A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Road to Damascus

A >> August Strindberg >> The Road to Damascus



Produced by Nicole Apostola




AUGUST STRINDBERG

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

A TRILOGY

ENGLISH VERSION BY GRAHAM RAWSON

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GUNNAR OLLÉN

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE



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 God, 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
pass. 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 title, 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
hell 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 worshipper 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 Titan, 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 authoress, the other two actresses, all of them
pronounced characters, endowed with a degree of will and
self-assertion, 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 authoress 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 Rügen, after having first been compelled
to stop in Hamburg owing to lack of money. Strindberg stayed on
Rügen 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 Brünn, 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, assisted
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 scrape 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 fortitude 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
assurance 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 Neustädtische
Kirchstrasse 1, in Berlin, facing a Gothic church in Dorotheenstrasse,
situated at the cross-roads between the post office in Dorotheenstrasse
and the café 'Zum Schwarzen Ferkel' in Wilhelmstrasse. 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 café 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, shift 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. Space prevents us, however, from
entering on a more detailed analysis 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 hell. 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 _idées 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 Engström, 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 passion 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 shore to
see what had shimmered 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 Strlndberg. 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.
Eliasson 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. Cäsar
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 cafés. 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 repetition 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.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.