fail as a man.¹

References to Hamsun are also to be found in Miller's letters. In, for example, Letters to Anaïs Nin (1965)—a 379-page selection of his letters to her between 1931 and 1946—Hamsun is mentioned five times, and not merely in passing (pp. 35, 156, 158, 159, and 194). In his correspondence with Durrell, however, Hamsun's name seems not to occur, at least to judge by the index.

Finally, there are the novels themselves, where among the wealth of references to authors' names in general, Hamsun's is also frequently to be found.

It is altogether beyond doubt that Henry Miller is deeply interested in Hamsun, and knows the works well. Doubtless he read Hamsun in German. His upbringing was in German and English, and the general atmosphere—if one accepts the testimony of William A. Gordon²—was German. In any case there were few English translations of Hamsun available in Miller's early years: up to the year 1920 when an English translation of Markens Grøde appeared—Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1919—only Sult and Ny Jord had been translated, in 1899 and 1914 respectively.³ By contrast, all his books were available in German.

Miller's enthusiasm for Hamsun centres chiefly on Mysterier. In The Books in My Life he writes: ‘I can recall with accuracy the first books I singled out to reread” (p. 40). And Mysterier is one of the five he mentions: “Hamsun, as I have often said, is one of the authors who vitally affected me as writer. None of his books intrigued me as much as Mysteries.” Nor does his estimate change in the course of time; later in the same book he says in reference to Mysterier:

Even if, as a writer, I am aware with each rereading of the “defects” or, to be more kind, “the weaknesses” of my favourite author, the man in me still responds to him, to his language, to his temperament, just as warmly.

(p. 212.)

In Miller's letters to Anaïs Nin, three of the five references to Hamsun relate to Mysterier, the most important of which reveals that he had borrowed a copy for her:

Meanwhile, riding the subway, I reread Mysteries which I am holding for you. It swept me off my feet again. And what resemblances there are between Hamsun and myself, His dreams, his crazy stories, his buffoonishness. It's a deceptive book! If you were to pick it up all by yourself and skim thru it, you would probably say it was trash. But believe me, it isn't. And you can't, or mustn't skim it through (sic). He was and still remains one of my idols. I wanted to get Wanderers for you but this is equally representative—if not quite so poetic. But all his force, his passion, his whimsicality, are here. You ought to adore it.⁴

Miller does not speak in detail of Hamsun's other books. He mentions certain titles in passing, e.g. in The Books in My Life where “Pan, Hunger, Victoria, Wanderers, Segelfoss Town, Women at the Pump …” (p. 259) are mentioned; or further on in the book, Sult is again mentioned, but not in relation to the novel itself but Jean-Louis Barrault's dramatization of it.

I do not doubt that—as Gregory Nybø puts it—“Henry Millers beundring for Mysterier værmer et norsk hjerte”;⁵ but it is nevertheless somewhat strange to see the American praising Hamsun's second novel so fulsomely whilst hardly mentioning at all the novel with which Hamsun made his debut: Sult. A more detailed comparison of these books with which Miller and Hamsun made their respective breakthroughs throws up so many parallels that it is difficult to believe that there was not some more causal connection.

One might begin with the genesis of the two works and with a number of external biographical correspondences. Both Tropic of Cancer and Sult are debut novels which established their authors as writers of the first rank in the literary world of the day. Neither men were any longer exactly young when the books appeared: Hamsun was 31, Miller 33. On the other hand, this was for neither man the first entry into literature. Hamsun had already published quite a number of articles, a few short stories, and one or two essay-type publications,⁶ without however establishing for himself a place on the Parnassus of the day. Henry Miller had also previously published a number of articles, had written some prose poems and a novel or two for which he had been unable to find a publisher (e.g. “Clipped Wings”, “This Gentile World”). It was then that the Obelisk Press in Paris, run by an expatriate American Jack Kahane, showed interest in the manuscript of Tropic of Cancer, mainly on account of its more scandalous passages. In a letter to Durrell, Miller himself said about Kahane: “He won't publish a thing unless it has a sensational quality, unless it might be banned in England and America. … He hasn't much taste either I can tell you.”⁷

