Strindberg the Man/Chapter 3

WHEN Strindberg left Sweden on the 18th of November, 1884, after the legal proceedings with reference to Married were brought to a close, his name became wrapped up almost immediately in a strange silence.

We young people could not but believe that the victory which Strindberg had won when he was acquitted of the charge of blasphemy, would turn all minds towards him and that he would finally be given justice as poet and reformer.

But instead of that he practically disappeared from our view. His literary activity was dormant during the next few years; or if he wrote anything, it did not reach us.

When we again met Strindberg as the unique poet, he was an entirely different man. He had become a skillful dramatist who had written a couple of short hypermodern dramas, The Father and Lady Julia, which no publisher in all Sweden had cared to print but of which a publisher in Hälsingborg^[1] was the financial backer. Despite the fact that Zola had written the preface to The Father and partly approved of the play, the public at home rejected it. Strindberg's former friends and protectors, Georg ​Brandes and Björnstjerne Björnson, pronounced their anathema over him and scattered broadcast over the entire North the opinion that the author of The Father was-—a madman. The story passed from ear to ear that one of Strindberg's psycho-pathological stories, written during his sojourn on a Danish island, was founded on personal experience and that he was ripe for the lunatic asylum.

In the midst of all this literary gossip about him, his The Inhabitants of Hemsö made its appearance. In it there was no sign of insanity. With a hand so light that we could hardly believe it to be that of Strindberg, he had painted this Japanese idyl of the skerries. It was a hymn of praise to the summers on Kymmendö,^[2] those summers which had seen the birth of Master Olof and probably also that of The New Kingdom,—a hymn to the out-of-door life among the skerries to which he loved to return from the oppressive heat of France and Switzerland.

We can easily understand why Strindberg regarded his The Inhabitants of Hemsö as a literary transgression. His artistic love of truth accused him of having painted the picture in too light colors—like the well-known oil painting “Ruskprick”^[3] by his own hand in which is seen nothing but a mist-white ocean and a ​still whiter sky, with a big, red “Ruskprick” penetrating through both.

In his introduction to Life Among the Skerries Strindberg endeavors in his amiable, naïve manner to exculpate himself from his own charges in this matter. He declares that it is the bright, smiling element in the life of a man who dwells among the skerries—when it actually takes that form—which he desired to depict in The Inhabitants of Hemsö. In Life Among the Skerries he had endeavored to give the penumbra, and in order to be able fully to excuse himself, he finally half promised to give “possibly later on and under better auspices, the umbra which must exist in order to present the picture in its completeness.”

But he never gave us this complete picture with the bluish-black umbra. Things never became so cheerful about him as to permit him to write that work. I believe, besides, that he was too much concerned in the matter himself and that he loved the smiling idyl of the skerries too intensely to deepen it into tragic greatness.

For the inhabitants of central Sweden, The Inhabitants of Hemsö came as a harbinger of joy, but for us, the dwellers on the west coast who have learned how to love the strikingly wild which our coast has to offer, much more than the inland lake idyls of the Baltic coast, to us Strindberg's idyl of the skerries was altogether too tame, and shared too much of the nature of Japanese water-colors. This is the reason why at my first meeting with Strindberg, which is now to be related, I made an attempt to convert him, i.e. to get him to relinquish his hold on ​the entirely idyllic and devote himself and his pen to the titanic, the grandeur of our west coast, which I considered to be more fitting for the author of The Father.

After six years of exile Strindberg could stand it no longer. He had to return to his beloved Sweden once more, and it had become so dear to him on account of the visions caused by his long absence, that he could not be satisfied with anything less than actually embracing and beholding his entire native land. He must see it and describe it.

The provincial critic had always emphasized his rural descriptions as the best in his prose works. The practical up-to-date publisher could afford, therefore, to be interested in such a plan as to let Strindberg, the then dethroned chief, undertake a king's circuit through the land.

I had not been able to find out what parts of the country he had covered. But he must have had a particular interest in Bohuslän, for one of the first provinces that he explored rather thoroughly was that province.

One day in September, 1890, the local press announced that August Strindberg had arrived in Gothenburg and taken up his abode at Göta Källare.^[4] He intended to study the natural sceneries of Bohuslän and go on a sail along the coast.

One of the first to call on him was Gustaf af Geijerstam^[5], who was at the time employed by August Lindberg ​as a sort of literary-aesthetic critic or counsellor, translator and dramatist. Strindberg and Geijerstam were still the best of friends and Geijerstam did everything in his power during Strindberg's stay in Gothenburg to make the latter enjoy all possible privileges during his Bohuslän journey. He provided a large suitable sailing-yacht for Strindberg's use. The intellectual element of the city of Gothenburg gave a reception in his honor.

