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Man
of War
a novelist improvises on Hamsun's
improvisations. By Duncan McLean.
INTRODUCTION
My title, 'Man of War', comes
from the Journals of Kierkegaard, an entry dating from some time in 1845: When a skipper sails with a smack
he usually knows his whole cruise beforehand; but a man-of-war
only gets its orders at sea - that is what happens to genius;
he is out on the deep before he gets his orders.
Shortly, I'm going to discuss a couple ways in which Hamsun seems to me to go 'out on the deep', without orders in advance. But first of all I'm going to get into my fishing smack, and launch it into relatively familiar waters, for me at least. I'm going to get a bit autobiographical, and go back into the good old days when times were bad, as Dolly Parton puts it.
HOW I MET HAMSUN
About ten years ago, I was living
in Leith, in conditions not a million miles away from the Kristiania
of Hunger. I was very short of money, unable to find any
congenial work, and unwilling to stick for long at the small
amounts of uncongenial work that came my way. This was
down to pride, in part. Also, more importantly - much more importantly
to me - I was consumed with the determination to write. Nothing
else mattered very much.
And I did write. Or at least I tried to. Plays, stories, first
chapters of novels. They were all rubbish, their only merit coming
from the fact that they tended to be very short. They were short
because my ideas, my invention, seemed always to peter out after
two and a half pages or so. (A great blessing, looking back.)
I think a large part of my problem was that I was worrying too
much, thinking too much. I couldn't set down a sentence without
stopping to consider it from all angles: checking its politics,
counting its syllables, searching for echoes of previous writers
which would have to be done away with. I would stagger away from
my typewriter after ten hours work, one short paragraph completed.
And first thing next morning I'd cross out three-quarters of
that paragraph and start again. This went on for two or three
years.
What's my theme? I would ask myself. What's my philosophy? What
message am I trying to communicate to the world? And then I would
spend six hours working out the message, three hours trying to
make it into a story, and the last hour banging my head off the
desk.
I remember thinking at the time, Christ, I must be doing something
wrong. I mean, look at Bleak House: 800 pages! Dickens
can't've been writing a paragraph a day, or he'd never've got
finished.
One good thing I was doing at this period was reading
a hell of a lot. As I hinted above, my life at the time sometimes
seemed rather Hamsunesque. I remember walking back from the Central
Library in Edinburgh one day in the pouring rain, and putting
my armful of books under my coat to keep them dry: I'd half a
dozen or so, they made quite a lump under my old Crombie coat.
I'd been walking along for half an hour or so quite happily,
and was almost home, when suddenly a police car came bombing
down the street and mounted the pavement right in front of me.
Two police jumped out, came running round to face me, and told
me to get back against the wall.
What's up? I said.
What's that under your coat? one of them said.
Books, I replied.
He laughed sarcastically.
No, it is, I said, I've just come from the library.
Let's see them, said the other policeman, so I unbuttoned my
coat, eased the books from under my arm, showed them the spines.
Give, said the first policeman, and reached over to grab the
books. He looked at the covers, then looked me up and down. Have
you got any proof these are from the library? he said.
Well, look in the front. There's all the date stamps and stuff.
He sniffed, flicked open the first book, and looked at the date
stamps. Then the second book. Then the third one.
As he was opening the fourth one, I heard someone calling my
name. I looked up, and there was my friend Robert Alan Jamieson,
squeezing towards us between their car and the dripping hedge.
What's up? he said.
Do you know this man? the policeman said to Alan.
Aye, said Alan. What's he done?
Nothing, I said. I was just keeping my books out of the rain,
and...
Quiet, said no 1.
There's been a lot of thefts of books recently, said no 2.
What, library books? said Alan. They glared at him.
Amongst others, no 2 continued, handing my books back to me.
Rain was spattered all across the plastic covers, and down the
edges of the pages.
They're all wet, I said.
Just watch it in future, said the first policeman, turning back
to the car.
A second later that was them, roaring away down the street. Alan
and I watched them go, gobsmacked, then carried on to my flat,
a hundred yards or so away.
Jesus, I said. I didn't know it was against the law to read books
in this part of town!
It's either that or your haircut, said Alan.
Wouldn't it be fitting if one of the
books I'd been carrying home to read was Hunger, with
its several funny but slightly menacing meetings between the
central character and Kristiania's policemen? Unfortunately,
I don't think it was Hunger. BUT (and here's the connection)
it was Robert Alan Jamieson who introduced me to Hamsun's
work, just about exactly at this time. It might even have been
that very day.
