Hungry & Unloved

Hungry & Unloved Into the Chicago offices of Armour & Co. one day in 1887 walked a hobo with a letter for the president. Its plea: give me $25. Meatpacker Philip D. Armour got a kick out of the writer's literary style, ordered the $25 paid to him, and said, "It's worth it." The writing hobo was a 28-year-old Norwegian immigrant with goldrimmed spectacles and an aristocratic face. In Norway he had been a cobbler's apprentice, woodsman, stevedore and road navvy. He had come steerage to the U.S., worked for tight-fisted Wisconsin farmers, taught Unitarian Sunday school in Minneapolis, driven a horsecar in Chicago (where he was fired for letting his horse plod past waiting passengers while he read Euripides).

"D" for Luck. His name was Pedersen. He had signed his first poems "Hamsund," after his family farm, but a careless printer dropped the final 'd' off an early byline and he stuck to the misprinted name for luck. Meatpacker Armour's $25 was one of Knut Hamsun's rare breaks in the U.S.; in 1888, he returned to Norway to write of his disenchantment with the U.S. of booming stockyards and cornlands. He had found no cultural life in the U.S., only "prudishness, self-complacent ignorance," and "patriotism engendered by tin fifes."

In Europe, as in the U.S., Hamsun went hungry. One day he walked into the Copenhagen office of Editor Edvard Brandes, who later wrote "I have seldom seen a man more derelict in appearance. But that face! . . . The expression on his quivering pale face haunted me." The manuscript Hamsun gave Brandes was the story of a writer starving to death in a big city. Published as Hunger it brought Hamsun world recognition. Other novels followed. They were written in a simple, austere, almost laconic style, but with passages of high lyricism and great narrative power. European critics found him "new and

American." In neutral Norway in World War I, Hamsun went into retirement to write his major work, Growth of the Soil, which brought him the 1920 Nobel Prize. He gave away the prize money, refused to be interviewed. Said he "In 100 years I shall be forgotten."

Hobo at Heart. His prize-winning novel was an idealized picture of a frontiersman's struggle with the soil, the state, society and himself. Popular critics called Hamsun a great nature writer, but other novels such as The Woman at the Pump, the story of an emasculated man living in a sexy situation (nine years before Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises), showed that Hamsun's real literary impulse, formed during his years of vagabondage, was a profound reaction to petit bourgeois life. A few years later he embraced Reaction as a political faith. His wife was an outright Nazi sympathizer, and Hamsun himself fell for the Hitler line. When Germany conquered Norway, he told his countrymen: "Norwegians! Throw away your rifles and return home. The Germans are fighting for us and all neutrals." He supported Vidkun Quisling, and in 1943 visited Hitler.

Norwegians took an oblique revenge. They began sending his books back to him. Thousands of dog-eared copies of his most famous titles came tumbling in upon him through the post. When the Germans capitulated, the Hamsuns were brought to trial. His wife got three years; he was fined $65,000. Last week, in seclusion near Grimstad, Norway, Knut Hamsun died at 92. In death his country forgave him. His coffin was draped by a Norwegian flag.

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