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Candida by George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw’s early works are problem or issue plays, the trouble being that the problems or issues seem so silly and shallow to us, 130 years later, that it’s hard to care about them very much. Also Shaw just doesn’t have the giant depth of Ibsen or the fierce intensity of Strindberg, the dazzling wit of Wilde or the humanity of Chekhov – so his plays feel, to me, like moderately attractive, wordy rambles.

This one is on that perennial subject, which goes back to the Greeks and still fuels countless soaps and novels today, the Love Triangle. This one is between:

  1. James Morell, a 40-something vicar who works in the East End (his house overlooks Victoria Park)
  2. his wife, 33-year-old Candida
  3. and a pathetic drip of a pimply poet, 18-year-old Eugene Marchbanks, who mistakes teenage ineptitude and shyness for finer feelings, and is convinced that Candida really loves him

As with ‘Arms and the Man’ the supposed narrative, let alone the ‘issues’ the play ‘deals with’ (what does a woman want? what is marriage for? yadda yadda yadda) scarcely ruffled my mind. The most interesting thing about ‘Candida’ is the astonishing detail of Shaw’s set descriptions and stage descriptions.

The play opens with three very densely packed pages, comprising 1,200 words, describing the vicinity and contents of Victoria Park in East London, before zooming in to describe the exterior of Morell’s dwelling place, St. Dominic’s Parsonage. He gives us a minute description of the drawing room which is the set for most of the play before finally alighting, like the camera in an old-fashioned movie, on the male protagonist himself and proceeding to summarise the man Morell, his character and appearance, his career and attitudes, in prose which reads just like a novel. This is just part of this long description:

The Reverend James Mavor Morell is a Christian Socialist clergyman of the Church of England, and an active member of the Guild of St. Matthew and the Christian Social Union. A vigorous, genial, popular man of forty, robust and goodlooking, full of energy, with pleasant, hearty, considerate manners, and a sound, unaffected voice, which he uses with the clean, athletic articulation of a practised orator, and with a wide range and perfect command of expression. He is a first rate clergyman, able to say what he likes to whom he likes, to lecture people without setting himself up against them, to impose his authority on them without humiliating them, and to interfere in their business without impertinence. His well-spring of spiritual enthusiasm and sympathetic emotion has never run dry for a moment: he still eats and sleeps heartily enough to win the daily battle between exhaustion and recuperation triumphantly. Withal, a great baby, pardonably vain of his powers and unconsciously pleased with himself. He has a healthy complexion, a good forehead, with the brows somewhat blunt, and the eyes bright and eager, a mouth resolute, but not particularly well cut, and a substantial nose, with the mobile, spreading nostrils of the dramatic orator, but, like all his features, void of subtlety.

On their first appearances the text stops to give equally as detailed descriptions of the two other main characters, as well as ancillaries such as Morell’s snippy secretary, Miss Proserpine Garnett, and Candida’s comically Cockney father, Mr Burgess.

Mr. Burgess enters unannounced. He is a man of sixty, made coarse and sordid by the compulsory selfishness of petty commerce, and later on softened into sluggish bumptiousness by overfeeding and commercial success. A vulgar, ignorant, guzzling man, offensive and contemptuous to people whose labour is cheap, respectful to wealth and rank, and quite sincere and without rancour or envy in both attitudes. Finding him without talent, the world has offered him no decently paid work except ignoble work, and he has become in consequence, somewhat hoggish. But he has no suspicion of this himself, and honestly regards his commercial prosperity as the inevitable and socially wholesome triumph of the ability, industry, shrewdness and experience in business of a man who in private is easygoing, affectionate and humorously convivial to a fault. Corporeally, he is a podgy man, with a square, clean shaven face and a square beard under his chin; dust coloured, with a patch of grey in the centre, and small watery blue eyes with a plaintively sentimental expression, which he transfers easily to his voice by his habit of pompously intoning his sentences.

What these enormous descriptions convey, I think, is Shaw’s lofty superiority to his own characters. His brisk businesslike dismissal of them then carries in into the stage directions which often subtly mock and undermine them.

And it’s this (on the admittedly slender basis of having read just two of his plays) which gives Shaw’s plays their superficiality. He himself undermines their seriousness at every turn, not with comedy – as in Wilde – but with a kind of robust good-humoured mockery which is rarely actually funny but is facetious and unserious enough to prevent his characters acquiring real gravitas.

Act 1

We are introduced to the reverend Morell and his secretary, Proserpine, also to a young Oxford clergyman Morell has picked up, the Reverend Alexander Mill.

Then his father-in-law Mr Burgess arrives to make it up after they had an argument. Morell lost his temper with Burgess for winning a contract with the council by dint of paying his employees starvation wages. As a result Morell shamed the Guardians out of accepting Burgess’s bid and Burgess was miffed. Now Burgess announces that he’s got most of the work automated and raised the pay of the remaining workers. Morell is briefly overjoyed before Burgess explains that he only did it to win the contract i.e. not out of the kindness of his heart.

Onto this scene enters Morell’s wife Candida, aged 33, who’s arrived home from a trip somewhere. She’s arrived back along with Eugene Marchbanks, a slight, weedy, effeminate, shy, nervous scribbledehoy.

After a bit of politeness, Burgess and Candida exit leaving Morell and Marchbanks by themselves. Dialogue in which Marchbanks manages to massively insult Morell, by telling him all his ideas about life are wrong and that his wife doesn’t love him. Marchbanks is, we are told, a poet who believes all kinds of poetical things about love are true. He phrases them quite persuasively but the nub of the scene is he manages to anger even the kind-hearted tolerant Morell who eventually grabs him by the lapels and shouts at him to leave his house. Comically, it’s at this precise moment that Candida enters and insists that Eugene simply must stay for lunch, mustn’t he, John?

So that’s Act 1 but what impressed me, as usual, was the detail of the dialogue instructions.

(Eugene chafes intolerantly, repudiating the worth of his happiness. Morell, deeply insulted, controls himself with fine forbearance, and continues steadily, with great artistic beauty of delivery.)

MARCHBANKS: (unimpressed and remorseless, his boyish crudity of assertion telling sharply against Morell’s oratory)

MORELL: (redoubling his force of style under the stimulus of his genuine feeling and Eugene’s obduracy).

I’m fascinated by Shaw’s obsessive detailing of every aspect of his characters’ personality, history, gestures and tones of voice, which leaves almost nothing to the interpreter of the actor of the character, the director of the play or the reader.

