|
Curb Your Modernism: Knut Hamsun’s Victoria
by
Jeffrey David Cantwell
Contact: cantwell76@yahoo.com
On the big bright marquee at the theater of Modernist Literature, well beneath the blinking bulbs of titans like Kafka and Conrad, tiny simple letters spell out the (phony) name of Knut Hamsun. His work exists in a relative limbo, his reputation approaches ignominy; Virginia Woolf arrives by limousine, Hamsun pulls up in a diesel Peugeot. Nonetheless, scores of superlatives are tossed above his handle, all of them correct and contradictory and – most unfortunately – controversial. But notice who opens the show…
Nobel Prize laureate, front-runner for Father of the 20th Century Novel, and pep booster for Adolf Hitler, Hamsun was born Knut Pederson in Norway, 1859, where he spent his formative years performing odd jobs and avoiding a proper education at no great distance from the Arctic Circle. He had a string of early literary failures beginning with his first work of fiction at 18; it wasn’t until the publication of Sult, or Hunger, in 1890, that his voice and reputation was established. Shot like a roadside flare from the future and arcing over the last century, Hunger illuminated an accident of broken thought and guts that had rarely been glimpsed in print. Poking at urban indifference and digging through subconscious ruin years before psychoanalytic concepts gained fin-de-siècle hipster cachet, Hamsun gave brutal, plotless expression to the mind of his character, and offered a radical blend of author and work. Poverty is endured, art is suffered for, and characters behave badly in general; Hunger is as claustrophobic as literature gets, and provides every reason for folks like Henry Miller to be so enamoured with Hamsun’s work.
Eventually he got around to writing Victoria. Which isn’t really like Hunger at all.
More structured than Hunger in plot and gentler in the mental invasion of its characters, Victoria is a lesser novel, and a slender one, but by no means slight. Trading a city environs for the country, Hamsun touches on desperate love, filial obligation, and artistic invention; what results is a delicately told, lyrical soap opera.
In brief: our hero Johannes is a miller’s sensitive son, Victoria the posh daughter of the local Lord. They are young, they are curious, and – why not? – in love. Ostensibly, Victoria concerns the unrequited sort, or rather, a cruelly approaching-requitable love, which is decidedly less romantic, perhaps less tragic, but on the whole less tedious; the reader has cause to entertain a Maybe. But the titular Victoria especially is so confounded by conventions of her class that she delays her admission, and beyond that point rails against the affair’s growth. Such hang-ups dominate the plot; Victoria is very much a study of social habituation, which one may assume was already passé when the novel was published, in 1898. Perhaps unintentionally, the situation still provides a small deal of frustration on the reader’s part, though not so much the characters, who seem to take their lot on the chin. The men in particular seem so tame that their occasional outbursts of violence ring impossible silly.
* * *
A Curious Digression:
I first opened my low-down flea market paperback of Victoria while riding NJ Transit up the Northeast Corridor to Manhattan. Now here was a window scene of piled industrial debris and countless shades of rust, not at all consistent with Hamsun’s pastoral tenor and downright dreamy prose. Anyway, I am in the back of the train car, on one of those two-seaters that are smaller than the regular seats; you have to keep your back rigidly straight like in a Quaker church pew. There I sit, and everything smells funny, and this baby is crying, and I inspect Victoria’s cover with the awfully San Franciscan flowers-in-her-hair borderline Harlequin-romance type of woman. I’m reluctant to start reading, because let’s be honest it looks terrible. And so as you and I often do I stare at the ceiling, and picture the sky beyond, and wait for the usual Steinway to drop, maybe an upside-down lemon meringue pie, or the prow of a luxury ocean liner, falling and piercing my forehead. But of course these moments pass; I begin to read…and lo and behold! From above, Hamsun himself starts flinging organs filled with blood, albeit in his graceful and righteous way, but it’s all so mordant, just like the cover blurb said it would be, and we’re off. I finish two hours later, pulling away from Secaucus, and as though from a decent meal I am full but not stuffed. And it strikes me: it would be a barefaced anachronism to write this sort of fiction today, like Big Star playing power-pop in 1972…but of course without that sort of impudence the world would lack a Sister Lovers and sundry works produced against a similar grain. Which is to say, wouldn’t it be nice if someone would?
