'homo obscurissimus'

The Royal Game
by Stefan Zweig

The arrival of a new Zweig from his champions at Pushkin Press couldn't have been better timed after I struggled and finally gave up (for the moment) on a recent read. Not only does Zweig always manage to satisfy, and not only are the little french-flapped, tactile editions from Pushkin a joy to have in one's mitts but I have long wanted to read this novella, having always suspected that the game of chess would provide the perfect architecture on which to hang a tale. I used to play a tiny bit of chess when I was a kid and received a Kasparov chess computer as a birthday or Christmas present. An electronic board with pressure sensitive pads and LED's along the edges, it felt cutting edge at the time but a little clunky in memory. You signalled each move by pressing down the piece you wanted to move and then down again on the square you wanted to move it to. Kasparov, playing to the difficulty level you had set him on, would then move via the medium of those LED's. Even on an easy setting I found it hard to compete and didn't have the discipline to play on my own repeatedly to get much better so it became another gift with a short shelf-life and my future as a chess champion disappeared for good. After reading this novella I'm glad I didn't dedicate hours to studying in solitude, the game of chess itself comes across as a fearsome adversary and the humans in thrall to it left battered and bruised by their association.

On a liner journeying from New York to Buenos Aires our narrator discovers through a friend that the world famous (but unknown to him) chess champion Mirko Czentovic is on board. His friend relates this man's history, from his lowly beginnings as an orphaned boy in a remote Yugoslavian village, his care under the village pastor, his ignorance in 'every field of culture' and the sudden emergence of his innate understanding of chess. With his talent unearthed it isn't long before he has mastered 'every secret of chess technique,' his only weakness an inability to imagine the board in his mind, needing both board and pieces to hand in order to sort through problems. Such a meteoric rise 'transformed his early unsureness into a cold and awkwardly flaunted pride', something that shall be tested within the confines of this journey.

Fascinated by monomaniacs our narrator determines to find out as much as he can about Czentovic but is frustrated by his aloofness. He decides to use a chess board to draw him out, fully aware of what makes the royal game so enticing.

...a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval yet ever new; mechanical in operation yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space though boundless in its combinations; ever-developing yet sterile; thought that leads to nothing; mathematics that produce no result; art without works; architecture without substance, and nevertheless, as proved by evidence, more lasting in its being and presence than all books and achievements; the only game that belongs to all peoples and all ages; of which none knows the divinity that bestowed it on the world, to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilarate the spirit. One searches for its beginning and its end. Children can learn its simple rules, duffers succumb to its temptation, yet within this immutable, tight square it creates a particular species of master not to be compared with any other...

Eventually through the garrulous behaviour of a fellow passenger a game is finally created between Czentovic and a collective of the liner's chess players and it is through this encounter that the real central character of the novella will emerge. Amongst the passengers is a man who might even be able to challenge the supremacy of the champion; armed with the one skill that Czentovic lacks but crippled by his own weaknesses, it will be a fascinating contest. This man's back story allows Zweig to vent his feelings about the Nazi regime and to develop one of the novella's central themes: that of confinement and freedom. Not only is the location of the novella confined: a limited space, a finite journey, a set cast list; but as the quote above makes clear, the game of chess itself is an expression of the dichotomy between confinement and limitless freedom. This Austrian gentleman has had his own experience of confinement at the hands of the Gestapo who didn't use physical torture to extract secrets but almost its opposite.

They did nothing to us; they merely deposited us in the midst of nothing, knowing well that of all things the most constant pressure on the soul of man is nothingness. By placing us singly, each in an utter vacuum, in a chamber that was hermetically closed to the world without, it was calculated that the pressure created from inside, rather than cold and the scourge, would eventually cause our lips to spring apart.

His story is horribly compelling and matched by the thrilling chess match that slowly unfolds. As I suspected, the confines of the form, the subject and the approach make The Royal Game a perfect novella, providing exactly what a reader could ask for. It's far too terrifying to tempt me into dusting off those 32 black and white pieces but has instilled in me a new-found respect for a pursuit for which our narrator believes the word game is 'an offensively narrow construction.'

