[In the following essay, Ferguson creates an outline of events in Hamsun's life immediately preceding the publication of Hunger, including several anecdotes about Hamsun's relationships with other writers during this time.]

The question of anonymity, and Hamsun's lifelong violent ambivalence towards the concept and consequences of personal fame, brings us at once up against one of the central paradoxes of this strange man. So far, we have met a Hamsun who was a tireless promoter of himself as personality and writer, keenly and noisily airing his views in newspaper debates, bringing himself through personal letters to the attention of editors and writers, famous and influential strangers. The Norwegian memoirist Peter Egge wrote that he first heard of him through a journalist colleague of his, Arne Dybfest, who told him that when in America, he had met in a newspaper office a man ‘who ceaselessly advertised himself, and who was a consummate bluffer both in what he said and what he wrote’. Those repelled by Hamsun's personality found in his decision to publish the Hunger extract anonymously one more example of the calculated coquetry on which his whole approach to his reader was based.

For years Hamsun had been preoccupied with the form and the idea of his name, progressing from Knud Pedersen to Knut Pederson to Knut Pederson Hamsund to Knut Hamsund to Knut Hamsun. He had used this preoccupation with making his name famous as the subject of self-mockery in the short-story “On Tour.” He also experimented with the use of the author's anonymity as part of the technical apparatus of his story “Fragment of a Life.” The tear-jerking short-story from 1884 carried the romantic ascription ‘By a Young, Unknown Writer’. When now in the early winter of 1888 he took a short trip to Sweden, and from there sent to Dagbladet an appreciation of Julius Krog's painting The Queen of Sheba, he signed his review ‘By a Norwegian Author’. Now surely this anonymity was coy, as the anonymity of the Hunger extract was coy, and the purpose behind it all simply to whip up enough curiosity about the author's identity to make the revelation of it a good newspaper story. So, more or less, ran the argument based on coquetry. The Christinia newspapers certainly reacted as though this had been the idea: between 19 and 30 November, Verdens Gang ran a series of five articles, enthusiastically discussing the extract from Hunger and speculating on the identity of the author. In the last article they were able to reveal that he was Knut Hamsun, ‘currently living in America, from where, as our readers will recall, he has on several occasions sent articles to us’.

Hamsun's whole style of authorship, his insistence on ambiguity, his rejection of certainty, his juggling with lies that turn out to be true, and truths that turn out to be lies, his recognition and reproduction of the calculating nature of the mind's voice, has always repelled certain readers, and created in them a distrust of Hamsun both as man and as writer. His grimly cheerful description of the aim of his unpublished short story “A Liar,” from 1886, as demonstrating that lying is not sin but talent, shows well enough how easy it is to face the phenomenon of Hamsun the man with suspicion. We shall see, throughout the 1890s, how violently his attitude towards the truth affected his contemporaries. However, in the specific case of Hunger, the small fact that Verdens Gang described him as ‘currently living in America’ suggests that Hamsun was not in any way involved in the leaking of his ‘story’ to the press. Even more important than this, there are contained in letters to friends and acquaintances concerning both the partial and the complete appearance of Hunger, explicit statements that seem to express a genuine ambivalence towards the business, not merely of being famous, but of being famous as the dreadful and shocking author Knut Hamsun. Resuming his correspondence with his honoured and trusted friend Frydenlund after the break of his second American trip, Hamsun apologises for not having written, ‘but you know, one feels a little sensitive about it, when things seem to be turning out badly, and so one does not write’. He then goes on to report that at last he has been having some success:

The piece that was in Ny Jord is actually just a part of a whole. I had to publish it early for the sake of the money. The whole will consist of a series of analyses, and will be published in the autumn. I have a publisher for it already. But it will be published anonymously. So you must not mention it to anyone. I would have given a great deal not to have been revealed as the author when that extract was published. Some wretched Swedish newspapers leaked the news first, and that was that. But I will never admit publicly that it was I who wrote it. You know, it is quite something to reveal oneself as nakedly as I did there. And in the remaining parts of the book it will be worse. But I permit myself to think it will cause a nice little stir when it comes.¹

The confusion of emotions is characteristic: deep down, Hamsun did not know whether he was ashamed or proud of what he had done. The tensions that this uncertainty produced were to give rise to much of the sense of strangeness and inspired disharmony of the full version of the novel, and were to remain vital elements of his literary personality.

Once it became public knowledge that Hamsun was the author of the piece in Ny Jord things began happening very swiftly around him in Copenhagen. He was introduced to the literary world of cafés and parties by Erik Skram and his wife, the Norwegian novelist Amalie Skram. The Danish Erik was active in defence of young Norwegian writers generally at this period, when many of his countrymen were beginning to react against the craze for Norwegian art and artists which had persisted in the capital throughout the 1880s. This was in part a cult of the Norwegians as the pure, uncorrupted members of the family of Scandinavian peoples, which received further impetus from the European successes of Ibsen and Bjørnson. Even though it was fading by the early 1890s, it undoubtedly benefited the careers of younger Norwegian writers too, like Hamsun and his contemporary, Gabriel Finne.²

Hamsun began to frequent the circles that met in the café Bernina, where Norwegian expatriates like Kielland and Thaulow, Garborg, and Hans Jaeger had previously assembled groups of artists and writers around them. He found himself lionised, and invited out to parties. He spent Christmas with the Skrams, and was invited to spend New Year with the prominent Winkel-Horn family, but refused, feeling already that the frantic socialising, though necessary for his career, was keeping him from his work. Already the whole circus seemed slightly ridiculous to him; he was sure, he wrote to Skram, that he did not deserve the honour of being invited to the Winkel-Horns, and with a jib at the current hysteria over Fridtjof Nansen's achievement, added that it would all be much more understandable if one happened to be someone who had just walked over the polar cap.³

