Strindberg’s Island

In my early twenties I became an avid sailor. Whenever life seemed too complex I would turn to the sea – to the curative simplicity of sailing. I loved to be in the grasp of the elements and was thrilled by the way a tug here or a pull there would miraculously bring everything into fragile balance.

One early autumn, when life wasn’t going exactly to plan, I joined two friends sailing around the Stockholm archipelago, the 20,000 islands and skerries that protect the approach to the Swedish capital from the Baltic. As afternoon sank into evening we set course for the outer islands and Kymmendö, the setting of August Strindberg’s novel The People of Hemsö (Hemsöborna).

Here and there they slipped past a broom-beacon, sometimes a ghostly white sailing-mark, in some places late snowdrifts shone like linen on a bleaching green, in others net-floats rose to the surface of the black water and scraped against the keel as the boat passed over them.

This is the passage that I remember best from my first-ever reading of the novel: the approach to Hemsö. I must have read it when I was still at school but the image of this peaceful night-sail, where things seem to come alive in the dark, had somehow settled in the shallows of my mind. It was also an image that had stayed in Strindberg’s imagination for many years. He wrote the novel in exile, during one of the darkest periods of his life. In 1884, in a letter to his publisher, he said: ‘I need to go away to purge Sweden and Swedish stupidity from my system.’ He spent the next three years travelling around Europe with his family. On reaching Lindau, on the shores of Lake Constance in Bavaria in 1887, misery finally caught up with him; his recent writings on Swedish life and society had made him unpopular ‒ even hated‒‒ by conservatives and feminists alike. His publisher was getting increasingly nervous about his work, and his marriage to Siri von Essen had turned sour. Obsessed with the idea that his wife was unfaithful, he also worried that his penis might be too small. This was not a new anxiety for Strindberg but on this occasion he was ‘irritated to the roots of my testicles’ and resolved to get an expert opinion. In a letter that year he wrote cheerfully after a doctor’s examination (in a brothel): ‘I had my semen investigated which proved fertile, and was measured at full cock (16 x 4 centimetres).’ Far away, angry, paranoid and pursued, Strindberg was homesick. That autumn in Lindau, his manhood freshly measured, his mind turned to the island of Kymmendö, where he had spent so many happy summers, and he sat down to write a novel about life in the Swedish countryside and skerries, ‘the first genuine novel I have written’. Remarkably The People of Hemsö shows no sign of a tortured mind. On the contrary, this is a novel full of life, humour and compassion, capturing the light and colour of the summer skerries. After the darkness of a long winter, summer illuminates the islands in full Technicolor. For the briefest of times the greenery seems greener and the sea and sky bluer than anywhere else in the world. Newly reborn, nature is so freshly minted it makes you feel almost unclean. Strindberg, better known for his plays, wrote most lyrically about the islands in his poetry, but most successfully in The People of Hemsö. The plot is simple enough: Carlsson arrives on the island from the forests of the north to become factor at the farm of the widow Flod. Madame Flod’s adolescent son, Gusten, is more interested in sailing around the skerries and shooting seabirds than managing the farm, and Carlsson soon sees an opportunity for advancement. Before long, Gusten is outmanoeuvred as Carlsson marries Madame Flod ‘for the gold’. The wedding itself is a shambles, conducted by a drunken minister. The story is generally described as a naturalistic tragi-comedy or a burlesque, but Strindberg himself called it a ‘rustic realism’ and wavered between thinking it a masterpiece and a farrago of caricatures. The novel may be all of these things, but it is completely charming and quite unlike anything else he wrote. The exiled writer’s love of ‘home’ is so present you begin to think it may be your home. More characteristically, perhaps, it is also a story of lust and power. As an outsider, Carlsson eventually finds that he cannot master his new environment. He is alone, and as a farmer from the north he remains a stranger in the seascape of the archipelago, whereas Gusten, the hunter and the son of the sea, rises to the task and triumphs. The novel is also full of passages of breathtaking beauty, and its detailed descriptions document a traditional way of life in the skerries that would soon disappear with the introduction of large-scale tourism. Conscious that his marriage was collapsing, the tormented Strindberg wrote of the bright joys of love on the summer island of Kymmendö, where he first brought his wife shortly after they were married, and where their first child, Greta, was christened. Ironically he was never to return. He had written his first play, Master Olof, there, having rented rooms from a former farmhand who had married the widowed mistress of the farm. When The People of Hemsö was published in 1887 his former hosts forbade him from ever setting foot on Kymmendö again. The novel’s first sentence is widely considered one of the most famous openings in Swedish literature. Only sixteen words long, it uses all nine vowels in the Swedish language, and most of the consonants, and a sea-breeze blows through the sentence and brings us straight into its seascape. (Strindberg excelled at jumping straight to the core in his opening sentences, consider: ‘Miss Julie’s gone mad again tonight. Completely mad!’). Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to catch that breeze in translation, though I shall try:

Han kom som ett yrväder en aprilafton och hade ett höganäskrus i en svångrem om halsen.

He came like a whirlwind on an April evening with a jug on a strap round his neck.

Four wonderful nouns set the sentence in motion‒‒ yrväder (whirlwind), aprilafton (April evening), höganäskrus (earthenware jug from Höganäs) and svångrem (strap). There is flurry and movement in Strindberg’s writing and you sense both the threat of disorder and the energy of action – and the jug full of schnapps swinging from Carlsson’s neck may also be an indication of things to come. The ever-present wind defines the seascape and blows life ‒ and peril ‒ into those who pass through it. That autumn when I sailed to Kymmendö we berthed in darkness. The next morning I walked across the island to the north-east side and my place of pilgrimage: Strindberg’s writing-hut. He built this tiny shack of unpainted pine planks with the aid of local farmhands in 1872. Weathered by wind and sun, it is empty now, but it has been lovingly preserved by the Strindberg Society. Inside, the pine-planks shivered, and through the single window facing the sea the sun was just shaking itself free of the horizon. At that moment the mirrored surface rippled in a sigh of morning breeze and the light exploded, shooting diamonds through the glass. Dazzled, I sat for a while on the rocks outside the hut and smelt the pine resin heating up in the woods behind me. Then I took off my clothes and went for one of the most perfect swims of my life.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 51 © Karin Altenberg 2016