Creditors Reexamined

CREDITORS REEXAMINED Lrrn.E EXCEPT A SMATTERING of details can conceivably be added to the analysis of the autobiographical basis of Strindberg's Credit01's (Fordringsiigare, 1888) presented by the late Martin Lamm in his Strindbergs dramer, I, 330-348. But that analysis is frankly and almost completely an examination of the playas a reflection of Strindberg's personal idiosyncracies, his reading, his troubles with his wife as recorded in En dares forsvarstal (The Confession of a Fool, 1887) and elsewhere, and possible influences in his immediate environment. Illuminating as all these matters are, they can hardly fail to color any reader's interpretation of a play that will have to and can stand on its own merits as literature and theater for non-Swedish readers and theatergoers, who neither have access to the wealth of biographical and period background nor care particularly about the author's personal frustrations and dilemmas. For the Strindberg scholar, it is certainly important to know that Strindberg exploited more or less accurately facts from his first marriage as he saw them and as he recorded them in highly artistic form in the novel The Confession of a Fool, that he like many of his contemporaries was interested in hypnosis and psychiatry and their possible value for his own writing, and, that he, in general, probably more than any other major writer used himself and his environment as sources for what he wrote. For people who are particularly interested in the details of other people's lives, the autobiographical elements will remain fascinating much as the gossip columns of our newspapers. The play itself both in the Swedish original and in translation, will, however, be the concern of most theatergoers and certainly of most readers. In this article I shall examine the play without regard to autobiographical or other background in an attempt to discover why Herbert Grevenius' comment in The Blanche Theater program of February 2, 1938, "Det ar en bra otack pjas, men den ar otackt bra" (freely translated , "It is a pretty terrible play, but it is terribly good") is particularly apt either when the play is read or seen on the stage in Sweden or in America. Creditors is, if anything, a thorough application of the principles of characterization, economy of staging, compactness of structure, and naturalness of dialogue that Strindberg advocated in the preface to Froken lulie (Miss lulie, 1888). The play consists of one tightly packed act, the three major characters are complex and dynamic, the dialogue is reminiscent of that of actual life itself but intensified in 281 282 MODER~ DRAMA December Strindbergian fashion to fit his characters, and the staging is simplified to a minimum. Equally important is the fact that his broad themethe relationship between man and woman within marriage-is universal and timeless. The play emphasizes, to be sure, as the title of the play suggests, the give and take within the first and second marriages of one specific woman. It is a play deliberately conceived and composed within the framework of accounts; consequently, such terms as C1'editors (and debtor, by implication), bills, payment, first mortgage, accounts, settling , tearing up bills, and dun are basic. The use of terms borrowed from everyday financial transactions, startling as they may be at first glance when applied to an institution as human and complex as marriage , is a device that Strindberg exploits with harrowing effectiveness. For the three characters-a brilliant teacher of Greek and Latin (Strindberg says "dead languages"), a highly gifted and extremely sensitive artist, and a beautiful woman with some claims to achievement as a creative writer-are the very sort of people whom the world in general would find interesting and even charming. But what Strindberg does with them is not to present them primarily at their social best but as they are either when all pretense and camouflage are stripped away or when pretense and camouflage are used for the attainment of deliberate ends. It becomes almost immediately clear that the play deals with the dissection of souls, as we see Gustav, the first husband, going to work on Adolf, the second husband, who does not know that his new friend is...