Doctor Glas

by Hjalmar Söderberg

  “First published in 1905, Doctor Glas is considered to be Swedish novelist Hjalmar Söderberg’s masterpiece. The beautiful young wife of the repellant Reverend Gregorius confides to Glas that her sex life is making her miserable and begs for his help. Smitten with her, he agrees, even though she already has another lover. He does intervene, but when it becomes clear that the Reverend will not give up his ‘rights,’ Glas begins planning his murder. Arranged in the form of a journal, this fascinating, deeply moral (yet never moralizing) novel . . . offers the voyeuristic thrill of reading over the doctor’s shoulder as he wrestles with his conscience.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Splendid. . . . Söderberg [is] a marvelous writer.” —THE NEW YORKER

  “Written in a world before the two world wars, the novel has an icy wind in it, a sense of weeding the world so that only the strongest and loveliest can live. Söderberg offers both a moral and a roadmap. These days, that’s a fairly distasteful combination.” —LOS ANGELES TIMES

  “Even the Swedes were dismayed by Söderberg’s grim-grey novel when it was published in [1905], but today it is recognized as a Scandinavian masterpiece.” —TIME

  “This is a moving book. It is in the form of a journal, written by the doctor, and conveys with powerful economy the close, confined environment, and the articulate despair of a man who has missed love, let alone marriage.” —TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  “When one reads the novel from the perspective of a new century, what is particularly striking is the way Glas’s conscience seems haunted by the troubles of the past hundred years.” —THE LONDON TIMES

  “A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.” —NEWSWEEK

  Translation Copyright © 1998 by Rochelle Wright

  First edition 1998 by University of Wisconsin/Madison Scandinavian

  Studies Department

  Introduction Copyright © 2015 by Tom Rachman

  First Pharos Editions Printing April 2015

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Cover and interior design by Faceout Studio

  Published by Pharos Editions, an imprint of Counterpoint

  2560 Ninth Street, Ste. 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.pharoseditions.com

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  e-book ISBN 978-1-9404-36227

  Contents

  Introduction by Tom Rachman

  Foreword

  June 12

  June 14

  June 15

  June 18

  June 19

  June 21

  June 22

  June 23

  June 28

  July 2

  July 5

  July 6, Morning

  July 7

  July 9

  July 10

  July 11

  July 13

  July 14

  July 17

  July 24

  July 25

  July 26

  August 2

  August 3

  August 7

  August 8

  August 9

  August 10

  August 12

  August 13

  August 14

  August 17

  August 21

  August 22

  (Later)

  August 23

  (Later)

  August 24

  August 25

  August 26

  August 27

  September 4

  September 7

  September 9

  September 20

  October 7

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION BY TOM RACHMAN

  From his café table in central Stockholm, a young doctor contemplates the summer street, where pedestrians—and perhaps life itself—are passing him by. Outwardly calm, he is inwardly fevered. For Dr. Glas is pondering murder.

  The young wife of a foul old preacher has visited the doctor’s examination room with a confession. Her repugnant husband forces himself on her, does so often, regardless of her pleas for pity. What can she do? And what can the doctor do?

  Tyko Gabriel Glas is a man learned about the body, but intimate only with the mind. By his own description, he is an ugly fellow, a virgin still at age 33, and resigned to solitude, finding companionship in the intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Europe. (Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel came out in 1905.) Told in diary entries, Doctor Glas questions social hypocrisies, challenging the conventions against abortion and euthanasia, along the way citing Schopenhauer, Kant, Maupassant, Strindberg, Ibsen, Nietzsche—an admixture of philosophers and authors from a time when the scholars proposed rules for living, and the writers tested them in tales.