And one day Geijerstam made arrangements for me to meet Strindberg. My card of introduction was that I was an enthusiastic disciple of his and that I had been all over the coast which he now proposed to explore, so that I might perhaps be permitted to put my services at his disposal.

About seven o'clock I called at the hotel. The hours between seven and ten in the evening, eleven at the latest, were always Strindberg's conversation hours. Then he enjoyed sitting down to a cup with some good friend or casual acquaintance.

When Strindberg came down stairs to meet me that evening, I saw him personally for the first time. I saw his mighty head with the disarranged gigantic mane illumined by the gas-light just behind him in the stairs. But within this halo of a saint, I saw a face the traits of which were harder and colder than those of the youthful poet with the thorn pressed against the forehead. He had endured many sufferings since that time and they had left an intensified paleness on his face. They had ​plowed furrows in his cheeks and dug dark hollows under his eyes.

His eyes! In these there was nothing of the dreamer, of that Master Olof whom I had loved as a good brother. They were light grey and cold, the flash of the eye was sharp and repellent, and the continual forcing of the focus had, as it were, pressed the eyes farther back under the vault of the forehead. Immediately I recognized in him the persecuted man, and I saw that unceasing hounding had changed him so strangely that he had something wolfish in his nature. There was a tension in his expression as though he were ready immediately to snap back in case anyone yelped at him.

There was, besides, a different air about him from the one he had displayed in the pictures of his youth. In some of these there is something unrefined about him. In one of them he reminds you of a young fellow who has been sitting on the tailor's table^[6] all his life and thereby acquired an expression of fatuity.^[7] In another there pops up a sort of school teacher who pretends to be a superior spirit in spite of the fact that detachable cuffs reach down on his knuckles. Of the youthful face of 1870, which in my opinion is ideally beautiful, there was not a trace, nor did he resemble in the least the pictures of his later youth.

The Strindberg of forty met me as a cosmopolitan. ​He looked very much like a sculptor who had travelled for a long time. His dress was faultless and modest. He also impressed me as being tired, to a certain extent, of all that he had seen and experienced. I did not know at that time that the romance of his first marriage was then drawing to a close, that a third person had come between him and his wife and that one of the reasons for Strindberg's journeys at that time was the need of being away from the two women, who made his life at home unbearable.

Geijerstam introduced me to him, we seated ourselves at a window in the café, and when Geijerstam left for the theatre the conversation was soon under way.

In the beginning Strindberg was rather reticent. Without pretending to do so, he sat there and spied on me secretly. As I wished to gain his confidence at once and make it plain to him that I had no evil designs, I began making a sort of literary proposal.

He sat there quietly and listened to the tale of how we, the young at the old petrified Latin School, had been carried away by his first poems. I told him how his youthful power of action had proved contagious in our case, how we had joined him in the insurrection and how we had had to suffer with him.

Strindberg sat there in silence and heard me as I poured over him all the enthusiasm of youth which we had received from him. What he thought of it all, I do not know, but it was not until afterwards that I noticed what a confirmed skeptic he was. He could take my words for what they were worth, I felt that it was my ​duty to pour out my heart before him. He gave no sign of displeasure, and that being so, I thought I had some reason to be satisfied.

Afterwards we chanced upon other subjects. He began to ask me questions about Bohuslän, and when I suggested that he ought to study the northern part of it in particular, because of the fact that the landscape was of unusual beauty and grandeur, he immediately agreed to my proposition.

—And do you know why? he asked. Well, because the primary rock in the northern part consists of red granite while that of the southern part is grey.

And immediately he entered into a geological exposition of the structure of the entire country, presented so plainly and clearly that later on it impressed me like a painting. I was amazed not only at his knowledge, but also at his ability to complete this geological ensemble in a few rapid strokes. When he had ceased talking, I wished to put forth a feeler as to whether it was only a scientific interest that attracted him to Bohuslän, or whether he was particularly fond of our Bohuslän scenery. His answer shocked me most terribly.—Bohuslän! No, it is as insanely ugly as a landscape on the moon.

I tried to defend what I considered beautiful beyond all comparison and, therefore, I began an attack on the skerry-environs of Stockholm. I declared that one must feel depressed among those islands covered with dark-green spruce and pine, that the dark-green and the bluish gray tone of the water do not go ​well together, that at my first visit to the Stockholm skerries, I was unable to breathe until I had reached Sandhamn.^[8]

Strindberg defended himself by describing his Kymmendö—yet without mentioning it by name, for he always tried to make a secret out of that spot which he loved most dearly of all that I heard him speak of—and he described its loveliness in such colors that I could feel that he had enjoyed daily being in the midst of this ideal landscape.

