Selected Letters: 1898-1952

by Knut Hamsun, Harald S. Næss

Norway's greatest writer after Ibsen, winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hamsun was an outcast when he died. The second volume of Hamsun's letters casts a revealing light on many fascinating aspects of Hamsun's private and public life. They demonstrate the tireless and total dedication to his writing which earned him worldwide recognition, as well as the personal anguish and joy which two marriages and a divorce brought him. They often reveal the strange juxtaposition of the warmly sympathetic and the unexpectedly repellent sides of his personality. Finally, they show the painful price he paid for his support of the Nazis during World War II. After the war he was tried and found to have ""impaired mental faculties."" Rather than sentence him to prison, a massive fine was levied on him which made him destitute, and his wife and one of his sons were imprisoned for several years. Hamsun's final years left him alienated and alone among his fellow countrymen.

351 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Novels of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (born Knud Pedersen), include Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920.

He insisted on the intricacies of the human mind as the main object of modern literature to describe the "whisper of the blood, and the pleading of the bone marrow." Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with the psychological novel Hunger.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first volume of Hamsun’s letters reveal an arrogant, pretentious, overconfident young man who is sure of his superiority and greatness. In this collection, covering the years 1898-1952, he has become a great man, a writer of mythical proportions who has become his nation’s leading intellectual after three of his most significant novels—Hunger, Mysteries and Pan—received the acclaim he expected. But his success leads to unexpected fears, “I am now 38 years old…but I sit here doubting whether it is any use continuing. I never had doubts before; my nerves are strained and I am poor, and I am beginning to have doubts.” But his doubts didn’t last long. Even as he squandered Bergljot’s—his first wife—small inheritance, mostly through his gambling addiction, his pity and remorse is reserved mostly for himself. He confides to a friend that “Bergljot is marvellous! She says it can’t be helped what I have lost…Heavens, I’d much rather she had given me a thorough dressing-down and called me a hound and a wastrel…” He professes his shame, but in doing so, he has one of his very moments of honest introspection, “But I must try from now on to be a somewhat better person. I don’t think I’ve ever actually been a bad person; but I do have a tendency toward excess; I don’t have the best of balance. I should have had balance enough to keep me from setting out on this adventure.” Yet, as the rest of his life would reveal, such moments of honesty were rare indeed. Indeed, just a few days writing this, he writes a delusional letter to Bergljot that his gambling would cure their financial woes writing “In fact it is possible for metro stake not more than 20 francs and for this easily to become 100,000 francs in seven minutes. I have known many such instances…”

Hamsun was a man for whom appearances and ideals were paramount. His one daughter with Bergljot, Victoria, and four more with his second wife, Marie, created the appearance of a good father with five children—an important illusion for the Norway of his times. But he was not really an engaged father as he admitted to a friend describing what he needed in a new house, “The thing is: I am alas an impossible man; I must be well away from the family, because although I am hard of hearing I damn well hear things I shouldn't, for example children's cries. And then I can't get on with my work. Therefore I must have a big house, with empty rooms between me and the children.” His letters reveal a distant father, one who had an on-again, off-again relationship with Victoria, and one who was demanding that his sons fulfill his ideals, as they did when they joined the German army in World War II. But, in one of the rare instances of humor he exhibited, it can be inferred that he had a certain love for them, “One day Tore was run over by a cyclist, but he was given a krone for this, and I think he is wondering whether to be run over again.”

His reputation was indelibly damaged when, for the first time in his life, he became politically vocal in support of Hitler and the Third Reich. It was triggered by his opposition Carl von Ossietzky’s nomination for the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize, which as awarded to him in 1936 following a concerted campaign of supporters. Hamsun was a strong supporter of Vidkun Quisling, personally presented his 1920 Nobel Literature Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels, and had an unpleasant personal meeting with Hitler. He remained a steadfast supporter, even writing an editorial extolling Nazi virtues after Hitler died in a Berlin bunker. His letters reveal a naive, blinkered man whose opinions were molded as much by the years of financial and literary success he had Germany, his instinctive derision of England, and his suspicion of democracy as by fascism. His muddled thinking was revealed when, in 1934, he wrote, “Germany is in the middle of a transformation. If the government has taken the step of setting up concentration camps, then you and world should understand that there are good grounds for this.” This gullible, immature view never wavered, even when he saw the reality of Nazi rule through his experiences with the Nazi governor of occupied Norway.

The letters of the postwar period, of his arrest, trial, and ultimate internal exile, show an aging man who intellect was sharpened and reborn. They would be of great interest to any reader of his stunning, final memoir On Overgrown Paths. This collection did little to deepen to my understanding of Hamsun. But they did add depth to some of the things I had long known. It was a good collection for me, but probably not something I would recommend to a general reader of Hamsun.