it just wasn’t as I’d imagined it, and so the pleasure wasn’t that great ––– Strindberg, big and small

There is a minor character in A Dream Play, the Billposter – you know, like theatrical posters – who is the first happy person the goddess meets on earth.  “beside him is a fishing net with a green handle” – what could that mean?

DAUGHTER.  You all complain, at least with your eyes and voices.

BILLPOSTER.  I don’t complain that much… not now that I’ve got my net and a green fishing chest!

DAUGHTER.  And that makes you happy?

BILLPOSTER.  Oh yes, so happy, so… it was my childhood dream and it’s all come true, even though I am fifty now, of course…

DAUGHTER.  Fifty years for a fishing net and chest…

BILLPOSTER.  A green chest, a green one…  (186)

All of those crazy ellipses are in the original.  The only thing I omitted was an asterisk by the translator explaining that “green” might possibly be symbolic.  This bit is not much in itself, but the follow-up is excellent.

OFFICER.  It’s the Billposter, with his net…  How was the fishing?  Good?

BILLPOSTER.  Oh yes!  The summer was warm and rather long… the net was pretty good, but not quite as I’d imagined it!

[snip some stuff with the Officer and his girl trouble]

DAUGHTER.  What was wrong with the net?

BILLPOSTER.  Wrong?  Well, there wasn’t anything wrong, not really… it just wasn’t as I’d imagined it, and so the pleasure wasn’t that great.

DAUGHTER.  Just how had you imagined it?

BILLPOSTER.  How? ––– I can’t really say…

DAUGHTER.  Let me tell you! ––– You had imagined it a little differently!  Green, yes, but not that green!

BILLPOSTER.  You do know, don’t you!  (191-2, S. went a little crazy with the !, didn’t he?)

The Billposter is not a character of any depth.  This is it; you’ve seen it all.  Yet Strindberg has given him an outstandingly human moment in the play, and one that contrasts with all of the passion and agony of most of the rest of A Dream Play, a moment worthy of Pascal.

But perhaps I just recognize myself in it.  Many others, too.  So often in the dream plays, I just recognize Strindberg, who is awfully interesting whether as a creative artist or a clinical case study.  The central characters can be close to blanks, because they are needed to experience all of the successive steps of the dream journey and to express the Big Ideas of Strindberg, as when the Daughter jerks the play to a halt to deliver a lecture on Buddhism:

DAUGHTER.  In the dawn of time before the sun shone, Brahma, the divine primal force, allowed Maya, the world mother, to seduce him, so that he might multiply himself.  [etc.]  The world , life, and mankind, are therefore only phantoms, an illusion, a dream image –––

POET.  My dream!

DAUGHTER.  A true dream! ––– [more Brahma]  But this yearning for suffering conflicts with the desire for pleasure, or Love…  do you understand what Love is yet, a supreme joy coupled to the most profound suffering, sweetest when it is most bitter?  (243)

This is the tiresome Strindberg of the Age of Aquarius, crowding out his minor characters and original imagery for someone else’s predigested mix of Schopenhauer and Eastern religion.  Pedro Calderón de la Barca spends his play working hard to earn the claim that life is a dream.  Strindberg assumes it from the beginning and then treats it as a revelation, as if I had not been following along.

But this is the risk of Strindberg’s later technique, of his originality.  A scene that surprises with its audacity is followed by, or mixed with, received twaddle; images that have lost some of their shock only because they have been stolen by so many films are accompanied by Strindberg’s own thefts from across two thousand years of theater.

the scene is dull and says nothing, but cannot be excluded ––– Bergman directs A Dream Play

Ingmar Bergman devotes a chapter of The Magic Lantern to A Dream Play (1901).  “In 1986, I was to direct Strindberg’s A Dream Play for the fourth time, a decision that seemed good” (35), even though the three earlier attempts had “come to grief” or “turned out poor” or “been ruined” (36).  But this time, despite the small stage, pregnant lead actress (the great Lena Olin), and heartbroken stage designer, Bergman tries again, as certain kinds of artists do.

