ever has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one worthier of it," pronounced Thomas Mann of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun. Andre Gide compared him to Dostoevsky but thought Hamsun was "perhaps even more subtle" than the Russian master. Maxim Gorky, writing privately in 1927, confessed to Hamsun: "I tell you this quite sincerely, at this moment you are the greatest artist in Europe; there is no one who can compare with you."
      Today Hamsun is little known or read in the English world and remains a deeply problematic presence in his homeland. Streets, parks, and monuments commemorate the names of Henrik Ibsen and Bjornstjerne Bjornson, but not of Hamsun. His name draws an ambiguous stare, a reaction that readers of his novels might be forgiven for thinking a more apt memorial than a conventional work of bronze or stone. What has happened? Knut Hamsun's rise to international renown in the first decades of the twentieth century was eclipsed by his fatal alliance with the Nazi cause in the final years of his long life, an act of misplaced nationalism rather than ideological affinity. 
      Unrepentant until the end--he died at age ninety-two in 1952--Hamsun affected indifference, and throughout his later life was ambivalent about his celebrity. One even suspects that the scandalous acts of his late years--particularly the grotesque gesture of presenting his Nobel Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels--were calculated to shock, to undermine any facile conclusions of literary historians.
      Yet Hamsun's great novels remain potent and significant works of art. Ten years before Freud published An Interpretation of Dreams, Hamsun studied the shadowy impulses that inhabit the frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness. Hunger, Hamsun's first major novel, published in 1890, was a stark repudiation of the socially conscious, moralistic fiction exemplified by Ibsen. "I will make my character laugh where sensible people think he ought to cry," Hamsun exclaimed. "And why? Because my hero is no character, no 'type,' ... but a complex, modern being." 
      Hamsun's novels are characterized by an almost subversive honesty, paradoxically realized through an awareness of the subtle dishonesties we practice through social conditioning and deference to convention. The most insignificant incident--sitting on a park bench with a stranger--can magnify for a Hamsun hero into a hypnotically revealing interior disquisition. Reading Hamsun's Mysteries, for example, Henry Miller commented, "I always feel I am reading another version of my own life."
      Knut Pedersen (Hamsun's name underwent a number of permutations) was born in Lom (central Norway) in 1859, the fourth of seven children. Subsistence farming yielded a marginal livelihood for the family, but Norway was becoming industrialized and formerly settled peoples were drifting into cities or immigrating in growing numbers to America.
      Joining this generalized movement, the Pedersens immigrated, not to America but to the far north, to join Hamsun's uncle, who had settled on a small farm and sent word that prospects were favorable. Hamsun was not yet three years old when he made the journey into a magical land that was to awaken in him a sympathy to nature that equaled if never quite supplanted his preoccupation with human psychology. Indeed, there are few if any writers for whom a mystical reverence for a landscape so fully defined an author's creative elan. 
      It is not hard to understand why. The Pedersens settled on a hillside in the village of Hamsund in Hamaroy, some two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. The exaggerated seasonal changes, the endless summer nights and fiery winter skies, accentuated an intoxicating spectacle of immense, glacier-carved mountains and magnificent fjords.

amsun's earliest years were evidently happy, if cramped. He lived with his parents and six siblings, along with his mother's parents, until age nine, when his uncle, Hans Olsen, summarily demanded payment for the farm.With no chance of the Pedersens paying off the farm in the time demanded, Olsen, in failing health, suggested that Knut come to stay with him and assist in his work. The years that followed--of violence, intimidation, joyless pietism, and physical drudgery in his uncle's house--turned the boy's mind inward. 
      "My home was poor but full of warmth," the 87-year-old Hamsun volunteered to an examining psychiatrist after his arrest in 1947. "Each time I was allowed to go back there from my uncle's, I cried and thanked God. He starved me and ruled over me. ... He was not without good qualities, but he had no idea how to treat children." Hamsun once even maimed himself with an ax with the hope of being sent home to the care of his mother, but to no effect.
