Bookplanet: the Norwegian who invented modern fiction

IN FROM THE COLD
by JEFFREY FRANK
The return of Knut Hamsun

I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that’s when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America—perhaps the curse of a minor language—but his influence is certainly felt; Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’ ” In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city’s Latin Quarter. Several times when I asked about Hamsun’s works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, “He was a traitor!” I’d try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again.

I knew what that was about, of course. During the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War, Hamsun had been a collaborator; he had met Goebbels and Hitler, and was unrepentant to the end. It was baffling: how could the man who wrote “Hunger,” “Mysteries,” and “Pan”—those surpassingly original books—have had any sympathy for Nazis? Hamsun was not some bitter second-rater. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1920, and, unlike other Fascist sympathizers, such as Céline and Pound, he had a deep and lasting grip on his public, that of an enchanter. Singer admitted to being “hypnotized” by him; Hesse called him his favorite writer; Hemingway recommended his novels to Scott Fitzgerald; Gide compared him to Dostoyevsky, but believed that Hamsun was “perhaps even more subtle.” The list of those who loved his sly, anarchic voice is long.

Half a century after Hamsun’s death, his politics and, especially, his wartime behavior remain confounding. But, with the recent publication, in Norway, of a two-volume biography by Ingar Sletten Kolloen, of nearly a thousand pages, he no longer seems quite so elusive. And, if there is not yet a Hamsun revival, certainly a Hamsun reëmergence is under way. Books that were never available in English, such as a bizarre journal about a half-imagined journey to the Caucasus (“In Wonderland”), some of the short stories, the “wanderer” novels of middle age, and even some early journalism, have recently appeared in translation, along with new editions of his most famous books. Two competing English versions of both “Hunger” and “Pan” are available, and last month Penguin issued a fresh translation of “Victoria.” In Norway and Denmark, early editions of Hamsun are fetching ever-higher prices, though these are mostly the books he wrote long before the rise of Fascism.


The Scandinavian countries, in a period of less than a century, produced an extraordinary body of literature; an abbreviated list includes Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Jens Peter Jacobsen, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and Sigrid Undset. None of them were so beguiling as Hamsun, though, whose works include twenty novels, six plays, two volumes of poetry, and three collections of stories. Most compelling are the early novels, and, in particular, “Hunger”—a sort of hallucinatory “New Grub Street,” overheated, half-crazed, and funny.

A hint of the novel’s existence came in 1888, when one of its four sections appeared in a short-lived Danish literary journal called Ny Jord (“New Ground”). The author was listed as “Anonymous,” but the tiny Dano-Norwegian literary community quickly learned his name. Hamsun, not yet thirty, was suddenly a man to be reckoned with, and more so when, a year later, he published his first book, “From the Cultural Life of Modern America,” a rude, amusing, and occasionally stupid attack on the New World, which the critic Georg Brandes (Nietzsche’s early champion) praised highly. When “Hunger” came out, in 1890, Hamsun informed reviewers that he was trying something different; he was not, he insisted, interested in marriages and balls—the book was not really a novel at all. Rather, as he told a friend, “What interests me are my little soul’s endless emotions, the special, strange life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a hungry body.”

Hamsun’s narrator, a writer, is a careful cataloguer of his own psychological states—no victim but, like Hamsun himself, a subversive, generational voice. Not a great deal happens, and yet from the first line—“It was in that time when I walked around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one can leave without being marked by it”—the novel’s oddly joyful desperation never flags. Poor, ambitious freelance writers in Western cities may no longer be starving, but certainly they suffer the same humiliations as Hamsun’s narrator: editors pay them very little, make them wait endlessly for a reply, and are indifferent to their enormous God-given talents. More than once, Hamsun’s famished hero finds that his “nervous state had gotten out of hand,” as when, at one point, he is unable to sleep:

Suddenly I snap my fingers several times and laugh. What the hell was this! Ha! I imagined I had found a new word. I sit up in bed and say, It’s not found in the language, I have invented it— Kuboå . It does have letters like a word—sweet Jesus, man, you have invented a word . . . Kuboå . . . of enormous grammatical importance.
The word stood out sharply against the darkness in front of me.
I sit with open eyes, amazed at my discovery and laughing for joy. Then I start whispering: they might be spying on me and I intended to keep my invention a secret. I had crossed over into the pure madness of hunger.

