Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts

Monday 16 May 2022

On the Rim of the Sea

 Enjoy the sea view. Don’t fall in

At the end of 2012 I started this blog. I don’t know quite what I planned to do with it at the time. The heading says “Travel, science, books Whatever I feel like, really.” Which is more or less how it’s panned out. It’s been an eclectic mess of pieces covering everything from lentil recipes to politics. (Quite a lot of politics, actually.)

I realized that some of the pieces were beginning to fit a pattern. I would become interested in some topic or event, and gather books about it – then use them to write a piece on that particular subject, examining the different angles and accounts. I don’t think this format was a new idea. Punch did this in its book-review pages when I was growing up and I believe The New Yorker (a magazine I like) has as well. It lets you swoop down upon some incident or time that has piqued your curiosity. 

In my case, they included such varied topics as the philosophy of science, the world’s worst shipwreck (no, not the Titanic), the postwar occupation of Germany, the extraordinary life of Marie Curie’s daughter Ève, the fate of Chinese labourers on the Western Front, the way novelists have seen Fleet Street, a writer’s memoirs of Imperial India, the last great sailing ships, and the Golden Age of crime fiction.

At some point I saw that, strung together in the right order, the pieces would be a review of the 20th century through its memoirs and literature. At that point my new book, On the Rim of the Sea, began to take shape.

The book’s title was inspired by a passage in the splendid Instead of a Letter, by the late Diana Athill. In it she describes how, as a child, she shocked her grandmother by talking of life as being in a bowl, floating on the sea; provided one stayed at the bottom of the bowl, one might be serene – but every now and then the motion of the sea flung one up the side and forced one to a view of “dangerous, cold grey water” that would be unbearable. That, she said, was the origin of madness. Is it? The years covered by the pieces in this book (roughly, 1912 to the present) certainly showed us more of the sea than we should have liked. As I write (May 2022), the cold grey water is back with a vengeance. But it has not always been that way. This book has its darker bits, but there were lighter times.

This book is, in part, a self-indulgence – I acknowledge that freely; it’s the result of years spent reading books on a whim. But there is also a purpose. The books of a time, especially its memoirs and reportage, do hold up a mirror to a period or incident when it has long passed. I’d strongly disagree with the critic Cyril Connolly, who wrote in The Unquiet Grave (1944) that: '"The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence." This is, frankly, bullshit. Most writers will not produce a masterpiece – I won’t – and we don’t always aspire to. Rather, we provide a lens through which others can better see the world. This is not always an art; quite often, it is just a craft.

If On the Rim of the Sea shines a light on unfamiliar corners of the past century, I shall be happy. If its readers enjoy it, I shall be very happy indeed.


Where to buy On the Rim of the Sea

The book is available as both an ebook and a paperback. If you’d like to support independent bookshops (as many people do), they can order it; you will need the ISBN number (978-0991437481).

To buy online:

Amazon (or in the UK, here)

Apple Books

Barnes & Noble/Nook

BetterWorldBooks

Booktopia (Australia)

Waterstones

Rakuten Kobo

Scribd

 

Wednesday 26 December 2018

Diana Athill: Self-scrutiny, and the writer’s world


Happy 101st birthday to Diana Athill. One of the most successful editors of her day, she is now one of Britain’s best-loved writers


Those who can, write; those who can’t, edit. Or is that unfair? I hope so, as I do both. In Diana Athill’s case, however, there’s no doubt; she writes with grace and concision.

Athill, who was 101 on December 21, helped found the firm of André Deutsch in the early 1950s and built up a formidable list, making it a leading English-language publisher for 40 years. Following her retirement in 1993, she has turned to writing, with astonishing success; her account of aging, Somewhere Towards the End, has been widely admired, and her most recent book of memoirs and reflections, Alive, Alive Oh!, was published as recently as 2016. In fact, to those in the know, she had long been a writer as well as an editor; she won the The Observer’s short-story prize in 1958 when she was in her early 40s, and published a short-story collection in 1962. This was followed soon afterwards by a remarkable memoir, Instead of a Letter – of which more below. But the most widespread acclaim has come for books she has written since her retirement.

I must admit I was late to the Athill party. I have an aversion to writers I have been told to like. Moreover I was nonplussed by the first of her books that I read, Stet: An Editor’s Life (2002), her account of her publishing career. I was irritated by Athill’s privileged background and was disappointed that she highlighted authors I had not read and, in several cases, had never heard of. But I sensed I was missing something. Rereading Stet after several years, I saw that I was.
*

Athill was born in Norfolk and brought up as part of the “county” set; she went to Oxford, and spent the war in the BBC – a job she got through a personal contact in its recruitment office; class was as powerful then as now. Disappointed in love, she fell into a series of relationships, one with a young refugee met at a party. (“He sat on the floor and sang ‘The Foggy Foggy Dew’, which was unexpected in a Hungarian.”) This was André Deutsch. The affair did not last long; the friendship, however, did, and at the end of the war he asked her to join him in the publishing company he was founding. She was to work as an editor for the next 50 years, all but the last few with Deutsch himself. She says little in this book of her personal life, but she has written of that elsewhere (again, more of that below). Stet the word is a proofreader’s instruction, used to cancel a correction – is about Athill’s life in publishing.

