Book Review : Making Sense Out of a Stormy Life

August Strindberg by Olof Lagerkrantz. Translated by Anselm Hollo. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $24.95)

The thesis of this new and painstakingly researched biography of August Strindberg makes cool sense out of a perfervid life at the cost of draining it of some of its interest.

That is not really a reproach to the author, Olof Lagerkrantz. Nobody could stand Strindberg’s emotional gyrations indefinitely--his friends, supporters and three wives operated in shifts--and the reader of any detailed biography is likely to become fed up as well. Lagerkrantz, perhaps without meaning to, simply suggests a reason why.

Take Strindberg’s ferocious onslaught upon his first wife, Simi, with accusations of adultery and lesbianism and, upon one occasion, with a beating. Lagerkrantz writes that “Strindberg was entering a period in which he was consciously creating sources of infection--illnesses and passions--in his own organism for the sake of his art.”

And throughout his detailed account of the playwright’s feuds, furies, manic bursts of activity; hallucinations, researches into chemistry, theology and history; public explosions of various kinds; love affairs and friendships that almost invariably turned to hatred and obsession, the author comes back to the same question. Was Strindberg consciously and unconsciously driving himself to extremes in order to sustain a literature of extremity? Was a contorted life his uncontrolled substance, administered for the sake of the creative trances it induced?

Partly so, Lagerkrantz suggests; and if the suggestion is acute, it is also damaging. The interminable sexual, political, literary fits and starts, the agonies, the wildness, already lose much of their interest if they are explained, as often they have been, as signs of intermittent mental illness. But as deliberate indulgences in order to scare up prophecy, they lose even more. They become about as stirring to follow as warm-up calisthenics.

Strindberg was born and brought up in comfortable circumstances, though he used the fact that his mother had once worked in an inn to picture himself as a struggling son of the servant class. As the author points out, he would invariably dramatize his circumstances. Apart from accusing almost every one who was close to him of betrayal or worse, he would portray himself as alone and struggling.

In fact, he had admiring patrons and supporters--along with enemies, to be sure--right from the start. One of his earliest plays caught the attention of the King of Sweden, who invited him to the palace for a chat and a small stipend. During a separation from Simi, he writes of living on a starvation diet of oatmeal and herring. His landlady later revealed the menu: pancakes and four eggs for breakfast, a steady stream of fish and chicken, varied by veal and beef.

Early Successes

Lagerkrantz relates the early successes, among them a panoramic treatment of Swedish life in “The Red Room” and a satiric portrait of social pretentions that is still regarded as the Swedish “Candide.” He recounts the marriage to Simi, more or less by prearrangement with her then-husband: an initial idyllic life on an island outside Stockholm, and a stormy existence in Paris after the attacks upon one of his books seemed to him to require exile.

There was a return to Sweden for trial and triumphant acquittal on a blasphemy charge. There was a stay at a broken-down castle in Denmark where Strindberg conducted a strange three-way relationship with the aristocratic landlady, her overseer and the overseer’s nubile sister; where he wrote “Miss Julie” and “The Creditors.” There was a long, fairly happy sojourn in Berlin, where he briefly married a well-to-do Austrian journalist; and later, a productive return to Stockholm, and marriage to a young actress, Harriet Bosse.

That marriage didn’t last either. Strindberg’s sexual passion invariably turned into the conviction that his partner was out to destroy him. He spent his last years as a grand old man; a celebrity, as he was for most of his life; and--also for most of his life--in a turbulent whirl of feuds, polemics and hallucinations.

Cool Judgment

Lagerkrantz’s book shows both love and cool judgment. It suffers from several kinds of murkiness, however. The translation is wooden and awkward, although I liked the fact that Strindberg’s poetry is quoted both in English and Swedish. Lagerkrantz clearly feels that his subject is a great man; but he doesn’t manage to convey much of the greatness. He is dealing with a torrent, clearly, but he doesn’t succeed in showing us what the torrent is made of.