“Life is a cruel
banquet. You pay for food and board with your blood,” Frida Uhl Strindberg.
I was tweeting
while watching the first episode of the new series Mr. Selfridge on PBS a few
weeks, when Evangeline Holland from Edwardian Promenade mentioned that the character
of Delphine Day might have been inspired by Frida Strindberg who opened the
Cave of the Golden Calf in London in 1912.
I immediately looked Frida up on Wikipedia to see if she was one of the
playwright August Strindberg’s wives. Bingo! So of course I went on a research
binge to find out more about her. In the end, while I admired her courage and
her intelligence, she must have been an incredibly difficult woman.
Her
biographer, Monica Strauss, points out that Frida was ill-equipped for the life
that she pursued. Higher education was not an option for her. While her father
had set her up in a career in journalism, it was never meant to be a career. It
was just a temporary measure until she eventually married and had children. He
never realized that, in a sense, he’d opened Pandora ’s Box. Having tasted
freedom and independence, Frida was reluctant to give it up. When Frida pursued
the same sexual freedom as a man, she was condemned for it.
Frida Strindberg
was born Frida Uhl on April 4th in 1872. Her father, Friedrich Uhl, was the editor and
drama critic of the Wiener Zeitung, one of the oldest, still published
newspapers in the world, at the time it was the official government newspaper
in Austria. Her father championed progressive ideas and writers, but not in his
daughters. He expected them to live conventional, middle class lives, with no
scandal. Frida came from a broken home. Her parents had an arranged marriage
which broke up discretely when she was 7.
Her parents marriage had been an attempt to gloss over some of the more unsavory
elements of their backgrounds. Although she converted when she got married,
Friedrich’s mother was born Jewish. Frida’s mother Maria had been born
illegitimate.
After
the separation her mother moved back to the country, while her father lived in
his office at his newspaper. While her
older sister was off at convent school, Frida spent two years living alone with
a governess in Mondsee outside Vienna.
Left to her devices, she spent hours in the library, devouring books, developing
a mind of her own. She saw very little of either of her parents during her childhood. After leaving school,
Friedrich arranged for her to have a job reviewing books and theatre in Munich.
Although Frida lived with a family friend, she had been given a taste of
freedom. Although it probably wasn’t in his plans, her father gave Frida a
great gift, the ability to fend for herself. This knowledge made her stubborn,
it gave her confidence, and it made her life difficult. Soon Frida was off to Berlin in pursuit of
the married playwright her father had introduced to her the previous summer. It
was the beginning of her life long obsession with difficult geniuses. Starved
of affection by both parents, Frida would often find herself attracted to older
men.
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It was
in Berlin, that she met Strindberg. The playwright was 43, recently divorced,
with three children he hardly saw. He
was not only broke, but suffering from writer’s block and depression. He had
published a semi-autobiographical novel about his first marriage that had
caused a scandal in Sweden when excerpts were published in one of the
newspapers. Not exactly son-in-law material. Frida was twenty, beautiful,
headstrong and independent. While Frida had an ‘Electra’ complex; Strindberg’s
issues were a bit more complex. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, he was a
misogynistic bastard. Although he was attracted to strong, independent women,
he also felt emasculated and threatened by them. He longed to find a woman like
his mother who had died when he was a young boy. When Frida tried to pay the check (she had
invited him out to dinner), he freaked out. He once told Frida’s sister that he didn’t
think of her as a woman because she was clever. Clearly Frida and Strindberg were
two people who should never have gotten married.
The
marriage was immediately in trouble. On their wedding night, Strindberg tried
to strangle Frida in his sleep, thinking she was his first wife. When Frida
tried to help promote Strindberg’s career by writing articles about his work, he
resented it. He became verbally abusive,
accusing her of being a whore. Then Frida discovered that she was pregnant.
Given their precarious financial situation, Frida considered abortion which
angered Strindberg. Since Strindberg didn’t want Frida to work, they had to move
in with her grandparents. A move to Paris didn’t help mend the cracks in the
marriage. Strindberg wanted her to be a
wife and mother. Any ambition to be more
would not be tolerated. The couple separated after 18 months and the marriage was
eventually annulled. Strindberg would never see Frida or their daughter ever
again.
Now 24,
Frida moved back to Munich, determined to somehow make a living. Her daughter
Kerstin was left behind in Austria with her mother.
On the rebound, Frida fell
into the arms of another playwright Frank Wedekind, author of the controversial
plays ‘Spring Awakening’ and the Lulu plays (Pandora’s Box). His relationship with Frida was his first with
a woman of his own class. That should have been her first warning. Just as she
did in her relationship with Strindberg, Frida threw herself into promoting
Wedekind’s career. As a thank you, Wedekind knocked her up. So now Frida could add unwed mother to her
resume. When her son was born she named
him Max Friedrich. Since he was conceived before her marriage to Strindberg was
legally over, Frida could legally give him her husband’s last name. Although
Frida meant well, this caused her son problems in later life.
Her
affair with Wedekind now over, Frida dropped her son off with her mother, and
continued her career in Munich. Freed from the shackles of marriage and
motherhood, Frida pursued her new life with a vengeance. Over the years, she constantly reinvented
herself, from cultural impresario to art dealer to scenario writer. With her lover, the poet Hanns Heinz Ewers,
she started the first German cabaret in 1900. For a time, she was closely
involved with several writers of the Young Vienna movement, such as the poet
Peter Altenberg and the journalist Karl Kraus, whom she convinced to sponsor a
reading of Wedekind's Pandora's Box.
There
were more love affairs, but Frida was never able to find that one man who could
truly understand her. She would try to
bind her lovers to her by making herself useful to them by promoting their
work. But while they were happy to avail themselves of her help, in the long
run, her difficult geniuses chose less complicated women. Her affair with the writer Werner von Oesteren
was a particularly stormy period in her life. On more than one occasion, she threatened
him with a gun. In 1905, she sued him for harassing a detective that she had
hired to follow him. In London, she
pursued the painter Augustus John relentlessly, until he brutally broke off the
relationship.
She
seems to have never really gotten over her marriage to Strindberg. Her
discovery that her mother had interfered with their relationship behind her
back seems to have softened her feelings towards him. In her eyes, he almost became a saint after
his death. From hating and resenting him, she created an idealized image of her
ex-husband that little to do with reality. After his death in 1912, and her
move to New York in 1914, Frida continued to promote his work, even directing a
production of one of his plays. Later on, she wrote the memoir Marriage
with Genius which was published in 1937. Her relationships with her children were
strained. Years would go by when Frida neither saw her children nor wrote to
them. Years later, Frida tried to make up for the years of neglect, particularly with Kerstin but it was too late. She would never have a particularly close relationship with either of her children.
Returning
to Austria after the First World War, Frida spent her last years in her
family's summer residence at Mondsee and died there on June 28th
1943 at the age of 71.
Further reading:
Monica Strauss, Cruel Banquet: The Life and Loves of Frida Strindberg, Harcourt Inc., 2000