The first section ends with the narrator in a state of near-bliss after getting ten kroner for a feuilleton, but his over-all situation does not seem likely to improve. The novel breaks grammatical rules, tenses skip around, and the narrator seems increasingly unhinged. By the end, when the narrator boards a ship, it is as if Hamsun had parted the curtain of the nineteenth century and were peering into the absurdities of the twentieth.

“Hunger” was a literary sensation, although the critical response was mixed. Hamsun naturally hoped that Brandes, a voice of modernism, would become an ally, but Brandes found the book monotonous, a judgment so painful to Hamsun that he wrote to him, saying, “I don’t feel completely alone without you—but without your understanding, it’s useless for me to continue.” He believed that Brandes hadn’t read enough of the novel: “If we add it up I don’t think you’d find more psychical emotions in ‘Raskolnikov’ than in my book.” Brandes and others, however, were beginning to realize that Hamsun not only was an uncomfortable fit with his time but was in many ways an impossible, perhaps even a dangerous, figure.


Knut Hamsun—baptized Knud Pedersen—was born in 1859 in rural central Norway. Three years later, the family moved to Hamarøy, north of the Arctic Circle, to work at Hamsund, a farm that belonged to his uncle. Hamsun did not attend school until he was nine, and then not for very long; his childhood was isolated and miserable. His uncle, whom he later described as “a confirmed bachelor, stingy and hot-tempered,” beat him with a ruler and otherwise abused him; but he was also in charge of the local library, and Hamsun more or less taught himself Norwegian, which then, in its written form, was almost identical to Danish. His modest background and his lack of formal education were points of both great sensitivity and pride; in a letter to Brandes many years later, he asked, “What does someone like me know—born a peasant-farmer, without a degree in anything, unable to afford to sit and read philosophy?”

In his precocious late teens, Hamsun had two clumsy stories published in very limited editions, and, on the strength of this, he asked a wealthy Norwegian merchant named Erasmus B. K. Zahl for financial backing. He was, he wrote, “no one’s favorite, with nothing but ordinary schooling,” and yet “I’ve managed to bring my knowledge-thirsty soul a little higher than my just-as-unprivileged equals.” To Hamsun’s shock, Zahl sent him sixteen hundred kroner, then worth about four hundred dollars. Still, the money didn’t go very far, and Hamsun struggled to survive, mostly in Copenhagen, which at the time was the center of cultural gravity in Scandinavia. In the eighteen-eighties, he twice made his way to America. He stopped in New York, where he was amazed by an elevated railway that went “up in the air, above the people’s houses,” but he stayed mainly in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He also spent eight months in Chicago as a cable-car conductor, and worked on a large farm in the Dakota Territory, a setting for several early stories. Hamsun’s opinion of the country was mixed. He saw it as overwhelmed by materialism and excessive patriotism, and at one point he wore a black ribbon in support of four anarchists sentenced to hang after the Haymarket bombing, in Chicago. But he admired the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. And he admired Mark Twain, whom he saw give a lecture in New York, and from whom he certainly learned a great deal about the use of the vernacular. Hamsun went home in the summer of 1888 and never returned.

A year after the publication of “Hunger,” Hamsun set out on the lecture circuit in Norway, brazenly attacking the older literary generation; a particular target was Ibsen, who was then sixty-three and had just returned after twenty-seven years abroad. When Hamsun spoke in Kristiania (now Oslo), Ibsen had a front-row seat, and was joined by, among others, the composer Edvard Grieg, the Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and a young concert pianist, Hildur Andersen, who had become Ibsen’s consort. Half an hour into the talk, as Kolloen describes it, Hamsun let loose, accusing Ibsen of bringing a “coarse and spurious” psychological understanding to the stage. Ibsen, for his part, just sat there, impassively. (He is believed to have had Hamsun in mind when he wrote “The Master Builder,” published the following year. The play is about an aging architect who is terrified of being outdone by the new generation. “I’ve begun to grow afraid—so awfully afraid—of the young,” he says.)

