The Women at the Pump by Knut Hamsun

First published:Konerne ved vandposten, 1920 (English translation, 1928)

Type of work: Satire

Time of work: The late nineteenth century

Locale: A small coastal town in northern Norway

Principal Characters:

• Oliver Andersen, an emasculated cripple
• Petra, his wife, a woman of loose morals
• Frank, a son of Petra and a student of philology
• Abel, a son of Petra and a blacksmith

The Novel

Knut Hamsun’s title indicates his novel’s subject: The town pump is the center of life in a small town, because it is notoriously a gathering place for gossips. Few of Hamsun’s characters of either gender seem to have much more to do than to participate in the gossip, raillery, and persiflage which in such a town flow like water from the pump. The novel’s pervasive ironic tone arises from the distance between characters’ views of themselves and their importance and the omniscient narrator’s view of these little people and their little lives:

Oh, that little anthill! All its inhabitants are occupied with their own affairs, they cross each other’s paths, push each other aside, sometimes they trample each other under foot. It cannot be otherwise, sometimes they trample each other under foot....

This peculiarly misanthropic novel is lacking in plot. Incidents take place, sometimes repercussions are reported (as in the mail robbery) but other times not. Hamsun’s interest is in the daily lives of the people on whom he reports.

The book opens with a dramatic moment in the town’s life: The town’s only steamer, the Fia, owned by Counsel Johnsen of the Wharfside, sets sail on its maiden voyage. Aboard as a deckhand is young Oliver Andersen, son of a widow. After an accident at sea which left him maimed and impotent, he returns home with a wooden leg. Petra, to whom he was engaged, returns his ring, and Oliver and his mother sink into a destitute state. Some days, he rows out to fish, but he realizes little profit from that. One day his luck changes; he discovers an abandoned ship and for a time lives well on money from salvage. When Petra comes back willing to marry him, he thinks it is more good luck. Petra soon has a son whom they name Frank and, later, another son named Abel. Oliver is eventually lucky enough to have a family of five children.

Oliver and Petra’s marriage consists (as it must) of mutual deception and self-deception, lies, and evasions. Still, it is not an unhappy life, judged according to the standards of these characters, who ask nothing of themselves and very little from anyone else. Oliver is not a jealous man and does not have much dignity. He uses his knowledge of his sons’ paternity to blackmail the wealthy Counsel Johnsen into giving him a job as warehouseman. He evades his chief creditor by offering him his wife’s sexual services. As a cripple, he plays on the townspeople’s sympathies to get what advantage he can. He is pathetically content with little: some sweets, a new hat, a colorful tie. When he finds some stolen bank notes, he is ecstatic and becomes, in his own eyes, a great man so long as the money lasts. Any sympathy which can be elicited for Oliver, so deformed in body and spirit, must come as a consequence of his attitudes toward his children. Despite the fact that none of them is his and that this fact has gradually leaked out at the town pump over the years, he is a devoted and proud father. Still, his altruism should not be overstated. He benefits from his children, both socially and economically, and he looks to them for support in his old age.

Frank, the eldest, is to Oliver a brilliant scholar, but Hamsun makes it clear that Frank is actually a dull grind, and, in his pursuit of philology,the very embodiment of sterile academic learning. When Frank eventually reaches his full potential for priggishness by becoming Headmaster of the local school, Oliver is extremely proud:

at that moment no one came and told Oliver that he was a childless man. His children were nothing but pure invention on his part, granted, but he had them, during the whole of their childhood and growing-up...he and they knew each other, they called him father,...and now Frank was returning to his native town, a great and learned man.

Abel, his other son, seems to be one of the few sympathetically portrayed characters in the book. Apprenticed early to Carlsen the Blacksmith, he becomes almost a son to him, almost compensating Carlsen for his bitter disappointment in his own son. Intelligent, sensitive, industrious, and a generous contributor to the family’s support, Abel soon takes over the shop. He frequently finds ways to give Oliver extra spending money. In Oliver’s eyes, however, Abel can never compare with Frank. Abel also fails to find favor with the young woman on whom he has set his heart, Little Lydia. As so often is the case in Hamsun’s novels, first love is impossible, but Abel, a realist, is content with another. The remaining children, two daughters, known only as Blue Eyes and Brunette, exist only to be married off to their respective swains, one improbably named Drawing-pin, the other, Edevart, son of Jorgen the Fisherman. (The use of demeaning names is common in the novel.)

