August Strindberg | Miss Julie / 1966

the crazy lady

by Douglas Messerli

 

August Strindberg Miss Julie, translated from the Swedish by Michael Meyer (New York: The Modern Library, 1966)

 

Rereading Miss Julie for the first time since I was a youth, I perceived why I had resisted for so long in revisiting the great Swedish playwright’s works. As translator Michael Meyer notes in his 1960s Preface, there have been few great productions of Strindberg’s work in either Britain or the US. As we in Los Angeles are about the face a new production of the play, adapted by Neil LaBute—who has evidently replanted the drama into the 1920s. I think I may skip it. As the translator points out, Strindberg’s works require a kind of “overacting” or, at least, demands actors who are willing to go to the “precipice,” a style that is quite distasteful for American and British theatergoers, who prefer acting that seems more naturalistic. Although the playwright himself would early on argue against this acting tradition, the very pitch of his work sometimes encouraged it. In certain European countries and in South America “overacting” is not only permissible but is often evidence of an actor’s abilities (witness the recent Italian filmed prison-version of Julius Cesar, Cesar Must Die) which the Swedish playwright demands, certainly in his 1888 drama, Miss Julie.

 

     Meyer’s translation of the play was performed in England in July 1965 with Maggie Smith and Albert Finney as Miss Julie and Jean. I would have loved to have seen that production, and while reading often could hear Smith’s voice in the fluctuations between Julie’s stubborn pride, crazy demands of male suitors, and, at play’s end, her desperate pleas for showing her the way out of the situation in she has suddenly become involved. And I could quite well imagine Finney’s charming knavery as well as his innate ability to demonstrate a more refined sensibility than the landed gentry he serves. But even their fine acting skills could not have quite taken me “over the edge” of Strindberg’s sudden chasm of absurd events.

      Having, as he describes it, “cut-away” “like a lamb cutlet,” all the bone and fat, his characters so suddenly slip upon the ice of sexual relationships with what begins as Julie’s flirtatious imperiousness—so reminiscent of Ibsen’s later gun-toting heroine in Hedda Gabler—that, at first, one may think that one has “missed” a scene. How did things so suddenly turn from a girl’s toying with her equality with the servants to a tragedy in which she has “crossed the line.”

      To contemporary audiences, moreover, the whole series of events, which closes in Julie’s presumably proud facing of death, seems utterly senseless. Americans have never had a class system as did the turn-of-the-century Swedes, in which it was not only a crime but a kind of existential fall from grace for a young lady of class to bed down with a valet. Although the English may certainly recall that inescapable caste system, even the British of the 21st century would have difficulty in comprehending how a young girl of 25, having had sex with a servant, would have to leave home or kill herself out of shame, or that Jean may face severe punishment or imprisonment. Only perhaps if were to imagine Julie as being underage, or her sexual encounter with Jean as being a rape might we be able to comprehend the consequences that Strindberg puts forth. As it stands, one can only imagine an audience of 20-year-olds giggling over Julie’s, Jean’s and Christines’ consternation for the few hours of their lust. And locating the play at the end of the 20th century’s most libertine decades would seemingly make even less sense.

      I suppose in the 1950s one might have presented the two J’s as being of the same sex, which may have shocked some theatergoers enough to convey the play’s “predicament.” But even then it would hardly suggest the consequences of the woman-hating Strindberg requires. As a woman brought up to be a man, Julie is doomed, in Strindberg’s thinking, to be brought down to earth, required to transform herself from a strong woman used to making beasts of the men around her into a kind of slave:

 

    miss julie: I can’t go. I can’t stay. Help me! I’m so tired,

       so dreadfully tired. Order me! Make me do something!

       I can’t think, can’t act—

 

The problem with Julie, like the women in so many of Strindberg’s plays, and unlike the simple-minded believer Christine, is that she does not know her place. And that’s a hard sell for any of today’s audiences. It is difficult to swallow a story of “a crazy woman in the attic”-in-the- making, which Jean suggests from one of his very first lines: “Miss Julie’s crazy again tonight.”

