Confusion (2 page)

The distinguished scholar who tells this story of scrambled exhibitionism is still trembling, ashamed— and fascinated, as he revisits his past, wondering, we might surmise, if in gaining his place in the world he has not sacrificed his true passion as much as the neglected mentor who put him on the path to doing so. Here, in any case, the narrator is aching for a youth he can never possess.

Perhaps
Confusion
is not, after all, the tale of a young man acquiring the insight that turns him into an adult but the reverse: a surreptitious effort to conjure back to life the narrator's benighted student days, in which the pursuit of knowledge was polymorphous, when every intimacy quivered with possibility and peril.

In September 1930, the Nazis stunned the world by winning almost 6,500,000 votes—up from 810,000 two years earlier. Zweig justified Hitler's victory as “a perhaps unwise but fundamentally sound and approvable revolt of youth against the slowness and irresolution of ‘high politics.'” Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann's son, felt driven to write an open letter refuting Zweig's muzzy response to the vote: “not everything youth does and thinks is a priori good and pregnant with future,” Mann declared. “It may seem paradoxical that i should remind you of this; for i am young myself. However, many of my contemporaries—let alone the even younger ones!—are now engaged in propagating retrogression and barbarism with all that élan and determination that ought to be reserved for finer purposes. The revolt of youth can be in the service and interest of noble and ignoble forces.”

Zweig's misguided hurrah was one in a series of last-ditch bids to stave off superannuation by actions as forceful as they were erratic. “I seem to myself like a hunter who is actually a vegetarian and can take no pleasure in the game he must shoot,” he wrote a friend two months before the vote, adding that only flight remained for him. Soon, he acted on his prognosis, fleeing the Nazis and domesticity both. His marriage disintegrated. In 1934, he hired a new secretary, Lotte Altmann, who at twenty-six was almost exactly half his age; the two became lovers and eventually married. Exiled from Austria, Zweig traveled to Brazil, falling in love with its natural, passionate beauty and racial tolerance, while also writing dismissively about the country's absence of higher culture. Back in Europe, he moved for a time to Bath, saluting England's even-keeled rationalism, but he could not acclimate to the chill of its emotional reserve and felt humiliated by having to register as an enemy alien. He then moved to Manhattan, from Manhattan to new haven, from new haven to Manhattan, then from there up the Hudson to Ossining where, perched in a humble bungalow a mile up the hill from sing sing prison, he wrote much of his autobiography,
The World of Yesterday
. Once again, however, he pined for Rio's colorful embrace, to which he and lotte soon returned. In September 1941, as the Brazilian summer heat intensified, he moved upland to the tiny hamlet of Petropolis, where at first he was happy to be so far removed from the storm of world events. But then the distance from Europe began to make him feel guilty. Moreover, the fact that he could not get the books he wanted weighed on him, and the isolation which had first been so calming began to grow oppressive.

In one of his final letters to friderike, written just after seeing Rio's carnival, he declared, “all i have been able to give was thanks to a certain interior élan; i could seize the imagination because i was seized myself and that produced a warmth that could communicate. Without faith, without enthusiasm, reduced to the sole power of my brain, i walk as though on crutches.” in February 1942 he and Lotte took a lethal dose of Veronal.

For years, Zweig had been haunted and sustained by memories (and fantasies) of an intellectually vibrant youth. Now, with his books legally forbidden to the German-Austrian public for whom they'd been composed, Zweig's epicurean nostalgia itself became a secret that could not be shared. He was unwilling to “live on as [his] own shadow.” the question of how he could allow his much younger and cherished second wife to follow him into the realm of the shades is the only real outstanding mystery of his death.

Ultimately, Zweig's gifts as a writer were bound up with his self-tormenting, and this misery, in turn, was fueled by a conviction that the secret of creation itself glimmered palpably before him, yet beyond his reach—at a distance that yawned ever wider with the passage of years. The accusations of inauthenticity that have been leveled against Zweig since the first publications of his work and continue to crop up to this day fail to register the potency of this unfeigned anguish—or the ways that Zweig's anguish made him acutely sensitive to the craving for self-transcendence in others.
Confusion
captures this dilemma. If we can see past both Zweig's successes and his failures to the struggling figure at their heart, we discover a writer who deserves to be admired for the ardent, unflagging compassion he felt toward human weakness in all its guises. Empathetic confusion suffuses his work. In this sense, he knew himself, and us, very well.

—GEORGE PROCHNIK

For J. A. R.

They meant well, my students and colleagues in the Faculty: there it lies, solemnly presented and expensively bound, the first copy of the Festschrift dedicated to me by the members of the Department of Languages and Literature on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday and to mark my thirty years of academic teaching. It is nothing short of a complete biographical record: no minor essay of mine has been overlooked, no ceremonial address, no trifling review in the annual volume of some learned journal or other has failed to be exhumed from its papery grave by bibliographical industry—my entire career up to the present day is set out with impeccable clarity, step by step like a well-swept staircase—it would be truly ungrateful of me to take no pleasure in this touching diligence. What I myself had thought lost, spent and gone, returns to me united and well-ordered in the form presented here: no, I cannot deny that as an old man I now scan these pages with the same pride as did the schoolboy whose report from his teachers first indicated that he had the requisite ability and strength of mind for an academic career.

And yet: when I had leafed through the two hundred industrious pages and looked my intellectual reflection in the eye, I couldn't help smiling. Was that really my life, did it truly trace as purposeful a course with such ease, from the first to the present day, as the biographer describes, sorting the paper records into order? I felt exactly as I did when I first heard my own voice on a recording: initially I did not recognize it at all, for it was indeed my voice but only as others hear it, not as I hear it myself through my blood and within my very being, so to speak. And so I, who have spent a lifetime depicting human beings in the light of their work, portraying the intrinsic intellectual structure of their worlds, was made aware again from my own experience of the impenetrability in every human life of the true core of its being, the malleable cell from which all growth proceeds. We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.