I wanted the audience to experience the stench of the backyard of the Advocate’s office, the cold beauty  of Fagervik’s  summer countryside in snow, the sulphorous mist and glint of hell in Skamsund and the magnificent flowers round the Rising Castle, the old theatre behind the theatre corridor.  (36)

Hang on, I want to return to that stage designer.

The designer’s lips trembled and he looked at me with his slightly protruding eyes.  ‘I want her to come back,’ he whispered.  I did not embark on a cure of souls and persisted, but a few weeks later, he broke down and said that he couldn’t cope, after which he packed his bags and returned to Gothenburg, where he hoisted sail and went to sea with a new lover.  (36)

Someday a Swedish director will make a film based on this chapter.

In A Dream Play Indra’s Daughter (an Indian deity) descends to earth to experience humanity.  The first thing she see is that Rising Castle, a flower-like structure steadily growing out of a pile of manure, the primary sex-and-dirt image in this play.

DAUGHTER:  Tell me, Father, why do flowers grow out of dirt?

GLAZIER [piously].  Because they don’t like the dirt, so they hasten up into the light, to flower and die. (181, pages from the OUP edition)

This is not Strindberg’s answer.  The goddess plunges into the muck, experiencing love, marriage, poverty, and so on, accompanied by a number of Strindbergish figures, until she reasserts her godhood and brings the play to a close in a Prospero-like manner, in verse, even.

DAUGHTER.
Our parting is at hand, the end approaches;
Farewell you child of man, you dreamer,
You poet who understands best how to live;
Hovering on wings above the earth,
You dive at times into the mire
To graze against it, not fasten in it!  (246)

Bergman worries over scene after scene.  “[T]he unhappy coal-heavers are a taxing affair.”  In the Fingal’s Cave scene characters “declaim beautiful and worthless verses about each other, the vilest and the most lovely side by side” (39).  That scene climaxes in a shipwreck and a vision of Christ walking on the water; it involves one of the strangest mixes of tone I have ever seen, equal to the most baffling parts of Goethe’s Faust. 

The rising waves threaten to drown them in the cave.

DAUGHTER.  If only I were sure it is a ship…

POET.  To tell you the truth…  I don’t think it is a ship... it is a two-storied house, with trees outside… and… a telephone tower…  A tower reaching up into the skies…  It is the modern Tower of Babel, sending its wires up there – to communicate with those above…

DAUGHTER.  Child, human thoughts need no metal wires to transmit themselves; ––– The prayers of the devout make their way through every world…  That is certainly no Tower of Babel, for if you would storm heaven, then storm it with your prayers.  (234-5, ellipses all Strindberg’s)

Have I just copied out a chunk of Swedenborg, updated for the age of telephony?  The characters at this point pop back out in the theater to witness the satirical argument of the Deans – “The following scene in the theatre corridor is dull and says nothing, but cannot be excluded” (Bergman, 40).

Of course the production is a failure, as was, on a smaller scale my reading of the play.  “So much effort, pain, anxiety, tedium, hope, all to no avail” (51).  This was Bergman’s last try, with this play, not with Strindberg.  Not mine, though, not yet.

Strindberg becomes part of the great pancake - To Damascus - Life used to be just a great nonsense.

STRANGER:  I’ll soon believe nothing is impossible.  This is the worst I have ever known.

MOTHER:  Oh no.  There's worse possible.  Just you wait.

That beautiful sentiment is from Act II, Scene 5 of To Damascus I  (1898).  These are the most perfectly Strindbergian lines I found in all of Strindberg.  Why did Samuel Beckett even bother (because Beckett is funnier).  This play is Strindberg’s return to drama, practically to writing, after several years of spiritual, artistic, sexual, you name it crisis.  It is not his return to theater, since the play is unplayable, not that that has ever stopped a theater director.

Two great artistic benefits came out of Strindberg’s crisis.  First, he abandoned his misogyny, finding the female within himself and turning his attention to integrating the male and female principle, etc., etc., not a good idea but as bad ideas go much less painful to read and I think more imaginatively fruitful than Woman-as-Enemy.  Some of this he picked up from alchemy, some from Swedenborg, some perhaps from his second wife.