Act 2

Same scene, later the same day, Eugene and Miss Proserpine. Eugene spills his naive thoughts about love:

MARCHBANKS: All the love in the world is longing to speak; only it dare not, because it is shy, shy, shy. That is the world’s tragedy.

Eugene keeps plugging away at Proserpine until he gets her to admit that she has feelings for Morell and loses her temper with his childish persistence. Which is just the moment when bluff old Mr Burgess enters. He, also, has an argument with Miss P who calls him a fat head – then realises she’s gone too far and repents when the bell goes and she exits.

Burgess tells Eugene he thinks Morell is mad because earlier this morning he called him a ‘scoundrel’. This obviously plays to Eugene’s recent argument with Morell.

Morell enters and Burgess complains that Proserpina called him a fat head. Morell laughs and tells him to forget it. Burgess says (aside) to Eugene, Told you so – mad! The scene is all about manual labour. When Morell says that Candida is filling the lamps both Burgess and Eugene are outraged, Eugene in particular can’t bear to think of her sullying her pretty white hands etc.

In the event Candida enters carrying one of the lamps she just filled which leads to melodramatic wailing from Eugene who says he has the horrors. Burgess comically thinks he’s talking about delirium tremens till Candida clarifies that Eugene is talking about the poetic horrors. Candida drags Eugene off to chop onions, leaving time for Burgess and Proserpine to spat a bit more. P wins and Burgess goes into the garden in a huff.

When Candida returns she makes Morell stop writing and come and sit and talk with her. She tells him the obvious fact that Prosperine is in love with her, just like all his previous secretaries – and the congregations at his church only come because he’s such a damn good sermon giver, a great performer, that it’s better than a play. But none of them believe in God or practice what he tells them.

This all leads to the notion that Morell receives love and adulation from his secretaries and flocks and yet love is desperately wanting for the one person who needs it, Eugene! She goes even further by revealing she knows that Eugene is ready to fall in love with her. Morell is shocked and upset that his wife is attracted to the young man he laid hands on for saying he loved her. Some kind of power is taking Candida away from him.

She goes even further in saying she hopes Eugene finds out about love from a good (kind, noble) woman and doesn’t degrade himself by finding out from a bad, fallen woman. And now she horrifies Morell by saying she would sacrifice her purity and duty for Eugene.

CANDIDA: Ah, James, how little you understand me, to talk of your confidence in my goodness and purity! I would give them both to poor Eugene as willingly as I would give my shawl to a beggar dying of cold, if there were nothing else to restrain me.

Candida’s mockery, and even her phraseology, directly echo Eugene’s, and when she clinches her speech by giving him a mocking kiss, it breaks Morell’s heart. He angrily pushes her away just as Eugene and Burgess re-enter, to be amazed by the couple arguing.

Marchbanks sits on the sofa and Candida goes to cheerily sit next to him but he is scandalised. His says he is upset because he can see how much Candida has hurt Morell.

MARCHBANKS (aside to her). It is your cruelty. I hate cruelty. It is a horrible thing to see one person make another suffer.

Burgess and Marchbanks are remonstrating with Candida when Lexy, Morell’s young assistant enters. He has a message from the Guild of St. Matthew. They have booked a hall and put up posters advertising that Morell will speak to them, but now…he has sent a telegram saying he won’t go and won’t speak.

I didn’t understand the timing of this. If Morell is meant to have had some change of heart because of his argument with Candida, that’s only just happened, and there’s been no time for him to send anyone a telegram. So it must have been a result of his earlier conversation with Eugene, where Eugene attacked his superficial speechifying and said he knew nothing of love.

All the other characters are disconcerted and amazed. Morell always keeps his speaking engagements. And letting a group down on the very evening of his talk is unprecedented. Candida tells him they’ll all come along to support him, they’ll sit on the stage and everything.

At which point Morell calls Miss Prosperine in and tells her to telegraph the Guild of St. Matthew to tell them that he will speak after all. Burgess is reluctant to attend until Morell tells him the chairman is on the Works Committee of the County Council and has some influence in the matter of contracts at which point, with comic effect, he reverses his decision. He’ll require Miss P and Lexy, as well.

But when Candida renews her offer to attend, Morell tells her no: she must stay at home and entertain Eugene. He goes so far as to say he is afraid of Eugene’s criticism and won’t be able to express himself, won’t speak freely if Eugene is watching.

MORELL: I should be afraid to let myself go before Eugene: he is so critical of sermons. (Looking at him.) He knows I am afraid of him: he told me as much this morning. Well, I shall show him how much afraid I am by leaving him here in your custody, Candida.
MARCHBANKS (to himself, with vivid feeling): That’s brave. That’s beautiful.

So…so he’s leaving Candida and Marchbanks alone together as a kind of test… This along with the characterisation of Candida, in fact the central triangle between Morell, Marchbanks and Candida is comprehensible just deeply improbable.

Act 3

Same scene past ten that evening. Eugene has been reading Candida poetry for two hours, ever since Morell left the house. With the result that Candida is slumped in an armchair gazing hypnotised at the tip of a poker she’s holding. Eugene stops reading and asks her what she thinks and has to ask several times to wake her from her trance. He is a bit hurt that she’s hasn’t been listening, she is remorseful.

She asks him to come closer. She is in an armchair and he lies on the hearthrug with his head on her lap. He says he has only one thing to say and repeats her name in an impassioned poetic way, says that repeating her name is like praying. She is kindly but also shrewd and sensible at the same time, asks if praying this prayer makes him happy and he says yes.

I’d have thought all this was advanced flirting and this is just the moment when when Morell comes in and sees them together. When Morell says the others have gone to dine somewhere Candida goes out to tell the maid she can go to bed, leaving Morell alone with Marchbanks.

Morell interrogates Eugene, in effect asking him whether he has seduced his wife, though it’s all expressed more obtusely than that. Eugene says his wife maintained a ‘flaming sword’ between them. The conflict between them is populated by subtle sentiments, clever turns of debate and conflicting interpretations of phrases, but the entire situation seems preposterous. This clergyman is allowing his young guest to see whether he can tempt and seduce his wife away from him…

To put it another way, both of these men dress up the process of falling in love, being in love, being married, maintaining a relationship, in a bluster of metaphors and allusions which are presented as sophisticated dialogue but feel really tiresome. The general idea is Marchbanks speaks in absurdly naive, over-the-top poetic flights of fancy while Morell is the straight man, providing the thumping bathos of reality.

