Johan Bojer

To Meet Him . . . Is Disappointing There has always been something immediately stirring, especially romantic for me in the mere mention of a Norwegian fjord. Perhaps that is because Thor and Loki were companions of earliest childhood. Nor will I ever forget the surveys and power of the first chapter of The Great Hunger. It had the breadth of sky and the mystery of rock and sea. To meet the author of such a book is necessarily a little disappointing. Bojer is slow, slight, would be almost dapper, were it not for keenness of eye, vigor of movement and ruggedness of countenance. He speaks English with difficulty. His lecturing in the U. S. was largely to Scandinavian organizations. The day I heard him he paid a glaring, a vociferous tribute to Frank Norris.* Bojer is of Scandinavian peasant stock. His youth was one of struggle and poverty, but he soon learned to dream. The essential poet in him developed early. He himself says : "The best education for any child is a window through which it may gaze upon some fairy world." A youth spent near the wild sea and on the wild crags, listening to the stories of peasant women, tending flocks in the mountains--there could be no better for the development of a mind which was later to bring to a great understanding of the human heart a strong and liberal philosophy.

Bojer was educated in a military school at Trondhjem where the boys received free teaching and keep and even a little pay. Here, he says, he heard Knut Hamsun, who was already well known as a writer, lecture. Later, he became a clerk in an office; then, what he calls a "literary tramp," acting as newspaper correspondent, writing books, reading much. After he was married and became a householder he settled down at Hvalstad near Christiania, where he now lives with his family.

There is a sense of prophecy and of deep moral values in Bojer's books. They are all books which would like to bring to humanity something of the nobility of sea and mountain moods. Llewellyn Jones says of them:

"What saves Bojer's novels from being didactic and therefore misleading is his adherence to the great truth that there is no such thing as a science of ethics but that there is such a thing as an art of conduct. You cannot make general rules of conduct, for every case has its not to be duplicated features. Human situations are not like the situations of geometry, infinitely repeatable. But the general 'lie of the land in the case of an author may at least be indicated roughly."

* Bojer stated that, in his opinion, Frank Norris was the world's greatest novelist.