Strindberg's three foreign wives

It is strange to think that Strindberg, who revolutionized the Swedish language, chose three wives who in different ways struggled with the language. Siri von Essen, his first wife, had grown up in Finland speaking French with her mother and Swedish with her father but since she had no formal education she never learnt to spell properly in Swedish and Strindberg often had to correct her spelling. Also, when she started working as an actress, she had a Finland-Swedish accent which was not acceptable on the Swedish stage at that time. She worked hard at trying to eradicate that accent and it is dubious whether she ever got rid of it altogether.

Frida Uhl, Strindberg’s second wife, set out to learn Swedish. She even suggested that Strindberg’s eldest daughter Karin should come and live with them in order to teach her Swedish. Frida’s letters from England in 1894 show that she made some attempts at least to pick up vocabulary but the marriage did not last long enough for her to make any serious progress. She was fluent in French and English, and German was her native tongue, so given the right circumstances she probably could have mastered Swedish well enough to translate Strindberg’s works into German, as was her intention.

Harriet Bosse, Strindberg’s third wife, was born in Norway and lived in Norway until her mid teens so when she arrived in Sweden she was told by various theatre producers that she needed to master ’King’s Swedish’ before she could hope for major parts.  When she auditioned at Dramaten the Artistic Director said that he would only employ her when she had learnt to speak like a normal person, i.e. without a Norwegian accent. Harriet spent two months with a voice coach, working intensively at her pronunciation and intonation and after that she was offered her first part at Dramaten. She continued to struggle with the language for a long time after that and complained that the Swedish language ’did not want to get into my head, which is understandable, because  I previously spoke the most beautiful language in the world.’ But Harriet was stubborn and ambitious and she felt sure that one day she would master the Swedish language and speak like a native. For a long time she conversed in Norwegian with her sisters but in the end she gave in and spoke Swedish in private as well.

Strindberg international

So, the centenary of August Strindberg’s death has come to a close. It has been an extraordinary year and I wish I could have spent more of it in Sweden where there was an impressive number of new productions. At least I managed to see Lucky Per’s Journey at Intiman in January and that was a truly marvellous performance. It is a play which is not often done but this production was so inventive and imaginative that I long to find some English producers who could put it on here in England. George Bernard Shaw believed in the play but Strindberg himself thought it was too ‘bourgeois’ (‘brackig’).

One of my favourite Strindberg plays is The Ghost Sonata and I had the good fortune to enjoy three different productions of that play this year alone. One was in my translation at the Chelsea Theatre in London in July, directed by Eldarin Yeong, a young Chinese woman director. She had chosen a very physical approach and this created an eerie, surreal atmosphere. The production was her Master’s Thesis in Directing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and she had managed to cast only professional actors. Like so many English actors they had found Strindberg odd and difficult. Judging by what I saw at one of the last rehearsals - because I missed the performances in the theatre - we shall see more of this Chinese director.

The second version of  the play was at a small theatre in San Francisco as part of the Strindberg conference there in October. The set and the costumes were more solid and the style of acting was less adventurous but it went down well with the audience on the night I was there. The last production of The Ghost Sonata was in December in Uddevalla where I was giving a talk about Strindberg and it was put on by a dance company. It was totally absorbing and had that marvellous, zany, unpredictable quality. The costumes, the mobile set and the movement were all beautifully in tune with the play. In September, a French ensemble came to London and performed Mademoiselle Julie at the  Barbican, with Juliette Binoche in the lead. It was a contemporary setting with disco dancing and see-through screens which separated the audience from the actors. It was powerful but I didn’t believe in Jean who walked in a stooping fashion with unkempt hair and with a generally rather slovenly appearance. 

Anna Pettersson gave a shortened version of her brilliant performance of Miss Julie in San Francisco and I can now see why the critics raved about it.

Personally, I have given twelve lectures about Strindberg this year and it has been heartening to see how people warm to different aspects on Strindberg. My topics have covered Translation problems, Strindberg and his Women, Faith and Doubt in Strindberg’s works, Strindberg productions in England, The Chamber Plays  and a summary of my experience  with Strindberg. It has been a truly inspirational year and it has been my privilege to talk in London, Seattle, San Francisco, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uddevalla and Trollhättan.

Apart from that I continue to spread the word to my small group  of students at Southbank International School, London. 

