Where Have You Been? (38 page)

In Thomas Mann's great story “Tristan,” the bourgeois Klöterjahn has trouble even reading the handwriting of the writer Spinell; Mann's admirably ironic conclusion is that writers are typically people who write rarely and with great difficulty. Zweig is one writer I can think of who enjoyed writing, and to whom it came easily, all of it: from his teenage poems, straightaway put out by the august publishers of Dehmel and Liliencron (in 1901, when he was barely twenty), to his first shot at a feuilleton, accepted by the paper his parents subscribed to, the
Neue Wiener Presse
, while Zweig briefly cooled his heels in the editor's office, to his translations of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (in 1905 and 1910) and others; to the essays and popular biographies, on Verlaine, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens, and dozens and dozens of others, which Paul Bailey, an admirer of at least some of Zweig's fiction, describes as “slightly embarrassing”; the lectures and statements and appeals; the intermittent plays and libretti (for Richard Strauss, once Hofmannsthal's opposition and tenure had lapsed with his death in 1929); the stories and novellas, mainly framed narratives, encounters with strangers and madmen—unfortunates with stories, one thinks of them as being—mediated always by the same sane, starchy voice. Zweig himself speaks a little smugly in
The World of Yesterday
of “this preference of mine for intense, intemperate characters in my novels and novellas.” “The typical Zweig story,” notes the critic William Deresiewicz cooling to his subject in an afterword, “is a tale of monomaniacal passion set loose amid the veiled, upholstered civility of the Austrian bourgeoisie, the class into which Zweig was born.” The only form to resist his suit at all was the novel; he managed in fact only one,
Beware of Pity
, published in 1939 (
The Post Office Girl
was a posthumously published two-part wreck and an excellent argument against any novels by Stefan Zweig: it encouraged his prolixity, and he had no idea how most people walked and talked and lived in the world—as an original conflation of John Fowles with Uri Geller put it, “The silver spoon that met him when he entered the world was later to become something of a crucifix”). He loved and approved all aspects of writing and publishing, from the fetishistic
cura
of the works of genius in his collection to his own bibliophile editions with Insel Verlag, which he praises for appearing without a single misprint that he was aware of (and he would have been aware). He wrote some twenty or thirty thousand letters. He loved his days researching Magellan, say, or Mary Queen of Scots, at the British Library. When he went to India, it's unthinkable that he would have come back without his poem on the Taj Mahal. If Hofmannsthal had his “Chandos” crisis of language and expression, Zweig bespeaks something very like the opposite: an abundant, facile, and unhindered lifelong logorrhea.

At some time, curiously, Zweig's actual methods swung from one pole to the other. I find both descriptions—and conditions—alarming. In 1899, as a very young man, he wrote to an editor:

I realize … that this Novelle, as with most of my pieces, is slapdash and over-hasty, but … I find that when the last word is written I can make no more corrections, in fact I do not even check through for spelling and punctuation. This is a silly and obstinate way to go about things, and it is completely clear to me that it will prevent me from ever achieving anything great. I do not know the art of being conscientious and diligent … I have burned hundreds of my manuscripts—but I have never altered or rewritten a single line. It is a misfortune not easily to be altered, since it is not a purely external thing but probably lies deep in my character.

It is a strange performance, the clash of callow self-certainty with a certain innate modesty, resolved in a (typically Zweigian) stance of passivity and helplessness and evasion (“probably”). Compare this to the insight into his processes provided in Zweig's last work, the posthumously published
The World of Yesterday
:

So if my books are sometimes praised for sweeping readers along at a swift pace, it does not come from any natural heated or agitated approach to the work of writing, but is entirely the result of my system of always cutting unnecessarily slack passages—anything at all that, like radio interference, might distract the reader's attention. If I have mastered any kind of art, it is the art of leaving things out. I do not mind throwing eight hundred of a thousand written pages into the waste-paper basket, leaving me with only two hundred to convey what I have sifted out as the essence of the work.

