The Road to Damascus, a Trilogy Part 1

The Road to Damascus.

by August Strindberg.

INTRODUCTION

Strindberg's great trilogy _The Road to Damascus_ presents many mysteries to the uninitiated. Its peculiar changes of mood, its gallery of half unreal characters, its bizarre episodes combine to make it a bewilderingly rich but rather 'difficult' work. It cannot be recommended to the lover of light drama or the seeker of momentary distraction. _The Road to Damascus_ does not deal with the superficial strata of human life, but probes into those depths where the problems of G.o.d, and death, and eternity become terrifying realities.

Many authors have, of course, dealt with the profoundest problems of humanity without, on that account, having been able to evoke our interest. There may have been too much philosophy and too little art in the presentation of the subject, too little reality and too much soaring into the heights. That is not so with Strindberg's drama. It is a trenchant settling of accounts between a complex and fascinating individual--the author--and his past, and the realistic scenes have often been transplanted in detail from his own changeful life.

In order fully to understand _The Road to Damascus_ it is therefore essential to know at least the most important features of that background of real life, out of which the drama has grown.

Parts I and II of the trilogy were written in 1898, while Part III was added somewhat later, in the years 1900-1901. In 1898 Strindberg had only half emerged from what was by far the severest of the many crises through which in his troubled life he had to pa.s.s. He had overcome the worst period of terror, which had brought him dangerously near the borders of sanity, and he felt as if he could again open his eyes and breathe freely. He was not free from that nervous pressure under which he had been working, but the worst of the inner tension had relaxed and he felt the need of taking a survey of what had happened, of summarising and trying to fathom what could have been underlying his apparently unaccountable experiences. The literary outcome of this settling of accounts with the past was _The Road to Damascus_.

_The Road to Damascus_ might be termed a marriage drama, a mystery drama, or a drama of penance and conversion, according as preponderance is given to one or other of its characteristics. The question then arises: what was it in the drama which was of deepest significance to the author himself? The answer is to be found in the t.i.tle, with its allusion to the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles of the journey of Saul, the persecutor, the scoffer, who, on his way to Damascus, had an awe-inspiring vision, which converted Saul, the hater of Christ, into Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. Strindberg's drama describes the progress of the author right up to his conversion, shows how stage by stage he relinquishes worldly things, scientific renown, and above all woman, and finally, when nothing more binds him to this world, takes the vows of a monk and enters a monastery where no dogmas or theology, but only broadminded humanity and resignation hold sway. What, however, in an inner sense, distinguishes Strindberg's drama from the Bible narrative is that the conversion itself--although what leads up to it is convincingly described, both logically and psychologically--does not bear the character of a final and irrevocable decision, but on the contrary is depicted with a certain hesitancy and uncertainty. THE STRANGER'S entry into the monastery consequently gives the impression of being a piece of logical construction; the author's heart is not wholly in it. From Strindberg's later works it also becomes evident that his severe crisis had undoubtedly led to a complete reformation in that it definitely caused him to turn from worldly things, of which indeed he had tasted to the full, towards matters divine. But this did not mean that then and there he accepted some specific religion, whether Christian or other. One would undoubtedly come nearest to the author's own interpretation in this respect by characterising _The Road to Damascus_ not as a drama of conversion, but as a drama of struggle, the story of a restless, arduous pilgrimage through the chimeras of the world towards the border beyond which eternity stretches in solemn peace, symbolised in the drama by a mountain, the peaks of which reach high above the clouds.

In this final settling of accounts one subject is of dominating importance, recurring again and again throughout the trilogy; it is that of woman. Strindberg him, of course, become famous as a writer about women; he has ruthlessly described the hatreds of love, the h.e.l.l that marriage can be, he is the creator of _Le Plaidoyer d'un Fou_ and _The Dance of Death_, he had three divorces, yet was just as much a wors.h.i.+pper of woman--and at the same time a diabolical hater of her seducing qualities under which he suffered defeat after defeat. Each time he fell in love afresh he would compare himself to Hercules, the t.i.tan, whose strength was vanquished by Queen Omphale, who clothed herself in his lion's skin, while he had to sit at the spinning wheel dressed in women's clothes. It can be readily understood that to a man of Strindberg's self-conceit the problem of his relations with women must become a vital issue on the solution of which the whole Damascus pilgrimage depended.