* * *
The novel follows a series of encounters, beginning in childhood, between Johannes and Victoria, at times awkward and tender, and punctuated by Johannes’ musings on his secret sweetheart. The characters grow into adults, with Johannes achieving some fame as a poet and Victoria striving to sustain her dynastic status quo. Though they share a mutual fascination, quite sincere, any relationship is obviously doomed. Johannes cannot compete with the desires of Victoria’s family, nor her wealthy suitor Otto, who falls into the nice and neat stereotype of priggish aristocrat. Victoria herself often suffers bouts of prim hesitation, those moments when “her lips seemed to tremble slightly; but at once she regained her composure.” And while this may seem so hopelessly ancient in a world of Hawaiian Quilting television programs and reading “Juicy” on the backside of a child’s pants, what drives the work is Hamsun’s gushing marvel at the nature of love:
“Does it not cause the monk to creep by night through high-walled gardens and fasten his eye to the windows of sleepers? Does it not possess the nun with foolishness and darken the princess’ understanding? It lays low the king’s head by the wayside so that his hair sweeps the wayside dust as he whispers lewd words to himself and sticks out his tongue.”
Oddly enough, given Hamsun’s comfort with the subject in other works, there is almost no physical element to their attraction; in Victoria, no lust is expressed by what must be two awfully hard-up individuals. Hamsun keeps their love pure and sappy and metaphysical, recalling for the reader (of certain sensitivities) that formative adolescent crush uncomplicated by underwear, though in Victoria it lasts a lifetime. It is this clean and clear veneration of Victoria that inspires Johannes’ works, and in one whimsical scene a neighbor comes knocking after Johannes has been singing out the window in the middle of the night. Johannes has been particularly motivated:
“I tell you, it’s never gone so well before. It was like one long flash of lightning. I once saw a lightning flash run along a telegraph wire; God, it looked like a sheet of flame. Well, that’s the way my ideas have been flowing tonight. What am I to do? I can’t believe you’ll go on being angry when you hear the whole story. I sat here writing, you see, I never moved – I remembered about you and sat still. Then a moment came when it slipped my memory, I had to let off steam; and I paced the room once or twice. I was so happy.”
Echoes of Hunger resound as the act of creation exhilarates the artist, though in Victoria it is the spirit, not body, which will soon starve. As the presence of his muse recedes, we see Johannes scrape against a misery so absurdly low, it reads like an academic translation of a proverbial blues:
“Today, as I am unable to work, unable to think, unable to find peace from my memories, I shall try to get down what happened to me in one night. Gentle reader, today I have here an altogether dismal day. It is snowing outside, there is almost no one passing in the street, all is sad, and my soul is unspeakably desolate. I have walked for hours, in the street and in my room, and tried to compose myself a little; now it is afternoon and things are no better with me. I, who should be warm, am cold and pale as a burnt-out day.”
The latter days of the novel wrap up the foiled lovers’ lives, with the consequences of Victoria’s indecision tied on like a miserable bow, and a struggling Johannes recognizing the truth of poetry written by his more stimulated younger self: “love was creation’s source, creation’s ruler; but all love’s ways are strewn with blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood.”
Having wed just as work on Victoria began, Hamsun too felt inspired; he would later name his daughter after the novel. One can imagine and forgive this fresh marriage encouraging such a romanticized picture of love – “as if happiness lay naked before me with a long, laughing throat and wanted to come to me” – though indeed it is soothed in the finale with great cynicism. Nonetheless, while not the masterpiece of Hunger, Victoria remains a pleasure, benefiting from its expressive prose, tempered by tact, and tight design as a perverse love-letter.
Alas, the Hamsun who would be Norway’s Finest, who met the progressive Mark Twain and was briefly exposed to New World attitudes as a streetcar conductor in Chicago, would find such different inspiration toward the end of his life. Certainly nothing in Victoria could be interpreted as support for fascism; however, mention must be made that Hamsun’s politics were deranged. He presented his Nobel Prize to Joseph Goebbels, and supported Germany during both World Wars. Sentenced to jail by a liberated Norway following the Second, Hamsun remained free on account of his age and actively wrote until his death.
|