Hamsun was by then the very portrait of a young artist, complete with pince-nez; a contemporary described him as “dangerous for all women, interesting and striking.” One gets glimpses of this in his second novel, “Mysteries” (1892) —an apt title for one of his oddest and richest books. Everything about it is a little mysterious, from the moment “a stranger appeared in town, a certain Nagel, a remarkable, eccentric charlatan who did a lot of curious things.” It’s not clear why Nagel is there or what he’s getting out of staying. He falls obsessively in love with Dagny Kielland, a clergyman’s daughter, and has an affair with an older woman; he carries a violin case, but there’s almost certainly no violin inside. He is probably borderline insane, and definitely suicidal; although the novel has a third-person narrator, it is every bit as inflamed as “Hunger.” Hamsun’s able English-born biographer Robert Ferguson quotes Hamsun’s own description of the book: “The hero of ‘Mysteries’ is a poseur, a pathological phenomenon, who is part madman and part genius”—which sounds very much like the author. The novel is somewhat disjointed; irrational monologues alternate with discussions of Marx or Tolstoy or Ibsen, whose plays, not surprisingly, are dismissed by Nagel as “dramatized wood pulp.”

The reviews, again, were mixed; one critic said that Hamsun “hadn’t given up the sickly hallucinations of ‘Hunger,’ ” and he was labelled an opportunistic copier of modern Russian literature. Today, one can recognize in “Mysteries” the shape and spirit of the modern novel, produced at a time when the modern novel did not yet exist. Hamsun’s next two books, “Editor Lynge” and “Shallow Soil,” were romans à clef—the first about an unloved newspaper editor and the second a disparaging look at the artistic community in Kristiania—and deserve the obscurity into which they have fallen. But then came “Pan,” published in 1894, a short, sexy, lyrical novel filled with hints of the supernatural. Hamsun, in his flawed English, described “Pan” with considerable accuracy in a letter to its German publisher, Albert Langen: “Think of the Nordland in Norway, this regions of the Lapper, the mysteries, the grand superstitions, the midnight-sun, think of J. J. Rousseau in the regions, making acquaintance with a Nordlands girl—that is my book.” It’s told as a memoir by one Thomas Glahn, who has moved to the northern woods with his dog, Aesop, and becomes romantically entangled with Edvarda, the daughter of a rich local merchant. Glahn, with his “animal eyes,” is, like Nagel, drawn to irrational acts.

At one point, Edvarda compares Glahn unfavorably with a rival, a lame physician. “Even if you were lame, on top of everything, you couldn’t hold your own against him,” she insists. Glahn later begins to brood:

No, even if I was lame on top of everything, I couldn’t hold my own against the Doctor, could I? I definitely wouldn’t be able to hold my own against him; those were her words. . . .
Standing in the middle of the floor, I cock my gun, place the muzzle against my left instep, and pull the trigger. The shot pierces the middle of my foot and goes through the floor. Aesop gives a short, frightened yelp.

“Pan” is like that; Glahn and Edvarda torment themselves as much as they torment each other—Glahn does things like tossing one of Edvarda’s shoes into the water “whether for joy at her being so near or from some urge to assert myself and remind her of my existence.” Among the surprises of the book is its structure, which includes an epilogue, “Glahn’s Death,” told by a second narrator, who seems to belong to another novel entirely. No matter; Glahn’s narrative and Glahn’s death somehow belong together. Hamsun wrote to Langen that “every chapter is a poem, every line worked hard on,” and every page, he thought, was “havey of thoughts and fantasi.”