  “I want to sit comfortably in a theater box and watch people murder each other on stage, but I myself have no business there. I want to keep out of it—leave me in peace!” Dr. Glas declares, adding, “I’ve read Crime and Punishment and Thérèse Raquin.” Which is to say, he knows how miserably the murderers fared in the novels by Dostoevsky (1866) and Zola (1867). (When Dostoevsky’s book first came out in Swedish in 1894, it was not called Crime and Punishment but had the name of its protagonist, Raskolnikow, meaning that Söderberg’s title, Doctor Glas, would have echoed both its Russian and French antecedents.)

  Doctor Glas and Crime and Punishment, in particular, share much. They describe troubled young protagonists estranged from society, peering in from the margins, witnessing fading religiosity, and edging toward the same question: What meaning has “Thou shalt not kill” if no holy power enforces the commandment?

  However, Crime and Punishment betrays its intent from the title—crime cannot occur but that punishment follows, Dostoevsky argues. As for Zola, he disavowed the criminality in Thérèse Raquin, claiming merely to depict raw humanity, never to endorse its villainy. Söderberg then was the boldest of the three, disputing the agonies of a penitent Raskolnikov and floating a more shocking proposition: that perhaps one could end a life for a just motive, without punishment, without remorse. In different forms, this idea underpins many political battles of today, over right-to-die legislation, abortion laws, the death penalty, targeted assassinations.

  Upon publication, Doctor Glas, Crime and Punishment and Thérèse Raquin each provoked scandal and denunciations. Critics feared that if literature were to cleanse killing of its traditional taboos, then the act could be justified by any twisted logic. As it happened, in the 20th century, ideologies such as Nazism and Stalinism effected just such a nightmarish project. And yet the secular Western societies that emerged thereafter did not persist in massacres. On the contrary, data indicate a steady decline of violence in the West over the centuries.

  How then do questions raised in Doctor Glas and its literary cousins resonate today, in this period of paradoxes—a time when the average teenager has probably glimpsed a beheading video online but never known a single death beyond the screen. In Sweden, this novel remains a classic. It has inspired films, at least one theatrical production, and two spin-off novels, one from the clergyman’s perspective, another from his wife’s. Meanwhile, murder stories are all the rage, fueled by the Nordic Noir trend, not least Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, which is rife with wicked acts avenged through “moral” brutality. Despite this, Sweden remains a markedly peaceable society, its pages spattered with blood, its streets clean.

  The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, himself a resident of Sweden, argues that the philosophical struggles of the past have ended up primarily an adolescent concern. “They were the only ones who were preoccupied wit
h existential issues,” he writes. “Dostoevsky has become a teenager’s writer, the issue of nihilism a teenage issue.”

  It’s as if the dispute between Raskolnikov and Dr. Glas over the spiritual cost of killing has ended. Who won? Read Söderberg’s intriguing novel, and decide.

  —TOM RACHMAN

  FOREWORD

  HJALMAR SÖDERBERG (1869–1941) was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the city so intimately associated with his literary works. He studied briefly at the University of Uppsala and was employed as a civil servant before turning to journalism and eventually establishing himself as a free-lance writer. After a painful divorce from his first wife, he married a Danish woman and moved to Copenhagen, where he resided for the last twenty-five years of his life.

  Söderberg began publishing fiction in the 1890s, but his literary orientation was a cross between the realism or naturalism that had dominated the 1870s and 1880s and a more subjective, lyrical approach that came to the fore in the last decade of the century. Following the famous dictum of Danish critic Georg Brandes, who in the early 1870s initiated the Modern Breakthrough in Scandinavian literature with a series of lectures at the University of Copenhagen, Söderberg took up problems for debate, especially moral and religious ones. In particular he attacked conventional Christian morality when he perceived it as conflicting with human rights and human worth.

  Like many writers of the Modern Breakthrough, Söderberg was an agnostic. He did not believe in a God who intervened in human circumstances, but neither did he assert that human beings governed their own destiny. Instead his world view was deterministic and fatalistic. According to Söderberg, events are only marginally subject to our own will and are largely determined by factors outside our control; anything promising comfort to human beings is illusory. The motto from his play Gertrud (1906) may serve as a summary of his philosophy: “I believe in the desires of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul.”