 

     Only if we recognize Miss Julie as a kind of artifact from another era and, as Michael Meyer argues, perceive the latter half of this play as a kind of dream chamber in which the inner conflicts of Strindberg’s figures are being played out in public, will the drama be tolerable or believable. Yet the early part of the play has been so well-grounded in naturalism, with its pared-down and clipped dialogue, that the dream-like sequences of the second half seem more like the blather of a mad woman, as Julie creates an imaginary Swiss Hotel to which all three might escape, than as the internal sufferings of a woman suddenly plagued with guilt and regret.

      Perhaps it is these very problems or tensions which dynamize Strindberg’s work. We may find the series of events and stereotypes of sex nearly unbearable, even laughable, but we also must perceive that their tormented conditions are meant to be believed. And that is why, as Meyer argues, in order to succeed with Strindberg the actor must go literally “over the top,” performing the work at full throttle. There’s little room in this author’s brutal world for meekness. When suddenly Julie shifts from her temporary “slavery” to a long abusive lashing out against Jean as a man, she momentarily comes alive (even Jean recognizes it as “the blue blood talking”) as she becomes a vessel less of love than of utter hate—hate for both the man she has dared to love and for own daring to have been loved.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2013).

August Strindberg | The Ghost Sonata / 1966

 

strindberg as absurdist

by Douglas Messerli

August Strindberg The Ghost Sonata, in Michael Meyer, trans. The Plays of Strindberg, Volume 1 (New York: The Modern Library, 1966)

 

One of August Strindberg’s last significant works, The Ghost Sonata, of 1907, is also one of the author’s strangest works. Written five years before his death, the writing of this play, during which Strindberg was suffering from a skin disease so painful that the rub of the pen against his hand caused him to bleed. The Ghost Sonata, as translator Michael Meyer remarks, represents “a return to that mood of cynicism and disillusionment with the world of the living which we find so often in his earlier work.”

 

    The play, moreover, is an odd mix of genres, including everything from naturalism (in his portrayal of a beautiful home on a lovely street), to symbolism (particularly in the last scene wherein the Daughter and Student discuss the meaning of the hyacinth, linking it to the room’s Buddha), Expressionism (particularly in the play’s various characters who represent aspects of human greed and selfishness), and even early Theatre of the Absurd (in its presentation of the Mummy—the Colonel’s wife—who lives and sleeps in a closet) and the Milkmaid (a character who haunts The Old Man’s vision, but can be seen only by the Student, a “Sunday child”). While these various approaches to drama may each, in their own way, be interesting, together they create a somewhat bizarre series of tensions, which make it hard to know, at times, whether we are to see these abstractions as representations of “real” life or a comic exaggeration of life. 

      Strindberg’s major theme in this work, moreover—that there is no faith or honor, no love, joy or beauty to be found in human life, despite the Student’s intense disavowal of these facts—is a rather unbearable one, even if the play convincingly anatomizes each of these dead-living characters’ evil lives. Indeed, the interrelationships between the Mummy, the Old Man, the Colonel, the dead body upstairs, the Student, and the Daughter, as well as between the servants, Bengttson and Johansson—several of which have sexual liaisons, business partnerships, and other previous activities—are quite preposterous.

     The Ghost Sonata is at its best, I might suggest, in its absurd elements, as when the Daughter describes the beautiful home in which lives as representing a series of tribulations, the cook boiling away the juices from the meats they eat:

 

                          Oh yes. She cooks many dishes, but there is no nourishment in

                          them. She boils the meat till it is nothing but sinews and water,

                          while she drinks the juice from it. When she roasts she cooks

                          the meat till the goodness is gone; she drinks the gray and the

                          blood. Everything she touches loses its moisture, as though her

                          eyes sucked in drink. She drinks the coffee and leaves us the

                          dregs, she drinks the wine from the bottles and fills them with

                          water——

 

When asked why they simply don’t fire the cook, the Daughter explains that the cook simply refuses to leave.

