Strindberg the Man/Chapter 5

IT does not seem improbable that Strindberg began what he calls his Inferno-wandering—the “pathological crisis” of his physicians—during his honeymoon at Gravesend.

Several times during our conversation he reverted to one of the experiences of that period. It is also discussed in some of his autobiographical works, probably in some of the Blue Books.

One Sunday morning he left Gravesend for London. On one of the morning trains he had arrived at the station just south of London Bridge. From this point he continued on foot, crossing at this early morning hour the long, deserted bridge.

But suddenly the bridge is no longer deserted. Towards him there comes like a wave an endless procession of mystic penitents, all with hoods over their heads, so that only the gray beards or the chins are visible, advancing slowly and with silent steps.

Strindberg would always revert to these phantoms of London Bridge. If they were real, then, through the deep impression they made upon him, they aided in bringing about the crisis which was being fanned to life within him. If, on the other hand, they were not real but mere visions, then they formed the introduction to the “pathological crisis”.

​Fully corporeal visions Strindberg never pretends to have had. Of their nature we can judge by his diarian notes in Inferno. When they became numerous, he felt a desire to keep track of them, and from 1895 to 1909, he thus continued his diary of which the pages in Inferno are an abstract. As a rule he seems to have had auditory hallucinations, conversations with invisible persons, with Swedenborg and others.

He had to cut short his honey-moon in order to fight out his second literary lawsuit, because A Fool's Confession had been seized. Thereupon he accompanied his wife for the first time to her relatives in the little Catholic village on the Danube. After that he did not come in touch with his friends until March, 1894, when he returned to Friedrichshagen, where he put up at a hotel in order to read the proofs of his Antibarbarus I.

During the time he wrote this book, Strindberg had got into peculiar ways, and when his attention was called to the fact that here and there his argument was based on erroneous premises, he would not join issue on the subject. He became embittered and ceased to associate with his friends. He shut himself up within his own self and became impervious to reason.

After having returned to Austria for the summer, Strindberg left for Paris in August. There he no longer studied the sciences in the proper sense of the word; he had cast them all overboard because of the fact that he had met with a few incongruities in what, of course, should have been entirely flawless, and instead, with the wild desire of the passionate seeker after truth, he had ​entered the apocryphal borderland of science, alchemy and hyperchemistry instead of scientific chemistry, astrology instead of astronomy, etc. He had also severed relations with literary art and his interest had gone over to mediaeval necromancy.

Strindberg hastened to Paris in order there to devote himself to these quasi-sciences. He believed himself to be in possession of certain ideas which, if he could prove them, would immediately make him famous within the province of scientific research, perhaps bring him enormous riches. As he had not written any literary works which brought him an income, he was practically destitute of everything.

I wish by the way to point out in this connection that Strindberg during his Inferno-period in Paris doubtless would have starved to death unless a stout-hearted Swede had intervened and sent him 300 crowns^[1] a month (the same amount that Bonnier paid him for The Inhabitants of Hemsö). This man was Vult von Steyern, editor and publisher of The Daily News, who ever since the legal proceedings against Strindberg caused by Married, had faithfully stood by him when want from time to time peeped in at his door.

Strindberg's little Austrian wife had accompanied him to Paris. As she was not only a hindrance to him in his scientific research and proposed experiments but also could not but notice that a pathological crisis was imminent, Strindberg took the first opportunity to send ​her home. The pretence was that their httle daughter Kerstin had taken ill.

Strindberg tells of the “wild joy” he experienced when he was rid of his wife: “My pretty jailor who spied on my soul night and day, guessed my secret thoughts, watched the trend of my ideas, jealously observed my soul’s striving towards the unknown.”

It was the latter in particular which worried and tortured Strindberg. The serious psychic disturbance through which he passed during the following few years already began to show itself in certain peculiarities which obliged the little Austrian woman to play the part of an attendant. In spite of his constant, keen self-analysis, Strindberg could not observe the abnormalities which his sickness caused. Not even years after his recuperation would he recognize them as manifestations of a disease of the mind. And this is consistent with the nature of the disease.

As Strindberg himself feared the worst, he decided to rid himself entirely of his wife. Seized with a mad desire to do himself harm, he says, he committed what he has termed “suicide” by sending her an outrageous, unpardonable letter and saying farewell to wife and child, hinting that a new relation had laid, hold on his thoughts.