The new life was costing him money, and in spite of the fact that he at once treated established writers like the Skrams as literary equals, he was still living the material life of the character from Hunger, in a loft ‘nine ells from the moon’. The publisher Philipsen, on the advice of Edward Brandes, had already advanced Hamsun 100 kroner towards the full version of Hunger, but most of this had gone on a short holiday trip to Sweden in the autumn, and by December he was broke again. He sat down and wrote a long letter to Johan Sørensen, a rich publisher whose ambition was to produce cheap editions of great books for the education of the masses. He introduced himself as the author of the Hunger story, and asked for practical help. Sørensen replied enclosing 200 kroner within a week of receiving the letter. Once again, Hamsun's faith in the patriarch had been rewarded. In three more letters, all in this same month of December, he thanked his patron, and as in the short series of letters to Zahl some ten years earlier, described graphically and persuasively his faith in himself and his hopes for the future. In these letters Hamsun laid great stress on his determination to be true to himself:

I do not seriously believe that Philipsen will try to put pressure on me as regards the form and content of my future production. In any case, I would not agree to this. If any attempt is made to prevent me from writing the way I believe I ought to write, then I shall consider myself morally free from Philipsen.⁴

Philipsen had indeed given Hamsun a mild warning against ignoring ‘the masses’ in his writing, explaining that without their interest and support, it was not possible for an author to live. But Hamsun was not interested in writing for ‘the masses’. He was quite obsessed by the desire to pursue the psychological literature he had started to explore with Hunger. It was the inner world that fascinated him, the depths and darknesses, the bright places, the cities and mountains, the remote universes and small flowers of his own mind.

But in December 1888 the finished novel was still eighteen months and a great deal of irrelevant journalism away. Yet time and again the mood of the book suddenly bursts out into private letters, showing how constantly it was in his mind. One detail from a letter to Sørensen went directly into the book, the observation that ‘for the past six weeks I have had to write with a cloth bound round my left hand, because I could not stand the touch of my own breath on my skin’. He describes also how he has to strike his safety matches under the table, because he cannot stand to see the flaring of the match. He felt himself that these sensitivities were absurd and ridiculous; they were nonetheless real, and a vital part of the swarming mass of trivia which made up the mosaic of reality he was determined to try to record.

A second large sum of money, boldly begged from Sørensen in December, enabled Hamsun to make the symbolic move away from the slum quarters on St Hans Gade to a new address at Number 25, Nordvestvej, and to clothe himself properly. He was particularly pleased to be able to buy decent clothes: Copenhagen University students had invited the new sensation to lecture at their Union Building. ‘Only intelligent people will be there’, he wrote to Sørensen, with a touching faith in the intelligence of university students, ‘so it is good that I will not have to feel ashamed on account of my clothes.’

He gave two lectures, the first on 15 December, and the second on 12 January 1889. He had originally been invited to speak on the American philosopher Henry George, but saw his chance to turn the occasion rather more to his own advantage and suggested instead that he lecture on his views on America, based on his personal experiences there. These were in violent contrast to the optimistic views of America usually presented to the Scandinavian public, either by a writer like Ibsen in The Pillars of Society, or by such as Bjørnson who had been on lecture tours there, and written extensively in the press of his good impressions of the New World. Ibsen had never been to America, it was only a symbol of freshness to him; and Bjørnson's America was a place of civic receptions, bunches of flowers and brass bands at the local railway stations of small towns where his arrival was regarded as a major event. Hamsun's, however, was the working man's experience of America, a harsh place where anonymity, insecurity, rootlessness and poverty formed the common fate. It was the land of disappointment and disillusionment which had sucked his brother Peter under, and he was deeply cynical about it as the society of the future. He also felt to a high degree the Old World's arrogant contempt for the cultural aspirations of the New, an anti-democratic stance that went down extremely well in a Copenhagen still buzzing from Georg Brandes' seminal lectures there on Nietzsche in May. The response to Hamsun's first lecture was tremendous. Already the publisher Philipsen realised that he had a controversialist of rank on his hands, and without waiting to hear the second lecture he commissioned Hamsun to write a book on America.

Hamsun worked at breakneck speed on his commission throughout the winter and early spring of 1889, for the moment setting aside the completion of Hunger. He had two full sections of it still to write while the beginning of it was already going through the printers, but managed to finish it in time for publication on 3 March 1889. The speed with which he produced the book reflects three things: the fact that it was based on material and attitudes familiar to him from his two Copenhagen lectures plus the farewell lecture in Minneapolis in March 1888; the fact that he had to or chose to write most of it without troubling the reference books; and the fact that he did not really want to write it. Writing about America and playing cultural historian bored him, and kept him from his real work. But having contracted to do the book for money, he made sure that he got it out of the way as quickly as possible. He called the book On the Cultural Life of Modern America, and prefaced it with a motto—‘Truth is neither objectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity’—which is at once both justification and excuse for what follows. For as well as a book about America, it is a very entertaining book about Hamsun, crackling with irrational prejudices, some hilarious, some considerably less so. America pleases him not. Not its politics, not its language, not its women, not its sensationalist press, not its crass materialism, not its analphabetism, not its literature, not its painting, nor yet its theatre.

As one might imagine from the circumstances of its composition, On the Cultural Life of Modern America contains many fine examples of waffle. This, for example, on the famous actor Edwin Booth: ‘One can see him intoxicated. But he acts superbly, as long as he does not lapse into carelessness.’ It also contains striking observations: he writes of American painting, that ‘Where American literature speaks with dashes, American art speaks with clothes.’ He sees acutely some of the absurdities and incongruities in the American version of individual freedom; an immigrant's tobacco knife will be taken from him at the customs, he observes, but as for his revolvers, he is welcome to keep both of them if he wishes, ‘for the revolver is the national murder weapon’. He despises what he sees as the ‘despotic’ freedom of democracy, its tendency to level down and encourage a mob response to issues and events. Returning to a matter in which he had felt a personal engagement, he discusses the anarchist bombings in the Chicago Haymarket in 1886. The mob's unfocused clamour for revenge seems contemptible to him ‘when not one in a hundred, not one in a thousand, knew what Anarchism was’. The subsequent trials demonstrate only too clearly what it is that most frightens an American—‘those crimes that do not occur every day, those that the mob is incapable of understanding—the crimes of ideals’.