In 1898, when Parts I and II of the trilogy were written, Strindberg had been married twice; both marriages had ended unhappily. In the year 1901, when the wedding scenes of Part III were written, Strindberg had recently experienced the rapture of a new love which, however, was soon to be clouded. It must not be forgotten that in his entire emotional life Strindberg was an artist and as such a man of impulse, with the spontaneity and naivity and intensity of a child. For him love had nothing to do with respectability and worldly calculations; he liked to think of it as a thunderbolt striking mortals with a destructive force like the lightning hurled by the almighty Zeus. It is easy to understand that a man of such temperament would not be particularly suited for married life, where self-sacrifice and strong-minded patience may be severely tested. In addition his three wives were themselves artists, one an auth.o.r.ess, the other two actresses, all of them p.r.o.nounced characters, endowed with a degree of will and self-a.s.sertion, which, although it could not be matched against Strindberg's, yet would have been capable of producing friction with rather more pliant natures than that of the Swedish dramatist.

In the trilogy Strindberg's first wife, Siri von Essen, his marriage to whom was happiest and lasted longest (1877-1891), and more especially his second wife, the Austrian auth.o.r.ess Frida Uhl (married to him 1893-1897) have supplied the subject matter for his picture of THE LADY.

In the happy marriage scenes of Part III we recognise reminiscences from the wedding of Strindberg, then fifty-two, and the twenty-three-year-old actress Harriet Bosse, whose marriage to him lasted from 1901 until 1904.

The character of THE LADY in Parts I and II is chiefly drawn from recollections--fairly recent when the drama was written--of Frida Uhl and his life with her. From the very beginning her marriage to Strindberg had been most troublous. In the autumn of 1892 Strindberg moved from the Stockholm skerries to Berlin, where he lived a rather hectic Bohemian life among the artists collecting in the little tavern 'Zum Schwarzen Ferkel.' He made the acquaintance of Frida Uhl in the beginning of the year 1893, and after a good many difficulties was able to arrange for a marriage on the 2nd May on Heligoland Island, where English marriage laws, less rigorous than the German, applied.

Strindberg's nervous temperament would not tolerate a quiet and peaceful honeymoon; quite soon the couple departed to Gravesend via Hamburg.

Strindberg was too restless to stay there and moved on to London. There he left his wife to try to negotiate for the production of his plays, and journeyed alone to Sellin, on the island of Rugen, after having first been compelled to stop in Hamburg owing to lack of money.

Strindberg stayed on Rugen during the month of July, and then left for the home of his parents-in-law at Mondsee, near Salzburg in Austria, where he was to meet his wife. But when she was delayed a few days on the journey from London, Strindberg impatiently departed for Berlin, where Frida Uhl followed shortly after. About the same time an action was brought for the suppression of the German version of _Le Plaidoyer d'un Fou_ as being immoral. This book gives an undisguised, intensely personal picture of Strindberg's first marriage, and was intended by him for publication only after his death as a defence against accusations directed against him for his behaviour towards Siri von Essen.