Strindberg's directing tips

Strindberg was never a theatre director in the modern sense of the word but he was very keen to help his actress wives and his last protégé, Fanny Falkner, to achieve the best results on the stage. He was perceptive and had an intuitive approach to acting. He first spotted Fanny when she was appearing in a non-speaking part at Intiman in one of his plays. He looked at her without saying anything but he went straight to August Falck, the artistic director of the theatre and told him: ‘There is our Easter girl, alive and well. She must play the girl in Easter.’ Falck was appalled and thought Strindberg was mad to think of casting a completely inexperienced and untrained girl in a leading part. Falck already had another actress in mind for that part but without consulting Falck Strindberg invited Fanny and a young actor called Alrik Kjellgren to his apartment at Karlavägen and there he rehearsed the young couple privately. After a few rehearsals Strindberg was moved to tears. He turned to Kjellgren and said:’What do you think, she is a born artist. Her expressions, her eyes, her hair - her hair!’

He drew up a list of the basic principles of speaking on stage. In a letter that he wrote to Fanny on 30 May 1908 he gave her the following advice:

‘1. Speak slowly, legato, all words in the sentence strung together; the commas and full stops must not produce a staccato, but glide across with a little extra sound which I shall teach you.

2. Speak naturally, but do not ‘talk’.

3. A broad register in the beginning, a little affected; imagine making a speech or preaching but without shouting.

4. Begin to speak grammatically correctly, and get used to a slightly pedantic speech on a daily basis, as if you were reading aloud or giving a lecture. Stop talking or chatting when you are speaking normally. In other words: don’t be careless, but speak slowly.

5. Watch your consonants, especially your R’s. The vowels are easier to hear.

6. If you make a habit of speaking carefully every day you won’t need to read so much.

7. Speak, articulate, ‘phrase’ like a singer. Listen to your own voice and enjoy it when it sounds good.

8. Flygare speaks carefully as a rule, listen to her, imitate her. It should sound a little exaggerated, important!

And the whole secret about speech is : slowly, drawn out, legato. Beginners prattle but do not speak. They deliver in staccato, which is the worst of all.

Walk in nature; speak to yourself there, read poetry; that strengthens your voice.

And learn to breathe through the nose, when you speak, then you get the best delivery...

I am determined to make you into a great actress; but take it seriously and work at it because it is not child’s play.’

Did he succeed? Well, Fanny became a member of the original company at Intiman and took part in many plays during the next two years until the theatre had to close due to financial problems.She played Bertha in The Father and she took over the role of Eleonora in Easter when Flygare went on tour with the play. She was also the first actress to play the leading role in Swanwhite, the play Strindberg had written specifically for Harriet Bosse. Her youth and innocence and not least her beauty seduced the critics and audiences alike. 

Strindberg akso asked her to design the cover for his play Abu Casem’s Slippers and after Strindberg’s death she returned to painting and became a well-known miniature portrait artist.

What's in a name?

What’s in a name?

About twelve years ago I came across an attractive, young-looking woman who could have been in her mid forties. She introduced herself as Madeleine Strindberg, August Strindberg’s granddaughter.

‘Hello, hello,’ I thought. ‘Something funny here.’ She can’t be one of Siri von Essen’s granddaughters. Karin only had one daughter, also called Karin and she married her cousin, Hans’ adopted son, Erik. They didn’t have any children so there were no grandchildren from Strindberg’s eldest daughter, or only son for that matter. Greta, the second daughter, died in a train crash just a month after August’s death. She was pregnant at the time but the child did not survive either.  Anne-Marie, Strindberg’s daughter by Harriet Bosse, only had two sons, so Madeleine could not belong to that family either. Who was she then? Could it have been one of Frida Uhl’s offspring? Frida had one daughter by Strindberg, Kerstin, who in turn had one son, Kristoffer Sulzbach. 

‘Ah!’ But Frida had an affair with another well-known playwright, Franz Wedekind, and managed to produce a son before her divorce from Strindberg was made absolute. In other words, Madame Strindberg, as she called herself for the rest of her life, had given birth to another Strindberg who could legitimately keep the name and who, because of that name, got Swedish citizenship and helped thousands of Jews  flee from Germany during the  Second World War. He became a journalist and writer and wrote a very interesting novel about life in Berlin during the war. The German title was Die Juden in Berlin. Wie sie leben, lieben und sterben. When the book was published in Sweden the Strindberg family were not pleased to have this ‘bastard’ Strindberg in their midst so he published the Swedish version under another name, Fredrik Uhlson.

The book was reissued by Bonniers a few years ago with an afterword by Jan Myrdal. So it was this Friedrich Strindberg, August’s legitimate (since he was born in wedlock) but not biological son who had a daughter in the 1950s called Madeleine. She is a well-known artist, based in London and she has won the prestigious Jerwood Prize for her art. In a way, of course, Madeleine was right. She is August Strindberg’s granddaughter, even if his blood is not running through her veins.

