Do men or women of the world still exist? Well-educated, they are from families that value taste, manners and intellectual cultivation, and with enough money to allow their children to acquire these qualities; they attend concerts, look at paintings, travel and meet men and woman of distinction. They could, for example, while still young, watch Rodin perfecting his sculpture, write operas with Richard Strauss or help James Joyce find the perfect words for turning something he had written into other languages.
Stefan Zweig was just such a man. He was born in 1881 to a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna, during the last Golden Age as he put it. He and his wife killed themselves in 1942 in despair at Hitler’s destruction of their civilisation.
Zweig’s abiding masterpiece, in my opinion, and he wrote vastly, is The World of Yesterday, his autobiography of life during the Golden Age — travelling comfortably through the main European capitals, to the United States and as far as India, seeking out what was most valuable for the mind and the senses, and perfecting his own writing. Barely into his forties, he was world-famous, sold tens of thousands of books in many languages and became rich enough to collect the manuscripts of Bach and Mozart.
Zweig is little read now, although novels like The Post Office Girl and Beware of Pity are very good indeed. Pushkin Press has done yeoman work in bringing them to new readers, and now publishes this collection of four novellas.
Of these, Letter From an Unknown Woman is superb. The 12-page letter to the beloved is to be read only after the writer’s death. It starts along familiar, even slightly tedious lines. A 13-year-old girl conceives a crush on the man across the hall, a good-looking, fastidious, famous author; he lives alone with his elderly man-servant and comes home with elegant women. She gazes at him through the spy-hole in her parents’ front door and sometimes lurks outside hoping for a glimpse of her ‘beloved’.
When she is old enough she gets a job in a shop and continues to stalk him. One day when she is 18 he stops her in the street — she is very pretty — but doesn’t recognise her as the little neighbour from across the hall because he never remembers anything that might intrude on his total self-regard. He invites her to a meal, then to three nights of passion, and forgets her. She has his child but never tells him.
To escape from poverty she sells herself, as she puts it, to rich men, many of whom beg her to marry them. One night her beloved sees her in a restaurant with one of her titled clients. Of course he has no idea who she is, invites her back to his flat for another passionate night, and, inevitably, she never hears from him again. Their child dies, she is in a dark place, and writes him the letter. He is stirred a bit, just a bit, by a faint memory ‘as of distant music’.
What we have here is a double portrait: she describes him minutely, wholly without judgment; simply put, he is a shit.
In The Debt Paid Late, a married woman visiting a small-town café on her own recognises a once-famous actor with whom she was besotted when she was very young. He is now a helpless, shambling, down-and-out bore, slighted by all. She tells him what he once meant to her, and divulges his history to the amazed café owner and the customers. She arranges things so he will have some money for the rest of his life and enjoy the respect of his neighbours.
Readers new to Stefan Zweig should start here.