Then second, he invented the dream play, or his version of it.  Strindberg acknowledged The Tempest and Life Is a Dream as precedents, directing attention away from his great debt to Goethe’s Faust and his enemy Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.  I love all of these plays.  None of the three To Damascus plays rank with them, although A Dream Play (1901) might.

As the title suggests, To Damascus is a conversion narrative, with a Strindberg-like Stranger who as the Saul who becomes Paul.  He is subjected to a series of trials and torments on his way from this world into the next, from doubt to belief. 

STRANGER:  Yes.  I’ve been noticing everything lately.  Not just things and incidents, forms and colours – now I see thoughts and what things signify.  Life used to be just a great nonsense.  Now it has a meaning, and I see a purpose in it where before I only saw a game of chance.  (To Damascus I, Act I, Sc. 1)

Since the play has just begun, the Stranger is only in the preparatory stage of conversion.  There are three plays (the first two written in 1898, the last in 1901) not because Strindberg had planned a trilogy but because he doubted that he had really gotten the Stranger across the divide.  It is as if there are always more tests.  Strindberg was likely right about that.

The form is completely free, limited only by the convention the scene.  Sets float around, light and sound replace action, and characters all have allegorical labels.  Dream logic prevails, supposedly.  I have doubts.    The results are passages like this one, perhaps my favorite in all the Strindberg I read:

DOCTOR:  He’s lost already, like a broken egg.  Now he’ll be whipped into a froth, and atomized, and become part of the great pancake.  All right, then.  Go to hell.  [To the OTHERS.]  Howl, victims!  Howl! [The GUESTS howl.]  (To Damascus II, Act IV, Sc. 1)

No point in giving any context; context will only damage the sublimity of the great pancake.

For the To Damascus plays I have switched to the Michael Meyer translation in The Plays of Strindberg, Volume II, Vintage.

Perhaps when death comes, life begins. – – – Strindberg's Dance of Death

The Dance of Death I (there is a sequel I have not read), from 1900, a year when August Strindberg wrote six plays.  The next year he wrote seven.  Eighteen plays in four years .  One might suspect Strindberg of being a hack, but this is just how his creativity functioned, years of nothing and then an outpouring.

These are the years when Strindberg created his dream plays, radically detached from even the conventions of theatrical realism.  The Dance of Death is a blend of the dream play with the warring couples of The Father and Miss Julie, as a rotten marriage jerks from plausibility to mannerism without warning.  Beckett’s Happy Days or Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or maybe Sartre’s No Exit, those are descendants of The Dance of Death.

The husband this time is the Captain, author of a “rifle manual” and in some position of authority on an island fortress; the wife is Alice; Kurt is an old friend whose appearance catalyzes the action of the play, which means he becomes a weapon the man and woman try to use to destroy each other.  I guess, unlike in the earlier plays, neither clearly succeeds.

This is what I remember most vividly from seeing Ian McKellan and Helen Mirren do the play:

ALICE plays ‘The Entry of the Boyars’, while the CAPTAIN performs a kind of Hungarian dance behind the desk, his spurs jangling.  Then he slumps to the floor, unnoticed by KURT and ALICE, who continues to play the piece to the end.

ALICE [without turning round]:  Shall we take it again?
                                                         Silence.

ALICE [turns round and sees the CAPTAIN lying unconscious, concealed from the audience by the desk].  Good God!

She stands with her arms crossed over her breast, and gives a sigh as of thankfulness and relief.  (136)

But it is much too early in the play for her to remain happy.  The word “slump” does not convey the surprise and comedy of McKellen’s collapse; “sigh” gestures towards whatever Mirren was doing.  The Captain and Alice are both juicy ham parts that reward big acting.  I suppose there is also a way to play them small.

CAPTAIN [sits again].  So you didn’t escape this time.  But you didn’t get me put away either! [ALICE is amazed] Oh, I knew you wanted to have me put in prison; but I’ll cross that out!– – –You’ve probably done worse things than that.– – –[ALICE is speechless] And I wasn’t guilty of embezzlement!

ALICE.  And now I’m to be your nurse?

CAPTAIN.  If you wish.

ALICE.  What else can I do?

CAPTAIN.  I don’t know.

