Where Have You Been? (37 page)

Peeling the Onion
covers the years from 1939 to 1959, when
The Tin Drum
was published; it is an autobiography of Grass's youth. I didn't read it during the kerfuffle of 2006, but coming to it now, in both the inadequate original and in Michael Henry Heim's always spirited English translation, things seem, if anything, even worse. There is a kind of plainspoken and rueful candor that is apparently entirely outside Grass's gift; perhaps it can only be done by Anglo-Saxon writers. One thinks of the noble line of Edmund Gosse, J. R. Ackerley, or Laurie Lee, or more recent accounts of such “difficult” lives as Janet Hobhouse's
The Furies
or Tobias Wolff's
This Boy's Life
. This is what Grass, by equipment either a rococo fabulist or else a polemicist, cannot do: stand at the end of a life and—however crooked—tell it straight. There are important categories, such as “the poetry of fact,” but also even “the truth of fact,” that are inimical to him (they are no good to a polemicist or a fabulist). The oddest, most dismaying thing about
Peeling the Onion
is that Grass should ever have attempted anything of the sort, so unwinning, unresonant, unstylish, and unconvincing is the result. (And that too makes one think this was not a voluntary exercise.)

The revelation of the SS membership comes too late in the book (not unnaturally, one turns the pages, impatient for it to come—pp. 109 to 111), and then, when it is gone, one feels too winded—literally, too punched—to carry on through the rest of it. (I actually put it down for two weeks, unwilling to continue.) It is both too heavily trailed and too much put off, too perfunctory and too dilatory, too defensive and too aggressive. They are two pages of failed writing that should be put in a textbook and quarried for their multiple instances of bad faith.

The whole episode is announced by a break in style, an end to Grassian gabbiness and a new, manly brusqueness: “Nothing about the journey there.” Then the Waffen-SS makes its first appearance, not as a principal, in the nominative, but in the genitive, “a drill ground of the Waffen-SS,” just as “I” appears not as “I” but as “the recruit with my name” (a habitual and awful periphrastic tic throughout the book). There is callous hard-bitten military jargon (“a pocket like Demyansk forced open”) followed by a dismaying, and dismayingly rare, statement of fact: “I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent.” There is a disquisition on the historical von Frundsberg, a sixteenth-century mercenary, who gave Grass's unit its name: “Someone who stood for freedom, liberation.” There is a bizarre note on the international composition of the Waffen-SS (to the boy who knew, apparently, next to nothing of what he was letting himself in for?) that makes it sound like the League of Nations: “It included separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch and Flemish, and many Norwegian and Danish soldiers.” And then the
Fazit
, sounding rather more self-justificatory than it needed to: “So there were plenty of excuses.” And the last, pat sentence: “I will have to live with it for the rest of my life”—though one should note, that, here, of all places, the German uses an impersonal construction!

As a plea, an account, a confession, this is so bad as to be easily counterproductive. Still, aside from the gravity of its content, it is really no worse than what comes before and after: the endless invocations of the onion, memory (though also of the amber, memory); the strings of rhetorical questions, sometimes as much as half a page of them, one after another; the tedious speculative reading lists of books read (or not read) at a certain time; the intercalation of irrelevant and largely flippant episodes; the cross-references to Grass's work in fiction; the places and persons revisited, years later, in greater comfort, by Grass and his wife; the indifferent use of consequence and inconsequence to match the “now I remember, now I forget”
tenue
of the book; the underlying but sharply unmistakable whiff of self-congratulation attending the whole thing.

“Even in formation I was a loner, though I took care not to stand out,” Grass writes: “I was a schemer whose mind was forever elsewhere.” Bland and pat and dreamy enough, you might think, but in German it is, again, a little worse. Grass's terms are not the near synonyms “loner” and “schemer,” but the near opposites “
Einzelgänger
” and “
Mitläufer
,” the one who walks alone and the one who runs with others. The horrible suspicion arises that Grass's deepest project here is the destruction of meaning. Not so much “peeling the onion” as “applying the whitewash.”

 

STEFAN ZWEIG

Romain Rolland, one of Stefan Zweig's many illustrious friends (he seems not to have had any others), expressed surprise that he could be a writer and not like cats: “
Un poète qui n'aime pas les chats!
” It's only one of an unending series of things—as if the man didn't have a shadow—that strike one as being “not quite right” about this popular-again popularizer, like the
Kitschmeister
Gustav Klimt glitteringly and preposterously back in fashion, and neither of them any better than they were the first time round.