Let's make on it was that day. We got back to my flat, put on
the kettle, and Alan said, Here, you've got to read Knut Hamsun.
He's great.
Now, Alan Jamieson is a writer whose work I like a lot, so I
took his recommendation to heart. His first novel, Soor Hearts,
is set in a turn of the century fishing village in Shetland,
and deals with the fall out after the return of a wandering black-sheep
son of the community. In fact, it appears to draw on several
typical Hamsun archetypes: the remote and fairly narrow-minded
rural setting, the sexual and fiscal impropriety revealed behind
the respectable masks of the villagers, the traveller from distant
parts, spreading new and sometimes dangerous ideas.
VIEW FROM THE MARGIN
I don't know how Jamieson first came to read Hamsun. Knowing
that he was born and raised in Shetland, I suppose I assumed
that there was some geographical connection. In retrospect that
was probably naive: probably Alan just picked up Hunger
or Mysteries in some paperback edition, and took a liking
to him, the same way he might have picked up Kerouac or Hesse.
However, I have to admit that geography was part of the reason
I was drawn to Hamsun.
I studied literature at university in Edinburgh, Scotland's capital
city, and over four years heard Scottish writers mentioned maybe
half a dozen times, and then usually in passing: the long and
rich traditions of writing in place of birth had been squeezed
out of the university, squeezed out to the edges – off
the edges! I didn't even come from Edinburgh, or Glasgow even,
or any of the centres of population and power in Scotland. I
was born in Fraserburgh, a small fishing town on the extreme
north-east of the North-East: on the periphery of the periphery.
I don't know if what I'm about to write is completely daft, or
an eminently suitable reason for liking a piece of writing, but
I just admit it, or observe it now. I have always been particularly
interested in writing that has its origins in cultures usually
considered marginal, distant from the great cosmopolitan centres
of the world: Frank Sargeson from New Zealand, Ghulam Hussein
Sa'idi from Iran, William Heinesen from the Faroe Islands.
There always seems to me to be a particular value in setting
down the lives, the stories, of people who've never been written
about before. Giving voice to people who've previously been voiceless.
I suppose that's one of the things I've tried to do in my own
fiction.
I know now that that wasn't exactly what Hamsun was doing. If
anything he was giving voice to the parts in all of us
that had previously been dumb. But when Alan Jamieson first suggested
I should read him, where he came from was one of the reasons
that I resolved to do so.
Well, Alan showed my Growth of the Soil, but I wasn't
particularly taken by the look of it, so I held off. Then I came
across Hunger, in a jumble sale. It was a seventies paperback
edition, with the fine introduction by Isaac Singer, and the
fluent - but I now know seriously flawed - translation by Robert
Bly. I remember very clearly starting to read as I stepped out
of the church hall, and walking home to Leith, entranced, barely
conscious of the shops and people I was passing. And that was
me, hooked.
It must be one of the most joyous moments in life, when you read
a paragraph - one sentence even - of a writer you've never encountered
before, and you get that surge of electricity: the recognition
of the world, the buzz of the language, the jolt to the brain
of a new outlook on life. And what else did this guy write? Did
he starve to death six weeks after completing this one masterpiece?
He lived to ninety-two! He wrote another thirty books? Happy
day!
THE SPIT IN THE EAR
Let's return to the Kirkegaard quotation. "...that is
what happens to genius; he is out on the deep before he gets
his orders." It seems to me that, if you wanted to, you
could go through each of Hamsun's major books and demonstrate
a high degree of the type of improvisation implied by Kirkegaard
- being 'out on the deep' before you really know where you're
going. Certainly in the books that are closest to my heart -
Hunger, Mysteries, Pan - the central characters don't follow
a predetermined course from their first appearance to their last.
All of them are out on the deep of their lives, sometimes drifting,
often scudding before some sudden squall: blown this way and
that by gusts of economics, or sexual attraction, or small-town
narrow-mindedness. When Lieutenant Glahn spits in the Baron's
ear in Pan, for instance, we know it springs, not from
a long considered plan, but from an irresistible momentary impulse.
Quite often Hamsun underlines this point by having a character
argue or state one thing, then switch abruptly to the opposite
position. At the start of the short story 'Queen of Sheba', for
instance, the ticket inspector on the train asks him where he's
going:
'Stockholm, of course,' I answer.