Here, the modesty is paired with a methodical application of that “conscientiousness” and “diligence” he earlier castigated himself for—or boasted of?—lacking. Even then, it is oddly unconvincing, part of a spiritedly oxymoronic two-page attack on “anything tediously long-winded,” that is itself chock-full of redundancies and questions begged. What are phrases like “tediously long-winded” or “unnecessarily slack” but examples of what's wrong? (And what happens, one wonders, to those passages that are “necessarily slack”? Presumably they are nodded through.) What is the dreary and inept simile “like radio interference” but an awful instance of something that needlessly “distract[s] the reader's attention”? (Roth in his letters is forever taking Zweig to task for his hammy way with comparisons.) What does the last clause of the quotation, the nineteen words from “leaving” to “work,” really add to the sentence? The German expression “[only] to cook with water,” [
auch nur
]
mit Wasser kochen
(sort of the opposite of “cooking with gas”) describes the unexceptional, the uninspired, the sublunary, the mortal. Zweig, in strangely praising—like a jam manufacturer—the role of water in his processes (“my system”), apparently fails to realize that every page of his is sodden, formulaic, thin, swollen, platitudinous.

Take some instances. Here is the English widow, Mrs. C., in
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
: “In essence, I regarded my life from that moment on as entirely pointless and useless. The man with whom I had shared every hour and thought for twenty-three years was dead, my children did not need me, I was afraid of casting a cloud over their youth with my sadness and melancholy—but I wished and desired nothing more for myself.” It's not so much riveting as riveted. Here is a description of the servant-woman Crescenz in the story “Leporella” (Zweig seems to be especially bad at those sudden changes to which, as a writer, he is so dependably drawn): “The sluggish heaviness suddenly left her rigid, frozen limbs; it was as if since she had heard that electrifying news her joints were suddenly supple, and she adopted a quick, nimble gait.” Here is another old woman, the mother in
The Post Office Girl
: “But then a confused torrent of broken, half-intelligible sentences burst from her toothless, working mouth, interspersed with floods of wild triumphant laughter. Tears roll down her cheeks and into her sagging mouth as she stammers and waves her hands, hurling the jumble of excited words at her bewildered daughter.” Here—lest it be supposed that it's only older female characters who somehow escape Zweig's otherwise “meticulous but at the same time condensed style” (Anthea Bell in an afterword)—is Zweig's narrator in the novella
Amok
: “I had seen a new world, I had taken in turbulent, confused images that raced wildly through my mind. Now I wanted leisure to think, to analyse and organise them, make sense of all that had impressed itself on my eyes, but there wasn't a moment of rest and peace to be had here on the crowded deck.” One appreciates the ease, the fluency, perhaps most of all the fearlessness of the writing, but I fail to see the least dash or economy or precision (let alone beauty) in this clubbing and relentless and unaware deployment of parts of speech that stands in for a style, and is everywhere the same. Zweig is at one and the same time an absolutely natural and absolutely dreadful writer; the one quality of course does not preclude the other.

Zweig finished
The World of Yesterday
in 1941, shortly before his death in February 1942, but neither the new form nor the old subject, neither being in the New World nor the probable end of the rest of it, neither his turning sixty (as he, something of a Peter Pan, wished never to do) nor whatever thanatophile twinkle he had in his eye enabled him to transcend his ordinary possibilities. It is indeed his “least personal biography.” Hermann Kesten, Joseph Roth's sometime friend and fellow exile, and later his editor, mused expertly:

A reader of Zweig's autobiography could be pardoned for thinking this Zweig must have been a colourless individual. In fact he was a strange and complicated person; fussy and interesting, bizarre and cunning; brooding, calculating and sentimental; helpful and distant; amusing and full of contradictions; comfortable in his manner, sometimes anything but in the things he said; actor-ish and hard-working; always intellectually stimulating; banal and devious; easily excited and quickly tired …