Strindberg was acquitted after a time, but before that his easily fired imagination had given him a thorough shake-up, which could only hasten the crisis which seemed to be approaching. After a trip to Brunn, where Strindberg wrote his scientific work _Antibarbarus_, the couple arrived in November at the home of Frida Uhl's grandparents in the little village of Dornach, by the Upper Danube; here the wanderings of 1893 at last came to an end. For a few months comparative peace reigned in the artists' little home, but the birth of a daughter, Kerstin, in May, brought this tranquillity to a sudden end. Strindberg, who had lived in a state of nervous depression since the 1880's, felt himself put on one side by the child, and felt ill at ease in an environment of, as he put it in the autobiographical _The Quarantine Master_, 'articles of food, excrements, wet-nurses treated like milch-cows, cooks and decaying vegetables.' He longed for cleanliness and peace, and in letters to an artist friend he spoke of entering a monastery. He even thought of founding one himself in the Ardennes and drew up detailed schemes for rules, dress, and food. The longing to get away and common interests with his Parisian friend (a musician named Leopold Littmansson) attracted Strindberg to Paris, where he settled down in the beginning of the autumn 1894. His wife joined him, but left again at the close of the autumn. In reality Strindberg was at this time almost impossible to live with. Persecution mania and hallucinations took possession of him and his morbid suspicions knew no bounds. In spite of this he was half conscious that there was something wrong with his mental faculties, and in the beginning of 1895, a.s.sisted by the Swedish Minister, he went by his own consent to the St. Louis Hospital in Paris. During his chemical experiments, in which among other things he tried to produce gold, he had burnt his hands, so that he had to seek medical attention on that account also. He wrote about this in a letter:

'I am going to hospital because I am ill, because my doctor has sent me there, and because I need to be looked after like a child, because I am ruined.... And it torments me and grieves me, my nervous system is rotten, paralytic, hysterical....'

Never before had Strindberg lived in such distress as at this period, both physically and mentally. With shattered nerves, sometimes over the verge of insanity, without any means of existence other than what friends managed to sc.r.a.pe together, separated from his second wife, who had opened proceedings for divorce, far from his native land and without any prospects for the future, he was brought to a profound religious crisis. With almost incredible fort.i.tude he succeeded in fighting his way through this difficult period, with the remarkable result that the former Bohemian, atheist, and scoffer was gradually able to emerge with the firm a.s.surance of a prophet, and even enter a new creative period, perhaps mightier than before. One cannot help reflecting that a man capable of overcoming a crisis of such a formidable character and of several years' duration, as this one of Strindberg's had been, with reason intact and even with increased creative power, in reality, in spite of his hypersensitive nervous system, must have been an unusually strong man both physically and mentally.

Upon trying to define more closely what actual relation the play has to those events of Strindberg's restless life, of which we have given a rough outline, we find that for the most part the author has undoubtedly made use of his own experiences, but has adapted, combined and added to them still more, so that the result is a mixture of real experience and imagination, all moulded into a carefully worked out artistic form.

If to begin with, we dwell for a while on Part I it is evident that the hurried wanderings of THE STRANGER and THE LADY between the street corner, the room in the hotel, the sea and the Rose Room with the mother-in-law, have their foundation--often in detail--in Strindberg's rovings with Frida Uhl. I will give a few examples. In a book by Frida Uhl about her marriage to the Swedish genius (splendid in parts but not very reliable) she recalls that the month before her marriage she took rooms at Neustadtische Kirchstra.s.se 1, in Berlin, facing a Gothic church in Dorotheenstra.s.se, situated at the cross-roads between the post office in Dorotheenstra.s.se and the cafe 'Zum Schwarzen Ferkel' in Wilhelmstra.s.se. This Berlin environment appears to be almost exactly reproduced in the introductory scene of Part I, where THE STRANGER and THE LADY meet outside a little Gothic church with a post office and cafe adjoining. The happy scenes by the sea are, of course, pleasant recollections from Heligoland, and the many discussions about money matters in the midst of the honeymoon are quite explicable when we know how the dramatist was continually haunted by money troubles, even if occasionally he received a big fee, and that this very financial insecurity was one of the chief reasons why Frida Uhl's father opposed the marriage. Again, the country scenes which follow in Part I, s.h.i.+ft to the hilly country round the Danube, with their Catholic Calvaries and expiation chapels, where Strindberg lived with his parents-in-law in Mondsee and with his wife's grandparents in Dornach and the neighbouring village Klam, with its mill, its smithy, and its gloomy ravine. The Rose Room was the name he gave to the room in which he lived during his stay with his mother-in-law and his daughter Kerstin in Klam in the autumn of 1896, as he has himself related in one of his autobiographical books _Inferno_. In this way we could go on, showing how the localities which are to be met with in the drama often correspond in detail to the places Strindberg had visited in the course of his pilgrimage during the years 1893-1898. s.p.a.ce prevents us, however, from entering on a more detailed a.n.a.lysis in this respect.

