Old Man

LOOK BACK ON HAPPINESS -- Knut Hamsun--Coward-McCann ($2.50).

In his essence, the "I" who tells Look Back On Happiness is 79-year-old Knut Hamsun himself, as fierce and fine an old man as ever declined to batten on the adulation of fools. And his novel is less a novel than a devoutly unpretentious rec ord of things he values, or despises.

He values, as he has valued all his life, bare nature itself, and human living inter locked with nature. He despises, as he has for years, what he summarizes as "the modern spirit in Norway" (read "the world") and to the "little upstart heart" of the "modern" reader he addresses his book.

First seen in the silence of a winter alone in northern Norway, this old man begins, with the spring, to drift. The following summer he spends on a farm which, thanks to tourists, is swiftly disintegrating. He is not fond of the tourists.

Of the English he remarks: "England will soon have to open old people's homes for her sons. She desexes her people with sport and obsessive ideas: were not other countries keeping her in perpetual unrest, she would in a couple of generations be converted to pederasty. . . ." Most of all he deplores what he sees in Ingeborg Torsen, a fine young woman who, thanks to her feminist education, has become a sexual derelict, disconsolately out for what she can get. She manages inadvertently to cause a murder; she is bound, for a while, to a dismal little actor who lives off her. Subtly, she is interested in the old man; uneasily, he is drawn to her. During the next year or two he continues to see her. In the long run he has the satisfaction of seeing her well-married (to a carpenter), grey-haired, hard-worked.

Of his own uncertain affections, his age, his gradual loss of power ("They were planned so big and red; yetthey are small irons, and they hardly glow") he tells no less serenely. "I have followed the septuagenarian of literature step by step, and reported the progress of his disintegration." He ends his book with a quiet, magnificent diatribe which should make most readers duck, most smug old men-of-letters blush.

"I can no longer herald a renaissance; it is too late now. Once, when I had the power to do much and the desire to do more, mediocrity everywhere was too strong. I was the giant with the feet of clay--the lot of many youths. But now, my small, small friend, look about you: there has appeared, even within your field of vision, a figure here and a figure there, a shining crest, lavish with its bounty, geniuses beneath the open sky--you and I should bid them welcome. I walk in the evening of life and, trembling, recognize myself in them; they are youth with jeweled eyes. Yet you begrudge them your recognition; yes, you begrudge them fame. Because you are nobody."

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