The book says not a word about this most secret factor in my mental development: that was why I couldn't help smiling. Everything it says is true—only what genuinely matters is missing. It merely describes me, it says nothing real about me. It speaks of me, but does not reveal what I am. The carefully compiled index comprises two hundred names—and the only one missing is the name of the man from whom all my creativity derived, who determined the course my life would take, and now calls me back to my youth with redoubled force. The book covers everything else, but not the man who gave me the gift of language and with whose tongue I speak: and suddenly I feel to blame for this craven silence. I have spent my life painting portraits of human beings, interpreting figures from past centuries for the benefit of today's sensibilities, and never thought of turning to the picture of the one most present to my mind. As in Homeric days, then, I will give that beloved shade my own blood to drink, so that he may speak to me again, and although he grew old and died long ago, be with me now that I too am growing old. I will add a page not previously written to those on open display, a confession of feelings to be set beside that scholarly book, and for his sake I will tell myself the true story of my youth.

Before beginning, I leaf once again through the book which claims to depict my life. And once again I cannot help smiling. How did they think they could reach the true core of my being when they chose to approach it in the wrong way? Even their very first step is wide of the mark! A former schoolmate, well disposed towards me and also a bearer of the honorary title of Privy Councillor, claims that even at grammar school my passion for the humanities distinguished me from all the other pupils. Your memory is at fault, my dear Privy Councillor! As far as I was concerned, anything in the way of humanist studies represented coercion which I could barely endure; I ground my teeth and fumed at it. For the very reason that, as the son of a headmaster in our small North German town, I was familiar at home with education as a means of earning a living, I hated everything to do with languages and literature from childhood: Nature, true to her mystic task of preserving the creative instinct, always impels the child to reject and despise its father's inclinations. Nature does not want weak, conformist progeny, merely continuing from where the previous generation left off: she always sets those of a kind at loggerheads, allowing the later-born to return to the ways of their forefathers only after making a laborious but fruitful detour. My father had only to venerate scholarship for my self-assertive instinct to regard it as mere intellectual sophistry; he praised the classics as a model to be followed, so they seemed to me didactic and I hated them. Surrounded by books, I despised them; with my father constantly pressing intellectual pursuits on me, I felt furious dislike for every kind of knowledge passed on by written tradition; it was not surprising, therefore, that I barely scraped through my school-leaving examinations and then vigorously resisted any idea of continuing my studies. I wanted to be an army officer, or join the navy, or be an engineer, although I had no really compelling inclination for any of those professions. Only my distaste for the papery didacticism of scholarship made me wish for a practical and active rather than an academic career. But my father, with his fanatical veneration for universities and everything to do with them, insisted on my following a course of academic studies, and the only concession I could win was permission to choose English as my subject rather than classics (a compromise which I finally accepted with the private reservation that a knowledge of English, the language of the sea, would make it easier for me later to adopt the naval career I so fervently desired).

Nothing could be further from the truth in that curriculum vitae of mine, then, than the well-meant statement that thanks to the guidance of meritorious professors I grasped the basic principles of the study of the arts in my first term—what did my passion for liberty, now impetuously breaking out, care then for lectures and lecturers? On my first brief visit to the lecture hall its stuffy atmosphere and the lecture itself, delivered in a monotonously clerical and self-important drone, so overcame me with weariness that it was an effort not to put my head down on the desk and doze off. Here I was back at the school I had thought myself so happy to escape, complete with classroom, teacher's lectern in an excessively elevated position, and quibbling pedantry—I could not help feeling as if sand were running out of the thin-lipped open mouth of the Privy Councillor addressing us, so steadily did the words of the worn lecture notebook drop into the thick air. The suspicion I had entertained even as a schoolboy that I had entered a morgue of the spirit, where uncaring hands anatomized the dead, was revived to an alarming degree in this factory churning out second-hand Alexandrian philosophy—and how intensely did I feel that instinct of rejection the moment the lecture I had sat through with such difficulty was over, and I stepped out into the streets of the city, the Berlin of those days which, surprised by its own growth, was bursting with a virility too suddenly attained, sparks flying from all its stones and all its streets, while the feverishly vibrant pace of life forced itself irresistibly on everyone, and in its avid greed greatly resembled the intoxication of my own only recently recognized sense of virility. Both the city and I had suddenly emerged from a repressive petit bourgeois atmosphere of Protestant orderliness, and were plunged too rapidly into a new delirium of power and opportunity—both of us, the city and I, a young fellow starting out in life, vibrated like a dynamo with restlessness and impatience. I never understood and loved Berlin as much as I did then, for every cell in my being was crying out for sudden expansion, just like every part of that overflowing, warm human honeycomb—and where could the impatience of my forceful youth have released itself but in the throbbing womb of that heated giantess, that restless city radiating power? It grasped me and took me to itself, I flung myself into it, went down into its very veins, my curiosity rapidly orbiting its entire stony yet warm body—I walked its streets from morning to night, went out to the lakes, discovered its secret places: I was truly a man possessed as, instead of paying attention to my studies, I flung myself into the lively and adventurous business of exploration. In these excesses, however, I was simply obeying an idiosyncrasy of my own—incapable from childhood of doing two things at once, I immediately became emotionally blind to any other occupation; everywhere and at all times I have felt the same impulse to press forward along a single line, and even in my work today I tend to sink my teeth so doggedly into a problem that I will not let go until I feel I have entirely drained it of substance.