Polygrapher Zweig (“twig”), dubbed “Erwerbszweig” (something like branch of the economy or branch of industry) in catty, envious Vienna: this anxious success and oh-so-modest failure; best-selling and most-translated German-language author before World War II, and now again book of the week here, rediscovery of the century there, and indulgently reviewed more or less everywhere; this uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s; un-Austrian Austrian and un-Jewish Jew (where Joseph Roth—who has certainly spoiled me for Zweig—was both, to the max); neither pacifist much less activist but passivist; professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector, owner of Beethoven's desk and Goethe's pen and Leonardo and Mozart manuscripts and busy Balzac proofs and contemporaries out the wazoo, plus four thousand
manuscript collection catalogs
; who logged his phone calls and logged his letters and logged his books, and, who knows, probably logged his logs; this cosmopolitan loner and blue-riband refugee, so “hysterically discreet” he got married by proxy and to a man; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, “spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler's threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt's impending entry into the war to Brazil. He even fled Rio for a Brazilian mountain resort. From there there was no more running”; who left a suicide note that, like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined—actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note—one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that
he doesn't mean it
, his heart isn't in it (not even in his suicide); someone whose books I briefly thought I wouldn't mind reading, before, while setting down the umpteenth of them amid groans (it was the novella
Confusion
)—adding the stipulation to myself: yes, but only if they'd been written by someone else.

Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He's the Pepsi of Austrian writing. He is the one whose books made films—eighteen of them, and that's the books, not the films (which come in at a stupefying thirty-eight). It makes sense: these hypothetical and bloodless and stiltedly extreme monuments and monodramas for “teenagers of all ages,” as someone said, books composed for the bourgeoisie to give itself culture or a fright, needed Hollywood or UFA to make them real, to give them expressions, faces, bodies, rooms, and dialogue; and to drain some of the schematic
guignol
out of them. Of course he failed the Karl Kraus test—who didn't? Kraus quotes some driveling yea-sayer to the effect that Zweig with his novellas had conquered all the languages of the world, and adds two words of his own: “except one.” The story went the rounds—it was far from being just a piece of Nazi propaganda—that Zweig had his manuscripts checked for grammatical errors by a German professor, which gets most things about Zweig: the ineptitude, the eagerness to please, the respect for authority, and the use of others.

It's not easy to think of a writer so poorly thought of by his maybe peers, and it can't all be attributed to envy or resentment of his great inherited wealth, easy success, unproblematic seductions, and vast readerships. Even among writers, there may be odd moments of honesty. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who for the best part of thirty years shared a publisher with Zweig—Anton Kippenberg, founder of the Insel Verlag—wrote literally to dispraise him; when Kippenberg, foolishly trying to change Hofmannsthal's ideas, informed him, publisher-paternalistically, that Zweig had won a poetry prize, Hofmannsthal wrote back in a (for him) strange blaze of candor, that the prize wasn't a prize at all, but a bursary, and that Zweig had had to share it with “eight other sixth-rate talents.” When Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt started the Salzburg Festival in 1919, it was one of their stipulations that Zweig—who had recently moved to Salzburg—be rigorously excluded. (Zweig took to absenting himself from Salzburg every summer, while the festival was on, mostly, one imagines, to spare his own feelings.) Hofmannsthal's friend Leopold von Andrian put himself through a Zweig novella—that same
Confusion
I mentioned earlier—“reluctantly, a spoonful a day, like a nasty-tasting medicine,” and, in the course of a comprehensive, paragraph-long taking-apart, wrote: “each sentence incredibly pretentious, false and empty—the whole thing a complete void.” In his memoirs, Elias Canetti recalls a meeting with Zweig, who had come back to Vienna for two reasons: to get his teeth seen to, and to set up a new house that would publish his books. The next sentence is: “I think almost all his teeth were pulled.” The malicious and inescapable and (in a master like Canetti) perfectly deliberate undercurrent is that of course Zweig's books are not worth talking about. The teeth are more important, and even their
exeunt omnes
is a better outcome than anything to do with the publication—or extraction?—of the books.

Even Joseph Roth, a complicated friend of Zweig's who more or less lived off him for the last ten years of his life, picked holes in the style of each successive book he was sent, partly as a way of discharging his debt, and partly to preserve his independence. Then the veteran Germanist Hans Mayer remembers a visit to Musil in Switzerland in 1940. Musil couldn't get into the United States, and Mayer was suggesting the relative obtainability of Colombian visas as a
pis aller
. “He looked at me askance and said: Stefan Zweig's in South America. It wasn't a bon mot. The great ironist wasn't a witty conversationalist. He meant it. […] If Zweig was living in South America somewhere, that took care of the continent for Musil.”