MARCHBANKS (Dreamily): A woman like that has divine insight: she loves our souls, and not our follies and vanities and illusions, or our collars and coats, or any other of the rags and tatters we are rolled up in. (He reflects on this for an instant; then turns intently to question Morell.) What I want to know is how you got past the flaming sword that stopped me.
MORELL (meaningly): Perhaps because I was not interrupted at the end of ten minutes.
MARCHBANKS (taken aback): What!
MORELL: Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there long.
MARCHBANKS: It’s false: there can he dwell for ever and there only. It’s in the other moments that he can find no rest, no sense of the silent glory of life. Where would you have me spend my moments, if not on the summits?

There’s an interlude of broad comedy when Burgess, Lexy and Proserpine stumble into the living room having come from a champagne dinner bought by Burgess, each one a bit tipsy which exaggerates their basic characters.

Anyway, this larking about is a comic interlude before the climax of the play, arrived at in a roundabout, laboured way. This Great Climax is that Morell and Marchbanks both ask Candida to choose between them. Shaw makes a sort of feminist point that Candida finds both of them absurd, finding Marchbanks a pathetic child (sat on the sofa ‘like a guilty schoolboy on his best behaviour’) but just as disappointed by her husband who hesitates to assert that he is ‘master’ of the house.

Both men make set-piece speeches bidding for her love before Candida announces her decision. She says she gives herself to ‘the weaker of the two’. Morell, in his convention, literal way interprets this to mean Marchbanks who throughout the play and in his arguments with Morell has painted himself as a feeble weakling up against strong determined Morell, and I think the audience is intended to go along with this interpretation, too.

However, it is a conceit or gag or ploy. Marchbanks grasps it immediately but Candida has to spell it out to Morell that by this phrase she in fact means him. Then she delivers the Author’s Message which is that Morell only appears strong because all his life he has had other people (mostly women) to support him.

CANDIDA: Ask James’s mother and his three sisters what it cost to save James the trouble of doing anything but be strong and clever and happy. Ask ME what it costs to be James’s mother and three sisters and wife and mother to his children all in one. Ask Prossy and Maria how troublesome the house is even when we have no visitors to help us to slice the onions. Ask the tradesmen who want to worry James and spoil his beautiful sermons who it is that puts them off … I build a castle of comfort and indulgence and love for him, and stand sentinel always to keep little vulgar cares out. I make him master here, though he does not know it…

And once it’s pointed out to him, Morell instantly agrees, with rather sickening Victorian sentimentality.

MORELL (quite overcome, kneeling beside her chair and embracing her with boyish ingenuousness): It’s all true, every word. What I am you have made me with the labour of your hands and the love of your heart! You are my wife, my mother, my sisters: you are the sum of all loving care to me.

Somehow, by some alchemy which might work in the theatre but rings very hollow on the page, Candida’s choice and her explanation transform Marchbanks. Instead of the pathetic weed he’s been for all the play up to now, he is at a stroke transformed into a man. He even sounds like a man:

MARCHBANKS (with the ring of a man’s voice—no longer a boy’s—in the words). I know the hour when it strikes. I am impatient to do what must be done.

He declares that this morning he was 18 whereas now, having gone through whatever process Shaw has in mind, he feels ‘as old as the world’, and the play closes in some kind of climax of Victorian high-mindedness which I’ll quote in full to give you the preposterous pompous flavour:

CANDIDA (going to him, and standing behind him with one hand caressingly on his shoulder): Eighteen! Will you, for my sake, make a little poem out of the two sentences I am going to say to you? And will you promise to repeat it to yourself whenever you think of me?
MARCHBANKS (without moving): Say the sentences.
CANDIDA: When I am thirty, she will be forty-five. When I am sixty, she will be seventy-five.
MARCHBANKS (turning to her): In a hundred years, we shall be the same age. But I have a better secret than that in my heart. Let me go now. The night outside grows impatient.

‘The night outside grows impatient,’ yes.

Thoughts

An Ibsen play moves through a carefully structured series of revelations which shake the audience and the characters’ sense of themselves. Strindberg’s characters torment each other with an intensity which bites the imagination. But Shaw describes his characters in such excruciating detail on their first appearance that he destroys any sense of mystery or surprise as he puts his totally-explained mannequins through the motions.

Long before the end I was exasperated with the footling histrionic Marchbanks, but also immensely frustrated with Morell’s inability to simply kick the cuckoo out of his nest. I think we’re intended to sympathise with Candida, I think she’s meant to be a Modern Woman and a variation on Ibsen’s great Nora Helmer. But she, and the play in general, have absolutely none of Ibsen’s depth. Instead, her insistence on playing up to Marchbanks, her insistence at the end of Act 1 that he stays for lunch even though he and her husband have just come to blows; her toying with him at the start of Act 3, all this just seems wilful and silly and superficial, especially when it becomes plain how much it’s hurting the husband she claims to care for.

All three of them seem to hurt each other but not for the deep reasons of Ibsen or Strindberg but just because Shaw wills it so for our entertainment. The reversal on the penultimate page where Candida proves that Morell is the weaker of the two doesn’t feel like the revelation of a great truth, the solution of an issue we can all relate to, but a cheap gag at the end of a rather tiresome entertainment.

Credit

‘Candida’ by George Bernard Shaw was first staged in 1894 and published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s ‘Plays Pleasant’ volume, which also included ‘Arms and the Man’, ‘You Never Can Tell’, and ‘The Man of Destiny’. I read the 1946 Penguin paperback edition, 1964 reprint.

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Posted by Simon on October 25, 2024

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The Father by August Strindberg (1887)

NURSE: Why do two people have to torture each other to death?

In the English-speaking world August Strindberg (1849 to 1912) is famous for a handful of plays characterised by intense plots and hysterical characters. But in the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’, translator Michael Robinson is at pains to point out that this handful of dramas is just a fraction of the output which makes Strindberg such a major literary figure in his native Sweden.

For a start Strindberg wrote what is widely considered the first modern Swedish novel, ‘The Red Room’ (1879) but he also wrote weighty histories, short stories, poems, essays, scientific studies, sociology, books on occultism and more. At some points he dropped writing altogether and devoted himself to painting, creating at least 117 accredited works which push beyond Victorian realism into an early Expressionism, especially his depictions of stormy seascapes.

Back to the plays, Strindberg wrote more than 60 and in a wide variety of styles or genres, starting with plays about Swedish history and moving onto naturalistic tragedy, monodrama and then, in his later pieces, experimental pieces which anticipate expressionist and surrealist techniques.

The Father

Act 1

This is a play about a very unhappy marriage. Adolf is a middle-aged captain in the cavalry. He lives at home but still has authority over a company of soldiers. Twenty years ago he married Laura, the sister of the parson who he enjoys chatting to. But Adolf and Laura are at daggers drawn. They have been married for 20 years and the marriage has degenerated into outright hatred.

