NORWAY: River of Books

Knut Hamsun, 83, No. 1 Norwegian novelist and No. 1 intellectual pro-Nazi, had always bruised easily. So when Norwegians heard that he had suffered a stroke, some thought they knew the reason. For years his countrymen had loved his books (Hunger, Growth of the Soil, The Road Leads On). But now those books, which had once nudged bibles on Norwegian bookshelves, were boycotted; dog-eared copies were even trickling back to Hamsun at Grimstad. Last week, though Hamsun had since recovered from his stroke, the trickle of books swelled to a river. Though the local post office hired extra help, they still could not deliver all the thousands of Hamsun volumes winging home to roost. Grim-faced citizens volunteered to help deliver them: they carted the books to his farm and dumped them at Hamsun’s door. Last week, at an auction in Oslo, a 20-volume first edition of Hamsun’s collected works came up for bidding. A blunt silence fell. When a woman shouted “five ore” (U.S. equivalent: one cent), another, to pacify the auctioneer, bid one crown (about 25¢), won the edition and promptly mailed it back to its author.

When Hamsun, first showed sympathy with the Nazis in 1933, Norwegians cared little. But it was different when the Nazis invaded Norway and Hamsun told his countrymen: “Norwegians! Throw away your rifles and return home. The Germans are fighting for us and now are crushing England’s tyranny over us and all neutrals.” In Washington the Norwegian Minister, Wilhelm Munthe de Morgenstierne, doubted that Hamsun had said this. If he had, said Minister de Morgenstierne, “I am inclined to credit it to a very old man’s tiredness and anguish.”

But it was true. He who had worn black for anarchists hanged after the Haymarket riots,* and who chiefly wrote of simple peasant lives, had ranged himself beside the Gestapo. To the big, white country house which success had brought him, after harsh years of poverty, winds bring the cool fragrance of sea and kelp, of grass and Norwegian earth. Outside the maples whisper. But in the house, now crammed with a painful store of books, the man who always loved solitude had won it, at last, in bitter measure.

*When Hamsun worked in Chicago as a streetcar conductor.