Stefan Zweig

I managed to mess up my book reading schedule and haven’t read Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl for the Slaves of Golconda group. Instead, I thought I’d offer some background information on Zweig himself. He is a little-known author these days, although when he was alive and at the height of his fame, he had to barricade himself in his house at Salzburg to keep his legion of fans at bay. His books were translated across the world, although he was better known for his biographical writings (on Erasmus, Balzac, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, Kleist, Tolstoy, Dickens) than his fiction. He was also a friend of any number of famous cultural figures, including Freud and Rilke – after a conversation with Rilke he wrote ‘one is incapable of any vulgarity for hours or even days’. This excitable, idealistic Zweig is much in evidence in his youth. As the rich second son of a millionaire textile manufacturer, he was able to devote himself to the causes that interested him, and art was the guiding star of his life. He had joined with a group of aesthetes in Austria during his teenage years and was devoted not just to the concept of art but to a vague, if stirring, political belief in a united, harmonious Europe. He declared himself not Austrian, but a European, and in this optimistic frame of mind reported that ‘The world offered itself to me as a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise.’ It seems scarcely conceivable that less than thirty years later, he and his second wife would die in a joint suicide pact.

Part of the problem – although by no means all of it – was that Zweig was Jewish. Initially he didn’t think this counted for anything. His family was not religious, but they were prosperous, educated and assimilated. His memory of his youth was entirely free from anti-Semitic slight; indeed his race was something that he entirely discounted. Not that he was ignorant of the Jewish question, rather he dissociated himself from the Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews who were migrating from a hostile Russia into what would eventually become an even more dangerous Western Europe. Such distinctions were not destined to last. By 1933 the Nazis were burning his books, in 1935 an opera by Richard Strauss, The Silent Woman, was closed down after only two performances because Zweig had written the libretto. In 1938, the Nazis destroyed his library in Salzburg, but by that point, Zweig had been driven into exile in London. He had begun to believe that Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was directed at him personally and he never really recovered from this paranoia.

But other discontents were stirring. It was in the thirties that his 20-year marriage to one of his fans, Friderike (they met through the letters that she wrote to him), broke down when he fell in love with his new secretary, Charlotte Altmann, who was a clichéd twenty-seven years younger. In her biography, Friderike explained how Zweig longed for space and for silence to create, something that her two children and her sociable lifestyle prevented him from enjoying. Zweig begged for a divorce on the grounds that he wanted to regain his ‘student’s freedom’, although within the year he had married Lotte. It might have been peace that Zweig was after, but given the brief interlude between this point and his suicide, peace regained clearly didn’t hit the spot. Instead it might be a blissful return to a former point in time that really appealed, nostalgia for his student days confused with a longing for a youthful, optimistic state of mind that he could no longer summon up. It would not be the first time that a man, feeling something had turned inexorably sour in his life, decided that a change of woman might provide the answer.

If it wasn’t love that went wrong on Zweig, if that was a smokescreen for a deeper discontent, we might look instead to the strongest guiding force in Zweig’s life, which was his belief in humanism. Humanism is a kind of moral philosophy, a perspective on life that affirms the dignity and worth of all people and the supreme belief in human intelligence as the source of all solutions to the problems that beset mankind. It proposes the need for a universal morality that would guide and inform all human conduct, but chooses not to trust to the supernatural or the spiritual for answers. The ultimate goal of humanism is to make life better for all individuals, but it doesn’t necessarily believe that is easily achieved; instead it looks to the community to work together to provide support and sustenance.

There is something beautiful and idealistic and almost noble about the humanistic stance. It’s also managed to be the dominant moral philosophy in the Western world between the Renaissance and, oh around about the end of World War II. All those years, people believed they held the key to the good life in their hearts, if they looked carefully enough. They believed as well that life was continually getting better, and that eventually, man would reach a state of perfection. Humanism was also deeply bound up with culture and the arts, the finest expression of humanist knowledge. Humanism had its problems, undoubtedly, not least of which was that this was a philosophy created by, held by and explored by men; half the world was rigorously excluded from its all-encompassing claims. But there is a nobility to it that our modern day philosophies lack. Now we’re in the era of post-humanism – the belief that the answers to all our problems lie beyond the human domain, in the world of technology and science. We’ve given up on ourselves as the agents of our own rescue.

