Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (8 page)

Zweig headed initially for Brussels, in the hope of meeting up with the revered writer unannounced. But on his arrival he learnt that Verhaeren was currently not in the city. He was greatly disappointed, but all this changed while he was visiting the sculptor Charles van der Stappen at his house:
“Le voilà!”
—there was Verhaeren, standing in the doorway. He had an appointment with van der Stappen, who was then making a bust of him, which required one last sitting for artist and model. Zweig was allowed to join them in the studio and talk to Verhaeren for several hours while van der Stappen went about his work. The portrait head of the short man with the furrowed brow and the enormous, lugubrious beard (alluding to the Gallic chieftain, Zweig called it a “Vercingetorix moustache”
¹⁴
) ranks among van der Stappen’s finest works, and Zweig later used a photograph of the bust as the frontispiece for his book of translations of Verhaeren’s poems.

Although Verhaeren was a good twenty-five years his senior, and Zweig always addressed him as “Maestro” in his letters, it should be emphasised
that the relationship was one of mutual respect and liking from the outset. Verhaeren had quickly recognised that this young Austrian still in his early twenties, who was such a spirited champion of his work and its wider dissemination, was no dreamer or empty flatterer. Once again, Zweig had impressed not only with his almost childlike and sometimes naive enthusiasm, but also with the great seriousness and determination that he brought to his work. This combination enabled him time and time again to win the trust of others. He himself, after years of drifting without direction, now finally found, in the person of the man whose work had already given him sustenance and support, the long-awaited fatherly friend and artistic advisor:

He was the first great writer that I got to know personally. At the time I already felt the first stirrings of literary ambition within me, but it was still faint and faltering, like a distant flash of summer lightning on the skies of my soul. As yet I didn’t know if I was truly called to be a writer, or simply wanted to be one, and my deepest longing was to meet a real writer face to face and heart to heart, someone who could be an example to me and decide my destiny. I loved writers from their books: distance and death lent them an aura of beauty. I knew a few contemporary writers: they disappointed by their proximity and their frequently repellent way of life. At the time I knew none whose life could serve as a pattern for me, whose experience could be my guide, whose consonance of life and work could help me to marshal my still-faltering inner resources. I found examples in biographies of writers who had achieved a harmonious balance of life and work, but I instinctively knew that every vital principle, every inner design is only learnt from real life, from personal experience and examples seen with one’s own eyes. [ … ]

I saw Liliencron one evening in Vienna, surrounded by friends, applauded on all sides, and then sitting at a table among people and a lot of talk, his own words lost in the babble; I caught Dehmel’s hand once in the melée, caught a greeting from this acquaintance and that. But at no time was I close to anyone. I could have got to know some of them better, but my shyness kept me from forcing myself upon them, which I later came to recognise as the secret and happy law of my being: that I was not to seek for anything, and that everything would be given to me at the right time. What shaped me never sprang from my own desire, from my active will, but was always vouchsafed by grace and destiny: and so it was with this wonderful man, who suddenly stepped into my life at the appointed hour, and then became the intellectual guiding light of my youth.
¹⁵

As for the ‘city of his youth’, that turned out to be Paris, which seems to have fulfilled all of his—in part very clichéd—expectations. Zweig’s mood at the end of his visit, with its new friendships and discoveries, must have been nothing less than euphoric. There was no doubt in his mind that he had to return, and by next year at the latest.

By September he was back in Vienna, where he moved into a new bedsitter at Tulpengasse 6. Here the books piled up between ashtrays and coffee cups—tobacco and strong black coffee having long since become essential accompaniments to his working day. He read voraciously and widely. He had just discovered the works of Selma Lagerlöf, read Jacob Wassermann’s
Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs
and Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
, and studied Wilhelm Bölsche’s
Liebesleben in der Natur
, a book that ushered in a new era of non-fiction for the general reader.

Soon afterwards he had decided on the subject for his final dissertation, which, after the student life he had been enjoying so far, promised to leave him little time for other pursuits over the next year or eighteen months. He proposed to dispel the dark, gathering “storm cloud of a dissertation”
¹⁶
with a study on
The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine
. The choice of subject sounds unusual for Zweig, given that he said of himself: “All my thoughts are inspired by objects, events and persons, and anything purely theoretical or metaphysical is a closed book to me”
¹⁷
—a statement that chimes with his approach when searching for a topic or doing research for other projects. So one would expect him to be less interested in comparing the ideas of the French philosopher and critic (who had died in 1893) with the work of other thinkers than in examining their practical utility. For Zweig, Taine’s hypothesis that all human decision-making is determined by heredity, social environment and historical situation failed to stand up to critical scrutiny. He argued that people need to be understood more as individuals, and that it is necessary to go much deeper into their psychology to explain their actions. An interesting conclusion, since in essence Zweig is here formulating part of the recipe for success of his later works, particularly the historical biographies, where he always tried to dissect the character of a person in minute detail before attempting to write about him or her.

Apart from general complaints about his work, Zweig’s letters from these years tell us little about the ideas that he was studying. But he could not emphasise often enough that he wanted to “toss the wretched dissertation behind me” as quickly as possible. The phrase became a standard expression of his whenever he had to deal with anything unpalatable. The work
on the dissertation brought him little pleasure, it has to be said. But it did give him his first introduction to the works of Ben Jonson, about whom Taine had written at length.

