Books: Obsession Strindberg: a Biographyby Michael Meyer

The advantage to being a fanatic is that everybody remembers you for your obsession. The disadvantage is that nobody remembers you for much else. Nearly three-quarters of a century after his death, in 1912, Johan August Strindberg looms large in the public consciousness as the theater’s greatest misogynist, a man who never met a woman he couldn’t hate.

The bleakest of Swedes did, in fact, think of women as “whores,” including his three wives. In brilliant but vitriolic plays like Miss Julie (an aristocrat lusts after her servant) and Creditors (hell in the shape of a triangle), Strindberg practices his own advice to other authors on the treatment of female characters: “Accuse them, blacken them; abuse them so that they haven’t a clean spot–that is dramatic!” His second wife, Frida, an Austrian journalist, compared marriage to Strindberg to “a death ride over crackling ice and bottomless depths.” There is little evidence that his first wife, Siri, a Finnish actress, or his third wife, Harriet, a Norwegian actress, would have disagreed.

But to begin and end with this cartoon of frothing male vituperation does nothing to reveal how a Strindberg play can still electrify an audience in 1985, or to explain why writers as different as Kafka and Camus, Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre have read Strindberg with admiration bordering on reverence.

Biographer Michael Meyer, accustomed to tamer Scandinavians (as in his 1971 Ibsen: A Biography), fails to address the fearful Strindberg paradox as forthrightly as he might. He is long on description, short and cautious on analysis. But in the process of collecting data from Strindberg’s life and from some 75 volumes’ worth of plays, novels, stories, poems, essays, diaries and letters, Meyer scatters all the fascinating and self-contradictory clues a reader could ask for. Strindberg emerges as the most deceptive of fanatics. He was “slim and elegant,” fastidious in his dress and aristocratic in his bearing, with a “trace of shyness.” The great intimidator confessed to being “afraid of the dark,” as well as of “dogs, horses, strangers.” He did not lack that rarest trait of the possessed, a sense of humor. He loved Dickens. He translated Mark Twain. When the mood was upon him, possibly after a few absinthes, he strummed his guitar while standing on one leg.

For a single-minded writer, Strindberg’s interests were strangely diverse. In addition to being the most prolific of authors–throwing his pages to the floor as fast as they flowed from his pen–he was a painter of considerable skill. Before he came to the theater, by way of walk-on parts at the Royal Theater of Stockholm, he studied medicine. Dabbling in alchemy, he attempted to produce gold by mixing copper and iron sulfate. Languages enchanted him. He applied himself to Chinese and Japanese, and although he remained violently anti-Semitic, he decided in middle age to learn Hebrew.

For a decade Strindberg lived in exile (Paris, Berlin, Switzerland), and all his life he lived as a kind of pilgrim, tracking down every cracked new theory, pursuing every wild whim in the desperate hope that it might lead to the Truth. As an early modern, caught in the whirlwind and helping to agitate it, he understood that he inhabited “an age of transition”–at one moment “split and vacillating,” at the next moment “urgently hysterical.”

In the best plays of Eugene O’Neill and John Osborne, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter, wherever anger scalds and language blisters, the ghost of this strange, contradictory figure hovers in the wings. The demons he unleashed from his bedroom still wander through films and fiction today. As a young man, Strindberg wrote his manifesto: “No spring-cleaning is possible, everything must be burned, blown to bits.” Here stands the classic confession of the artist as terrorist–not a nice man, but very much our contemporary.