ALICE [sits down apathetically in despair].  This must be everlasting hell!  Is there no end, then?

CAPTAIN.  Yes, if we’re patient.  Perhaps when death comes, life begins.

ALICE.  If only that were so!  (173)

See, I said it was like No Exit.  This is on their silver wedding anniversary.  Mature Strindberg has renounced the satisfying closure of tragedy.

The triple dash (– – –) is a common feature in Strindberg’s late plays.  I used two different translations, and it is in both, so it must be in the Swedish.  I wonder what it means.

Page numbers have all been to the Oxford World’s Classics Miss Julie and Other Plays, tr. Michael Robinson.

Some Strindberg filth - Miss Julie - now you know what I’m talking about

Miss Julie (1888) reverses and rearranges The Father.  Now the man will defeat the woman.  What begins as a seduction, with the complicity of the woman, turns into something much uglier, much worse, a battle of willpower that ends with the destruction of Miss Julie’s will, literalized through some kind of hypnosis.

Since the story is about a man revenging himself on a woman for having sex with him, it might seem like the play is Strindberg’s punishment of Miss Julie for her sexual discretion.  Strindberg’s misogyny is infamous.  Miss Julie comes with a preface full of this kind of twaddle:

The half-woman is a type who thrusts herself forward and sells herself nowadays for power, decorations, honours, or diplomas as formerly she used to do for money.  She is synonymous with degeneration.  (60)

Other parts of the Preface are so ironic, even plainly satirical, that I am careful not to take any of it too seriously, but the remarkable thing is that the play itself reverses the claims of the preface and the logic of its own story.  The servant deliberately turns the sexual encounter into a weapon to avenge himself not for the sex, but for earlier humiliations going back to his childhood, humiliations that he attributes to his class but are in fact the result of his own weakness.  Julie’s tragic end is not the result of the erasure of her will, but rather its assertion.  The servant is humiliated again at the moment of his supposed triumph.  He’s the weak one, not Julie.  Seen this way, the play is a double of The Father from the previous year.

Miss Julie introduced me to Strindberg’s filth theme.  If it was in The Father, I missed it.  The servant tells Julie the story of the first time he saw her.  He was a child; he had snuck into the estate’s park to steal apples.  He was intrigued by a building like “a Turkish pavilion” of unknown purpose.

The walls were all covered with portraits of kings and emperors, and over the windows there were red curtains with tassles on them – now you know what I’m talking about.  (82)

Actually, I thought I knew, and I was right, but those portraits threw me off the foul scent for a minute.  So that’s how rich people decorated their outhouses in 19th century Sweden.  The boy, hearing people approach, escapes through the toilet, so when he first sees the “pink dress and a pair of white stockings” belonging to Julie he is literally covered in the excrement of his masters.  The servant is at this point still trying to seduce Julie.

Turning to the introduction of the Oxford World’s Classics edition:  “[Miss Julie] had to wait eighteen years for its first professional production in Sweden and an unexpurgated text was not published or performed there until well into the following century” (xiii).  No kidding.  Sex, filth, death – whatever excesses Freudian critics may have committed against other writers, they are on firm ground with Strindberg.

All of this in one plain set, a kitchen, with three actors plus some mimes.  Kitchen mimes are an example of the Naturalism for which Strindberg is so well known.  I will never stop mocking the term “Naturalism.”

It’s all here in these books! - The Father, some realistic Strindberg

DOCTOR.  There are many different kinds of women, you know.

CAPTAIN.  Recent research has shown there’s only one!  (Act II, Sc. 4, p. 31)

The Father (1887) is the earliest Strindberg play I read.  It is a good place to start to see the great Strindberg theme of the battle of the sexes.  Just blatant open warfare. 

PASTOR.  You’ve too many women running your home.

