Plays by August Strindberg Volume I Part 1

Creditors; Pariah.

by August Strindberg.

INTRODUCTION

This is one of the three plays which Strindberg placed at the head of his dramatic production during the middle ultra-naturalistic period, the other two being "The Father" and "Miss Julia." It is, in many ways, one of the strongest he ever produced. Its rarely excelled unity of construction, its tremendous dramatic tension, and its wonderful psychological a.n.a.lysis combine to make it a masterpiece.

In Swedish its name is "Fordringsagare." This indefinite form may be either singular or plural, but it is rarely used except as a plural. And the play itself makes it perfectly clear that the proper translation of its t.i.tle is "Creditors," for under this aspect appear both the former and the present husband of Tekla. One of the main objects of the play is to reveal her indebtedness first to one and then to the other of these men, while all the time she is posing as a person of original gifts.

I have little doubt that Strindberg, at the time he wrote this play--and bear in mind that this happened only a year before he finally decided to free himself from an impossible marriage by an appeal to the law--believed Tekla to be fairly representative of womanhood in general.

The utter unreasonableness of such a view need hardly be pointed out, and I shall waste no time on it. A question more worthy of discussion is whether the figure of Tekla be true to life merely as the picture of a personality--as one out of numerous imaginable variations on a type decided not by s.e.x but by faculties and qualities. And the same question may well be raised in regard to the two men, both of whom are evidently intended to win our sympathy: one as the victim of a fate stronger than himself, and the other as the conqueror of adverse and humiliating circ.u.mstances.

Personally, I am inclined to doubt whether a Tekla can be found in the flesh--and even if found, she might seem too exceptional to gain acceptance as a real individuality. It must be remembered, however, that, in spite of his avowed realism, Strindberg did not draw his men and women in the spirit generally designated as impressionistic; that is, with the idea that they might step straight from his pages into life and there win recognition as human beings of familiar aspect.

His realism is always mixed with idealism; his figures are always "doctored," so to speak. And they have been thus treated in order to enable their creator to drive home the particular truth he is just then concerned with.

Consciously or unconsciously he sought to produce what may be designated as "pure cultures" of certain human qualities. But these he took great pains to arrange in their proper psychological settings, for mental and moral qualities, like everything else, run in groups that are more or less harmonious, if not exactly h.o.m.ogeneous. The man with a single quality, like Moliere's Harpagon, was much too primitive and crude for Strindberg's art, as he himself rightly a.s.serted in his preface to "Miss Julia." When he wanted to draw the genius of greed, so to speak, he did it by setting it in the midst of related qualities of a kind most likely to be attracted by it.

Tekla is such a "pure culture" of a group of naturally correlated mental and moral qualities and functions and tendencies--of a personality built up logically around a dominant central note. There are within all of us many personalities, some of which remain for ever potentialities. But it is conceivable that any one of them, under circ.u.mstances different from those in which we have been living, might have developed into its severely logical consequence--or, if you please, into a human being that would be held abnormal if actually encountered.

This is exactly what Strindberg seems to have done time and again, both in his middle and final periods, in his novels as well as in his plays. In all of us a Tekla, an Adolph, a Gustav--or a Jean and a Miss Julia--lie more or less dormant. And if we search our souls unsparingly, I fear the result can only be an admission that--had the needed set of circ.u.mstances been provided--we might have come unpleasantly close to one of those Strindbergian creatures which we are now inclined to reject as unhuman.

Here we have the secret of what I believe to be the great Swedish dramatist's strongest hold on our interest. How could it otherwise happen that so many critics, of such widely differing temperaments, have recorded identical feelings as springing from a study of his work: on one side an active resentment, a keen unwillingness to be interested; on the other, an attraction that would not be denied in spite of resolute resistance to it! For Strindberg DOES hold us, even when we regret his power of doing so. And no one familiar with the conclusions of modern psychology could imagine such a paradox possible did not the object of our sorely divided feelings provide us with something that our minds instinctively recognise as true to life in some way, and for that reason valuable to the art of living.