Nor was it just the Austrians, to whom such
Schmäh
was in their mothers' milk. Hermann Hesse thought neither Zweig's poetry nor “his many other books” deserved to outlast the day. When Kippenberg heard that his author had a part interest in a factory, the publisher is said to have quipped back: “What—another one?” When Zweig moved to England in 1934 (and was naturalized in 1938), that was taken semijocularly in many literary quarters—again, not Nazi—to be a major item in that ongoing “punishment of England” (“
Gott strafe England
”) that had been on the German agenda since 1914. The composer Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, “of course never read a line of Zweig” (one admires the economy of effort), sees him only as a possible source of funds for his theater; Zweig, one guesses, in adding the notch of another great man to his metaphorical bedpost. Brecht asks Eisler for a tune. Unfortunately, the tune he asks for is “Song of the Vivifying Effect of Money,” and it's not lost on Zweig. Later—in spite of everything, one would think—the two writers go for lunch together, and when Brecht comes back, Eisler—again, really lovely, the stringent cut-to-the-chase of these Marxist types!—asks him how much Zweig shelled out for lunch. “Two and six,” replies Brecht, a Lyons Corner House or something, the multimillionaire Zweig at the time was residing in Portland Place, and then it's straight back to the revolution. Farther west, in Princeton, or much farther, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family spent diverting evenings—this in 1939—debating which of Zweig, Ludwig, Feuchtwanger, and Remarque was the worst writer. Emil Ludwig himself, in an obituary, wrote that none of Zweig's writings had had an effect on him that could compare with his death. It's a well-meaning but damning and finally ineluctable summation. I have seen the Brazilian press photograph of Zweig and Lotte, his second wife, lying dead of their overdoses of veronal on two pushed-together single iron bedsteads, he on his back, mouth a little agape, in a sweat-stained shirt and knitted tie, she on his shoulder in a floral wrap and clean hair, and you can practically hear the ceiling fan going round. It makes Weegee look tame.

Of course the forty-third president of the United States knew whereof he spake, and there is such a thing as misunderestimation. As well as knowing him best, a man's contemporaries have every reason for getting him wrong, but the fact remains that there is an unusual consensus here—Mann, Musil, Brecht, Hesse, Canetti, Hofmannsthal, Kraus—to the effect that Stefan Zweig was a purveyor of
Trivialliteratur
and, save in commercial terms, an utterly negligible figure; when from the distance of Britain or America one erroneously supposes something more like the opposite to be the case: that here is someone who is among the best his country and language and period have to offer, and who comes with the good opinion and endorsement of his peers. Partly it's the distinction—far more rigidly observed in Germany than in the English-speaking world—between serious and popular (
e
and
u
in German parlance,
Ernst
and
Unterhaltung
), but there's more to it than that. There is something touchingly wrong about Zweig. He had a trammeled life and preached freedom; he gave himself to public causes and had little to say; “the least personal biography he ever wrote,” thus John Fowles, “was his own”; he was obtuse and hypersensitive and worshipped at the altar of friendship. He is like someone walking up a down escalator, his eyes anxiously fixed on Parnassus—all those people and friends whose manuscripts he collected—toiling away and not coming close. He, by the way, knew it—he deprecates himself and means it; he lists authors who are more important than he is, and means it; Friderike, his first wife, wrote to him, “Your written works are only a third of yourself,” with little fear of contradiction from him; he is the modest man in the story with plenty to be modest about—it's his apologists who need telling. In 1981, the last time a Zweig revival was plotted—that one failed; this time, with Pushkin Press's nice paper and pretty formats and with new translations by the excellent Anthea Bell, it seems to be succeeding—John Fowles (a thoroughly representative Anglo-Saxon
e
and
u
crossbreed) wrote: “Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse than any other famous writer of this century. Even ‘famous writer' understates the prodigious reputation he enjoyed in the last decade or so of his life, when he was arguably the most widely-read and translated serious author in the world…” Fifty languages and millions of copies in circulation, but “serious author”? Ain't no way. I have seen Zweig referred to in German as “an exemplary subrealist” and “the notorious writer of bestsellers,” which is more like it. The Viennese critic Hilde Spiel deemed his fiction—which has taken the lead in the present reinflation of his reputation—as “closest in spirit to Schnitzler's—and not a patch on it.” That seems fair to me.