This new relation which had taken hold of his thoughts, was his metaphysical brooding, not at all another woman. After this letter to his wife, he calls himself “Self-murderer and assassin”, and becomes misanthropic to such a degree that he repels everybody. And yet he wonders that nobody comes to call on him.

​The same night his wife left him, he began his experiments. With drawn curtains, fearing to be taken for an anarchist, he worked with a smelting furnace fire in a Dutch stove and six crucibles of fine china bought for money “stolen from himself” in order to demonstrate that there is carbonaceous matter in sulphur and that sulphur, therefore, is not an element. Towards morning he thought he had found carbon in the residue of the sulphur and that thus he had “upset standard chemistry” and attained to that “immortality which mortals grant.”

He was jealously anxious about his great discovery and did not dare to let it be known among the authorities. He wished to prove also that sulphur contains hydrogen and oxygen, but he did not possess enough apparatus. His monthly allowances he had spent in experiments, he ceased to take regular meals, and besides, during the first “sulphur-night,” he had burned his hand so severely that the skin peeled off and he could not touch anything without feeling pain.

“My hands were black as want, bleeding as my heart,” he complains in Inferno.

But at the same time, he begins to speak of Unknown Powers which had persecuted him for years and put obstacles in his way. He is surrounded by a frightfully solemn, empty silence, and this induces him to challenge the Invisible One to wrestle with him body to body and soul against soul.

Thus the “atheistic” free-thinker, the convert to the occult sciences, has no sooner stepped over the threshold of the temple of the magians than he conjures up “an ​invisible one” to wrestle with. He has become an atheist, he says, because he has noticed how the unknown powers leave the world to its fate without showing the least signs of life.

But at the same moment in which he, as a follower of the occult sciences, takes this purely atheistic stand, he conjures up the Great Invisible One. His entire metaphysical endeavor thus had this aim: the seeking after a God and a harmonious conception of God.

His Inferno-wandering shows many phenomena like those by which the psychic sufferer is beset; he suffers continually from the mania that he is pursued, a Russian by the name of Popoffsky (the Pole Przybyszewski) has come to Paris in company with his wife in order to murder Strindberg, and he announces this round about Strindberg’s hotel by playing Schumann’s Aufschwung etc.

But in spite of all this, Strindberg, in the midst of the chaos of these storms, retains that wonderful self-control, that sovereignty over himself which he owes to his artistic qualities and which finally brings him deliverance. When his occult friend, the practitioner of black arts, who calls himself Simeon Magus in their anonymous correspondence, wishes to influence Strindberg, he wards him off with real heroism. Magus preaches the denial and the destruction of the ego, but Strindberg answers that this is madness.

“What little I may possibly know,” says Strindberg, “emanates from my ego as the centre; the destruction of the ego is suicide.”

​Despite the fact that Strindberg loves and admires this invisible magician, with whom he is connected only through correspondence, in every letter he presents him with proofs of his antipathy for theosophy, and when Magus begins to make use of elevated language and tries to tyrannize him, as if Strindberg were a lunatic, and orders the poet to read Mme. Blavatsky^[2], the self-conscious artist within Strindberg assumes such proportions that he becomes a head taller than the magician, and Strindberg declares proudly that he does not need any Blavatsky and that nobody has anything to teach him. When the magian still threatens, he is warned not to meddle with Strindberg’s fate which “is in the keeping of the hand of Providence which always has guided me.”

At the same time that he so powerfully beat back the attack of the magian against his spiritual liberty, he secretly suffered mental torments of the worst kind, believing himself to be in continual danger of his life, pursued by his former friend the Pole.

At this time Strindberg had taken up his abode in the old Catholic Hotel Orfila in rue d’Assas, and I, not knowing of his presence, had settled down in Hotel des Americains in rue de l’Abbe de l’Epee, on the other side of the southernmost part of the Jardin du Luxembourg, where Strindberg had resided earlier.

From mutual friends I learned that Strindberg dwelled in the Quartier de Montparnasse, but that he had begged to be excused from social intercourse on account of his ​chemical experiments. It was hinted that he was not in his right mind and that on this account it was advisable to respect his refusal to receive callers. Where he kept himself nobody knew, since the day when he had had an attack of nerves because dinner had been served for him in the yard of Mme. Charlotte’s Crémerie in rue de la grande Chaumière, the little restaurant of the artists where he surely was surrounded by sincere friends.