Stefan Zweig believed in civilization – that beautiful faith in intelligence and artistic understanding to promote harmony, insight, communal well-being. He believed that there was a natural understanding between people of similar education and ability. He was thrilled to be part of an intricately interconnected group of artists whose mutual acclaim he assumed to be second nature. We might call him naïve, as much artistic achievement was ever fueled by jealousy, rivalry and enmity. But there is a fragility that Zweig always identified in his fictional characters as well as his biographical ones, a recognition that civilization might not always be the solution, that one might be too nice, too charming, too civilized for one’s own good. It provided the real spike of interest in his work, but it may also have tormented him in reality. The jury is out as to why Zweig and Charlotte took their overdose of barbiturates, in what should have been a peaceful exile in Brazil in 1942. Zweig ought to have had some inkling that the Nazis were not going to be allowed to overrun Europe as he feared. But the Second World War destroyed, for many artists, some fundamental belief in the humanity of the human race, and the possibility that truth and beauty might make a better world. Certainly those beliefs have been rarely in evidence ever since. The enormity of such a loss might well be behind the enigmatic words Zweig wrote in his final note, thanking the people of Brazil and saluting his friends:

‘May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.’

A Hit And A Miss

Shall we get the miss out of the way first? I was very disappointed not to enjoy Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout more, particularly since some of my blogging friends whose taste I respect had expressed a high opinion of it. Let’s be clear; this book certainly didn’t fail me due to a quality issue. It’s beautifully written, poignant, insightful and clever in conception. In a series of short stories, Strout circles her main protagonist, Olive Kitteridge, showing her in relation to her husband, her son, her friends and her enemies. Sometimes the story involves her centrally, on other occasions she is peripheral or destined to make only a brief if significant intervention towards the end. But as the stories build up, so the reader develops an ever more intricate portrait of Olive and we watch her as time passes and she struggles to deal with the thankless business of ageing.

When the book begins, Olive is a middle-aged woman with a grown up son (although the first story has flashbacks to an earlier incarnation). But it’s the rapid progress to old age that is Strout’s territory here. In this respect I was completely mislead by the cover of the novel that shows the bare back and shoulders of a young woman in a strapless dress. If it hadn’t given me completely false expectations, I might have picked a better moment to read it. I loved the thought of a novel that revolved around a central character, showing her from multiple perspectives, but I wasn’t anticipating the perils of growing older to be the main focus. Olive’s deteriorating relationships with her husband and son provide an important theme; Olive is a big woman, we’re repeatedly told, big in opinions too, a bit of a bulldozer, you might say. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, probably due to a career as a school teacher, she is often contemptuous, easily bored or irritated by others. There’s a deep well of resentment and anger inside her that she has never explored or acknowledged herself but it comes out in her rough handling of those she loves. That is her paradox; she does love both husband and son, but she takes her bad feelings out on them too, bullying her son with her big emotions, sniping at her husband for his irritating good nature. Her son’s marriage, quite late in life, is the first step in what will end up a bitter estrangement for her, as she overhears his new wife at the wedding mentioning what a hard time Chris has had growing up. Olive can’t hear this, and nor can she make it right much later in the novel when she visits him in California with his second wife and behaves rather badly. Olive’s perspective has petrified into her own sense of righteousness, and any stirrings of horror at the memory of some of the things she’s done are quickly flattened out before they might seriously challenge her self-image. Funnily enough, it’s only those closest to Olive who suffer at her hands. In one of the best stories in the book, she imposes her hefty presence on a young man who is contemplating his own suicide and manages to hang on in there with him long enough to make a difference. And in another story she teams up with some of her local friends to try to help a young girl suffering from anorexia. Olive is like a burning brazier – those furthest away get warmed by her heat, but those too close get withered by the flames. This is a remarkable portrait, but to be honest, Olive is the kind of woman I would cross the street to avoid if I met her in real life.

