Norway has had two novelists who were undeniably world-class; both are read around the world; both have had a significant influence on authors throughout the world; both received the Nobel Prize in Literature; and both became embarrassments. The less serious embarrassment was Sigrid Undset, an immensely talented novelist who embarrassed secularizing Lutheran Norway by becoming Catholic and, even worse, actively and noisily defending the Catholic faith in the public sphere, which made it impossible to treat it as just some weird artistic eccentricity. But Undset also had qualities that even secularizing Lutheran Norway admired, like her patriotism and fierce opposition to Nazism. The other great novelist / embarrassment to Norwegians was a higher order of embarrassment altogether.
Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) published his first novel in 1877, but with the publication of Sult in 1890, his worldwide reputation was secured. Sult, or Hunger, showed the world a new kind of novel, extremely psychological, and both it and the novels that followed made Hamsun the most influential novelist in the world, as other novelists began imitating Hamsun's innovative style and forms of experimentation. Markens Grøde, or Growth of the Soil, was published in 1917, and played a significant role in getting him the Nobel Prize in 1920. He was the titan of the Norwegian literary scene, indeed, of the world literary scene, and championed a literary approach that eschewed realistic naturalism and instead worked for a romantic union of scientific starkness and passionate feeling. He summed up the literary world of the day like no one else. And that was part of the beginning of the embarrassment. Hamsun was not some weirdo on the fringe; his beliefs were at the cutting edge of what the educated classes of his day claimed to believe. It's just that Hamsun really, really believed it.
The intellectual climate of the time saw itself as rising above the superstitions of the past, the Christian illusions, the pallid sentimentalism and ordinary conventional morality of the populace; it saw itself as a clear-eyed affirmation of a scientific view of the world, and, more than that, humanity; it had contempt for any kind of egalitarianism and looked for people strong enough to cast off illusions and seize the opportunity to achieve new things; it was eugenic and imperialist and chauvinist and racist. And Hamsun believed it all enthusiastically, so it is perhaps no surprise that when Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came along, Hamsun was right on board with them. It is a commentary on the historical course of modern Norway that this was not what caused the embarrassment. Hamsun's views, while not universally accepted, were entirely mainstream in Norway at the time, however much modern Norwegians might try to sweep that fact under the carpet. In many ways, Hamsun was the mainstream. (Indeed, part of Sigrid Undset's turn to Catholicism may well have been a reaction to just how common views like Hamsun's had become in Norway.)
Norway was in an awkward position in World War II; it was a neutral country rich with resources that had become stretched very thin by the war, and by early 1940 both Britain and Germany were preparing to invade it to prevent all those resources from falling into the hands of the other side. Germany got there first, on April 9, seized a large portion of the country in about a day, and then systematically broke the underprepared Norwegian military forces while fending off a desperate attempt by the British and French to block German control of the country. By June 7, the British were abandoning the country and King Haakon VII was forced to flee to London. The Germans took over, first administering Norway directly, and then handing the reins over to the collaborationist government of Vidkun Quisling. Knut Hamsun was a firm supporter of the Quisling government (although not of every person in it). Many, many Norwegians who had been sympathetic to Hamsun-like views swung around quickly when they were invaded; not Hamsun, who actually believed it all. And even worse, he never stopped; he continued to insist that he was right even when the Quisling government was overthrown and the King's government returned. This was the last straw for the Norwegians, who started holding book-burnings for his books. He was forced by the new government to undergo a psychiatric examination, which declared him to be severely impaired and he spent some time in a psychiatric hospital -- a situation that was almost certainly constructed to allow the Norwegian government to drop its treason charges against him and fine him instead. Certainly Hamsun insisted that it had all been rigged, and he doesn't show much evidence of impairment in any other way. He died in 1952, and ever since Norwegians have not quite known what to do with their most influential and famous novelist, who had been the single most important author in Norway for around sixty years. So they keep reading him and they keep hating him and they keep making excuses for him and they keep commemorating him and then hate him more for having commemorated him .
Growth of the Soil, which again was published in 1917 long before much of this, has been on my pile of possible candidates for the fortnightly book literally for years now; every time I've considered doing it, there were always more intriguing books to do. There still are, but while there is no doubt whatsoever that in the opposition between Hamsun and Undset, my sympathies are entirely with the latter (not merely morally and religiously but also aesthetically to the extent that I have so far seen), I think there's an advantage to knowing something of what Undset in part was reacting against. In any case, I'm getting it off the pile and reading the Penguin Classics edition translated by Sverre Lyngstad.