But, he asks, what else can one expect of a land where the highest morality is money, where the meaning of a work of art is reduced to its cash value, where Woman calls the tune, ‘tending her nerves in the morning, painting works of art until two o'clock, reading Uncle Tom's Cabin until six o'clock, and strolling in the evening until eight’? There is practically nothing he will admit to liking about the country, and had there been, he would have been obliged to leave it out, since the aim of the book is so very clearly to provoke. Writing of American literature, for example, Hamsun avoids any extended discussion of a writer whom he adored, and learnt much from, Mark Twain, and concentrates instead on a lengthy attack on Walt Whitman (‘A rich human being rather than a talented poet. He can write, of course; but he cannot feel.’), and a treatment of Ralph Waldo Emerson which is mainly a critique of Emerson's Unitarian philosophy.⁵

Discussing the mixed nature of American society, he writes that ‘cohabitation with the blacks was forced upon the people. Inhumanity stole them away from Africa where they belong’, a statement that would have pleased Marcus Garvey himself. He also describes the war against slavery as in reality a war against aristocracy, and draws attention to the hypocrisy of capitalists in the northern states who maintained immense landholdings in the south—what kind of morality was that for a democrat? But from such discussible points he veers suddenly away, and concludes that ‘Instead of founding an intellectual élite, America has established a mulatto stud-farm.’

There are certain passages in the book, notably the entire last section entitled ‘Black Skies’, in which the writing itself reaches heights of visionary intensity and the kind of hallucinated surrealism one associates with Céline and Henry Miller; but generally speaking it descends too often into adolescent crudity, with what he hopes are shocking jibes about ‘black half-apes’, to sustain any degree of sympathetic attention from a modern reader.

‘Childish’ was the word Hamsun himself always used on the several occasions in later life in which he dissociated himself from the book.⁶ It does not appear in his Collected Works, and while he lived he refused to allow it to be republished. He knew too well that in it he was still consciously playing the role of enfant terrible, the brilliant brat who sees through the emperor's clothes, the wise child who, along with drunks, always tells the truth. And it was a role he was getting tired of.

Even so, he made a conscientious effort to promote the book, with copies despatched with requests for reviews to critics at home and abroad. He hoped that it might create a scandal of the kind that had operated so favourably for Christian Krohg's novel Albertine in 1885. In letters to friends he indulged himself in a scenario in which Bjørnson would signal a general attack on him by denouncing the book, with Georg Brandes and Arne Garborg jumping to his defence and a great debate ensuing.⁷ But Bjørnson remained silent, as did Garborg.

Brandes, who had heard Hamsun's second lecture in January, and had seen and lavishly praised the book in proof copy, reviewed it for Verdens Gang on 9 May. His original enthusiasm had waned, and now he praised the author's talent as potential rather than actual. Hamsun hoped for a translation into German, and a second edition, but his real opinion of the book always remained that it was unworthy of him. He did not regard it as ‘real’ writing, and complained to Philipsen of how he constantly had to curb inspiration when he felt it rising up in him. He was in fact almost finished with his American hackwork, and after two more articles in 1890 and 1891 he dropped the whole subject for the next twenty years. What pleased him most about the book, naturally, was the money. He received 960 kroner, far and away his biggest payday to date; and, as he proudly wrote to Victor Nilsson, the same advance as both Ibsen and Bjørnson received.

One of the book's fans—and it did have fans, and continued to do so—was August Strindberg. Hamsun was at this time quite obsessed by Strindberg. His letters to the Swede Nilsson in America are full of gossip about him, wondering tales of his mercurial personality, his expressed fears of incipient lunacy, his prodigious industry (‘he makes Balzac look like a dwarf’). He had already sent to Strindberg an article written on him in America and published in English on 20 December 1888 in the magazine America, though the text had been so mutilated and ‘edited’ that he half-expected an angry reply from Strindberg. When now he came across On the Cultural Life of Modern America, Strindberg was impressed. He was another like Hamsun, a man willing to express his opinion on anything under the sun—and in his case, on most of the things beyond it—and the book's violent subjectivity appealed to him. In April 1890 he wrote to Brandes that ‘all the opinions I've suffered half to death for over the last five years’ were ‘openly and frankly expressed’ in Hamsun's book.⁸

Hamsun was already very conscious of the fact and form of his growing fame. He wanted to meet the writers he admired, and had written to Arne Garborg asking him to put him in touch with Strindberg's friend and ally in Nietzsche, Ola Hansson. He was also keen to meet Strindberg himself—but not yet. He wrote to Victor Nilsson in January 1889:

I look forward to meeting Strindberg one day. I was invited to a party one evening at which he was to be present, but I did not go. I am proud, in my way.

Hamsun realised that Hunger was the key to his whole future. He wanted fame, and the respect of the Strindbergs and Ola Hanssons; but only the deserved fame, the warranted respect, that the writing of an exceptional novel would bring him. His wish to be famous, though compulsive to the point of obsession, was nevertheless not the desire for fame at any price, and he was not deluded by the intense local fame created in Copenhagen and Christiania by his magazine and newspaper articles, and his hastily written demolition job on American civilisation, into thinking that he was now worthy of Strindberg's attention.⁹

In the Spring of 1889 Hamsun returned to Norway. Johan Sørensen had prepared a room for him at his house in Fagerstrand where he could write in peace, and sent his assistant Olaf Huseby to meet Hamsun off the Copenhagen train at Christiania station on Good Friday. Sørensen took his duties as patron seriously, and when Hamsun arrived was able to inform him that he had arranged a house-party consisting of the historian Ernst Sars, and the newspapermen Lars Holst and Ola Thommessen, three of the most influential names in contemporary Norwegian cultural life. Hamsun and Sørensen talked alone for a while, and suddenly a full-scale quarrel erupted: Hamsun had dared to speak his mind about Sørensen's household gods, Bjørnson and a language reformer named Knud Knudsen. Hamsun admired and respected Bjørnson, but was never guilty of the idolatry so many of his fellow countrymen practised towards him; it was typical of Hamsun's courage, and his almost fanatical insistence on independence, that instead of retreating when he saw that he was treading on his benefactor's toes, he trod all the harder. Sørensen was not a man used to being crossed, and the two men argued long into the night and Hamsun eventually left the house rather than sleep the night there. He returned the next day to collect his suitcase, and that was the end of the association with Sørensen.¹⁰

In June he moved into a flat on the fourth floor at Number 18 Torvgaden, just around the corner from the Grand Hotel on Karl Johans gate, the ‘Bernina’ of the Norwegian capital, where famous and would-be famous artists met to drink and talk. Still he did not finish Hunger. The lure of controversy proved too great for him, and over the next few months he produced a number of newspaper articles, most of them on non-literary topics, which performed the undeniably useful function of making his name better known and providing him with a small independent income.