Hamsun’s next novel, “Victoria,” an overwrought, dazzling, painfully class-conscious, and lugubrious romance about a miller’s son who loves an aristocrat’s daughter, came four years later—just after Hamsun married Bergljot Bech, the daughter of a socially prominent Norwegian family—and was Hamsun’s first real financial success. It was six more years before his next novel, the slight “Dreamers,” appeared, and after that Hamsun’s career began to take a somewhat different path.


Ingar Sletten Kolloen is the first Hamsun biographer to have full access to the Hamsun archive, and in Norway his book set off intense discussion about the writer’s collaboration and about his treatment by the authorities after the war. Kolloen is particularly good on Hamsun’s personal life: his second marriage, roiled by jealousy and fury, to the actress Marie Andersen, when he was forty-nine and she was twenty-seven; and his relationship with his children, a daughter with Bergljot and two sons and two daughters with Marie. One gets glimpses of Hamsun’s interest in world affairs, but it is a rather narrow interest: a belief in the destiny of Germany, and, for reasons that no one has ever quite figured out, a hatred of England. Robert Ferguson notes that Hamsun had nurtured this prejudice from his youth, and one can only suppose that a few personal encounters helped him form a view of an entire nation; as Kolloen and others have remarked, the British were to Hamsun what the Jews were to the Nazis. Englishmen appear in arrogant walk-on roles in several of his books. In the middle of “In Wonderland,” Hamsun recalls a Munich streetcar ride: “A little girl . . . falls, gets in between the horses and is trampled, hurt. But we manage to pull her out alive. Meanwhile the Brit is smoking his pipe. When it’s all over and the driver delays a moment before going on, the Brit looks at his watch in irritation,” and asks for a refund of his fare. In two novels, “Benoni” and “Rosa,” a caricatured Englishman meets and then marries Edvarda, the girl from “Pan,” and in “The Last Joy,” from 1912, Hamsun couldn’t contain himself: “England will soon have to establish old folks’ homes for its children, most likely. It unsexes its people with sports and fixed ideas; if Germany hadn’t kept it in a state of perpetual uneasiness, it would have turned to pederasty in a couple of generations.” Possibly, these views became amplified over the years—during the First World War and afterward—for another, more selfish reason: England never really went for Hamsun’s books, while the German reading public adored him from the start.

In the new century, Hamsun seemed to mourn his life in the previous one; in the spring of 1907, he delivered a lecture, “Honor the Young,” in which, nearing fifty, he denounced the Fourth Commandment and, with it, his parents’ generation. (Kolloen notes that Hamsun was so busy with this lecture that he didn’t have time to travel to Hamarøy for his father’s funeral.) After “The Last Joy,” as if acknowledging that he was no longer a reliably youthful narrator, Hamsun abandoned the first-person voice entirely; with “Segelfoss Town,” in 1915, he began to write bloated two-volume novels, set in small towns populated by tramps, peddlers, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats. By far the most successful of these was “Growth of the Soil,” published in 1917—an epic saga about the tribulations and joys of Isak, a farmer-settler, and Inger, a woman with a harelip with whom he makes a life.

“Growth of the Soil” was a worldwide sensation; in Norway, a first printing of eighteen thousand copies sold out in about three weeks—an extraordinary number in a country with a population under three million—and almost from the day of publication there were rumors that Hamsun would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. When no literature prize was awarded in 1918, the betting was that he would get it in 1919, when he turned sixty, but that year the Swedish Academy chose a Swiss, Carl Spitteler, known for his four-volume “Olympian Spring.” When Hamsun won, in 1920, it was chiefly because of “Growth of the Soil,” which the Academy saw as a lesson of “heroic struggle.” The book has its share of darkness—a central event is the murder of an infant—but it was above all a celebration of simple rural virtues. It also may strike readers today as the sort of self-important novel that the young Hamsun would have mocked. “The long, long path over the marshes and into the woods—who has been there?” it begins portentously. “Man, a man, the first one who was there. There was no path before him.” Hamsun by then no longer enjoyed public appearances, and he went almost reluctantly to the ceremony, in Stockholm, where, in a curious echo of his “Honor the Young” pronouncements, he said something very sad and very strange: “What I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry—to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave. . . . Today riches and honors have been lavished on me, but one gift has been lacking, the most important one of all, the only one that matters, the gift of youth.”