I bought one of her expressive paintings at an exhibition, signed in flamboyant handwriting: Madeleine Strindberg. So now I can boast that I have a Strindberg painting in my collection. 

Talking about Strindberg

August has followed me everywhere this year so far and if things work out we shall stick together until the end of the year, like an old couple. Maybe it is time to live apart for a while after that. We shall see.

 I am amazed at how many people are jumping on the bandwagon this centenary year and holding forth about the most incredible aspects of him. Is there any Swedish writer who has been so thoroughly examined and dissected even after his death, I wonder? In many cases he did a better job himself in his autobiographical or semi-autobiographical books and I can't help wondering whether some of the new Strindberg 'experts' may have exploited  this centenary without any real research or depth behind them. I have just come back  from the Gothenburg Book Fair and wherever you turned  there was someone  speaking with great conviction but not always matched by knowledge about August Strindberg.

I remember Mary Sandbach, a chain-smoking grande dame who translated some prose works by Strindberg in the seventies. When my first volume of Strindberg plays came out she was obviously very suspicious of me and wondered where I was coming from and who I was to enter her field, so to speak. Since I rarely touched the prose she forgave me but after that I had Michael Meyer to contend with. He was the drama translator par preference when it came to Scandinavian authors from the sixties onwards. His Swedish was not perfect but at least he had lived in the country and he spoke the language - albeit with a strong accent and with many linguistic mistakes. However, we locked horns on one occasion, but since I realised I couldn’t afford to have him as an enemy I told him straightaway that he would never find any of his phrases or expressions in my translations. I also told him that I never look at another translator’s work when I am translating and he could rest assured that I would only work from the original. He gave me one long look and after that we were friends.

This year will see me travelling all over the place, giving talks on a number of subjects related to Strindberg: ‘Translation problems from Swedish to English’, ‘How to teach Strindberg to teenagers’, ‘Strindberg productions that my husband and I have been involved in’, ‘Strindberg and his women’ - of course, ‘Strindberg and drama’, ‘Strindberg in my life’, ‘Faith and doubt in Strindberg’s work’, etc. Some are in English and some in Swedish. Several talks are written in both languages.

So what has this year taught me? I will have given more than a dozen talks in all by the time I return from my last trip in December. Most audiences have been very attentive, appreciative and grateful, but there have been quite small gatherings. People haven’t exactly been bending over backwards to listen or buy the book, Strindberg and Love or the Swedish version, Lite djävul, lite ängel, Strindberg och hans kvinnor. We can’t compete with self-revelatory books, ‘feel good’ books or Cookery and Gardening books.  There may be slightly more interest in him after this year of celebrations but do not let us be deceived by that. He is still an oddball, viewed with suspicion by the young.  And it is going to be very hard to change his image. To many he will remain the madman and the misogynist.     

Strindberg still in the news - August

Strindberg still in the news

There has been a lot of media coverage about Strindberg this year, especially in Sweden in Sweden. Judging by the opinions offered on a number of subjects concerning our literary genius he is obviously just as controversial today as he was a hundred years ago. 

What surprises me is that it’s Strindberg the person who is nearly always in focus - rather than Strindberg, the author. Why is it that his life is more interesting to the majority of people rather than his work?

He did, of course, lead an extraordinary life and he liked to draw attention to his person, even if it meant that he was the subject of ridicule or, in some cases, a hate campaign. He lived on the edge most of the time and thrived on provocation. That is not something which is going to endear him to all and sundry. He was generally considered a bad influence on the young with his revolutionary and indecent ideas. After all, a man who advocated free love and who made fun of the holy communion, the royal family, the military establishment and politicians in general would probably be more on the side of the rebels than the establishment.

This year I have been asked to give around a dozen talks about him and most of them will be about his attitude to women because that is the subject most people have requested. I find the fact that he was a serious religious seeker more remarkable, especially when you consider that he lived at a time when the established church (similar to the Church of England) had a tremendous hold on society.

When working on his plays I have struggled with some beautifully expressed sentences which resist translation. At the same time, he offers the translator a forum for imaginative solutions which make the translator’s job very rewarding. He was a master of dramatic dialogue and performing it is most gratifying to actors. Just look at the way he uses punctuation. His dashes and exclamation marks mark the tempo and energy - The way his characters talk over each other, interrupt each other or simply don’t listen  - all this creates a very intense and realistic atmosphere.

Maybe a little less personal exposure would have been beneficial to his career as a writer. A certain amount of reserve could have meant that people concentrated more on his writing than his histrionics.