The first of these was an article for Dagbladet on Fridtjof Nansen, whose achievement in walking east to west across Greenland had made him a national hero in Norway. Nansen's popularity never penetrated to the Christiania smart-set; they felt that his habit of going about the streets of the capital ostentatiously wearing his ‘famous explorer's clothes’ was in poor taste. Hamsun's attitude to what he called the ‘hysteria’ surrounding Nansen was also one of superior disapproval. For him, the writers were the aristocrats of a society, the natural recipients of its highest forms of praise, status and attention. He did not so much begrudge the explorer his fame as find it incomprehensible and slightly ridiculous. The fame of sportsmen affected him in the same way. He called the whole business ‘humbug’, a word that was to whizz around his own head like a boomerang over the next few years.¹¹

His next target was Ibsen. In August 1889 Hamsun reviewed August Lindberg's production of Ghosts at the Christiania National Theatre for Dagbladet, and the article appeared on the front page—as indeed everything he wrote appeared on the the front page in the year of his Norwegian breakthrough. Here he voiced for the first time—at least publicly—the aesthetic and artistic doubts about Ibsen which he developed as the subject of one of the lectures he was to deliver on his sensational national tour of 1891. This early attack on a man who was already, like Bjørnson, a demi-god among his countrymen, was controlled. He praised some of the acting, shook his head over Fru Alving's relentless capability, and questioned some of Ibsen's dialogue:

There are one or two lines in the last Act that I do not quite understand, although they apparently went down very well in England and Germany. To mention but one, Osvald's line ‘Mother, give me the sun’.¹²

Hamsun was being ironic: he understood the lines only too well. He found Ibsen simplistic and obvious, and was baffled and irritated by his reputation as a difficult writer. He felt that Ibsen had betrayed his talent in switching from the verse-dramas of his early period like Brand and Peer Gynt to the dogged prose realism of plays like Ghosts, a possibility that Ibsen himself hinted at in his last play, When We Dead Awaken.¹³

Next up: Lars Oftedal. Oftedal was a pietist politician, editor, and moral agitator, one of the most feared men in Norwegian politics. Hamsun had an old score to settle with him: he was the man whose teachings had captured the dark imagination of his uncle Hans Olsen up in Hamarøy in the 1860s. Now, with re-elections to the Norwegian parliament looming, Hamsun produced a series of articles for Dagbladet which he hoped would destroy Oftedal's chances. ‘I shall make Oftedollops of the man’, he wrote gleefully to Erik Frydenlund.

The eleven articles¹⁴ appeared throughout October 1889, and they gave Hamsun a taste of something that was to be rare for him in the coming decade—widespread public popularity. He fully expected—perhaps even hoped—to be sued by Oftedal, for the style was as ever personal and unashamedly subjective. But Oftedal did not. Instead, the articles were read with approval, and his name noted in circles which would not normally have cared about a writer. It was also one of the few times in his life in which he publicly and unequivocally stood on the Left.

The amount of attention the articles attracted induced a small publisher in Bergen, Mons Litleré, to publish them in book form in December. Hamsun received a further 250 kroner for this, and the number of works published before the full version of Hunger appeared now rises to five. Lars Oftedal continued to have a local, Scandinavian reputation: the Danish writer Jeppe Aajaer recalled¹⁵ that in the 1890s it came ‘crashing like a rock through the windows of the mission houses’, and, in writing his own Master and Mission against pietism in 1897, used Hamsun's book as his model.¹⁶

In September Hamsun took a short holiday in Valdres. He warned Erik that he would be bearing with him a number of eccentric gifts—hats ‘the like of which you have never seen—one for each of us. Individually styled to accommodate the unique architecture of our heads to my express specifications.’ He must have enjoyed himself up there—he managed to lose a short story about ‘an extremely unusual horse’ which he wrote in the Valdres cariole.¹⁷ It turned up in time to make the Christmas Eve number of Dagbladet, a marvellous comic vignette about a horse making a fool of a man.

Back in the capital he moved again, in November, to a fourth-floor apartment at Number 3 Waldemar Thranes gate. The flat cost him forty kroner a month, and was a decent distance from the centre of town and the attractions of the Grand Café; he was now quite determined to get Hunger finished. Bjørnson had offered him free board and lodging at his house at Aulestad for a year, but he turned it down, knowing that with a human whirlwind like Bjørnson around he would never get his writing done. He was also receiving repeated offers of the job of theatre director at Bergen's National Stage, the second-most important theatre in Norway after Christiania's National Theatre. This was a post both Ibsen and Bjørnson had occupied in their time, and the temptation must have been considerable. And at 4000 kroner a year, the money was tremendous. Nevertheless, he appears to have turned it down with a minimum of soul-searching, explaining to friends that he did not know enough about the theatre to take it on. Another reason may have been that he feared further postponements on Hunger.

Hamsun worked hard throughout the winter, putting together the scraps of the novel he had been assembling ever since the autumn of 1888. Finally, in the spring of 1890, with the end of the book in sight, he moved back to Copenhagen, and just as he had done with On the Cultural Life of Modern America, wrote the final sections of it while the earlier parts were already going through the printers. The full version finally appeared on 5 June 1890.

