Pan

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Produced by Tim Becker, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks,
and the Online Distributed Team

PAN

Translated from the Norwegian of

Knut Hamsun

by W. W. Worster

With an Introduction by Edwin Björkman

New York

Alfred A. Knopf

1927

Published July, 1921
Second printing August, 1921
Third printing September, 1921
Fourth printing February, 1922
Fifth printing January, 1927

Knut Hamsun: From Hunger to Harvest

Between "Hunger" and "Growth of the Soil" lies the time generally
allotted to a generation, but at first glance the two books seem much
farther apart. One expresses the passionate revolt of a homeless
wanderer against the conventional routine of modern life. The other
celebrates a root-fast existence bounded in every direction by
monotonous chores. The issuance of two such books from the same pen
suggests to the superficial view a complete reversal of position. The
truth, however, is that Hamsun stands today where he has always stood.
His objective is the same. If he has changed, it is only in the
intensity of his feeling and the mode of his attack. What, above all, he
hates and combats is the artificial uselessness of existence which to
him has become embodied in the life of the city as opposed to that of
the country.

Problems do not enter into the novels of Hamsun in the same manner as
they did into the plays of Ibsen. Hamsun would seem to take life as it
is, not with any pretense at its complete acceptability, but without
hope or avowed intention of making it over. If his tolerance be never
free from satire, his satire is on the other hand always easily
tolerant. One might almost suspect him of viewing life as something
static against which all fight would be futile. Even life's worst
brutalities are related with an offhandedness of manner that makes you
look for the joke that must be at the bottom of them. The word
_reform_ would seem to be strangely eliminated from his dictionary,
or, if present, it might be found defined as a humorous conception of
something intrinsically unachievable.

Hamsun would not be the artist he is if he were less deceptive. He has
his problems no less than Ibsen had, and he is much preoccupied with
them even when he appears lost in ribald laughter. They are different
from Ibsen's, however, and in that difference lies one of the chief
explanations of Hamsun's position as an artist. All of Ibsen's problems
became in the last instance reducible to a single relationship--that
between the individual and his own self. To be himself was his cry and
his task. With this consummation in view, he plumbed every depth of
human nature. This one thing achieved, all else became insignificant.

Hamsun begins where Ibsen ended, one might say. The one problem never
consciously raised by him as a problem is that of man's duty or ability
to express his own nature. That is taken for granted. The figures
populating the works of Hamsun, whether centrally placed or moving
shadowlike in the periphery, are first of all themselves--agressively,
inevitably, unconsciously so, In other words, they are like their
creator. They may perish tragically or ridiculously as a result of their
common inability to lay violent hand on their own natures. They may go
through life warped and dwarfed for lack of an adjustment that to most
of us might seem both easy and natural. Their own selves may become
more clearly revealed to them by harsh or happy contacts with life, and
they may change their surfaces accordingly. The one thing never
occurring to them is that they might, for the sake of something or some
one outside of themselves, be anything but what they are.

There are interferences, however, and it is from these that Hamsun's
problems spring. A man may prosper or suffer by being himself, and in
neither case is the fault his own. There are factors that more or less
fatally influence and circumscribe the supremely important factor that
is his own self. Roughly these fall into three groups suggestive of
three classes of relationships: (1) between man and his general
environment; (2) between man and that ever-present force of life which
we call love; and (3) between man and life in its entirety, as an
omnipotence that some of us call God and others leave unnamed. Hamsun's
deceptive preference for indirectness is shown by the fact that, while
he tries to make us believe that his work is chiefly preoccupied with
problems of the second class, his mind is really busy with those of the
first class. The explanation is simple. Nothing helps like love to
bring out the unique qualities of a man's nature. On the other hand,
there is nothing that does more to prevent a man from being himself than
the ruts of habit into which his environment always tends to drive him.
There are two kinds of environment, natural and human. Hamsun appears to
think that the less you have of one and the more of the other, the
better for yourself and for humanity as a whole. The city to him is
primarily concentrated human environment, and as such bad. This phase of
his attitude toward life almost amounts to a phobia. It must be
connected with personal experiences of unusual depth and intensity.
Perhaps it offers a key that may be well worth searching for. Hamsun was
born in the country, of and among peasants. In such surroundings he
grew up. The removal of his parents from the central inland part of
Norway to the rocky northern coast meant a change of natural setting,
but not a human contact. The sea must have come into his life as a
revelation, and yet it plays an astonishingly small part in his work. It
is always present, but always in the distance. You hear of it, but you
are never taken to it.