      Despite these trials, life with his uncle, who maintained the local library, exposed Hamsun to books and the rudiments of an education. His formal schooling, mostly through a traveling school that served the isolated communities, amounted to little more than two years, a deficiency he was sensitive to throughout his life. But his initiation into the descriptive potential of words grew into a fixation. "Language must resound with all the harmonies of music," Hamsun wrote in 1888. "The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from the soul by its very rightness. A word can be transformed into a color, light, a smell. It is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored."
      Hamsun's advance into adolescence paralleled the deteriorating physical condition of his uncle, until it became apparent to both that physical advantage lay with the youth. Hamsun left his uncle's service after five years and went to live with his godfather's family in Lom for about a year, before returning to Hamaroy in 1875 to work in a nearby coastal trading post. 
      For the next four years Hamsun worked as a clerk, a shoemaker's apprentice in the regional center of Bodo, and a schoolmaster in the remote Lofoten Islands. During these years Hamsun made his first attempts at writing--conventional romantic fiction and poetry that he succeeded in getting published under the name Knud Pedersen Hamsund, according to the Norwegian custom of identifying one's place of origin in one's name. These youthful writings sank without a trace, but the success of bringing his name before the public in print, and an evident conviction that serious literary works were within his power, led Hamsun to bold action. 
      In 1879 the nearby village of Kjerringoy was the most important trading center in the north, and Erasmus Benedikter Kjerschov Zahl was the richest and most important personage in Nordland. Kjerringoy today is a charmingly restored merchant center in a wild and beautiful setting about thirty miles north of Bodo. A handsome bust of Hamsun stands in an untended, overgrown moor overlooking a mountainous coast. 
      With nothing to lose, twenty-year-old Hamsun addressed a formal letter to Zahl requesting a loan of 1,600 kroner "in the name of art and progress" for a trip to Copenhagen to arrange for the publication of a manuscript of poems. Hamsun's letter was discovered in the Nordland County archives in 1977 and includes a footnote in Zahl's hand: "Answered 1/5/79 and promised him 1600 kroner."
      Hamsun replied at once, proclaiming Zahl "a rare and generous spirit of the most superior sort" and laying his "ardent gratitude [before Zahl's] throne." This unlikely transaction for a sum perhaps three times Hamsun's annual earnings stands as one of those enigmatic moments when destiny seems determined to have its way. Hamsun traveled to Kjerringoy and obtained the loan in person. But instead of going to Copenhagen he settled in a small coastal community, where he continued to write. Before long he appealed again to Zahl for another 400 kroner, which was dutifully telegraphed to him, before making his way to Copenhagen.
      Cosmopolitan and cultured Copenhagen surely impressed the raw youth from Hameroy; unfortunately, Copenhagen was not similarly smitten with Hamsun and his manuscript was rejected. As devastating as this had to have been, Hamsun appealed the decision by visiting Bjornstjerne Bjornson in Oslo. The renowned writer indulgently suggested that Hamsun take up acting. Finally he solicited the influence of no less a figure than Sweden's King Oscar II, on a state visit to Norway, who, Hamsun reported back to Zahl, "is taking a personal interest in me."
      In spite of the king's "personal interest," for the next ten years Hamsun traversed the anonymous path of physical labor. He took the first of two trips to America in 1882, coming across to a contact in Chicago as "a young man who has come to this country with a view to becoming President of the United States."
      Another colorful description found Hamsun "tall, broad, lithe, with the springing step of a panther and with muscles of steel. His yellow hair, which he wore long, drooped down upon his shoulders and imparted to his clear-cut classical features something of a leonine appearance."
      Hamsun possessed an undeniable magnetism and was extremely attractive to women, yet he was unusually chaste in his relations. Describing one incident during his years in America when he was specifically propositioned, he wrote to a friend years later, "I did not accept. Can you understand that? ... Are there many like me, or am I the only idiot in the world?" He went on to describe his erotic passion for light and how he had once set fire to his curtains and watched them burn, to the alarm of his landlady.
