Poppa Could See in the Dark

THE STRANGE LIFE OF AUGUST STRINDBERG (246 pp.)--Elizabeth Sprigge--. Macmillan ($3.50).

The great dramatist lay on his bed in a sweltering Paris room, holding an uncorked vial of potassium cyanide and reading The Pleasure of Dying. No sooner had he decided that it was not yet his time to taste this pleasure after all, than he became suddenly convinced that a former friend, the Polish writer, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, was trying to kill him by filtering poison gas through the walls of his room. He fled, writing to a friend to take care of his remains if he were killed, since he did not wish to be cut up by medical students. "The cheapest is cremation (50 francs)," he advised. "I do not want to lie in Swedish soil, for it is damned . . ."

Incest of the Soul. If August Strindberg had lived in the heyday of Freud, he would probably have been locked up as a paranoiac or reduced to the status of a dull neurotic. Since he died unpsychoanalyzed, in 1912, he remained merely a famous literary figure and an exceedingly odd duck.

Although few Americans know any of Strindberg's plays, they have heard his shrieks echoed on their own stage, particularly in the works of Eugene O'Neill and in some of Lillian Hellman's more unpleasant plays. Strindberg wrote straight historic drama, sunny fairy-tale plays and symbolic fantasies. But he is most noted for his dramatization--in a manner as unnerving as chalk scratching on a blackboard--of seemingly ordinary families in which hatred and insanity screech at each other over the tea cozy.

His strange life, recorded with more care than brilliance by Biographer Sprigge, unfolds much like a Strindberg play, except for an occasional redeeming touch of the ridiculous.

Strindberg was the son of a shipping agent and a servant girl; his dominant childhood memories were the sound of nearby church bells and a gnawing fear of practically everything. He violently loved his mother, described his feelings as "incest of the soul." Yet, as with almost all the women in his life, his love for her was tinged with jealousy and hate. When she died and his father married the family housekeeper, he cast himself in the role of Hamlet.

Later he actually wanted to be an actor, but failed; from play-acting he turned to playwriting. He read widely and weirdly; like Friedrich Schiller's heroes, he considered himself a rebel; like Kierkegaard, a pessimystic; like Darwin, a scientist; like Goethe's Faust, he turned to black magic (which he practiced in his attic). When he was crossed, he would roam the woods lashing at branches and hacking down young trees; sometimes he would climb a tree and yell defiance at the universe. "

At 26, in Stockholm's fashionable shopping center, he met Baroness Sigrid ("Siri") Wrangel, an angel with Nordic frosting, looking as sweetly innocent as if caviar would not melt in her mouth. It was love.

The Lark Said: "Carry On!" When ecstatic August walked by her side, her small feet appeared so much part of him that he "seemed to be walking on four legs." Pouring out his passion, he wrote her: "Forgive me!!!!!! Sunday morning. I will, I will be mad. Now I've talked about it all. Who to? To the spring, to the oaks, to the willows, to the anemones, and the bells sang and the lark said: 'Carry on!' ... I love you, I love you, I love you . . ."

After a sordid divorce from Baron Wrangel, Siri married Strindberg. He wrote furiously--learned history (Sweden's Relations to China and the Tartar Lands), a religious play (The Secret of the Guild), a novel (The Red Room) for which he was denounced as an atheist and a radical. In 1884 he briefly became a popular hero when he was brought to trial (and acquitted) for committing blasphemy in print. He once called Christianity a religion for "women, eunuchs, children and savages." When his four-year-old son asked him whether God could see in the dark, Strindberg answered: "No, but Pappa can."

In the darkness around him, Strindberg saw only enemies, including his own wife, whom he suspected of deceiving him and being a Lesbian. Insanely jealous, he came to believe that Siri's children were not his (a suspicion he dramatized in his play, The Father). For a while Siri and August lived in a filthy old castle near Copenhagen, together with a mad Countess who played the hurdy-gurdy, a gypsy steward who practiced hypnotism, and a pack of wild dogs.

After 14 years and countless breaks and reconciliations, Siri and August were divorced. He grew a Mephistophelean beard and devoted himself to the study of evil. He roamed about Europe, now trying to photograph the moon, now trying to make gold. He was interested in the Orient and Buddhism.

He married twice again; both marriages broke up quickly. He wrote: "All women hate Buddhas, maltreat, disturb, humiliate, annoy them, with the hatred of inferiors, because they themselves can never become Buddhas. On the other hand they have an instinctive sympathy for servants, male and female, beggars, dogs, especially mangy ones. They admire swindlers, quack dentists, braggadocios of literature [and] pedlars of wooden spoons . . ."

Strindberg's fears and passions eventually found relief of sorts in the old, familiar sound of the church bells. He came to believe that each of his ordeals was merely a penance on his own road to Damascus. He went home, and became the Grand Old Man of Swedish letters. While he was dying of cancer of the stomach, he wanted to have his children near him. One evening, while his daughter Karin was at his bedside, he picked up the Bible and murmured: "Everything is atoned for." Soon afterwards, he died.

At his request he was buried in once-damned Swedish soil, under a simple oak cross bearing the inscription Ave Crux Spes Unica (Hail, Cross! The Only Hope).

Many commentators on Strindberg have found everything from surrealism to schizophrenia in his life & work. But he was, after all, just a son of the quiet old 19th Century.

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