CAPTAIN.  You can say that again!  It’s like being in a cage full of tigers.  If I didn’t keep a red-hot iron in front of their noses they’d tear me to pieces the first chance they got!  (I.3, 6)

The Captain lives in a house of women – wife, daughter, childhood nurse (see above) who is a substitute mother figure, mother-in-law (who never sets foot on stage), and numerous servants.  And however hyperbolic he sounds, the Captain is right.  He and his wife Laura compete for the affection of their daughter.  The wife wins by having her husband sent to a mental institution.  Perhaps she has actually driven him insane, or perhaps she has merely convinced the law he is crazy.  Also possible is that he was essentially insane already; his own weakness has destroyed him with his wife just giving him the slightest tap over the edge.  The mother is a first-rate villain, a monster.  Yet perhaps the family is better off rid of the father.

Technically, this is an exercise in manipulating sympathy.  The father starts at a high level, the mother low; there is a modest attempt to increase sympathy for the mother, but mostly Strindberg systematically destroys sympathy for the father.  I have been reading Bleak House, where the standard Dickens (Trollope, Eliot, etc.) move is to create sympathy for the most unlikely characters.  Strindberg is helping found the great Modernist tradition of literature with only horrible characters.

CAPTAIN [gets up].  Get out, woman!  To hell with you, you witches!...  Get out, woman!  At once!

NURSE.  Lord preserve us, what’s going to happen now?

CAPTAIN. [puts on cap and equips himself to go out].  Don’t expect me home before midnight!  [Exits

NURSE.  Sweet Jesus, help us, how is this all going to end?  (I.9, 23-4)

A naïve Strindberg reader, that is just what I was asking! Not now, though. As he grows mad, the Captain begins to transform himself into a character in a tragedy, as if he realizes he is in a play, or as if his madness requires dramatization. The Father is often considered one of Strindberg’s “realistic” and Naturalist plays, but the range of literary reference suggests something else.

The CAPTAIN enters with a pile of books under his arm.CAPTAIN [puts the books on the table].  It’s all here in these books, every one of them.  So I wasn’t mad! (Act III.5., 45)

I am making The Father sound a bit more like Pirandello than it really is, but it is a bit like Pirandello.  And I see that in this scene, the Captain is on the wrong track, furiously leafing through the Odyssey, Ezekiel, and Pushkin, when what he needs is Aeschylus.  Well, he figures it out in the end, that he is Agamemnon (or Othello) while his wife is Clytemnestra (or Iago), when it is far too late.

'To me it’s among the greatest works in the history of drama,’ I replied truthfully - poor suffering actors - some Ghost Sonata

Four more days on August Strindberg, I promise, and I already have no idea what I want to say.

Strindberg is weird and I barely understand him.  Some of his plays, or large parts of them, are obviously immensely effective theatrical art.  Then other sections, even in the same play, are baffling, cryptic, tedious, didactic – name your sin.  The “dream plays” – A Dream Play, To Damascus, The Ghost Sonata – abandon ordinary narrative logic and structure, which leaves Strindberg free to write as a genuine visionary writer, but also allows him to spew some pretty dubious nonsense.

Then there are Strindberg’s ideas, about women, marriage,  and sex, particularly, that occasionally take some pretty appalling turns but are always –and remember I have only read eight plays, but within those, I do mean “always” – redeemed by an irony or reversal so fierce that the original terrible idea is at least challenged and sometimes demolished.  The latter effect is impressive.

Or so it seems to me.  Here is Ingmar Bergman, who is directing The Ghost Sonata:

At my side was a tiny little creature, or possibly a ghost, the grand old lady of the theatre.  Maria Schildknecht, dressed up in the parrot dress and hideous mask of the Mummy.  ‘I assume you are Mr Bergman,’ she whispered, smiling kindly but terrifyingly.  I confirmed my identity and bowed awkwardly.  We stood in silence for a few moments.  ‘Well, what do you think of this then?’ said the little ghost, her voice stern and challenging.  ‘To me it’s among the greatest works in the history of drama,’ I replied truthfully.  The Mummy looked at me with cold contempt.  ‘Oh,’ she said.  ‘This is the kind of shit Strindberg knocked up so that we should have something to play at his Intimate Theatre.’  She left me with a gracious nod…  Imperishable, in a role she hated under a producer she hated.  (Ch. 12 of The Magic Lantern, italics added)

So there are differences of opinion.  This is her part:

MUMMY [like a baby]. Why are you opening the dawer; didn’t I twell you to keep it cwosed?...
BENGTSSON  [also babbling like a baby].  Ta, ta, ta, ta!  Ittle lolly must be nice now, then she’ll get a sweetie! – Pretty Polly!
MUMMY [like a parrot].  Pretty Polly!  Is Jacob there?  Currrrre!
BENGTSSON.  She thinks she’s a parrot.  Maybe she is…  [To the MUMMY]  Come on, Polly!  Give us a whistle!
The MUMMY whistles.  (Scene 2, tr. Michael Robinson, Oxford World’s Classics, p. 266, italics in original)

Actors sometimes have to suffer for our entertainment.  She gets her revenge by the end of the scene, though.