      While working as a farmhand in Minnesota, Hamsun was diagnosed with terminal tuberculosis. He obtained enough money to return to Norway and booked a train to New York. With characteristic impetuosity, Hamsun climbed on the roof of the train and rode with his mouth wide open, gulping down curative blasts of fresh air. Perhaps the therapy worked. After a period of convalescence, he fell into a familiar pattern of want, unsuccessful literary ventures, and physical labor. A second trip to America introduced Hamsun to streetcar conducting in Chicago and further grueling physical labor. At one point during the Chicago winter, Hamsun was reduced to using layers of newspaper as insulation under his thin clothes. At the same time, one roommate recalled that he sometimes stayed up all night writing, so "intent on creating a form which was different from everybody else's that he would not tolerate anything that resembled the work of others."
      Eventually Hamsun boarded a ship back to Europe, came ashore in Copenhagen, pawned his raincoat, rented the cheapest room he could find, and set to writing. In a delirium of self-examination he worked, crafting his desperately won prose into art by years of dictatorial discipline. It was 1888. Knut Hamsun was twenty-nine years old and on the cusp of European fame.

unger did not appear until 1890. It was and remains a sensational book. Not really a novel in a conventional sense, it is a story of an impetuous young writer starving in Christiana (Oslo). It is misleading to say the novel is about these externals, for the main character is not the starving writer so much as consciousness itself. Substantially, the material circumstances of the tale, including the narrator's own physical body, are mere distractions, objects of either bothersome necessity or, just as often, playful curiosity. 
      Wandering the streets, fashioning in his mind "a consideration in three parts of Philosophical Consciousness [--n]aturally I'd find a moment to break the neck of some of Kant's sophistries. ... Actually, I wouldn't attack Kant after all, I could avoid that, I would just have to make an invisible detour when I came to the problem of Space and Time"--the narrator is checkmated in midthought because he has left his pencil stub in a pawnshop. Later, when his hunger becomes too severe, he finds a piece of wood to chew on. "That helped. Strange I hadn't thought of that before," he muses.
      In this world of extreme want there is no invitation to pity; the narrator's self-pity is hilariously mocked by the seamless access we have to his self-justifying thought processes, thus rendering that maudlin response null and void. Hamsun's nameless hero looks back to the impoverished student and spiritual aristocrat Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and anticipates the alienated Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis (Kafka significantly acknowledged his debt to Hamsun in his writings). 
      Hunger, for all its desperate scenes of want, is not a dark book. The narrator, frustrated by the need to accommodate the physical environment, engages that environment, often with joyful exuberance and a childlike ability to find beauty and virtue in the most insignificant minutiae. The novel is also a comic masterpiece. Like Dostoevsky and Kafka, Hamsun is a master psychologist. He expresses his ultimate sympathy for his subjects through comic predicaments and what Rebecca West warmly called his "completest omniscience about human nature."
      Some readers have found Hamsun troubling for many of these qualities. "Hamsun's whole style of authorship," acknowledged biographer Robert Fegurson, "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 a man and as a writer."
      Undeterred by such cautionary responses, Hamsun began work on his next novel, Mysteries, and, with his sudden celebrity, began a series of lecture tours staking out in the most combative terms his aesthetic values. Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, and other writers of antiquity, Hamsun maintained, had ceased to be writers but were merely "authorities"; their works were not literature but symbols. His contemporaries fared even worse. The magisterial Ibsen, upon hearing of Hamsun's notorious lectures, positioned himself in the front row for a lecture in Oslo.  Hamsun proceeded to mercilessly ridicule and dismantle Ibsen's pretensions to art. 
