The Road to Damascus | Page 4

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,