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Title: Pan

Author: Knut Hamsun

Release Date: January, 2005 [EBook #7214]

[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]

[This file was first posted on March 27, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAN ***

Produced by Tim Becker, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks,

and the Online Distributed Team

PAN

Translated from the Norwegian of

Knut Hamsun

by W. W. Worster

With an Introduction by Edwin Björkman

New York

Alfred A. Knopf

1927

Published July, 1921

Second printing August, 1921

Third printing September, 1921

Fourth printing February, 1922

Fifth printing January, 1927

Knut Hamsun: From Hunger to Harvest

Between "Hunger" and "Growth of the Soil" lies the time generally

allotted to a generation, but at first glance the two books seem much

farther apart. One expresses the passionate revolt of a homeless

wanderer against the conventional routine of modern life. The other

celebrates a root-fast existence bounded in every direction by

monotonous chores. The issuance of two such books from the same pen

suggests to the superficial view a complete reversal of position. The

truth, however, is that Hamsun stands today where he has always stood.

His objective is the same. If he has changed, it is only in the

intensity of his feeling and the mode of his attack. What, above all, he

hates and combats is the artificial uselessness of existence which to

him has become embodied in the life of the city as opposed to that of

the country.

Problems do not enter into the novels of Hamsun in the same manner as

they did into the plays of Ibsen. Hamsun would seem to take life as it

is, not with any pretense at its complete acceptability, but without

hope or avowed intention of making it over. If his tolerance be never

free from satire, his satire is on the other hand always easily

tolerant. One might almost suspect him of viewing life as something

static against which all fight would be futile. Even life's worst

brutalities are related with an offhandedness of manner that makes you

look for the joke that must be at the bottom of them. The word

_reform_ would seem to be strangely eliminated from his dictionary,

or, if present, it might be found defined as a humorous conception of

something intrinsically unachievable.

Hamsun would not be the artist he is if he were less deceptive. He has

his problems no less than Ibsen had, and he is much preoccupied with

them even when he appears lost in ribald laughter. They are different

from Ibsen's, however, and in that difference lies one of the chief

explanations of Hamsun's position as an artist. All of Ibsen's problems

became in the last instance reducible to a single relationship--that

between the individual and his own self. To be himself was his cry and

his task. With this consummation in view, he plumbed every depth of

human nature. This one thing achieved, all else became insignificant.

Hamsun begins where Ibsen ended, one might say. The one problem never

consciously raised by him as a problem is that of man's duty or ability

to express his own nature. That is taken for granted. The figures

populating the works of Hamsun, whether centrally placed or moving

shadowlike in the periphery, are first of all themselves--agressively,

inevitably, unconsciously so, In other words, they are like their

creator. They may perish tragically or ridiculously as a result of their

common inability to lay violent hand on their own natures. They may go

through life warped and dwarfed for lack of an adjustment that to most

of us might seem both easy and natural. Their own selves may become

more clearly revealed to them by harsh or happy contacts with life, and

they may change their surfaces accordingly. The one thing never

occurring to them is that they might, for the sake of something or some

one outside of themselves, be anything but what they are.

There are interferences, however, and it is from these that Hamsun's

problems spring. A man may prosper or suffer by being himself, and in

neither case is the fault his own. There are factors that more or less

fatally influence and circumscribe the supremely important factor that

is his own self. Roughly these fall into three groups suggestive of

three classes of relationships: (1) between man and his general

environment; (2) between man and that ever-present force of life which

we call love; and (3) between man and life in its entirety, as an

omnipotence that some of us call God and others leave unnamed. Hamsun's

deceptive preference for indirectness is shown by the fact that, while

he tries to make us believe that his work is chiefly preoccupied with

problems of the second class, his mind is really busy with those of the

first class. The explanation is simple. Nothing helps like love to

bring out the unique qualities of a man's nature. On the other hand,

there is nothing that does more to prevent a man from being himself than

the ruts of habit into which his environment always tends to drive him.

There are two kinds of environment, natural and human. Hamsun appears to

think that the less you have of one and the more of the other, the

better for yourself and for humanity as a whole. The city to him is

primarily concentrated human environment, and as such bad. This phase of

his attitude toward life almost amounts to a phobia. It must be

connected with personal experiences of unusual depth and intensity.

Perhaps it offers a key that may be well worth searching for. Hamsun was

born in the country, of and among peasants. In such surroundings he

grew up. The removal of his parents from the central inland part of

Norway to the rocky northern coast meant a change of natural setting,

but not a human contact. The sea must have come into his life as a

revelation, and yet it plays an astonishingly small part in his work. It

is always present, but always in the distance. You hear of it, but you

are never taken to it.

At about fifteen, Hamsun had an experience which is rarely mentioned as

part of the scant biographical material made available by his reserve

concerning his own personality. He returned to the old home of his

parents in the Gudbrand Valley and worked for a few months as clerk in a

country store--a store just like any one of those that figure so

conspicuously in almost every one of his novels. The place and the work

must have made a revolutionary impression on him. It apparently aroused

longings, and it probably laid the basis for resistances and resentments

that later blossomed into weedlike abundance as he came in contact with

real city life. There runs through his work a strange sense of sympathy

for the little store on the border of the wilderness, but it is also

stamped as the forerunner and panderer of the lures of the city.

