



Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
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LEGENDS

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

BY

AUGUST STRINDBERG



LONDON: ANDREW MELROSE

3 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN


1912




CONTENTS

       I. The Possessed Exorcist
      II. My Wretchedness Increases
     III. My Wretchedness Increases (cont.)
      IV. Miracles
       V. My Incredulous Friend's Troubles
      VI. Miscellanies
     VII. Studies in Swedenborg
    VIII. Canossa
      IX. The Spirit of Contradiction
       X. Extracts from my Diary, 1897
      XI. In Paris
     XII. Wrestling Jacob

Note




I

THE POSSESSED EXORCIST


Hunted by the furies, I found myself finally in December 1896 fixed
fast in the little university town Lund, in Sweden. A conglomeration
of small houses round a cathedral, a palace-like university building
and a library, forming an oasis of civilisation in the great southern
Swedish plain. I must admire the refinement of cruelty which has chosen
this place as my prison. The University of Lund is much prized by the
natives of Schonen, but for a man from the north like myself the fact
that one stays here is a sign that one has come to an inclined plane
and is rolling down. Moreover, for me who am well advanced in the
forties, have been a married man for twenty years and am accustomed
to a regular family life, it is a humiliation to be relegated to
intercourse with students, bachelors who are given to a life of riot
and carousing, and who are all more or less in ill odour with the
fatherly authorities of the university because of their radical way of
thinking.

Of the same age, and formerly a companion of the professors, who now
no longer tolerate me, I am compelled to find my friends among the
students, and so to take upon myself the role of an enemy of the
seniors and of the social circles of solid respectability. Come down,
indeed! That is just the right word, and why? Because I scorned to
submit myself to the laws of social life and domestic slavery. I have
regarded the conflict for the upholding of my personality as a sacred
duty, quite irrespective of the fact of its being a good or bad one.

Excommunicated, regarded with suspicion, denounced by fathers and
mothers as a corrupter of youth, I am placed in a situation which
reminds one of a snake in an ant-heap, all the more as I cannot leave
the town through pecuniary embarrassment.

Pecuniary embarrassment! That has now been my lot for three years,
and I cannot explain how all my resources were dried up, as soon as
my profits were exhausted. Four-and-twenty dramas of my composing are
now laid up in a corner, and not a single one performed any more; an
equal number of novels and tales, and not one in a second edition.
All attempts to borrow a loan have failed and continue to fail. After
I had sold all that I possessed, need compelled me at last to sell
the letters which I had received in the course of years, _i.e._ other
people's property.

This constant condition of poverty seems to me so clearly to depend
upon some special purpose of Providence that I finally endure it
willingly as a part of my penance and do not try to resist it any
more. As regards myself, I want of means signifies nothing to me
as an independent author, but it is disgraceful not to have the
wherewithal to support my children. Very well! I make up my mind to
bear the disgrace though it involve pains like hell. I will not yield
to the temptation to pay for false honour with my life. Prepared for
anything, I endure resolutely to the uttermost the most extraordinary
humiliations and observe how my expiatory pangs commence. Well-educated
youths of good family treat me one night to a serenade of caterwauling
in my corridor. I take it as something I have deserved without
disturbing myself. I