Strindberg: A Life

by Sue Prideaux

Novelist, satirist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist, and hellraiser—August Strindberg was all these, and yet he is principally known, in Arthur Miller's words, as "the mad inventor of modern theater" who led playwriting out of the polite drawing room into the snakepit of psychological warfare. This biography, supported by extensive new research, describes the eventful and complicated life of one of the great literary figures in world literature. Sue Prideaux organizes Strindberg's story into a gripping and highly readable narrative that both illuminates his work and restores humor and humanity to a man often shrugged off as too difficult.

Best known for his play Miss Julie, Strindberg wrote sixty other plays, three books of poetry, eighteen novels, and nine autobiographies. Even more than most, Strindberg is a writer whose life sheds invaluable light on his work. Prideaux explores Strindberg's many art-life connections, revealing for the first time the originals who inspired the characters of Miss Julie and her servant Jean, the bizarre circumstances in which the play was written, and the real suicide that inspired the shattering ending of the play. Recounting the playwright's journey through the "real" world as well as the world of belief and ideas, Prideaux marks the centenary of Strindberg's death in 1912 with a biography worthy of the man who laid the foundation for Western drama through the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Literature, Art, Literary Fiction

352 pages, Hardcover

First published May 29, 2012

About the author

Sue Prideaux is an Anglo-Norwegian novelist and biographer. She has strong links to Norway and her godmother was painted by Edvard Munch, whose biography she later wrote under the title Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. Prior to taking up writing she trained as an art historian in Florence, Paris, and London.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Anastasia Fitzgerald-Beaumont · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is properly no history; only biography”, so wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. I begin to feel this is true, having consumed life after life in my recent reading. There was Savonarola, then Queen Anne, then Wilkie Collins, then John Dee, then Robespierre. And now, for something completely different, there is August Strindberg!

Yes, I’ve not long finished Strindberg: a Life by Sue Prideaux. Published in this centenary year of his death, it’s the first full biography in English of the Swedish literary giant for thirty years. Actually, while he is best known as a playwright and theatrical innovator, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint Strindberg, a man of restless and towering temperament. The dramatist was also a novelist, an essayist, a journalist, a photographer, a horticulturalist, a poet, an occultist, a historian and a painter.

Prideaux begins her masterly study with an observation that comes close to being axiomatic: “During the writing of this book it became apparent to me that outside Scandinavia Strindberg is best known for two things: Miss Julie and alarming misogyny.” It was so alarming that the year after his death Rebecca West wrote that “There will never be – except among the perverse – any enthusiasm in England for the works of August Strindberg, the foremost European masculinist and hater of women.”

And, my goodness, how outrageous his hatred could be! At one point he called on legislators to reconsider the emancipation of “criminal, instinctively evil animals.” It seems to me, though, that the intensity of his passions here carries its own absurdity, almost like the theatrical anti-Semitism of the French novelist Celine. After all, this is a man who was married three times, so he can’t have hated women that much.

His misogyny, moreover, was largely conditioned by developments in his own personal life (paranoia was a recurring problem) rather than the wider political or social world. The Father, a play in which a sea captain is deliberately driven mad by doubts over the paternity of his children, was written at a time when he was having doubts about his own children by Siri von Essen, his first wife.

If you really do see Strindberg through the eyes of Rebecca West then it may come as a surprise that he started out as a great champion of women’s rights, as Prideaux points out, in advance of most contemporary feminist opinion. Getting Married, his 1884 collection of short stories advancing the cause of female emancipation, was considered so scandalous that he was arraigned on a charge of blasphemy.

In so many ways he was a man beyond his times. For example, I was surprised to learn that it was not until 1984 that Miss Julie, a play which deals with sex and class as power relations, was played in an unexpurgated version in his native land. So much for Scandinavian sexual liberation!

Altogether his was a remarkable life, Storm at one point, Stress at the next! If ever any individual proved the truth of John Dryden’s poetic observation that great wits are sure to madness near allied it is Strindberg. A heavy imbiber of absinthe, he came close to complete mental collapse in the 1890s, the period of his self-defined ‘inferno crisis’. It was this time when the Gothic quality of his life achieved a particularly bizarre intensity, detailed in Inferno and From an Occult Diary, his own accounts of the period.

The remarkable thing here this is the lucid description of a spiral down into madness by a man who, in the end, managed to retain control of his sanity. Was it just another role, like his misogyny, a drama being played out in the theatre of his life? Talking of parts I may as well mention him as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Long fascinated by the occult and a believer in alchemy, he makes the claim that he turned some dirt from the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris into gold. Yes, gold, glistening through a drug and absinthe-induced fog!

It was also during the Inferno period that he wrote an admiring review of Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream, that is before he concluded that the painter was trying to murder him! It seems obvious that The Scream is a painting that anyone in a volatile mental condition would do well to avoid, cutting, as it does, into intense states of emotion.