Stet is in two pretty much equal parts. The first is a narrative account of her career, mostly with Deutsch. The second recalls her work with a series of writers, the best-known of which are Jean Rhys and V.S. Naipaul; the others – Alfred Chester, Molly Keane, and one or two more – are no longer household names, if they ever were.

The first part of the book is a fascinating picture of postwar publishing in all its amateurish glory. When André Deutsch was founded in the 1950s, it worked out of a converted house; books were dispatched from a packing bench that was a plank over the bath. This doesn’t surprise me; my first job, in 1974, was in publishing, and I sometimes ran the packing bench. Things hadn’t changed much. But there is nothing amateur about Athill’s shrewd insight into book buyers: “There are those who buy because they love books and what they can get from them, and those to whom books are one form of entertainment among several. The first group, which is by far the smaller, will go on reading ...The second group has to be courted.” In Athill’s view, by the 1980s the second group had been seduced away by more visual media, leaving little space for literary publishing. She may have been right – then. But electronic publishing has now made books good value again, at least when sold by independents or small publishers whose overheads are low. So that second audience is being reclaimed (albeit mainly with genre books). Although Athill retired in the 1990s, she will clearly have been aware of these developments, and one wonders what she thinks of them. She says little in Stet about technological change in general, although photosetting and on-screen page design arrived in her time.

When it comes to editing, though, Athill clearly had rigorous judgement. If a book didn’t quite work, she didn’t want it, whoever had written it; and she rejected one of Philip Roth’s – a decision that caused her some pain later, but was surely right at the time. She had felt that he was writing about a different type of character than usual simply to prove that he could, and it did not ring true.

This is, in fact, the key to the second half of Stet itself; it does ring true. This is because Athill has chosen to recall not the writers who would be best-known today, but those about whom she feels she has something to say. The result is a series of character sketches that do have impact, and draw you in whether you are interested in the writer or not. V.S. Naipaul is the only modern “superstar” covered here. Of the others, I had heard of Jean Rhys and Molly Keane, but knew very little about them; I knew nothing of Alfred Chester at all. But I was fascinated. These three, and the other, sketches suggest that Athill was not just a good editor; she was a generous friend to her writers as well. (And to Deutsch himself, despite his apparent self-absorption.)

Of these sketches, it is that of Jean Rhys that stands out. “No-one who has read Jean Rhys’s first four novels can suppose that she was good at life,” writes Athill, “but no-one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was.” The later stages of Rhys’s life and the mess she had made of it, and her struggle with alcohol, are there – but so is her gift as a writer, and the strange early life that Athill felt explained much about her. The thumbnail sketch of V.S. Naipaul, too, is vivid, with this shrewd insight: that those whose cultural or national background is unclear must define themselves, and the personal resources needed for this can be great. Not everyone has them, and one can become lost, and stumble. As someone who has spent much of their life in an international milieu (in my case international development), I understand this all too well.

I am glad I read this again. Athill is, to be sure, a member of a privileged group – she uses the word caste – with an iron grip on the publishing world; but she knows that. This caste was “the mostly London-dwelling, university-educated, upper-middle-class English people [who] loved books and genuinely tried to understand the differences between good and bad writing; but I suspect... our ‘good’ was good only according to the notions of the caste.” She puts this in the past tense but one wonders if that caste and its prejudices have really quite gone yet. However, Athill’s judgment as an editor clearly transcended it. So does her empathetic and subtle understanding of those she met.

This is a charming book.

*

But what of Athill herself? From Stet, it is clear that she is someone of substance, but she says little of her own affairs. In her other books, however, she does. Her private life has been colourful and she has been frank about it. It has included the suicide of a lover and an affair with an American revolutionary, Hakim Jamal, a cousin of Malcolm X. Jamal and his associates inspired a later novel by V.S. Naipaul, Guerillas; Athill, then his editor, did not like it. She eventually wrote a memoir of her own about her friendship with Jamal, Make Believe: A True StoryHowever, her first volume of autobiography, Instead of a Letter (1962), contains nothing so lurid (though it is quite frank about sex). What it does contain, is acute self-analysis. I rarely admire introspection in autobiography; too often it comes over as solipsism, and in any case, it is a poor substitute for narrative. So I should not have liked this book. But I did.

It is, in sum, a meditation on why one should bother to live; and why, in effect, she decided that she could be bothered. She starts with her grandmother, not long before death:

...She turned her beautiful speckled eyes towards me one afternoon and said in so many words: ‘What have I lived for?’ It was she who should have been able to tell me that. All her life she had been a churchgoing Christian ...I said to her what I believed: that she had lived, at the very least, for what her life had been.