The main problem for me was that I should have read this book some other time, not just having turned 40 and being somewhat aware of the passage of time. This book pulls no punches on the realities of growing older; the physical decay, the loss of loved ones to humiliating, devastating illnesses, the growing estrangement of relationships that have outlived their sustaining love. And yet, the hope that age brings with it the wisdom and insight necessary to weather these last, bitter storms is repeatedly undermined. Life can still surprise Strout’s characters, with its outpourings of emotion, its cruel unpredictability. Things hurt just as much and there’s a whole lot less to look forward to. It wasn’t quite the message I was hoping for, just at that particular moment. If the book hadn’t been so well written, I might have managed to put up with it, but it was so poignant and painful that I will admit to not quite reaching the end. But I put it back on the shelf with another day in mind. It really is very good and well worth reading, and just because I was having a wimpish moment, there is no reason why other readers wouldn’t get a great deal out of it.

So I went in search of something more light-hearted and was fortunate enough to place my hands on the utterly delightful Mariana by Monica Dickens. This was my first Persephone book ever, and I can see why readers love their shape and size; it was just a gorgeous volume. But the real pleasure is the story itself. It’s absolutely for fans of I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love as it may well be a romance, but it’s the innate humour of family life and growing up that forms the real focus. The novel opens with Mary, grown-up and married, waiting out the war alone in her house in the country. When she switches on the radio, the news she hears couldn’t be worse; the destroyer her husband is on has been sunk and whilst there are survivors she doesn’t know whether he is amongst them. There is no way of getting news that night and so she is forced to sit it out, reliving in fantasy how the events of her life brought them together. And then the real story begins and we are transported back to Charbury, the beautiful house in Devon where her extended family all gathered for idyllic school holidays. We pass through Mary’s misguided but charming infatuation with her older cousin, Denys, her disastrous attempt to study acting, her dream year in Paris when she gets engaged to the wrong man, and much else besides. What makes this such a delightful book is Mary’s gloriously witty narrative. I laughed out loud many times and was gently buoyed along by its sustained, intrinsic humour. Here’s a passage where the children are staging a play that Mary has written, one Charbury summer holiday, and Denys, in the lead role naturally, is making a pre-performance speech ‘which they had decided, from long experience of their parents, would be essential.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, during the execution scene in the next act, mothers” (with a glance at his own) “are requested to keep their seats, and not rush on to the stage, because it’s really not as dangerous as it looks.” With this alarming announcement, the dust-sheet folded over the string behind him slid jerkily aside, revealing a hanging noose. Aunt Mavis gave a slight scream, Granny said, “Oh, dear,” and Taggie behind her said, “Will you look at that?” and the black furry caterpillars that were her eyebrows shot up into her hair. “A trifle macabre. Almost Tchekov, one might say,” murmured Uncle Guy, as he crossed his long legs and leaned back, preparing to enjoy himself. Needless to say, when Sarah, as Sir Egbert of Corsica, in Denys’ riding breeches and boots with a green satin blouse of her mother’s, dropped through the trap-door and was hanged, mothers and aunts rushed on to the stage as one protesting woman. The play came to an abrupt end, cutting off Denys’ “Darling, I loved you the very first moment I saw you,” and the final kiss.

“But I told you – ‘ he protested through the uproar. “Oh these women!” He shrugged his shoulders and walked off the stage to join the men. Mary was so excited by the play’s success, that she was not upset by its untimely end, although she was disappointed to miss even a theatrical embrace from Denys. The most chagrined person was Michael, who, in the executioner’s bransack, was all ready to play ‘God Save the King’ on his mouth-organ, and now nobody wanted to hear.’

It’s simply a charming novel, and one guaranteed to make you happy. Recommended for convalescences, holidays and dark days of all kinds.