'Where else would I be going?'
'Yes, but this is the train for
Kalmar, don't you understand, it's going to Kalmar,' he says
irritably.
'Well then, what are we going to do?' I ask.
'What you'll have to dowhere did you say you were going? You
won't get to Stockholm on this train.'
'Fine, then I'll go to Kalmar, actually I meant to say Kalmar,'
I answer. 'I've never really fancied Stockholm anyway.'
I think that is one of the things that
makes Hamsun's novels so exciting to read: his characters are
never cogs in some predictable plot or thematic development:
we never know what they're going to do next. You can follow this
improvisatory strand right into his later novels too, to an extent.
On the whole I'd say they suffer from over-structuring - the
way Growth of the Soil goes over the same ground twice,
for instance, I find rather tedious - but there are still free
spirits like August, and the other wanderers: they are the improvisers
who wander into the well-regulated lives of the villagers, not
really knowing where they're going, or what they're doing, but
just constantly moving on.
HAMSUN AS IMPROVISER
i. Waking into the world
Speaking as a writer of stories and novels, my guess
is that Hamsun's approach to constructing fiction was largely
improvisatory too, at least in his earlier novels. In other words,
it's not just his characters who improvise. It's the author himself
too. Did Hamsun meticulously plan and plot out Mysteries
and Victoria before starting to write them? Did he know
what was going to happen at the end of the book when he sat down
to start it? Did he even know what was going to happen twenty
pages ahead? I don't believe so, not in the early books.
And don't get me wrong, I don't mean this as a criticism: I think
he started these early books with a scene, a mood, an atmosphere
in mind, and launched off on his voyage, with only a vague notion
of where he was going to end up. The start of Pan is pure
mood. The narrator rhapsodises, swirling up a mist of atmosphere:
the endless days...the islands and skerries...the smell of the
forest...the gladness towards all things. It's only in chapter
two that characters and actions and dialogue start to emerge
out of this glorious fog.
Or look at the start of Hunger. The narrator is lying
awake in his attic room at six in the morning. He lets his eyes
wander around his miserable hovel, describes what he sees: old
newspapers pasted to the walls, adverts for bread and shrouds.
Then he gets up, puts his clothes on. Of course he does. Then
he goes downstairs and out into the streets. Again, of course
he does: what else would a man do but wake up, get dressed and
go out?
Of course the narrative does work on that level of basic realism.
But I'd suggest that the opening of Hunger uses a common
trick or technique of the storyteller. It's used by every blues
singer: "Well I woke this morning, blues all around my bed..."
Have your central character waking into the world, seeing it
with fresh eyes, and you have the start of a story. Everything
flows on naturally from there. Much easier than having a character
getting undressed, climbing into bed and falling asleep at the
start of the story. What next? 'Eight hours later he woke up'?
No, not nearly so good.
Ivan Goncharov starts his great comic novel Oblomov in
exactly this way: "Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov was lying in his
bed one morning in his flat in Gorohovy Street..." Even
I've done it at least once, in my short story 'Shoebox'. The
tale starts with a bit of talk between a boy and a girl, vaguely
sexual. Where better for them to be talking about such matters
than in bed. Okay, so I have a couple in bed. What next? They
go to sleep? No, we already decided that was bad idea. Okay,
they get up, get dressed. What next? Breakfast, of course. So
they go through, open the cornflakes and get stuck in? No: boring.
They go to the kitchen, find the cupboard is bare. Disaster!
They're getting really hungry now, and there's nothing to eat!
So they nip across to the shop and buy some grub, right? Wrong:
too easy, where's the drama in that? What happens is: they're
on the dole, they've no money, so they have to go over to the
corner shop and steal their breakfast. Now there's a moral dilemma,
there's drama, there's a story.
I learnt that from Hamsun.
ii. Walking into the world
One of the things you gain by starting your story this way is
an excuse for describing, or at least presenting, the world that
the character inhabits. Even better in this respect than having
your characters waking up is to have them walking into the world
- or some part of it - for the first time. This is a very common
technique. The first example that comes to mind is Gogol's Dead
Souls. I wonder, by the way, whether Hamsun had read this
book? We all know of his admiration for Dostoevsky, but often
I think that characters like Nagel have more than a whiff of
Gogol's anti-hero about them. Anyway, here's the start of Dead
Souls:
To the door of an inn in the provincial town of N. there drew up a smart light spring carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, land owners possessed of about a hundred souls, and, in short, all persons who rank as gentlemen of the intermediate category. In the carriage was seated such a gentleman - a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over thin. [...] His arrival produced no stir in the town, and was accompanied by no particular incident, beyond that a couple of peasants who happened to be standing at the door of a dramshop exchanged a few comments...
