Carl Joachim Hambro

Biography

Early life and education

Hambro was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), capital of Norway. He was the third of four sons born to Carl Joachim Hambro (1885–1964), the President of Parliament and long-time leader of the Conservative Party, and his first wife, Gudrun "Dudu" Grieg (1881–1943). On the younger Carl Joachim's date of birth, 7 June 1914, his father, for whom he was named, made a speech at the Jubilee Exhibition in the Frogner Park, which commemorated the 1814 constitution. The twins Edvard and Cato were Carl's elder brothers, who both made success within the Anglosphere: the former became the 25th President of the United Nations General Assembly and a respected legal scholar, whilst the latter became board member of the World Federation for Mental Health. The younger brother, Johan, was secretary general of the Norse Federation for 27 years in the post-war period, yet is remembered above all for his commercially successful biography of their father. Living in the Uranienborg neighbourhood of Western Oslo, the Hambro family belonged to the upper-class society of early 20th-century Norway, and was, according to biographer Tormod Petter Svennevig, intellectually engaged; its forebears included both businesspeople and women's rights activists, of whom many were active in politics.

The younger Carl Hambro was educated at Fagerborg Upper Secondary School, whence he graduated in 1932, following Latin studies. Among his school contemporaries were Niels Christian Brøgger, who became an essayist and novelist, and Kaare Martin, a future Nazi politician.

Journalistic and educational career

Having made study trips to London and Paris in the mid-1930s, Hambro graduated with a cand.philol. degree in 1939. In the summer of that year, on 15 July, he married Wenche Rynning-Koren (born 1916). Upon the outbreak of war, he was employed at the Oslo Commerce School, where he lectured until 1943. Hambro spent the latter part of the war in Uppsala, Sweden, where he taught at the Norwegian College and chaired the local Norwegian Society (1943–1944). After the war he returned to Oslo, teaching at the Commerce School until 1946. He had lectured in French literature at the Norwegian Library College in two intervals, during and after the war: from 1940 to 1941 and from 1945 to 1946. For the rest of the decade he taught Norwegian at Sorbonne, France. He also worked as a correspondent for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (1946–1948), Dagbladet (1946–1948), Verdens Gang (1948–1949) and Arbeiderbladet (1949–1951). From 1951 to 1952 he was a press worker for the Research Councils in Norway and for the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations. In that decade he mainly acted as cultural counsellor at the Norwegian embassy in London. Employed in 1952, he acted in that position for seven years, whereupon he returned to Oslo. He was assistant teacher in French at the University of Oslo from 1963 to 1965; in that position he bemoaned the insufficient command of his students in their own mother tongue, maintaining that the Norwegian language should be used more actively in foreign-language tuition.

Literary career and death

Hambro made his literary debut in 1958 with the non-fiction book Frankrike ("France"), and released his first novel two years later. The novel, entitled De frafalnes klubb ("The Club of the Estranged"), was lauded by contemporary critics, but failed to arouse much subsequent interest from scholars. Hambro's reputation as a novelist rests more on his trilogy about the fictional character Nico Dietmeyer, deemed a Bildungsroman by academics. That work, serialised in the 1960s, was Hambro's first major commercial success, and has been reviewed in detail both by contemporaneous commentators and modern literary scholars. After a few unsuccessful novels in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hambro pivoted towards non-fiction, especially focusing on linguistics and politics, fields of interest that he shared with his father, who had become fascinated by Sanskrit and East Asian poetry during his philology studies. The younger Hambro's most well-known and successful book within linguistics was the 1969 Ting, tanke, tale ("Thing, Thought, Speech"), followed by Språket i funksjon ("Language in Operation") in 1972.

Having divorced Rynning Koren, Hambro eventually married Christine Holter (born 1931). Their daughter Ellen Hambro would later become Director of Norway's Climate and Pollution Agency. Carl Joachim Hambro died on 19 February 1985 and was buried in Grefsen. Hambro's obituarist Finn Jor described him as a man fond of debate with a keen interest in societal issues, yet who was no front person in public discourse, not possessing the eloquence of his father.

Authorship

In 1958, Hambro released a non-fiction book titled Frankrike (English: France), as a tribute to the country in which he had spent most of his early adulthood. His love for France was not inherited from his parents, however: the elder Carl Joachim and Dudu were fervent anglophiles, the former having both written and translated English-language works, and the latter having been a voracious reader of Anglo-American novelists ranging from Rudyard Kipling to Aldous Huxley.

His debut novel, the satirical De frafalnes klubb, was published in 1960. It tells a story of some disillusioned cynics in Paris who create a new philosophical and literary "-ism," which gains worldwide popularity. According to reviewer Brikt Jensen, Hambro offered a critique of "the modern type of man [who embraces] the first philosophical system that comes to sight." Jensen also commended Hambro for his "un-Norwegian" perspective, calling him a "distinguished European." The literary scholar Willy Dahl opined that the novel denoted Hambro's declared scepticism towards "every sort of intellectual or political pigeonholing," a scepticism that he shared with his father C. J. Hambro, whose disdain for radical and totalitarian ideologies was well known.

The elder Hambro was also, according to literary scholar Per Thomas Andersen, vital for the next literary work of the younger Hambro: he provided biographical context for a trilogy comprising the novels Frels oss fra det gode (1963; "Deliver Us From the Good"), Utfor stryket (1964; "Down the River") and Vi vil oss en drøm (1966; "We Want a Dream"), which describe the adolescence of a young man named Nico Dietmeyer. Living in the upper-class society of Western Oslo in the 1930s, Dietmeyer has an authoritarian father who commits adultery, despite personally emphasising decorum in his moral system. The first of them was favourably reviewed by Brikt Jensen in Verdens Gang, who called it "a declaration of love for Oslo". Reviewing for the same newspaper, Ragnhild Lorentzen gave the second novel a laudatory review, praising Hambro for having taken an important task upon his shoulders, whilst simultaneously criticising him for blurring the line between adolescence and adulthood. Dahl maintained that these novels constituted an unpretentious, yet clear-eyed criticism of conformity in that milieu, whilst Andersen considered them stories about double standards and liberation from one's own father. Rottem maintained that the novel was autobiographical, and that Hambro tried to polemise against the extramarital relationship that his father had enjoyed with actress Gyda Christensen. 1966 proved to be a fruitful year for Hambro: he first contributed to the lightly pornographic literary collection Norske sengehester ("Norwegian Bedposts"), and subsequently, in September, delivered a vehement critique of the Norwegian education system in the pamphlet Er gymnasiaster mennesker? ("Are Graduates People?"). The last novel of his trilogy about Nico Dietmeyer was released in November of the same year; Lorentzen deemed the first part of the book to be somewhat verbose, inconclusive and unoriginal, yet also well-written.