A further similarity between the two authors relates to the singlemindedness of their determination to be a writer, and the persistence which they brought to the task. Hamsun first tried in Norway, then went to America, then returned to try anew, until at length he succeeded and was able to bid farewell to all those little odd jobs he had taken to keep body and soul together. Similarly Henry Miller had had all sorts of jobs, as is reported in the various “chronologies” in the books about him: “Worked at a great variety of jobs, ranging from father's tailor shop to employment manager of messenger department, Western Union Telegraph Company, 1909-1924.”⁸ Then he determined to become a writer, tried without success in America, came to Europe, returned to America, then back again to Europe where he eventually succeeded in having Tropic of Cancer published. Thus they both found themselves in existential situations of some similarity.

Too much emphasis should not be placed on these details. They relate only to external matters, and may simply be coincidental. In truth, in these two sets of preparatory experiences for authorship there is much that is almost cliché-like: a desperate desire to be a writer, a period travelling abroad to improve one's fortunes, the early hack writing, the readiness to endure economic and social privation in order to reach one's goal, and so on. Other parallels would not be difficult to find.

Two things nevertheless, in my view, lend a certain extra significance to these outward events. In the first place there is the element of social revolt which manifests itself in both their attitudes. They both crave recognition as great writers, but they resist submitting themselves to the literary modes of the day. On the contrary, they conduct themselves like real Bohemians; they set out to “épater le bourgeois”, indeed to create scandal, and make their way into the world of literature by writing scandalous books. In Hamsun's case, this is to some extent true of Sult; and alongside it one thinks also of his lecture tour where he turned fiercely on the older generation of writers. In Miller's case, it was rather the challenging sexual descriptions which he later rationalized in Freudian and Jungian terms, e.g. in “Utinerine Hunger” in the essay collection The Wisdom of the Heart (1941), but which equally led to a considerable “succès de scandale”.

The second thing is that, running like a scarlet thread through many of Miller's comments about himself and his work, is his insistence that the man and the artist must in his case be seen as a unity, and that his books are to be read as explorations of the man and the artist. The books are about the man, he says, and about how the man became what he is. If one combines these comments with the many literary influences on him—which Miller in no way plays down, rather the reverse—there are good reasons for thinking that the man whose experience of life was so similar, i.e. Hamsun, played an important part at the formative stage.

Clearly decisive here is the question of how far Miller was familiar with the details of Hamsun's life, and whether he was himself conscious of any parallel. I have not come across any clear evidence concerning this; and it is unclear to what extent Miller read about the authors he admired. There is nothing on this subject in The Books in My Life, apart from the fact that he also read essayists and critics. The most one can say is that he had opportunities for acquainting himself with the facts of Hamsun's life. In the absence of any conclusive evidence, it is perhaps best not to press these external similarities too far.

But there are other things. There are many inner correspondences between Tropic of Cancer and Sult which make it seem likely that Hamsun's book played a part, consciously or unconsciously, in the emergence of Miller's first novel. Hamsun always insisted that Sult was no novel. What he probably meant by this was that the book had nothing in common with the “usual” kind of realistic novel which was being written at the time, with the sort of wideranging descriptions of men and society which were to be found in Lie, Kielland, Garborg and others. He wanted to make clear that he was offering something new, also on the level of technique. In the same way, Henry Miller writes on the first page of his debut novel:

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty … what you will.⁹

He too is concerned to emphasize that he is coming with something new. He goes even further than Hamsun: it is not a novel, not even a book; it is purely invective.

Both pronouncements are open to dispute. There is no real reason to prevent one characterizing both books as novels. The pronouncements in each case are declarations of literary intent and say nothing about the structural unity found in the books.

