Time limps on toward the centenary of Knut Hamsun. Norway waits and worries. Hamsun was the first person shameless enough to wait so long to leave our vale of tears that his death occurred practically on the eve of his hundredth birthday. Now he has to be feted while people still have him fresh in their memory. And this is a fearful thing—to be expected to celebrate a writer's centennial while one still remembers how it was to be his contemporary. Even Ibsen was more tractable than Hamsun on this point.
So: A nation which ten years ago denied that its greatest writer was in possession of his faculties, forcibly committed him to a psychiatric clinic, forcibly put him in an old folks' home, put his wife and sons in prison, took away his fortune; in short, allowed itself to do everything that a people wants to do with its writers—this nation is now supposed to celebrate his centenary. Seldom if ever has the world has seen the like of this writer's birthday party. But there has to be one!
For the man is world-famous.
Other Norwegian writers are only world-famous in Norway, but Hamsun is so the world over. The story of what happened to Hamsun in his old age is too well-known and too dismal to rake up; it was a tragic and wholly clear consequence of a genius's misrelation to a self-satisfied and intellectually democratic age, and it showed up a people's unworthiness and immaturity in the glare of floodlights. The signs would indicate that this writer's centenary has got to be the most painful ever.
But it won't be.
Everything will go as if buttered; speeches will be made, literature students will write in the newspapers, professors will give lectures, and Olav Storstein will write another dozen articles on Hamsun. Books will be published. Nobody will laugh in the wrong places. Everything will be just as usual. Heavens, how beautifully everything will go! The only man in Norway—and the last—who was in condition to make a scandal; well, he's the one we're burying now!
Either there is something wrong with Norwegian writers, or there is something wrong with Norwegians, for the story isn't new. A classic case is the treatment of Henrik Wergeland, whose patriotism wasn't—in Norwegian eyes—anything to brag about either. But Wergeland died young, and when they noticed that the man in fact was dying, they let him depart in peace, and even gave him some compensation toward the end. After the press had slandered him long and thoroughly enough, and tuberculosis had done the rest of the work, the Norwegian people pressed him to its bosom and incorporated him into the national treasury. Since then the people have regarded him as a holy relic in himself.. But Wergeland didn't let himself be seduced by their embrace, and one of the last things he wrote was the lines:
. . . .Now as I fade
They make Busts and draw Portraits . . .
Not much more enraptured by her countrymen was Amalie Skram, who emigrated to Denmark and had herself buried there under the epitaph: "Danish citizen, Danish housewife, Danish authoress."
Ibsen too kept a cool head. When the time had come, when he was world-famous enough, and when the grave was near, the Norwegian people opened their arms to him as well. But he was unmoved, he withstood the nation's fond charm. He had never had a weakness for it anyway. And all the gossip, slander, and filth which had gone through the Norwegian press over the years had become too deeply rooted in him.
Yet it would be profoundly unjust to think that it is only their writers whom Norwegians treat after this jolly pattern. In fact it is applied to almost all who lift their heads above the average. (Aside from skiers and ski jumpers, who spend their meaning-filled lives in deep harmony with their people.) Edvard Munch was practically driven out of the land with stones, and he stayed away for a long time; he roamed around for years sojourning in European hotel rooms, until he ended up in Dr. Jacobsen's famous nerve clinic in Copenhagen, where he gradually came to himself again. In this time of wandering, which encompassed about seventeen years, the understanding and the practical help which met Munch in Germany was probably what kept him physically alive. After the clinic in Copenhagen, Munch journeyed "home" to Norway — as a recluse and a people-wary eccentric, but healthy in spirit and with full creative power.
Still, Edward Munch's exile was paltry compared to Ibsen's. Ibsen left Norway with a small stipend in his pocket, took his wife and son to Rome—and was gone for twenty-nine years. That wasn't originally their plan, but the return home kept being postponed, year after year.
