Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (15 page)

His habit of sending copies of his works to celebrated contemporaries had also led to a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. The latter studied very closely the texts that he was sent, and he had already responded in enthusiastic terms to Zweig’s Balzac essay:

One immediately gets drawn into the turmoil that you set out to describe. The man is somehow made for you, I don’t know who your Napoleon was, but you have inherited your fair share of the two men’s drive for mastery, which in your case is directed towards the language. While I was reading I couldn’t get the image of a dashing horseman on a noble steed out of my mind. I slip easily into your thoughts, as if they were old acquaintances.
⁷

There are various hints and suggestions that Zweig was not only Freud’s conversation partner and correspondent, but also one of his patients. Zweig’s friend Benno Geiger, for example, comments to that effect in his (admittedly rather unreliable) memoirs, which will be discussed in more detail later. On the other hand there is no evidence in Zweig’s diaries or in the published correspondence with Freud to indicate that this was the case.

What is beyond doubt, however, is the admiration that Zweig felt for Freud and his work. Without having studied Freud’s works in any depth prior to this time, he instinctively understood how works of fiction could also benefit from the fact that Freud had dared to speak openly about matters that had hitherto been considered too embarrassing for discussion, things that were only whispered behind closed doors. Zweig’s interest was not just coincidental, for in his most recent short stories he was trying to portray psychologically fascinating events seen from an unusual perspective—hence the fact that the stories in the 1911 collection
Erstes Erlebnis
were subtitled
Stories from the Land of Childhood
. Reviewing the collection in the
Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde
, the resident critic referred again to the author’s intentions and was fervent in his praise:

The great stylist is in his element when he charts the faintest stirrings, as yet only sensed, of a mind that is only now beginning to think for itself. The “first experience” of the title is sexual in nature. The writer has discovered the first dawning of the sexual urge in pure sensation, at a time when the physical body is still wholly childlike. What these children experience, but do not understand, perverts their character, their entire being in a matter of days or hours. They are aware neither of things nor of their own selves; the unknown disturbs them profoundly, for the very reason that they do not comprehend it.
⁸

Freud too had received a copy of the book, and thanked the author by return for these tales of childhood, which he characterised as “sensitive and psychologically significant”. And he was not the only one who had found the work of great interest: “Unfortunately the large circle of readers in my house snatched the book away from me, temporarily at least, when I had barely read the first story. But perhaps you won’t mind at all exchanging one old reader for so many young ones.”
⁹

As has already been mentioned, we need to be very wary about drawing inferences about Zweig’s own life and experiences from these stories. More so than with other subject matters and genres, the characters in his stories, battling as they do with all manner of erotic enticements and entanglements, are apt to invite identification with the author. But the boundaries between self-portrayal and fictional narrative are too fluid for us to be able to draw any reliable conclusions about Zweig’s life. At the very beginning of his career as a prose writer, at the end of 1903, Zweig had written to Hermann Hesse: “Personally I am very shy about adopting a different persona in my novellas, and in my two longer novellas
[Die Liebe der Erika Ewald
and
Die Wunder des Lebens
] I have hidden myself away in the characters of girls, so that I hardly know myself what I have made up and what I have borrowed from myself.”
¹⁰
And it was the same in later works—they offer little more than vague clues to the author’s past experiences (and perhaps his longings), so that nearly all attempts to establish a link with Zweig’s own life are just a leap in the dark. Even with some of his letters (such as the early ones to Georg Busse-Palma) one wonders whether the references to certain experiences and the comments about various infectious diseases necessarily accord with the facts—or whether on occasion a certain desire to show off, not to mention poetic licence, got the better of him here.

In
Die Welt von Gestern
Zweig devotes a good deal of space in one chapter to the experiences of young men with prostitution in the years before the
First World War. He talks about fathers, for example, who employed a “more curious method” of sex education, hiring “a pretty maidservant for the household, who was given the task of teaching the young lad by practical example. It seemed preferable to them that the young fellow should deal with this tiresome matter under their own roof, thus maintaining social decorum while at the same time eliminating the risk of his falling into the hands of some ‘scheming female’”.
¹¹
Understandably, Zweig switches in this section from the first-person narrative to a generalised account.

