Studies in Strindberg
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Studies in Strindberg Michael Robinson d STUDIES IN STRINDBERG STUDIES IN In this volume Strindberg’s accomplishments as a dramatist are STRINDBERG set against his achievements in other elds, as an autobiogra- pher, painter, letter writer and theatre director. There are studies of individual plays, in which Strindberg’s theatre is related both to naturalism and the theatre of the absurd, and of the role played by his life-long interest in historical drama as a means of mirroring his own experience. Other essays consider the problems posed by Strindberg’s preoccupation with converting his own life into litera- ture and the relationship between his later plays and the musical Expressionism of Schoenberg and Berg as well as the importance he placed on letter-writing as a model for writing of all kinds; these letters are also used to explore his ideas about acting and thea- tre generally. A recurring concern is with the extraordinary period of mental and emotional turmoil, known as the Inferno Crisis, in which Strindberg refashioned himself as a writer; not least through his ground-breaking work as a painter. The collection is prefaced by an account of the di culties Strindberg’s works have encountered in their reception in England and concludes with a ‘penance for Strindberg’ in the form of a wide-ranging study of the nineteenth- century actress that re-examines the concern with character and theatricality of the earlier essays in a new context. ROBINSON ]u[ www.ubiquitypress.com www.norvikpress.com Michael Robinson Cover illustration: The Town (1903) by August Strind- berg, Strindberg Museum, Stockholm. ]u[ NORVIK PRESS SERIES Studies in Strindberg Michael Robinson ][u Norvik Press ubiquity press London Published by Ubiquity Press Ltd. Gordon House 29 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PP www.ubiquitypress.com and Norvik Press Department of Scandinavian Studies University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT www.norvikpress.com Text © Michael Robinson 1998 Original edition published by Norvik Press 1998 is edition published by Ubiquity Press Ltd 2013 Cover illustration: e Town (1903) by August Strindberg, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Via Wikimedia Commons. Source: Google Art Project. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:August_Strindberg_-_e_ Town_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Ubiquity Press Ltd Printed in the UK by Lightning Source ISBN (paperback): 978-1-909188-02-0 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-909188-06-8 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-909188-10-5 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bac is work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. is licence allows for copying any part of the work for personal and commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Suggested citation: Robinson, M 2013 Studies in Strindberg. Norvik Press/Ubiquity Press. DOI: http:// dx.doi.org/10.5334/bac To read the online open access version of this book, either visit http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bac or scan this QR code with your mobile device: For B. E. R. and in memoriam G. E. R. Contents A Note on the Text i An Introduction 1. Leaving Gravesend at Last, or Introducing Strindberg to England 1 Narrative, Plot and Self 2. Translating the Self 15 3. Life Plots and Letters 25 4. History and His-Story 39 5. ‘P-aris’: Note for an Unwritten Volume of Strindberg’s Autobiography 53 Plots, Plays and Performance 6. Naturalism and the Plot in Creditors 63 7. Prisoners at Play: Form and Meaning in e Dance of Death and Beckett’s Endgame 71 8. ‘Spela den så att Pontoppidan och Fru Nansen få blåskatarrh’: Strindberg’s Correspondence with Actors and Directors 87 From Naturalism to Modernism 9. Towards a New Language: Strindberg’s Break with Naturalism 105 10. ‘New Arts, New Worlds!’: Strindberg and Painting 115 11. Strindberg and Musical Expressionism in Vienna 135 A Penance for Strindberg 12. Acting Women or e Performing Self 151 Notes 167 Index 187 A Note on the Text Wherever possible references to Strindberg’s works are to the new edition of Samlade Verk currently under publication (hereafter SV). Quotations are identied in parenthesis within the text thus [SV 4, 240]. Otherwise John Landquist’s edition of Samlade Skrifter (1912–20, hereafter SS) has been used. Volume and page number are likewise given in arabic numerals in parenthesis after a quotation thus [SS 54, 235]. SgNM denotes Strindberg’s so-called ‘Gröna säcken’ (e Green Sack), encompassing the drafts, notes and manuscripts he originally preserved in a green linen portmanteau while travelling. ese are now deposited, along with much other material, in the Royal