That THE STRANGER represents Strindberg's _alter ego_ is evident in many ways, even apart from the fact that THE STRANGER'S wanderings from place to place, as we have already seen, bear a direct relation to those of Strindberg himself. THE STRANGER is an author, like Strindberg; his childhood of hate is Strindberg's own; other details--such as for instance that THE STRANGER has refused to attend his father's funeral, that the Parish Council has wanted to take his child away from him, that on account of his writings he has suffered lawsuits, illness, poverty, exile, divorce; that in the police description he is characterised as a person without a permanent situation, with uncertain income; married, but had deserted his wife and left his children; known as entertaining subversive opinions on social questions (by _The Red Room_, _The New Realm_ and other works Strindberg became the great standard-bearer of the Swedish Radicals in their campaign against conventionalism and bureaucracy); that he gives the impression of not being in full possession of his senses; that he is sought by his children's guardian because of unpaid maintenance allowance--everything corresponds to the experiences of the unfortunate Strindberg himself, with all his bitter defeats in life and his triumphs in the world of letters.

Those scenes where THE STRANGER is uncertain whether the people he sees before him are real or not--he catches hold of THE BEGGAR'S arm to feel whether he is a real, live person--or those occasions when he appears as a visionary or thought-reader--he describes the kitchen in his wife's parental home without ever having seen it, and knows her thoughts before she has expressed them--have their deep foundation in Strindberg's mental make-up, especially as it was during the period of tension in the middle of the 1890's, termed the Inferno period, because at that time Strindberg thought that he lived in h.e.l.l. Our most prominent student of Strindberg, Professor Martin Lamm, wrote about this in his work on Strindberg's dramas:

'In order to understand the first part of _The Road to Damascus_ we must take into consideration that the author had not yet shaken off his terrifying visions and persecutionary hallucinations. He can play with them artistically, sometimes he feels tempted to make a joke of them, but they still retain for him their "terrifying semi-reality." It is this which makes the drama so bewildering, but at the same time so vigorous and affecting. Later, when depicting dream states, he creates an artful blend of reality and poetry. He produces more exquisite works of art, but he no longer gives the same anguished impression of a soul striving to free itself from the meshes of his _idees fixes_.'

With his hypersensitive nervous system Strindberg, like THE STRANGER, really gives the impression of having been a visionary. For instance, his author friend Albert Engstrom, has told how one evening during a stay far out in the Stockholm skerries, far from all civilisation, Strindberg suddenly had a feeling that his little daughter was ill, and wanted to return to town at once. True enough, it turned out that the girl had fallen ill just at the time when Strindberg had felt the warning. As regards thought-reading, it appears that at the slightest change in expression and often for no perceptible reason at all, Strindberg would draw the most definite conclusions, as definite as from an uttered word or an action. This we have to keep in mind, for instance, when judging Strindberg's accusations against his wife in _Le Plaidoyer d'un Fou_, the book which THE LADY in _The Road to Damascus_ is tempted to read, in spite of having been forbidden by THE STRANGER, with tragic results. In Part III of the drama Strindberg lets THE STRANGER discuss this thought-reading problem with his first wife. THE STRANGER says:

'We made a mistake when we were living together, because we accused each other of wicked thoughts before they'd become actions; and lived in mental reservations instead of realities. For instance, I once noticed how you enjoyed the defiling gaze of a strange man, and I accused you of unfaithfulness';

to which THE LADY, to Strindberg's satisfaction, has to reply:

'You were wrong to do it, and right. Because my thoughts were sinful.'

