Now I sit at my open window, writing — for whom? Not for any friend or mistress. Scarcely for myself even. I do not read today what I wrote yesterday; nor shall I read this tomorrow. I write simply so my hand can move, my thoughts move of their own accord. I write to kill a sleepless hour. Why can’t I sleep? After all, I’ve committed no crime.
DOCTOR GLAS was first published in Sweden in 1905, when it caused a scandal, largely because of its handling of those two perennially scandalous items, sex and death. I first read it in the form of a tattered paperback sent to me by Swedish friends — a reissue of a 1963 translation, published to coincide with the film based on it. On the back of my copy are various well-deserved encomiums from newspaper reviews: “a masterpiece,” “the most remarkable book of the year,” “a book of rare quality developed with true skill.” Nevertheless, Doctor Glas has long been out of print in this English version. It’s a pleasure to welcome it back.
The uproar around Doctor Glas stemmed from the perception that it was advocating abortion and euthanasia, and was perhaps even rationalizing murder. Its protagonist is a doctor, and he has some strong things to say about the hypocrisy of his own society concerning these matters. But Hjalmar Söderberg, its author — already a successful novelist, playwright, and short-story writer — may have been somewhat taken aback by this, because Doctor Glas is not a polemic, not a work of advocacy. Instead it is an elegant, vigorous, and tightly knit psychological study of a complex individual who finds himself at a dangerous but compelling open doorway and can’t decide whether or not to go through it, or why he should.
The novel’s protagonist, Doctor Tyko Gabriel Glas, is a thirtyish medical man whose journal we read over his shoulder as he composes it. His voice is immediately convincing: intelligent, wistful, opinionated, dissatisfied, by turns rational and irrational, and unnervingly modern. We follow him through his memories, his desires, his opinions of the mores of his social world, his lyrical praises or splenetic denunciations of the weather, his prevarications, his self-denunciations, his boredom, and his yearning. Glas is a romantic idealist turned solitary and sad, and afflicted with fin de siècle malaise — a compound of fastidious aestheticism, longing for the unobtainable, skepticism concerning the established systems of morality, and disgust with the actual. He would like only beautiful things to exist, but has the sordid forced on him by the nature of his profession. As he himself says, he’s the last person on earth who should have been a doctor: it brings him into too much contact with the more unpleasant aspects of human carnality.
What he wants above all is action, a feat to perform which might fit the hero he hopes he may carry around inside him. In romances, such deeds often involve a knight, a troll, and a captive maiden who must be rescued, and this is the sort of situation that fate serves up to Doctor Glas. The troll is a flesh-creepingly loathsome and morally repulsive pastor called Gregorius, whom Glas hates even before he finds he has good reason for his hatred. The maiden in captivity is his young and beautiful wife, Helga, who confides to Doctor Glas that she has married Gregorius out of mistaken religious notions, and can no longer stand his sexual attentions. Divorce is impossible: a “respectable” clergyman convinced of his own righteousness, as the Reverend Gregorius is, would never consent to it. Mrs. Gregorius will be enslaved to this toadstool-faced goblin forever unless Doctor Glas will help her.
Doctor Glas has now been given a chance to prove himself. But will he discover that he is a brave knight, an ordinarily timorous nobody, or just as much of a troll as Gregorius, only a murderous one? He contains within himself the possibilities of all three. His name, too, is threefold. Tyko refers to the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who kept his eyes on the stars, far away from the earth-iness of the earth — as Doctor Glas so often does throughout the novel. Gabriel is the name of the Angel of the Annunciation, proclaimer of the Holy Birth, who is also credited with being the Destroying Angel, sent to wipe out Sodom and Sennacherib, and thought to be the angel of the Last Judgement as well. Thus it’s a good name for a medical practitioner, who holds the keys to life and death, but it’s also a good name for Doctor Glas, who must decide whether or not to take judgement into his own hands.
