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Summary
Summary
Novelist, satirist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist, and hellraiser--August Strindberg was all these, and yet he is principally known, in Arthur Miller's words, as "the mad inventor of modern theater" who led playwriting out of the polite drawing room into the snakepit of psychological warfare. This biography, supported by extensive new research, describes the eventful and complicated life of one of the great literary figures in world literature. Sue Prideaux organizes Strindberg's story into a gripping and highly readable narrative that both illuminates his work and restores humor and humanity to a man often shrugged off as too difficult.
Best known for his play Miss Julie, Strindberg wrote sixty other plays, three books of poetry, eighteen novels, and nine autobiographies. Even more than most, Strindberg is a writer whose life sheds invaluable light on his work. Prideaux explores Strindberg's many art-life connections, revealing for the first time the originals who inspired the characters of Miss Julie and her servant Jean, the bizarre circumstances in which the play was written, and the real suicide that inspired the shattering ending of the play. Recounting the playwright's journey through the "real" world as well as the world of belief and ideas, Prideaux marks the centenary of Strindberg's death in 1912 with a biography worthy of the man who laid the foundation for Western drama through the twentieth century and even into the twenty-first.
Author Notes
Sue Prideaux is a writer living in Sussex, UK. Her book Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in biography.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this exhaustively researched and beautifully produced biography, Prideaux (Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream) tackles the peripatetic and tumultuous life of August Strindberg, the famously difficult 19th-century Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, photographer, and painter. Prideaux shows a clear fondness for her subject, portraying him as a deeply earnest and vulnerable man, and an almost comically tireless seeker after great truths-whether of literature, science, or the occult. Though Prideaux occasionally glosses over some of Strindberg's nastier prejudices, including his misogyny and anti-Semitism, her efforts to balance the more incendiary elements of a complex and fallible man serve her intention of making Strindberg a more "approachable" figure. By discussing the conservatism of Strindberg's Sweden and the new philosophies of consciousness and evolution swirling through Europe, Prideaux does an excellent job of locating Strindberg in his period-she convincingly sets Strindberg's work at the leading edge of modernism, and demonstrates the ways in which his own life and inner machinations were his most important sources of intellectual and artistic inspiration. A must-read for fans of Strindberg, Prideaux's tome is substantial and interesting enough to please anyone looking for a great bio. Includes an index, bibliography, chronology, notes, and numerous illustrations and photos. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Sue Prideaux opens her biography of August Strindberg, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of his death this year and which is longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize, with the genesis of his most famous play,Miss Julie. Early in 1888, Strindberg, his first wife Siri, and their three young children were staying in a Copenhagen hotel they could not afford for the premiere of his play The Father. Among the other hotel guests was the feminist writer Victoria Benedictsson, who was in despair at the end of her affair with Georg Brandes, the powerful literary critic who had recognised Strindberg's first novel, The Red Room (1879), as a work of genius. On 7 January, Strindberg's seven-year-old daughter Karin woke him in the middle of the night: she was terrified she had condemned her soul to eternal damnation by keeping a vigil at the bedside of Benedictsson, who had taken a morphine overdose. Remembering this episode in later life, Karin remarked: "I'll never forget the expression on his face. He was so interested. Not a smidgen of human sympathy or compassion crossed his features, just naked curiosity he was fascinated." Prideaux's achievement is to restore Strindberg's humanity. She shows the vivisectionist of extreme emotion as a kind and humorous man. She is not an apologist for the crueller consequences of his chaotic personal life instead she calmly sets the pain he caused himself and others alongside his astonishing creative achievements (61 plays, three books of poetry, 18 novels, nine volumes of autobiography, in addition to all his paintings, photographs, musical compositions, scientific experiments and botanical research). Violent beatings at home and school, and his mother's early death, shattered Strindberg's childhood. When he left home for Uppsala University in 1867, his father, who by then controlled around a third of Stockholm's steamships, gave his son a handful of cigars and told him to fend for himself. "From time to time in Strindberg's plays and stories," Prideaux remarks, "one finds the characters who wield the power offering their victim a cigar while administering a life-crushing blow." Hoping for an Uppsala worthy of its luminaries Linnaeus and Swedenborg, Strindberg was sorely disappointed by the pettifogging way "the professors fought for advancement by means of pamphlets and newspaper articles". Having left without a degree, he got a job as assistant librarian