Strindberg: A Life Of Contradictions

September 01, 1985|By Reviewed by Gerald Weales Author of ``Clifford Odets, Playwright,`` and of the forthcoming ``Canned Goods as Caviar``.


By Michael Meyer

Random House, 615 pages, $24.95

Simple minds always talk about contradictions and inconsistencies,``

August Strindberg wrote in an essay on Hamlet, ``but every living creature is composed of elements which are not homogeneous.`` If inconsistency is the true test of being alive, Strindberg, who frequently announced that he was about to die, must have been the most alive of modern writers. A playwright who helped change the form of world drama and a novelist who influenced the shape of contemporary Swedish prose, he regularly renounced literature for political, philosophical, metaphysical and scientific projects.

``I am a socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is antireactionary!`` he wrote in 1880; but 10 years later he explained the

``changed direction`` of his social thought by describing himself as ``born an aristocrat``; at the end of his life, the people`s poet once again, he asked to be buried in the workers` section of the cemetery.

He was a misogynist who both lusted after and idealized women; he liked to imagine or recall the image of a peaceful and loving family, but he fought his way through three love/hate marriages and vacillated between indulging and ignoring his offspring. He was an anti-Semite whose reputation depended on the support of Jewish publishers, producers and critics.

``Jews do not believe in friendship or gratitude,`` he insisted in a letter full of unfriendliness and ingratitude, written after Albert Bonnier, his Jewish publisher, had cancelled a debt of Strindberg`s. His life story is littered with broken friendships since the charm, warmth and concern that drew people to him was likely to turn in an instant to suspicion and hate. To love or admire Strindberg was to risk being pilloried in play, novel, pseudoautobiography or essay.

Add to these contradictions of character Strindberg`s preoccupation with the occult, his hallucinatory adventures and his ``persecution mania,`` and it is hardly surprising--his stature as an artist aside--that biographers are drawn to so richly confused a life.

Michael Meyer`s monumentally detailed ``Strindberg`` follows hard on the heels of the translation of ``August Strindberg,`` the 1979 work by Olof Lagercrantz , whom Meyer does not identify, coyly calling him ``a recent Swedish biographer.``

The difficulty in writing Strindberg`s life is how to impose form on this disorder. ``Why must I suffer thus? What have I done?`` he asks his diary, but the anguished cry turns to farcical lament when the context indicates that he is unhappy with the food his cook is providing.

Then one remembers that the cook in ``The Ghost Sonata,`` written a few months before the dairy entry, is one of ``that breed of vampires,`` sucking the substance from the other characters, and that 20 years earlier Strindberg had identified writers as vampires, sucking ``the blood of his friend, his nearest and his own.``

That Strindberg`s life is the primary subject of his work is obvious, but the question is how much of his life is his invention. At one point he says that he is not sure whether ``The Father`` is his life or ``a work of the imagination,`` and he elsewhere sees his life as unfolding like a novel.

Lagercrantz tends to take everything Strindberg has written--including letters and diary entries--as the work of a self-conscious artist, which is presumably what Harriet Bosse, his third wife, meant when she said years after his death that ``Strindberg never wrote a word which he didn`t intend to be published.`` This makes him an unlikely source of hard information, his remarks being the expression of transient mood or immediate need. But who can the poor biographer trust? The recollections of ex-wives and former friends presumably are as doctored as Strindberg`s own ``autobiographical`` writing.

Strindberg once spoke of ``my tragicomic life.`` As though Lagercrantz took his clue from that phrase, his biography often reads like a spoiled high comedy, which is a possible approach to the playwright`s abrupt shifts from angst to the everyday.

Anyone who knows Meyer`s ``Ibsen`` knows what to expect of

``Strindberg.`` The biographer works his methodical way through the life, month by month, trying to sort out the changing concerns of Strindberg, balancing his personal crises, his intellectual enthusiasms and the unending flow of his writing.

The best thing for American readers about Meyer`s book is that the biographer, who is also a translator of Strindberg`s plays, is more interested in him as a dramatist than Lagercrantz is. Still, Meyer`s Strindberg comes across as an intellectual and emotional chameleon, most arresting at his most vituperative. The avalanche of detail that makes Meyer`s biography valuable also makes it something of struggle to read. Strindberg`s comment

notwithstanding, in this version his life does not unfold like a novel.