But she began to ask herself the same question. Her grandmother, she realised, had “created a world” for the family, in which they lived and functioned as human beings. But what of Athill herself?  That was a question to whistle up an icy wind ...Which is my reason for sitting down to write this.” She proceeds to take us through her early life at the Norfolk manor, including her realisation that her mother did not really love her father. Her grandmother has an absolute belief in a secure and transparent world, but Athill does not:

I shocked her once. I was about ten years old and had thought of an image for life. I thought that it was as though people were confined in a bowl which was floating on a sea. While snug at the bottom of the bowl they lived their lives complacently, but the bowl spun and tossed on the sea and its spinning sometimes sent one of them up its side until he could see over the rim. All round would be the endless chaos of dangerous, cold grey water ...and anyone who had seen it ...would not be able to bear it. That, I decided, was the origin of madness.

Her grandmother is appalled. But in her early 20s Athill does look over the rim of the bowl. Since her mid-teens she has been in love with a man who, as an undergraduate, was brought in to tutor her brother; she calls him Paul. She grows to adulthood in her love for him, and they become engaged. He joins the RAF and goes to Egypt and she intends to join him as soon as she finishes at Oxford, which she soon will. But then he is transferred to Transjordan and his warm, intimate letters cease, with no explanation; two years later a curt note arrives asking to be released from the engagement, as he wishes to marry someone else. It appears, she thinks, to be the sort of formal note one might send to a jilted fiance in order to avoid a breach-of-promise suit. It seems to have destroyed her. She spends the war working for the BBC, but feels little interest in the job, or in life; she does not say so, but her 20s sound as if they were overshadowed by what we would now call depression. “I was not even affected by whatever feverish gaiety there may have been about (people speak of it in memoirs); it did not come my way. Years of emptiness. Years leprous with boredom...”

And yet it is her, not Paul, who survives. He – his real name was Tony Irvine – did marry, but flew into a mountain in northern Greece soon afterwards and never met his unborn son. (Oddly, Athill herself eventually did, some 60 years later.) Athill, meanwhile, has been set adrift, and her capacity for close relationships will never recover. But she rebuilds herself as something else. First comes her successful collaboration with Deutsch, which will make her one of the most powerful and respected editors in Britain. And then, in 1958, a chance meeting in Regent’s Park causes her to write a short story that, to her surprise, wins the Observer prize. The happiness this brings her is unfeigned, and is wonderfully described in the book.

Instead of a Letter could have been very dull. After all, one’s life may be interesting; one’s soul is usually not, at least to those not close to us. What lifts the book is its descriptive power and delightful asides. At Oxford: “On the river at night, moving silently through the darkness under trees: suddenly the man punting whispers ‘Look!’ ...Three naked boys are dancing wildly but without a sound in the moonlight.” She writes, too, of sailing with Irvine in the years before the war, something he very much liked to do, and there is “the sound of a jetty underfoot”, seaweed and the iron rings to which boats are moored. There is a gift here for using few words to invoke a scene in the reader. Moreover her language has clean, spare lines, and yet it flows; always concise, but never abrupt. One feels that she could have drawn one in had she written of a blade of grass, or a crack in the pavement. Athill has since said that Instead of a Letter came to her quite naturally; there was no plan; she could not wait to return home in the evenings and write, and it simply came out the way it did. Perhaps the best books often do.

Instead of a Letter takes Athill’s life to 1962, when it was written. It seems to strip her bare, and later books have been even franker. Yet one wonders if something is hidden, deep down. She is English after all. John Preston, who interviewed her for The Telegraph in 2011, commented that “while she is very welcoming, there’s a natural reserve to her. Something both distant and scrutinising. ...Behind the affability, one suspects, she would be as unsparing in her judgments of other people as she is of herself.” There are hints of this in Instead of a Letter; now and then some prevailing hypocrisy, or the prejudices of her family, are coldly skewered. Portraits show a strong chin and steely blue-grey eyes. Athill has, it seemed, hidden nothing from her readers; yet I wonder if we really know who she is.

Or maybe we do. She told Preston that she had always been a watcher. “Even at times of acute unhappiness I’ve watched myself being unhappy. I also think I’m one of those people who has never been wholly involved in an emotion, but then I think a lot of writers are like that.”

And she, of all people, would know.

Diana Athill passed away on January 23 2019, 
less than a month after this piece was posted.


Mike Robbins’s books are available in e-book or paperback from 
most online retailers, including Amazon (UK and US).


Sunday 13 August 2017

On whether he warned us


Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer from the 1920s and 1930s. Exiled by fascism, he committed suicide in 1942. Now liberals hold him up as a prophet of tolerance and internationalism. Why? And who was he really?