There are so many ways of presenting truth. Strindberg's is only one of them--and not the one commonly employed nowadays. Its main fault lies perhaps in being too intellectual, too abstract. For while Strindberg was intensely emotional, and while this fact colours all his writings, he could only express himself through his reason. An emotion that would move another man to murder would precipitate Strindberg into merciless a.n.a.lysis of his own or somebody else's mental and moral make-up. At any rate, I do not proclaim his way of presenting truth as the best one of all available. But I suspect that this decidedly strange way of Strindberg's--resulting in such repulsively superior beings as Gustav, or in such grievously inferior ones as Adolph--may come nearer the temper and needs of the future than do the ways of much more plausible writers. This does not need to imply that the future will imitate Strindberg. But it may ascertain what he aimed at doing, and then do it with a degree of perfection which he, the pioneer, could never hope to attain.

CREDITORS

A TRAGICOMEDY

1889

PERSONS

TEKLA

ADOLPH, her husband, a painter

GUSTAV, her divorced husband, a high-school teacher (who is travelling under an a.s.sumed name)

SCENE

(A parlor in a summer hotel on the sea-sh.o.r.e. The rear wall has a door opening on a veranda, beyond which is seen a landscape. To the right of the door stands a table with newspapers on it. There is a chair on the left side of the stage. To the right of the table stands a sofa. A door on the right leads to an adjoining room.)

(ADOLPH and GUSTAV, the latter seated on the sofa by the table to the right.)

ADOLPH. [At work on a wax figure on a miniature modelling stand; his crutches are placed beside him]--and for all this I have to thank you!

GUSTAV. [Smoking a cigar] Oh, nonsense!

ADOLPH. Why, certainly! During the first days after my wife had gone, I lay helpless on a sofa and did nothing but long for her. It was as if she had taken away my crutches with her, so that I couldn't move from the spot. When I had slept a couple of days, I seemed to come to, and began to pull myself together. My head calmed down after having been working feverishly. Old thoughts from days gone by bobbed up again.

The desire to work and the instinct for creation came back. My eyes recovered their faculty of quick and straight vision--and then you showed up.

GUSTAV. I admit you were in a miserable condition when I first met you, and you had to use your crutches when you walked, but this is not to say that my presence has been the cause of your recovery. You needed a rest, and you had a craving for masculine company.

ADOLPH. Oh, that's true enough, like everything you say. Once I used to have men for friends, but I thought them superfluous after I married, and I felt quite satisfied with the one I had chosen. Later I was drawn into new circles and made a lot of acquaintances, but my wife was jealous of them--she wanted to keep me to herself: worse still--she wanted also to keep my friends to herself. And so I was left alone with my own jealousy.

GUSTAV. Yes, you have a strong tendency toward that kind of disease.

ADOLPH. I was afraid of losing her--and I tried to prevent it. There is nothing strange in that. But I was never afraid that she might be deceiving me--

GUSTAV. No, that's what married men are never afraid of.

ADOLPH. Yes, isn't it queer? What I really feared was that her friends would get such an influence over her that they would begin to exercise some kind of indirect power over me--and THAT is something I couldn't bear.

GUSTAV. So your ideas don't agree--yours and your wife's?

ADOLPH. Seeing that you have heard so much already, I may as well tell you everything. My wife has an independent nature--what are you smiling at?

GUSTAV. Go on! She has an independent nature--

ADOLPH. Which cannot accept anything from me--

GUSTAV. But from everybody else.

ADOLPH. [After a pause] Yes.--And it looked as if she especially hated my ideas because they were mine, and not because there was anything wrong about them. For it used to happen quite often that she advanced ideas that had once been mine, and that she stood up for them as her own. Yes, it even happened that friends of mine gave her ideas which they had taken directly from me, and then they seemed all right.

Everything was all right except what came from me.

GUSTAV. Which means that you are not entirely happy?

ADOLPH. Oh yes, I am happy. I have the one I wanted, and I have never wanted anybody else.

GUSTAV. And you have never wanted to be free?

ADOLPH. No, I can't say that I have. Oh, well, sometimes I have imagined that it might seem like a rest to be free. But the moment she leaves me, I begin to long for her--long for her as for my own arms and legs. It is queer that sometimes I have a feeling that she is nothing in herself, but only a part of myself--an organ that can take away with it my will, my very desire to live. It seems almost as if I had deposited with her that centre of vitality of which the anatomical books tell us.

GUSTAV. Perhaps, when we get to the bottom of it, that is just what has happened.