The World of Yesterday
is orderly, often bland, sometimes honest, sometimes disingenuous, occasionally unintentionally funny, from time to time downright stupid. Fowles is cross with a biographer (“one of his less gifted biographers”) for remarking “with an infelicity bordering on the sublime, that ‘no one has ever accused Zweig of a sense of humour,'” but I really don't know why; it's so obviously true. Then, all his life, Zweig prided himself on his lack of any political nous. He is in Belgium in August 1914, and so sure is he that the Germans won't invade that he offers to hang himself from a lamppost if they do. A few hours later, they do, and he doesn't. A book that says—of Maxim Gorky!—“there was nothing striking about his features” (just as it does, incidentally, and with more justice, about Rainer Maria Rilke: “features, not in themselves striking”) isn't going to raise the bar for perspicacity or boldness. Accordingly, the human portraits are not among the best things here: the pages on Vienna, Berlin especially, and Paris are much to be preferred to the sanctimonious, almost slobbering passages on Hofmannsthal, Verhaeren, Rilke, Rathenau, Rolland, and Strauss, full of the sort of adulatory humbug that was Zweig's real element. However, saying that his choice of publisher—the later Nazi Kippenberg, who put him through a long and painful and expensive separation that hurt his reputation and earned him years of scolding letters from the fiery Roth—“could not have turned out better” is in a different class of untruth: a sort of sentimental and half-deluded, half-diplomatic twaddle.

Zweig's worst whitewashing is reserved for his sentiments at the outbreak of World War I. In his guileful paraphrase (and in a chapter titled none too bashfully “The Fight for International Fraternity”), he describes an essay he published in September 1914 in a Berlin newspaper (“After all, I was a writer, I had words at my disposal, and I therefore had a duty to express my convictions in so far as I could at the time of censorship”), titled
To Friends Abroad
: “I addressed all my friends in other countries, saying that I would be loyal to them even if closer links were impossible at the moment, so that at the first opportunity I could go on working with them to encourage the construction of a common European culture.” Then this and that, mostly to underline Zweig's bravery and isolation, and then over the page, “fourteen days later, when I had almost forgotten the article”—so much for his convictions, one thinks—he gets a letter from his pacifist friend Romain Rolland: “He must have read the article, for he wrote: ‘I for one will never forsake my friends.'” As told, the story makes no sense. Here's Zweig, sticking his neck out, courting danger and even a run-in with the censor, and here's the protestation of loyalty from his friend. Why? Why is it so clear that Rolland has read the article? Why the strange, rebuking sound in Rolland's sentence? Isn't everybody being brave together? Well, no, not when you read the words Zweig actually addressed to his foreign friends, quoted in Donald Prater's 1972 biography: “This hatred for you—although I do not feel it myself—I will not try to moderate, for it brings forth victories and heroic strength … Do not expect me to be your advocate, however much I may feel this my duty! Respect my silence, as I respect yours!” Inasmuch as this ghastly jelly-wobble of a passage says anything, it prorogues Zweig's foreign friendships for the duration: no wonder the German censor found little to take exception to! German poet sends French poet to Coventry—it's exactly right, it's
magnifique
and
comme il faut
! Imagine Zweig's humiliation, then, when he got Rolland's letter! That ringing sentence, slicing through Zweig's vermicular dither and duplicity, “I for one will never forsake my friends!” You have to hand it to the French! And then imagine living with that for twenty-five years, and then writing it in your autobiography, not what happened, nor what you wish had happened, but the whole thing just so obfuscated that it makes no sense, and the relief you feel when you've done that! And you call it “The Fight for International Fraternity.” You talk about your “immunity to this sudden patriotic intoxication” and you wonder, a little repetitiously, but then you're like that, about being “perhaps the only person to be shockingly sober amidst their intoxication,” and you swear “an oath that I kept after 1940 as well—never to write a word approving of the war or denigrating any other nation,” which perhaps wasn't such a great idea in 1940 as it might have been in 1914, but let that go, when on the next page of Prater's biography there is a letter from Zweig to Kippenberg: “My great ambition, however, is to be an officer over with you in
that
army, to conquer in France—in France particularly, the France that one must chastise because one loves her,” and then you might have understood that Hesse is wrong to say that he dislikes your books but admires your convictions,
Gesinnung
, he says, using that rather unpleasant word, because separations of that sort don't really work, and the rottenness of your writing isn't just confined to your style, because rottenness isn't like that, and perhaps more to the point, style isn't like that either—remember, Buffon said
le style, c'est l'homme même
—and you admit, not before time, that you are just putrid through and through.