And Glas is glass: like the diary form itself, it’s a reflecting surface, a mirror in which one sees oneself. It’s hard and impermeable, but easily shattered; and, from certain angles, it’s transparent. This last quality is one of Glas’s complaints: he can only fall in love with women who are in love with someone else, because their love makes them radiant; but their love for other men means that Glas himself is invisible to them. So it is with Mrs. Gregorius: she is having an adulterous affair with another man, and can’t “see” Doctor Glas. She can only see through him, making of him a means to the end she longs for. As for Doctor Glas’s nemesis, it’s worth noting that although “Gregorius” is the name of a saint and of a couple of popes, it’s also the name of a certain kind of telescope. Like Glas, Gregorius is glassy; he wears glasses, and looking into them, Glas sees the reflection of his own bespectacled self. Perhaps he hates Gregorius so much because the man unconsciously reminds Glas of the father who used to punish him, and whose physicality repelled him as a young boy; or perhaps it’s because Gregorius is his ogreish double, the sly, whining, selfish, and self-justifying personification of the lust he can’t permit himself to act out.
At first glance the structure of Doctor Glas is disarmingly casual, almost random. The device of the diary allows us to follow events as they unfold, but allows us also to listen in on Glas’s reactions to them. The workings of the novel are so subtle that the reader doesn’t notice at first that it has any: so immediate, even blunt, is the voice that we appear to be reading the uncensored thoughts of a real person. Glas promises candour: he won’t set down everything, he says, but he will record nothing that isn’t true. “Anyway,” he adds, “I can’t exorcise my soul’s wretchedness — if it is wretched — by telling lies.” Chance encounters and trivial conversations alternate with fits of midnight scribbling; jokes and pleasant convivial meals are followed by hours of anguish; night and dreamtime counterpoint the world of purposeful daylight. Unanswered questions punctuate the text — “By the way, why do the clergy always go into church by a back door?” — as do odd moments of hilarity verging on the burlesque, as when Gregorius considers administering the communion wine in the form of pills, to avoid germs. (The pill idea soon recurs in a much more evil form.)
Söderberg had read his Dostoevsky: he too is interested in the disgruntlements of underground men, and in charting impulse and rationalization and motive, and in the fine line that runs between the violent thought and the criminal act. He’d read his ghost-ridden Ibsen and that master of bizarre obsession, Poe. He’d also read his Freud, and he knows how to make use of the semiconscious motif, the groundswells of the unspoken. There are two hints in the text that point us toward the book’s methods: Glas’s meditation on the nature of the artist, who to him is not an originator but an aeolian harp, who makes music only because the winds of his own time play over him—thus the discursiveness; and his invocation of Wagner, who used the leitmotif to connect large swaths of disparate music into a unified whole. A tracing of all the red roses — from dead mother to out-of-reach beloved to rejected potential sweetheart — reveals some of these interconnections, as does a survey of all the astronomical images, from moon to stars to sun to the sunny, starry-eyed Mrs. Gregorius. “Truth is like the sun,” says Glas’s friend Markel, “its value wholly depends upon our being at a correct distance away from it.” And so it would be, we suspect, with Mrs. Gregorius: she can be valuable for Glas as an ideal only as long as she is kept at a correct distance.
Doctor Glas is deeply unsettling, in the way certain dreams are — or, no coincidence, certain films by Bergman, who must have read it. The eerie blue northern nights of midsummer combined with an unexplained anxiety, the nameless Kierkegaardian dread that strikes Glas at the most ordinary of moments, the juxtaposition of pale spirituality with an almost comic vulgar sensuality — these are from the same cultural context. The novel launches itself from the ground of naturalism set in place by French writers of the nineteenth century, but goes beyond it. Some of Söderberg’s techniques — the mix of styles, the collagelike snippets — anticipate, for instance, Ulysses. Some of his images anticipate the Surrealists: the disturbing dreams with their ambiguous female figures, the sinister use of flowers, the glasses with no eyes behind them, the handless watchcase in which Doctor Glas carries around his little cyanide pills. A few decades earlier and this novel would never have been published; a few years later and it would have been dubbed a forerunner of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
Doctor Glas is one of those marvellous books that appears as fresh and vivid now as on the day it was published. As the English writer William Sansom has said, “In most of its writing and much of the frankness of its thought, it might have been written tomorrow.” It occurs on the cusp of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, but it opens doors the novel has been opening ever since.