  Söderberg thus lacked the spirit of optimism that had dominated in the 1870s and ’80s. He was not convinced that the problems he identified and debated could be solved. Instead a tone of skepticism, pessimism, resignation, and melancholy suffuses his works. This stance, common to many writers at the turn of the previous century, also encompassed an interest in psychology and the thought processes that underlie behavior.

  Söderberg’s main genre is prose, and he is especially famous for his short stories, little vignettes from Stockholm life, some only a few pages long. A selection in English translation, Short Stories by Hjalmar Söderberg, was published in 2009. Other important works are the autobiographical novel Martin Bircks ungdom (1901; trans. Martin Birck’s Youth, 2004) and Den allvarsamma leken (1912; trans. The Serious Game, 2001), a moving narrative of doomed love. In addition he occasionally wrote for the stage. Gradually, however, he came to believe that the fictional framework was a barrier preventing him from expressing what he really wanted to say and turned instead to speculative, philosophical works about religion and to aphorisms. In his last years, he was a vigorous opponent of Hitler, even after Denmark was occupied by the Nazis. Articles sent from Copenhagen appeared in the sole Swedish newspaper to defy restrictions on freedom of the press.

  Many of Söderberg’s works, Doctor Glas included, may be called “tankeböcker” (“thought books”), a term the author himself employed. Primary emphasis is on feelings, reflections, and impressions. In Söderberg’s narratives, characters tend to converse or ponder rather than act; his strength is psychological insight rather than a carefully constructed story.

  The overt subject matter of Doctor Glas nevertheless created a scandal when the novel first appeared in 1905. It was thought to be about euthanasia, abortion, infidelity, and marital “rights” and to promote the first three while dismissing the last. Many issues raised in Doctor Glas are just as topical today. Euthanasia and the right to die figure prominently in deliberations about medical ethics now that technology can prolong life beyond anything Söderberg’s contemporaries could have imagined; abortion remains a conflict-ridden and divisive question. Current debate on date rape and physical and psychological abuse, in marriage and in relationships in general, is not very far removed from Söderberg’s discussion of marital “rights.”

  Certainly Söderberg did expect his readers to think about these issues, but they are not the thematic core of the text. The plot, too, is relatively secondary, since the outcome of Glas’s interrogation of the two voices within him seems predetermined. More important are the novel’s philosophical and psychological dimensions. In the aftermath of the pastor’s death, Glas comes to the realization that action ultimately is meaningless because it derives from the law of necessity. He also alludes to the ancient wisdom that one should not try to get to the bottom of things, for “he who sees the face of God must die.” Perhaps human beings are not intended to ask, or to understand. At the same time the narrative is a compelling psychological portrait of paralysis, of a failed attempt to escape the confines of the individual ego and establish meaningful relations with others, and an equally unsuccessful effort to come to grips with the source of the failure.

  Doctor Glas was written more than a century ago, but Söderberg’s fluid, graceful Swedish retains a strikingly modem quality, in part because it seems casual and effortless—though in fact the author revised and polished extensively. Not surprisingly, the novel remains a favorite among Swedish readers and in recent decades has reached new audiences adapted as a dramatic monologue. Two film adaptations, the first directed by Söderberg’s son-in-law Rune Carlsten in 1942, the second by Mai Zetterling in 1968, offer strikingly different but equally compelling versions of the story.

  Doctor Glas was previously translated in 1963 by Paul Britten Austin. This older version, somewhat British in flavor, is accurate and admirable in many ways, but the present rendition turns anew to the source text, in accordance with the precept that a great work of literature deserves a fresh translation every generation or so. The new translation generally follows Söderberg’s syntax and sentence structure; the fragments, the frequent ellipses, and the numerous sentences beginning with “and” or “but” are present in the original. Occasionally a word or two is interpolated to clarify a reference that might otherwise be obscure to the English-language reader. When such additions would have been cumbersome but explanations nevertheless seemed desirable, separate notes are provided at the end of the volume.

