ALFHILD DVERGSDAL: HAMSUNS DREAM: THE CROP OF THE FIELD
Markens Grøde (1917), a novel about finding one's place, putting down roots and running a farm, was written while the author was on the move. The story of Sellanraa can be read as Hamsun's dream of the place he wanted for himself and his family, where he, as Isak, managed to combine the roles of father, husband, farmer and family provider.
The story of Sellanraa can be read as Hamsun's dream of the place he wanted for himself and his family, where he, as Isak, managed to combine the roles of father, husband, farmer and family provider.
Writing fiction about and for his contemporaries was not new to Hamsun. All his life he was preoccupied with writing “life’s own driving life” in various ways and looked with contempt on artists without contact with the world, who pursued literature and art for the sake of art. Hamsun himself read little fiction, he preferred non-fiction: newspapers, biographies, historical works. He was aware that he wrote books in the transitions between fiction and fact: “… I am from the earth. And one should not simply assume that I am only “poetizing” when I write about it,” he wrote in 1910 (“The Inner Damage”). He did not want to be called an author, something he occasionally points out in his letters: Hamsun referred to Markens Grøde as a “Warning” for his contemporaries. The warning concerned the lack of rights for children as a result of a recently liberalized penal code, and perhaps also how bad things could be if the desire for profit and short-term gain were allowed to govern social development. Hamsun also called the book an agricultural novel – he wanted to show the possibility of new clearing in an urbanized society. The novel has a central place in Hamsun's life and writing. While Sult represents Hamsun's breakthrough as a writer, Markens Grøde marks the high point of his writing career – and its low point: Hamsun received the highest award in fiction, the Nobel Prize for the novel. With the Nobel Prize money, Hamsun restored the Nørholm farm where he lived for the rest of his life. But the Nobel Prize medal was presented to Hamsun 25 years later by Joseph Goebbels as a gift of friendship during the war.
OF COURSE YOUR WRITER HAS CALLED ME THE AUTHOR MR., SHE PROBABLY DOESN'T KNOW THAT I'M IN MY 57TH YEAR AND I'M ACTUALLY A FARM OWNER HERE IN THE SALT. (LETTER, 13/12/1915)
It was in 1916 that Hamsun began work on Markens Grøde. He was then living with his family on the farm Skogheim in Hamarøy, where they had moved in 1911. It was an aging father of young children who wrote: The 57-year-old had had three children in four years. Hamsun supported his family through his writing and needed peace and quiet at work. But small children proved difficult to reconcile with a home office. The children's cries pained the father and broke his concentration. A "kiosk" was built in 1916 as a last resort, at Marie's request, to avoid Knut's writing time away from home and to prevent them from having to move from Skogheim.
The long absences from the young children were one of the dilemmas surrounding Hamsun's writing situation during the years at Skogheim. Another was related to the farm, which he also had to leave during the writing periods. Farming was Hamsun's great interest and passion in life, associated with undivided joy and pleasure. Not farming as a leisure activity – he strongly distanced himself from such "luxury farming", "I'm a bit too practical to get involved in that" (letter 21.4.1916). And not the daily farming either, but clearing, planning and developing a farm that Hamsun was keenly interested in. Reaching the farm's full potential unfortunately proved to be a quick fix for Skogheim – "Gaardlappen", as he eventually called the farm:
I HAVE NO MORE TO DO HERE, I HAVE DIGGED AND BREAK UP ALL THE EARTH, MY MISSION IS OVER. AND SHOULD I GO HERE AND JUST LOOK AT MY FARM PAPER, THEN I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M GOING TO LIVE HERE FOR, THEN I MIGHT AS WELL LIVE IN ASIA. (LETTER 30.3.1916)
Hamsun writes that he was exhausted and frayed in the last years of the Skogheim era. He experienced profound dilemmas between the necessity of writing, the anxiety and worry that surrounded every single writing project with him, the longing for his children, and the joy and pleasure of farming that had to be abandoned. We can see these dilemmas reformulated in various ways in Markens Grøde.