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'we paid the price in full'

The World Of Yesterday
by Stefan Zweig

translated by Anthea Bell

Whilst the whole Christmas and New Year thing was happening I could justifiably give myself a break from blogging and simply settle down with a substantial book. This is what I chose. Another well-produced volume from Pushkin Press, whose focus on Zweig's oeuvre has helped to bring his work to a wider readership, there is a pleasing feel to the book in your hand and its 500 pages give it a satisfying heft entirely in keeping with the importance of what is between its covers. Living in an era where memoir has been hijacked by celebrities with nothing real to say or sports stars who have barely begun to live at all it is important to be reminded what real memoir can achieve. It may be crass but just thinking in terms of Who, What, Where, When and How you can get a quick idea of why David Hare called it 'one of the most important memoirs of the twentieth century'. Living in Vienna during a period that saw the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the 'golden age of security', two World Wars and the rise of Nazism, Zweig's position in society and his viewpoint as a writer and a Jew put him in a unique place as a witness to the shifting political tides of the beginning of the century. But before we anticipate the darkening days of what would become the end of his life (Zweig's suicide occurred shortly after the publication of this book - although there is no hint of it in what we read) there is so much uplifting material about Viennese culture, art and artists, including Zweig's encounters with people ranging from Rilke to Rodin.

It is generally assumed that getting rich is a Jew's true and typical aim in life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Getting rich, to a Jew, is only an interim stage, a means to his real end, by no means his aim in itself. The true desire of a Jew, his inbuilt ideal, is to rise to a higher social plane by becoming an intellectual.

I can't say that I had ever considered Zweig as a child when reading his fiction so there is something joyous about reading about his childhood and schooling. His intelligence means that school becomes a 'constant surfeit of tedium', where the rigid curriculum means that pupils end up outstripping their teachers knowledge, adding to the their precociousness. Boys of that age have their minds on other things too of course, even in a rigid society at the turn of the century, in fact the lack of flesh on display and of an opportunity to even converse with the opposite sex creates something closer to a surfeit of passion. 'Forbidden fruit excites a craving, only what is forbidden stimulates desire, and the less the eyes saw and the ears heard the more minds dreamt.' A certain level of privilege means that schooling for Zweig is merely a stepping stone towards the life he wants to lead. He is quite honest with himself, drawing up a plan of attack:

For three years I would not bother with my university studies at all. Then, in my final year, I would put on a strenuous spurt, master the academic material and dash off some kind of dissertation. The university would thus have given me all I really wanted of it: a couple of years of freedom to lead my own life and concentrate on my artistic endeavours - universitas vitae, the university of life.

The importance of art to Viennese society is made very clear, this is a time and place where the general public are more likely to recognise an actor from the state theatre in the street than one of the country's leading politicians. But rather than this being similar to our current cult of celebrity it is a veneration of the status of art, and theatre in particular, in providing the culture and conscience of the nation. I can't help but be envious when I read of a society that considers theatre to be 'a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, a bright mirror in which society could study itself, the one true cartigiano of good taste...a spoken three dimensional manual of good conduct and correct pronunciation, and an aura of esteem, rather like a saints's halo, surrounded all who had even the faintest connection with the court theatre.' Vienna also provides of course a level of society below that of the state. The cover illustrates what we might term cafe society and it is here that Zweig begins to get a fuller understanding of human character and motivation, a dose of reality that shows up the 'whiff of scented notepaper' about his early novellas.

What I had hardly credited in realist novels was present here, teeming with life, in the little bars and cafes that I frequented, and the worse someone's reputation was the more I wanted to know him personally...Perhaps the very very fact that I came from a solidly established background, and felt to some extent that this 'security' complex weighed me down, made me more likely to be fascinated by those who almost recklessly squandered their lives, their time, their money, their health and reputation - passionate monomaniacs obsessed with aimless existence for its own sake - and perhaps readers may notice this preference of mine for intense, intemperate characters in my novels and novellas.

In mentioning our current predilection for celebrity and fame by association there can't be many who wouldn't get a thrill from reading the casual way with which Zweig is able to drop the names of his contemporaries, friends and colleagues. The man was connected. But he is also humble and he takes pains to explain that with any mention of his own success, 'I am not speaking of something that is really mine, but something that once was mine, like my house, my native land, my self confidence, my freedom, my lack of inhibition. I cannot illustrate the depths to which I...sank...without mentioning, first, the height from which we fell.' Even so there is something thrilling about the ease with which his throwaway admiration for Rodin leads to a meeting with the man himself and later a trip to his studio. It is here that Zweig witnesses the master at work, furiously altering a painting in progress and learns what for him is 'the eternal secret of all great art'.

