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Stringberg,
who was described by Eugene O’Neill as ‘the precursor of all
modernity in our present theatre,’ was a frustrated actor who made his
life into a performance, driving himself to the brink of madness, if not
beyond, and transforming his experience into plays, autobiographical
fiction and unreliable autobiography.
He might have been an even greater artist if he had been capable
of more detachment, but he wrote in the only way he could—hastily,
without revising, turbulently confusing suspicions and superstitions
with objective realities. Waldemar
Bulow once asked him: ‘Why
do you lie so much about your friends?’
‘I tell you, the minute the pen gets into my hand, the devil
gets into my body.’
The son of a housemaid and a spice
dealer turned commission agent (who went bankrupt four years after his
son was born) Strindberg went from high school in Stockholm to Uppsala
University, but his studies were interrupted by spells of teaching, an
unsuccessful effort to become an actor and a suicide attempt.
He wrote his first play in four days when he was twenty, and
within two years had achieved a success with I
Rom (In Rome), a one-act
play which was given seven performances at Stockholm’s Dramatic
Theatre.
He
was 23 when he finally left Uppsala in 1872, and within six years he had
worked as a journalist and a librarian, made another attempt to become
an actor, completed two more plays and married the first of his three
wives, Siri von Essen, who played the title role when Fröken
Julie (Miss Julie, written in 1888) was produced in 1889.
To some extent he was identifying—as the son of a
housemaid—with Jean, the valet who sleeps with his master’s
daughter, but he could also identify with Julie all the better for
having had an affair during the summer of 1888 with a 17-year-old
housemaid and having felt a quasi-aristocratic superiority.
He
makes one of his narrators say: ‘I
burn with the desire to accuse myself and defend myself both at the same
time.’ Tormented
throughout his life by guilt, he found relief by writing about it and
projecting it into his plays, but he also had enough in common with
Flaubert and Zola to believe that the artist could be a scientific
observer of behavior and, by dissecting it, contribute to human
understanding of humanity. Strindberg took a morbid pleasure not only in
analyzing his own pain but in inflicting additional pain on himself for
the sake of having more to observe, better material to feed into his
plays. Even his suspicions
that Siri was deceiving him were liable to be fomented, wilfully, when
he wanted to write about jealousy.
Nor
was he merely forcing his life to model for his art. With the
self-destructive subtlety of a schizophrenic, he used his own drama as
material for accusations against Siri.
Fadred (The
Father, 1887) had dramatized the in-fighting in their marriage.
By October 1887, when the play was in rehearsal, their
relationship had improved, but working on his script had the effect of
reviving his suspicions. He
wrote to his friends, trying to check on her movements, and he wrote a
five-page letter to a Swedish judge, saying he had written the play only
to ‘find out something’ about her, but the plot must have given her
the idea of driving him mad with jealousy.
The day before the dress rehearsal he was convinced that he was
soon going to find out whether the play was a fiction or whether his
life had been a fiction, and that as soon as he knew he would either go
mad with guilt or kill himself.
H
was divorced from Siri in 1892 and married to the Austrian journalist
Frida Uhl in 1893. She left him after 17 months and they were divorced later in
1894. Until 1897 he wrote
little, traveling between Paris, Austria, and Sweden, suffering from
hallucinations and twice staying voluntarily at a ‘nerve clinic.’
He studied alchemy and the occult, and he kept a diary, not only
recording dreams and hallucinations, but developing them, building up a
new vocabulary of imagery he would use in the theatre.
Till
Damascus (To Damascus, Parts I and II 1898, Part III 1901) is partly
a dissection of the problems in his second marriage, partly a
re-enactment of the conversion he had undergone to what he called
‘confessionless Christianity,’ partly an attempt at auto-therapy.
The Beggar represents the facet of the hero which is uppermost
when self-contempt gets the better of him.
As in Ett drömspel (A
Dream Play, written 1901, staged 1907), he took dreams and music as
his structural model, weaving patterns but refusing casual connections
and sequential consistency.
In
May 1901 he married Harriet Bosse, an actress who scored several
successes in his plays, even after they were divorced in 1904.
For
three years (1907-10) he had his own theatre, the Intimate Theatre,
which presented most of his ‘chamber plays.’
They vary between the subdued tone-poem, almost static, and the
hysterically galvanic Pelikanen (The Pelican, written and produced 1907).
Seventeen
months after the closing of his theatre, Strindberg died of stomach
cancer.
--Ronald Hayman
Fact & Fiction
In one of the arguments between Strindberg and his actress wife,
Harriet Bosse, he reminds her that what he was writing was a play, not a
biography. His duty, he
says, is to be true to the characters, not the facts.
I suppose that corresponds to my intentions.
The other two characters are fictional, and Strindberg never
wrote a play about his marriage to Siri von Essen.
But he did write a biased novel about it, A
Madman’s Defense.
As
a biographer, I try to leave the balance of sympathy unsettled until the
last possible moment. Was
Ted Hughes in the right and Sylvia Plath in the wrong?
What about the way Jean-Paul Sartre treated Simone de Beauvior?
Was Proust committing suicide when he shortened his life by
refusing to go into a clinic with an illness that needn’t have been
terminal? How could I sympathize with a man who treated women badly as
Brecht did? How could I
make an anti-Semitic anti-feminist into the hero—or at least the
central character—of a play? It’s
easier to write a dialogue when you’re carrying on an argument with
yourself on a subject that makes you impassioned.
A
biography must take its shape from the facts.
If you don’t exert yourself in finding out what they are, the
book won’t be any good. But
when I was writing this play, I knew how easy it would be to overload my
skiff, I read A
Madman’s Defense—if I hadn’t once bought a second-hand copy,
the play might never have been written—together with the chapters in
Michael Meyer’s biography that describe Strindberg’s marriage to
Siri (1877-92) and the marriage to Harriet, whom he met in 1900 and
married in 1901. She left
him before the year was over, came back to him, and left him again.
I’m still shockingly ignorant about his second marriage, which
was to an Austrian journalist, Frida Uhl, who became his wife in 1893
and left him seventeen months later.
In
the mid-nineties he was verging on madness.
He dabbled in alchemy and tried to manufacture gold.
I haven’t read Inferno,
the account he wrote in French of these mad years.
I didn’t read a biography of Harriet Bosse until after I’d
finished my first draft. I
made some changes, but not many. I’m
not certain that the play would have turned out worse if I’d done more
research, but that’s my gut feeling.
I was trying to concertina two marriages, one of which lasted
fifteen years, into a two-hour play.
If I’d found out more of the facts, the skiff might have sunk.
But
there’s one way in which writing a play is like writing a biography.
You can’t do either without giving yourself the illusion that
you know all the important characters rather better than you know most
of your friends. And in
this play all four characters are important, or five, if you count Siri.
But a playwright is a special case, and Strindberg is a special
playwright. You have only
to see one good production of The
Father or The Dance of Death
to feel you’re on intimate terms with him.
I
admire him enormously. I
agree with Eugene O’Neill, who called him “the precursor of all
modernity in our present theatre.”
In making him into a character and putting him into a rehearsal
situation, I’ve been unforgivably impertinent, and I’m counting on
being forgiven. He made one
of his narrators say “I burn with the desire to accuse myself and
defend myself both at the same time.”
What I’m doing to him is gentle in comparison with what he did
to himself, and, to misquote what he said at the end of his preface to Miss
Julie, I may be making a mistake, but if I am, I hope to go on and
make others.
--Ronald Hayman, July 1995
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