As regards the other figures in the gallery of characters in Part I, we have already shown THE LADY as the identical counterpart in all essentials of Strindberg's second wife, Frida Uhl. Like the latter THE LADY is a Catholic, has a grandfather, Dr. Cornelius Reisch--called THE OLD MAN in the drama--whose pa.s.sion is shooting; and a mother, Maria Uhl, with a predilection for religious discourses in Strindberg's own style; another detail, the fact that she was eighteen years old before she crossed to the other sh.o.r.e to see what had s.h.i.+mmered dimly in the distant haze, corresponds with Frida Uhl's statement that she had been confined in a convent until she was eighteen and a half years old.

On the other hand, the chief female character of the drama does not correspond to her real life counterpart in that she is supposed to have been married to a doctor before eloping with THE STRANGER, Strindberg.

Here reminiscences from Strindberg's first marriage play a part. Siri von Essen, Strindberg's first wife, was married to an officer, Baron Wrangel, and both the Wrangels received Strindberg kindly in their home as a friend. Love quickly flared up between Siri von Essen-Wrangel and Strindberg. She obtained a divorce from her husband and married Strindberg. Baron von Wrangel shortly afterwards married again, a cousin of Siri von Essen. Knowing these matrimonial complications we understand how Strindberg must have felt when, on the point of leaving for Heligoland to marry Frida Uhl, he met his former wife's (Siri von Essen) first husband, Baron Wrangel, on Lehrter Station in Berlin, and found that, like Strindberg himself, he was on a lover's errand. Knowing all this we need not be surprised at the extremely complicated matrimonial relations in _The Road to Damascus_, where, for example, for the sake of THE STRANGER, THE DOCTOR obtains a divorce from THE LADY in order to marry THE STRANGER'S first wife. In addition to Baron Wrangel a doctor in the town of Ystad, in the south of Sweden--Dr. Elia.s.son who attended Strindberg during his most difficult period--has stood as a model for THE DOCTOR. We note in particular that the description of the doctor's house enclosing a courtyard on three sides, tallies with a type of building which is characteristic of the south of Sweden. When THE DOCTOR ruthlessly explains to THE STRANGER that the asylum, 'The Good Help,'

was not a hospital but a lunatic asylum, he expresses Strindberg's own misgivings that the St. Louis Hospital, of which, as mentioned above, Strindberg was an inmate in the beginning of the year 1895, was really to be regarded as a lunatic asylum.

Even minor characters, such as CAESAR and THE BEGGAR have their counterparts in real life, even though in the main they are fantastic creations of his imagination. The guardian of his daughter, Kerstin, a relative of Frida Uhl's, was called Dr. Casar R. v. Weyr. Regarding THE BEGGAR it may be enough to quote Strindberg's feelings when confronted with the collections made by his Paris friends:

'I am a beggar who has no right to go to cafes. Beggar! That is the right word; it rings in my ears and brings a burning blush to my cheeks, the blush of shame, humiliation, and rage!

'To think that six weeks ago I sat at this table! My theatre manager addressed me as Dear Master; journalists strove to interview me, the photographer begged to be allowed to sell my portrait. And now: a beggar, a branded man, an outcast from society!'

After this we can understand why Strindberg in _The Road to Damascus_ apparently in such surprising manner is seized by the suspicion that he is himself the beggar.

We have thus seen that Part I of _The Road to Damascus_ is at the same time a free creation of fantasy and a drama of portrayal. The elements of realism are starkly manifest, but they are moulded and hammered into a work of art by a force of combinative imagination rising far above the task of mere descriptive realism. The scenes unroll themselves in calculated sequence up to the central asylum picture, from there to return in reverse order through the second half of the drama, thus symbolising life's continuous repet.i.tion of itself, Kierkegaard's _Gentagelse_. The first part of _The Road to Damascus_ is the one most frequently produced on the stage. This is understandable, having regard to its firm structure and the consistency of its faith in a Providence directing the fortunes and misfortunes of man, whether the individual rages in revolt or submits in quiet resignation.