At the end of a journey, one taken through success and failure by turns, from a miserable childhood through mature delusions, we are left with the brilliance of the life, which proves the point of alchemy, in a metaphorical sense at least – some base things can be turned into gold. Prideaux is to be commended on her own alchemic talents, conjuring her way with considerable panache through a life simply packed with incident and drama, onstage and off.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the more insane bits that don't require much context:

During his morning walks he would take a box of morphia and a syringe in his pocket to conduct research en route. He thought he might be able to prove whether plants had nervous systems by injecting them with morphine. Once he was arrested when injecting apples hanging from a tree but he explained his scientific quest to the policeman who thought he was a madman and let him go.
He tried to make an electric generator using bits from the family spinning wheel, the whalebone spokes of an umbrella and strings filched from a sibling's violin. He drove the family mad with tearing their useful things apart. When his father told him there had long existed a reward for the person who could invent a perpetual motion machine, he set to work with parts of the coffee percolator, a soda-water bottle, bits of a birdcage, a hanging lamp and planks that he had made by smashing a chest of drawers to bits. When the machine did not work, he hurled it against a wall in a fury. However, he succeeded in making a Leyden jar, a primitive electrical device whose ingredients included the skin of a dead black cat13 he had found in the road on the way back from school and brought home in his handkerchief, and some home-made electro-phosphorus. This established his reputation as a scientist and after this triumph he laid chemistry aside for the time being.
Strindberg seemed extremely interested in monkeys at that time. He had a theory that the gorilla was descended from a shipwrecked sailor and an ordinary female monkey. One of his great proofs of this was the similarity between the inside of the paw of a gorilla and the palm of the hand of an old sailor. He showed photos of both, and indeed there was a great resemblance.
Strindberg was also greatly occupied with alchemy, and claimed to have extracted gold from earth which he had collected in the Cimitière Montparnasse.
Earlier in the year Strindberg had tried to cast an envoûtement on his daughter Kerstin so that she should become ill and Frida would summon him to her side for a reconciliation but the spell had misfired: it was not Kerstin who became ill but another of his daughters, Karin, his eldest. Racked with remorse, he became terrified that he had lost the upper hand over the hounds of Hell. He began to hear voices in the walls of people who were plotting to kill him and he resorted to exorcisms.
In the crèmerie where he still continued to take his meals and to appear perfectly normal among his friends, Madame Charlotte discovered him in her kitchen one morning having arranged all the saucepans in a circle and, wearing nothing but his shirt and his underpants, performing a dance of exorcism around them. Madame Charlotte reported affectionately:

He explained he was doing this to chase away the evil spirits which might poison the food. During the hot weather he would usually climb in through the window, since evil spirits stood watching the doorway; and one day everything in the kitchen exploded just before lunch was to be served.

This was a consequence of Strindberg trying to make gold in a saucepan, and the whole meal was ruined.16
He also practised subjugating Munch to his will. His diary of 4 June reads:

I went to see the Danish painter who lives in the rue de la Santé. The huge dog had gone. We set off to get some dinner at a pavement café in the boulevard Port-Royal. My friend was cold and felt indisposed. I put my coat over his shoulders and he became most amenable, I could do what I liked with him … Then suddenly he had a nervous seizure, he began to shake like a medium under the influence of the hypnotist … what could this mean? A tunic of Nessus? Was my garment impregnated with my nervous fluid? … Had I become a magician without being aware of it?
Munch merely had a chill.
Strindberg's host in Dieppe was the successful Norwegian landscape painter Frits Thaulow26 who made enough money to exercise his naturally benevolent nature. When, the following year, Oscar Wilde was released from Reading Gaol he went straight to Dieppe where Thaulow was not embarrassed to be seen with him and often invited him to dinner at the Villa des Orchidées. His wife Alexandra was equally magnificent. During Strindberg's stay at the Villa des Orchidées she was at first puzzled to discover dribbles of candle wax about her well-kept home but she soon discovered that Strindberg was getting up in the night and tapping the walls and ceilings with a broomstick to check for hidden machines. She suggested that they go round the house with a compass which would detect any untoward electrical activity. This pacified him for a while but when Strindberg saw a man peering through binoculars, a sight not uncommon on that or any coast, he was not to be mollified. People were spying on him and on 28 July 1896 he left Dieppe for Ystad in southern Sweden to take the medical advice of Anders Eliasson,27 a doctor he had briefly visited the previous year.
Strindberg would become neurotically upset if people arrived a minute before or a minute after the allotted hour of seven o'clock. The Beethoven Boys would gather on the stairs with their instruments and there would be a great studying of pocket-watches and listening for the church bells before ringing the doorbell on the dot.
Laura Hansson was not amused. Her husband had encouraged Strindberg to join them in Berlin to further both their literary careers and Strindberg, who was supposed to be the blue touch paper for cultural revolution, spent his time shut up in a kitchen cooking up experiments like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In addition, sulphur smelled terrible. Laura had organised a programme of introductions to the right literary people but Strindberg would not cooperate: networking was not, and never had been, of the slightest interest to him. He felt that he was being organised, something he always disliked, especially by a woman. He started to call her Laura the Mortician and Lady Bluebeard. Threatened by her energetic efforts to manage his career, he decided she was ‘A dangerous woman, stealing the spermatozoa from men and passing them off as her own. Bit by bit she'll box me up and put me away in the nut-house’21 and he did a midnight flit, leaving the Hansson house without a word and showing up at Przybyszewski's with the precious Green Sack. Laura the Mortician had been spying on him, he told Przybyszewski, he had found the Green Sack gaping open and the letters from Nietzsche were missing. She had stolen them for unnamed purposes. Later he remembered that he had left the letters in Sweden for safekeeping but meanwhile the feud raged.