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian middlebrow writer known for his novellas and for his historical biographies. His work was widely translated between the wars and was immensely popular. From quite a young age he travelled widely, especially in Europe, and had friends in the arts in much of the continent. But he was Jewish and in 1934, sensing what would happen in Austria, he went into exile in England – ironically, one of the few Western countries where he was not well known. In 1940 he moved to the US and eventually to Brazil, where, despairing of Europe’s future, he committed suicide with his wife in Petrópolis in February 1942 at the age of 60.

Zweig in 1939 (NPG/Bassano)
Until recently Zweig, once a best-seller, was largely forgotten. In recent years, however, there’s been a revival – and this time it has extended to Britain, where he has been championed by the Pushkin Press, which has brought out new editions of much of his oeuvre, both his biographies of historical figures, and his fiction. Some years ago Pushkin published a new edition of Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, begun in 1934 and finished just before his death in 1942. It is less a conventional autobiography, more a sentimental journey through Zweig’s world as a cosmopolitan young writer before the First World War, when he knew figures such as Rodin and Rilke. The book describes, too, the war itself, its aftermath and the gathering storm of fascism.  Pushkin has now brought out Messages From A Lost World, a collection of lectures and articles Zweig produced between 1916 and 1941, translated by Will Stone. Much of this material has hitherto been unavailable or never existed in English.

Why this sudden interest in Zweig? He is long dead and, although very popular in his lifetime, was not a literary heavyweight. He had languished for years in obscurity; I only discovered him myself when searching for someone else (Arnold Zweig, the pro-Soviet author of The Axe of Wandsbeck). But now it seems we cannot get enough of him. There is a clue as to why in a recent brief piece by George Prochnik, one of Zweig’s biographers (The Impossible Exile, 2015), in The Atlantic (February 6 2017):

I wonder how far along the scale of moral degeneration Zweig would judge America to be in its current state. We have a magnetic leader, one who lies continually and remorselessly—not pathologically but strategically, to placate his opponents, to inflame the furies of his core constituency, and to foment chaos. The American people are confused and benumbed by a flood of fake news and misinformation. Reading in [The World of Yesterday] how, during the years of Hitler’s rise to power, many well-meaning people “could not or did not wish to perceive that a new technique of conscious cynical amorality was at work,” it’s difficult not to think of our own present predicament.
 
In other words, he resonates with those who hold certain views about our own times. This seems to be the case also from Nicholas Lezard’s adulatory review of Pushkin’s reissue of The World of Yesterday  (The Guardian, December 4 2009):

 ...[T]his is more than just an autobiography; it is a long lament for a lost world, a testament to the values of decency, toleration, humanism, and artistic and cultural endeavour ...he has produced a document which, however well you think you know the story, is essential to our understanding of history. For it was as an enthusiast for the pan-European cultural project that Zweig found his greatest motivation and, eventually, his greatest pain... 

Here we have Zweig used as a stick with which to beat Trump in the US and also, though only by implication, to support European integration in the UK.  If I wished to be cynical, I would say that the Zweig revival was nothing more than the anglophone liberal establishment co-opting a long-forgotten mediocre Austrian writer in order to make points of their own, exploiting the pathos of his death to do so. But is that fair?  It doesn’t help that Zweig divided the critics during his own lifetime. His sales were enormous. In Brazil, he received a state funeral in the presence of President Getúlio Vargas (himself to commit suicide a few years later).

Yet in a highly critical piece in the London Review of Books (Vermicular Dither, January 28 2010), critic Michael Hoffman excoriated Zweig and pointed out that other writers of the era had had no time for him. “As well as knowing him best, a man’s contemporaries have every reason for getting him wrong,” wrote Hoffman, “but the fact remains that there is an unusual consensus here – Mann, Musil, Brecht, Hesse, Canetti, Hofmannsthal, Kraus – [all considered that], save in in commercial terms, [he was] an utterly negligible figure.”

To justify his revival, Zweig would have to bring us some message of his own from the time in which he lived. There are two ways one can do this from the grave: as a witness; or as a prophet. The World of Yesterday would be his claim to the first role. Messages from a Lost World, his lectures and articles, would establish his claim to the second. Do either of these books succeed on those levels?

The answer to that is, in fact, quite messy.

II 
Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday was published not long after his death. It has never really disappeared, but has come back into vogue of late. It is alternately infuriating, charming and gripping. It is, at its best, profoundly vivid. One reason for its impact today is simply that Zweig was well-connected, and the book includes pen-portraits of many figures who are still historically important. Many are literary or artistic; we meet Romain Rolland (who Zweig knew well) and Auguste Rodin; in one of the book’s best passages, Zweig sees the master at work in his studio, so absorbed in his work that he forgets the young writer’s presence, and is startled when he realises that Zweig is still there. Hofmannsthal appears, and gets more generous treatment than he ever gave Zweig, who he despised (one of the good things about Zweig’s own memoir is that it is largely spiteless). Richard Strauss is also in the book; Zweig briefly succeeded Hofmannsthal as Strauss’s librettist, to the mortification of the Nazis. Neither are all Zweig’s acquaintances from the arts. He knew, and warmly describes, German Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, who he saw not long before his tragic assassination in Berlin – an event supposed, by some, to have helped set Germany on the road to Nazism. There is also a memorable description of Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, who was Zweig’s first editor.