Library Stockholm, in sixty-nine box les, transferred there from a previous deposition in Nordiska Museet. e inventory of the contents undertaken by Margareta Brundin and catalogued by Barbro Ståhle Sjönell now enables an item in Gröna säcken to be identied with some precision. us SgNM 15: 4,7 refers to Box 15, folder 4, page (or item) 7. (For later items identication is sometimes by Box only.) Strindberg’s letters, collected in twenty volumes as August Strindbergs brev, edited by Torsten Eklund and Björn Meidal (Stockholm, 1948–1996) are identied in parenthesis in the text with the volume number in Roman numerals. Where an English translation exists in the two -volume collection of Strindberg’s Letters, edited and translated by Michael Robinson (London and Chicago, 1992), the page reference is also included in parenthesis in the text. [VI, 45; 1, 273] thus denotes volume VI, page 45 of the Swedish edition and volume 1, page 273 of the two-volume English edition. References in the notes to SE (Cambridge, 1996) are to August Strindberg, Selected Essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 1996). An Introduction 1. Leaving Gravesend at Last, or Introducing Strindberg to England ‘Address for the time being: Gravesend by London 12 Pelham Road. (England) Best wishes to your brother and sister Yrs. August Sg’ [IX, 191]. is hastily written and unpunctuated message appears on an undated postcard from Strindberg to his eldest daughter, Karin, now living with her mother, Siri von Essen, in Finland. Strindberg had seen neither his three children nor his rst wife since leaving Sweden in September 1892 for what was to prove an extended self-exile spent mainly in Germany, Austria and France. Here, however, he was keeping his rst family tenuously in touch with his movements following his recent second marriage to the young Austrian journalist Frida Uhl. e ceremony had taken place on Heligoland in May 1893, with two local pilots as witnesses, because the recent cessession of the island to Germany in 1890 meant that British marriage regulations still obtained there, and no banns were required. Now he and Frida had proceeded to England to enjoy (though that is hardly the word to describe so disastrous a venture) a combination of business trip and honeymoon. England – or ‘die Fraueninsel’ as he described it in an equally laconic note to the Finland-Swedish author Adolf Paul [IX, 196; 2, 457] – has rarely been closely associated with Strindberg, either during his lifetime or since, and the three weeks that he spent there in 1893, rstly in Gravesend, where he and Frida came ashore, and then in London where they lived in Pimlico, at the home of the theatre director J.T. Grein, are emblematic of the diculty with which he has subsequently found acceptance here. Strindberg’s immediate problems stemmed in part at least from Grein. He had been encouraged to leave Germany by the latter’s vague promise to mount a production of e Father at his recently established Independent eatre, where it would be a Scandinavian follow-up to the production of Ibsen’s Ghosts with which the theatre had opened the previous year. However, although he advertised Strindberg’s play among his future repertoire on the playbill for his inaugural production, Grein failed whatever promise he may have given. In fact he travelled abroad during the time Strindberg spent in London and he would later write that he could neither nd an English actress prepared to play 2 An Introduction the part of Laura nor obtain the Lord Chamberlain’s permission to put the play on in the rst place. Problems also arose where the publisher William Heinemann was concerned. Strindberg not only believed that Heinemann was prepared to publish his sequence of ve meditative poems Somnambulistic Nights in Broad Daylight (1884–90); he also thought that he was interested in commissioning English editions of some of his novels. Heinemann seems to have had no such serious intention, however, and Strindberg’s initial enthusiasm for England as the latest of several promised lands in his career rapidly deteriorated. ‘England is a southern country,’ he had written to Paul, shortly after arriving in Gravesend, ‘with roses high on the house walls even at Whitsuntide, laurels in ower as tall as two men and enormous, real chestnut trees!’ [IX, 198]. But within a month the entire country had become for him a ‘robbers’ nest’. He informed Paul that he had been ‘on the brink of getting rabies in all the heat and pit coal’ [IX, 215], and, without waiting to see any of his schemes mature, he hurried back to the more familiar ground of Germany. Moreover, as so often in his career, business failure rapidly soured his personal relationships, this time with Frida who ominously remained behind in London ‘to take care of [the] theatres and publishers’ [IX, 215].