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Hoodwinkery and Legerdemain

The one thing that five of the six Stefan Zweig books currently in print in Britain have most strikingly in common is not the author’s consistency of style but his photograph opposite the title page. The most famous of these, The Royal Game, notorious in European and American chess circles for decades, is the only one innocent of his image, the publisher preferring instead to show us a sketch of the battleground whereupon that so-called royal game is fought. The photograph in the other five books is warmly revealing. Herr Zweig’s devilish Viennese smile – as evident yet as beautifully suppressed as a maître d’s as he spins a yarn to his richest and most despised customer that really, yes truly, there are no free tables tonight – underlines a polished French moustache which is given subtle uplift by the fourth finger of Zweig’s right hand lying against his cheek. Posing thus he exudes the supremely confident air of a conjuror, a salesman of Hispano-Suizas, a hypnotherapist; definitely someone not to be trusted – and one cannot help but speculate on what his left hand is doing.

I think I know. It is writing the books. For Stefan Zweig is one of those sinister figures – an author who became British yet was for ever Viennese – who is supremely capable of the hoodwinkery and legerdemain involved in arranging his features for a photograph whilst cunningly carrying on scribbling as the photographer, concealed within his little black hood, explodes the flash. (The photograph was taken in Berlin before Zweig gave up writing Strauss libretti and fled the Nazis. He then lived in Bath before moving to Brazil with his second wife where he killed himself in 1942.)

Zweig must be approached cautiously. He can turn the unsuspecting reader into a recluse or a coffee-house wastrel. Some years ago I was due at a party at 7 p.m. Earlier that day I had come across a copy of The Royal Game and, unable to wait until the weekend, I

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The one thing that five of the six Stefan Zweig books currently in print in Britain have most strikingly in common is not the author’s consistency of style but his photograph opposite the title page. The most famous of these, The Royal Game, notorious in European and American chess circles for decades, is the only one innocent of his image, the publisher preferring instead to show us a sketch of the battleground whereupon that so-called royal game is fought. The photograph in the other five books is warmly revealing. Herr Zweig’s devilish Viennese smile – as evident yet as beautifully suppressed as a maître d’s as he spins a yarn to his richest and most despised customer that really, yes truly, there are no free tables tonight – underlines a polished French moustache which is given subtle uplift by the fourth finger of Zweig’s right hand lying against his cheek. Posing thus he exudes the supremely confident air of a conjuror, a salesman of Hispano-Suizas, a hypnotherapist; definitely someone not to be trusted – and one cannot help but speculate on what his left hand is doing.