MUMMY.  [opens the closet door]  Now the clock has struck! – Get up and go into the closet where I’ve been sitting mourning our misdeed for twenty years – You’ll find a rope in there like the  one with which you strangled the Consul upstairs, and with which you thought to strangle your benefactor…  Go!
[The OLD MAN goes into the closet]
MUMMY  [Closing the door].  Bengtsson!  Put up the screen!  The death screen!  (Sc. 2, italics in original)

I am making Strindberg sound like Alfred Jarry here, a writer of nightmare gibberish.  The Mummy whistles.  The death screen!  And this isn’t the craziest stuff.

There was no hairpin, but I saw it - a week of August Strindberg

This is where I spend a week writing about an author about whom I knew close to nothing a month, or let’s say a year ago, and now I’m some kinda expert.  It’s August Strindberg week!  This’ll be fun!  He was nuts!

He really was somethin’ else.  I will do my best to avoid anything biographical, because that really is all secondhand for me, and at least I did read some of the plays for myself, but I understand the temptation.  What family drama, what wild swings of opinion, what invective.  After a crisis of confidence in his marriage and writing and beliefs Strindberg spent five years working on science.  What science?  Creating gold!  He was an actual alchemist, in the 1890s.  He’s a character in a John Crowley novel.

The sheer bulk of Strindberg’s writing is hard to understand.  He wrote something like eighty plays, of which I have now read eight, and only the most famous. He wrote novels, short stories, history, popular science, and rants.  Elias Canetti, in his memoir A Tongue Set Free, described his mother’s obsessive reading of Strindberg – this was during and after World War I, so after Strindberg’s death.  Teenage Canetti would buy his mother every volume of Strindberg he could find, assiduously avoiding glancing at the contents because his mother forbid it.  Canetti’s book gave me my first hint of what Strindberg meant to people outside of the theater.

No, the first hint, which I did not understand, came from Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography The Magic Lantern (1987).  Bergman constantly returned to Strindberg throughout his life, in his films, his reading, and especially in the theater:

When I was twelve, I was allowed to accompany a musician who was playing the celeste backstage in Strindberg’s A Dream Play.  It was a searing experience.  Night after night, hidden in the proscenium tower, I witnessed the marriage scene between the Advocate and the Daughter.  It was the first time I had experienced the magic of acting.  The Advocate held a hairpin between his thumb and forefinger, he twisted it, straightened it out and broke it.  There was no hairpin, but I saw it.  The Officer was backstage waiting for his entrance, leaning forward at his shoes, his hands behind his back.  He cleared his throat soundlessly, a perfectly ordinary person.  Then he opened the door and stepped into the limelight.  He was changed, transformed: he was the Officer.  (Ch.4, tr. Joan Tate)

I suppose this story has happened to many children at many different plays, but how appropriate that it was this play, one where the theatrical illusion is constantly violated.  The result was a life of the highest creativity that was suffused with Strindberg.

Here is what I read, by the way, the material for the next few days.  This is a good time to let me know what I should have read not instead of but of course in addition to these.  Always in addition.

The Father (1887) – terrific, intense, deeply misogynist, and yet…

Miss Julie (1888) – as a bonus, it has a preface as hilarious as those of Zola.

To Damascus I & II (1898) – these are oddities, but boy do they explain a lot.

The Dance of Death I (1901) – I saw Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen do this one in 2001 or 2002.  Was that ever fun.

A Dream Play (1901) – Bergman has a funny section describing the impossibility of doing this play, yet he tries again and again.

