MARRIED IN HASTE

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22111, 5 June 1937, Page 17

MARRIED IN HASTE

♦ THE TRAGEDY OF STRINDBERG Marriaffe With Genius. By Freda Strindberg:. Jonathan Cape. 45S pp. (12s 6d net.) Wives of great men, those of them who keep diaries and write books about their famous husbands, all remind us that their men were often weak and undignified creatures. Apart from the slight interest of the slippers-and-dressing-gown view of the eminent, wisely displayed in very few cases, little that is significant is disclosed to posterity by the revelation that So-and-So was sensitive to the scent of wild vernal o was unfaithful to his wife when the moon rode high. It cannot be said that the glory of D. H. Lawrence and Nijinsky was much enhanced by their wives’ writings. Mrs Conrad wrote more objectively and calmly, but Strindberg’s widow has made known very little of importance that was not implicit or explicit in her husband’s books. The„ reac l er .fI,;r 1 ,;r ° n Confessions of a Fool and Marriage” will know that Strindberg suffered greatly, that he .was melancholy, a pessimist who delighted, in the physical sense, in self-torture, a pessimist who had fits of cruelty and who despised and loathed women more often than he was excited by them. He was one half-hour cola and formal, and the next fiery and passionate; and each mood was violently felt and expressed as a matter of life and death. Strindberg was, in fact, not sane. Freda Strindberg’s memories supply many chapters and verses of illustration. Her wiser sister saw his wildness. She recognised his greatness and his extravagance. She saw that he towered above the eccentric and unwholesome, if talented, set with whom he consorted, but he would be apt to drive an ordinary being like myself insane . He weighs on my nerves like lead ..... These people are very interesting in books, but they are utterly impossible in life. Strindberg, fortunately, was more rarely a sadist than a masochist. Another friendly observer wrote sadly about his wife, “She had left her child with her parents, for Strindberg had demanded that she choose between him and her child, in order to prove to which she was most bound —and now she longed dreadfully for her little one.” Strindberg expressed his views of women more than once in language of varying nastiness. 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,sei' vants, male'and female, beggars, dogs, especially mangy ones. Great wits are, sure, to madness near allied. And Strindberg, with foolish arrogance, made his independence ruinous. Content and disdainful in sponging upon his wifes relatives, he yet, with crass dignity, spurned the sincere and gracious assistance of Knut Hamsun. . To be married to such a being was exquisite torture, gladly borne by Freda Strindberg, partly because she made him her hero, partly because she admired his genius, chiefly because she loved him. He was 43 and she 18 when they married in Heligoland in 1893. Already he had nd himself of one wife, the support of whom and their children crippled his second marriage. Money, money was his continual cry, and he never had enough. Freda Strindberg won her husband in the same way as Romola Nijinsky won hers, by sheer devotion, attentiveness, and subservience. Both were raising storms of trouble, for themselves. However, the days of courtship and early marriage arc remarkably recorded by Strindberg s second wife. Presumably she is writing 40 years after the events; but they are told with an ecstatic girlish* ness which means either that she has retained her youth marvellously, or that hers was the love romance of a century. That is her own belief; she would, other circumstances being equal, marry Strindberg again. But the background of the tale is more interesting than the passions of the principals, despite their frenzied journeys and whimsical desertions and reunions. They met in Berlin where the girl was a dramatic critic, and some sense escapes of the greatness of the two great Scandinavian dramatists, Ibsen and Strindberg They married in defiance of the bride’s parents, and after seven weeks in London the wife pawned her clothes and jewellery to allow the husband to escape. Hectic letters passed to and fro, and the wife retired for a time to an English convent. The recently honoured name of J. T. Grein enters the tale as an understanding and kind benefactor of this wretched pair. The scene changes to a castle on the Danube where the Strindbergs lived an uneasily idyllic life and their child was born. Family quarrels were insupportable, and, after vicissitudes, Paris received Strindberg. These episodes are the best of * he . Paris in the ’nineties, mildly decadent, obstinately aesthetic, and abounding in talented men and women. This was the Pans of Langen, Hervieu, and Catulle Mendes; but Strindberg starved there and nearly died. He had incessant difficulties with the publishers of' his autobiographical novels and the producers of his sensational plays. At times he laid aside his pen and painted, an art which seems to have paid him better than literature, for he had talent more easy to appreciate graphically than by wprds. At other times chemistry was his occupation, ana he burnt himself and suffered in operations that appeared more like those of the alchemist than of the scientist. Here again he must have been inspired, for he threw off daring speculations since verified; and his claims about the nervous system of plants have not been laughed away. . ... Such a man was a genius; but he should not have married. Indeed, he did not stay married long. Short as the experience was, it was deplorable.