To say these two lovers ruin each other is only to begin to sum up the harm they do. Glahn’s erratic will and whimsical cruelties are mirrored by the impulsivities of Edvarda, a village girl in tight, high-collared Edwardian blouse and long dark skirt, with witchy little boots on her flirty feet. Hamsun, a largely self-schooled wanderer upon many rough roads, who visited America twice in the 1880s (deciding that we were a failure as a culture and a country), laughs in the teeth of this idea.

Thus it went right over my head that Hamsun was writing an anti-Rousseauvian story, to confront the proposition that people in a state of nature live more honorably, more simply, more authentically. I had never read Rousseau (and still haven’t read more than bits). The handsome lieutenant is ever on the hunt for females, and they find him: the island’s small harbor-town is full of maidens, who respond to him as if to some night-flower exuding delicious nectar. The second shock is how out of control, sexually out of control, are these 19th-century Norwegian Lutherans.

Nature apprehended with a full if unstable sensorium: this is the first shock of Pan, Glahn’s tender, ecstatic, yet often amused response to the natural world. The madly bursting, insanely concentrated Arctic summer is upon him, and he fishes and hunts, reading meanings in the markings on the powdery wings of giant moths that come out in the undark nights. Thomas Glahn, is living alone in a forest hut on a wilderness island. A few weeks later, at sea, standing uncertainly on quivering legs, with many hours of little or nothing to do aboard-the steward had warned me to stay out of sight when not with a mop in my hands, and to work slower, by God, on this unionized ship-I find the paperback at the bottom of my duffel. One is Pan, by the Norwegian Knut Hamsun (1859–1952), someone heretofore unknown to me. It worked for Melville, for Richard Henry Dana, for Jack London … I get a berth on a ship out of Oakland, and in the two weeks before we sail I go the rounds of my scruffy friends, hinting at dangers to come for the daring young adventurer.Ī guy in a bookstore in Palo Alto recommends some books to take along. I’m living in Berkeley, my impersonation of a graduate student in history falling apart.

Pan knut