At about fifteen, Hamsun had an experience which is rarely mentioned as
part of the scant biographical material made available by his reserve
concerning his own personality. He returned to the old home of his
parents in the Gudbrand Valley and worked for a few months as clerk in a
country store--a store just like any one of those that figure so
conspicuously in almost every one of his novels. The place and the work
must have made a revolutionary impression on him. It apparently aroused
longings, and it probably laid the basis for resistances and resentments
that later blossomed into weedlike abundance as he came in contact with
real city life. There runs through his work a strange sense of sympathy
for the little store on the border of the wilderness, but it is also
stamped as the forerunner and panderer of the lures of the city.

As a boy of eighteen, when working in a tiny coast town as a cobbler's
apprentice, he ventured upon his first literary endeavors and actually
managed to get two volumes printed at his own cost. The art of writing
was in his blood, exercising a call and a command that must have been
felt as a pain at times, and as a consecration at other times. Books
and writing were connected with the city. Perhaps the hatred that later
days developed, had its roots in a thwarted passion. Even in the little
community where his first scribblings reached print he must have felt
himself in urban surroundings, and perhaps those first crude volumes
drew upon him laughter and scorn that his sensitive soul never forgot.
If something of the kind happened, the seed thus sown was nourished
plentifully afterwards, when, as a young man, Hamsun pitted his
ambitions against the indifference first of Christiania and then of
Chicago. The result was a defeat that seemed the more bitter because it
looked like punishment incurred by straying after false gods.

Others have suffered in the same way, although, being less rigidly
themselves, they may not, like Hamsun, have taken a perverse pleasure in
driving home the point of the agony. Others have thought and said harsh
things of the cities. But no one that I can recall has equalled Hamsun
in his merciless denunciation of the very principle of urbanity. The
truth of it seems to be that Hamsun's pilgrimage to the bee hives where
modern humanity clusters typically, was an essential violation of
something within himself that mattered even more than his literary
ambition to his soul's integrity. Perhaps, if I am right, he is the
first genuine peasant who has risen to such artistic mastery, reaching
its ultimate heights through a belated recognition of his own proper
settings. Hamsun was sixty when he wrote "Growth of the Soil." It is the
first work in which he celebrates the life of the open country for its
own sake, and not merely as a contrast to the artificiality and
selfishness of the cities. It was written, too, after he had definitely
withdrawn himself from the gathering places of the writers and the
artists to give an equal share of his time and attention to the tilling
of the soil that was at last his own. It is the harvest of his ultimate
self-discovery.

The various phases of his campaign against city life are also
interesting and illuminating. Early in his career as a writer he tried
an open attack in full force by a couple of novels, "Shallow Soil" and
"Editor Lynge", dealing sarcastically with the literary Bohemia of the
Norwegian capital. They were, on the whole, failures--artistically
rather than commercially. They are among his poorest books. The attack
was never repeated in that form. He retired to the country, so to speak,
and tried from there to strike at what he could reach of the ever
expanding, ever devouring city. After that the city, like the sea, is
always found in the distance. One feels it without ever seeing it.
There is fear as well as hatred in his treatment of it.

In the country it is represented not so much by the store, which, after
all, fills an unmistakable need on the part of the rural population, as
by the representatives of the various professions. For these Hamsun
entertains a hostile feeling hardly less marked than that bestowed on
their place of origin, whither, to his openly declared disgust, they are
always longing. It does not matter whether they are ministers or actors,
lawyers or doctors--they are all tarred with the same brush. Their
common characteristic is their rootlessness. They have no real home,
because to Hamsun a home is unthinkable apart from a space of soil
possessed in continuity by successive generations. They are always
despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily,
and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge
of life on a large scale. Greatness is to them inseparably connected
with crowdedness, and what they call sophistication is at bottom nothing
but a wallowing in that herd instinct which takes the place of mankind's
ancient antagonist in Hamsun's books. Above all, their standards of
judgment are not their own.