One day the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch came and related that he had, run across Strindberg who had commenced to feel rather lonesome and shown himself desirous of his company. In order to facilitate his approach. Munch had proposed to paint Strindberg’s picture, and Strindberg had been posing for him a couple of hours now and then.

But Strindberg had a fixed idea. Ever since he had heard Schumann’s Aufschwung played one afternoon in the neighborhood of Hotel Orfila, he had been fully convinced that Przybyszewski had arrived in Paris by way of Vienna-Berlin in order to murder him. The reason for the Pole’s mania for murder was that his wife had been intimate with Strindberg only a very short time before she had met the Pole.

Without being initiated into the details, anyone will readily see that on such grounds Stachu scarcely had a reason for conjuring up a hatred of Strindberg so glowing as to inspire him with the idea of murder. Munch and myself knew very well that there was another man on whom Stachu had lavished all his hatred and whom he had dealt a severe blow by describing him ​unsympathetically in a novel where he ended his life as a suicide. Thus he had already exacted the vengeance, the taking of which he seems to have imposed upon himself on account of the liberties which his wife had permitted herself before her marriage, and had no special occasion to fly into fits of anger.

The endeavors on the part of Munch to assure Strindberg that he had nothing to fear from the Przybyszewskis, were in vain. Once Strindberg got this false notion into his head, no counter-evidence could get it out of him. Not even the fact that Stachu was in Copenhagen in the greatest misery and, try all he might, could not possibly come to Paris to continue his studies of trials of witches and mediaeval Satanism!

Finally, however, Strindberg got a piece of counter-evidence before which he had to bow. From Berlin came the news that Przybyszewski's first wife, a young Polish woman, had committed suicide after having murdered their two children because of worries over lack of support, and that Stachu, who immediately had gone there, had been arrested and stood indicted for having urged her to commit this deed of despair.

When, on the 18th of June—Strindberg mentions this in his Inferno—Munch came in, annihilated and trembling from head to foot and broke the news to Strindberg, the latter had to give up his false notion. And—characteristic of Strindberg—he was so completely delivered of it, that as soon as the first surprise had abated, he felt sincere sympathy for his friend who formerly had shown such a tenacious attachment to him, ​and peace came into his soul after he had been pursued for months by monsters of his own imagination.

But threatened he was; this idea he still clung to. Secretly he believed that it was his ardent prayers which had perhaps turned away the dagger and that he had parried the thrust in such a way that it caught the assassin right in the heart.

Just as fearful as he had formerly been of Przybyszewski's dagger, equally eager he now became to save and to reestablish his friend with the murderous intentions. He agreed with Munch that they must save the Pole's literary reputation by an article to be written by Strindberg for the Revue Blanche concerning his literary merits and illustrated with his picture (the Pole's) drawn by Munch. But this plan was never executed. An article in a Paris review could hardly have resulted in Przybyszewski's liberation. Other measures had to be taken. Munch was ordered to call me.

After having resided six months in Strindberg's neighborhood without having seen him a single time, I was thus brought together with him as by chance. I know that it was Przybyszewski's indefatigable devotion to Strindberg which had aroused the suspicion of the latter and that Strindberg, of course, was glad to receive support when he was in need of it, but felt an aversion to being gratefully indebted for what he could not repay.

One afternoon about five o'clock, I walked over to Hotel Orfila in order to call for Strindberg. In the porter's lodge, I had to keep company with an old Catholic priest and a couple of young candidates for the ​priesthood while the attendant went up stairs to inform Strindberg of the call. His room was tabooed ground, for there he watched in a continual state of anxiety over his great secrets, his new methods for the production of iodine and gold. He was at the time occupied with his gold syntheses.

Hotel Orfila looked like a monastery. The room in which I sat was cold and damp. The old fellows, who came and went, impressed me as “slippery eels” and I felt very depressed at the thought that the Master Olof of my youth had been confined in such a place. A more unfit asylum for one who suffered from typical melancholy could hardly be found.

Finally Strindberg came. With a silent greeting, he beckoned me to follow. Not until we had advanced a good distance in the street did he begin to speak.

