Hamsun, Boswell

Since my last post I've read an issue of The New Scientist, and an issue of Eclectic reading. I've also read Frank Brady's biography of James Boswell, and then I have read Knut Hamsun: Dissenter and Dreamer by Ingar Sletten Kolloen. The Brady biography covered the latter years of Boswell's life, and followed a better written and more insightful first volume by Frederick Pottle. It was published in the 1960's, and according to the foreword an unfair collaboration was proposed by an authority on Boswell on a much less experienced person. The life of Knut Hamsun, which interested me since I have read his books and knew only that he had become a Fascist. Well, what a sorry character he was, and he treated his wife, who was condemned as a collaborator where he was acquitted on the basis of mental incapacity -- he went on to write a book, giving the lie to the verdict direct -- abominably, cutting her off without a penny when he was both rich and she was 67. Awful. His early years of hunger and poverty, his mentally ill mother, all led to write great classics and make a shipwreck of his life.