His movements became more and more decisive, almost irate; a kind of wildness or intoxication had come over him, he was working faster and faster. Then his hands slowed down. They seemed to have understood that there was no more for them to do...He took a deep breath, released from tension. His figure seemed to grow heavier again. The fire had gone out.

Rodin had entirely forgotten that Zweig was even in the room, actually reacting angrily when he eventually spotted him waiting, as if he were an intruder. That total absorption in the process is one of many observations made by Zweig of his fellow artists. The deliberation of Rilke...

This golden age of creativity is also one of security as the opening chapter heading tells us. Turn of the century Europe saw nations brimming with confidence and the development of commercial flight made borders and frontiers seem almost pointless. Travel was possible without passports and Zweig as a prodigious traveller was able to sample and be connected to the wider cultural experience, something that must have in part contributed to the upsurge in feelings of international fraternity. However, those last years of European confidence hid the danger that was growing, the fact that all countries were filed with that same confidence and had ambitions that could not be contained by the land mass itself. The sequence of events that lead to what would become the Great War are noted by Zweig together with his own incomprehension at the manner in which friends and colleagues became transformed by the growing hostilities.

Gradually; in those first weeks of war in 1914, it became impossible to have a reasonable conversation with anyone. The kindest and most friendly acquaintances seemed to be drunk on the smell of blood.

In our current financial crisis there are even words of comfort, particularly for creative types, from the time of depression and hyperinflation that followed the end of war.

I myself do not think I ever lived and worked with more intensity and concentration than I did in those years. What had been important to us before mattered even more now. Art was never more popular in Austria than at that time of chaos. Money had let us down; we sensed that what was eternal in us was all that would last.

I'm just quoting great chunks now because the book is filled with observations that you'll want to note down or earmark. To have such a humble, enlightened, important voice like this in print is to have a direct link to one of the most fascinating periods of history. Anthea Bell doesn't need my praise after being awarded and OBE and recently winning the TLS translation prize (and also in the running for the same prize from Three Percent), but I shall praise her anyway. He translation makes light work of this 450+ page memoir. There are notes at the end of each chapter (and a pleasingly small number of them too), usually there to explain the few idiomatic words or phrases that she leaves in the original language or some background information (Zweig never really mentions his personal relationships). A book, as I said, that reminds you what memoirs should contain, a fascinating insight into an artist and a time, and a testament to a life that we now know had very little left to run. As his travels become more like flight into exile you cannot help but be saddened by such an ending.

And as the train crossed the border I knew, like the patriarch Lot in the Bible, that all behind me was dust and ashes, the past transformed into a pillar of bitter salt.

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'Two spectres walk, still searching for the past.'

Journey Into The Past
by Stefan Zweig

After the triumph of Zweig's novel Beware Of Pity it was high time for me to enjoy some of his shorter fiction, the form that he is most feted for. John Self seems to have already reviewed most of it but he must have been distracted recently (those babies are rather dependent) allowing me to pounce quickly on this novella begun in the 1920's, published in German in the 1970's and only now published in English for the first time (after the discovery of the manuscript) with Anthea Bell's translation from Pushkin Press.

Paul Bailey provides the foreword and Anthea Bell a fascinating Translator's Afterword. Both of them place the work in its context, a book that may only be coming to us now but which was begun very close to the period in which it is set. Beginning just before The Great War the story covers a period of nine years; however it is not only time but also distance that has separated the two protagonists and the power of the book comes from the emotional force of such a reunion.

Perhaps influenced by the last book I read, I found great significance in the way that Zweig indicates the changing emotional states of his characters by their reaction to or perception of the space around them. At the beginning, chronologically, Ludwig moves into the home of his ailing employer, the Privy Councillor. Having come from such a low social status he is hugely intimidated by the opulent surroundings he finds himself in.