In personal matters his diaries are far more candid. On one day, for example, he records an inner “unrest, to allay which I take two lady friends home with me in the afternoon, whose beautiful bodies give me pleasure”.
¹²
There is also a good deal of talk about his own “Kärntnerstrasse exploits”. Did he extend his experiences into other areas? A diary entry such as: “In the evening [ … ] one of those unnat. episodes of the strangest sort, an encounter with the two brothers P, all very hasty but it did the trick”,
¹³
might well invite such thoughts, but in the end we can only speculate.

In the autumn of 1911 he was in Berlin for a week, staying at the Hotel Prinz Friedrich Carl. The reason behind the trip was once again Émile Verhaeren, because Zweig wanted to talk to Max Reinhardt in person about his forthcoming production of Verhaeren’s play
Hélène de Sparte
(translated by Zweig as
Helenas Heimkehr
). He planned another trip to Germany for the coming year, and contemplated an extended stay in Hamburg on this occasion; but in actual fact he would have been quite happy to travel further afield. From Vienna he wrote to Busoni, his companion on the return voyage from America: “In the spring they are putting on my new play here in the Burgtheater, and then in a dozen other cities [ … ] in the autumn. But where I should really like to be is on a ship somewhere between the Far East and the Wild West—and hopefully in company as congenial as it was that time.”
¹⁴

As for the “new play” he refers to,
Das Haus am Mee
r [
The House by the Sea
], which looked set to give him his first-ever premiere in his own home theatre, the Burgtheater, Zweig was looking forward to it with very mixed feelings. In May of the same year his one-act play
Der verwandelte Komödian
t was also due to be premiered, at the Lobe Theater in Breslau; and the previous history of this piece gave him little cause for rejoicing. The work had been written two years earlier, after the actor Josef Kainz had asked Zweig to write a stage play that he could perform at guest appearances in other cities. Zweig duly obliged with an amusing piece set in the rococo
period, which fitted the bill perfectly—or fitted him like a glove, as Kainz put it, announcing that he planned to premiere the work at the Burgtheater. But the facile charms of the text and the joys of anticipation quickly turned sour when Zweig received the news that Kainz had died very suddenly, shortly before rehearsals were due to start. After his experiences two years earlier, when he had found himself in almost exactly the same situation in Berlin with his
Tersites
and Matkowsky, he was not surprisingly doubly dismayed. And then to cap it all, when he was preparing the published edition of the play, with the printed dedication “In memoriam Joseph [
sic
] Kainz”, he found his own name misspelt in the proofs again as “Stephan”, prompting him to fire off a postcard to the publishers urgently requesting them to correct the error and standardise the spelling of his name in future.

For Das Haus am Meer
, whose premiere was likewise postponed several times, he had chosen a serious historical subject where human dignity and justice were the central issues. In the play he attacked the haggling that went on to recruit German mercenaries for the American War of Independence. It was a striking choice of subject matter, which seems to have been motivated by his reading and his conversations with Verhaeren and others, since there is no obvious connection with anything that was happening at the time.

With the successive postponements the preparations for Zweig’s play dragged on for so long that the impresario Alfred Freiherr von Berger, who had been lined up to direct the piece, passed away in the meantime. His death cast a further shadow over Zweig’s seemingly ill-starred career as a dramatist; this time, however, the play was not dropped from the repertoire. Instead of the spring premiere originally planned, a new date was set for the autumn.

