Notes on The Post-Office Girl, a novel, by Stefan Zweig
While he was actually alive and working, Stefan Zweig was one of the most famous writers in the world. Today, he is known by relatively few — but those few are deeply admiring. Zweig was a versatile writer, producing biographies, novels, etc.
One of his novels is The Post-Office Girl. Zweig wrote it in the 1930s yet never published it. It was published in 1982, forty years after his death. The book is in two parts, labeled, straightforwardly, “Part One” and “Part Two.” In the middle of the second part, the story takes an abrupt turn. Moreover, it ends abruptly.
Perhaps Zweig did not really complete the novel? In any event, it is brilliant, or suffused with brilliance.
I think of Ben Hogan — who said, “There’s recreational golf and there’s competitive golf. And the two have nothing to do with each other.” I say: There’s writing — even very good writing — and there’s Stefan Zweig. He had a very rare literary gift.
Zweig was Viennese, born in 1881. Jewish — but not self-consciously so. European. Eventually, Hitler rose to power and antisemitism exploded — which made many people feel very Jewish indeed. Jean-Paul Sartre articulated a concept: The antisemite makes the Jew.
One episode of Zweig’s life involves an opera. He wrote the libretto for Die schweigsame Frau, composed by Richard Strauss. Strauss, showing spine, refused to allow Zweig’s name to be taken off posters and programs. The Nazis banned the opera after three performances.
Zweig went to England, then New York, then Brazil. He wrote a memoir, The World of Yesterday, describing life before Nazism ended it. The day after he finished the memoir, Zweig and his wife, Lotte, killed themselves. That was on February 22, 1942.
In The Post-Office Girl, a double suicide is contemplated.
The story takes place in 1926. The title character is Christine Hoflehner, age twenty-eight. Her family has been ruined by the World War — along with countless other families. Impoverished, battered. Her brother, gone, her father, gone. She cares for her mother — sick, hopeless, penniless — in their backwater Austrian town. She has a sister who lives in Vienna, with a husband and children. They are getting by. Christine works at the post office, feeling stultified by the drudgery.
One day, something unexpected takes place: Relatives — a well-off aunt and uncle, living in America — ask Christine to spend a week with them at a resort hotel in Switzerland. Christine discovers how the other half lives, or how the cream lives. It changes her. But the fancy folk at the hotel have discovered her poverty, which creates a scandal. Christine is forced to leave, humiliated. Back in her backwater town, she finds life more unbearable than ever.
Zweig’s writing is raw and refined at the same time. However elegant, it is honest and penetrating. He is a master of description — physical and mental. I would like to share some passages here. The translation from German is by Joel Rotenberg. I am not writing a review or a report or even a recommendation. I am offering some passages, providing tastes, for those who appreciate this sort of thing.
Christine’s job at the post office is “miserably paid,” writes Zweig, and miserable in general.
But still: a little bit of security, a roof over your head, room to breathe, just barely; might as well get used to it — after all, the casket’s an even tighter fit.
Consider:
She tries harder, this twenty-eight-year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes that she no longer knows, that it’s like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once. When was the last time she was happy?
Maybe when she was a schoolgirl, with her mates, before the “guns of August”:
Any little thing would set off waves of that effervescent girlish laughter. A teacher who stammered, a funny face in the mirror, a cat chasing its tail, a look from an officer on the street, any little thing, any tiny, senseless bit of nonsense, you were so full of laughter that anything could bring it out. It was always there and ready to erupt, that free, tomboyish laughter, and even when she was asleep, its high-spirited arabesque was traced on her young mouth.
And then it all went black, snuffed out like a candle.
Zweig gives some history:
1916: She’s eighteen. There’s a new catchphrase in the household, used constantly: too expensive. Her mother, her father, her sister, her sister-in-law escape from their troubles into the smaller-scale misery of the bills, from morning until night they reckon up their poor daily life aloud. Meat, too expensive, butter, too expensive, a pair of shoes, too expensive: Christine hardly dares to breathe for fear it might be too expensive.
A little more history:
And 1917 — nineteen. They buried her father two days after New Year’s; the money in the bankbook was just enough for them to dye their clothes black. It’s getting more and more expensive to live, they’ve already rented out two rooms to a pair of refugees from Brody, but it’s not enough, not enough, even if you slave until late at night.
One theme of this book — not a major theme, but something present, even as an undercurrent — is sex. Christine, in 1924 (Zweig is still doing history), notices the younger people in town:
. . . these postwar seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds aren’t waiting quietly and patiently, waiting for someone to want them and take them. They’re demanding pleasure as their right, demanding it as impetuously as though it’s not just their own young lives that they’re living but the lives of the hundred thousand dead and buried too. With a kind of horror Christine, now twenty-six, watches how they act, these newcomers, these young ones, sees their self-assurance and covetousness, their knowing and impudent eyes, the provocation in their hips, how unmistakably they laugh no matter how boldly the boys embrace them, and how shamelessly they take the men off into the woods — she sees them on her way home. It disgusts her. Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete.