My beloved Bohuslän, on the other hand, I could not induce him to love. I described a sail along its coast. I recalled to him how we wake up in the morning in a setting that has not changed since the time of the Vikings. It forms the background of primaeval man. And the red tinge of the cliffs against the light green, isn't that the most beautiful combination of colors that can be seen in nature?

But Strindberg was not to be moved. This Prometheus, who indeed, if anyone, was in every respect created for a background like that of a Bohuslän landscape, this Viking of violent passion, had fallen desperately in love with the idyllic surroundings of his native city!

And this really seemed to me altogether unreasonable, that he who himself had proclaimed that “he found the joy of existence in the hard, cruel struggle of life,” should be capable of loving natural sceneries which are the very opposite of all that.

​However, we glided away from this topic on which we entertained such absolutely incompatible views. Already at my first meeting with Strindberg, I noticed how greatly it displeased him to be contradicted. He did not suffer the least little hobby, to which he himself clung, to be rudely manipulated.

This right he reserved for himself. It seemed as though the destruction of a truth which for a long time he had been imparting to all whom he met, the grinding of it to the finest powder between the heavy stones of his mental mill, and the scattering of it to the winds, gave to this indefatigable self-tormenter above all other things the most exquisite enjoyment. Hence his wrath against anyone who tried to anticipate him.

He was in his favorite mood when he could play the part of story teller. In his autobiography he repeatedly asserts that in this genre he has outrun others not a little, or to make a clean boast of it—an entire ell.

So we next spoke of movements down there in continental Europe. This topic warmed him up. The woman question he considered that he had exhausted and placed in its proper milieu as a speciality for unmarried society women alone. The labor question he had for a time lost interest in, because of the endeavors on the part of the industrial socialists to bring about a complete state of bankruptcy in contemporary society. But the agricultural question appealed to him, and he had tried to study it during a lengthy sojourn among the French peasantry. This class naturally makes up the main bulk ​of the nation, and it is therefore among them that the new commonwealth must be founded.

Besides, he was skeptical about all these social theories, and those which he himself had only lately enunciated, he had already torn to pieces. In one question, however, he showed a lively interest, and that was the dreadful possibility hinted at by Henry George, viz., that modern civilization was face to face with a decline, and that once more we had to expect the mediaeval Fimbul-winter.^[9]

While Strindberg told of all this, the latest and the very latest,—that which in the very course of speaking he added as a conclusion to the preceding—he truly lived over again, as it were, a thousand lives. He became Master Olof once more, but a Master Olof who had abandoned the church where there was no longer any work to do, and who had devoted himself to a more general betterment of the world, a utilitarian, as he then styled himself.

All the time while talking he smoked cigarettes. He inhaled the smoke with the same passionate delight that he hurled forth a few paradoxes with which he hoped to catch me. But when I cleared the reefs on which he hoped to test me it did not seem to disappoint him but rather to cause him satisfaction.

At times when he had launched some crushing argument or just caught the idea of one, he would suddenly stop and perform a cigarette smoker's tour d'adresse ​which made the same pleasing impression on me as some clownery in the circus. It was at the same time amusing and cleverly executed. He would inhale a big puff of smoke which he managed in such a manner that it made two consecutive circuits through his nose and throat.

This smoker's tour d'adresse seemed to me to be something more than a mere trick. It bared one side of Strindberg even more than any of the words he had pronounced on this occasion: it testified to how great and flaming a passion he had always been in this cold world.

The spirit kept rising gradually the longer we continued. We were drinking Swedish nectar,^[10] and little by little we had got into the student atmosphere which Strindberg had a special ability to produce. This ability he retained even to old age. Despite the fact that he had already made a great name in Europe and had been overwhelmed with international marks of esteem, he had not acquired any overbearing manners. He was plain and natural and did not pound the humble opponent to death with peremptory language.

But he was also at this time an entirely different man from the pale Loke whom I had seen descending the hotel stairs. His cheeks had taken on color, his eyes had grown darker and seemed to be dark-blue, they were beaming and open and had lost every sign of suspicion. The Strindberg who extended his hand to me with a good-night was a man full of grace and good will, and I grasped his hand as firmly and as cordially as though I ​had been saying good-bye for a long time to my own father.

When he returned from his trip through Bohuslän, I did not have a chance to see him. I only heard from Geijerstam that Strindberg had had some disagreeable experiences. The foul gossip in connection with his Married had penetrated even to the unliterary inhabitants of the wilds of the country, so that the people openly showed him their hatred for being the father of Married. But this after all was no wonder, for the local press had done its best during the years just preceding to keep him continually on the rack.