at the Stockholm Royal Library, where he encountered The Devil's Bible, full of exorcisms and spells, written on 300 parchments, each the entire hide of an ass. He found alchemy and black magic alluring for the rest of his life. Siri was the only child of the Finnish Baron Reinhold von Essen. She was two years younger than Strindberg, wealthy and, when they met, already married and the mother of a two-year-old daughter. Wooing her with poems, letters, suicide threats and the promise of an acting career, he persuaded her to give up her child, husband, most of her fortune and her social respectability for him in less than a year. Strindberg is often accused of misogyny. Prideaux is careful to dispute this charge and replace it with a more accurate, if no less troubling, account of his attitudes to his wives and lovers. He genuinely wanted Siri to have the career she dreamed of. He was prepared to look after their children while she went off to Finland to act. In his book Getting Married (1884), he set out a feminist manifesto of woman's rights. But their own marriage ended with him knocking Siri to the ground and pummelling her with his fists while the children looked on. Feeling himself "provoked to the very root of my testicles", he took a doctor with him to a brothel so his penis could be measured in its erect state (16 x 4cm), then asked one of the prostitutes to rate his performance ("entirely creditable though not cum laude"), before his semen was examined and pronounced fertile. A second marriage to Frida Uhl, a journalist 24 years younger, was a bigger debacle. After the birth of their daughter, when his wife wanted to resume her career, Strindberg declared her journalism useless. In Paris, he became friends with Gauguin, and Prideaux notices the similarities in the letters they wrote to their ex or abandoned wives to explain that they could send no money to support their offspring. Gauguin played his mandolin and Strindberg played his guitar, and they planned a South Sea musical that came to nothing. His third failed marriage was to Harriet Bosse, a young actress. He tried to cancel their honeymoon so he could work. When George Bernard Shaw met Strindberg, he was completely charmed: "No one could have imagined that he had been the intimate of one of those households that he put on stage." Prideaux's sophisticated book makes it entirely credible. When asked if she regretted her marriage to Strindberg, Frida said: "Through him my insignificant existence was raised to a higher sphere. I would marry him again without a moment's thought or doubt." This, too, is credible. Strindberg inspired love far beyond his circle of family and friends. By the end of his life he had semi-mythic status in Stockholm. Outraged that he was not awarded the Nobel prize, 20,000 people, over half of them impoverished, contributed to a public fund and he was given an anti-Nobel prize of 50,000 krone. He gave almost all of it away to charity. Ten thousand mourners followed his coffin. The next day his grave was vandalised.
Booklist Review
The strikingly handsome August Strindberg (1849-1912) had a miserable childhood and became the devoted father of five children. Less successful as a husband, he was married and divorced three times from much younger women two of them actresses. He tried to strangle his second wife on their honeymoon. His plays, murderously claustrophobic scorpion dances of marriage, portray extreme psychological states. He also painted Turneresque pictures, was an expert photographer and gardener, and dabbled fruitlessly in alchemy and the occult. Poor until he was 50 years old, tried for blasphemy and obscenity, he was awarded an anti-Nobel Prize by his supporters. Prideaux's biography, the fourth in English, is lavishly illustrated and reasonably priced and efficiently narrates the complex life in 308 pages of text. Unfortunately, most of Strindberg's works discussed in this book apart from Miss Julie, The Ghost Sonata, and Getting Married are unknown to English-speaking readers. Strindberg influenced Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Ingmar Bergman, and no one ever heard him laugh. His last words were: Don't bother about me. I no longer exist. --Meyers, Jeffrey Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Prideaux garnered wide acclaim for her award-winning Edvard Munch (2005), a biography of the conflicted, controversial Norwegian artist best known for his iconic The Scream, a painting that captured the corrosive anxiety that afflicted not just his own psyche but the soul of the contemporary world itself. The same accolades are likely to descend on the novelist-cum-art historian for the present insightful, compelling, comprehensive study, which illuminates another fascinating Scandinavian who was subversive and no less tormented by enduring inner demons-- Swedish polymath August Strindberg. Strindberg and Munch were not only friends who shared a common Nordic heritage but also kindred spirits, as Prideaux's complementary portraits reveal. For example, both experienced childhood trauma; both lived turbulent lives, internally and externally; both shocked their conservative audiences by unabashedly challenging conventional thinking; both traveled abroad extensively amid difficult circumstances; both explored the vexing enigmas of personal identity and the unconscious; and both fashioned influential works that depict the ineluctable angst that suffuses the human condition. Simply stated, Prideaux has produced two superb biographies that are eminently worthy of the subjects they commemorate. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. H. I. Einsohn Middlesex Community College