The Captain is extremely rude, brusque and controlling towards her, controlling her movements, monitoring every penny she spends. Slowly it emerges the enmity is rooted in a religious divide. Laura, her mother and the Captain’s old maid, Margret, are all devout Christians. The Captain, on the other hand, is a freethinking atheist. More than that he’s a would-be scientist. He is undertaking serious research into the mineralogy of meteorites using a spectroscope. Typically, his wife misinterprets this as a mad claim that he can see life on other planets through a microscope.

Thus, in conversation with the pastor, the Captain gives vent to venomously misogynist sentiments, claiming it’s like living in a cage full of tigers and:

CAPTAIN: It’s man against woman, all day long, without end… (p.8)

What’s brought the situation to a head is the couple’s furious argument about what to do with their daughter, Bertha, aged 17. Laura wants her to stay in the household, subject to the Christian influence of her, her mother and maid. There’s also talk of indulging Bertha’s alleged talent at painting.

The Captain, on the contrary, wants to get his daughter out of this snakepit of superstition, away from ‘a bunch of ignorant and superstitious women’, to send her to lodge with an atheist lawyer in town, and to have her trained as a schoolteacher.

When a new young doctor arrives, Dr Östermark. Laura has engineered his arrival, having forced the old doctor to retire. Now she makes sure to meet him first and brief him about her husband’s ‘madness’ but the doctor in facts acts as a kind of chorus and intermediary. He hears both sides giving their versions of the story. For example he listens to the Captain complaining that his scientific researches are being hampered because the booksellers he’s sent off to for books he needs haven’t replied. Later the doctor finds out from Laura that she has been intercepting the Captain’s mail and destroying these very letters. So when the captain calls Laura his ‘enemy’ it’s not far from the truth. There really is a war between them.

In a big argument the captain, in his rigid legalistic way, insists that a father has complete and utter control over his child, to which Laura malevolently replies, well, what it Bertha isn’t your child, if I was unfaithful? Then all the captain’s high and mighty legal rights evaporate.

Act 2

He’s so infuriated he goes out for an extended sleigh ride. This gives Laura an evening with the new doctor to turn him against her husband. She tells the doctor it was the captain’s paranoid notion that Bertha isn’t really his own child. She tells him the captain has a track record of worrying about his sanity going back years, and the doctor is taken in by all this and takes her side.

When he still doesn’t return, Laura sets the maid Margret to sit up for him and she’s joined by Bertha who can’t sleep. She asks if it’s true that her father is ill and the maid confirms it, ill in the head. Of course the captain isn’t mentally ill he’s just a strict angry man, but the play shows us all the women in his household ganging up on him.

Margret packs Bertha off to bed and the captain returns from his ride. He goes straight to his photography album to look at photos of him and Bertha. He asks Margret if they look related, him and Berth, and questions the maid about the father of her child. Clearly he’s rattled by Laura’s suggestion that Bertha isn’t his daughter.

The doctor had stayed on to wait for the captain’s return and now they have an intense discussion about the nature of paternity. The captain talks about studies into crossbreeding horses and zebras. The doctor quotes Goethe who apparently said that every man must take the paternity of his children on trust to which the captain immediately responds:

CAPTAIN: Trust? Where a woman’s concerned? That’s risky. (p.30)

And then speechifies about the absurdity of paternity, asking the doctor if the very idea of a father walking along the street hand in hand with his children isn’t somehow absurd. He tells two stories about women he’s met who’s turned out to be immoral and seducible.

CAPTAIN: That’s the danger, you see, their instinct for villainy is quite unconscious. (p.31)

The introduction had mentioned Strindberg’s reputation for misogyny but it’s something else to be subjected to a play, and a character, so devoted to expressing an endless list of accusations against woman.

Anyway the scene with the doctor ends oddly, with an unnatural angularity to it. In fact it’s symptomatic of the way the relations between all the characters are oddly unrelaxed, feel like the speeches of puppets.

DOCTOR: Good night, then, Captain. I’m afraid. I can be of no further use in this case.
CAPTAIN: Are we enemies?
DOCTOR: Far from it. It’s just a pity we can’t be friends. Good night. (p.32)

The doctor exists and the captain goes over to the door and calls Laura in, for he realises she was listening just outside. He tells her he’s been to the post office and discovered that she’s been tampering with his outgoing and incoming mail, and also understands she’s been embarked on a campaign to persuade everyone he’s mad. As I say, the dialogue has a kind of programmatic, schematic aspect to it:

CAPTAIN: I won’t appeal to your feelings, for you don’t have any, that’s your strength. I do, however, appeal to your self-interest.

The scene gets odder for the captain lays out the possibility that all her scheming will actually drive him mad. But she must consider. If he goes mad he will lose his position in the army, then where will she be? If he goes mad he might commit suicide in which case she’ll lose his life insurance.

LAURA: Is this a trap?
CAPTAIN. Of course. It’s up to you whether you walk round it or stick your head in it.

The captain proposes an armistice. His terms are that she frees him from his doubts about Bertha’s parentage: is he the father? And. characteristically, Laura doesn’t respond at all like a real person would, but instead enters into the elaborate fencing, the strategising, as if in a game of chess, about which response suits her aims best.

The captain starts to rant. He compares himself to a slave who has slaved away and ruined his health and all for someone else’s child. He’s served 17 years hard labour in this cruel servitude. He works himself into such a state that he starts crying. He describes himself as a child in his helplessness before her scheming. And Laura walks over and strokes the hair of her poor man-baby and he goes into a kind of trance of remembrance, remembering how, when they married, he was a big tough officer on the parade ground but at home completely capitulated to her will ‘as to a higher, more gifted being’ (p.36).

Laura joins the reverie, describing how she felt like the mother of her man-baby but going on to explain how revolted she felt after sex because the pure mother had degraded herself to become the mistress – Ugh! So he tried to regain her by asserting his masculinity. But, Laura points out, that was his mistake. Again it all has the schematicness of a PowerPoint presentation.

LAURA: Yes but that was your mistake. The mother was your friend, you see, but the woman was your enemy; love between the sexes is a battle. Don’t go thinking I gave myself; I didn’t give, I took – what I wanted. (p.37)

Yes, the captain admits she had total power over him, could bend him to her will, could persuade him that a potato was a peach. But he awoke to his shame and sought to reassert his identity through some great act. But there was no war so it couldn’t be a military exploit. And that’s why he turned to science, hoping to make his name with his discoveries. And that is why her cutting off his letters to the booksellers is such a crime against the core of who he wants to be.

