Furies of the North

Inferno. By August Strindberg. Translated by Mary Sandbach. (Hutchinson, 25s.)

STRINDBERG, whose fame in this country rests largely on his very rarely performed plays, was

also a prose writer of astonishing fertility: five novels, dozens of short stories, fairy tales, fables and historical sketches; half a dozen volumes of

essays on subjects ranging from the technique of drama to French peasant folklore, as well as treatises on chemistry and alchemy, fill about half of the shelf of some fifty volumes of his collected works. But most important among Strindberg's prose writings are undoubtedly the series of autobiographical documents which pro- vide us with a unique record of the follies, ob- sessions and sufferings of a man in whom genius and madness mingled. The Son of a Servant (covering the period from 1849, the year of his birth, to 1871), The Growth of a Soul (1872- 1886). The Confession of a Fool—le Plaidoyer d'un Fou,' which, as Mr. F. L. Lucas has pointed out, would be more correctly translated as 'A Madman's Defence' (1875-1888), At Odds (1892- 1894), Inferno (1894-1897), Legends (1897-1898) and Alone (1899-1900) provide an almost con- tinuous—and at some points overlapping-- narration of the first fifty years of his life. Not all of these books have been translated into English, and most of those that have are no longer in print. The appearance of a new trans- lation of Inferno is therefore to be welcomed, the more so as the text of this edition, which is based on the original French text as well as on the first Swedish edition, is superior to that previously available.

Inferno is an astonishing book. It deals with perhaps the darkest period in Strindberg's life, when his creative work had come to a stop and he plunged more and more deeply into fan- tastic chemical researches and gold-making ex- periments. It provides an utterly candid record of persecution mania-- candid because it is com- pletely sincere in conscious intention and also most graphic in its unconscious self-revelation.

The story opens with Strindberg's parting from his second wife, the Austrian journalist Frida Uhl: I4er last words, 'When shall we meet again?' and my answer, 'Soon,' still echoed in my ears as an untruth, a deception that I was unwilling to admit, even to myself, though something in me whispered that we had now parted forever. . . .

Frida Strindberg had gone to Austria, where their child had fallen ill; Strindberg remained be hind in Paris. When he received a letter from his wife, urging him to give up his gold-making experiments, he struck back savagely: In an attack of righteous indignation, oil' overwhelmed by a furious desire to do MYs.e" an injury, I committed suicide by dispatch's! an infamous, unpardonable letter, casting wife and child for ever, and giving her to yodel- stand that I was involved in a new love affair' dMeymabldulllig a

bullet hitdivorce. Theand my wife replied bY The desire to hurt and the simultaneous feel

i ' ngs of guilt it arouses are only too evident In these terse sentences. It is a measure of Strind- berg's power as a writer that his subsequent account of his conviction that he was being 011: sued by mysterious enemies who tried to eXP°S,' him to electric currents generated by satat machines in attics above his bed leaves tw" reader in no doubt that these delusions are Or direct outcome of his horror and remorse at 1115 cruelty towards his wife and child.

Without doubt Inferno is a record of th.es ravings of a madman : wherever he goes, lIckle surrounded by deafening noises--there can no doubt in his mind that there is a conspirar behind this, involving vast crowds of Pe°P a torn piece of paper glimpsed in a gutter, a raky of light falling on a wall, a passage in a Wri.. opened at random, will make him take Wine 0 tous decisions; the most trivial event becomes omen of God or the Devil; irrational fears rn3h/cis him quarrel with his best friends who are only support in a desperate plight. But becao; this record is set down by a writer wh°with bines the utmost honesty towards himselfrO inspired powers of expression which enable n to remain lucid even about his most insan,e °we the most valoa.o

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sessions, it provides not only

insight into the workings of the humanff 11.1! la „s but also an opportunity to relive the su tio of a man driven to the limits of self-lacer_nt This book makes it possible to understand wr_1):5 goes on in the mind of a paranoic who kilaart, that he is suffering from delusions and Yet,cina- n.ot help being really terrified of the insc"s tieohnisnd himofthe enemies that lurk in the s

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It was this experience which enabled Strind- berg to make his contribution to the literary debate about realism which preoccupied his con- temporaries: he recognised that psychological reality was as real as mere external reality, if not more so; and so he transcended the mere naturalism of his earlier work by the deeper realism of plays in which dreams and obsessions —inner realities—are given their full weight on the stage. It was Strindberg who blazed the trail for Joyce, Proust and Beckett. And it was the experience described in Inferno which was decisive in showing him the way.

For, having plunged into the depths of mad- ness, Strindberg fought his way back to sanity. it was his discovery of his great countryman human soul who also saw the monsters of the auman soul as far more real than any external rellity, which enabled Strindberg to regain his balance. Swedenborg showed him that his ex- perience was by no means unique and that it ii lerely represented the hell he had created for it rmself by his own transgressions : By revealing to me the true nature of the terrors that beset me during the past year, Swedenborg had set me free from the electrical experts, the practitioners of the black arts, the Wizards, the envious gold-makers and the fear of insanity. He had shown me the only way to salvation: to seek out the demons in their lair, within myself, and to destroy them by— repentance. . . For the understanding of Strindberg's plays oerno is indispensable; as a human document unique. It is to be hoped that its publication whl,lead to a worthy English edition of the Wrrtitneg:.eries of Strindberg's autobiographical

MARTIN ESSLIN