Inhuman Lear

By G.M.

ICE AGE

by TANKRED DORST

Knut Hamsun was a hero to his fellow Norwegians and a novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. But in the '30s, he espoused Nazism, and when the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, he collaborated with them, later even wrote a glowing obituary of Hitler. After the war, he scarcely deigned to offer any explanation, nor would he acknowledge the slightest regret.

It is on the postwar years of this grim eccentric that Tankred Dorst, a West German playwright who was a P.O.W. in the U.S., has based his play. He asks an enormous imaginative effort from a European or U.S. audience: the moral issues of World War II still seem crystal clear to the countries that fought Hitler. Stereotypes about people therefore persist. Yet Dorst commands respect for Hamsun as a man who above everything else must be true to himself-- whether he is right or wrong is to him irrelevant. With masterly compression, the novelist's years of trial are made into a resounding study of an extreme form of personal integrity that far transcends its shoddy circumstances.

Hamsun is housed in an old-folks home while the government ponders what to do with him. The psychiatrists are baffled and so are the official interrogators, who seem gradually reduced to bullies out to crack a 90-year-old man. Hamsun remains impervious. He is possessed by neither God nor the devil and certainly not by Hitler, whom he disliked, but apparently by a fiercely primitive individuality that remains unyielding to all external forces, including the government of Norway. It is one of Dorst's achievements that a thousand questions about the debts owed by the citizen to the state and vice versa press wordlessly on the action. Roberts Blossom is a tremendous Hamsun, a man who sees the world narrow but himself whole. Unpitiable and pitiless, Hamsun retains to the end the stature of King Lear before his arteries hardened.

G.M.

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