'All he had brought with him, even he himself in his own clothes, shrank to miserable proportions in this spacious, well-lit room. His one coat, ridiculously occupying the big, wide wardrobe, looked like a hanged man: his few washing things and his shabby shaving kit lay on the roomy, marble-tiled wash-stand like something he had coughed up or a tool carelessly left there by a workman...'

What changes his perception almost immediately is his meeting with the Councillor's wife. Her warmth and sympathy strike right at the heart of his insecurity.

'...how was it that her first words went straight to the festering, scarred, sensitive part of his nature, straight to the seat of his nervous terror of losing his independence...How had she managed to brush all such thoughts of his aside with that first gesture of her hand? Instinctively he looked up at her, and only now was he aware of a warm sympathetic glance confidently waiting for him to return it.'

From that first meeting he is in love with her, his passion of course contained because of his situation and also because he doesn't even consider the chance of it being reciprocated. Again, like The Glass Room this is a book filled with passion, and it is finally released when it is announced that Ludwig will leave to develop the business in Mexico, keeping him away from Germany, and from her, for two years. Her shock at this news is like the release of a cork and Zweig doesn't hold back when describing their lust for one another ('wild ecstatic frenzy', 'like animals, hot and greedy'). The ten days before his departure are a mixture of public reserve and private moments of stolen passion.

This is a story about memory though and the real strength of it is not the description and immediacy of the affair (which is being recalled for us during a literal journey) but the transformation of these feelings by separation. Whilst in Mexico and only a short time from his return to Germany (and to her) war breaks out and he has to remain where he is. It isn't until three years after it ends that he returns and Zweig shows so effectively the many and varied changes. That house for example, once so foreboding and humiliating, is now a space filled with memories of love and lust.

'Everything stood out in a significant way, speaking urgently of some memory. Here was the wardrobe that her attentive hand had always secretly kept in order for him, there were the bookshelves to which an addition was made when he had uttered a fleeting wish, there - speaking in yet sultrier tones - was the bed, where countless dreams of her, he knew, lay hidden under the bedspread.'

Zweig's undoubted skill is in the complex and nuanced emotional and psychological landscape that they have to negotiate with their reunion.

Germany too has changed and Zweig's pacifism shows itself again. Not only has war been the cause of their separation but the country when he returns seems to be gearing up already for its next conflict. Brownshirts and goose-stepping are a striking image, all the more so in a story started over a decade before the Nazis came to actual power. A homeland that had been a forward moving industrialised nation is depicted as one already running towards the logical consequences of nationalism. The consequences of this for Zweig are all too well known.

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'Poor Hofmiller!'

Beware of Pity
by Stefan Zweig

Billed not only as a great novel but one of the greatest ever by no less a man than my father, there was quite a lot riding on this, my first experience of Zweig, whose reputation in the English speaking world is enjoying a bit of a renaissance thanks to the efforts of Pushkin Press and NYRB Classics. My Dad thankfully knows his stuff (he's 'phone-a-friend' clever) and Beware of Pityis a brilliant novel on many levels. That warning contained in the title is a hugely relevant corrective to anyone who finds themselves in the habit of looking after those they feel sorry for, a dubious motivation as Zweig quickly points out when he describes the two kinds of pity.

'One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.'

In an introduction it is explained that this story was related in person by its protagonist, Captain Hofmiller of the Commissariat, in the years leading up to the Second World War. Irked at the way others regard him as a decorated soldier he determines to 'compel you to hear from my own lips by what torturous paths I attained the status of hero.' In 1913 as a 25-year old second lieutenant with the Imperial Uhlans he commits what the French call a 'gaffe', a social faux-pas which sets in motion a series of events from which it is difficult, even after the passage of many years, 'to decide exactly where my sheer gaucherie ended and my guilt began.' Keen to use what he can to advance his status Hofmiller gratefully accepts the opportunity to attend a dinner at the imposing schloss of Kekesfalva. The evening doesn't begin well when he is late (before such a thing became fashionable) but it isn't long before he is enjoying his surroundings and when the evening develops into a night dancing he gets caught up in the atmosphere, remembering as a matter of protocol, not to mention a possibility of further increasing his positive image, to ask the daughter of the house to dance. He is baffled by her extreme and emotional reaction, horrified to see the head-turning and music silencing effect it has on the evening. Edith, it turns out is lame and Hofmiller makes what apologies he can during the confusion, beating a hasty retreat from his evening amongst the higher echelons.