      Similarly, the house is served by a maid after whom the Daughter must dust and clean up the

mess left behind. Describing a nearby desk, the Daughter explains:

 

                          …it won’t stand straight. Each day I put a cork disc under its

                          leg, but the maid takes it away when she dusts, and I have to

                          cut a new one. Every morning the pen is clogged with ink,

                          and the inkwell too. I have to wash them after she’s gone, every

                          day of my life.

     A bit like the figures of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, the elderly figures of Strindberg’s spook play, join each other at dinner in complete silence, having “nothing to say to each other, for neither will believe what the other says.”

     Even more ridiculous, are the insane actions of the Mummy, as she pops in an out of her closet, speaking like a parrot.

      While The Old Man’s evil machinations, however, may at first seem intriguing, as he invites the young hero-Student to attend The Valkyrie with him, in the end his intrigues gain him nothing. For just as he reveals all the lies, perversities, and even murder of the Colonel and his guests, so does the Mummy reveal even worse actions by The Old Man.

     In another room sits the “angel” of this work, required to die by Strindberg as a consequence of the world’s guilt, while the Student must embrace truths he has struggled not to believe:

 

                 Unhappy child, born into this world of delusion, guilt, suffering

                 and death, the world that is for ever changing, for ever erring, for

                 ever in pain.

    In the end, accordingly, the very bleakness of the author’s vision delimits his play’s significance. Is it any wonder that there have been few major British or American productions of this “ghost” play over the years?            

 

Los Angeles, April 11, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2013).

August Strindberg | The Red Room / 2009

selling out

by Douglas Messerli

 

August Strindberg The Red Room, translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves (London: Norvik Press, 2009)

Although Strindberg had already published one of his major dramas, Mäster Olaf in 1872, his long fiction, Röda rummet (The Red Room) of 1879 was his first great success, and is often described as the earliest modern Swedish novel. In noting that, however, one should not expect the kind of psychologically-based, well-made fictions of such modernists as Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and even fellow Scandinavian writer Knut Hamsun. The Red Room can hardly be said to have any coherent structure, and, as a social satire of the whole Swedish culture, it has little concern with character. Rather, it resembles in odd ways, as translator Peter Graves suggests, the kind of overview of society that occurs in Dickens' novels. Yet even here the similarities quickly disappear, since narrative is at the heart of the great English writer's fictions, whereas Strindberg relies on a series of comically imagistic sketches to capture his much beloved and obviously much hated Stockholm.

      To tell his story, Strindberg relies on what might be described as a single thread in the figure of a young idealist Arvid Falk, following the vicissitudes of his life along by tracing loose strings through the various figures he meets along the way. Strangely, however, because of Strindberg's buoyant comic timing and the large palette from which he paints his doctors, lawyers, actors, artists, philosophers, journalists, do-good philanthropists, publishers, carpenters, prostitutes, street urchins, misers, ministers, and just plain drunks one doesn't, ultimately, feel the lack of coherency in this work. Strindberg sets this whole world so a-whirling already in the second chapter that by the last page the reader is dizzied enough that he has had little time to realize that the merry-go-round upon which he has just careened should have sent him wobbling off into chaos. That sense of dislocation, perhaps, is why this work does seem, despite its numerous set pieces, so modern.

      Moreover, as anyone who has read of Strindberg's life up until the time The Red Room's creation realizes, most of the various figures of satire have to do with careers with which he himself had suffered and failed. Accordingly, there is, at times, a biting edge to this work that will find its fulfillment in the author's later domestic dramas and autobiographies of madness. But here, despite the constant sense of the injustice and meaninglessness of the society at large, we do not ultimately feel, as Graves puts it, the "disillusion and pessimism" that seem to be "at the heart of the book."