If one believes that it was the evil reactionary circles in Norway who drove Munch and Ibsen away, one is on the wrong track; it was not the chapel folk and the puritans and pietists who were after them. It was the intelligentsia, the progressive, radical intelligence personified, who made the most important contributions to the witch-hunt. For example, while Edvard Munch and his family were still in Oslo, a well-known radical doctor gave a lecture in the Student Union purporting to explain Munch's pictures as a manifestation of a latent mental illness whose symptoms could be shown in several generations of the Munch family.
It is hardly going too far to attribute this attitude toward distinguished compatriots to an unconscious but energetic hatred of the very thing these men represent. And in the cases of Wergeland, Ibsen, Munch, and Hamsun the diagnosis is quite clear, it is the average intellectual's hatred of the independent spirit. The hatred of the superior. Even while the whole Oslo gang was attempting in good faith to dispatch them, the unconscious insight must have been present: These are our superiors! Let us try to throttle them before it is too late! It is related that Ibsen in his old age talked about a drama that he had yet to write; it would be an important work, and the theme was to be envy! It's too bad Ibsen never wrote it, for it would presumably have shed light on this national mystery.
Now, the burial-and-jubilee phenomenon is nothing new in Norway; the tradition is long. The greatest example goes back almost a thousand years, to the battle of Stikkestad, where the Northmen gathered and killed King Olav Haraldssønn—after which, as soon as he was in the earth, they proclaimed him to be Norway's Saint Olav, the country's patron saint. The conversions began the very night Olav died, and before the year was up even his bitterest opponents had become his followers.
It helps to get people into the ground.
Great God, how good and quiet and unanimous it becomes in the land when someone is dead! The peace which follows is already reason enough to kill a man once in awhile. But it mustn't be just anybody. No peace followed after Quisling, for he wasn't significant enough, and he had no truth to administer. On the other hand, it looks as if the persecution and demolishing of the great souls is truly a kind of higher civic duty, something which in fact has to happen in order to drive the situation and the man to the extreme, to awaken his last reserves of strength, and to leave behind a true image in the world. Without mean acts and persecutions from the Norwegian quarter, it is doubtful whether Wergeland, Ibsen or Munch would have achieved the degree of loneliness and bitterness necessary to wholly and fully release their work. If Olav Haraldsønn had not been killed by Norse weapons, he would hardly have become Saint Olav. And if Hamsun's lifelong misrelation to the people and the age had not been crowned with the monstrous slanders which overtook him at the end, he would not have left behind a monumental picture of a genius's lack of reason and adaptability. Unyielding, obstinate, inflexible unto madness, he wandered with open eyes right into the disgrace which was to save him forever from becoming "one of ours". Hamsun carried out his own destiny with the same genius with which he wrote his books; the civic humiliation of the last years was the final fabulous capstone to his work.
It will be painful to hear the speeches at the centennial dinners.
Of course, the need to kill great men is by no means an isolated Norwegian phenomenon. Strindberg was shut out of Swedish theaters for years, and practically starved as he roamed around France and Germany. Gustaf Fröding was almost killed by Swedish critics, and Ernst Josephson was driven mad by his nice Swedish colleagues. Goethe characterized the trend a hundred years ago:
"...wer sein Gefühl dem Pöbel Offenbart, hat man von je gekreuzigt und verbrannt!"Whoever bares his feelings to the rabble has from aye been crucified and burned.
The Gospels, too, have words for it: "Your fathers stoned the prophets and now you are raising monuments to them." It is relevant here that the history of such attacks on an individual, all against one, actually forms the nucleus of our culture. The crucifixion on Golgotha is like a great summary picture of the soul's fate in the culture which was to come.
Neither were the Athenians as they should have been; but they were a people with a feel for style and aesthetic sense, so they didn't hold a jubilee for Socrates afterwards. And in the square in front of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the Florentines have put down a modest stone plaque with a shy text, with approximately the following words: "Here we burned brother Gerolamo Savonarola and his three fellow believers *** one spring day four hundred years ago. Today we erect this memorial to him."
Norwegians are in good company when they hate their great fellow citizens—but that doesn't make them either Athenians or Florentines.
This page added February 2001
