Hjalmar Soderberg - Serious Game

An Introduction to Hjalmar Sderbergs The Serious Game By Elena Balzamo

In 1912 Hjalmar Sderberg, already a celebrated and controversial author, published a new novel: The Serious Game. At the age of forty-three he had produced three novels, as many collections of stories, two plays, an essay and an innumerable amount of critical writing. The Serious Game, the longest, most ambitious and perhaps the most successful of his works, was not only the crowning achievement of Sderbergs literary career, one that had stretched back over fifteen years, but also suggested new possibilities to the author. Who at the time would have suspected that this novel, which bore witness to an artistic talent in the full flowering of his abilities, would also be his swan song: the raising of a creative voice that would lead to silence? This, however, was to be the case. In the thirty years that remained of his life, Sderberg produced nothing to equal his earlier works: in fact, he would no longer write fiction, abandoning literature in favour of history and religion. The publication of The Serious Game was followed by six years of total silence, just as the previous six years had seen him produce the vast majority of his most important writings. The causes of this silence and the slowing down of his artistic output can be found in the events that had overturned Sderbergs life during this period, completely altering its course.

Out of his entire, somewhat uneventful life, the period from 1903 to 1912 is highlighted by the intense dramas it encompassed. In 1903, after four years of disastrous marriage to an emotionally unstable woman, Hjalmar Sderberg received a letter from an unknown female, expressing her admiration for The Youth of Martin Birck, the novel he wrote in 1901. A young woman, the wife of an officer, sensitive, fond of literature, languishing in the colourless provinces beside her ageing husband, had entered Sderbergs life. Her name was Maria von Platen. An exchange of letters ensued, followed by a meeting, and Sderberg was soon involved in an affair the outcome of which he was still unable to foresee. A tumultuous three-year relationship punctuated by varying periods of separation and reconciliation began in 1903. Sderberg would go back to her on numerous occasions. However, for Maria von Platen, who went on to have affairs with other Swedish men of letters, this affair was just another simple episode. For Hjalmar Sderberg, in his search for happiness, it was to become a terrifying drama, a catastrophe that stripped him of everything. Ground down by the fighting at home, the scandal that surrounded him after the affair became public, the anguish caused by his break-up with a wife whom he still loved and his mounting financial problems, he could see only one solution: flight.

I know that I scarcely had a choice, he explained in a letter. The extreme solution was at hand. Could he have suspected that by leaving Sweden in 1906 he was condemning himself to an eternal exile? That by cutting himself off from the nurturing womb-like environment of Stockholm he was signing his own death warrant? By no means, even if he did claim to have reached a crossroads in both his personal life and his literary career. I only went to Copenhagen for a brief stay. I had no plans. I saw no future ahead of me I considered myself finished as a writer.

And so it was that after a slight moments hesitation he settled in Copenhagen and became involved with a young Danish woman, who would bear him a child in 1910 and became his second wife in 1917. He was to enjoy a peaceful and orderly existence with her until his death in 1941, never to return to Sweden except on short visits.

But all of this lay in the future. In 1906, uprooted, battered and penniless, Hjalmar Sderberg disembarked in Copenhagen, moved into a small hotel and fought his first battle with the demons that were tormenting him. The result was Gertrud, the play that became famous throughout Europe thanks to Carl Dreyers film adaptation. First published in 1906, it had already enjoyed productions in both Stockholm and Copenhagen by 1907. The play, which drew upon certain aspects of his experiences with Maria von Platen, without reproducing them exactly, was centred entirely upon the character of Gertrud, a woman who could only exist for and through love. It was not, however, a settling of old scores with his former mistress, but rather an act of total absolution. A single desire had survived Hjalmar Sderbergs grand passion: to understand. I believe I would like to be something that most likely doesnt exist, says Arvid Stjrnblom, the male protagonist of The Serious Game. I would like to be the soul of the world. To be the one who knows and understands everything.

Despite the undeniable success of Getrud, and the cathartic effect it must have had upon its creator, its subject matter was far from being exhausted. The demons from the past continued to crowd in, and Sderberg would make another attempt to exorcise them: this time in The Serious Game.

Hjalmar Sderberg has the well-earned reputation of being one of the poet laureates of Stockholms city life, due in part to the portrait he presents of it in The Serious Game. Nearly every district of the Swedish capital is described here, unencumbered by too much detail but captured with a striking clarity as a series of snapshots in which permanent details, such as houses, gardens and churches, are set against other, more ephemeral elements: atmospheric conditions, changes in light, the flow of crowds Stockholm at the start of the twentieth century is revealed to us as a living, moving thing, its features changing with the passing of time. Automobiles replace horse-drawn cabs; gas lamps make way for electric lighting. At first glance, theres nothing surprising about this: a realist author describing a place he knows well, which has been a familiar part of his daily life and which he knows right down to its smallest detail. However, the suggestive power with which Stockholm is evoked is due less to the fact that it was once the writers natural locale, than that it has ceased to be so. The Serious Game is a novel composed in exile: by the time it was being written, Sderberg had definitively left the country of his birth behind him. Everything he describes the cafs, the nights at the Opera, the walks along the quays belonged to the past, to an era that, like his youth, was now gone for good.

But if you were a poet, Arvid, the protagonist of The Serious Game is asked by Lydia, his lover, could you not then, like Goethe and Strindberg and so many other and lesser ones, make literature from what was once, for you, life and reality, happiness and unhappiness? Couldnt you? Never, he replies. I dont think that its possible, even for a poet for that matter, to make literature from his love so long as theres the spark of life in it. I suppose it has to be dead first, before he can embalm it. This exchange reveals, beyond the problematic relationship between fiction and reality, one of the most frequently recurring themes in Sderbergs writing, precisely delineating the authors attitude towards the description of events. His time in Stockholm was over; the drama played out. The past was now dead. I have come more and more to realise that I can never bring it back to life, he announced in a letter written as early as 1907: the wheels of artistic creation had been set in motion. The trauma that he lived through had become nothing more than raw material ready to be transformed into a work of art. It is not what he has experienced that is the cause for all that is sick, horrible and confused in his writing, Arvid Stjrnblom observes of Strindberg in The Serious Game. Thats what he seems to believe himself, but thats not the way it is. On the contrary, it is all that is sick, horrible and confused in his own nature that causes everything he has to experience and live through. This observation is particularly apt. Refracted through the prism of Sderberg the Artist, the emotional drama that pitched Sderberg the Man into a state of total chaos transforms itself into a marvellously balanced literary work. The disruptive experience is still there, but restructured and, for want of a better word, put in its place.