Hunger is one of the great novels of urban alienation, on a par with Kafka's Castle, Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, and Rilke's Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, and what gives it its peculiar authority is that it was in many ways Hamsun's own story. In writing it he drew on the experiences he underwent during his two most desperate periods in Christiania in the winters of 1880-81 and 1885-86, and probably also drew on the experiences of his winter in Chicago in 1886-87. The many small correspondences of fact and fiction—the narrator's visit to the castle, for example, and his address at Tomtegaten II—as well as the autobiographical details that crop up in letters to Erik Frydenlund and Johan Sørensen, indicate that the book is Hamsun's self-portrait in fiction. From America Victor Nilsson wrote asking him whether the events described in Hunger had really happened to him: ‘Yes, all of it, and much more, right here at home’, replied Hamsun.

The novel describes a period of months in the life of a young stranger who lives in Christiania while trying to make a name for himself as a writer. The absurdly ambitious nature of the subjects he writes about—appreciations of Correggio, denunciations of Kant, a verse drama set in the Middle Ages—means that he is rarely in luck with the editors of the newspapers where he tries to sell his stuff. Most of his time is spent in the effort to keep body and soul together. Always hungry, often homeless, he wanders the streets of Christiania, an emaciated human consciousness in rags, looking for work, begging for food, becoming involved in a series of preposterous encounters with policemen, tramps and whores, strange beings who are nevertheless not half so strange as he. Like the protagonist of “On Tour,” he is pitifully and absurdly keen to keep from a surrounding world always perceived as hostile the catastrophic extent of the gap between the pretensions and the realities of his life. It's a grim theme, but the novel's great triumph is that in Hamsun's careful hands, it doesn't finally seem grim at all. As the hero's vivid torments continue, we begin gradually to suspect something that Hamsun undoubtedly wanted us to suspect; namely that what looks at first like a dogged inability to do anything about his plight is in reality a dogged refusal to act. He does not in actual fact want release, and is in some perverse way enjoying his predicament, savouring to the full the bizarre sensations of homelessness, hunger, insecurity, and the attendant forms of isolation, social, cultural, sexual, economic. We get the curious feeling that the whole thing is willed; a life-game that the hero is playing, to see how far it can go, how far he can let it go, how low he can sink, how long suffer. It is a prolonged flirtation with death and madness which the narrator can indulge in only because he knows he has the strength to withdraw from the game before it claims him. The novel has no plot—plot is replaced by this tension created by the struggle between the narrator's strong mind and the attracting forces of total personal annihilation. Few things are better suited to break down and render anonymous a human personality than prolonged want of the most primitive kind—want of love, money, warmth, food, a place of one's own—and the narrator's secret victory, always achieved, is that he remains hugely and quixotically himself through the worst deprivations and humiliations that befall him. When on the last pages he joins a ship bound for England, and sails away both from the novel and the city with which he has wrestled so desperately, it is clearly no retreat, but only a temporary withdrawal.

Hamsun was proud of the book. Fifteen years and a great deal more disillusionment later, he described it with a wry fondness as ‘My first book, written in the days when the way of the writer seemed to me the most honourable in the world.’¹⁸ Yet even at the time, he was aware that the book had faults—eight of them, ‘or rather, lacks’,¹⁹ as he specified on more than one occasion, leaving one with the curious impression that he had worked from some kind of list of psychological states to be described. We get the same impression from a comment to Georg Brandes which also shows again how extremely competitive Hamsun's attitude towards literature was: ‘If we were to count them’, he wrote, ‘I do not think that we would find a greater number of spiritual fluctuations in for example Raskolnikov²⁰ or in Germinie Lacerteux than in my book.’²¹ On several occasions he protested vigorously that Hunger was ‘not a novel’, and ought not to be treated as such. ‘The book plays on just one string’, he pointed out, ‘but tries to draw hundreds of notes from it—no doubt with a varying degree of success, naturally.’²²

The book's fame and its status as one of the central texts of modern European and American literature confirm that he achieved in fact a consistently high degree of success. Save for a few external details, such as the presence of horse-drawn carriages in the streets, Hunger remains eerily and thrillingly undated. Hamsun's concern, after all, was with the workings of his mind, and in Hunger he produced perhaps the first novel to make consciousness itself a hero. In so doing he signalled the voyage inwards towards introspection which in our century probably reaches its furthest point in Samuel Beckett's work, via Kafka, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.²³ The achievement was largely the result of his own talent and genius; yet a look at the literary background in Europe against which Hamsun produced his novel indicates that he was also, inevitably, a child of his own time.

The sensation created by Hunger on its publication—and its enthusiastic critical reception among writers rather than critics—reflects a literary world in a process of dramatic change affecting every artistic capital of Europe, and the figure of Georg Brandes was central to this process of change and development. A Dane who was also a European, he made it his business to introduce the most important European thinkers to Danish minds. In his Main Currents in 19th Century Literature, published through the 1870s, he had written on Taine, Renan, John Stuart Mill, and called for a utilitarian literature of social debate. The rise of Ibsen and Bjørnson was closely connected with his championing of them, and especially with the spread of their reputation and influence across northern Europe. Then in the 1880s Brandes came across Nietzsche. The two corresponded, and Brandes became convinced of Nietzsche's genius. The series of lectures he delivered on him in Copenhagen in May 1888 effectively signalled Nietzsche's ‘breakthrough’ as a major philosophical and literary influence on the younger generation of European writers. These lectures served in a sense to crystallise for literature a host of large and small indices which had been confusedly abroad in European literary circles since the middle of the century. This was the sense that somehow, somewhere, something had been shattered. Between them, Darwin and Nietzsche put an end to God and the old certainties. This ‘shattering’ of the soul in a curious way echoes the shattering of the atom by physicists, and Strindberg was one of the first to try to accept and reflect and live out these new understandings. His preface to the published version of his play Miss Julie in 1888 sounded the keynote of the new vision. In it, he wrote of ‘modern characters, living in an age of transition more urgently hysterical at any rate than the age which preceded it’, and as a response to this claimed to have created in his play characters who were ‘split and vacillating’. He described the human soul as something ‘patched together’. This essay had a particularly strong effect on Hamsun, whose own theoretical justifications for his writing often make points similar to those made here, notably in the aversion to the idea of ‘characters’, whether on stage or in a novel, who are in fact merely clichés, exhibiting Taine's ‘dominant characteristic’, and repeating at regular intervals short catch-phrases or exclamations by means of which audiences and readers might readily recognise them.