But The World of Yesterday can often grate. Zweig is an incorrigible name-dropper. As Leo Carey remarked in a review in The New Yorker (The Escape Artist, August 27 2012), it is sometimes “tempting to see his sedulous gathering of eminent friendships as a counterpart of his manuscript collecting” (Zweig was a noted collector of scores, manuscripts and memorabilia). Late in the book there is a long list of those who, he says, stayed with him in Salzburg (including not only Hoffmanstahl but also Thomas Mann, who does not appear to have liked him much either). There is also a whiff of cant. Early on he claims that he wondered if he should ever have dared submit his early work. Later there’s more evidence of his wretched false modesty when he recounts how gobsmacked he is when Maxim Gorky is to write an intro to his work, or he affects to have been humbled to have been approached by an American publisher (it was Benjamin Huebsch of Viking). “Such apparent success was apt to confuse one whose faith, hitherto, had been in his good intentions rather than in his ability and the efficacy of his work.” Oh, do shut up, Stefan. After all, there is an undercurrent of ego simply in making one’s work available.

One is also irritated when he ‘modestly’ praises his own writing, citing his “distaste for everything redundant and long-winded... I had always felt it incumbent on me to study the causes of the influence of books or personages within their own time, and I could not but ask myself in hours of reflection to what particular characteristics my books owed their, to me, unexpected success.” He then says that it was his concision, which is scarcely evident in this passage. In fact, Michael Hofmann goes so far as to refer to his “abundant, facile and unhindered lifelong logorrhoea.” That is not fair, but it is true that Zweig could be wordy.

Neither is Zweig always a reliable witness. He spent the latter part of the First World War in Switzerland (for reasons that will be discussed below), and then recounts how he returned across the Austrian frontier to a most poignant moment:

Upon alighting I became aware of an odd restlessness among the customs officers and police. [A]n old lady in black with her two daughters, from her carriage and clothes presumably an aristocrat... [was] visibly excited and constantly pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

A train rolls slowly into the station:

...not the customary, shabby, weather-beaten kind, but with spacious black cars, a train de luxe ...Then I recognized behind the plate glass window of the car Emperor Karl, the last emperor of Austria standing with his black-clad wife, Empress Zita. I was startled; the last emperor of Austria, heir of the Hapsburg dynasty which had ruled for seven hundred years, was forsaking his realm! 

It is a wonderful moment – but a few pages later he describes how the cold autumn air came through the broken windows of his own carriage as he rode on into Austria. But the Emperor did not leave Austria in the autumn but on March 24 1919; moreover he entered Switzerland with a British escort, something Zweig would surely have noticed. In short, Zweig was probably not there. 

Oliver Matuschek, author of an excellent recent biography of Zweig, Three Lives, does not mention these disparities, but notes it is strange that Zweig had never mentioned this incident before. He is reluctant to accuse Zweig of lying, , but concludes: “The most likely explanation is that Zweig’s account is not to be taken literally, as a description of events that he actually witnessed, but rather as a narrative allegory.” This is a polite way of saying that Zweig made it up.

Matuschek is a little harsher regarding an episode from 1911 that is not in The World of Yesterday, but which Zweig had recounted elsewhere. In April 1911, the dying Gustav Mahler was brought home by his wife and family aboard the German liner Amerika; the young Zweig, who had been visiting New York, happened to be aboard. Zweig’s account of the voyage in the presence of the dying composer was emotional. But in fact he only saw him once, from a distance, on disembarkation. He had sent an offer of help to the family, but Alma Mahler was suspicious of his motives and later said that far from helping, Zweig had disappeared rapidly at Cherbourg. Once again, however, Matuschek seems to suggest that Zweig is not being overtly dishonest; rather, that he felt he had a duty to chronicle what he saw as his presence at history. He may be right. The fact remains that, as the work of a witness, The World of Yesterday must be found wanting, and it is therefore hard not to call much else in the book – the distinguished friendships, for example – into question. 

III 
But if Zweig did wish to capture history in The World of Yesterday, he succeeded – not in his relentless name-dropping, or in his portraits of the great and the good, or in moments such as the departure of the Emperor, but when he was not trying so hard. It is in these passages that he tells us most. 

Thus he goes to the quiet resort of Baden to enjoy the summer: “Throughout the days and nights the heavens were a silky blue, the air soft yet not sultry, the meadows fragrant and warm, the forests dark and profuse in their tender green...” One day, reading in the park,he senses a flurry of disturbance; the band stops playing; people press towards a news placard. What has happened is the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo. But nobody seems terribly upset.

Franz Ferdinand lacked everything that counts for real popularity in Austria ...He was never seen to smile, and no photographs showed him relaxed. He had no sense for music, and no sense of humour, and his wife was equally unfriendly. My almost mystic premonition that some misfortune would come from this man with his bulldog neck and his cold, staring eyes, was  ..shared by the entire nation; and so the news of his murder aroused no profound sympathy. Two hours later signs of genuine mourning were no longer to be seen.