I think I know. It is writing the books. For Stefan Zweig is one of those sinister figures – an author who became British yet was for ever Viennese – who is supremely capable of the hoodwinkery and legerdemain involved in arranging his features for a photograph whilst cunningly carrying on scribbling as the photographer, concealed within his little black hood, explodes the flash. (The photograph was taken in Berlin before Zweig gave up writing Strauss libretti and fled the Nazis. He then lived in Bath before moving to Brazil with his second wife where he killed himself in 1942.) Zweig must be approached cautiously. He can turn the unsuspecting reader into a recluse or a coffee-house wastrel. Some years ago I was due at a party at 7 p.m. Earlier that day I had come across a copy of The Royal Game and, unable to wait until the weekend, I opened a bottle of something crisp and Germanic and then the book and started in on both, thinking to relax for an hour before I left the house. When I next glanced at my watch, noting that it was uncommonly dark outside (and that somehow I had managed, perhaps in a trance, to turn on my reading light), I was shocked to discover I was three hours late and in no condition to party anywhere. The party-givers, being readers themselves, were most understanding when I rang the next day. But how could I explain I was detained by a book on chess? In fact The Royal Game is not a book on chess (unless you are one of those people for whom Homer’s Odyssey must be classed as travel literature). Chess is merely the psychological trigger for the story’s vivid emotional premises. To reveal all of these, especially to tell you how the strange, and patently unqualified, individual on the luxury liner crossing the ocean to New York in pre-war Europe, manages to baffle the reigning world chess champion as they confront one another over a board, would be to spoil your fun. Perhaps it is better for the reader to have no interest in chess, certainly to have no idea how the pieces move; for the book deals, as does all Zweig’s work, in the emotional and psychological friction created between people; their ambitions, their irreconcilable aspirations and, in the end, their startling humanity. The reader is left gasping, tugging down raised eyebrows, adjusting his values; if young he is awestruck at the chutzpah, if old (like me), amazed at the author’s concentration and able to add the sheer silken pleasure of the read to that list of delights which includes one’s first hearing of the Goldberg Variations, eating foie gras, or, in my case, falling in love with Lady Macbeth at the age of 10. An acquired taste, then, Zweig? Well, he is uniquely mittel-European; part of that huge, magnificently sad and lonely hole left in European culture by the persecution and disappearance of the Jews. Is it not worth pointing out that had the Nazis, from 1933 on, laid waste to millions of acres of forests, polluted the reservoirs and rivers, destroyed all buildings above three storeys in height and generally set about gutting the heart of the country in which they had gained power, they would have been forcibly stopped? Stopped not only by their fellow Germans and Austrians but by a consortium of connected Europeans? Yet this is what they did to their culture in sociological terms and that is why talents like Zweig had no choice but to join a diaspora which, even today, seventy-two years after Hitler’s accession to power, is Europe’s irreparable loss. In reading Zweig, one sees the stylistic and imaginative literary genius that blossomed in Germany, Austria, Moravia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and other Jewish-touched cultures of central and eastern Europe (as well as parts of France, Spain and Italy). All now gone. What is left are the books – in Zweig’s case, books where the action takes place inside characters’ heads rather than in conventional conversation or startling derring-do. Dialogue is often intensely internal. Yet one feverishly turns the pages as if gripped by what vulgarians call a thriller (as if life, for the reflective person, could be anything else). Having finished The Royal Game I wanted to read more, and fortunately the Pushkin Press has satisfied my craving. I next embarked on Beware of Pity. In many ways it is Zweig’s masterpiece; word for word the best value (and not just because it is 372 pages long, at a mere £8.99), paragraph for paragraph the most enthralling and historically detailed. It stands alongside other great books written about the same epoch (and with the same European cast of mind) – Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, most of Kafka, Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, the somnambulistic works of Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and the astonishing Leo Perutz (several times bravely published in the UK by Harvill). Beware of Pity is told in the first person and revolves around a single instance of the title’s admonition. I cannot reveal this dramatic and simple incident precisely because it will mar your delight, or perhaps revulsion, but I can tell you it is immensely rich in the hideous and alarmingly anachronistic military mores with which the Austro-Hungarian army went to war in 1914. It is an indication of the author’s casual genius that this momentous conflict is incidental, though the novel’s protagonist does finally speculate on its horrors. Even so, all that pales into insignificance beside one single incident, in which the hero ignores the need to beware pity. He asks a woman to dance. In fact it seems to me that all of Zweig’s fiction – he was also a prolific author of monographs on such historically poignant figures as Marie Antoinette, Magellan, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Erasmus, Balzac, Dickens, Mary Queen of Scots – has a distinguishing stylistic heart where a single, often banal, moment, like the beat of the butterfly’s wings, precipitates a great drama, a hurricane elsewhere. Over that single moment the author worries like a dog with an intellectual bone; always chewing on it, returning to it, tossing it around, never leaving it be and never being bored by it (and, so, ergo, never tiring the reader). Casanova, the one monograph of Zweig’s published by the Pushkin Press, is no less reoccupied by its theme, wich Zweig does not have to work to establish, for we all know the principle preoccupation of its subject – the seduction of women. Instead of a biography we get what he subtitles A Study in Self-Portraiture. And that is what it is: a constant reworking, fascinating, hypnotic, as centrifugally devoted to its core as its subject was to bedding every woman he encountered, of the real truth of Casanova’s life, his fears, his fearful secrets, his autodidactic personality and venality and victimization and creation of himself. Goodness, how I wish Zweig had lived to write a book like this on Freud or Kafka or even Hitler! Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman, beautifully rendered into English by Anthea Bell (who did Sebald a similar service with her transcription of his Austerlitz), is so intensely Viennese, though the action takes place wholly on the Cote d’Azur, that the smell of coffee and the aura of the coffee-house seem to be impregnated into the paper and the type. I say this because this edition is such a perfect size for the pocket, so companionable to take on the tube or, above all, bring along to the coffee shop. Again we have a story, told in the first person and compellingly centred around a simple incident which we are led up to and then away from. When the  difficulties, the recriminations, the heartbreaks start, we find tears pricking the corners of our eyes and the cause is not tobacco smoke in the coffee-shop – for we have been careful to place ourselves in the non-smoking section of the place, or we are in a Starbucks which, say what you like about the company’s distasteful American zeal, does not tolerate der Raucher on the premises – but the character’s sheer humanity. Once again Zweig works his magic: time becomes meaningless, the coffee grows cold, appointments are missed. You get to the end of the book and you resist the urge to begin again. But begin again you will; if not the same day or the morrow, then next week, when there is nothing on TV, no other book beckons, one’s lovers are abroad, and the pub has long since lost its allure. In Confusion, subtitled The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R von D, a successful man looks back on his life and, slowly, with all the skill of a raconteur, lets us into the deadly secret of his university mentor which so changed his life and made him what he is. Yes, of course, a woman is involved, of course there is the banality of a tragedy which is at bottom simply and intensely  human; but this is Zweig, and so here we are again, with a story so able to touch our hearts, at the mercy of time which clocks cannot measure and inside an agenda we cannot control: we are glove puppets in the hands of the author and we willingly shed all our conventional devotions (except that of the devoted reader). Finally, in The Invisible Collection & Buchmendel, we get two light, frothy novellas with a common theme: an obsessed eccentric of the sort who can only ever appear authentic in middle-European fiction. The poet Blok said that the very sound of the word Pushkin made him feel exhilarated, and it must be said that the Press of the same name maintains this tradition. The sheer feel of the books, their design and smell, is delicious. They are a reader’s delight. And in Stefan Zweig the Pushkin Press has rediscovered one of the ultimate readers’ writers.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Malcolm Gluck 2005


About the contributor

Malcolm Gluck, grandson of the Austrian Kaiser’s barber, recently left the Guardian, where he was wine correspondent for more than 15 years. He has written two dozen books, is involved with a further seven over the next two years, and lives with three floors of other people’s books and a bicycle in a notorious north London suburb.

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