Yes, he did actually say A. but he also said B. He changed opinions shamelessly, but not without reason. It would help greatly in understanding this complex man if we read everything in context, rather than pick some provocative statements to score a quick sensational point.

I was asked once in an interview what I thought about Strindberg’s famous measuring of his penis or of the alleged rape of a sixteen-year-old servant girl at Skovlyst in Denmark.

My answer to the first question was that I didn’t find it particularly odd or shocking that he measured the length of his penis. I remember many of my girl friends measuring their boobs in their teens, while chasing the ideal measurements. Presumably, the size of a man’s penis is as vital to his masculinity as the size of the boobs to a woman’s femininity, although that logic  defeats me.

As regards the famous ‘rape story’, the girl in question was not a servant but the sister of the manager of Skovlyst Manor, and she had turned up in Strindberg’s bedroom in the early hours and late at night, in a way which Strindberg found provocative.

According to the girl’s own admission she consented to the intercourse but her brother quickly tried to make a big scene of it and used blackmail. Strindberg was acquitted but contracted a venereal disease for his sins.

When taken thus in its entire context this story takes on a different hue. That is the case with most of the ultra sensational episodes in Strindberg’s life.

Strindberg's spiritual search

Strindberg’s spiritual search

Strindberg loved battles. He would enter any battle like a war-hungry soldier. He wrote about the battle of the sexes, the class struggle and the battle of brains, and in his early play, Master Olof, he lets the main character, Olaus Petri, say: ‘It wasn’t the victory that I wanted, but the struggle.’

In Master Olof, which is about the introduction of Protestantism in Sweden he uses the Reformation as a metaphor fo the rise of Socialism. Towards the middle of the 1880s Strindberg went through a period of atheism and he wrote to his publisher, Bonnier: ‘Since I am about to become an atheist (the world is run by idiots, consequently God is an idiot) I shall probably attack God from now on as well.’ 

This warning to his publisher must have been very worrying indeed. Strindberg had already stood trial for blasphemy once and Bonnier, who was Jewish was, naturally, uncomfortable with anything which might be interpreted as an attack on the Church of Sweden. In another letter to the Danish critic Edvard Brandes, Strindberg admitted that he was preparing to become an atheist but he found it horribly difficult. His atheism was - in his own words - a mental experiment which had failed at once.

During his short marriage to Frida Uhl he was drawn to Catholicism which he was introduced to through his mother-in-law in Austria. But with Strindberg we can never know for sure what he stands for. As soon as we have put a label on him he changes and is already on his way somewhere else. His Austrian mother-in-law was a believer and a good Catholic, but she was also drawn to Swedenborg who became one of Strindberg’s idols during the 1890s.

He bought a Catholic prayer book and a rosary and even thought of entering a monastery. In Inferno he writes:’I have bought a rosary. Why? It is beautiful and the Evil One is afraid of the cross.’ The thing that held him back was the need to obey. Strindberg found it very difficult to obey anyone. 

‘I am not a wild man. I prefer strolling by the sea and growing cucumbers. But people hate me because I write so bloody well. My motto is: Leave me alone, I am prickly. Why the hell do they have to probe me when I am prickly. But everyone has to have a feel. And then they get stung!’

The road back to Christianity meandered along some narrow paths, via Swedenborg, Kierkegaard, Buddhism and Islam. But in the end Strindberg found his way back to the faith of his childhood and by that time regret and remorse had replaced his wrath and defiance. ‘What shall I regret? How much shall I regret?,’ he asks himself. ‘How should I live in order to please God?’ At the same time he realises that his greatest sin was the way he had treated his wife and children. He accuses himself of hubris, the only sin that the gods won’t forgive. Maybe Christ is an avenging spirit? 

In 1897 he abandoned Swedenborg  and didn’t return to him until the end of his life. In May 1897 he applied for a place in a Benedictine monastery but when he found out that the abbot had been sacked because of a sexual offence he withdrew his application.

‘I want to have religion as a quiet accompaniment to the monotonous everyday tune of life.

A buddhist book has made a more lasting impression than all the other holy books because it puts positive suffering above abstinence.’ 

His most beloved drama, A Dreamplay, is a synthesis of all his thoughts about faith and the meaning of life. The leading character, Indra’s daughter, an invention by Strindberg, has been interpreted in many ways - as a human being or as a divine being. She walks through life like a female Jesus and returns to heaven at the end of the play. Her recurring line is: ‘Det är synd om människorna,’ a sentence which is practically untranslateable. ‘Mankind is to be pitied,’ is perhaps the closest we can get to this sigh of compassion.