In the case of Sult one might define the theme of the novel as being that of the struggle of the artist's “jeg” for moral self-assertion; this struggle leads to defeat in the field of practical living; the “jeg” takes to flight, but has preserved its integrity. Tropic of Cancer treats of the emergence of an artist in the midst of life's chaos; it does not lead to defeat, but the conclusion is nevertheless characterized by ambivalence; the artist's “I” is content where he is, but one of the hero's alter-ego figures, Fillmore, is forced into hasty flight which the hero has arranged. The two novels have identical frameworks of plot and action. Both are urban novels, both treat of man and the big city, of the city's fascination, and of the main character's progression through it. In both instances, the action consists in the hunt for jobs and in erotic adventures.

The organization of the plot on the other hand varies. The structuralizing element in Hamsun's novel is the hero's relationship with the girl called Ylajali; and the four sections may be termed encounter, dreams, association and departure. All the while the hero is job-hunting. All the time he is starving, but is repeatedly saved: in the first place by his fee for a story, in the second by a helping hand, and in the third by an advance which the newspaper editor gives him. Only when the girl he loves sends him charity does he give up and flee. Three times he is able to let himself be rescued without moral compromise. To accept charity from a woman on the other hand would be moral degradation, would turn him into a kind of Irgens figure (from Ny Jord) and this he finds impossible. The hero's erotic adventures are the thin connecting thread in a book of fragmentary scenes which illustrate the twists and turns of starvation fantasy and of his attempts to find a job.

The reverse is the case in Tropic of Cancer. The structuralizing element here is the repeated attempt to find a job. The book consists of fifteen sections of varying length; the sections are untitled and are marked only by the fact that the text starts a new page. The central section is the eighth (pp. 91-150). It tells of Van Norden and his friend Carl and his history with “the rich cunt, Irene” (p. 97) and of the book's first-person hero who gets a regular job as a proof-reader (p. 131). Apart from the teaching job he gets in Dijon and which is recorded in the penultimate section, this is the one real job he gets.

The section can be called central for several reasons. The characters Van Norden and Carl make it clear that they represent different sides of the novel's first-person hero. The story of Irene is a kind of résumé of the book's stories about women. The story about the job is a conflation of the colourful vie de bohème which was lived in those circles. Added to this is the fact that the seven preceding sections deal in large measure with fantasies—fantasies about the books he is going to write, about how one gets hold of something to eat, about the women in his life. The most important are those fantasies about food and how one acquires it (sects. 5 and 6, for example, pp. 49-71). In the last seven sections, on the other hand, it is the stories about women which acquire the greatest importance: the revels in Le Havre (sect. 10), the story of the two street-walkers who are after his money (sect. 11), and about Fillmore and his Russian princess who suffers from gonorrhea (sect. 12).

One can therefore go much further than Kingsley Widmer who claims that “what unity the book has must be discovered mostly in its metaphors”.¹⁰ I would say that the novel has a distinct if not entirely stringent composition. This is perhaps not immediately apparent at first reading, when the likelihood is that one gains a chaotic impression of a collection of anecdotes with no inherent unity apart from the fact that they represent the hero's experiences. The same impression is created by an unsuspecting first reading of Hamsun's Sult. The linking thread of the hero's relationship to Ylajali is not so immediate as to present an initial impression that this is little more than a collection of anecdotes.

In terms of composition, therefore, the two novels have much in common: an anecdotal, apparently chaotic unity with a less than obvious structure, but with similar components: starvation fantasies, erotic adventures, and the artist's need for self-assertion.

The similarity in the choice of motif is also conspicuous—not so much, perhaps, in the main elements, but very strongly marked when it comes to the dreams of becoming a writer. The hero of Sult writes articles, stories, a big drama (“Korsets Tegn” about “en herlig, fanatisk Skjøge”, SV, I, p. 151). The hero of Tropic of Cancer is often described as sitting at his typewriter (pp. 4, 21, 44, etc.); he has “manuscripts, pages scrawled with revisions” (p. 8); he speaks about “my manuscript” (p. 26); he writes articles, and so on.