 

                     The satire is ebullient and hits home with an open, almost

                     Pythonesque, glee which is, however, remarkably free from

                     bitterness....

 

     Although The Red Room received mixed reviews from the critics and was turned down for newspaper serialization, the work quickly sold out and went through four editions in the next year, allowing Strindberg at least a short period of economic relief.

     From the very beginning of the book we quickly come to realize that poor Arvid Falk is a kind of holy fool, a gentle, even bashful man, seldom able to stand up to friends or enemies in his defense of goodness and meaningful social involvement. His own brother has chiseled him out of some of his inheritance, and others throughout the book will hit him up for money and even his suit and overcoat whenever he is able to accumulate anything.

     At work's beginning Falk has a respectable job, even if low-paying, as an Assessor. But he can no longer bear to work at a place where no one shows up until hours after starting time, spending most of their remaining hours in countless meetings where nothing gets settled save the pettiest of decisions. Despite no training in writing, he is determined to quit the government and become a journalist. The ridiculousness of this decision is apparent to anyone who has read Hamsun's novel Hunger, published eleven years later, whose journalist hero nearly starves to death. Falk similarly undergoes nearly every kind of deprivation possible. To start with, even before he can raise a pencil to paper, he is accused by the press of having attacked the government—a terrible blow to his socially-concerned brother. Falk is innocent; the man to whom he has told his story and revealed his decision returned home to immediately write a piece for one of the most disreputable newspapers of the day.

     The rest of Strindberg's work is centered on the assignments given Falk and the individuals he meets along the way. A visit to a publisher lands an immediate assignment to rewrite a German documentary, The Guardian Angel, about the surviving children of a couple drowned in a shipwreck; fortunately, they were insured, but as they rush to claim their inheritance they discover that the boat that carried their inheritance had also sunk, and their parents had failed to pay the insurance premium due on the day their death! Falk wisely rejects the assignment.

     A visit to a religious charity portrays a mad man sitting behind a churchlike-organ shouting messages to various employees through the trumpet while pulling out its stops. A visit to a local  field uncovers artists living in shanty-like constructions, one painting landscapes, the other religious subjects, while nearby two friends spend the day reading philosophy. For supper they quickly gather up anything that might sell (including each other's prized possessions), speeding them off to the pawnbrokers, and gathering at a local bar to fill their bellies. It is the room in the bar, nicknamed the Red Room, that gives Strindberg's work its title. And it is in this room where Falk feels most a home, surrounded by seedy Bohemian-like types.

     I will not list every societal situation Falk must endure—he meets up at various moments with a theatrical troupe, a beautiful prostitute, an entire household of unemployed workers, and a disgusting-looking and profoundly boisterous man of the medical profession; he visits the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), attends a labor meeting, and finally, in complete despair, travels with the doctor to the countryside for a few weeks of rest. Upon his return he is seen as being a different man, a being who now has now sold out to the barren and destructive society he has fought. Becoming a teacher of Swedish Literature and History at a Girl's School, he smilingly attempts to keep a bird's-eye view of the society. Strindberg writes:

 

                      But when he is tired of family life and the falseness of society he

                      goes down to the Red Room and meets that dreadful man Borg [the

                      doctor], his admirer Isaac, his secret and envious enemy Struve...and

                      the sarcastic Sellén....

 

Of Falk, Borg writes:

 

                      He lives for his work and for his fiancée, whom he worships. But I

                      don't believe all that. Falk is a political fanatic who knows it would

                      destroy him were he to let air reach his flame, so he smothers it

                      instead with these strict, arid studies. I don't believe he will succeed

                      and however much he controls himself I fear there will be an

                      explosion at some point.

 

Strindberg suggests, as I read it, that there may be hope for some in Swedish society despite the impossibility of their cause. It is the possibility of those explosions that promise change, and in allowing their potential Strindberg appears to look ahead to the Futurists and other literary movements of the new century.

 

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2010

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (Winter 2010/2011).