Strindberg's False Starts
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Strindberg's False Starts THE FIRST VOLUME of August Strindberg's autobiography appeared in 1886 when he was 37 years old. It had not been recollected in...
...This sounds suspiciously close to literary masturbation, a fertilizing of oneself...
...It shows us a flock of Strindbergs cohabiting one spirit, and performs an astonishingly thorough preFreudian analysis of them...
...his detestation of teaching by rote and cruelty...
...He was living in Switzerland and quarreling with his first wife, Siri, once his "queen with the sunlit forehead...
...It begins with over-rich expectations...
...Maria Weyl, the sister of his second wife, wrote that "he can be savage with men but he does not even contradict a girl"-yet he is often thought of as the woman-hater par excellence...
...But since the children received food and comfort from her, they loved her...
...He wanted success and suspected the motives of his admirers...
...His false starts were to be the prologue to a badly-navigated, tempestuous voyage of self-exploration in poetry, prose and drama that took poor, suffering, sublime Strindberg farther than anyone else has ever been...
...Talk about Oedipal this-and-that, competition between the sexes, the pen as a penis, latent homosexuality, paranoia, and the rest is dead-ended jargon when it refers to a creator of Strindberg's caliber...
...According to an imaginary interview that prefaces the book, he sets out to produce not a novel, not a confession ("I have no intention of asking for forgiveness"), but "an attempt at the literature of the future," meaning, no doubt, fiction in which the author is his own hero, but views himself with Zola-like "scientific" detachment...
...Strindberg is usually said to have hated the other sex...
...the two may for him have been synonymous...
...He might just as well have become, to deduce from the range of his activities, a soldier, a biologist, a musician, a chemist, a physicist or a teacher...
...He could not get on the right footing with his mother, father or brothers...
...Others of Strindberg's subsequent themes bud at this stage: His encounters with poverty among school friends...
...Evert Sprinchorn taps European (and especially Scandinavian) history and criticism to put information behind the topical names and events mentioned in passing, to maintain clear lines of perspective between the epoch of the book and of its composition, and to question tactfully certain of Strindberg's factual errors and misleading statements-that, for example, he was conceived out of wedlock...
...Strindberg's life was an intermittent flow of emotional and intellectual crises, almost all of them of his own provoking...
...his facing of the question that recurs to the unorthodox artist-How can I know I am right...
...Since this three-sided vision suggests every man's dream of femininity, Strindberg's laceration of woman in print expresses not so much hatred as, first, his confusion between the real and the ideal (a confusion that lends vitality to his discussion of almost every topic he touches on...
...and also chaste, inhuman figures to be simultaneously owned and worshiped, private goddesses, exclusive muses...
...Kapff's Warning by a Friend of Youth Against the Most Dangerous Enemy of Youth and discovered that he had only 10 years to live...
...He considered himself "dead, physically, morally and financially...
...they must also be unremittingly vibrant young creatures, perfect instruments of lovemaking...
...The volume seems to have formed the basis for the opening chapter of Elizabeth Sprigge's standard biography which may, when and if later segments of the autobiography are printed, prove to have been in large part a deft synopsis of Strindberg's own writing...
...The book's subtitle is "The Evolution of a Human Being, 1849-1867," to which Strindberg adds, "There's only one person's life we really know and that one is our own...
...But the book's quietly obsessive undercurrent is the forming of his attitude toward women...
...his view of life as "a struggle from beginning to end...
...He was by conviction a "realistic" artist who toyed with occult theories and mystical beliefs-going so far as to imagine he had inherited the soul of Edgar Allan Poe who had died the year (1849) he was born...
...He is great because, among other reasons, his hard-won ferocity allowed him to articulate man's longing for woman as she ought to be and his unjustified, ungentlemanly disappointment with her as she is...
...The Son of a Servant (Anchor, $1.25) is Strindberg's portrait of his origins as a man and a mind...
...Reading The Son of a Servant one feels now and then that he deliberately created as fascinating a life as he could, in order to be able to describe it so well without having to tell lies or embellish...
...He could not bear the women he loved to have faults or ordinary desires...
...If the fears of his adolescence persisted he may well have unconsciously continued to defy them...