Alongside his own work, Zweig’s interests were still very much focused on Verhaeren. He remained firmly committed to the continuing dissemination of Verhaeren’s works in the German-speaking world. He translated Verhaeren’s stage plays and his monographs on Rembrandt and Rubens, which were published by Insel Verlag in lavishly illustrated editions. What proved rather more difficult was the realisation of a longstanding ambition to organise a reading tour for Verhaeren in Germany. As he made preparations for the tour Zweig doubtless had in his mind the scene portrayed by Verhaeren’s friend, the artist Théo van Rysselberghe, in a huge painting completed in 1901, which he knew very well from his various visits. Verhaeren, reading from his manuscript, extends a scraggy
right hand in the air to lend emphasis to his words, while his friends are gathered about him, sitting or standing in thoughtful pose and wearing expressions of intense concentration. Zweig’s aim was to make it possible for interested readers in Germany to attend just such an enthralling recital. For years he tried to put together a worthwhile itinerary for the reading tour, initially with little success. Meanwhile the theatres thwarted his plans by deciding with immaculate timing to put on Verhaeren’s plays in the very weeks when the critics and interested playgoers were likely to be out of town on holiday. “If it was anyone else but Verhaeren I would have chucked it all in ages ago!”
¹⁵
fumed Zweig in June 1911. But the following spring his long-cherished plans finally came to fruition. He accompanied Verhaeren on his tour of Hamburg, Berlin, Munich and Vienna; but at the evening readings he stayed quietly in the background, leaving the podium to the maestro.

The collaboration with publisher Insel Verlag had developed very pleasingly into a regular annual round of manuscripts delivered, proofs returned with corrections, print approvals, growing mailing lists for complimentary copies, invoices submitted and new contracts signed. In addition there were offers to write articles for the
Insel Almanac
and frequent requests for review copies of books published by Insel that Zweig wanted to write about in various journals. And increasingly he was used by his publishers as a consultant and intermediary, which in most cases led to a positive outcome, although the occasional mishap did occur. He had, for example, suggested Erwin Kraus as translator for the Dickens edition to which he had written an introduction. But to their horror the copy editors at Insel found that he had made “dreadful stylistic blunders” and outright translation errors: “We are in some desperation here.”
¹⁶
Zweig was surprised and “deeply embarrassed”, because he had heard Kraus speaking English on more than one occasion and, having read his essays, had no reason to doubt his command of German.
¹⁷

Over the years Zweig had developed considerable business acumen when it came to looking after his own affairs. Much as he liked Kippenberg personally, he scrutinised every contract very closely, even though Zweig liked to give the impression that he found any kind of “admin” extremely tiresome and of no interest to him at all. He also kept an eye on the publicity and sales, and did not hold back with criticism or suggestions for improvements in matters of detail: “For future editions I think it would be better to spell out the number of copies in thousands. And I
would have preferred to see ‘
third
enlarged edition’, to underline the sales success.”
¹⁸
The value of such knowledge in dealing with the commercial side of literature should not be underestimated. Zweig himself was well aware of how much this knowledge had benefited him, for unlike many of his colleagues he never had to struggle with other concerns in his day job apart from literature. He had also been very fortunate from the outset in his choice of publishers. Consequently he was more than happy to share the benefits of his experience with other authors, in the hope of saving them from the most serious beginners’ mistakes. He even told Hermann Hesse more than once, in response to the latter’s accounts of negotiations over new books, that he must not let publishers take him for a ride.

In 1912 a major new project was about to get off the ground, carrying with it the hopes of many—the Insel-Bücherei [Insel Library]. For some years now there had been discussions at Insel about launching an inexpensive series of books designed and produced to the same high standards as other Insel publications. Initial delays prompted Zweig to take up the matter on several occasions with Kippenberg and press him to proceed with this promising project. At first the idea was to produce “pamphlets” that would cost no more than twenty pfennigs. There was briefly talk of calling the series Der Monat [The Month] to establish a publication frequency, but this was then rejected in order not to straitjacket the project. Zweig’s involvement, and in particular his contribution to the original idea for this pioneering and hugely successful publishing venture, was unjustly played down in later years. There is no question that he took an active interest in the make-up of the book list long before any titles were published, and was fully behind the whole idea of the enterprise. He never had any objections to the production of affordable editions that were designed to appeal to the bibliophile market as well.