Octave Mirbeau’s sharp 1895 critique dismissing Auguste Strindberg while championing Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and his extraordinary novel Hunger – a masterpiece about poverty, pride and artistic genius.
One must admit that Mr Auguste Strindberg was rather an unfortunate invention—unfortunate for him and for us. We thought we had got our hands on another Ibsen. Alas! Ibsens are rare birds; they don’t grow on trees, even in Norway. We soon had to acknowledge we’d been duped. As a dramatist, Mr Strindberg doesn’t rise above the honest mediocrity of our usual theatrical suppliers; as a short story writer and novelist, he proves himself spectacularly inferior; his anthropology appears to be nothing but a limp rehashing, a dreary regurgitation of Lombrosian leftovers. For his compromised glory, it remains to be demonstrated that he is a decent chemist. But I am hardly qualified to judge that.
What’s regrettable about this affair—banal and commonplace as it is—is that it might harm less trumpeted but more worthy artists. I rather fear we will make them pay, through guilty silence, for the excessive praise so unfortunately heaped upon Mr Auguste Strindberg, which crushed him beyond redemption.
Yet I would like to speak today of a singularly gifted man, an original and powerful character who deserves, in every respect, the attention of literary folk and those curious about extraordinary souls. His name is Knut Hamsun, and the publisher Albert Langen has just revealed to us an extraordinary work by this Norwegian: Hunger.
Extraordinary, truly, and unlike any known work. Don’t go imagining this title conceals a book of social revolt, ardent sermons, anathemas and demands. Not at all. Hunger is the novel of a young man who is hungry, that’s all—who goes days and days without eating, and who hasn’t a complaint, hasn’t a hatred. Thrown out of his wretched lodgings, he wanders through the streets of Christiania; with no home but the thickets in the surrounding woods, no bed but park benches. His distress is complicated by his pride, for he won’t appear poor, and by his strict honesty, for he won’t become a thief. The hungrier he gets, the more he stiffens his dignity. Sometimes the windfall of a bit of money comes his way. But it’s only a brief respite in this permanent ascent to the Calvary of Hunger. Then, most often, through some singular perversity, this money with which he could live for weeks and gather new strength for coming hardships, he gives to those poorer than himself—charming soul, who remains, in this horror, gentle, naive, trusting, almost happy, sketching plans for books and plays, writing in the evenings by streetlamp light newspaper articles which he doesn’t doubt for an instant will bring him, the very next day, considerable sums and considerable honours.
No other drama, no other action in this book than hunger. And in this gripping subject, which one might think would grow monotonous, there’s such a diversity of impressions, renewed episodes of street encounters, nocturnal landscapes, a curious parade of unexpected figures, strangely bizarre, that make this book a unique work of the first order, and utterly compelling.
Autobiography, surely.
I have before me a photograph of Knut Hamsun. He is a man of strong build, with vigorous, supple limbs. Beneath rough, uncombed hair, his forehead is modelled with energetic, decisive thumb-strokes. His gaze is strange. In the depth of the eye socket, it has deep, muted gleams. One senses he must have witnessed many exceptional sights: there’s something distant about it, something of the traveller, the nostalgic, like a sailor’s gaze. His moustache curls up, short and neat at the edges above a lip full of kindness. A physiognomy of double expression—energetic and tender, ardent and contained, penetrating and veiled, proud and sad, and marked here and there, in the hollow cheeks, the pinched, sniffing nostrils, with signs of suffering—it impresses and long holds the mind.
Knut Hamsun is only thirty-four, and I believe no life has been more adventurous than his. Early on, it was tempered by misfortune.
At twenty-two, he left Norway, driven out by poverty and hunger. Weary of struggling with incredible courage against the fatalities that never ceased to crush him, despairing of earning a piece of bread through work, preserved moreover by a strictly loyal nature and indomitable pride from evil temptations, he embarked one fine day on a ship bound to fish for cod on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. He himself, in astonishing pages published a year ago in La Revue Blanche, recounted his existence there. It would be interesting to know if these few pages, of such intense frisson, aren’t perhaps a fragment of a more considerable work.
“Month after month,” writes Knut Hamsun, “we remained on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, fishing for cod. Summers and winters came and went, and always we remained in the same place, in the middle of the sea, between two worlds… Four or five times a year, we went to Miquelon to sell our catch and buy provisions; then we headed back out to sea, returned to the same place, to fish for cod and return to Miquelon. I never went ashore. What was the point? One saw few people in that abandoned hole, inhabited by fishermen and fish merchants… We weren’t sailors, we others, but simple fishermen. A sailor travels, and however long the crossing, always ends up arriving somewhere; whilst we never budged from the same place, our anchors buried in the sand. And this for so long that we had lost even the memory of dry land, having changed so much ourselves… Our continual promiscuity with fish had transformed us into sorts of molluscs, into strange marine animals, crawling in their boat and conversing in their own language.”
There was a woman on board, a single woman, the skipper’s wife. An ugly creature, frightfully dirty and slovenly, repulsive and shrewish; all considered her the ideal of beauty. And they loved her, “each in his fashion,” and they respected her like a holy idol, though wild calls of rut growled within them. They had strange and horrible ways of finding release.
“Then it came to pass that we found an unnatural pleasure in torturing our fish, in torturing our own fish. The two Russians, especially, became sick with the desire to commit such a sin…”
One should read in full these short, impressive pages, which have another accent of frenzied, bestial humanity than that of Iceland Fisherman. The sudden appearance of great steamers in the fog, the hallucinations it provokes in the night, are rendered by Knut Hamsun with a force, a terror, a grandeur of expression unknown to Mr Pierre Loti.
Allow me one more quotation:
“Sometimes I would wake towards midnight, half-suffocated by the exhalation of all these men tossing in their dreams. The lantern lit their thick bodies marinating in their coarse woollen shirts. The Russians, with their three or four whiskers on their jaws, looked like seals; from each hammock came sighs interrupted by indistinct words, and a name, always the same: that of the skipper’s wife. All were mad for her, and the brutes called her in their dreams. The acrid fog that penetrated through the portholes, the tobacco smoke, the smell of all these sweating men and the fish on board condensed into a thick, suffocating vapour that forced me to close my eyes as soon as I tried to reopen them. And I would fall back asleep, oppressed in a nightmare by a gigantic flower that settled upon me and, entwining me with its humid petals, sucked me, swallowed me, tenacious and hard, placid and soundless.”
After three years of this existence, Knut Hamsun left for America, where, without resources, support, or connections, he became a labourer. For another three years, he worked the land, barely earning his living, reduced to privations, but not suffering from them, for he had acquired an extraordinary power of endurance. Then he dreamed of returning to Norway. But how? He had no savings, no money to pay for his journey, and he was too proud to request repatriation. Besides, he probably never thought of it. At last he managed to get taken on as a sleeping-car conductor on one of America’s major railways. Fed, housed, adequately paid, he was able after four years to accumulate enough savings to undertake his return journey and set to the literary work for which he had always, within himself, maintained a passion.
But some time after his arrival in Norway, he was obliged, for some reason I don’t know, to expatriate himself again. And he took refuge in Paris, where, alone, poor, unknown to all, he pursues with determination one of the finest works of our time.
One must love this man; one must follow with passion this admirable and rare artist, in whose simple image I have seen shine the flame of genius.
1895.
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Léon Hennique Novel 