...And the cure...
...He was the fourth of eight children, and yearned for more of his mother's time and affection than she could or would give him...
...But Jesus could not heal the body, only the soul...
...His spinal marrow and his brain would rot, his face would turn into a death's head, his hair would fall out...
...What Lucas and other patronizers of Strindberg are blind to is the quality of the raw pieces the playwright cut out of his life to make his art...
...These early years, in truth, comprised one long false start...
...They must be cushiony wife-mothers to run to with troubles, infinitely resigned and tolerant, capable of shedding vast, balmy quantities of consolation...
...Yet in retrospect he understood it with a clarity that must have terrified him...
...It had not been recollected in tranquillity...
...If he did, the notion of hate, here as everywhere, needs qualification...
...He had just outraged Sweden with the collection of short stories Married, which attacked the upper classes, the church and birth control, and brought him to public trial-he was narrowly acquitted...
...the rudiments of his vulnerable systems of ideas...
...the only thing left was to save the soul from everlasting damnation...
...So many false startsand some of them went on into middle age...
...The family, he concludes, is the "home of all social evils, a charitable institution for indolent women, a prison workshop for family breadwinners, and a hell for children...
...The fact seems to have been that he could not cope with his life-it dizzied him-much less model it...
...Strindberg was of a temperament that risks the forbidden...
...If it does, all the more credit to Miss Sprigge for trusting Strindberg enough to take him more or less at his soul's face value...
...His relationship with his father was equally-one might say, "classically"-ambiguous...
...His immediate objective at 15, though, was to rescue his soul...
...For he is his own most convincing witness...
...Later he was to practice medicine, journalism, sinology and acting before and while he wrote his first plays...
...The body was condemned to death at 25...
...At 15, he tells us, he read Dr...
...Not a confession and definitely not a whitewash job: The author is more callous with himself than a conventional biographer would be, although as recently as 1962 F. L. Lucas could go tut-tutting through Strindberg's life and plays and find little of worth in either but "sheer intensity," whatever that is, and a "trenchant brevity of dialogue" which "can still to some extent survive...
...Perhaps the act of writing about it at feverish speed served to free him from his worst memories...
...He kept ducking himself in his past until, in the end, he had to go directly into his unconscious for surcease and inspiration, and, almost by accident, to invent automatic writing (and painting) and thus give rise to a new kind of selfprompted, characteristically 20th century literature...
...and, second, the access of power that rose in him when he took up a pen...
...He became a Pietist and talked of a career as a clergyman (if he did live beyond 25), maybe an ironnerved Brand: He was 16 when Ibsen's play was published...
...Here, then, is young Strindberg in his own words, uncut and rendered in fine, enjoyable English...
...Strindberg calls him "a stranger, more an enemy than a friend," then hops into the paternal shoes for an instant, remembering the present, and remarks, "That is the thankless position of the father in the familythe provider for all, the enemy of all...
...A very important human being evolves in The Son of a Servant...
...in 1912 even, shortly before his death, he willed to his third wife, Harriet Bosse, his "formula" for making gold...
...Nevertheless, he completed the record of his first 18 years, almost 100,000 words, in two months, dashed off a succeeding volume in less than a month and, in the following two years, wrote his three most celebrated naturalistic plays, The Father, Miss Julie and Creditors...
...The book's editor and translator, Evert Sprinchorn, remarks in his introduction that "the taciturn Ibsen seems an open book compared to the embarrassingly candid Strindberg who tells all, who strips himself naked before our eyes, and who becomes more elusive, more mysterious as he does so...
...The relief, in any case, was only temporary...
...Timid in person, he found extraordinary combativeness as well as release in his writing...
...Yet he condemns her unjustness and violence, her making him confess to drinking some wine he had not drunk, her egging his father on to punish the children, and being small-minded (she is the servant of the title...
...It also assists our understanding of Strindberg's urge to write and of the nature of his sources, without explaining his gifts away in terms of neuroses, as some critical theses have tried to do...
...Christ...
...And the great advantage of telling one's own life is that one is dealing with a sympathetic and interesting person...
...Very likely it was...
...He had debts and three children to keep...
Vol. 49 • June 1966 • No. 12