  Söderberg paints an evocative, impressionistic picture of turn-of-the-century Stockholm; many milestones are familiar to Swedes of today. Without some knowledge of the layout and geography of the city, much of the novel’s characteristic atmosphere inevitably is lost. To help the English-language reader visualize the setting, place names have generally been translated. Thus “Skeppsholmen” (a small island connected to the city center by a narrow bridge) is rendered “Ship’s Isle,” “Strömmen” (the current linking the Baltic to the east of the city with Lake Mälaren to the west) becomes “the Stream,” and “Jacobs torg” is translated “Jacob’s Square.” Sometimes an uneasy compromise seemed the best solution, though inconsistencies result. “Helgeandsholmen” (“Isle of the Holy Ghost”) becomes merely “Helgeands Isle,” but “Kungsholmen” (“King’s Isle”) is left untranslated, since it is apparent from context that the name encompasses an entire section of town. The goal throughout has been fidelity to Söderberg’s spirit and intent.

  —Rochelle Wright

  JUNE 12

  I’VE NEVER SEEN SUCH A SUMMER. Hot and sultry since mid-May. All day long a thick, inert cloud of dust hovers over the streets and squares.

  Only in the evening do people rouse themselves a bit. I took an after-dinner walk just now, as I do almost every day after visiting patients; there aren’t many now during the summer. A cool, steady breeze blows in from the east, the cloud lifts, wafts slowly away and becomes a long, red veil off to the west. No noise from the work carts any longer, just an occasional cab and the bell of the streetcar. I walk slowly
down the street, meeting an acquaintance now and then and stopping to chat for a while at a corner. But why is it that I keep running into Pastor Gregorius? I can’t lay eyes on that man without recalling an anecdote I once heard about Schopenhauer. The dour philosopher was sitting one evening in a corner of his café, alone as usual; the door opens and a disagreeable-looking person steps in. Schopenhauer stares at him, his features twisted with disgust and horror, leaps up and begins beating the man on the head with his walking stick. Solely because of his appearance.

  Well, I’m no Schopenhauer, of course. When I saw the pastor approaching me from a distance on Vasa Bridge, I quickly stopped and positioned myself, leaning on the rail, to admire the view: the gray buildings of Helgeand Isle, the old, worn wooden bath house in Viking style, reflected in the rippling current, the ancient willows dipping their leaves in the Stream. I hoped the pastor hadn’t seen me and wouldn’t recognize me from behind, and I had more or less put him out of my mind when I realized he was standing next to me, leaning on the rail just as I was, his head cocked to the side—in precisely the same posture as the time twenty years ago in St. Jacob’s Church when, sitting beside my late mother in the family pew, I first saw that dreadful physiognomy stick up from the pulpit like a poisonous mushroom and start droning his “Our Father.” The same puffy, sallow face, the same dirty yellow sideburns—a bit grayer now, perhaps—the same inscrutable, mean look from behind the glasses. No possibility of escape now—he’s one of my many patients, and sometimes he comes to me with his aches and pains.

  “Well, good evening, Pastor, how are you?”

  “Not well, not well at all. My heart’s bad—irregular heartbeat. Sometimes at night it almost seems to stop.”

  Pleased to hear it, I thought. Go ahead and die, you old scoundrel, and I’ll be rid of the sight of you. Besides, you have a beautiful young wife you’re probably tormenting to death, and if you die she’ll remarry and find a much better husband. But aloud I said, “Oh, I see. Well, perhaps you should stop by my office one of these days and we’ll look into the matter.” But he had a good deal more to say, important things like this heat is quite extraordinary, and it’s stupid to build a big house of parliament on that little island, and as a matter of fact, my wife isn’t really well, either.