Zweig sees no reason to change his plans and trots off to visit friends in Belgium, where the Belgian army has started to prepare for war; even this seems slightly farcical (in a charming detail, we learn that their machine-guns are mounted on carts pulled by dogs). It comes as a shock when he realises that war really is imminent, and he takes the last train to cross into Germany. The atmosphere of that summer – the insouciance regarding the assassination, the doubt there will be war – is well expressed. And yet Zweig has sensed an undercurrent. For the last year he has been uneasy. First there is the arrest of Alfred Redl, a spy at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian intelligence machine (this is a fascinating episode, well described by Fitzroy Maclean in his book Take Nine Spies). Then he finds himself watching newsreels in a cinema in Tours and is taken aback when the Kaiser and Franz Joseph appear on the screen:

A spontaneous wild whistling and stamping of feet began in the dark hall. Everybody yelled and whistled, men, women, and children, as if they had been personally insulted. The good-natured people of Tours, who knew no more about the world and politics than what they had read in their newspapers, had gone mad for an instant, I was frightened. I was frightened to the depths of my heart. For I sensed how deeply the poison of the propaganda of hate must have advanced through the years... 

It may be these incidents did not alarm him so much at the time as he would have us believe. Even so, resonance can be retrospective, and he is telling us a lot here. This does echo in our own time; the media politics of hate, a rottenness at the heart of the establishment, and a failure to know when they are coming home to roost. One wonders if we will recognize the beginnings of the third world war. Could it be taking shape in some current crisis – perhaps the confrontation between Qatar and its neighbours?

It goes on. Zweig’s description of the aftermath of the First World War is an excellent read. As the Austrian currency collapses, Germans stream over the border to Salzburg to quaff multiple steins of virtually-free beer. Then along comes the German inflation of 1923 and the Austrians stream into Bavaria to get tanked up. A visit to Berlin:

Into the stove, 1923 (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung)
For a hundred dollars one could buy rows of six-storey houses on Kurfűrstendamm… some adolescent boys who had found a case of soap forgotten in the harbour disported themselves for months in cars and lived like kings ...All values were changed, and not only material ones; the laws of the State were flouted, no moral code was respected, Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world. ...the Germans introduced all their vehemence and methodological organization into the perversion. Along the entire Kurfűrstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame. ...Whoever lived through these apocalyptic months, these years, disgusted and embittered, sensed the coming of a counterblow, a horrible reaction. ...For the German people, a disciplined folk, did not know what to do with their freedom and already looked impatiently toward those who were to take it from them.

Is that us, bored with our cheap booze, porn and wide-screen TVs? Is the election of Trump, and Brexit, a result of sheer boredom and frustration with ourselves? If so, The World of Yesterday did warn us.

I began by saying that, to justify the new attention being showered on him, Zweig would have to justify his stature as either a witness or a prophet. His claim to be a witness rests mainly on The World of Yesterday. It is flawed. Sometimes it is long-winded and discursive. At other times Zweig tries too hard to insert himself into history, in claiming (for example) that he saw the last Emperor leave, or Mahler on the point of death; at these points the book is misleading, or simply not true. Yet maybe Matuschek is right to forgive him, for in a broader sense, The World of Yesterday really is an extraordinary work of witness. For the moment, with reservations, I’m with the defence.

IV 
But what of those who see Zweig as a prophet, trying to warn us from the past? For this we turn to the second book, Messages from a Lost World. The title does in itself claim, for Zweig, the mantle of a prophet (it isn’t his title; the book is a modern anthology of Zweig’s articles and speeches put together in 2016 by the Pushkin Press). The pieces in Messages from a Lost World vary in subject, but mostly reflect on Zweig’s sense of loss for the cosmopolitan, unified Europe of his youth, and his wish to see the borders come down again. Given this subject matter, and the circumstances of Zweig’s death, it’s easy to see why Pushkin would think this book relevant for 2016, with its rising nationalisms and threat of European disunity.

On first reading I was rather impatient with the book. Translator Will Stone suggests in his detailed introduction that Zweig’s internationalism was really just a series of personal connections, and there is some evidence for this in this collection as well as  in The World Of Yesterday. The phrase that kept occurring to me was “liberal elite”. There also seemed to be a hefty dollop of nostalgia. Zweig seemed to hark back to a pre-WW1 Europe that was indeed united for the educated and multilingual, but a place of division for the rest. This contrast has a nasty modern resonance.
This is evident in one of the earlier pieces in the book, European Thought In Its Historical Development, a lecture given in 1932 in Florence.  Zweig traces several divisions and reunifications of Europe. The fall of Rome splits Europeans asunder, but they are reunited, to some extent, by the founding of the universal Church, which replaces temporal power with a spiritual one. Then Latin revives and “spiritual men across Europe ...can now correspond with each other again ...It matters not in the epoch of Humanism whether you study in Prague, Oxford or Paris.” Well, that does not help if you happen to be an illiterate goatherd, or even a modestly prosperous merchant, but this dimension seems not to have engaged Zweig. Instead he recounts the continuing atomization and reunification, as he sees it, of the continent. The Reformation splits civilization apart again; music reunites it, but the introduction of nationalism into music shatters the surface once more, according to Zweig.

