“The unhappiest moment of his life was the hour of his birth.” So reads the first sentence of a biography of August Strindberg published in the Forties, with its then familiar inference that Strindberg’s existence had begun in deprivation and was resumed under lifelong persecution. In recent years, however, an increasingly revised opinion has refuted any conclusion arrived at by accepting Strindberg at his own estimate. Olof Lagercrantz’s biography¹ of the man (it is not primarily a critique of the work) is the most enlightening which has appeared; to begin with, the author acknowledges that “any biographer of Strindberg must in a sense protect himself from his subject: for every phase of his life, Strindberg decided how he wanted to be understood and deliberately created a persona for himself.”

One of his most deliberate creations was indeed “the hour of his birth.” In 1896, at the age of forty-seven, he wrote from Paris to a Theosophist friend in Stockholm that he had been born under the sign of the Ram, which represented Sacrifice; his reward for his life’s work: “to be butchered. Every success a consequence of suffering, every trace of happiness tainted by dirt; every encouragement a mockery, every good deed punished by crucifixion.” When he wrote these words Strindberg, while not at the moment popular in Sweden, was the highly acclaimed author of The Father, Miss Julie, and Master Olofand his Parisian self-exile was being sustained with funds provided by a wealthy patron