It was interesting to read in Human Smoke, the subject of my earlier review, references to Stefan Zweig, and his opposition to the Nazi regime. Zweig became convinced that Nazi domination of Europe was
inevitable and would lead to the extinguishing of all he held dear, leading to his death by suicide, together with his wife, in 1942.
Zweig was a great writer in the classical condition. His masterpiece, Beware of Pity, describes how an almost Dostoevskian failure to act decisively can create massive psychological conflicts which ultimately lead to disaster. His collections of short stories show a talent for the genre equalling Chekov and de Maupassant. One can only regret the lack of further writings from his later years due to his premature end.
This collection of four stories, reflects the imminent tragedy of Zweig's life, for they all end in a suicide, causing the reader to wonder how far Zweig had conditioned himself to the thought of death by his own hand in the years leading up to his own demise. In reading this I was reminded of W G Sebald's book The Emigrants, in which all four of his characters also take their own lives.
The stories are rich with understanding of people under pressure. Zweig was a master of describing the agonies of people beset by a burning conscience, the pain of a thwarted desire to return to loved ones, the agony of unrequited love. His characters are people who feel things more deeply than most, who are unable to shrug off emotional pressure or to find escape in diversionary activities. They live on the existential edge of their mental suffering and find no balm in the consolation of friendship or the beauties of nature. The stories serve as a reminder that tragedy can strike anyone, however settled, particularly those who step outside their day to day lives, whether voluntarily, in seeking a better life for themselves, or involuntarily through the effects of war or social disruption.
The people in these stories feel things greatly. Where others may be upset, these people are desperate. Where others feel affection for a friend, these feel a passionate force that dominates their lives. Where a mistake has been made, Zweig's characters feel a conscience so great that it drives them to distraction. And yet as the newspapers show every day, these things happen in real life, and perhaps Zweig was more plugged into the realities of emotional extremity than those with more settled minds.
And yet, Zweig seemed to have a great sense of the healing power of numinous experience, prompted particularly by the night sky. Some of his most lyrical passage happen under the stars. In The Star Above The Forest, an hotel waiter determined to tie himself to a railway track, looks up at,
the silent blue-black sky, with the tops of a few trees swaying in front of it. And above he forest stood a shining, white star. A single star above the forest . . . the dying ma tool the sparkling star above the forest to his heart . . and saw all the fire and despair of his love.
In Amok, the doctor sees above his head,
the magical constellation of the Southern Cross, hammered into the invisible void with shining nails and seeming to hover . . . I felt as if I was being bathed by warm water falling from above, except that it was light washing over my hands, mild, white light pouring around my shoulders, my head, and seeming to permeate me entirely. Now for the first time, I knew the blessed joy of reverie, and the more sensual pleasure of abandoning my body woman-like to the softness surrounding me.
Yet these glimpses of a transcendent nature, fail to calm these troubled souls, as indeed they failed to calm their author who had he waited another two or three years before taking his life, would have seen the end of the Nazi curse.
Zweig fans will want to own this book, as indeed would anyone who enjoys the short-story tradition of classical European literature. It is a beautifully produced little book, only 143 pages long, and in small format and many readers will devour it in a day - causing this reader at least to baulk slightly at its cost (it can be found much discounted at online bookstores however).
Anthea Bell has produce another of her usual excellent translations, one curiosity being her use of the word "roundaboutation" on page 33 which I have not encountered before. Now where can I slot that into my conversation today?
