10

HUMAN BEINGS ARE TO BE PITIED

‘Why were you not as I imagined you?’ August Strindberg asked the actress Harriet Bosse in a letter a few years after their divorce.*

[* Quoted in Meidal, Björn, God dag, mitt barn!, Stockholm: Bonnier (2002).]

Harriet Bosse was twenty-three years old when the fifty-one-year-old Strindberg proposed. They married on 6 May 1901, but already two days later they were quarrelling. On 30 May she left him, but returned a few weeks later only to end up arguing again as Strindberg refused to accompany her on their honeymoon to Denmark. She left. He cried.

If you leave, if you have left, I do not know! Leaving, left, without having reconciled me with humanity — or with women!

Strindberg followed her to Copenhagen, and, for some moments, harmony was within reach. Then the pain arose again; new outbursts awaited them, as well as fervent fresh reunions in the yellow room in the home they shared in Stockholm. (Strindberg inscribed the code XXX in his diary when they had slept together.)

‘Why were you not as I imagined you?’ The question is the same for anyone who mourns their love — then, now, and in time to come. The image of the loved one, the fantasies and the yearning, is broken against the actual person. For many, the issue arises while love is still ongoing; in the misunderstandings, the rejections, in the possibility and impossibility of sharing one’s life and loneliness with another.

While August Strindberg suffered, twisted and turned his sentiments, the black-eyed and much desired Harriet Bosse came and went and fell pregnant with his child. She left him, she returned, he was happy, he made himself unhappy. He was dreaming. He noted his dreams in his diary. He wrote a dream play.

This was his third marriage and there was something repetitive about it. He might have learned something over the years, and yet he knew even less than before. He noticed his own patterns and positions, and made the observation that everyday life repeated itself. Sadness repeated itself. Yearning repeated itself.

In A Dream Play people appear but have no names. Instead they are called the Officer, the Lawyer, the Postman, the Poet. One is an old man, who has to go back to the classroom and be questioned on the multiplication tables, as if in school, as a lifetime punishment. The Lawyer is constantly quarrelling with his wife about which of them cleans the house, unable to break up. And the Postman — well, when he finally gets the green fishing-tools he has imagined his whole life, he cannot help comparing them with how he had hoped them to be: ‘It had to be green, but not that green.’

It is into this world that the god Indra’s daughter descends. She listens and seeks to understand human existence, which Strindberg himself summarises in one word, actually the worst word he knew: recurrence.

If Indra’s daughter wants to understand what it means to be human, she must experience the painful returning of memories, she must undergo ‘Repetition-recurrence. To retrace oneś own tracks; to be sent back to the task once finished.’ The conclusion she draws has become one of Strindberg’s most quoted phrases: ‘Human beings are to be pitied’.

The sentence shouldn’t be interpreted as self-pity, although that was certainly a feeling with which Strindberg was familiar. Instead it should be seen as an expression of a forgiving tenderness, the kind that acknowledges one’s shortcomings but still persists. Some of us seek that compassion in love, others in a higher power, mercy.

Nowadays Strindberg’s words are quoted both casually and seriously, often with a cheeky smile as a way to accept a peculiar world and an unfair life. They are said as a joke, as a sarcastic comment on a bad film, a lousy dinner, or a sleepless night. They linger on. As he himself once said, ‘I’m a hell of a man, capable of many great things.’