The second part of _The Road to Damascus_ is dominated by the scenes of the great alchemist banquet which, in all its fantastic oddity, is one of the most suggestive ever created on the ancient theme of the fickleness of fortune. It was suggested above that there were two factors beyond all others binding Strindberg to the world and making him hesitate before the monastery; one was woman, from whom he sets himself free in Part II, after the birth of a child--precisely as in his marriage to Frida Uhl--the other was scientific honour, in its highest phase equivalent, to Strindberg, to the power to produce gold. Countless were the experiments for this purpose made by Strindberg in his primitive laboratories, and countless his failures. To the world-famous author, literary honour meant little as opposed to the slightest prospect of being acknowledged as a prominent scientist. Harriet Bosse has told me that Strindberg seldom said anything about his literary work, never was interested in what other people thought of them, or troubled to read the reviews; but on the other hand he would often, with sparkling eyes and childish pride, show her strips of paper, stained at one end with some golden-brown substance. 'Look,' he said, 'this is pure gold, and I have made it!' In face of the stubborn scepticism of scientific experts Strindberg was, however, driven to despair as to his ability, and felt his dreams of fortune shattered, as did THE STRANGER at the macabre banquet given in his honour--a banquet which was, as a matter of fact, planned by his Paris friends, not, as Strindberg would have liked to believe, in honour of the great scientist, but to the great author.

In Part I of _The Road to Damascus_, THE STRANGER replies with a hesitating 'Perhaps' when THE LADY wants to lead him to the protecting Church; and at the end of Part II he exclaims: 'Come, priest, before I change my mind'; but in Part III his decision is final, he enters the monastery. The reason is that not even THE LADY in her third incarnation had shown herself capable of reconciling him to life. The wedding day scenes just before, between Harriet Bosse and the ageing author, form, however, the climax of Part III and are among the most poetically moving that Strindberg has ever written.

Besides having his belief in the rapture of love shattered, THE STRANGER also suffers disappointment at seeing his child fall short of expectations. The meeting between the daughter Sylvia and THE STRANGER probably refers to an episode from the summer of 1899, when Strindberg, after long years of suffering in foreign countries, saw his beloved Swedish skerries again, and also his favourite daughter Greta, who had come over from Finland to meet him. Contrary to the version given in the drama, the reunion of father and daughter seems to have been very happy and cordial. However, it is typical of the fate-oppressed Strindberg that in his work even the happiest summer memories become tinged with black. Once and for all the dark colours on his palette were the most intense.

The final entry into the monastery was more a symbol for the struggling author's dream of peace and atonement than a real thing in his life. It is true he visited the Benedictine monastery, Maredsous, in Belgium in 1898, and its well stocked library came to play a certain part In the drama, but already he realised, after one night's sojourn there, that he had no call for the monastic life.

Seen as a whole the trilogy marks a turning point in Strindberg's dramatic production. The logical, calculated concentration of his naturalistic work of the 1880's has given way to a freer form of composition, in which the atmosphere has come to mean more than the dialogue, the musical and dreamlike qualities more than conciseness.

_The Road to Damascus_ abounds with details from real life, reproduced in sharply naturalistic manner, but these are not, as things were in his earlier works viewed by the author _a priori_ as reality but become wrapped in dreamlike mystery. Just as with _Lady Julia_ and _The Father_ Strindberg ushered in the naturalistic drama of the 1880's, so in the years around the turn of the century he was, with his symbolist cycle _The Road to Damascus_, to break new ground for European drama which had gradually become stuck in fixed formulas. _The Road to Damascus_ became a landmark in world literature both as a brilliant work of art and as bearer of new stage technique.

GUNNAR OLLeN

Translated by ESTHER JOHANSON

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

PART I.

English Version by Graham Rawson

CHARACTERS

THE STRANGER THE LADY THE BEGGAR THE DOCTOR HIS SISTER AN OLD MAN A MOTHER AN ABBESS A CONFESSOR

less important figures FIRST MOURNER SECOND MOURNER THIRD MOURNER LANDLORD CAESAR WAITER

non-speaking A SMITH MILLER'S WIFE FUNERAL ATTENDANTS