Strindberg blushed that his family should be living in such an irregular household. In a family context he could be correct to the point of prudery and his embarrassment at the sound of Frankenau and her servant's drunken dinners next door turned to fury one day when Hansen took an axe to the communicating door and burst blind drunk into the family dining room, waving his revolver and terrifying the children.

(the relationship deteriorates until there are accusations of stolen peacocks and then this:)

‘Horribly nervous and with mild persecution mania after stormy days and sleepless nights! Go about with a revolver and a lead-tipped stick to protect my fair-haired boy from the Gypsy's kidnap plans!’ he wrote to Edvard Brandes in a letter jocular in tone but paranoid in undertone.53

As for Hansen, without Strindberg's friendship to live up to, he reverted to his previous bad behaviour. He did not even pretend to fulfil any duties about the estate but stayed out all night tomcatting, returning at dawn to sleep away the day. He broke into Strindberg's quarters, disarranging his possessions without stealing anything but perturbing him by infinitesimal but deliberately detectable disruptions. It was a war of psychic demoralisation using strange weapons that show Hansen to be every bit as familiar with the snakepit of psychological torment as the playwright.

‘He sets his dogs on me’, wrote Strindberg, ‘has infected the latrine, is drunk and riots every night, breaks into my apartment and terrifies my family, shoots his revolver beneath my window at three o'clock in the morning, performs Indian dances outside my door at the same time rattling sheets of zinc … enters my apartments with an illegally copied key, not to steal but to seek out family secrets so he can blackmail me at his leisure.’54

[Iulia Kyçyku · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely intense and captivating. Beautifully and neatly written. A wonderful book (and I would even say a wonderful experience). Useful to anyone interested in Strindberg's work and life or just in the extraordinary life of a permanently tormented genius.

[Marius Maxim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.

[Deb Lancaster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal. Sue Prideaux is, hands down, the best biographer I have ever read. Over the last few months I've read her Nietschze biography, quickly followed by Munch and finally Strindberg. I've never read a biographer who can bring these near mythical beings to life. She humanises them in such a way that I feel like I've met them. Just brilliant.

[Helena Halme · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well researched work on the great (and quite mad) Swedish author, August Strindberg. The story of his life is told chronically, following Strindberg's turbulent life from his miserable and loveless paternal home in Stockholm, to his many marriages and affairs, with the backdrop of his novels, plays, autobiographies and scientific experiments. Strindberg, who lived abroad in abject poverty for the majority of his life, and was married three times with five children, comes truly alive in Prideaux skilful portrayal.

At times, however, I was surprised by her strongly expressed antipathy against (as well as strong sympathy towards) some characters in the author's life. Prideaux doesn't, for example, seem to much like Strindberg's first wife, Siri von Essen, calling her 'talentless', 'course' and 'simple'. In total contrast, she seems to admire Strindbeg's third wife, Harriet Bosse. Such bias is fine in a novel, but perhaps a little unprofessional in a biography?

That said, I would highly recommend this book, for its comprehensive coverage of the life of a famous and still thoroughly underrated Swedish artist, author and playwright, as well as for the historical value of reading about the European artistic community at the end of 19th century.

[O.R. Melling · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm nibbling on this every morning with breakfast and enjoying it thoroughly. What a terrible childhood! What a mad and exciting life! Prideaux is a novelist herself and it shows in her marvellous writing. I'm adding to my vocabulary as I go along - meniscus, theophany, alembic, rumbustuous, purblind to name but a few. I'm nowhere near finished but feel enthusiastic enough to give it five stars all the way. UPDATE: Finished it this morning over French Toast with maple syrup. Cried when he died. But what is it with Scandinavians and misogyny? Strindberg, Lars Von Trier (genius, yes, but serious issues with women, Breaking Waves, Nymphomaniac I & II, good lord), and Prideaux herself. She uses the word "man-eater" for countless women and not a single use of "woman-eater" for all the men displaying similar tendencies towards promiscuity and sexual abandon. And she calls the great Isadora Duncan an "exotic dancer"!!! Otherwise, her book is truly brilliant.

[E T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely well written account of the life of mad and passionate artist

[Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible portrait of a completely fascinating, complicated and overwhelming life.

[Kate]

Recommended by Sam Leith in The guardian

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