From what has just been said one might conclude that the spirit of
Hamsun is fundamentally unsocial. So it is, in a way, but only in so far
as we have come to think of social and urban as more or less
interchangeable terms. He has a social consciousness and a social
passion of his own, but it is decentralized, one might say. He knows of
no greater man than his own Isak of "Growth of the Soil"--a simple
pioneer in whose wake new homes spring up, an inarticulate and uncouth
personification of man's mastery of nature. When Hamsun speaks of Isak
passing across the yearning, spring-stirred fields, "with the grain
flung in fructifying waves from his reverent hands," he pictures it
deliberately in the light of a religious rite--the oldest and most
significant known to man. It is as if the man who starved in
Christiania and the western cities of the United States--not
figuratively, but literally--had once for all conceived a respect for
man's principal food that has colored all subsequent life for him and
determined his own attitude toward everything by a reference to its
connection or lack of connection with that substance.

Taking it all in all, one may well call Hamsun old-fashioned. The
virtues winning his praise and the conditions that stir his longings are
not of the present day. There is in him something primitive that forms a
sharp contrast to the modernity of his own style. Even in his most
romantic exaggerations, as in "Hunger" and "Mysteries," he is a realist,
dealing unrelentingly with life as it appears to us. It would hardly be
too much to call his method scientific. But he uses it to aim tremendous
explosive charges at those human concentrations that made possible the
forging of the weapons he wields so skilfully. Nor does he stop at a
wish to see those concentrations scattered. The very ambitions and
Utopias bred within them are anathema to his soul, that places
simplicity above cleanliness in divine proximity. Characteristically we
find that the one art treated with constant sympathy in his writings is
that of music, which probably is the earliest and certainly the one
least dependent on the herding of men in barracks. In place of what he
wishes to take away he offers nothing but peace and the sense of genuine
creation that comes to the man who has just garnered the harvests of his
own fields into his bulging barns. He is a prophet of plenty, but he has
no answer ready when we ask him what we are going to do with it after we
have got it. Like a true son of the brooding North, he wishes to set us
thinking, but he has no final solutions to offer.

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN.

PAN

I

These last few days I have been thinking and thinking of the Nordland
summer, with its endless day. Sitting here thinking of that, and of a
hut I lived in, and of the woods behind the hut. And writing things
down, by way of passing the time; to amuse myself, no more. The time
goes very slowly; I cannot get it to pass as quickly as I would, though
I have nothing to sorrow for, and live as pleasantly as could be. I am
well content withal, and my thirty years are no age to speak of.

A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird's feathers in a
sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from
a place a long way off; from one who need not have sent them back at
all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.

And for the rest I have no troubles, unless for a touch of gout now and
again in my left foot, from an old bullet-wound, healed long since.

Two years ago, I remember, the time passed quickly--beyond all
comparison more quickly than time now. A summer was gone before I knew.
Two years ago it was, in 1855. I will write of it just to amuse
myself--of something that happened to me, or something I dreamed. Now, I
have forgotten many things belonging to that time, by having scarcely
thought of them since. But I remember that the nights were very light.
And many things seemed curious and unnatural. Twelve months to the
year--but night was like day, and never a star to be seen in the sky.
And the people I met were strange, and of a different nature from those
I had known before; sometimes a single night was enough to make them
blossom out from childhood into the full of their glory, ripe and fully
grown. No witchery in this; only I had never seen the like before. No.

In a white, roomy home down by the sea I met with one who busied my
thoughts for a little time. I do not always think of her now; not any
more. No; I have forgotten her. But I think of all the other things: the
cry of the sea-birds, my hunting in the woods, my nights, and all the
warm hours of that summer. After all, it was only by the merest accident
I happened to meet her; save for that, she would never have been in my
thoughts for a day.

From the hut where I lived, I could see a confusion of rocks and reefs
and islets, and a little of the sea, and a bluish mountain peak or so;
behind the hut was the forest. A huge forest it was; and I was glad and
grateful beyond measure for the scent of roots and leaves, the thick
smell of the fir-sap, that is like the smell of marrow. Only the forest
could bring all things to calm within me; my mind was strong and at
ease. Day after day I tramped over the wooded hills with Æsop at my
side, and asked no more than leave to keep on going there day after day,
though most of the ground was covered still with snow and soft slush. I
had no company but Æsop; now it is Cora, but at that time it was Æsop,
my dog that I afterwards shot.

