The exuberance of Strindberg
Andrew Brown
August Strindberg Olaf Lagercrantz Translated by Anselm Hollo (Faber £20) The man is a byword for moanings and gloom —'Strindberg had a little skunk/ Its coat was white as mink/ And every- where that Strindberg slunk/ that skunk was sure to slink' — yet the one thing to emerge unambiguously from this biogra- phy is his immense capacity for enjoyment. No matter how broke, misunderstood, unhappily married, or just as unhappily divorced Strindberg liked to suppose him- self, Lagercrantz, from the low and un- blinking perspective of a toad, is always Pointing out how Strindberg delighted in these sensations, as in all others.
And he had good reasons for happiness. He hardly had a day's illness in his life until he contracted the cancer that killed him: he worked prodigiously, and easily; his wives were intelligent, beautiful and interesting women. Because of all this, he managed to establish himself as one of the maddest and most miserable men in Europe.
There is no point in dealing with the Plays here. Lagercrantz hardly does. His interest is in how they were written, a rather more difficult subject. He is himself a considerable stylist, though this fact has been lost in translation, and I don't think that it can be illustrated in print at all. The Swedish language lends itself to sentences that are both melodic and taut; once the sound and the tensions of syntax are removed from a Swedish sentence, it is likely to appear flat.
One can blame the translator for missing Certain felicities of expression: the remark that Strindberg 'saw salmon kicking in a net as soon as he saw a glint of water', Which is not a cliché in Swedish, is inade- quately translated by the English cliché 'he counted his chickens before they were hatched'. There is a perfectly good Swed- ish cliché, which Lagercrantz uses else- where, to express that thought; and where the author has gone out of his way to avoid Worn phrases, the translator should too.
On the other hand, enough remains in this book of Lagercrantz's cast of mind to give the reader a glimpse into a thoroughly alien, yet still admirable morality. To British instincts, the most revolting thing that Strindberg did during the break-up of his first marriage was to treat his wife as he did. It says something for his character that when he did hit her on one occasion, this was remembered by all concerned as a• unique lapse, worth writing pages about. But the abuse that he poured on her: a whore, a lesbian, a vampire, and so on, and the humiliations that he put her through were really outrageous. She was not, as far as is known, even unfaithful to him in the customary way, let alone with the energy and dedication required to support his allegations.
Lagercrantz says quite clearly that this was the case, and that Strindberg in real life was only working himself up to the pitch necessary for the production of A Fool's Apology and Miss Julie. In this edition, Lagercrantz says that 'there was nothing insane about Strindberg's be- haviour in the sense that it was not possible to consider his action's as a rational prog- ression', which appears to sidestep the idea of moral insanity (an example might be provided by the experiments of Dr Mengele, which also proceeded in a ration- al progression, from one horror to the next). But in the original, Lagercrantz's comment is both more shocking and more sensible. What he actually wrote is that 'in Strindberg's behaviour there is nothing that is insane if that means that it can't be fitted into a sensible plan'.
It is not the same to be rational as to be sensible; 'rational' is a morally neutral term; 'sensible' is a term of praise; and to say that Strindberg's treatment of his wife was sensible implies that it was all justified by the production of A Fool's Apology`and Miss Julie. Whether his wife felt that this was the case is not recorded; and one has seen far too many examples of bad be- haviour being justified in the name of second-rate works of art to feel that the argument has as much force as it should. But this reaction does Lagercrantz an injustice; for if I understand him right, he does not say that it is permissible deliber-
ately to mistreat the people you love in order to produce a work of art, but that outsiders cannot judge between lovers, and should not attempt to do so. Unforgiveable behaviour within marriage is like nuclear warfare: it can only be limited if one side has no possibility of retaliation, but be- tween true lovers, there is always the possibility of a holocaust.
Yet consider the behaviour that Lager- crantz does censure: `Strindberg permitted himself moments of low comedy that were not worthy . . . while presenting Carlsson as an articulate and inventive, alert person, he proceeds to humiliate him in order to please (the general reader). Carlsson be- comes at that point a puppet manipulated by his master, and Strindberg himself something of a literary imperialist who believes that the rent for the summer cottage and payment for milk and fish also buys the right to ridicule the people who provide these services.'
What British writer would not think that he got at least as much for his money? Did Waugh, in Abyssinia, suppose that the inhabitants were immune to ridicule simply because they accepted his money? And yet this is a remarkable piece of criticism because it starts with the literary weakness of Carlsson, and derives this convincingly from a moral fault in the author. And this is done with much greater skill and percep- tion than one would find in English critics prone to moral seriousness.
Even if this book in translation lacks the immediately rewarding surface of the ori- ginal, the force of Lagercrantz's intellect is such as to provide anyone who is prepared to invest a little trouble in the book — whether or not you care about Strindberg or Sweden — with a number of useful puzzles of this sort. There is a quality of decent seriousness about the Swedes, in- timately connected with their feeling that they are not themselves funny, even if life is. The English tend to take themselves lightly, but life rather more seriously; a dose of Lagercrantz, or, in dangerous cases, Strindberg, will convince the suffer- er from ethnocentricity that neither he nor the world is worth taking seriously at all. And if literature can do that, who cares how many women suffer for it?
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