In fact, national music was the expression of a struggle for freedom from empires, and cannot be regarded as simply a divisive force. And in general, these arguments present Zweig as an elitist whose concept of European unity was profoundly superficial. Worse, they present him as a reactionary. Not long after reading Messages From A Lost World, I happened also to read Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind, in which he analyses a certain type of intellectual reactionary – one who believes that all was well before The Fall, whatever, for them, that Fall happened to be (and he quotes the Reformation as one example). Is that all that Zweig was? If so, translating these pieces was a waste of time; we can make our own nostalgia.

Moreover there is the feeling that Zweig is serving a class interest – a project of an international elite. Zweig did realise this at some level. In European Thought In Its Historical Development, he comments that  “only a slender allegiance by all states to a superior governing body could relieve current economic difficulties, reduce the propensity for war – [but] ...For until now it has been the domain ...of a selective higher class and its roots have not yet penetrated the roots of the people.” I was reminded of Slavoj Žižek’s 2016 book Against the Double Blackmail.  When Western liberals point the finger at working people in their own countries for being bigoted peasants, says Žižek, this is part of the “culture wars” fuelling movements such as Trump’s (he could have added Brexit in Britain, had he written the book a few months later). The “culture wars”, in his opinion, are themselves class conflict between the disadvantaged and a liberal elite that wishes to denigrate them to maintain its own position. At times it seems that all Zweig is doing is unconsciously confirming Žižek’s present-day analysis from the depths of the last century.

It does not help that for a man being praised for his foresight on fascism, Zweig actually did little, in the public space, to fight it. Leo Carey, in an absorbing piece in the The New Yorker (The Escape Artist, August 27 2012), comments that he was often asked to support anti-Nazi and Jewish causes:

He was anything but outspoken, however, and his silence frustrated other writers of the time and has been much criticized since. Klaus Mann, who failed to get him to contribute to an émigré journal he was running, was disparaging of Zweig’s decision to remain “ ‘objective,’ ‘understanding,’ and ‘just’ toward the deadly enemy.

Arendt: A harsh judgement
Hannah Arendt was contemptuous. In 1943, not long after his death, she condemned Zweig in the strongest terms for not fighting for the Jewish people:

Without the protective armor of fame, naked and disrobed, Stefan Zweig was confronted with the reality of the Jewish people. ...Thus this Jewish bourgeois man of letters, who had never concerned himself with the affairs of his own people, became nevertheless a victim of their foes and felt so disgraced that he could bear his life no longer

... For honor never will be won by the cult of success or fame, by cultivation of one's own self, nor even by personal dignity. From the "disgrace" of being a Jew there is but one escape-to fight for the honor of the Jewish people as a whole.

This is probably far too harsh. It seems to suggest that Zweig’s suicide was driven by shame at being Jewish. True, Zweig never seems to have bought into Zionism, despite knowing and admiring Herzl when he was younger.  But there is no evidence I know of that Zweig felt shame at being Jewish. His suicide was driven by his despair at the death of the civilised world he had known. Moreover, while he may not have been an activist, he did quietly assist fellow-writers who had fallen on hard times in this period; according to Matuschek, he was really quite generous. Where Arendt may have a point, however, is the suggestion that Zweig’s fame and prosperity had put him into a protective bubble in which he did not feel the brutal reality of Nazism until quite late. In fact, although he went into precautionary exile in London in 1934, he continued to visit Austria right up until Anschluss. As Arendt wrote in 1943 of The World of Yesterday (which had just been published): “The world that Zweig depicts was anything but the world of yesterday; naturally, the author of this book did not actually live in the world, only on its rim. The gilded trellises of this peculiar sanctuary were very thick...”

V 
But Zweig had paid his dues, in the First World War if not against fascism. He had written a pacifist play during the First World War; it was by all accounts not very good, but could have got him into serious trouble, especially since it was produced during the war in neutral Switzerland (this was why Zweig was there when the war ended). As to the narrow nature of Zweig’s internationalism, even Arendt acknowledges that Zweig did, in the end, understand that he lived in a changed world. Reading Messages from a Lost World, one does see when this understanding came to him, for Zweig’s thinking had evolved before he died. The European Thought essay is not the best thing in this book. There is also a remarkable lecture called The Historiography of Tomorrow, given during a lecture tour in the US in early 1939. This is seven years after European Thought; much had happened in between, not least that Zweig had been forced into exile.

