Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg, Strindberg's only child in his third marriage. Born 1902.
Strindberg's style expands to fit his wild excursions into the world of ideas and his eccentricities of conception, such as the story of when he tried to catch dead "souls" with a bottle containing sugar of lead, on the Montparnasse cemetery,[12] or that of the madman's microscopical studies of the genesis of humanity in At the Edge of the Sea. His expressions and metaphors often bear the imprint of overwrought feeling, as when he speaks of the "blood-poisoning cares of the household," or when the impression produced by a visit to parents-in-law is that "of a serpent's hole into which Satan had enticed him." When he describes poor people asleep at night in a railway carriage, as presenting the appearance of corpses on a battlefield and scattered human limbs, we cannot but congratulate ourselves on the dulness of our imagination.
Strindberg's "wildness" has been falsely attributed to the influence of alcohol. His use of absinthe, and his habit of heaping all sins upon himself—including that of drunkenness—account for the fable that he was incapable of writing without the aid of alcoholic excesses. He cannot even be placed in the long list of literary and artistic "drunkards "—including the names of Bums, Byron, Charles Lamb, Addison, Musset, Hoffmann, Poe and Baudelaire—to whom alcohol was a means of attaining to inspiration. Strindberg did not seek cortical excitation. He sought oblivion. In The Great Highway, "The Hunter" says to "The Wanderer" (Strindberg): "Mr. Incognito, why do you drink so much?" The Wanderer: "Because I am always lying on the operating-table, and have to chloroform myself."
He was not a man who suffered from chronic congestion of the head in consequence of indifference to all hygienic laws. Ever since the early days when he used to throw himself headlong into the open sea from a rock, he was devoted to cold-water ablutions. His morning exercise, which sometimes was taken so vehemently as to tire him out completely, was part of the routine of daily life. In his home-life he was of methodical, orderly habits; he detested alike uncleanliness and untidiness—in fact, precisely the opposite of what some people have imagined him to be.
The roots of his "wildness" cannot be found in the fumes of alcohol. There was a strain of the publicist and the agitator in Strindberg which found but an insufficient outlet. His craving for social reform was not satisfied by corresponding activity. He suffered from too much happening within him, and too little without. His stored-up energy caused a series of eruptions. Strindberg was an orator afflicted with dumbness. His faults of style are those of the typical orator. The splendour and vigour of his phrasing often hide blunders of logic and hasty conclusions. If Strindberg had met audiences face to face, like Björnson, and been in actual touch with the people, his tongue would have lost its sting. Björnson's pulpit manner would have fitted Strindberg badly, but it would have protected him against himself.
But Strindberg could not be a public speaker. Though he was essentially a "Confessor" on paper of the race of St. Augustine and Chateaubriand, he dreaded the personal jostling and exhibition which are inseparable from political life. Loneliness was necessary to him. The emanations, opinions and habits of others were apt to oppress him, if brought too closely within his own circle. In Paris he fled from his friendship with Jonas Lie; in Inferno he shows this dread of paying the taxes of friendship. He felt the identity of other people pressing on him in much the same way as Keats did. In company he did not like to be contradicted. Though a genial and generous host, he could turn friends out of his house if they proved themselves possessed of too great pugnacity of argument. "I have never hated human beings, rather the reverse," he says, "but ever since I was born I fear them."