He bluntly asks her, Do you hate me? and she replies yes, when he ‘acts the man’, to which he gives another drastically misogynist reply:

CAPTAIN: It’s like racial hatred. If we really are descended from the apes, at least it must have been from two different species. (p.38)

It is a life or death struggle. At which Laura plays her trump card. She has an incriminating letter a copy of which has been sent to the court. She is going to use it to have him committed. What letter? he says. The one he wrote to the old doctor in which he discussed his fears for his own sanity. And now that he has served his function, he can be dispensed with, he’s no longer needed, as she exits through the door and the enraged captain throws the lighted lantern after her.

Act 3

Act 3 opens in the same living room, that evening. The door out of the room is jammed shit with a door wedged against it. Laura and the nurse are rummaging through the captain’s things. They both refer to the noise of pacing, banging, and then sawing, which they can hear from the room overhead. The implication is that the captain has retreated to (or been locked in?) his room.

The pastor arrives and we witness Laura lying to him as she has lied throughout the play, claiming the captain threw a lighted lamp ‘in her face’ whereas we saw with our own eyes him merely throwing it at the door she was closing after her. Violent, but not as precisely cruelly violent as she describes.

Obviously appalled, the pastor asks what she’s doing and she explains she’s informing all and sundry that the captain’s had a breakdown into madness, starting with his commanding officer in the cavalry. the doctor has sent to the local hospital for a straitjacket.

But remember the pastor is the captain’s friend. More importantly, he’s Laura’s brother and knows what a spoilt, cunning, scheming person she’s been since a girl. Now he directly accuses her of manipulating the situation so she can get her husband committed, take charge of the family money and have Bertha raised the way she wants. He calls her marvellously strong-willed and completely untroubled by a conscience but she gives as good as she gets, demanding, ‘Prove it!’ and of course he can’t.

Enter the new doctor who promptly says a) an assault has been carried out and so it’s entirely Laura’s decision, how she wants to proceed, which will decide whether her husband is sent to prison or an asylum. Under the pastor’s beady gaze she hesitates to condemn the captain so the doctor takes the initiative and says the asylum will be best; even a prison sentence will end and the man would be released to present a renewed threat. From the asylum he will never be released.

The doctor has brought a straitjacket with him and shows Laura, the nurse and pastor how to put it on a patient and buckle it to a chair or sofa. Question is, which one of them will jump the captain from behind and quickly wrap it round him? They all demur at which point very conveniently enters the common soldier Nöjd who’s arrived with a message from the colonel. The doctor is in the middle of asking him to straitjacket the captain when the nurse intervenes. She can’t bear some rough soldier to do it so she’ll do it.

At which moment, with the precision of a well-oiled watch, there’s a knock at the internal door and the captain himself enters.

The captain

He isn’t obviously violent. The reverse, he’s in a very bookish mood. He’s brought a load of books with him to prove his point about the fragility of fatherhood and quotes from the Odyssey and the Bible to the effect that a man can never be totally sure that his children are his own.

The captain goes on a ranting monologue that may well indicate he’s mad. He asks the pastor and the doctor if they’re confident their children are indeed their own and reminds them of a music tutor and lodger, respectively, who their wives might have taken a fancy too, and claims he sees them both going pale, and mockingly says he can see the cuckold’s horns growing on their heads.

When he goes on to say that the one big hope he had to be a scientist has been stolen from him and so his life is now empty and meaningless, I realised he is like Hamlet, and with that realisation wondered if the entire play is a sort of ‘modern’ domestic version of Hamlet, not least in its obsession with ‘true’ fathers. His monologue ends with abandonment:

CAPTAIN: Do what you will with me! I no longer exist! (p.47)

Then doctor and the parson sneak out, solely to allow Bertha to enter and for their to be a twisted father-and-daughter scene. This starts off sensible with him saying he doesn’t care about throwing the lamp at her mother but it descends into what sounds like genuine mania when he rants that she has two souls but must only have one, she must love him with all her soul, she must become one with her.

And deepens when he says he is a cannibal and wants to eat her, compares himself to Saturn who ate his own children. He then makes the Hamlet connection explicit by paraphrasing Shakespeare:

CAPTAIN: To eat or be eaten! That is the question. (p.48)

At which point the captain goes over to a wall with guns on it and takes down a pistol. he quickly discovers the women have removed all the bullets from it. At this moment the nurse enters and leads him like a child away from the wall and sits him in a chair. Then she gets the straitjacket.

She now recites memories from his boyhood, reminding him of the time they had to coax him into handing over a kitchen knife he’d got hold of (and she removes the gun from his grasp) and then how they had to coax him into his shirt by pretending it was made of gold – and while she weaves a spell of memories the captain, as in a trance, allows her to put him into the straitjacket.

Moments later he snaps out of it but it is too late, he is bound and straitened and cannot escape. When he asks why, the nurse replies to stop him killing his child to which he replies – genuinely bonkers now – why not kill her, at least that way she would go to heaven.

At his point Nöjd re-enters. The captain orders him to attack the nurse and free him, but Nöjd can’t, making the sexist point that a man just can’t attack a woman, ‘it’s in a man’s blood, like religion’ (p.50)

Laura enters. Am I your enemy? she asks. You’re all my enemy, the captain replies, every woman he’s ever known: his mother who didn’t want to bear him; his sister who bulled him; the first woman he slept with who gave him venereal disease; his daughter who chose her mother over him; and now her, his wife – all enemies. The captain is given a little rant about how modern love has gone to the dogs.

CAPTAIN: In the old days a man married a wife; now he forms a business partner with a career woman or moves in with a friend. – And then he seduces the partner or rapes the friend. Whatever happened to lovely, healthy sensual love? It died somewhere along the way…(p.51)

As you know, I despise all expressions by any author of the idea that the world is going to the dogs, that the world is, specially and uniquely in their time, going to hell, all morals lost, all values abandoned, modern life bankrupt yadda yadda yadda. All authors since the start of writing have expressed the same whining sentiment. All it does is convey an epic failure of imagination, a complete lack of historical awareness.

But Adolf goes beyond this to express a range of physical hallucinations. these may or may not be true of modern mental illness but they reminded me of the clichés of madness which are used in Elizabethan plays. He says he is trying to fight with shadows. He says his thoughts dissolve into thin air. He says his mind is catching fire and next second says he is cold, so terrible cold.

Laura strokes his hair while the madman remembers how they walked in spring woodlands amid flowers when they first courted. Now everything is lost. Who rules our lives? God, the pious Laura replies. He asks the nurse to lay his tunic over him (he’s lying on the sofa in a straitjacket).