Zweig's home in Petrópolis (A. Maislinger/Creative Commons)
In the intervening period, Zweig appears to have moved from a theoretical support for closer international cooperation to the idea of a totally different world. In Historiography he explains how, while moving house, he has found an old history book from his schooldays and is taken aback that its chief objective is to impress upon the pupil the greatness of the Austrian empire in which s/he has been raised. “But twelve hours by rail from Vienna ...in France or Italy, the school textbooks were prepared with the directly opposing scenario: God or the spirit of history laboured solely for the Italian or French motherland.” The key dates, he says, are all wars. “It is deeply pessimistic and depressing."

As this lecture progressed, it seems, Zweig argued for a new set of values on which to base the study of history. In a telling passage, he points out that in 1797 Napoleon defeated Austria on Italian soil at Rivoli – but that victory, the type of event lauded in history schoolbooks, has long collapsed into insignificance, whereas in the same year and region Alessandro Volta produced the first feeble spark from his first battery – an event of far greater weight. More important still, Zweig states that: “I still remember the revelation I experienced many years ago, from a book which completely overturned [my] conception of history.” It was, he says, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, in which the theory of a struggle for existence is challenged by the notion that evolution is the product of cooperation. So Zweig is not driven solely by solidarity with an international elite of which he is a member; there is something deeper here. And he is certainly not a mere nostalgic – at least not by the end of his life.

Even in the earlier pieces, in which Zweig is driven mainly by nostalgia, he has a message for us. In almost the last piece in this book, The Vienna of Yesterday – a lecture given in Paris in April 1940, just a few weeks before the fall of France – he talks of the artistic identity forged by a Vienna whose best and brightest came from elsewhere. The fact that they did, did not negate its genius; it was its genius. “Gluck,” he says, “came from Bohemia, Haydn from Hungary, Caldara and Salieri from Italy, Beethoven from the Rhineland, Mozart from Salzburg, Brahms from Hamburg, Bruckner from High Austria, Hugo Wolf from Styria.” The important point is not that they didn’t come from Vienna; it is that they went there. Eighty years later, in a time of rising borders, this is something London would do well to remember.

Zweig is a fragile figure in some ways. It does sometimes feel that his suicide has lent him a weight that his career alone would not have done. But his contemporaries were – being jealous perhaps – unfair.  Reading his fiction today, one finds a tendency to exposition rather than inference. But there are interesting psychological insights (Zweig was an associate of Freud); I found his novella The Burning Secret very satisfying for that reason.  He is not perhaps a great writer. But he is a good one.  And he is a witness; The World of Yesterday is fascinating, even if its perspective is narrow and its facts open to dispute.
A street in Rio de Janeiro

As for Messages from a Lost World, these essays and lectures have been revived because they appear to make a link between our own times and Zweig’s, rather than for any intrinsic merit of their own. They aren’t really great literature; the early selections, in particular, are quite verbose, and nothing in them is a true revelation. On first reading I rather dismissed them. But I should not have done, for there is a fascinating evolution in these pieces, from nostalgia for a lost world to, in his last months, an understanding that the way led not back to that world but to a different concept of global organization. 

Besides, although these pieces are mostly not great writing, there are times when they make you sit up. In a 1936 essay called 1914 and Today, Zweig writes:

...in Argentina I visited the slaughterhouses and saw those beasts down in their enclosure, absorbed in their gentle grazing and lowing (a few pairs were even still indulging in the pleasures of love) whilst on the floor above you saw the flashes, heard the hammering of machines that ten minutes later would kill them, chop, carve, slice, disembowel and dismember them. But then the animal is enveloped by its unconscious; it has no idea to where it is led. Our human herds in Europe, who are today much closer to the butcher than they realize, have no excuse. ...Deep down they all know the menace that threatens and their dearth of will to confront it.

At the beginning of this piece, I asked whether the Zweig revival was nothing more than the anglophone liberal establishment exploiting a long-dead middlebrow writer for their own purposes. To an extent I think they are doing just that, and he cannot really bear the weight that is now being placed on his shoulders. It is our own job to find our own arguments for our own time. Indeed I wonder if Arendt would make just that point, were she still with us.

But that does not mean Zweig has nothing to tell us. The last piece in this book, In This Dark Hour, is an address given to the American PEN Club in May 1941. Zweig told his audience that  “this dark hour” was necessary to make everyone realize that “freedom is as vital to our soul as breathing to our body.” Or, as he also said on that occasion: “Darkness must fall before we are aware of the majesty of the stars above our heads.” Let us hope that we never have to re-learn that lesson in my lifetime.


Mike Robbins’s novel, The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (Third Rail, 2014), is available as a paperback (ISBN 978-0-9914374-0-5, $16.99 USA, or £10.07 UK) or as an eBook in all formats, including Amazon Kindle (ISBN 978-0-9914374-2-9, $2.99 USA, or £1.85 UK). Enquiries (including requests for review copies) should be sent to thirdrailbooks@gmail.com.

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