      "I will therefore have 'contradictions' in the inner man considered as quite natural phenomena," Hamsun declaimed, "and I dream of a literature in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic--not the only, not the dominating characteristic, but central, decisive."
      Usually majorities of his audience were women. One prominent feminist found Hamsun "a handsome man, dangerous for all women, interesting and striking." Another reported on his lecture, "God, he conquered them all. All the women, all of them, were at his feet."
      Hunger, Mysteries, and the two novels that followed it, Pan and Victoria, form a quartet and are considered by many to be Hamsun's greatest works. Each wove intense erotic emotion into stories of complex and paradoxical human psychology. With the exception of Hunger, each was set--as was almost all of Hamsun's subsequent fiction--in the remote fjords and hamlets of the far north. 
      More conventional in form than Hunger, Mysteries studies the impact of an enigmatic stranger, Johan Nagel, upon a coastal village in the north. Nagel acts outrageously, performing generous and courageous deeds, then deliberately incriminating himself by artfully revealing base motivations. His baffling presence--witty and urbane conversationalist, self-promoting charlatan, conscience of the community--undermines the social and psychic health of the village, and he departs, having disrupted the complacent certitudes that drew the community together.
      Hamsun's next novel, Pan, published in 1894, is the story of a solitary hunter, Lieutenant Glahn, living in a hut in the remote north. Pan presents some of the most lyrical and elegiac nature writing ever penned. The prose has the purity and hypnotic fascination of nature in its grandeur. Glahn's pantheistic revery is only disrupted by his love for Edvarda, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant. Hamsun trains his insight on this doomed relationship, compromised by pride and that nameless, primordial grievance that turns love between man and woman to enmity.
      By this time Hamsun's works were being translated into German and Russian, and his days of starvation lay behind him. He married well, the attractive daughter of a wealthy steamship design consultant, and took on the theme of love in his next novel, Victoria. Love in both instances eventually came to grief--in the novel through an impotent, fatalistic, but poetically rendered knowledge that love between man and woman is out of the grasp of mortals; and in Hamsun's own marriage, which lingered on for six years, through an estrangement that amounted to much the same thing.
      Victoria was Hamsun's most commercially successful novel to date, and the regular appearance of new novels in the years that followed added to his international stature. Between 1907 and 1910 three publishers in Russia alone brought out separate editions of his Collected Works.

amsun married again in 1909, to an actress--a profession he held in contempt--and this union lasted until his death. Hamsun was now fifty, and his fiction had assumed a more austere and mildly didactic tone. Increasingly, he took on the manner of the sage, and his novels looked back to virtues rooted in the earth and to the men and women who remained close to it.
      In the spring of 1909 Hamsun purchased a farm in Hamaroy and with his young wife returned to within walking distance of the scenes of his childhood. Dividing his time between farming and writing, Hamsun found life in the provincial north more stultifying than he perhaps expected, as well as logistically impractical for a writer closely engaged in overseeing the publication of his writings in Oslo and Copenhagen.
      Ordinarily isolating himself for his writing, Hamsun retreated to one of his most remote hideouts to begin work on Growth of the Soil, an epic that seems to have germinated from the land itself in its austerity and naturalistic movement. It is the story of Isak, a man without origins, who tramps north into virgin lands to settle on an auspicious site. 

"He comes: the figure of a man in this great solitude. He trudges on; bird and beast are silent all about him. ... Here and there he stops to dig with an iron tool, and finds good mold, or peaty soil, manured with the rotted wood and fallen leaves of a thousand years. He nods, to say that he has found himself a place to stay and live: aye, he will stay here and live. ... He sleeps at night on a bed of stacked pine; already he feels at home here, with a bed of pine beneath an overhanging rock."

 Isak advertises for a woman to help among the Lapps who pass by now and again. Soon Inger, disfigured with a harelip, arrives at his turf hut and together they work the soil and draw life from its fertility. Children are born--a profound thing--and hardship, human folly, and the grace that causes rains to fall form a matrix where destiny toils forward with lumbering sureness.