He identifies with Hercules who was wrapped in a poisonous shirt by his deceitful wife. He tries to sit up to spit at the women but collapses back. He asks to lay his head on her breast. When she asks if he’d like to see his child he says he has no child, men can have no children, only women can have children which is why the future belongs to them, and he starts to pray like a child before falling backwards with a cry.

In the short last scene Laura calls in the pastor and the doctor to stand over the captain’s body. The doctor says Adolf has had a heart attack. He’s not dead but he may or may not regain consciousness. The nurse claims he was praying to God when it happened which makes the pastor perk up. The last incident in the play is cute and slick, ending it with a bit of pat symbolism like the punchline of a joke. Bertha comes running onstage:

BERTHA: [enters from the left, runs to her mother] Mother, mother!
LAURA: My child! My own child!
PASTOR: Amen.

The End.

Questions

So what just happened? Was the captain genuinely mentally unstable? Was the letter he wrote to the old doctor actually accurate? Was Laura not inventing any of it? Although we saw her explicitly lie, were her lies based on a true perception of the case?

And was he tipped over the edge, as he appeared to say at the end of Act 3, purely by the doubt Laura raised in his mind about his paternity of Bertha? She described it as a strategy of war, so was it just that one thing, the planting of the seed of doubt, which won the war for Laura?

So was the sustained misogyny of the captain’s attitude a reflection of the author’s own beliefs or, on the contrary, was the whole point that they were the hysterical rantings of an already damaged mind? Was there a conspiracy against him? Or was that the typical paranoid delusions of the mentally ill?

Michael Robinson’s introduction

Robinson is a leading Strindberg scholar having, among other achievements, edited a selected letters and selected essay, and it shows. His introduction and notes are extremely focused, erudite and illuminating. It’s worth buying this edition for the clarity and range of his analysis. From his introduction to ‘The Father’ I took the following points:

Not naturalist Although naturalist in appearance, ‘The Father’ lacks what naturalism meant for Zola or Ibsen. Zola’s method required the detailed description of the characters’ heredity and environment, the studied accumulation of biographical facts about each character which supported Zola and his school’s claims to be replacing fictional flummery with scientific objectivity.

Not Ibsen Nor does this play have much in common with Ibsen, whose plays are characterised by 1) immensely detailed description of the stage set and props, and 2) more importantly, the way a present crisis leads to a series of dramatic revelations about the past.

Present battle Instead ‘The Father’ takes place in a basic set and the past is barely referred to (except to say Laura was a stroppy child and Adolf had a difficult childhood). No, the focus is on something else, on the conflict entirely in the present, of ‘two implacable hostile minds’, bound to each other by desire and hatred. And a conflict which represents the deepest primal conflict, that between the two sexes of Homo sapiens:

LAURA: Love between the sexes is a battle… (p.37)

Indeed, on the question of the characters being epitomes or types, representatives of the two sexes, Robinson quotes from a letter Zola wrote to Strindberg explaining that it was precisely this schematic nature of ‘The Father’ which displeased him.

Soul murder In a review of Ibsen’s Romersholm, Strindberg talked about själamord meaning ‘soul murder’, describing the kind of half-conscious struggle to subjugate and defeat the other, within a destructive relationship. This is exactly what ‘The Father’ is, a battle to the death between Laura and Adolf, which requires none of the sociological detail of Zola or the revelations from the past of an Ibsen. It’s a straight fight taking place in the present.

Contemporary psychology This explains why Strindberg was a great reader of the up-to-the-minute psychology of his day, devouring books by English and French psychiatrists. These (especially the work of Jean-Martin Charcot in hypnosis which was to so influence Freud) reinforced Strindberg’s sense of the suggestibility of the human mind (a strange form of auto-hypnosis occurs at the end of his next play, ‘Miss Julie’). And it is this power we have over each other, the psychological effects we have on each other, and the way this power can be used to devastating effect, which ‘The Father’ dramatises.

Laura doesn’t just win the battle of the sexes, she wins it so comprehensively that she persuades the captain that he no longer exists (p.47).

Comments

Mad farrago, isn’t it? Now, in 2024, we are more sensitive than ever before to all aspects of misogynist and women-hating attitudes, with the result that this entire play feels off-the-scale misogynist, beyond the pale in its toxicity. Even the ‘modern’ introduction is written by a man and dates from 1998, a generation before #metoo. Imagine the articles and papers which must have been written about Strindberg by countless feminist academics over the past 30 years…

I suppose there are two or three reasons to be interested in it. 1) One is the simple historical one of understanding the impact Strindberg had at the time and in the generations of playwrights following him. the history of European drama. All I know is what’s in the introduction to this volume which I’ve summarised above.

2) The translator Michael Robinson, describes it as a relatively ‘realistic play’ but it isn’t, is it? The fencing between Adolf and Laura is entirely artificial. In the combination of precise logic and brutal gender enmity it reminded me of (what I remember of) the tragedies of Jean Racine (1639 to 1699), the logical, almost robotic statement of strategies of hatred and power coolly and calmly discussed between opponents who want to destroy each other. For me it all has a kind of weird, metallic flavour.

3) The extremity of the characters’ hatred leads to dialogue which reads like the purest melodrama. Half the dialogue given to the old maid seems designed solely to promote the claustrophobic atmosphere of doom and disaster:

  • Lord preserve us, whatever will be the end of this!
  • Oh, God have mercy on us all! Where will this end!

Lots of punctuation marks!

4) The child imagery. The play is saturated with it. The old nursemaid remembers caring for Adolf as a child. Laura and the captain remember the early days of their relationship when he was a child in her hands. At various moments when he’s angry with either of them, the captain insists he is not a child but, as has already been established, he has been and maybe in his core still is, a kind of helpless child. the extensive use of child-mother-father-parent imagery creates a complex web of dynamics and tensions, but the central one appears to be that the play’s title is deeply ironic. In many ways, the supposedly dominant, powerful Father turns out to be the most helpless and outwitted character of all.

But of course, this entire idea can easily be interpreted as a form of self-pitying male misogyny.

5) But most of all, I am sick to death of literature about the sex wars. As a man in 2024, I am sick beyond words at the saturation coverage of gender issues everywhere I look: in the art exhibitions I go to, in plays and movies, in documentaries, in TV shows, on the radio, on social media, in all newspapers and magazines, in the coverage of the US presidential election, in the coverage of the Olympics or any sport you care to mention, in the gender awareness courses I take at work, in the conversation of my wife and daughter and all their friends, I almost never get a break from the incessant non-stop discussion of gender issues, almost entirely from the point of view of angry, aggrieved feminists.