I saw in his pale, ashen face what torments he had passed through. Since he now really occupied himself with black arts, I believe that there would be in his traits something of that proud boldness characteristic of the necromancer. For I had met some of the leading followers of occult sciences in Paris and I had had an opportunity of studying them at close quarters. In Strindberg there was not a sign of this presumptuousness by which, as he tells us, he had been beset, this hybris^[3] which is the only sin the gods cannot pardon.

On the contrary, Strindberg had already something of the penitent about him. I saw in his eyes that he had ​regretted his injustice towards Przybyszewski. The sensitive giant was nervous as a young girl and seemed almost to be accusing himself for the misfortunes of Stachu. I told him that it was the Pole's own brother who had accused him, but that made Strindberg even more conscious of guilt. He still thought that it was his—Strindberg's—hatred which had crystallized in the brother and caused him to play the part of accuser.

But now, when Przybyszewski was in jail and accused of having caused his Polish wife to commit murder and suicide, Strindberg's sympathy for the unfortunate man had been aroused.

We seated ourselves among the trees in front of the Brasserie des Lilas, and ordered some absinthe. Ever since Strindberg had ceased to frequent Mme. Charlotte's, this place had been his regular resort. But he never took his meals here, he only dropped in to provide for a little brighter dreams with diluted wormwood poison and for that fatigue which was necessary for him in order to sleep.

He was now so terribly upset about the fate of Stachu that he was ready to commit follies to save him. I was to assist him in starting diplomatic action from Paris in order to get Stachu out of jail. Strindberg was to make the declaration that Stachu was altogether too talented an artist and altogether too sensitive a being to endure a term in jail. It would mean insanity and the authorities would be guilty of spiritual murder.

Strindberg got tangled up in such difficulties that in the end we did not know how to execute his much too elaborate plan. He seemed to be convinced that Stachu ​was guilty and just on that account had to be saved in some supernatural way.

As I for my part was convinced that Stachu would clear himself, and with his superior powers of psychological analysis would be able to brush aside his brother's accusation, I considered it far more important to try to calm Strindberg than to plunge into great political adventures which in the end would lead to no results.

But Strindberg did not consent to be calmed. It struck me that he was bound to be occupied with some subject of care. On purely physical grounds he had been forced to give up the fixed idea that Stachu's dagger was over him continually, and as he was now out of that perpetual danger, he had to have another. He seemed to be desirous of pushing his diplomatic action so in absurdum that people finally might receive the impression that it was he himself who was to blame for the murder in Berlin and not the man who had been arrested.

Our long argument ended with my consenting to write to certain influential persons in Berlin. We also agreed that the large Polish colony in Paris should be stirred up, but that not until this had been accomplished would we resort to diplomatic ways and means. Strindberg in any case had had a chance to give vent to his fears and to air his plans. And he went home considerably appeased and not without a certain amount of self-satisfaction at the thought that the possibility of a little martyrdom still loomed up in the distance.

People had been speaking of Strindberg's insanity, which it was thought would soon break out. Of all that ​he said that night, I found nothing that indicated those soft spots in the brain which I have noticed in certain friends of mine who have become a prey to the disease.

In the same hotel where I had put up lived another author who for a long period of years was rated as one of the most prominent in his native land, and this man had for more than ten years been the subject of such well-developed insanity that it seemed incredible to me that he could control it. Once he had lost control and for six months he had been flogged by the attendants of an asylum simultaneously with his drawing up of the outline of the foremost literary monument that he left to posterity. And that man was so insane beyond all bounds that he had a decided inclination to impart some of it to those with whom he associated in order, as it were, to dilute the poison within himself.

Nothing of the kind existed in Strindberg's case. He had strange manias such as he always had had. But now he had one, more dangerous than the others: that of accusing himself of all kinds of transgressions. Besides this, in his researches he had got into a cul-de-sac where it was plain to him that he had to retrace his steps, a process which mortified him and which inspired him with such fear that instead of retreating to the first tenable point, he immediately began a rout so wild that he could not check himself until he had galloped back the entire length of the path of his life, even to the faith of his childhood.