In the nineteen-seventies, a Dane named Thorkild Hansen wrote “Processen mod Hamsun” (“Hamsun’s Trial”), a three-volume study that more or less concluded that Hamsun’s Nazism was a result of old age (Hamsun was eighty-one in April of 1940, when the Germans invaded); of deafness (even the radio was relatively useless to him); of isolation (he was living at Nørholm, his estate in southern Norway); and of the influence of his wife, Marie, whose enthusiasm for Nazi Germany is well documented. Robert Ferguson’s 1987 biography more or less endorsed the idea that Hamsun never fully understood the vileness to which he lent his name, a comforting view to people like me, who not only loved Hamsun but could not believe that his sympathies for the occupiers went very deep. (The excellent 1996 movie “Hamsun,” in which Max von Sydow plays the elderly Hamsun, takes this view.) But Kolloen shows that it was more complicated than that.

As Hamsun’s opinions became all too public during the nineteen-thirties, he seemed to realize that the artist and the polemicist needed to be separated if both were to thrive. In 1936, when Hamsun was seventy-seven, his last novel, “The Ring Is Closed,” was published, and reviewers noted with some relief that it was, simply, a novel—that, despite everything, the artist had remained true to his art. But his admirers had watched with some alarm as his politics evolved; many found it unforgivable when, in the mid-thirties, he attacked the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the anti-Nazi journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who had been tortured and imprisoned by his fellow-Germans. Even worse, he supported Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian defense minister who founded the pro-Fascist National Union Party, in 1933. Though that could be tolerated, barely, as a nasty idiosyncrasy, everything changed after the Germans invaded on April 9, 1940, and Hamsun urged his countrymen to throw down their weapons and coöperate.

The Nazi occupiers became increasingly pitiless, and increasingly clever at manipulating their trophy, Hamsun, who several times tried to rescue individual countrymen, almost always without success. When Hamsun’s publisher, Harald Grieg, asked for his help in winning the release of a writer whom the Gestapo had arrested, Hamsun arranged a meeting with Josef Terboven, the Reich Commissioner in Norway. Terboven shuffled papers and toyed with Hamsun before saying no; they parted with mutual loathing. The Oslo newspapers, though, showed pictures of Hamsun in a seemingly cheerful meeting with the Reich Commissioner, and Hamsun certainly realized that he had been used.

Hamsun did not endorse Hitler’s racial policies, and, as Kolloen points out, he was in friendly contact with Jews all his life, including Georg Brandes and his favorite publisher, Christian Kønig. Still, he was a man of his time and once suggested, not precisely in the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, that it might benefit everyone if the Jewish people had their own country. Two of Hamsun’s children—his son Tore, an artist, and his daughter, Ellinor, who studied acting—lived in Berlin in the late nineteen-thirties, although not, apparently, with much enthusiasm for what was going on. When Hamsun visited them in February of 1938, they were living in a Jewish neighborhood, and had Jewish friends. Tore was particularly close to Max Tau, a publisher, who had met the Hamsuns in Oslo; with Hamsun’s help, Tau was rescued from the Nazis.


Hamsun’s meeting with Hitler—re-created by, among others, Thorkild Hansen, Ferguson, and Kolloen—took place at Berghof on June 26, 1943, a time when the war was going badly for the Germans. Hitler, then fifty-four and heavily medicated, was not in top form. Nor was Hamsun; he had suffered at least one minor stroke and his hearing had worsened. After Hitler asked Hamsun about his writing habits, adding that he personally preferred working in the evening, he took Hamsun to his study, where they were served tea, and it was agreed that Egil Holmboe, a Norwegian, would do the translating. (Hitler’s usual interpreter, Ernst Züchner, took notes behind a curtain.) Hitler apparently hoped that the writer would inspire him, cheer him up, and perhaps talk about genius, a theme that always interested him. “I feel, if not entirely connected to you, that my life resembles yours very much in certain ways,” Hitler said at one point. But Hamsun had no desire to talk about writing, or art, or genius. He wanted to talk about politics, and about the viciousness of the Occupation. In particular, he wanted Hitler to fire Josef Terboven. He began by complaining that Terboven was clamping down on Norwegian shipping routes, and when Hitler tried to cut off this line of discussion Hamsun went on, “Furthermore, the Reich Commissioner on several occasions has said that in the future there won’t be any place called Norway.”

