The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories, 1885-1949, by Knut Hamsun, translated and edited by Richard Nelson Current
reviewed by Philip Landon

Knut Hamsun. Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories, 1885-1949. Trans. and ed. Richard Nelson Current. Univ. of Missouri Press, 2003. 155 pp. $29.95.

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) lived and worked in the United States on two occasions in the 1880s and recorded his impressions in a series of newspaper articles, reminiscences, and stories. Hungry for experience but handicapped by his limited knowledge of English, he eked out a precarious living in a succession of menial jobs: farm hand, road builder, Chicago streetcar conductor, etc. Gathered into one volume for the first time, the resulting material offers a fascinating, humorous glimpse into immigrant experience in the age of the bonanza farm and breakneck industrialization. Violent Anglophobia marks the early writings. Even stronger than Hamsun’s disapprobation of American and English society is his dislike of the Irish, a naked prejudice that surely had its roots in Hamsun’s own experience as a member of a cultural minority, the crucial difference being that Irish Americans spoke the dominant language and thus enjoyed an advantage that the young Norwegian writer envied. By tracing the roots of his frustration we begin to see how this candid social observer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, later came to make the misjudgments that led him to support fascism in the Second World War. Students of literary modernism, cultural marginalization, and American power will also find much of interest here. “No more than any other country on the planet can America stand alone,” Hamsun reflects in 1928 in an article that puts resentment aside and praises America for its flowering arts, its generosity, and its industriousness. “America is not the world. America is a part of the world and must live its life together with all the other parts.”