In the depth of his soul he had after all an anchorage which did not fail him, and that was his artistic ego. He knew that anyone who had worked as conscientiously as ​he had done during a life of trials and tribulations, nobody had a right to stone, even if he had made mistakes. But he had a vital need of letting loose the stream within him—this panta-rei-stream of Heraclitus—and it proved a delight to him at this stage to let his skiff passively glide away with the current. He was in need of rest after all his tribulations and disappointments, and he could not get it in any other way—a rest which was at the same time a movement away towards an unknown goal.

The goal which he reached would no doubt have been a different one, more worthy of his former and present self, had he not, during periods of weakness when he ought to have been prevented from anything of the sort, returned to the stuffy little homes down there by the Danube. Those old, religiously stunted crones did doubtless exert a destructive influence upon him just when the state of weakness rendered him most susceptible. Especially did they injure him by fanning to life his self-accusations and by getting him into a greater state of perplexity than was necessary.

During the most serious stage of his Inferno-period, Strindberg kept away from his friends entirely. After he had found out that Przybyszewski had been released from prison, Strindberg's inclination to self-torture received a new impetus. Through a couple of pieces of paper found in the street, he believed himself to have received a message to the effect that Stachu and his wife again had arrived in Paris and that they planned anew to murder him.

​Immediately he also suspected Edvard Munch of plotting with them and after one of the sittings for his portrait, Strindberg sent him a mystical post card which obliged Munch to discontinue his calls. It read as follows:

“The last time you called on me, you looked like a murderer or the tool of a murderer.—I only wish to inform you that the Pettenkofer gas-oven in the adjacent room is incapable of being used and is, therefore, unfit for the purpose. Sg.”

Shortly after that Strindberg had disappeared from Hotel Orfila. He had tried a couple of times to commit suicide by inhaling hydrocyanate of potash. But on the first occasion a hornet had entered the room buzzing furiously. The second time the bell-boy, who came in and disturbed him in his preparations, saved his life. But one night when he believed himself to be about to be murdered by means of poisonous gases and an electric machine, manipulated by his Polish friend in the adjacent room, he fled from the hotel, away from the death for which he longed so eagerly, but which nobody else than himself was permitted to administer.

No one of us knew where he had gone that scorching hot July day in 1896 when he disappeared. We thought that he had done what he once did in his youth, that he had voluntarily turned himself over to some private asylum for those suffering from mental derangement.

Not until one year later when he made his confession in his book Inferno, were we permitted to know that he had remained for a while in Paris in a small hotel near ​the Jardin des Plantes, where he passed through another imaginary death-crisis. This in turn forced him to renew his flight. When he arrived in the circle of acquaintances in Dieppe, they believed him to be completely mad. He himself seemed to fear being locked up and accordingly continued his journey to a friend of his, the hospital physician Dr. A. Eliasson at Ystad,^[4] who finally took charge of him in earnest.

According to the celebrated German psychiatrist, Dr. S. Rhamner,^[5] Strindberg's disease was so developed at this time that he ought to have been taken into some asylum. But it is possible that if this had been done contrary to his desire, the disease might have been further aggravated. His most irreconcilable enemies in Sweden have announced as a serious accusation against him, that if he had been shut up in an asylum, he would have gone completely mad. Surely, but many of us who are now regarded as fully sane, would probably have done the same.

Yet it is interesting to know that Dr. Rhamner on scientific grounds considers it safe to affirm that Strindberg's disease cannot be classified as paranoia, but rather as melancholy. It was a typical Melancholia Moralis with a desire for seclusion, indefinite fear, thoughts of death, suicidal ideas and false notions of guilt. Later on in the further development of the complex of symptoms, there was added praecordial anguish with attacks of ​Raptus Melancholicus accompanied by chimerical imageries and optical illusions. It was, therefore, a typical case of ordinary melancholy which at the height of its development showed itself as Melancholia Dæmomaniaca.

Furthermore, Dr. Rhamner points out that it would be a mistake to regard Strindberg's leaning towards mysticism and the occult sciences, found in all his writings, as a pathological sign. Strindberg's mysticism is finally focused in his endeavors to bring about a synthesis between science and religion.

It is different with his pessimism. He has himself tried to explain it as having been caused by his disconsolate childhood and all his sufferings. But these only played the part of sustaining moments, while his nervous constitution and psychic depression constituted the headspring of his ever conspicuous pessimism. Strindberg was born a neuropath.