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Strindberg and Love
‘Quite so; it came to an end. It was only magic lantern pictures . . .’ Sweden’s greatest dramatist, August Strindberg, wrote to a friend in 1904, when he was contemplating divorce for the third time. ‘Changing pictures, dissolving views. But isn’t the whole of life like that? Two minutes of bliss for thirty days of torture. That is the price.’
Strindberg was always attracted to independent, artistic women and altogether he was married to three – two actresses and one writer – and he proposed to a fourth, who was initially an actress and later became a professional painter. These four women – Siri von Essen, Frida Uhl, Harriet Bosse and Fanny Falkner – are the subjects of this book.
The danger of becoming involved with a writer, as the women in Strindberg’s life were all to discover, is that you are likely to find yourself woven into the work, and not always in the most flattering light. Whenever he fell in love Strindberg always felt that he had surrendered his soul. He turned the women he adored into goddesses and so when they inevitably failed to live up to his idealized image of them he became disillusioned and fought back through his writing. He always believed that he could transform the pain of loss into poetry and declared that life was only material for dramas – mainly tragedies.
Martinus dissects Strindberg’s relationships with women in all their complexity and builds up a fascinating picture of a romantic literary genius and those who loved him.
EIVOR MARTINUS is a playwright, novelist, translator and theatre director. She was born in Sweden and studied German, French, Latin and Russian at school and took her degree in English and Swedish Literature. She has lived in England since 1963.
She has adapted several Swedish classics for BBC Radio and has translated fifteen of Strindberg’s plays into English for stage productions in London and New York, including The Father, Lady Julie, The Ghost Sonata and The Great Highway. Four of her own plays have been produced in England and the USA and she has also translated and adapted plays by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Stephen Lowe and Caryl Churchill for theatres in Sweden.
Her association with the Lyckå Chamber Music Festival in Sweden began in 1992, since when she has directed productions of The Soldier’s Tale, The Magic Flute and a collage of love scenes from Shakespeare’s plays entitled Shakespeare on Love. She has received awards for her work from the Swedish Writers’ Union, the Swedish Academy and the British Comparative Literature Association.
Strindberg was always attracted to independent, artistic women and altogether he was married to three – two actresses and one writer – and he proposed to a fourth, who was initially an actress and later became a professional painter. These four women – Siri von Essen, Frida Uhl, Harriet Bosse and Fanny Falkner – are the subjects of this book.
The danger of becoming involved with a writer, as the women in Strindberg’s life were all to discover, is that you are likely to find yourself woven into the work, and not always in the most flattering light. Whenever he fell in love Strindberg always felt that he had surrendered his soul. He turned the women he adored into goddesses and so when they inevitably failed to live up to his idealized image of them he became disillusioned and fought back through his writing. He always believed that he could transform the pain of loss into poetry and declared that life was only material for dramas – mainly tragedies.
Martinus dissects Strindberg’s relationships with women in all their complexity and builds up a fascinating picture of a romantic literary genius and those who loved him.
EIVOR MARTINUS is a playwright, novelist, translator and theatre director. She was born in Sweden and studied German, French, Latin and Russian at school and took her degree in English and Swedish Literature. She has lived in England since 1963.
She has adapted several Swedish classics for BBC Radio and has translated fifteen of Strindberg’s plays into English for stage productions in London and New York, including The Father, Lady Julie, The Ghost Sonata and The Great Highway. Four of her own plays have been produced in England and the USA and she has also translated and adapted plays by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, Stephen Lowe and Caryl Churchill for theatres in Sweden.
Her association with the Lyckå Chamber Music Festival in Sweden began in 1992, since when she has directed productions of The Soldier’s Tale, The Magic Flute and a collage of love scenes from Shakespeare’s plays entitled Shakespeare on Love. She has received awards for her work from the Swedish Writers’ Union, the Swedish Academy and the British Comparative Literature Association.
318 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2001
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December 7, 2012
I've been obsessed with Strindberg since I had to study his plays at school in Finland. Having lived in Sweden as a child my language skills were beyond those required by the curriculum and so my Swedish teacher decided that I should not only achieve a good mark in my Swedish Baccalaureate, but should learn something new. She set about encouraging me to write an essay on Strindberg. For a teenage girl the Swedish playwright was not an easy subject. The prolific, socially critical and revolutionary writer, who died in 1912, was generally known as a misogynist. Eivor Martinus' motivation for Strindberg and Love is to try to refute this allegation. Strindberg's three marriages and a last engagement to a fourth, young actress Fanny Falkner, may suggest otherwise.
Martinus describes the writer from the point of view of his wives. She tries and succeeds in describing a passionate author living in a time with dramatic social change with fond detachment. Many of the sources the author has available to her are by Strindberg himself, which makes her task even more difficult. He had a tendency towards long periods of depression, often triggered by the end of an affair, or marriage. To combat these bouts of what I'm sure in today's world would be diagnosed as bipolar episodes, he often retreated to writing. The resulting novels were putrid, hostile, egoistic accounts of the previous relationships. But as Martinus points out, he made notes in his diary to remember not to let anyone see the writing; especially a new object of his love. Economic realities, however, often intervened and time and time again Strindberg had to sell the poisonous manuscripts to his publisher to keep himself in food and wine.
Martinus account of Strindberg is vivid, the writing is excellent, and the reader finds it easy to follow the loves and lives of the great writer without feeling she is reading a boring biography. I was sad to come to the end of the book. I felt that the women in his life and Strindberg were loved by each other as well as by the author.
Martinus describes the writer from the point of view of his wives. She tries and succeeds in describing a passionate author living in a time with dramatic social change with fond detachment. Many of the sources the author has available to her are by Strindberg himself, which makes her task even more difficult. He had a tendency towards long periods of depression, often triggered by the end of an affair, or marriage. To combat these bouts of what I'm sure in today's world would be diagnosed as bipolar episodes, he often retreated to writing. The resulting novels were putrid, hostile, egoistic accounts of the previous relationships. But as Martinus points out, he made notes in his diary to remember not to let anyone see the writing; especially a new object of his love. Economic realities, however, often intervened and time and time again Strindberg had to sell the poisonous manuscripts to his publisher to keep himself in food and wine.
Martinus account of Strindberg is vivid, the writing is excellent, and the reader finds it easy to follow the loves and lives of the great writer without feeling she is reading a boring biography. I was sad to come to the end of the book. I felt that the women in his life and Strindberg were loved by each other as well as by the author.
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