So I need a play like this – just one more rock in the Himalayan immensity of misogynist, gender-bating European literature – like I need a hole in the head.

Credit

I read The Father in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of ‘Miss Julie and Other Plays’ translated and introduced by Michael Robinson, and first published in 1998.

Related link

Strindberg reviews

  • The Father (1887)
  • Miss Julie (1888)
  • Dance of Death (1900)
  • The Ghost Sonata (1907)
  • Play reviews
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by Simon on October 14, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Play, Sweden, Theatre, Translation
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Posted by Simon on October 14, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/10/14/the-father-august-strindberg/

Edvard Munch: love and angst @ the British Museum

The fin-de-siecle

The last decade of the 19th century is famous for the decadent, dark imagery of its art and literature, and even life. In Imperial Britain this was epitomised by the decadent sexuality associated with the notorious trial of Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Book magazine and the pornographic prints of Aubrey Beardsley. In France there was a reaction against Impressionism which took many forms including the urban posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and the swarthy nudes of Paul Gauguin down in the South Seas. All were well-known and public artists, working in cosmopolitan cities which were the capitals of far-flung empires – London, Paris. They were famous and playing on large stages.

In the other countries of northern Europe, however, one of the most powerful artistic currents was Symbolism.

As the exhibition notes:

Symbolism was a literary and artistic movement that rejected representations of the external world for those of imagination and myth. Symbolists looked inwards in order to represent emotions and ideas.

In Belgium, north Germany and the Scandinavian countries, artists developed a wide range of techniques and styles, but tended to fixate on a handful of themes, namely sex and death. Death awaits with his scythe. Empty boats arrive at forbidding islands. Youths waste away from frustrated love. Beautiful young women turn out to be vampires.

Sex and death and anguish and despair, these are all much more personal, introverted, emotions. Wilde was a flamboyant public personality, Beardsley’s art was defiantly lucid and elegant, both were immensely sophisticated and urbane and cosmopolitan, confident doyens of the largest, richest city in the world.

Whereas much of the fin-de-siecle art from Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia was darker, more personal. Of course they produced urban and sophisticated art as well – the 1890s is characterised by an explosion of diverse art movements – but there was also a big strand of empty lakes and dark pine forests and brooding skies and agonised artist-heroes.

Edvard Munch

Munch is slap bang in the middle of this social and cultural movement. His most famous work is The Scream, which was first made as a painting in 1893 and then turned into a lithograph in 1895 which was reproduced in French and British and American magazines and made his reputation.

The Scream is probably among the top ten most famous images produced by any artist anywhere, and has been parodied and lampooned and reproduced in every medium imaginable (pillow slips and duvet covers, posters, bags, t-shirts). It featured in an episode of The Simpsons, clinching its status as one of the world’s best known art icons. It’s up there with the Mona Lisa.

The Scream (1895) by Edvard Munch. Private Collection, Norway. Photo by Thomas Widerberg

Why is it so powerful? Well:

  1. It is highly stylised and simplified – it barely looks like a human being at all, more like some kind of ghost or spirit of the woods.
  2. The rest of the landscape is drawn with harsh single lines, whose waviness seems to echo the long O of the protagonist’s mouth.
  3. The ‘primitiveness’ of the technique of wood carving – with its thick, heavy ‘crude’ lines – somehow echoes the primalness of the emotional state being described.

The exhibition

This exhibition brings together nearly 50 prints from Norway’s Munch Museum, making this the largest exhibition of Munch’s prints seen in the UK for 45 years.

It also includes sketches, photos and a few oil paintings, not least a big haunting portrait – The Sick Child – of his favourite sister, Johanne Sophie, who died of tuberculosis when she was just 13. These are set alongside works by French and German contemporaries, to present a powerful overview of Munch’s troubled personality, the artistic milieu he moved in, and his extraordinary ability to turn it into powerful images conveying intense, primal human emotions.

Vampire II (1896) by Edvard Munch. The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, on loan to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo

Claustrophobic

The exhibition is up in the top gallery in the Rotunda, a relatively small space, which was divided into smallish sections or rooms, the prints hung quite close together on the walls, and the place was packed, rammed, with silver-haired old ladies and gentleman. It was hard to move around. More than once I went to move on from studying a print and found I couldn’t move, with people studying the next-door prints blocking me to left and right and a shuffle of pedestrians blocking any backward movement. Imagine the Tube at rush hour. It was like that.

Possibly, in fact, a good atmosphere to savour Munch’s work. Trapped, claustrophobic, slightly hysterical. it forced me to look up at the quotes from his letters or diaries which have been liberally printed up on the exhibition walls. Just reading these immediately gives you a sense of where Munch was coming from, his personality and the motivation for his art.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. (1908)

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted – and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there, trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (22 January 1892)

The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.

All art, like music, must be created with one’s lifeblood – Art is one’s lifeblood. (1890)

I would not cast off my illness, because there’s much in my art that I owe it.

We do not want pretty pictures to be hung on drawing-room walls. We want… an art that arrests and engages. An art of one’s innermost heart.

Sexual anxiety

There’s plenty more where this came from. The exhibition gives a lot of biographical detail about Munch’s early life, describing the Norwegian capital of Kristiana, how it was connected to the rest of Europe by sea routes, how it was a small provincial town whose every aspect was dominated by the stiflingly respectable Lutheran church, but how young Edvard was attracted to its small bohemian, artistic set of poets and writers and artists, how he conceived a massive sequence of works about love and sex and death which he titled The Frieze of Life:

The Frieze is intended as a poem about life, about love and about death. (1918)

How he travelled to Paris and to Berlin and scandalised respectable opinion with the exhibitions he held there, but created a stir and won admirers for the stark, elemental quality of his woodcuts and prints. (The exhibition includes a map of Europe showing Munch’s extensive travels during the 1890s and 1900s, along with a selection of Munch’s personal postcards and maps.)

We are told Munch was born and brought up in a fiercely religious and conservative bourgeois family which was horrified when he fell in with Kristiania’s bohemian layabouts. These bohos practiced sexual promiscuity, had numerous affairs, and so were plagued by jealousy and infidelity and fights – all exacerbated by the way they drank too much, far too much.

It seemed obvious to me that Munch’s anxiety was caused by the crashing conflict between his extremely repressed bourgeois upbringing and the chaotic and promiscuous circles he moved in as a young man. On the one hand was a young man’s desire and lust, on the other were all the authority figures in his culture (and inside his head) saying even looking at a woman with lust in his heart would lead to instant damnation.