We can perhaps see traces of the joy of having our own, undisturbed and sheltered space in Isak's strong experience of his simple home: "He could go into this home and close the door and be there" (9). – A longing that, when fulfilled, is quickly tinged with loneliness when one has started to start a family. For Isak when Inger had left: "Deserted and quiet in the home, there was a heavy silence from the walls". For Knut when he sits and writes far from his family:
AT HOME ON THE FARM PLOT, THEY ARE NOW BUILDING ME A SMALL HOUSE, A KIOSK, WHERE I WILL BE IN SUMMER AND WINTER, NIGHT AND DAY AND BE AWAY FROM CHILDREN (WHICH I CANNOT DO AT ALL). THEN I'M GOING TO TRY TO WRITE A LITTLE SO THAT I DON'T HAVE TO TRAVEL SO MUCH AWAY WHEN I WANT TO HAVE PEACE. BUT NOT FOR THAT, THE TWO OLDEST WOULD PROBABLY FIND ME AT THE KIOSK TOO, AND I MUST SAY OUTright THAT IT'S FUNNY WHEN THEY COME TOO, BECAUSE CHILDREN HAVE WONDERFUL EFFORTS. NOW WHEN I TRAVELED I WANTED WHEN I CAME HOME AGAIN A RAINCOAT AND A SABER. (LETTER, KRAAKMO 15.6.1916)
Knut had five children, four of them – two boys and two girls – with Marie. Isak and Inger also had five children – two boys and two girls grew up.
The ambivalence associated with the necessary evil of writing can be seen dramatized in Markens Grøde through the painful conflict that develops between Isak and his firstborn son Eleseus, who wants to travel to the city, work in an office and make a living from his writing, is concerned with fashion and impressive language ("a classic weather we have", said Eleseus, for example), and take part in an urban culture. As a boy, Eleseus steals a pencil stub from Sheriff Geissler and thus becomes associated with writing, something degenerate, modernity and rootlessness. The schism between father and son, farmer and writer, is never resolved in the novel, it ends with Eleseus disappearing out of the novel's universe, to America. Is that where the author, while writing Markens Grøde, wants his own writing to go?
Markens Grøde, the novel about finding one's place, putting down roots and running a farm, was written while the author was on the move in his head. The story of Sellanraa can be read as Hamsun's dream of the place he wanted for himself and his family, where he, as Isak, managed to combine the roles of father, husband, new settler, farmer and family provider. For the adults, a place to live, for the children, a place of comfort, as he writes in a letter. The author's personal investment in the characters and main motifs in the novel can explain the highly emotional narrative style in the novel. The family left Skogheim in the spring of 1917, and in the town of Larvik, in a rented office room, Markens Grøde was finished while Marie was at home with the newborn "Singer", as Hamsun called her.
The farm that Hamsun then began to search for has much in common with the novel's Sellanraa. Hamsun wrote detailed instructions for friends who helped him search. The farm had to have a lot of open land; plenty of forest; no neighbors; have large, rustling trees on the plot; and the farm had to be located as far as possible from Kristiania. From his experience in Skogheim, Hamsun took the idea that the farm had to be away from the road, and from his childhood home in Hamsund that it should be by the sea. And the farm had to be "magistrate style" - not to impress, Hamsun explains, but because the somewhat stately farmhouses had many rooms, including one where a writer could go in, close the door and hide away.
But in the midst of the dream of Sellanraa, modernity leaves its mark. Both Knut's and Isak's interests are directed towards the development, improvement and efficiency of the farm. They leave the trivialities to the women and invest in technology in a modern spirit. The narrator/Isak himself reflects on how fulfilled needs give birth to new needs, in an endless series. Where is the stop button for when enough is enough? The telegraph line emerges throughout the novel, - Hamsun on Hamarøy writes in letters about how he needs fast and modern means of communication to make a living as a writer. Isak buys a mower. Hamsun was the first in Eide to buy a tractor.
Among the requirements for the farm Hamsun was looking for were: Installed light and water! Modern conveniences that the parents of young children would probably appreciate. And that a primary school should be located nearby. The four Hamsun children were not to grow up as uncivilized nature children.
Markens Grøde presents such a dream, but has not become an idyll. It dramatizes conflicts that readers can recognize in the violence of modernity as well as in the family, in emotionally charged ways from an author who at the time of writing experienced the conflicts firsthand. Hamsun never really took root. When he had arrived in Larvik, Knut began to think about some marshes on Hamarøy that he could have cultivated. When he was back in Nørholm after receiving the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he began to think that perhaps it was in the Swedish capital that he should have lived:
I THINK THAT THE CHILDREN HAVE BENEFITED FROM GROWING UP HERE, OTHERWISE I FOR MY PART WOULD RATHER HAVE BEEN IN STOCKHOLM. … LIVING IN STOCKHOLM AT WORK, IN A DIFFERENT TIME THAN HERE, WITH LIGHTS AND MUSIC AND BEAUTIFUL HOUSES AND ART AND WONDERFUL ANTIQUES. (LETTER 27.12.1920)