In the matter of the erotic experiences it is hardly possible to make comparison between Hamsun's highly allusive art and Miller's frequently provocative formulations and overt sexual descriptions. One might point to elements of Eighties bohemianism in Sult: “den sortklædte Dame” (SV, I, p. 104), a demimondaine who takes the hero back home, the whore-romanticism of the planned drama, etc. There is in any case a fair amount of challenging eroticism in Hamsun's novel. Miller's sexual abandonment fits appropriately into the post-war atmosphere of “the gay twenties” and surrealism's “écriture automatique”. Miller does not wish to write “literature”; he simply wishes to talk about himself, and his imagination is fed by the unconscious.¹¹ One can see a parallel here to Hamsun who, shortly after his first novel, published his article on “Om det ubevidste Sjæleliv” in the new periodical Samtiden. Both authors are fundamentally doing the same thing. Here possibly lies the explanation for Miller's lavish praise of Mysterier. Nagel's way of life and his fantasies are perhaps closer to Miller's than those of Sult's hero, even though in essence in the latter case they are the same.

The starvation fantasies on the other hand are much more readily comparable. Both men live in a large city without regular income; they starve, and this leads to fantasies. Hamsun's hero is clearly worse off than Miller's, who occasionally has money sent to him by his wife in America. The more important passages dealing with hunger and food in Miller come in sections 3, 5 and 6, and also in 9. The difference between Hamsun's and Miller's accounts might be summarized by saying that Hamsun writes more about the psychological effects of hunger, whilst Miller's fantasies dwell more on food and on ways of getting free meals.

Alongside these main motifs there are a number of minor ones that show marked similarities. The motif of the attraction of the big city plays an important role in both books. It is with this that Hamsun begins his book: “… i Kristiania, denne forunderlige By som ingen forlater før han har faat Mærker av den … (SV, I, p. 7). He moves around the city; street names are mentioned, and one can often follow the hero in his movements (e.g. SV, I, p. 41). The book ends with his saying “Farvel for denne Gang til Byen, til Kristiania hvor Vinduerne lyste saa blankt fra alle Hjem” (SV, I, p. 177). The city has provided a constant background, has been witness to the hero's despairing struggle and ultimate defeat.

So it is also in Tropic of Cancer. Paris is the background the whole time for the hero's experiences. He moves about the city; street and other names are mentioned which locate the action. On the opening page is the sentence: “It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom” (p. 1). Miller was not sent to Paris; he was there by chance. He means: it must surely have been some higher power which directed me.

Later, in section 9, there is clear reference to the mysterious attraction and charm exerted by the city: “When you've suffered and endured things here it's then that Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls, you might say, …” (p. 155). And later: “An eternal city, Paris … The very navel of the world … And like a cork … one floats here in the scum and wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless. … The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamour of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them …” (p. 164). And a little later, section 11 begins: “Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked” (p. 188). The book ends with the hero sending his friend Fillmore away; he sits over a beer and deliberates whether or not he should leave the city. But the river Seine which “gently winds through the girdle of hills” (p. 286) gives him a “wonderful peace” (p. 287). He feels he must stay where he is.

The main difference is that Miller is much more explicit than Hamsun in the working out of his motifs. But this is a permanent feature of his style. He says what he means in obvious words, whilst Hamsun is content with hints.

Another side motif is the playing with words. In Sult there is the name Ylajali, and the section with the paper cone and the constable (SV, I, p. 54); and the even better known example of the invention of the new word “kuboaa” (SV, I, p. 62). In Tropic of Cancer one finds a similar situation: “I'm lying there on the iron bed … when bango: out pops the word: NONENTITY!” (p. 72). In the section on the Hindu Nanantatee there is also a fragment where the author plays with words:

“The fucking business is bad, Endree,” he says. “But I will give you a word that will always make you lucky; you must say it everyday, over and over, a million times you must say it. It is the best word there is Endree … say it now … OOMAHARUMOOMA!”

