The life of a strange man and prolific writer

A Life

By Sue Prideaux

Yale. 371 pp. $40

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Reviewed by Frank Wilson

August Strindberg was just the sort of character only God could imagine - which may well be how Strindberg, one of the strangest of men, saw things himself.

"God in us, yes, in so far as we are emanations of His being, that is one thing," he once wrote to a friend, "but God as a fixed point outside us, by which alone we can accomplish anything, the Creator above us, and we His creations with traces of His being, that is how I understand the matter."

In the English-speaking world, Strindberg is best known as the author of plays, principally the naturalistic dramas Miss Julie and The Father, but also, to some extent, such later, stranger works as A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata. In Scandinavia, however, he is known for much more. As Sue Prideaux points out at the start of this splendid biography, in addition to Miss Julie, Strindberg wrote an additional "sixty plays, three books of poetry, eighteen novels and nine autobiographies."

Prideaux, an Anglo-Norwegian, is a novelist herself, and has wisely chosen simply to narrate the life of a man who happened to be a great writer. The works appear as benchmarks along the way, discussed (always insightfully) to the extent that they fit the narrative.

Of course, as Prideaux notes, "even more than most, [Strindberg] is a writer whose life illuminates his work." Or, as his onetime friend, the painter Carl Larsson, put it, he was "the great poet who attacks the material round about him like a Cyclone attacks people and whisks them away in whichever direction the wind is blowing, never pausing to ask what will become of the objects that are sucked in to the confusion. . . . What he wrote should be read as poetry, and seen in the context of his own dark soul."

Born in 1849, Strindberg was raised to be miserable: His Pietist mother assured him that he could do nothing on his own to be saved from eternal damnation, and his father routinely beat him. He was "bullied at home, bullied at school, valued in neither place and tormented in both." He attended Uppsala University off and on, with minimal financial help from his family, finally leaving without taking a degree. Before that, though, his play The Outlaw had won him the attention of and a small gift from Sweden's king. He then got a job in the Royal Library that would, in a strange way, prove of seminal importance to his thinking and work.

In the meantime, though, he had met the woman who would become the first of his three wives, Siri von Essen, an aspiring actress of modest talent, already married with a 2-year-old daughter. This marriage lasted the longest - 14 years - and produced two daughters and a son (another daughter died in infancy). The other two marriages (one child from each) lasted only a couple of years. All began in romantic rapture and ended in paranoia and recrimination. They also served as rich material for his work. The Father, for example, draws heavily, even explicitly, on the final days and quarrels with Siri.

Strindberg's marriages form the grotesque centerpiece of his life, and it would have been easy for Prideaux to make them the focus of her book. But she treats them as she does the works: essential elements needing to be integrated into the story in order that it may reveal, to whatever extent possible, the nature of the person the story is about.

For Strindberg's interests outside of literature also need to be taken account of. He was surprisingly good at learning languages, even difficult ones like Icelandic (though he never learned English). He was a powerful and original painter, as well as an innovative and pioneering photographer.

Most significantly, he was an alchemist. The interest can be traced to his time at the Royal Library, which was filled with occult volumes, and whose chief librarian, one Gustaf Klemming, was "a noted mage, spiritualist and Swedenborgian who was so terrified of being buried alive that he kept a coffin of open-weave willow in the basement and instructions that he was to lie there thirty days before interment."

Prideaux notes that "it has been recorded that there were no fewer than fifty thousand alchemists in Paris in 1883," and that some noted scientists were much taken with the occult, including Pierre and Marie Curie. Sir William Crookes, discoverer of thallium, claimed to have seen ghosts, and Sir Oliver Lodge, a pioneer in wireless telegraphy, believed in communication with the dead.

Strindberg convinced himself that he had transmuted base metals into gold, but soon realized that "from my former atheism I had relapsed into the deepest superstition." He saw omens everywhere. "The mission then," Prideaux writes, "becomes one of interpretation, a decoding of messages to see where the powers want to send him and in this way to show him the meaning and purpose of his life. . . . A rooster weathervane flaps its wings, soot falls into his absinthe, an indentation on his pillow takes a curious shape; nothing is too great or too insignificant to be a message from the powers. What does it all mean?"

The principal literary fruit of this period was his autobiographical novel Inferno, which Prideaux describes as "a book before its time . . . plot-less, meandering and entirely subjective." It is also, she points out, a book that "forms a headwater to the stream of consciousness literature but it is unlike Woolf or indeed Proust or Joyce who use the beauty of words to suck or seduce us into their stream. Strindberg uses almost childishly plain language." This certainly helps explain how he could go on to write something like The Ghost Sonata, which takes the standard tale of a student in love with a beautiful girl along the corridors of a grand house that turns out to be a malevolent region where nothing is as it seems, where time moves backward and forward and consciousness and the unconscious routinely change places.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Prideaux's book is how it manages to make Strindberg - a most unhappy fella, who fell out with just about everybody he formed a relationship with - seem both attractive and sympathetic. He does seem to have arrived at a certain serenity by the time of his death from stomach cancer in 1912.

Frequently vilified in his native land throughout his life - he was once tried for blasphemy, for which he could have been sentenced to a couple of years' hard labor - by the time of his death he had become something of a beloved figure to many. So much so, in fact, that when the Swedish Academy failed to award him the Nobel Prize, a subscription was taken up to which some 20,000 people donated 50,000 kroner.

On March 2, 1912, just weeks before his death, he was awarded the Anti-Nobel Prize. His greeting to the presenter was typical: "Don't look so damn solemn!"