The Best of Knut Hamsun. Knut Hamsun
said:
"Do you sail tonight, Captain?"
"Yes; in a short time," answered the man. He spoke Swedish.
"Hem, I suppose you wouldn't happen to need a man?"
I was at this instant utterly indifferent as to whether I was met by a refusal or not; it was all the same to me what reply the man gave me, so I stood and waited for it.
"Well, no," he replied; "unless it chanced to be a young fellow."
"A young fellow!" I pulled myself together, took off my glasses furtively and thrust them into my pocket, stepped up the gangway, and strode on deck.
"I have no experience," said I; "but I can do anything I am put to. Where are you bound for?"
"We are in ballast for Leith, to fetch coal for Cadiz."
"All right," said I, forcing myself upon the man; "it's all the same to me where I go; I am prepared to do my work."
"Have you never sailed before?" he asked.
"No; but as I tell you, put me to a task, and I'll do it. I am used to a little of all sorts."
He bethought himself again.
I had already taken keenly into my head that I was to sail this voyage, and I began to dread being hounded on shore again.
"What do you think about it, Captain?" I asked at last. "I can really do anything that turns up. What am I saying? I would be a poor sort of chap if I couldn't do a little more than just what I was put to. I can take two watches at a stretch, if it comes to that. It would only do me good, and I could hold out all the same."
"All right, have a try at it. If it doesn't work, well, we can part in England."
"Of course," I reply in my delight, and I repeated over again that we could part in England if it didn't work.
And he set me to work....
Out in the fjord I dragged myself up once, wet with fever and exhaustion, and gazed landwards, and bade farewell for the present to the town--to Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes.
Footnotes
1. Issued by the barbers at cheaper rates, as few men in Norway shave themselves.
2. Steam cooking-kitchen and famous cheap eating-house.
3. The last family bearing title of nobility in Norway.
4. Theatre of Varieties, etc., and Garden in Christiania.
5. Dwelling of the civil governor of a Stift or diocese.
6. In Norway, 14th of March and October.
Shallow Soil
Translator's Preface
In the autumn of 1888 a Danish magazine published a few chapters of an autobiographical novel which instantly created the greatest stir in literary circles throughout Europe. At that time Ibsen, Björnson, Brandes, Strindberg, and other Scandinavian writers were at the height of their cosmopolitan fame, and it was only natural that the reading world should keep in close touch with the literary production of the North. But even the professional star-gazers, who maintained a vigilant watch on northern skies, had never come across the name of Knut Hamsun. He was unknown; whatever slight attention his earlier struggles for recognition may have attracted was long ago forgotten. And now he blazed forth overnight, with meteoric suddenness, with a strange, fantastic, intense brilliance which could only emanate from a star of the first magnitude.
Sudden as was Hamsun's recognition, however, it has proved lasting. The story of his rise from obscurity to fame is one of absorbing interest. Behind that hour of triumph lay a long and bitter struggle, weary years of striving, of constant and courageous battle with a destiny that strewed his path with disappointments and defeats, overwhelming him with adversities that would have swamped a genius of less energy and real power.
Knut Hamsun began life in one of the deep Norwegian valleys familiar to English readers through Björnson's earlier stories. He was born in August, 1860. When he was four years old his poverty-stricken parents sent him to an uncle, a stern, unlovely man who made his home on one of the Lofoten Islands—that "Drama in Granite" which Norway's rugged coast-line flings far into the Arctic night. Here he grew up, a taciturn, peculiar lad, inured to hardship and danger, in close communion with nature; dreaming through the endless northern twilight, revelling through the brief intense summer, surrounded by influences and by an atmosphere which later were to give to his production its strange, mystical colouring, its pendulum-swings from extreme to extreme.
At seventeen he was apprenticed to a cobbler, and while working at his trade he wrote and, at the cost of no one knows what sacrifices, saved enough money to have his first literary efforts printed and published. They consisted of a long, fantastic poem and a novel, "Björger"—the latter a grotesque conglomeration of intense self-analytical studies. These attracted far less attention than they really deserved. However, the cobbler's bench saw no more of Knut Hamsun.
During the next twelve years he led the life of a rover, but a rover with a fixed purpose from which he never swerved. First he turned his face toward Christiania, the capital and the intellectual centre of the country; and in order to get there he worked at anything that offered itself. He was a longshoreman on Bodö's docks, a road-labourer, a lumberjack in the mountains; a private tutor and court messenger. Finally he reached the metropolis and enrolled as a student at the university. But the gaunt, raw-boned youth, unpractical and improvident, overbearing of manner, passionately independent in thought and conduct, failed utterly in his attempts to realise whatever ambitions he had cherished. So it was hardly strange that this the first chapter of his Odyssey should end in the steerage of an American-bound emigrant steamer.
In America, where he landed penniless, he turned his strong and capable hands to whatever labour he could find. He had intended to become a Unitarian minister. Instead of doing so he had to work as a farm-hand on the prairie, street-car conductor in Chicago, dairyman in Dakota; and he varied these pursuits by giving a series of lectures on French literature in Minneapolis. By that time he probably imagined that he was equipped for a more successful attack on the literary strongholds of his own country, and returned to Christiania. Disappointments and privations followed more bitter than any he had ever known. He starved