The Road to Damascus by August Strindberg


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Page 4

With his hypersensitive nervous system Strindberg, like THE
STRANGER, really gives the impression of having been a visionary.
For instance, his author friend Albert Engstr�m, 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. C�sar
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:

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Thu 28th Mar 2024, 22:46