(Johan) August Strindberg
Playwright, novelist. (1849-1912)
Strindberg was an absinthe guzzling misogynist, the browbeating godfather of naturalist drama. A prolific, experimental writer, he penned more than 60 plays, 10,000 letters and a library of novels, histories, short stories and poems in his forty year career.
In a foreword to A Dream Play, August Strindberg wrote:
'In this dream play, the author has attempted to imitate the inconsequent yet transparently logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.
The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble. But one consciousness rules over them all, that of the dreamer, for him there are no secrets, no scruples, no laws.'
Sounds like night out with the Green Fairy.
His works were towering psychological studies of sometimes labyrinthine structural complexity. Like Tchaikovsky, Strindberg was so far ahead of his time that he never really enjoyed the success that his talents deserved, but his influence can be seen in the works of German Expressionism, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter. Henrik Ibsen had a portrait of Strindberg at his desk. 'I cannot write a line', he once remarked, 'without that madman standing and staring down at me with those crazy eyes'.
The son of a shipping agent, Strindberg was born in Sweden in 1849. After his mother died in1862, his father remarried, and Strindberg's hate for his stepmother seems to have profoundly affected the playwright - in 1907 he published a piece entitled, Woman's Inferiority To Man. Indeed, critics will point to his misogyny as the flawed cornerstone of his output.
His finest work centre around the battle of the sexes, be it The Dance Of Death or The Father. His most famous play - the social drama, Miss Julie - is awash with his warped Darwinian theory. A young woman has an affair with her father's servant and ends up ordering the man to hypnotise her into killing herself.
Suicide was not a foreign concept to Strindberg. Legendarily miserable, it was while living in France that Strindberg went through his darkest period. He had moved there in 1896 to be at the centre of the exciting cultural explosion in fin-de-siècle Paris. But the potent mixture of harsh criticism to his work, guilt at abandoning his children, and the damaging allure of a café society drowning in absinthe's viscous hazards pushed the playwright into an abyss of paranoia and psychosis. He started dabbling in alchemy and occultism and back in the relative safety of Stockholm, recorded his experiences in the devastating novel, Inferno.
'I had been reading the precious little pamphlet The Delight Of Dying and it aroused a longing to leave this world. In order to investigate the borderland between life and death I lie down on bed, uncork the bottle of cyanide and let its deadly fumes fill the room. He is coming closer, the Reaper, so mild and seductive, but at the last moment someone always appears or something happens that cuts everything off; the waiter has an errand, a wasp flies in through the window.
The powers refuse me this one and only happiness, and I bow to their will.'
Strindberg eventually died from stomach cancer in May 1912. The modest wooden cross above his grave bears the Latin words: O Crux Ave Spes Unica (Hail To The Cross, Our Only Hope).
Posted: 01 November 1999
Revised: 14 June 2004
