Wednesday 28 March 2012

Life of Drama


“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.

16 comments:

  1. Scandinavian artists all seem to suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, alcoholism, and paranoia. Latitude and climate may play a bigger role in human affairs than we have yet realized.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Calvin, I think Montesquieu may have got there first. :-)

      Delete
  2. The green Fairy, wormwood leaves induce clarity, heightened mental and mood states but abuse provokes mental deterioration. Directions for use, pour icy water slowly through a lump of sugar on a slotted spoon over a glass containing a small amount of absinthe until the liquid is pale green.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anthony, you will find a piece here on the Green Fairy called, well, The Green Fairy! (27 October, 2009)

      Delete
  3. Now (having read, before your thoughts on this book, a cracking review in the Spectator), I really do have to read this.

    One slight aside: while not having any reason to doubt Strindberg's great misogyny, I do think that Rebecca West (talented writer that she was) has rather good (and pretty consistent) form in not being fair or accurate in her portrayal of those with whom she is in disagreement - in part because she often allowed intense, irrational emotions to mingle with her political vision.*

    I'm thinking particularly of her cruel, even defamatory, portrayal of her depicition of GK Chesterton as a monster and fanatic when he opposed plans by English socialists to adopt (abduct might not be too strong a word -so separated from their native country, culture, and family they would have been, shipped across the Irish sea to prim Socialist houses of tedium in the north of England) Irish children during a famine there in the 1st decade of the 20th century;

    or (more prosiacly, and at far greater length - interminable length, in fact) of the way her niggling intense HATRED of her Serbian friend's German wife completely takes over and ruins her portrayal of "the most interesting parts of Old Yugoslavia" in her otherwise rather fabulous "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon". Instead of carrying on with her stated aim of writing about Balkan politics and society, she lets a personal grudge take over her narrative.

    You appear to have concluded this too, thankfully!

    * I suppose one might misogynistically add "how like a woman" here - had the consequences of the adoption of such attitudes, only slightly disguised, by large numbers of (often immaculately uniformed) men in the 1930s not been intimatedly tied in with the great tragedy of Christian civilisation, both Western and Eastern. I fear too this cult of emotionalism, transmogrified into other forms, has not gone away, even if the intellectual structures that nurtured in then have changed very substantially.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dominic, many thanks. I reviewed Black Lamb and Grey Falcon here almost two years ago (Blood of the Lamb, 31 May, 2010). This is my conclusion about Gerda:

      When the party arrives in Belgrade we meet Gerda, his wife. Quite simply Gerda is a monster. She is German, not just German but an obvious Nazi. She travels south with West, West’s husband - who accompanies her throughout her trip - and Constantine to Macedonia but hates everything she sees: she despises the Slavs and Slav culture. Her mere presence diminishes Constantine, from giant to dwarf. It was with her that my sense of disbelief kicked in. Here the book was entering into the territory of the novel. I quickly realised that there was no Gerda; that she was an idea, a metaphor for the things to come, a metaphor for the Third Empire that was to visit Yugoslavia in 1941, a metaphor for a final sacrifice to the Black Stone.

      Delete
    2. Thanks, Ana, I'd quite forgotten that you'd read and reviewed BL&GF . Maybe you're right, but I still don't think Gerda works as a literary construct ;)

      Delete
  4. Your Blog is Fabulous. Good article rather. Very interesting.
    I admire the valuable information you offered in your article. Excellent submission very good post.
    Passport application form.
    hindi movies.
    Hardware and Networking.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ana another highly intelligent post that would not have appeared elsewhere. Strindberg was rough around the edges but an original, he saw many truths about the dynamics of power in relationships in his plays. He deserves to be remembered. The range of your reading is a salutory reminder of the extent of knowledge.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Richard. :-) He does indeed deserve to be remembered.

      Delete
  6. I found the Blog in the archives, you covered Absinthe very well. By the way, there was much inbreeding in Scandinavia.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Anthony. I expect there was. All those long dark nights. :-)

      Delete
  7. After all, this is a man who was married three times, so he can’t have hated women that much.

    Criticizing women's behaviour does not equal misogyny, Ana.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely not, James. But Strindberg did not just criticise women's behaviour; he criticised them as a species! His preface to Miss Julie gives a good general introduction to his attitude. Things got so bad that Siri von Essen, his first wife, refused to read his new work.

      Delete