“Unlike other occupied countries,” Hitler told Hamsun, “Norway has got its own government.”

“Everything that happens in Norway is being decided by the Reich Commissioner!” Hamsun replied, and he tried to explain that Terboven was ruining Hitler’s reputation. Eventually, Hamsun did something unheard of: he interrupted Hitler. The Reich Commissioner’s methods “don’t work with us, we can’t stand his Prussianness,” Hamsun said. “And then the executions! We’ve had it!”

Züchner, behind the curtain, knew that Holmboe had not translated the last outburst. When Hitler began to speak, Hamsun interrupted again: “Terboven doesn’t want a free Norway, but a protectorate—that’s the prospect he gives us.” Then he had a question: “Will he ever be recalled?”

Hitler tried to close the subject, saying, “The Reich Commissioner is a warrior, he’s only there for war-related duties.”

Soon Hamsun began to weep. “It’s not that we’re against the Occupation,” he told Hitler. “We’ll need that for a while. But that man is destroying more for us than Hitler can rebuild!” Again, Holmboe didn’t translate the riskiest part of the outburst. Rather, he turned away from Hitler and warned Hamsun, “Don’t talk about that! We have the Führer’s promise.”

It wasn’t over yet. Hitler began to talk about production, more panzer divisions, and new, secret weapons. While he was speaking, Hamsun tried several more times to break in, saying that he hadn’t come all this way for the honor of it. When Hitler repeated that one could see Germany’s good will in the fact that Norway had its own government, Hamsun, in despair, interrupted and said, “We’re talking to a wall!” Holmboe, Kolloen writes, didn’t translate that, either.

Before leaving, Hamsun said, “We believe in the Führer, but his wishes are being twisted.” He added, “It’s not the right sort of change in Norway. It will all lead to a new war.” That, too, went untranslated, but by now Hamsun had said enough for Hitler to say, “Shut up! You don’t understand a thing!” Hitler walked out and Hamsun wept again; he was particularly upset that Hitler hadn’t personally said goodbye. Later, Hitler screamed at his aides, “I don’t want to see that sort of person here anymore!”

Hamsun’s reputation was in ruins; not only had he seen Hitler but, in a sickeningly misguided moment earlier that year, he had given Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal. His postwar fate was already under discussion. In November, 1944, in Moscow, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, discussed Hamsun’s case with Terje Wold, the Norwegian justice minister in exile, and Trygve Lie, the foreign minister in exile. The author of “Victoria” and “Pan” was too great an artist to be treated like a common Nazi, Molotov said, and, at such an advanced age, should be allowed to die a natural death. Wold replied, in English, “You are too soft, Mr. Molotov.”


Norway was liberated in May of 1945, and the Norwegians were unforgiving toward collaborators. Terboven committed suicide before he could be shot; Quisling and other National Union leaders were executed by firing squad in October, and thousands were imprisoned, including Marie Hamsun, who got a three-year sentence and a fine. Hamsun faced treason charges, but no one knew quite what to do with the nation’s greatest writer, now almost eighty-six.

Hamsun was arrested, and in the next three years he was moved to a nursing home, to the main psychiatric clinic in Oslo, and then back to the nursing home. There are many photographs from this period, and in them Hamsun looks frail, even spectral, and sometimes puzzled. He was examined by doctors and psychiatrists, and many Norwegians took comfort in a psychiatric finding that Hamsun, though sane, was “permanently impaired” mentally. At least one newspaper reported that he was senile. Hamsun himself was offended at the idea that anyone thought his faculties were diminished. “There was nothing the matter with me, I was just old and deaf!” he later insisted. True, his eyesight was failing, and he’d had two cerebral hemorrhages, but so what? His faculties, he said, “had been severely impaired precisely by my stay at the psychiatric clinic.”

