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.
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 no
r 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:
Where Have You Been? Page 29