“OOMARABOO …”

“No, Endree … like this … OOMAHARUMOOMA!”

“OOMAMABOOMBA …”

“No, Endree … like this …”

(p. 82).

A further side motif—carelessness about money—is one that I would call a typical Hamsun motif: the man who throws his money about, despite the fact that he only came by it through some lucky chance and needs it himself. In Sult at one point the hero is given too much change; he eats a large steak which makes him sick, and then gives the remainder to a woman selling cakes on the street (SV, I, pp. 100-13). There is a similar incident in Miller, where the hero acquires some money, squanders rather too much on a meal and then gives the money to two street girls (sect. 11, pp. 188-97).

Also reminiscent of Hamsun is the story in Miller of Carl who, with a full bladder, pays court to a lady: “He imagines, the cute little prick that he is, that the situation calls for delicacy” (p. 102). This prompts one to recall the incident in Mysterier where Nagel tells of the lady in London whose company he was enjoying, and whom he did not wish to leave even though “Naturens krav” began to assert itself; he finally sees no other solution than to wet his trousers (SV, I, pp. 135-6).

In the light of these examples I think it is not unreasonable to establish a connection between these two novels, and to assume that Sult played a significant part in Miller's writing of Tropic of Cancer.

When one looks at the characters in the two books, one's initial impressions are not immediately similar. Sult treats essentially of one character, the young would-be author who speaks in the first person. None of the other characters in the book is anything much more than a shadow. The black-clad lady is the only one we hear very much about, yet even she is little more than sketched in. All the others glide past; we catch a glimpse of them without learning a great deal about them. In a compositional sense, this is entirely appropriate to the first-person narrative; the reader learns only what the hero experiences.

Tropic of Cancer is also a first-person narrative, in which the “I” is occasionally identified as Henry Miller (e.g. p. 99). But the book is not simply about this man Miller's life in Paris, but also about Van Norden, about Carl, and about Fillmore's. In general terms, they all four of them lead the same bohemian life. Fillmore is the only one with a steady job; the other three write books and live from free-lance journalism. They go out drinking together, and fill their leisure moments with wine and women. It is often difficult to distinguish clearly among the different characters. One might go seeking for small differences, as William A. Gordon does in his book;¹² but my feeling is that it is unnecessary. Miller writes about various characters and apparently divided up his portrayals, but it is clear that the whole book treats of himself and his own experiences in Paris. The other characters in fact illustrate various sides of his own individuality: Van Norden sexuality, Carl authorship, and Fillmore the regularity of work.

Support for this interpretation is to be found on p. 93: “I call him [Van Norden] Joe because he calls me Joe. When Carl is with us he is Joe too. Everybody is Joe because it's easier that way. It's also a pleasant reminder not to take yourself too seriously.” The identities of the different characters are blurred; they are all put on the same basis. When one remembers moreover how preoccupied with self the whole book is, there are quite strong arguments for assuming that in the various characters the author is describing himself.

If one is prepared to acknowledge this, then the ending might also be interpreted rather differently. The 15th and final section treats Fillmore's foolish betrothal to Ginette and his flight to America. Miller actively helps him. I believe one must be allowed to interpret this ending as an expression of the hero's ambivalence in respect of this flight: he can contemplate leaving, but at the same time wishes to remain in Paris. The latter feeling finally conquers.

Such an interpretation comes very close to the conclusion of Sult: the hero has suffered defeat and escapes from the city by ship. Miller's first-person hero does not have to accept actual defeat, but neither has he won; he merely comes to accept the situation. One has to remember that throughout the entire book America is there as a last possibility, e.g. p. 187: “It's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment.” The same thing occurs in Sult where several times ships appear in the background as though to indicate the possibility of flights. (SV, I, pp. 63, 71, 89, etc.)

