NORWAY: Put Out Three Flags

“I’ll always be a stranger among the people,” Knut Hamsun once wrote prophetically. Seven years ago Norway’s greatest soth century writer died an outcast, . reviled as a quisling by his own countrymen. “A more eminent disciple of Nietzsche than any German” in Thomas Mann’s judgment, Knut Hamsun was a peasant’s son who grew up in Norway’s far north, wandered as a hobo through Illinois and the Dakotas of the ’80s, and buried himself in a remote corner of Norway to write novels (Growth of the Soil, Pan, Hunger) of great depth and power. Then, old and full of honors, including the 1920 Nobel Prize, Knut Hamsun told his countrymen when the Nazis invaded Norway: “Throw away your rifles. The Germans are fighting for us, and now are crushing England’s tyranny over us and all neutrals.”

For the rest of his days, Norwegians heaped contempt on the old recluse they had once revered as “the giant of the North.” Thousands of copies of his famed novels were mailed back to him or dumped on the doorstep of his south coast farmstead. Before he died in 1952, a Norwegian court blocked all the old man’s bank accounts, imposed a fine of 425,000 kroner ($86,000), which was later reduced to 325,000 kroner.

Last week Norway observed the centenary of Hamsun’s birth amid hesitant signs of a Hamsun renaissance. His publisher brought out a 33-volume jubilee edition of his works; the literary magazine Vinduet published a special Hamsun number; the Oslo university library opened an exhibit of Hamsun letters and manuscripts; Oslo theaters scheduled revivals of Hamsun’s dramas. On the anniversary day, three flags flew—at Hamsun’s farm, at the university, at the publisher’s office.

But only three. Norwegians were quick to point out that “all” flags are flown on the anniversaries of such great Norwegian authors as Ibsen and Bjornson. Said the newspaper Dagbladet: “Hamsun will go down in history as one of the greatest authors. But . . . any attempt to explain away his conduct during the war would be wrong and in bad taste.”