‘Aristocratic radicalism’ was Brandes' term for the new stance, a term embraced by Nietzsche himself. It struck a chord at once among his audience of young poets and novelists bored by the fustian literature of naturalism and social utilitarianism, and ushered in a decade of proudly individualistic and defiantly ‘useless’ writing. Hamsun arrived back from America just too late to hear Brandes' lectures in May 1888, but Nietzsche continued to be the talk of the Bernina in Copenhagen and the Grand in Christiania. He was ‘in the air’, as Dostoevsky was in the air, and Hamsun could not have failed to pick up the ideas. In view of his sympathies for Fascist regimes in the 1930s and during the Second World War, it is natural to wonder to what extent he was influenced by Nietzsche in his youth, and whether this influence was decisive. Certainly the concept of ‘aristocratic radicalism’ must have appealed to him; deprived of the satisfaction of being a ‘real’ aristocrat by reason of his social background, his own unusually strong personality, and not least his achievement in writing a masterpiece like Hunger seemed to demand some sort of explanation. The kind of problems Hamsun had to face merely in being Hamsun were probably unusual: physically strong, brave, handsome, clever and quick of mind—the possession of such qualities can easily destroy a person. Where one is always effortlessly superior, the fun disappears; one ceases to bother to compete at all, but rests in the certain knowledge of one's mere superiority. These problems of the laxness of arrogance were something Hamsun had successfully surmounted. In seeking therefore to understand his own personality and success, the idea of the ‘born’ or ‘natural’ aristocrat implicit in Nietzsche's teaching, the concept of the ‘spiritual aristocrat’ must have seemed to provide an ideal explanation. Or perhaps more correctly, an ideal intellectual justification for something he had known instinctively all along—that in terms of the game of life, in terms of the rat race of society, he was born ‘better’ than the others. There were few, after all, who could have made the journey—largely unaided—from a dirty little farm in Hamarøy to the lecture hall at the Students' Union in Copenhagen. Nietzsche did matter to him, but hardly taught him anything he didn't already know.

When the novel was published, Hamsun set about its energetic defence and promotion. Reviews by Irgens Hansen in Bergen, and Carl Ewald and Edward Brandes in Copenhagen pleased him, and his friend Erik Skram, in the Bergen magazine Samtiden and the Danish Tilskueren, wrote enthusiastic appreciations of the book. But the one review he would really have liked—Georg Brandes'—he did not get. He presented Brandes with a copy, and perhaps rushed him for a response—‘you cannot have read enough of the book yesterday afternoon, and not enough in context’, he retorted when Brandes described the book as ‘monotonous’. The long letter of defence which this criticism fired off tells us a lot about what Hamsun was trying to do as a writer:

I have been thinking about what you said about my book. I had not expected such a view from you. In the first place, the action takes place in the space of just a few months, and in such a limited space of time not a great deal more usually happens than that which I have described; secondly, I have avoided all the usual stuff about suicidal thoughts, weddings, trips to the country and dances up at the mansion house. This is too cheap for me. What fascinates me is the endless motion of my own mind, and I thought I had described in Hunger moods whose very strangeness should strike one as being precisely not monotonous. …

My book must not be considered as a novel. There are enough authors who write novels when they write about hunger—from Zola to Kielland. They all do it. And if it is a lack of the ‘novelistic’ that possibly makes my book monotonous, then that is in fact a recommendation, since I had made up my mind quite simply not to write a novel.²⁴

Hamsun was noticeably more guardedly technical in his discussions of the book with literary men like Brandes, and in contrast to his attitude towards friends like Frydenlund and Nilsson seemed anxious to play down the autobiographical element. In letters to the Swedish critic Gustaf af Geijerstam he carefully distanced himself from ‘the man in the book’ and ‘the I of the book’. The general reaction of shocked excitement which Hunger created among the reading public at home in Norway must have confirmed him in his belief that he had succeeded at last in his ambition to produce something startlingly new and unusual in literature. Technically he had achieved this by his artful confusion of two forms, the autobiography and the novel. In succeeding experiments with the new genre over the course of the next ten years he was to discover that the public found this deliberate confusion of fact and fiction teasing, not a little disorienting, at times downright enraging, but always—fortunately for him—fascinating.

He was nervous and overworked after the last strenuous spurt on Hunger. and with the anodyne of hard work removed he felt loneliness keenly. Half-jokingly he asked Erik Frydenlund to look out for a woman for him, complaining that he was tired of travelling around without a single person he could turn to, without a home or any permanent place, from hotel to hotel, from country to country. He knew that he should rest, but felt that he could not afford it. He had received 2100 kroner for Hunger, but was spending money ‘like a pig’. As he turns over in his mind the possibilities for the summer, for the first time the idea of a trip to the near East comes up; he wanted to travel to Constantinople, a two-month sea voyage via Antwerp, Tunisia, Piraeus, Salonika and Odessa.²⁵ This is the first direct expression of a more than passing interest in the Orient—which in those days meant the near East—an interest that was probably fostered by his reading of Confucius and certain Buddhist scriptures which he would have found in Kristofer Janson's library in the course of his energetic progress towards self-education. Hamsun writes of this trip as though it had been firmly planned in his mind, and only circumstances had contrived to put it off for what he described as ‘at least a couple of months’. In fact, he had to wait another ten years before he made it. He lived on the wing during these days, constantly changing his address, making and abandoning plans with a bewildering, whimsical rapidity in which we recognise again the character portrayed in Hunger.

