Chance, Rex*

Author Hamsun Writes of Destiny's Slaves The Story. Carrying the Royal Norwegian Post over the mountain one morning, Benoni Hartvigsen chanced to join Rosa Barfod, the parson's daughter. It chanced to rain. They were by a cave. Taking shelter, they just talked. But a vagabond Lapp chanced to be passing as the rain let up, and he spread a rumor. Benoni denied stoutly, until the notoriety brought him more pleasure than harm. Then he half-admitted, hinted, boasted.

The parson heard and made Benoni sign a public retraction. Deputized by the lazy sheriff to read public announcements after church, Benoni omitted the retraction. Of course this was found out and the lion-marked post bag, symbol of Benoni's distinction among his fellow fishermen, was taken from him.

Benoni trembled and was more wretched when Trader Mack of Sirilund sent for him. Mack was Rosa's godfather and with all his property he could do a man much good or evil. When Mack merely suggested that Benoni go to buying herring for market with money from his lucky seining shares, Benoni eagerly promised he would and bought the necessary barrels and salt from Mack.

The ventures went well. Mack's condescension cheered Benoni and won him people's respect again. Now they called him "Hartvigsen." Even Rosa spoke him kindly when he was invited to Mack's Christmas party.

Mack sold Hartvigsen an old seine and when a vast school of herring, pursued by whales, happened to get bottled in a creek, he made a rich "shot" (haul). Mack told him he should get married now and buy a mortgage on the Sirilund trading station. So Hartvigsen gave his silver for a mortgage. He also talked with Rosa as Mack suggested. They were agreed. He enlarged his house, bought doves and a piano, stretched his mighty arms. He scarcely noticed Rosa pucker her nose when he boasted of his money and compared himself to Mack.

Upon registering the mortgage, Hartvigsen learned a larger one was ahead of it. That crafty Mack! And Rosa kept putting off their wedding, until young Nikolai Arentsen, her former betrothed, came home with his law learning, opened an office and began to get cases thick and fast. Rosa conveyed to the big fisherman that she was sorry, but . . . Soon he was "Benoni" again to everyone. He gave Mack notice for his mortgage money but went on working with him. He had to. Mack knew business, Benoni nothing. By chance Benoni learned there were lead and silver along a stretch of shore. He cared nothing for that. He wanted the rocks for fish-drying and bought them for one hundred dollars. Came a testy Englishman, with a mineralogist. While stupid Benoni fumbled for answers, the Englishman bid up to twenty thousand. Benoni's staggering imagination doubled the sum and collapsed. The Englishman had a title drawn and stalked off.

So there he was, "Hartvigsen" again, Mack's partner, his importance in the village so enormous there was no longer fun in boasting. Rosa's husband, fat, penniless, drunk, left for the South. Perhaps she would be his housekeeper; Mack had suggested it. She declined. Well, that was that. Perhaps he would find some one in the spring-- and there the tale ends, exasperatingly inconclusive, like life.

Significance. After writing of man wresting life from Nature's vehement fertility (The Growth of the Soil), man living life under social and domestic hindrances (Hunger, Pan, Children of the Age), and man extinguishing his vital spark in industrialism (Segelfoss Town), Author Hamsun, his objectivism increasing, here represents man missing life's simplest joys through his stupidity, animalism, social cowardice and property superstition. Even Mack, with his opulent dress, his feather-bottomed bathtub, his masterly way with his parlor-maids, his complete control of the village destinies, is the servant and prey of chance. None are free spirits save two imbecile beggars and a baby born in the room where they are dying.

The Author. In Norway, where hardly one in five escapes the fever of authorship and Government subsidies invigorate pens halfway able so that the people may have good reading for the long winter nights, there once arose the question: who shall succeed Ibsen and Bjornson as our national writers? The beginning of one answer@#134; appeared in the late '80's, in the Sunday magazine section of a Chicago newspaper --the first instalment of Hunger, by Knut Hamsun, tall, blond streetcar conductor.

The conductor's real name was Knud Pedersen. He had left behind him, in northern Norway, his peasant parents, the shoemaker to whom he had been apprenticed and a young manhood in Christiania (Oslo) as stevedore, tutor and court messenger. He had shipped to the U. S. as a deckhand, cut grain in the Dakotas, lectured ("to buy tobacco and gum shoes") in Minneapolis. His vicissitudes continued-- fishing cod on the Grand Banks included--until Hunger came to the attention of the Swedish king. Back in Scandinavia, Hamsun found himself not only famed but pensioned. He lectured (excoriating the U. S ) He wrote. He called Ibsen "a popular reasoner," Tolstoy "an active fool... an exceptional plowman." Undoubtedly he was original, humorous, elemental and an artist. He believed that "life is the only important thing in life," and retired to Larvik, six hours north of Oslo where, aged 66, he still deports himself vigorously. In 1920 he had the satisfaction of receiving the Nobel Prize (for The Growth of the Soil) and hearing the book acclaimed in the U. S. (where he had "wasted five years of my life"), as a monumental conception of the Spirit of the Middle West expressed in a Norwegian setting.

Pandolpho

THE GREAT PANDOLPHO--W. J. Locke--Dodd Mead ($2.00). A Locke novel is properly comparable to a piece of durable, finely adjusted, discreetly oiled machinery. Characters, emotions, setting, tempo all are exactly gauged: never a jar of incongruity, never a rasp of bad taste or triteness. The present model is, let us say, an Isotta-Fraschmi or other high-powered vehicle with an exotic name and impeccable appointments. Sir Victor Pandolpho lavishes an inexhaustible wealth of inventive brains, vivid culture and dynamic goodwill upon the world. He is one of the world's great givers. It is psychologically impossible for Paula Field, widow-novelist of like powers and dimensions, to return his love until his towering schemes crash and another woman has made him capable of emotional intake by a great and a paradoxical sacrifice. In other hands it would have been a preposterous extravaganza.

*BENONI -- Knut Hamsun -- Knopf ($2.50). <]FOOTNOTE>