First with flowers and then personal visits, Hofmiller attempts to right this wrong and Zweig is brilliant at showing the consequences of this single event on Hofmiller, the Kekesfalvas and the characters that surround them. Beyond that he is able to develop his theme of pity so that it extends backwards into the past and, as we have already seen from the novel's opening, forwards into the future. Such is the novel's scope that it can also be seen, especially through the depiction of the military and its strict structure, as a memorial to the decline of Austro-Hungarian power framed by two World Wars.

In one fantastic section Hofmiller describes his passion for riding, the pride of being 'lord and creator of this exhilaration' as he gallops ahead of his troops as they ride to the parade ground. but when they pass the schloss, aware subconsciously of Edith's physical proximity he slows his troops to a trot, guilty of having enjoyed his physical freedom so much. It is only once they are entirely clear of its line of sight that he shakes of this sentimentality and gives the order once more to gallop. Within the military unit he is a fairly anonymous component but his burgeoning status within the Kekesfalva household encourages him to continue his visits, especially given his 'conviction that I was an utterly superfluous individual, uninteresting to other people and at most an object of indifference'.



What he is unable to see until it is too late is that for Edith the visits have become vitally important, she feels that she has someone to get well for and each time he walks through the door he is giving her something that she has been lacking since she was first struck down by her disability: hope. In fact through his pity he cannot stop giving false hope to both Edith and her father. The theme of pity is totally dominant throughout the book, particularly after Hofmiller has spent an evening with Dr Condor, the man charged with helping Edith. Condor himself is not exempt; the story runs that he married his wife after failing to cure her of the blindness which had brought her to him as a patient and which he had promised to rid her of. But as Hofmiller becomes more aware of the domestic side of Condor's life he begins to realise the complexities that lie behind local legends. Condor relates to him the history of Herr von Kekesfalva, the local aristocrat who is neither local nor aristocratic. A man who has bought his title and the grand schloss which carries it, but not only that; bought it cheaply. The story of how he swindles the heir of the Kekesfalva estate is chillingly executed with a denouement that brilliantly unites it with the plight of Hofmiller. Condor advises him not to disappoint this man, now clearly weakened by his life, symbolised by Zweig in the black coat which has been ever present throughout his story but which is now 'shabby and shiny... at the elbows.' Hofmiller infact finds himself incapable of not offering him some hope.

'I could feel the old man's confidence increasing as I spoke, and for the first and last time in my life I had some inkling of the elation that accompanies all creative activity.
What I said to Kekesfalva on that paupers bench I no longer know, and never shall know. For just as my words intoxicated my avid listener, so did his blissful hanging on my words rouse in me a lust to promise him more and yet more.'

Within the strict constraints of Austrian society of the period and also of course Hofmiller's military discipline there are some shockingly frank exchanges between characters. Edith especially, after the constant diet of 'trumped-up stories' she is fed about her physical progress, wants to be honest, despite her emotional immaturity making such honesty impossible. When she throws herself at Hofmiller, stealing a desperate hungry kiss he reels from the room and confronts us with the shockingly brutal and offensive honesty of his realisation that he

'had never even thought of Edith as a member of the opposite sex; it had never even so much as crossed my mind that her crippled body was possessed of the same organs, that her soul harboured the same urgent desires, as those of other women. It was only from this moment that I began to have an inkling of the fact (suppressed by most writers) that the outcasts, the branded, the ugly, the withered, the deformed, the despised and rejected, desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy; that they love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love, and that no passion on earth rears its head so greedily, so desperately, as the forlorn and hopeless passion of these step-children of God, who feel that they can can only justify their earthly existence by loving and being loved.'

Zweig is unafraid of presenting a cast of characters with massive flaws, with far from altruistic motivations. Even Edith, who could have been an innocent, is far from that. Whilst she remains physically confined to her chair or her bed she is able to reach much further, an emotional tyrant within the house, her petulance indulged and her threats of drastic action thrown around cheaply for effect. She even has the power, as we saw earlier to bring a galloping horse to a respectful trot. The skill with which he charts the emotional landscape means that by the novel's close you too may be subject to your own pity and all too aware of the dangers.

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