As a boy of eighteen, when working in a tiny coast town as a cobbler's

apprentice, he ventured upon his first literary endeavors and actually

managed to get two volumes printed at his own cost. The art of writing

was in his blood, exercising a call and a command that must have been

felt as a pain at times, and as a consecration at other times. Books

and writing were connected with the city. Perhaps the hatred that later

days developed, had its roots in a thwarted passion. Even in the little

community where his first scribblings reached print he must have felt

himself in urban surroundings, and perhaps those first crude volumes

drew upon him laughter and scorn that his sensitive soul never forgot.

If something of the kind happened, the seed thus sown was nourished

plentifully afterwards, when, as a young man, Hamsun pitted his

ambitions against the indifference first of Christiania and then of

Chicago. The result was a defeat that seemed the more bitter because it

looked like punishment incurred by straying after false gods.

Others have suffered in the same way, although, being less rigidly

themselves, they may not, like Hamsun, have taken a perverse pleasure in

driving home the point of the agony. Others have thought and said harsh

things of the cities. But no one that I can recall has equalled Hamsun

in his merciless denunciation of the very principle of urbanity. The

truth of it seems to be that Hamsun's pilgrimage to the bee hives where

modern humanity clusters typically, was an essential violation of

something within himself that mattered even more than his literary

ambition to his soul's integrity. Perhaps, if I am right, he is the

first genuine peasant who has risen to such artistic mastery, reaching

its ultimate heights through a belated recognition of his own proper

settings. Hamsun was sixty when he wrote "Growth of the Soil." It is the

first work in which he celebrates the life of the open country for its

own sake, and not merely as a contrast to the artificiality and

selfishness of the cities. It was written, too, after he had definitely

withdrawn himself from the gathering places of the writers and the

artists to give an equal share of his time and attention to the tilling

of the soil that was at last his own. It is the harvest of his ultimate

self-discovery.

The various phases of his campaign against city life are also

interesting and illuminating. Early in his career as a writer he tried

an open attack in full force by a couple of novels, "Shallow Soil" and

"Editor Lynge", dealing sarcastically with the literary Bohemia of the

Norwegian capital. They were, on the whole, failures--artistically

rather than commercially. They are among his poorest books. The attack

was never repeated in that form. He retired to the country, so to speak,

and tried from there to strike at what he could reach of the ever

expanding, ever devouring city. After that the city, like the sea, is

always found in the distance. One feels it without ever seeing it.

There is fear as well as hatred in his treatment of it.

In the country it is represented not so much by the store, which, after

all, fills an unmistakable need on the part of the rural population, as

by the representatives of the various professions. For these Hamsun

entertains a hostile feeling hardly less marked than that bestowed on

their place of origin, whither, to his openly declared disgust, they are

always longing. It does not matter whether they are ministers or actors,

lawyers or doctors--they are all tarred with the same brush. Their

common characteristic is their rootlessness. They have no real home,

because to Hamsun a home is unthinkable apart from a space of soil

possessed in continuity by successive generations. They are always

despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily,

and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge

of life on a large scale. Greatness is to them inseparably connected

with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing

but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's

ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of

judgment are not their own.

From what has just been said one might conclude that the spirit of

Hamsun is fundamentally unsocial. So it is, in a way, but only in so far

as we have come to think of social and urban as more or less

interchangeable terms. He has a social consciousness and a social

passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of

no greater man than his own Isak of "Growth of the Soil"--a simple

pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth

personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak

passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain

flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it

deliberately in the light of a religious rite--the oldest and most

significant known to man. It is as if the man who starved in

Christiania and the western cities of the United States--not

figuratively, but literally--had once for all conceived a respect for

man's principal food that has colored all subsequent life for him and

determined his own attitude toward everything by a reference to its

connection or lack of connection with that substance.

Taking it all in all, one may well call Hamsun old-fashioned. The

virtues winning his praise and the conditions that stir his longings are

not of the present day. There is in him something primitive that forms a

sharp contrast to the modernity of his own style. Even in his most

romantic exaggerations, as in "Hunger" and "Mysteries," he is a realist,

dealing unrelentingly with life as it appears to us. It would hardly be

too much to call his method scientific. But he uses it to aim tremendous

explosive charges at those human concentrations that made possible the

forging of the weapons he wields so skilfully. Nor does he stop at a

wish to see those concentrations scattered. The very ambitions and

Utopias bred within them are anathema to his soul, that places

simplicity above cleanliness in divine proximity. Characteristically we

find that the one art treated with constant sympathy in his writings is

that of music, which probably is the earliest and certainly the one

least dependent on the herding of men in barracks. In place of what he

wishes to take away he offers nothing but peace and the sense of genuine

creation that comes to the man who has just garnered the harvests of his

own fields into his bulging barns. He is a prophet of plenty, but he has

no answer ready when we ask him what we are going to do with it after we

have got it. Like a true son of the brooding North, he wishes to set us

thinking, but he has no final solutions to offer.

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN.

PAN

These last few days I have been thinking and thinking of the Nordland

summer, with its endless day. Sitting here thinking of that, and of a

hut I lived in, and of the woods behind the hut. And writing things

down, by way of passing the time; to amuse myself, no more. The time

goes very slowly; I cannot get it to pass as quickly as I would, though

I have nothing to sorrow for, and live as pleasantly as could be. I am

well content withal, and my thirty years are no age to speak of.

A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird's feathers in a

sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from

a place a long way off; from one who need not have sent them back at

all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.

And for the rest I have no troubles, unless for a touch of gout now and

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