Often in the evening, when I came back to the hut after being out
shooting all day, I could feel that kindly, homely feeling trickling
through me from head to foot--a pleasant little inward shivering. And I
would talk to Æsop about it, saying how comfortable we were. "There, now
we'll get a fire going, and roast a bird on the hearth," I would say;
"what do you say to that?" And when it was done, and we had both fed,
Æsop would slip away to his place behind the hearth, while I lit a pipe
and lay down on the bench for a while, listening to the dead soughing of
the trees. There was a slight breeze bearing down towards the hut, and I
could hear quite clearly the clutter of a grouse far away on the ridge
behind. Save for that, all was still.

And many a time I fell asleep there as I lay, just as I was, fully
dressed and all, and did not wake till the seabirds began calling. And
then, looking out of the window, I could see the big white buildings of
the trading station, the landing stage at Girilund, the store where I
used to get my bread. And I would lie there a while, wondering how I
came to be there, in a hut on the fringe of a forest, away up in
Nordland.

Then Æsop over by the hearth would shake out his long, slender body,
rattling his collar, and yawning and wagging his tail, and I would jump
up, after those three or four hours of sleep, fully rested and full of
joy in everything ... everything.

Many a night passed just that way.

II

Rain and storm--'tis not such things that count. Many a time some little
joy can come along on a rainy day, and make a man turn off somewhere to
be alone with his happiness--stand up somewhere and look out straight
ahead, laughing quietly now and again, and looking round. What is there
to think of? One clear pane in a window, a ray of sunlight in the pane,
the sight of a little brook, or maybe a blue strip of sky between the
clouds. It needs no more than that.

At other times, even quite unusual happenings cannot avail to lift a man
from dulness and poverty of mind; one can sit in the middle of a
ballroom and be cool, indifferent, unaffected by anything. Sorrow and
joy are from within oneself.

One day I remember now. I had gone down to the coast. The rain came on
suddenly, and I slipped into an open boathouse to sit down for a while.
I was humming a little, but not for any joy or pleasure, only to pass
the time. Æsop was with me; he sat up listening, and I stopped humming
and listened as well. Voices outside; people coming nearer. A mere
chance--nothing more natural. A little party, two men and a girl, came
tumbling in suddenly to where I sat, calling to one another and
laughing:

"Quick! Get in here till it stops!"

I got up.

One of the men had a white shirt front, soft, and now soaked with rain
into the bargain, and all bagging down; and in that wet shirt front a
diamond clasp. Long, pointed shoes he wore, too, that looked somewhat
affected. I gave him good-day. It was Mack, the trader; I knew him
because he was from the store where I used to get my bread. He had asked
me to look in at the house any time, but I had not been there yet.

"Aha, it's you, is it?" said Mack at sight of me. "We were going up to
the mill, but had to turn back. Ever see such weather--what? And when
are you coming up to see us at Sirilund, Lieutenant?"

He introduced the little black-bearded man who was with him; a doctor,
staying down near the church.

The girl lifted her veil the least little bit, to her nose, and started
talking to Æsop in a whisper. I noticed her jacket; I could see from
the lining and the buttonholes that it had been dyed. Mack introduced me
to her as well; his daughter, Edwarda.

Edwarda gave me one glance through her veil, and went on whispering to
the dog, and reading on its collar:

"So you're called Æsop, are you? Doctor, who was Æsop? All I can
remember is that he wrote fables. Wasn't he a Phrygian? I can't
remember."

A child, a schoolgirl. I looked at her--she was tall, but with no figure
to speak of, about fifteen or sixteen, with long, dark hands and no
gloves. Like as not she had looked up Æsop in the dictionary that
afternoon, to have it ready.

Mack asked me what sport I was having. What did I shoot mostly? I could
have one of his boats at any time if I wanted--only let him know. The
Doctor said nothing at all. When they went off again, I noticed that the
Doctor limped a little, and walked with a stick.

I walked home as empty in mind as before, humming all indifferently.
That meeting in the boathouse had made no difference either way to me;
the one thing I remembered best of all was Mack's wet shirt front, with
a diamond clasp--the diamond all wet, too, and no great brilliance about
it, either.