Needless to say, despite all his ambitious plans for books and the dissertation, Zweig had visited Verhaeren again in the summer of 1903. After that he retreated for a while to the Île de Bréhat. From here he wrote to Victor Fleischer, whose brother Max was also working on a dissertation:

Dear Victor,

I’ve been meaning to write to you for days. Wonders never cease—I am working like a wild thing. I was in Paris, etc, now I’m on an enchanting little island in Brittany and working like crazy in a small arbour, when I’m not eating or—don’t be alarmed!—swimming. I’m working on (a) my dissertation, (b) a novella, (c) a translation of Émile Verhaeren, (d) the foreword to the Lilien book. So that’s four things I’m trying to get ready for publication in the next three weeks. O lordy, lordy! The women around here are not much to write home about, [ … ] the only people are painters, otherwise lots of cows, sheep, cats, rabbits, etc. God, there is so much to tell you! You’ll be amazed. What’s Max doing? Is he still in the land of the living? And what about his dissertation? Mine’s moving forward. I got twenty pages done in a week, forty pages of the novella, and ten pages of poetry translated. Now what about that, my friend! What do you say to that!
¹⁸

After the days of amusement in the capital this working retreat had become an urgent necessity if he was not to get too far behind with his various manuscripts. But his mood, despite the workload, seemed excellent, even if he evidently missed the agreeable aspects of student life in his solitude—the exclamation “O lordy, lordy!” is a quotation from the student song
Rückblicke eines alten Burschen
[
Reminiscences of an old student
], which begins with the words “O glorious old fellowship, where have you gone? Never shall you return, you golden days, so joyous and free!”

While Stefan was travelling around Europe and working towards the successful completion of his university degree, his brother Alfred had very different problems to contend with. In 1903 their father Moriz Zweig had to undergo a serious operation, which was followed by a long period of convalescence. For a whole year he was barely able to play any part in the management of the business. And to make matters worse, a long-serving close colleague chose this very time to leave the company, as he wanted to set up in business on his own. Now the time and effort invested in grooming
Alfred Zweig for a senior role in the family enterprise paid off. At the age of just twenty-four he took on senior management responsibilities as sole authorised signatory, graduating the next year to a full partnership.

It was highly unusual to find such a young man at the head of a firm of significant size. The succession of old or at least elderly gentlemen in positions of power extended from the Imperial ruling house, with the aged Kaiser at its head, through the government ministers and senior officials down to the most minor functionaries. Gustav Mahler’s appointment as musical director of the Imperial Opera House in 1897 caused a sensation—when he took up his post this ‘young man’ was just thirty-six years old. Stefan Zweig recalls that many men grew big beards at the age of twenty. This was done not just for reasons of fashion, but in order to look older, and therefore, in the generally accepted view of the time, to be seen as more trustworthy. He himself, like his brother, had sported a moustache since the time his beard first started to grow. Alfred sometimes chose to twirl the tips of his moustache stylishly upwards, and in some photographs, with his lightweight summer suit, elegant walking cane and a straw boater
à l’anglaise
, he certainly looks quite unlike the majority of his professional colleagues. Stefan attached no less importance to his dress, but in these early years he often looks a little more conventional and less dashing. Since his time at school he often wore glasses, which he did not put aside until the 1920s; it is unclear whether he ever really needed them, or whether they were just a fashion accessory as worn by the young, up-and-coming intellectual. As his eyes were very sensitive to strong sunlight, he occasionally wore sunglasses later on, and preferred to sit in the shade in the garden and street cafés.

He enjoyed the last remaining months of student life to the full, despite his heavy workload. Although he himself was generally described as quiet and retiring, he could impress others on occasion not only with his achievements to date, but also with his style of living. Max Brod, for example, recalls a meeting in Vienna:

For me, everything that I experienced in those few hours with Stefan Zweig was new and impressive. We wandered through the streets of Vienna, stood in admiration before massive yet intricate baroque facades, and finally made our way to the Wurstelprater amusement park. Afterwards Zweig took me to his student digs. As a spoilt mother’s boy I just couldn’t understand why Zweig wasn’t living with his parents, who also lived in Vienna. My poor head was buzzing with the adventures of Anatol. And then I spied all the rare books in foreign languages, and was served a glass of Danzig schnapps, which had little thin flakes of gold paper floating around in it. It seemed to me the height of racy urban sophistication. And then the words of wisdom dispensed by this man just a few years older than me—in short, I was completely bowled over.
¹⁹

With this account, written after Zweig’s death, Brod was in a sense returning the favour that Zweig did him in 1927, when he wrote a foreword to Brod’s novel
Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott.
Here he had described a setting in which Brod comes across as a supremely unassuming figure, whose wonderment at the life of this supposed bohemian with the rare books and the Danzig Goldwasser seems just as plausible as his reference to Anatol, the ladies’ man from Arthur Schnitzler’s play of the same name: “I can see him now as he was the first time I saw him”, wrote Zweig of Brod,

a young man of twenty, short, slight of build and infinitely modest. I see him in his joyous delight at being able to show his beloved and enchanting Prague to a stranger for the first time, and to tell him about his love for a heroic vanished world. [ … ] He talked about music, about Smetana and Janáček, [ … ] but always about others, never about himself or the songs and sonatas he had written. I asked him about his work; instead of answering the question he sang the praises of a completely unknown Franz Kafka, whom he saw as the true master of contemporary prose and psychology.
²⁰

Curiously, and doubtless out of amicability and a desire for dramatic effect, both Zweig and Brod, in their respective accounts, place their first meeting in the other writer’s native city. When and where they really met for the first time cannot be established with certainty, but it was probably in Prague. It is also worth pointing out here that Zweig, despite being on good terms with Max Brod, was destined never to meet the latter’s closest friend, the “completely unknown Franz Kafka”, although the Zweigs’ weaving mill happened to be located in the very district for which Kafka was later responsible as an agent for the “Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia”.