The Characters

Besides Oliver Andersen and his family, Hamsun has included representatives from all social strata of the town, from Double Counsel Johnsen (tradesman, shipowner, and recipient of the Cross of Danish Order of Knighthood) to Olaus the Glazier (foul-mouthed town drunk, blue and disfigured from a blasting charge which exploded in his face, and lacking one hand). Yet Hamsun’s omniscient editorial narrative technique allows readers to see that there is little real difference between the “high” and the “low,” except that the “high” have more money. It seems that both Johnsen and his son, Scheldrup, have had sexual relationships with Petra Andersen, as has another town luminary, Frederickson the Lawyer, member of the Storthing. Frederickson can be persuaded not to foreclose the mortgage that he holds on Oliver’s house if he receives frequent visits from Petra. Supposedly, he would like to marry Fia, daughter of Counsel Johnson. Yet when it appears that Johnsen’s ship, the Fia, has sunk uninsured and that Johnsen’s financial ruin is imminent, Frederickson finds it easy to shift his attentions to Froken Olsen, whose father’s financial prospects are improving. The Doctor is yet another particularly repellent character—bitter, arrogant, and cruel. Hamsun reserves his purest scorn for such white-collar types, showing them to be calculating, ruthless, corrupt little men.

Yet even when Hamsun presumably wishes to present a more positive character, as in the Postmaster, for example, the result is at best a shift from the repulsive to the merely exasperating. The Postmaster, a failed architect become full-time philosophical bore, tires everyone with his interminable babbling on such subjects as the transmigration of souls. After his son is implicated in a mail robbery, he loses his wits and seems to have been struck dumb.

Olaus the Glazier also comes to a bad end. As the town’s other notable cripple, he has had a relationship of complex hatred with Oliver. When Oliver’s pedant son, Frank, arrives home from his studies in order to assume the position of Headmaster, the drunken Olaus makes loud, taunting re-marks about Oliver’s impotence, Petra’s prodigious fertility, and Frank’s paternity. Oliver decides such insolence is not to be borne; it may even threaten Frank’s position. In the middle of the night, Oliver arranges for some oil barrels to tumble down and crush Olaus as he lies sleeping under a tarp on the wharf.

Critical Context

The Women at the Pump shocked Hamsun’s readers, particularly since it was published in 1920, the same year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his great paean to the common man, Markens grode (1917; Growth of the Soil, 1920). One commentator wittily remarked that if there had been an award for the least idealistic work of literature—in addition to the Nobel Prize’s award for the most idealistic and uplifting—then Hamsun might have won both for that year.

Critics have attempted to explain the novel’s misanthropy, citing Hamsun’s disillusionment because the Germans, with whom he had sympathized, lost World War I, the war the Postmaster calls “the Englishman’s war.” Hamsun’s lifelong Anglophobia is evident in the Postmaster’s denunciation:

your Englishman has a religion of his own in this world and justifies it in an entirely English manner. He reduces one people after another to subjection, takes away their independence, castrates them and makes them fat and quiet. Then one day the Englishman says: Let us now be just according to the Scriptures! And so he gives the eunuchs something which he calls Self-government.

Some critics associate Hamsun’s increasingly elitist and antidemocratic views with the years he spent in the United States (1882-1884 and 1886-1888). His book Fra det moderne Amerikas aandsliv (1889; The Spiritual Life of Modern America, 1969) is a satirical record of his experiences and expresses his views that cultural advance and refinement is not likely to take place in a democracy.

Like Strindberg, Hamsun was drawn toward German virility, masculinity, and militarism. Unlike Strindberg, he lived long enough to have to reexamine the implications of his antidemocratic views. He did so in Paa glengrodde stier (1949; On Overgrown Paths, 1967), a book of reflections written while he was awaiting trial for his pro-Nazi views during World War II. The book belies the court’s conclusions about Hamsun’s “permanently impaired mental faculties,” but its author remains an enigma.

Traditionally, satire has the instruction and improvement of its audience in view. In The Women at the Pump, Hamsun’s excessive and vitriolic misanthropy is more likely to repel than reform.

Bibliography

Ferguson, Robert. Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, 1987.

Gustavson, Alrik. Six Scandinavian Novelists, 1940.

Larsen, Hanna Astrup. Knut Hamsun, 1922.

Naess, Harald. Knut Hamsun, 1984.

Naess, Harald. “Who Was Hamsun’s Hero?” in The Hero in Scandinavian Literature, 1975. Edited by John M. Weinstock and Robert T. Rovinsky.