The scores of images he made of women as vampires and weird Gothic presences and looming succubi emerging from the shadows, represent a repeated attempt to confront the epicentre of that clash – sex, embodied – for a heterosexual young man – by sexualised young women. They attracted him like a drug, like heroin but all these compulsive thoughts about them triggered the terror of physical disease – the appalling ravages of syphilis for which there was no cure – along with the certainty of eternal damnation – and all these led to anxious, almost hysterical thoughts, about the only way out, the only way to resolve the endless nightmare of anxiety – and that was release and escape into death, the death which he had seen at such close quarters in the deaths of his beloved mother and sister from tuberculosis.

The obsessiveness of his sexual thoughts, and their violent clash with orthodox Christianity, is most evident in the hugely controversial Madonna, an obviously erotic image to which he blasphemously misapplies the title the Mother of God. When you look closely, you realise that those are sperm swimming round the outside of the frame, and a miserable-looking foetus squatting at the bottom left. Sex versus Religion! It’s amazing he wasn’t arrested for blasphemy and public indecency. In fact his 1892 exhibition in Berlin so scandalised respectable opinion that it was shut down after just a week.

Madonna (1895/1902) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

So Munch’s vampire women aren’t real women, of course they’re not. They are depictions of male anxiety about women, namely the irreconcilable conflict between the demanding, drug-addiction-level lust many young, testosterone-fueled men experience, whether they want to or not – and the feelings of shame about having such strong pornographic feelings and experiences, regret at handling relationships with women badly, and anxiety that you are a failure, as a man and as a decent human being. And terror that – if there is a God – you are going straight to hell for all eternity.

Plus, as the wall labels indicate, there really was a lot of heavy drinking in his circle and by Munch personally, which led to chaotic lifestyles among the bohemian set. Munch became a clinical alcoholic. And this addiction – to alcohol – will, of course, have exacerbated all the psychological problems described above.

Exposure to so many of Munch’s prints – alongside detailed explanations of how he made them, the Norwegian and north European tradition they stem from, and so on – really rubs in the fact that he was a great master of the form. It’s not just The Scream. Lots of the other prints have the same archetypal, primitive power, and the exhibition brings it out by setting Munch’s work beside prime examples by other leading print-makers of the time, in France and Germany (many of which are themselves worth paying the price of admission to see).

The subtle prints

It tends to be the extreme images we are attracted to – The Scream, The Madonna, the numerous vampire women, the worrying image of a pubescent girl sitting on a bed. But some decades ago we crossed a threshold into being able to accept all kinds of erotic and extreme images, so these no longer scandalise and thrill us in the same way they did their initial viewers, although they still provide powerful visual experiences.

But having had a first go around the exhibition taking in these greatest hits, I slowly came to realise there was another layer or area of his work, which is – in a word – more subtle. If the most obvious and impactful of his images are about stress and anxiety mounting to open hysteria – there were also plenty of images which were far more restrained. In which – to point out an obvious difference – the women are wearing clothes.

Instead of vampire women whose kisses are turning into bites, these tend to be of fully dressed, utterly ‘respectable’ late-nineteenth century types, set outdoors, in open air situations where… somehow, through the placing and composition of the figures, a more subtle sense of aloneness and isolation is conveyed. They capture the mood of a couple who are, for some reason, not communicating, each isolated in their brooding thoughts.

The Lonely Ones (1899) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Like the complex ways relationships between the sexes fail, become blocked and painful in the plays of Munch’s fellow Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. (Munch, as a leading artist of the day, was acquainted with both Ibsen and the younger playwright, Strindberg. It crossed my mind that if Munch’s more hysterical images can be compared to the highly strung characters in a Strindberg play, the more subdued and unhappy images in some way parallel Ibsen’s couples.)

Having processed the extreme images of vampire women, sex and death in my first go round, on this second pass I warmed to these less blatant images.

I noticed that the naked women images are almost always indoors (as, I suppose, naked women mostly had to be, in his day). But that the more ‘respectable’ and subtle images were all set outside, and often by primal landscapes – namely The Lake and The Forest – the kind of primeval landscape we all associate with Scandinavia and which really was available right on Kristiana’s doorstep.

The exhibition ends with a set of prints which perform variations on his characteristically hunched, half-abstract human figures – characteristically, showing one man and one woman – but in this series hauntingly isolated, leaning on each other or against each other, in postures which don’t look at all sensual but more like the survival techniques of characters from a play by Samuel Beckett.

Towards the Forest II (1897/1915) by Edvard Munch. Munchmuseet

Less striking than the vampires and naked women and girls, I thought these strange, half-abstract, ‘lost souls in the landscape’ images had a kind of purity and haunting quality all their own.

Breakdown and rebirth

It comes as no surprise to learn that in 1908 Munch had a nervous breakdown. His anxiety, compounded by excessive drinking and sometimes fighting, had become acute, and he was experiencing hallucinations and persecution mania. He entered a clinic and underwent a comprehensive detoxification which lasted nearly eight months.

When he left, he was a new man. Well, new-ish. His work became more colourful and less pessimistic and the wider public of Kristiania for the first time began to appreciate his work. Critics were supportive. His paintings sold. Museums started to buy his back catalogue. His life improved in all measurable ways. But in a textbook case of the artist who needs his anxieties and neuroses to produce great works, everything he carved and painted from then on – portraits of rich friends, of the farm he bought, murals for factories – lacked the intensity and archetypal power of his early years.

Years later all that storm and stress and hysteria seemed so distant as almost to be inexplicable.It is typical that, decades later, he told the story of how his famous painting, Vampire II, got its title. He himself had simply titled it Love and Pain. Pretty boring, eh? But Munch’s friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski, and clearly a man with a flair for publicity, described it as ‘a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’s face.’ And, looking back, Munch comments:

It was the time of Ibsen, and if people were really bent on revelling in symbolist eeriness and calling the idyll ‘Vampire’ – why not?

A man in remission from alcoholism and mental illness, the older Munch can be forgiven for not wanting to revive unhappy memories, and for wanting to palm off the idea for lurid titles onto his friends. But the prints themselves, and all his early writings, don’t lie. The later work is interesting and decorative – but it is the unhappy period covered by this exhibition which produced the intense and troubled works which seem to take you right into the heart of the tortured human condition.

Older, wiser and sober. Munch among his paintings at the end of his life

The promotional video

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by Simon on July 22, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Museum, Prints
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Posted by Simon on July 22, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/edvard-munch-love-and-angst-british-museum/