III

There was a stone outside my hut, a tall grey stone. It looked as if it
had a sort of friendly feeling towards me; as if it noticed me when I
came by, and knew me again. I liked to go round that way past the
stone, when I went out in the morning; it was like leaving a good friend
there, who I knew would be still waiting for me when I came back.

Then up in the woods hunting, sometimes finding game, sometimes none...

Out beyond the islands, the sea lay heavily calm. Many a time I have
stood and looked at it from the hills, far up above. On a calm day, the
ships seemed hardly to move at all; I could see the same sail for three
days, small and white, like a gull on the water. Then, perhaps, if the
wind veered round, the peaks in the distance would almost disappear, and
there came a storm, the south-westerly gale; a play for me to stand and
watch. All things in a seething mist. Earth and sky mingled together,
the sea flung up into fantastic dancing figures of men and horses and
fluttering banners on the air. I stood in the shelter of an overhanging
rock, thinking many things; my soul was tense. Heaven knows, I thought
to myself, what it is I am watching here, and why the sea should open
before my eyes. Maybe I am seeing now the inner brain of earth, how
things are at work there, boiling and foaming. Æsop was restless; now
and again he would thrust up his muzzle and sniff, in a troubled way,
with legs quivering uneasily; when I took no notice, he lay down between
my feet and stared out to sea as I was doing. And never a cry, never a
word of human voice to be heard anywhere; nothing; only the heavy rush
of the wind about my head. There was a reef of rocks far out, lying all
apart; when the sea raged up over it the water towered like a crazy
screw; nay, like a sea-god rising wet in the air, and snorting, till
hair and beard stood out like a wheel about his head. Then he plunged
down into the breakers once more.

And in the midst of the storm, a little coal-black steamer fighting its
way in...

When I went down to the quay in the afternoon, the little coal-black
steamer had come in; it was the mail-packet. Many people had gathered on
the quayside to see the rare visitor; I noticed that all without
exception had blue eyes, however different they might be in other ways.
A young girl with a white woolen kerchief over her head stood a little
apart; she had very dark hair, and the white kerchief showed up
strangely against it. She looked at me curiously, at my leather suit, my
gun; when I spoke to her, she was embarrassed, and turned her head away.
I said:

"You should always wear a white kerchief like that; it suits you well."

Just then a burly man in an Iceland jersey came up and joined her; he
called her Eva. Evidently she was his daughter. I knew the burly man; he
was the local smith, the blacksmith. Only a few days back he had mended
the nipple of one of my guns...

And rain and wind did their work, and thawed away the snow. For some
days a cheerless cold hovered over the earth; rotten branches snapped,
and the crows gathered in flocks, complaining. But it was not for long;
the sun was near, and one day it rose up behind the forest.

It sends a strip of sweetness through me from head to foot when the sun
comes up; I shoulder my gun with quiet delight.

IV

I was never short of game those days, but shot all I cared to--a hare, a
grouse, a ptarmigan--and when I happened to be down near the shore and
came within range of some seabird or other, I shot it too. It was a
pleasant time; the days grew longer and the air clearer; I packed up
things for a couple of days and set off up into the hills, up to the
mountain peaks. I met reindeer Lapps, and they gave me cheese--rich
little cheeses tasting of herbs. I went up that way more than once.
Then, going home again, I always shot some bird or other to put in my
bag. I sat down and put Æsop on the lead. Miles below me was the sea;
the mountainsides were wet and black with the water running down them,
dripping and trickling always with the same little sound. That little
sound of the water far up on the hills has shortened many an hour for me
when I sat looking about. Here, I thought to myself, is a little endless
song trickling away all to itself, and no one ever hears it, and no one
ever thinks of it, and still it trickles on nevertheless, to itself, all
the time, all the time! And I felt that the mountains were no longer
quite deserted, as long as I could hear that little trickling song. Now
and again something would happen: a clap of thunder shaking the earth, a
mass of rock slipping loose and rushing down towards the sea, leaving a
trail of smoking dust behind. Æsop turned his nose to the wind at once,
sniffing in surprise at the smell of burning that he could not
understand. When the melting of the snow had made rifts in the hillside,
a shot, or even a sharp cry, was enough to loosen a great block and send
it tumbling down...

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