      Growth of the Soil won Hamsun the Nobel Prize in 1920. Contrary to the early novels, the hero Isak has no restless inner monologue; he is but "a tiller of the ground, body and soul, a worker on the land without respite." He befriends his environment as a bird gathers twigs to build its nest. His existential musings are limited to "Eyah, Herregud!" an emotive ejaculation that can signal the birth of a child, the ruin of a crop by drought, or even the mystery of his wife's estrangement from his affections.
      This reverent idyll of a lost past surely struck a chord in a Europe exhausted by the carnage, confusion, and futility of the Great War. "I do not know how to express the admiration I feel for this wonderful book without seeming to be extravagant," wrote H.G. Wells. "I am not usually lavish with my praise, but indeed the book impresses me as one of the very greatest novels I have ever read. It is wholly beautiful; it is saturated with wisdom and humor and tenderness."
      As events in Europe gathered into a new and more belligerent condition with the rise of Hitler, Hamsun's attachment to the patron nation that embraced and advanced his literary ambitions for decades may have clouded his judgment. This, at least, is a charitable suggestion. In a labored defense of his actions before the court after the defeat of Germany, Hamsun explained, "I was in high favor with the German people. ... Every single great and proud name in Norwegian culture had first gone through Teutonic Germany before becoming renowned throughout the world. I was not wrong for thinking that. But I was faulted for it."
      Later, somewhat pathetically, he added, "No one told me what I was writing was wrong, no one in the entire country." Nor in his testimony did he acknowledge that his writings--mostly newspaper articles--were wrong. "What did I write? I wrote to prevent Norwegian youths from acting foolishly and defiantly vis-a-vis the occupying power to no avail, bringing only death and destruction to themselves."
      One can perhaps partially explain yet hardly justify Hamsun's actions with glib claims of advancing age, political naivete, or misplaced nationalism. Hamsun was presumptively thought to have "permanently impaired mental faculties," and no doubt the Norwegian authorities devoutly hoped that psychiatrists would confirm that diagnosis and rescue his name. But Hamsun would have none of it. In a thorough refutation of any such finding, he wrote his last book while in custody and awaiting the official judgment of the court. On Overgrown Paths, published in 1949, is a rambling and self-justifying memoir, but it leaves no doubt about the mental soundness of the its 88-year-old author. Abundant bursts of wit, keen observations, ironic references to his "impairments," and lyrical odes to nature give ample proof to the soundness and ingenuity of his mind at that late date.
      What then is Hamsun's legacy? Seven years after his conviction for treason, a proposal to establish a Knut Hamsun Society was addressed to Nobel laureates Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann. "The great writer has paid enough for his astonishing political mistakes," wrote Hesse in response. "I have never for one moment doubted the greatness of Hamsun's literary work."
      Mann was less forgiving. "I will have nothing to do with the formation of a Knut Hamsun Society," he wrote. "I know quite well that the stigma of his politics will one day be separated from his writing, which I regard very highly; and as a close student of both his work and his persona I recognize the inevitability, however regrettable, of his conduct during the Nazi era."
      Now, more than half a century after the war, Hamsun's writings should find their place outside the shadow of an abhorrent regime, whose heinous acts were, in any case, largely unknown to the proud and aged writer. The tangible contributions of Hamsun to the Nazi cause, apart from his writings, were negligible. He was no anti-Semite, and his intercession on behalf of those innocently imprisoned is a detail usually forgotten. Hamsun's literary reputation, as Mann thought, is gradually resurrecting in Norway. New editions of his works are available, literary seminars are taking up Hamsun's contributions, and many film adaptations of his works have received critical recognition. 
      Crediting his influence in the foreword to Hunger, another Nobel Prize--winning writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, wrote of Knut Hamsun: "He was the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect--his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole school of modern fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. ... They were all Hamsun's disciples."