To Damascus III (1904) – more of the above.

The Ghost Sonata (1907) – short, concentrated, pure; Strindberg aspiring to the condition if music.

This will give me something to do.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway - more Scandinavian books - I can't read all this

More Scandinavian literature, this time from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.  I won’t read it all, I am no kind of expert, I am stuck with English, etc.  But it is easy to get me excited about literature, so suggestions are most welcome.  And if anything looks appealing, perhaps we can read it together.

Denmark

At the forefront are Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.  The former I read in some quantity just before I started Wuthering Expectations, which was a while ago, I admit, but close enough that I doubt I will revisit him now.  The latter is, I fear, a philosopher, and thus spinach.  In real life, I like spinach, so that is just a metaphor.

More to the point are two short books by Jens Peter Jacobsen, the 1880 novel Niels Lyhne and the 1882 collection Mogens and Other Stories.  Jacobsen has had a strange career in English, kept alive by the glowing testimony of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, where Rilke seems to rank Jacobsen with the Bible.  I should see for myself.

Another novel, Pelle the Conqueror (1910) by Martin Andersen Nexø, I have meant to read for twenty-five years since I saw the magnificent 1987 Bille August film adaptation.  The novel will unfortunately not feature Max von Sydow, but it likely has other virtues.  It is long – the film only covered a fraction of the book – and grim.  I have no idea how it is written.

Isak Dinesen’s work is from the 1930s and later, but so many of her stories are set in Denmark’s past that she would fit well with the older writers.   I am thinking of Seven Gothic Tales (1934) and Winter’s Tales (1942) in particular.

By chance, unconnected to this project, I began reading the contemporary conceptual poet Inger Christensen, and I would like to continue my study of her work.  And I mean study – anyone want to help me work on her cosmic long 1969 poem it?  It (it) features elaborate mathematical patterns – tempting, yes?

Sweden

Even poking around, I still know nothing about Swedish literature.  August Strindberg obviously tops the list, and I hope to read a number of his plays, ranging from the 1888 Miss Julie to the strange 1907 Ghost Sonata.  But there are also novels, stories, essays, some freshly translated.  Please, I beg you, recommendations, guidance.

The Queen’s Diadem (1834) by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist is a novel I encountered a year ago in this post by seraillon.  It is either deeply original, or a knockoff of E. T. A. Hoffmann, or something in between.  The Hoffmann connection by itself would give me something to write about.

Hjalmar Söderberg is another novelist I met through book blogs.  I have read a number of convincing posts about his short, intense 1905 novel Doctor Glas.  If I like it, there are a couple of other Söderberg books in English.

Norway

Henrik Ibsen, of course.  I have read six Ibsen plays, I realize, yet I still feel at sea.  I want to read or re-read a good chunk of them, although I will likely follow conventional opinion and ignore his early phase.  Critics are always dividing Ibsen’s work into phases.  Expect lots of Ibsen.

Knut Hamsun had a long, complicated career, but I know him from his early novels Hunger (1890) and Pan (1894).  Talk about intense.  I would like to revisit those and also read another from the same run, Mysteries (1892).  Then – then I don’t know.  Hunger would likely make my Top 50 Novels of the 19th Century list, if I were to make such a thing.

Off the track – far, far off – is Farthest North (1897) by Fridtjof Nansen, a favorite of min kone, the account of his insane attempt to reach the North Pole by freezing his ship in the winter ice.  Eventually, he just decided to walk.  Utterly nuts.  Sounds wonderful.

Now, some trouble.  Henrik Pontoppidan, Karl Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlöf, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Verner von Heidenstam, Frans Eemil Sillanpää – the early Scandinavian Nobelists, the ones who, unlike Hamsun or Sigrid Undset lost their place in English, or never had one.  I gaze upon these names in ignorant awe.

I have often thought that it would be a great book blog project to sort through these and other old prize winners.  I do not believe it is my project.  Yet already comments in the previous post have me warily eying a long, recently translated Pontoppidan novel, the 1904 Lucky Per, which sounds either like a standard attempt to move Naturalism into Danish, or else something much stranger.  Hmm hmm hmm.

Please feel free to correct my errors and recommend more books.