August Strindberg by Walter Johnson (review)

178 Comparative Drama Kronenberger’s style is no doubt the better of the two; he also Americanizes “labour” and avoids typos. But, taken in the best light, such close similarities indicate pedantic notecard paraphrasing. The fol­ lowing is extracted from a longer parallel passage which describes an incident where American men tested Wilde’s virility with food, drink, and a brothel: Kronenberger, pp. 40-41: two husbands . . . invited him to dine at a Broadway chophouse. He ate everything that was set before him and drank all the wine and hard liquor he was plied with. Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit (New York, 1946), p. 54: Two of them invited him to dinner at a chop-house on Broadway . . . Wilde ate everything that was placed before him and drank whisky, wine and whatever else came his way as a thirsty man drinks water. Perhaps after some fifteen books and twelve editions Louis Kronen­ berger is tired. At any rate it’s hard to compete in 236 pages with Pear­ son’s 345, Phillipe Jullian’s 420, and Hyde’s 410, especially if one can’t match Pearson’s style, Jullian’s wit, or Hyde’s scholarship. But it is sad to think that Professor Kronenberger’s only hope must be that his readers have not read these predecessors, any one of whom throws him in the shade. CHARLES A. BERST University of California, Los Angeles Walter Johnson. August Strindberg. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. Pp. vi + 329. $8.50. Strindberg was the founder of what may be called psychoanalytic theater, states Professor Johnson in his well documented and interesting work on this Swedish author. Before Freud, Strindberg attended Dr. Charcot’s classes on hysteria at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris. “Is it an anomaly of instinct?” wrote Strindberg in 1874, “Are my feelings perverse because I want to possess my mother? Is this unconscious incest in my heart?” Strindberg sounded out his own depths, motivations, and fantasies in a never-ending search for some kind of balance and serenity —facts pointed out here in Johnson’s study. Strindberg’s experimental theater which explored the mysteries of the human personality is Nietzschean in philosophy. In such plays as The Father, Miss Julie, and The Dance of Death, the Dionysian in man is liberated and given an opportunity to grind out its perversities as well as its lusty sensualities. In most of his plays, Strindberg included or at least made reference to the joys of the bedroom, thus rejecting— at least attempting to—the Pietist and Lutheran beliefs which Ids parents Reviews 179 had imposed upon him. Strindberg declared sex to be fun and healthy; marriage, he suggested, should not be looked upon as a business trans­ action. Like the Hungarian doctor Max Nordeau, he advocated physical love and looked upon it as a natural and healthy experience. His out­ spoken statements concerning sexual freedom and the dangers of re­ pression, writes Johnson, earned him the quasi rejection of his works in Sweden in the beginning of his theatrical career. Strindberg’s plays had been performed in Paris since 1893, in André Antoine’s naturalistic “peep-hole theater” and in Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. In the early part of the twentieth century, however, Strind­ berg was neglected in Paris. Only with the advent of Antonin Artaud was new interest kindled. In Artaud’s mise-en-scène for A Dream Play he attempted “to reproduce the detached and disunited—although ap­ parently logical—form of the dream.” Artaud considered Strindberg a true alchemist of the theatre, believes Johnson, a blender of metals and chemicals into strange and untried alloys. In Germany, Max Reinhardt and the expressionist movement in that country took up the pro-Strindberg struggle. Johnson declares that Strindberg’s theater is filled with the type of female he both despised and to whom he was drawn, “Amazons, tribades, hermaphrodites.” Such castrating types devoured their men. “You know,” Strindberg wrote in 1887, “that as a creative writer I mix makebelieve and reality together, and the whole of my misogyny is theoretical, for I could not live without the company of a woman.” In Johnson...