Concurrently, he emphasized the unpredictable nature of the process of thought and its roots in the subconscious mind.

In 1891 he extended his crusade by going on a lecture tour of Norwegian cities, ending up in Kristiania (now Oslo) in October of that year. In these lectures, the contents of which were only known through newspaper reports until 1960, Hamsun repeated his call for a new literature while attacking the reigning deities on the Norwegian Parnassus, Ibsen, Bjørnson, Kielland, and Lie, the so-called Four Greats. Ibsen had received a special invitation to the Kristiania lecture and sat in the front row, beside Nina and Edvard Grieg. The lectures caused a sensation, but the reviews were mixed. Many critics found the attacks to be outrageously unfair as well as churlish and cast Hamsun as a Yankee self-booster, a reference to his recent sojourns in the United States.

This largely hostile public reaction is an essential part of the background to Mysteries, which appeared in 1892. As the reader will soon discover, the debate is continued on a wider scale in the novel. During the period of the novel’s genesis, Hamsun’s life was no less unsettled than that of Johan Nilsen Nagel, the book’s central character, as he kept moving between Kristiania and Copenhagen, between Copenhagen and the Danish island of Samsø, and from one Norwegian town to another. His finances were also precarious: the sales of Hunger were poor despite excellent reviews. These circumstances were bound to have a strong impact on the book he was writing. Indeed, in creating the central figure of Mysteries, Hamsun produced an aggravated or heightened version of his own provisional life: Nagel, whose rootlessness is global, represents the extreme limit of an existential condition with which his creator was intimately familiar. In effect, he can be seen as a virtual self of the author, whose artistic vocation helped prevent its real-life actualization.1

 

 

That vocation had not come cheaply. Hamsun’s beginnings as a writer had been slow and painful. By the time he appeared on the scene with a fragment of Hunger in 1888, he had served a literary apprenticeship of more than ten years and tried his fortune on two continents. His life, never an easy one, was often marked by severe hardship. Born to an impoverished peasant family at Garmotrxdet, Lom, in central Norway in 1859, Knut Pedersen, to use his baptismal name, had a difficult childhood. In the summer of 1862, when Knut was less than three years old, his father, a tailor, moved with his family to Hamarøy, north of the Arctic Circle, where he worked the farm Hamsund belonging to his brother-in-law, Hans Olsen. From the age of nine to fourteen Hamsun was a sort of indentured servant to his uncle, since the family was financially dependent on him. The boy’s beautiful penmanship made him particularly valuable to Hans Olsen, who suffered from palsy and needed a scribe for his multifarious business, from shopkeeper to librarian and postmaster. The uncle treated Knut with anything but kid gloves; at the slightest slip of the pen he would rap his knuckles with a long ruler. And on Sundays the boy was kept indoors, forced to read edifying literature to Hans and his pietist brethren while his friends were playing outside, waiting for Knut to join in their games. No wonder he liked to tend the cattle at the parsonage, where his uncle had his quarters. This allowed him to lie on his back in the woods, dreaming his time away and writing on the sky. Very likely, these hours of solitary musings away from the tyranny of his uncle acted as a stimulus to young Hamsun’s imagination. His schooling, starting at the age of nine, was sporadic, and his family had no literary culture. However, the local library at his uncle’s place may have provided a modicum of sustenance for his childish dreams.

During his adolescence and youth Hamsun led a virtually nomadic existence, at first in various parts of Norway, later in the United States. After being confirmed in the church of his native parish in 1873, he was a store clerk in his godfather’s business in Lom for a year, then returned north to work in the same capacity for Nikolai Walsøe, a merchant at Tranøy, not far from his parents’ place. There Hamsun seems to have fallen in love with the boss’s daughter, Laura. It is uncertain whether the young man was asked to leave because of his infatuation with Laura or because of the bankruptcy of Mr. Walsøe in 1875. In the next few years he supported himself as a peddler, shoemaker’s apprentice, schoolmaster, and sheriff’s assistant in different parts of Nordland.