He looked round for a small place where he could settle down for a few months quite anonymously and work; he had a collection of ‘curious short stories’ which he was hoping to add to and publish in time to catch the Christmas book market in Christiania. Sometime in June he moved into a hotel room in the small Norwegian coastal town of Lillesand,²⁶ on the south coast between Kristiansand and Grimstad. From here he continued his efforts to promote Hunger; the first edition of 2000 was selling poorly after the original sensation, and his publisher Philipsen was only ‘reasonably pleased’. He quickly abandoned his idea for a shortstory collection and thought of another novel: ‘I'll write a new book which will stir things up for the four prophets here at home, so help me God I will’, he wrote to Erik Skram in Denmark.²⁷ It was the idea of the competition that thrilled and inspired Hamsun most in the early days, the thought of killing kings and capturing citadels. It was not enough for him just to write and be published—nothing short of a complete victory over all other writers, sealed by some kind of crowning ceremony, was going to be enough for him.

His room had a large balcony overlooking the sea and the Saltholmen lighthouse,²⁸ with numerous potted plants and creepers, and he spent hours walking back and forth here trying to get started on the new book. A neighbour whom he described as a ‘mad musician’ disturbed his concentration with his violin playing. Hamsun soon found that he did not like the town. ‘Fillesand’ he called it punningly—Ragtown—and complained that it was a wretched little town whose only inhabitants were one priest and a lame tailor. The pleasures of the graveyard, which had brought him such comfort when a boy in Uncle Hans' house, and which had often soothed him during his worst times in Christiania,²⁹ exerted their old attraction on him here in Lillesand, and he frequently took the walk to Molands Church where he would ‘amuse himself’ by reading the different inscriptions on the gravestones, counting them, and sorting them by motto.

A distraction of a different kind was the visit of a young Englishwoman named Mary Dunne, a writer herself and already at twenty-nine a rich widow. Having come across Hamsun's Hunger in a bookshop, she had become infatuated with him, and wrote to him suggesting that she translate the book into English. What correspondence the two may have had has been lost, but from references Hamsun makes to Mary Dunne in letters to friends, and using Mary Dunne's own lightly fictionalised account of their relationship in her short story “Now Spring Has Gone,”³⁰ it seems clear that when she visited him that summer in order to discuss the translation, she fell in love with him. Hamsun was slightly flattered, slightly amused, and—apart from the possibility of being translated into English—distinctly not interested: early in September she visited him at Arendal and presented him with a photograph of herself which he carefully wrapped in a handkerchief and placed in the bottom of his yellow leather suitcase.³¹ According to Hamsun she actually proposed to him,³² an assertion that the tone of her story of the meeting lends credibility to. Clearly he wanted Hunger to appear in English, and occasionally permitted himself to dream of the riches an appearance in what he called the ‘beef-language’ would bring him; but Mary Dunne had difficulty in finding a publisher for her work, and his interest in the project soon disappeared.

Unable to get on with his novel, Hamsun eventually did the next best thing and produced a statement of intention for it which he called“From the Unconscious Life of the Mind,” published in the Bergen literary magazine Samtiden. It provides an interesting footnote not only to Hunger, but to all the fiction he was to produce throughout the 1890s:

We have an old proverb: There are many things hidden in Nature. For the attentive, searching man of today, fewer and fewer of these secrets remain hidden. One after another they are being brought forth for observation and identification. An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness. It might be something completely inexplicable—a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky, or the sea; an agonisingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an unnatural staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed; an intuition of some approaching danger in the midst of a carefree hour …

It was this vision of the unguessed-at complexity of the human mind—or at least, its under-representation in literature—that concerned Hamsun. He wanted a literature that would redefine normality and abnormality, that would in effect expand the known territory of consciousness and give a more vivid and accurate picture of what it's really like to be a human being.

Hamsun was proud of his article. To a friend he wrote that he felt he had gone ‘as far as a sane man can go—except the Russians, who can go as far again’.³³ But if we ignore for a moment the chirpiness and look at the article itself, we find that it casts interesting and probably unintentional light on the author's personal life at this time, confirming his essential loneliness, his sense of isolation, and indeed his slight paranoia. Describing his walk home from the Molands Church one day, he writes that he ‘met a number of people walking in the town … It interested me that all these good people I met glared so indignantly at me, as if the mere fact that also I was walking there was the height of impudence. I was used to these looks and scowls. I recognised them all again.’³⁴ He also mentions how he looked through an old newspaper trying to trace the source of an image that cropped up in his dreams; finding it, he realises that he did not register it consciously on the earlier reading because he was on that occasion searching its pages for something else, namely an attack on him which he ‘assumed’ the paper would contain—he apparently regularly received from America copies of any newspapers which contained attacks on him for his book On the Cultural Life of Modern America. He also mentions five anonymous, threatening letters received from America in connection with the book.

Later in the year the novel began to move a little. Nevertheless he knew that it was going to be a large book, and that he could not expect to see money for it for some time yet. He simply had to find a way to finance himself. One of the most important results of the publication of Hunger in June was the speed with which the book was taken up in Germany. Within one month of publication in Norway the book was being translated into German for the Berlin publishing house of S. Fischer. Although it did not relieve his immediate financial needs, the importance of this for Hamsun's career as a writer, for his economic future, and for his future attitude towards Germany cannot be overestimated. Without it, Hamsun might have gone the way of many another author from a small linguistic community, and simply disappeared along with all his works. And this goes not merely for authors, but for all artists: it is hard to think of a single known Norwegian artist from this period—or indeed from succeeding periods—who did not come to European prominence through German enthusiasm. The most well-known examples are the most obvious—Ibsen, Grieg, Edvard Munch and Hamsun himself.

The traditional links between the lands were strong: Germany gave Denmark-Norway her religion, her kings, her aristocracy, her military, her schooling. And just as there was an intellectual cult of ‘Norwegianness’ prevailing in Copenhagen which helped to make Hunger such an immediate critical success, so there was a corresponding cult of Scandinavianism in Germany around the year 1890 which ensured that the book received immediate attention, and subsequent translation. Ibsen and Bjørnson were the founders of this cult of Scandinavianism, but as the influence of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky spread among the younger writers it was names like Strindberg and Hamsun that came to the fore. The cult reached its heights in Berlin, where a group led by the Polish writer and musician Stanislaw Przybyszewski and his Norwegian wife Dagny Juel, Ola Hansson and Strindberg, and including Edvard Munch and the writers Arne Garborg and Andreas Aubert, set a frantic intellectual and social pace which only the most dedicated of romantics could follow. Hamsun was never a member of this group—he visited Germany only once, and briefly, in the early part of his life—but he profited by its existence. Ola Hansson wrote a critical study of him in German, and Harald Hansen reviewed Hunger for the influential magazine Freie Buhne. The magazine also printed Hunger prior to its publication in book form in 1891. Hamsun was of course delighted at this response to what was effectively his first novel. He could also inform Erik Skram that he had received further requests for authorisation to translate the book from Proznan in Poland, from Marienbad, from Vienna, as well as from England.

