A NORWEGIAN NOVELIST'S UGLY SYMPATHIES

...his conviction that the Nietzschean "spiritual aristocrat" ought to be the recognized authority to whom all others need render obeisance...

...The chief puzzle facing a biographer of Hamsun is surely this: How could a man capable of writing the most tender love stories, of singing paeans to the Norwegian landscape, of glorifying the individual in conflict with society, become an apologist for the Nazis...

...How could he exhort his beloved fellow Norwegians to become partisans of the German cause...

...So too with his characters: They can no more be fitted into a preconceived mold than their creator...

...Despite his indirection, his lack of proper schooling—he was truly an autodidact—Hamsun was a published author by age 18...

...The meeting went poorly, and there is evidence to suggest that the writer came away with his affection for Hitler extinguished...

...There is even a supposedly humorous reference to blacks as "monkeys," presaging a more thoroughgoing Nordic racism in his later years...

...When he finally met his Führer in person, Hamsun complained about the machinations of the Nazi governor of Norway...

...Shakespeare and Dante also came in for lumps...

...Hamsun could be charming, was attractive to women, and had a bold, even brave manner...

...No less pugnacious was Hamsun's social credo...

...In his own words, he was neither good nor bad, but both at once...

...Reviewed by Lothar Kahn Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages, Central Connecticut State University Knut Hamsun, one of the towering figures of modern European literature, may have been an enigma when Robert Ferguson began investigating his complex, wildly contradictory life...

...Later he had another reason: The English rejected his literary output across the board...

...As his public lectures began to draw crowds, Hamsun recognized the value of his outlandish stance, and stuck to it long after it had ceased to be necessary to advance his career...

...He disdained the comfortable middle-class existence of doctors and lawyers, their refusal to take risks, their elevation of security above all other goals...

...He was an uncompromising opponent of cosmopolitanism, republicanism, feminism, and what he saw as the false sophistication of urban life...

...But as we know, not everything that is original is admirable...

...Abhorring doubt, he regarded the admission of error as weak and inexcusable...

...and the twisted character traits—perhaps the result of Hamsun's years of physical and psychological suffering as a youngster working in the shop of a sadistic uncle—that lurked behind his singular charm and dignity...

...Ferguson makes clear, however, that none of these considerations extenuates the novelist's guilt...

...He loathed England's merchant mentality, its imperialism, its patronizing attitude toward Norway, its "hypocrisy...

...Actually, he was a man of emotional peaks and valleys, who hid his insecurities behind a proud and imperious facade...

...The Germans, by contrast, recognized Hamsun's talent and bought his books in large quantities...

...Personal and social obsessions converged in Hamsun's virulent Anglophobia and his equally strong Germanophilia...

...He never ceased inveighing against parliamentary babble, the futility and cheapness of political debate, the reluctance to abandon the endless haggling and submit to the cool judgment of one superior individual...

...Henrik Ibsen, the great man of Scandinavian letters, was his main butt...

...Ferguson does a deft job of revealing Hamsun's paradoxical character...

...How could he see in Hitler and Mussolini the saviors of humanity and the hope of the future...

...From there it was a small step to embracing the Nazis' racial ideology and echoing, albeit faintly, their anti-Semitic pronouncements...

...his dominant emotion at that moment was a consuming hatred for a psychiatrist who had characterized him as near senile...

...Nearly all of Hamsun's early heroes are vagrants, without fixed occupations...

...Still, this is by any standard an excellent biography...

...Hamsun, in turn, gratefully proclaimed the glory of German culture, and declared that Germans and Norwegians were remarkably alike: They were of one race, one mind, champions of blood and soil...

...Vigorous and fresh, they reflect one of the most sharply developed literary personalities of this century...

...He himself had been an itinerant in Norway as well as during his two visits to the United States, working happily as a farm laborer and miserably at countless other pickup jobs—peddler, streetcar operator and so on...

...In his controversial polemic The Cultural Life of Modern America, written when he was in his 20s, he lambasted the materialism of the United States and its craving for "meaningless progress...

...Ferguson, despite his love of Hamsun's work, does not pretend that it can be assessed in isolation from its author's avid collaboration with his traitorous compatriot, Vidkun Quisling, and unqualified endorsement of Hitler...

...As with earlier Scandinavian writers, it also enabled him to reach other national readerships...

...Although Hamsun produced a volume of poetry and a dramatic trilogy, Ms reputation as a writer ultimately rests on his novels...

...With such passions and aversions it is no wonder that Nazism was congenial to him...

...I this book has a fault, it is the inclusion of loo much Norwegian detail...

...This group became a prime target of his—and his heroes'—distrust and anger...

...When British reviewers bothered with him at all, they usually dismissed him as a near barbarian, overlooking his innovations and complexities...

...It is true that Hamsun sent off numerous telegrams to Hitler and others aimed at securing the release of friends under arrest, usually in vain...

...But thanks to Ferguson's painstaking efforts, the 1920 Nobel laureate is an enigma no longer...

...To show his mettle and to overcome the handicaps of his upbringing, Hamsum set about attacking literary figures who were in fashion...

...This biography displays the uniqueness of Hamsun's achievement alongside the many blemishes in his character, makes clear the interrelations, and shows how every quality he possessed carried within it the germ of its own opposite...

...But he did not feel wholly secure in the company of the formally educated, the socially entrenched, those who might have access to secrets denied him...

...Not Hunger, not Pan or Mysteries, not even the Nobel Prize-winning The Growth of the Soil received much critical or popular attention from them...

...But if Hamsun's anti-Semitism never reached the vicious pitch of Ezra Pound's or Louis Ferdinand Celine's, it was nonetheless reprehensible and dangerous, especially in a man who regarded himself as the conscience of his country...

...It might also be pointed out that Hamsun was deaf and nearing 90 at the time of the War, that he was estranged from his second wife—more Nazi than he—and that he lived in virtual isolation...

...You can discern in them Hamsun's belief that lying is, as he put it, not a sin but a talent...

...Confronted with the full record of Nazi atrocities at his trial for treason, Hamsun shrugged it of f without expressing any penitence...

...his dislike of talk and argument...

...Hamsun's distaste for institutionalized culture and education deepened with time, as did his reverence for the simple, the spirited, the natural—to him the distinctive qualities of the soil and those who cultivated it...

...This lifted the financial burden from his shoulders...