Chichikov's arrival involves no particular incident; the drama comes soon after, though. I don't suppose I have to underline how similar this beginning is to the start of Mysteries:
It all started at six one evening when a steamer landed at the dock and three passengers appeared on deck. One of them was a man wearing a loud yellow suit and an outsized corduroy cap.
This time the mode of transport is a
boat, but the technical approach is the same: launch your mysterious
stranger into the middle of some unsuspecting community, stand
back and wait for the explosion. The writer doesn't have to know
what the explosion is going to consist of, all he has to do is
light the fuse, by having his character suddenly appear in a
town he doesn't know, a world without a space reserved, a role
fixed for him.
As well as giving the writer an excuse to describe the world
- it's being seen for the first time, naturally the character
observes it very acutely - starting like this also allows the
writer to present the central character as he appears to bystanders:
so the peasants remark on Chichikov, and everyone notices Nagel
and his yellow suit. It's a much more immediate, easily graspable
way of starting a story than having a bunch of characters who
know each other well, I think. Take the start of The Busconductor
Hines, for instance, James Kelman's great first novel. There
you have Rab Hines and his wife Sandra sitting in their tenement
flat. But because they've sat there together for years, they
don't particularly notice each other, nor can the narrator step
back and describe them without destroying the integrity of the
art. All we can get is their wee actions, and their dialogue,
amazingly complex and subtle and multi-layered in what it tells
us about these two folk and their lives - but also quite hard
for the reader to appreciate fully at first reading.
HOW I IMPROVISE
I've used this beginning myself
too; at the start of my long story 'Hours of Darkness', for instance:
He came striding out of the north just as darkness was falling. Away to his right dark fields stretched out... A step to his left the cliffs plunged down to rocky coves scattered with cracked slabs split from the cliff-face, and already deep in shadow.
This improvisatory approach to fiction
writing, largely learned from Hamsun, has been immensely useful
to me. It got me out of the rut I mentioned earlier, the one-tortuous-paragraph-a-day
syndrome.
It's not artless, or easier than starting with a fully worked-out
plot or structure. In many ways it's harder. But it comes up
with the kind of stories I want to tell, and I want to read.
I'm not saying that you start with nothing at all. You have an
atmosphere, a mood, in mind. You have a character, or a few characters,
who walk into your head. You let them speak, and move around,
and the story grows out of their actions, their words.
In The Cultural Life of Modern America, Hamsun says of
Whitman, 'He does not control his material; he lets his material
control him.' I know that he's actually very critical of Whitman
in this book, and may well be implying that a writer 'letting
the material control him' is a bad thing. But on the other hand,
the whole book is so full of multi-layered ironies that it's
hard to be 100% sure of what Hamsun thinks.
One thing's for sure: he finds Whitman fascinating. In part,
I would suggest, this is because Hamsun actually has a great
deal of sympathy for the approach he imputes to him – not
so much as a lack of control, as a conscious decision
not to attempt to control every moment of his creation. James
Kelman was talking about this, I think, when he said in an interview,
that one of his goals was 'to obliterate the narrator, get rid
of the artist, so all that's left is the story.'
Later on in The Cultural Life of Modern America, Hamsun
writes about the kind of fiction he wants to read. Ten years
ago, when I first came across this passage, I thought, Yes! That's
still what we need! Here's what Hamsun wrote:
I am not asking for madness and the great sin – that is a question of morals, an issue by itself. I am asking for life, for bodies alive in their clothes – that is a question of art. Let these two lovers show us that their pulses throb and their lungs breathe; let them show us that life struggles beneath their skins, that their bodies are enflamed with vitality!
You can't have bodies enflamed with vitality
unless the language is enflamed with vitality. And your language
won't be enflamed if you've worked out every word in advance
of its appearance in the story. You have to show the struggle
beneath the skin of the language. Hamsun recognised this, and
the best of today's writers recognise it too.
The fuel is our thoughts, the flames are our words, and it is
the oxygen of utterance that allows combustion to produce heat
and light. My conclusion is: open your mouths, and write!