For the most part, however, this impressive list of successes was a matter of prestige and status rather than money. Hamsun corresponded energetically with a German translator named Marie Herzfeld throughout his stay in Lillesand, sending her short stories as well as his programme article “From The Unconscious Life of the Mind.”He exhorted her to read an imminent German translation of his American book by a Dr Hans Kurella (it never materialised), and enquired about the quality of the translation her colleague Maria von Borsch had produced of Hunger for Freie Buhne. He was particularly pleased with the violence of the blasphemous outburst that appears in the last part of the novel, and when Fischer's edition appeared, wrote anxiously to Marie Herzfeld asking her to check that it had been included. He sent her a long short-story “Chance,”written in the summer of 1889 though not published in Norway until Christmas Eve. Apparently she had trouble placing her German translation of it. He wrote to her on 26 November 1890:

I am sorry you have had such problems with “Chance”; it was wrong of me to send it. Next time you must simply refuse me when I send you poor quality stuff. In any case, I do not write like that any more; it does not interest me.

Nevertheless, she eventually managed to persuade Freie Buhne to take it in 1891. It was a small success, and one which Hamsun may later have wished undone in view of the storm which broke out over the story in 1892.

With the money earned from Hunger Hamsun was now able to start repaying some of the debts he had amassed in the course of the previous few years. He was particularly pleased to be able to pay off Nils Frydenlund the 200 kroner outstanding from 1886, plus a payment for interest on the money. But typically, no sooner had he repaid it than he had to start borrowing again. A man from his home county of Nordland had written to him describing the hard time he was having looking after his family of five children and wife. Hamsun knew the couple—had even been in love with the girl once himself—but this man had won her. Now he found that he had written promising the man 100 kroner in October, money which he no longer had, having just lent 100 kroner to a schoolteacher in Lillesand. This money, he was informed locally, he was unlikely to see again. He wrote in some embarrassment explaining the problem to Erik Frydenlund and, as usual, Frydenlund did not let him down.³⁵

Money, the new novel, and how to make sure that the new ‘psychological’ literature continued to make progress, and did not wither in the shadow of Norway's ageing ‘great men’—Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland and Lie; these were the three problems uppermost in Hamsun's mind during his six months' stay at Lillesand. And at some point he hit upon an idea which seemed to offer a partial solution to all three: a lecture tour of Norway's major cities in which he would both promote the new literature and explicitly condemn the old. The controversy would ensure the financial success of such an undertaking, and between lectures he would be able to continue work on the new book. By September 1890 he was already wholly committed to the idea, and had ceased work on the novel in order to prepare the lectures. In December he returned to Christiania to put the finishing touches to them, and in February 1891 took them with him to Bergen to begin one of the most controversial years of his long life of controversy.

Notes

1. EKF p233

2. Herman Bang Vol 3 H Jacobsen p58

3. KHSHV TH p55

4. Ibid p48

5. Emerson had been a Unitarian minister at Boston from 1829 to 1832.

6. Letter to Langens of 25.4.1914, for example, in OUB

7. KHSHV TH p97

8. Letter to Georg Brandes of April 1890 in Strindberg—Brev Stockholm 1965 p123

9. Their meeting, when it did take place in Paris some five years later, was electric with misunderstandings, with Strindberg at the height of his inferno crisis, and Hamsun doing his best to help him.

10. KHSHV TH p58

11. Olaf Norli—Et Festskrift Article by Olaf Huseby, Oslo 1933 p27-28

12. Quoted in Øyvind Anker Boken om Karoline Oslo 1982 p193

13. Characteristic of the terms of opposition in which Hamsun conceived even literary reputations was an elevation of Bjørnson at the expense of Ibsen. ‘How refreshing to read Bjørnson again’, he wrote in 1890. ‘We have had enough, thank you, of the supremely enigmatic writing that began with The Wild Duck and has lately reached new heights of lunacy with The Lady from the Sea.’¹²

14. The first of them is reprinted in Artikler 1889-1928

15. Før det dages—Jeppe Aakjær, Copenhagen 1929 p184

16. Oftedal did take a tumble—in 1891—but not as a result of Hamsun's book. He was involved in a scandal that also involved several young women which effectively ruined him as a church figure. Even so, there were loyal parishioners who refused to believe the stories, and his career as a politician continued.

17. EKF p236

18. Kringsjaa Christiania 1904 p500

19. KHSHV TH p99, p116

20. The title by which Crime And Punishment is traditionally known in Norway.

21. KHSHV p75

22. Ibid p72

23. Beckett's short story “The End” has striking parallels with Hunger. A tramp wanders pointlessly round a city, alternately comforted and tormented by the voice in his own head. He has the same fleeting, slightly ridiculous contact with people as the narrator of Hunger, and the story ends in his taking to a boat just as Hamsun's tormented hero does.

24. Ibid p75

25. EKF p238. Also Hvad jeg har oplevet Kristofer Janson p225

26. KHSHV TH p98

27. Artikler 1889-1928 p34

28. Norske Intelligenssedler 13.6.1890

29. The narrator of Hunger is often to be found sitting on benches in the cemetery at Our Saviour's Church.

30. In the collection Keynotes, London 1894, under the nom de plume she also used for her translation of Hunger, George Egerton. The collection carries a dedication to Knut Hamsun.

31. Letter to Bolette Pavels Larsen (no date) OUB

32. Letter to Arne Garborg 10.9. (no year) OUB

33. Letter to Bolette Pavels Larsen (no date) OUB

34. Artikler 1889-1928 p33

35. EKF p241