Finally a word must be said about the style. Miller has himself admitted his debt to Hamsun in the matter of style. This is doubtless meant generally. To demonstrate similarities in detail would require a much more extensive investigation than is possible here. I limit myself to adducing one passage from Miller and a similar one from Hamsun where it seems to me certain parallels are obvious.

The hero of Tropic of Cancer goes on an empty stomach to a concert in Salle Gaveau and reports his experiences:

My mind is curiously alert; it's as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! The notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I've never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It's as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations.

(pp. 87-8)

This passage can be compared with the following passage in Hamsun where the hero of Sult first meets Ylajali:

Saa fremmed som jeg i dette Øieblikk var for mig selv, saa fuldstændig et Bytte for usynlige Indflytelser, foregik intet omkring mig uten at jeg la Mærke til det. En stor brun Hund sprang tværs over Gaten, henimot Lunden og ned til Tivoli; den hadde et smalt Halsbaand av Nysølv. Høiere op i Gaten aapnedes et Vindu i anden Etage og en Pike la sig ut av det med opbrættede Ærmer og gav sig til at pusse Ruterne paa Yttersiden. Intet undgik min Opmærksomhet, jeg var klar og aandsnærværende, alle Ting strømmet ind paa mig med en skinnende Tydelighet som om det pludselig var blit et stærkt Lys omkring mig.

(SV, I, pp. 16-17)

Even if one disregards the merely external similarities in the genesis and related matters of the two novels, there nevertheless remain so many inner parallels that I find it difficult to think they are merely coincidental. I believe that Hamsun's Sult served as a model for Miller's debut novel. Of the way this occurred, however, it is impossible at this stage to say more.

One might nevertheless venture a modest hypothesis. The original text of Tropic of Cancer was much more extensive than the finally printed version. Durrell refers to it a few times in their correspondence.¹³ Gunther Stuhlmann, the editor of the correspondence with Anaïs Nin, mentions in his introduction that the manuscript was three times revised between signing the contract and final publication.¹⁴ It is therefore possible that the revision brought with it a closer relationship to Hamsun's debut novel as Miller became progressively clearer about the similarity. The manuscript was seemingly cut down to about half: Durrell speaks of 600 pages, whilst the “Black Cat” edition has approximately 300 pages.

This recognition of Miller's concrete debt to Hamsun in no way diminishes the American. It is merely a more obvious indication of his literary debt to the European tradition in general.

Notes

1. The Best of Henry Miller, ed. Laurence Durrell (London, 1960), p. 243. The essay first appeared in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941), but had already been printed twice before: in Horizon and in Creative Writing.

2. The Mind and Art of Henry Miller (Louisiania, 1967), p. 10.

3. R. G. Popperwell, “Critical Attitudes to Knut Hamsun, 1890-1969” in Scandinavica, IX (1970), p. 5.

4. A letter of 26 March 1934, p. 158.

5. Knut Hamsuns “Mysterier” (Oslo, 1969), p. 15.

6. A list of Hamsun's publications before 1890 is to be found in O. Øyslebø, Hamsun gjennom stilen (Oslo, 1964), pp. 361-3.

7. Laurence Durrell. Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence (London, 1962), pp. 16-17.

8. Ibid., p. 389.

9. Tropic of Cancer (New York, Grove Press, Black Cat Edition, 1961), pp. 1-2.

10. Henry Miller (New York, 1963), p. 20.

11. Cf. William A. Gordon, op. cit., p. 61.

12. Ibid., p. 99.

13. Ed. cit., pp. 225 and 233.

14. Henry Miller. Letters to Anaïs Nin, ed. and with an introduction by Gunther Stuhlmann (London, 1965), p. 22.