During this period, Hamsun formed an acute hatred for the clinic’s chief psychiatrist, Gabriel Langfeldt, who had taken an interest in his case. The psychiatrist, he observed, had come equipped “with his textbooks and his learned tomes,” while the novelist “had created several hundred figures—created them internally and externally like living people, in every psychological state and nuance, in dream and action.” But Hamsun hated Langfeldt mainly because he was conducting a parallel investigation with Marie Hamsun. Parts of the conversations with Marie, which touched on the most intimate issues of the Hamsuns’ marriage, became part of the public court record. For Marie, this was an unconscionable betrayal of privilege; for Hamsun, the ultimate betrayal was Marie’s, and he declared that he never wanted to see his wife again.

Hamsun, meanwhile, was up to something else: for the first time in years, he was writing—and keeping that a secret even from people he knew. “You’ve too often suggested to me that I write a book,” he wrote to a friend late in 1946. “It won’t happen. What can you expect of me now? I’m a wreck, and I’m well into my eighty-eighth year.” Hamsun knew that people regarded him as a traitor—he was shunned when he asked a boy to take a postcard to the mailbox. But his manuscript was no apologia, even though he said of his wartime polemics, “No one told me that what I was writing was wrong, no one in the entire country.” When a magistrate asked about “the murders, the terror, the torture,” Hamsun said that he hadn’t been allowed to read newspapers. What about Terboven, “who took direct orders from Hitler, and tortured and butchered the Norwegian people for five years?” Were the Germans a civilized people? “I didn’t reply,” Hamsun wrote. He challenged the authorities to find “any attack on the Jews” anywhere in his collected writings. Mainly, however, Hamsun had other subjects in mind.

The manuscript was published in 1949, when Hamsun was ninety, with the title “On Overgrown Paths,” and it accomplished what he most wanted—to demonstrate his artistry and to avenge himself on Langfeldt, who appeared by name in the book, over the objections of Hamsun’s longtime publisher. The “overgrown paths” referred to Hamsun’s youth, and in returning to that time he did so in a first-person voice he hadn’t used for nearly forty years. Hamsun, Robert Bly has said, “has a magnifying glass on his eye, like a jeweler’s”; and, as he had done in youthful stories like “A Quite Ordinary Fly of Average Size,” Hamsun closely observed his new surroundings, including nurses and patients and a fellow from Hamarøy who “carried his shoes over his shoulder and walked barefoot,” and whose sad love story runs through the book. Hamsun recalls talking about homesickness during a visit to Helsinki fifty years earlier; he had learned the word “homesick” in America, and he transports himself to the Dakota Territory: it is the eighteen-eighties, and he has just met a farm girl named Bridget, who calls him Noot, and seems “stuck on me” until an Irishman, Patrick, comes along. Patrick falls for Bridget, but she gets involved with an elderly Austrian baker named Kleist, who makes Bridget his apprentice. And so on, until there is another, abrupt shift of mood. “It’s three years since I was arrested, and here I sit,” Hamsun writes, adding, “All of us are on a journey to a land that we’ll reach soon enough.”

The Norwegian courts fined Hamsun four hundred and twenty-five thousand kroner (then about eighty-seven thousand dollars), and he was allowed to return to Nørholm, where he went into a slow, steady decline. In the spring of 1950, urged by her children, Marie, who was then sixty-eight, came home, and, after a four-year separation, all that Hamsun said to her was “You’ve been gone a long time, Marie. All the time you’ve been gone, I’ve had no one to talk to but God.” Few were willing to forgive him then for his wartime behavior, and it is impossible to do so today. Yet one can still watch, fascinated, as the writer makes his final turn in “On Overgrown Paths.” He seems to be reaching for what he had called “the gift of youth,” and in those last pages it is as if he had managed, however briefly, to retrieve it.