A minor — very minor — character in this book is Franz Fuchsthaler, “the schoolmaster from the next village,” but he is a lovingly, poignantly drawn:
Late at night, when he knows the neighbors are all asleep, he plays a somewhat labored but enthusiastic violin from scores he wrote out himself, mostly Schubert and Mendelssohn, or copies the finest verses and thoughts out of borrowed books onto white textured quarto sheets, which, when he has a hundred of them, he binds into an album with a glossy cover and a brightly colored label. He’s like a Koranic calligrapher who loves the handwriting with its delicate curves and shading for the mute joy of it, its silent expressive flair. For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicolored rows; he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener’s delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
Christine is on her way, by train, to Switzerland. She is looking out the window — stunned. All this time, she has been “just a night away, a day away from this infinitude, these manifold immensities!” Have some more, from Zweig:
Indifferent and without desires before, now she’s beginning to realize what she’s been missing. This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel’s disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.
But what about the virtual rags in which she is covered, the obvious poverty of her appearance? How will that go over at the luxury hotel?
Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.
Immediately, Christine gets her appearance fixed up. Her aunt sees to it. Christine, at the moment, is in a salon, getting her hair done:
Just don’t open your eyes, she thinks. If you do, it might go away. Don’t question anything, just savor this Sundayish feeling of sitting back for once, of being waited on instead of waiting on other people. Just let your hands fall into your lap , let good things happen to you . . .
At the Engadin, this choice part of a choice country, Switzerland, Christine can’t keep from gaping:
Unaccustomed to this dramatic canvas, this vast unfolding palette, Christine gazes at it numbly. She’s like someone used to nothing more than fiddle and pipes hearing the roar of a full orchestra for the first time: the sudden revelation of natural majesty is too much for her senses.
A line or two about time (a theme, or a motif, of the novel): In your room at the hotel,
you can think about nothing at all and just laze mindlessly, time belongs to you, not the reverse. You’re not driven onward by that frantic mill wheel of hours and seconds, you glide through time, eyes closed, as though in a rowboat with oars pulled in. Christine lies there, enjoying this new feeling . . .
Here is a nice oxymoron, about life at the hotel:
The pageant of idle busyness goes on all day.
Suddenly, Christine, all dolled up — transformed — is surrounded by flirters and suitors: the sons of high society. This passages involves one of them, but there are plenty more where he came from:
She feels his knee announce itself under the table. She sees his face as though for the first time, hard, tanned, vigorous, his decisive mouth beneath the trimmed beard, his eyes accosting her, boring into her. A kind of pride stirs in her: this man, so solid, so masculine, wants me, just me, and I’m the only one who knows. “Are we going to dance?” he asks. “Yes,” she answers, meaning much more. Dancing isn’t enough, it seems to her now.
He pursues her to her room, but, panting, she closes the door before he can get in.
Silly, she thinks, why was I so scared. Twenty-eight years old and I’m still saving myself, still denying myself, still waiting and shilly-shallying and scared. Why am I saving myself? For whom? Father scrimped and saved, Mother and I, everyone, the bunch of us scrimped and saved all through those terrible years, while the others were living, I never had the guts, for anything, and what did we get? And suddenly you’re old and faded and you die and you don’t know anything and you never lived and you never knew anything.
An observation:
Someone who’s on top of the world isn’t much of an observer: happy people are poor psychologists. But someone who’s troubled about something is on the alert.
Another observation:
. . . it’s one of the few advantages of age that one is rarely wrong about people.
Another one:
The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
Let me now paste one of the most striking passages of the book. It is about Lord Elkins. I could say more about him. But that’s enough: Lord Elkins.
The old man stares at the tip of his cane. Ever since the war he’s had a low opinion of people and of nations, they’re selfish, all of them, without the imagination to see the injustices they’re perpetrating. The idealism of his youth, a belief in the moral mission of mankind and the enlightened spirit of the white race that he took from the lectures of John Stuart Mill and his followers, was buried once and for all in the bloody mire of Ypres and the chalk quarry at Soissons where his son met his death. Politics disgusts him, the cool conviviality of the club and the showy self-congratulation of the public banquet repel him; since the death of his son he’s avoided making new acquaintances.
Some more (and by “this girl,” Zweig means Christine):
His generation’s sour unwillingness to recognize the truth and its inability to adapt to the postwar era anger him, as does the younger generation’s smart-alecky thoughtlessness. But with this girl he’s regained belief, a vague devout gratitude for the mere existence of youth; in her presence he sees that one generation’s painfully acquired mistrust of life is fortunately neither understood nor credited by the next, and that each new wave of youth is a new beginning.
Christine’s aunt and uncle inform her that she has to go back home, right away. Her poverty has been found out, and everyone is snickering. Christine is no longer the life of the party. When she receives the news, she reels. Zweig puts it like this:
Holding on to the wall, she makes it back to her room in a daze, the way an animal that’s been killed by a shot lurches on for a few steps before falling.
The young woman is now back home, in the home she has shared with her mother (though her mother has just died). The conditions here are far, far different from those at that hotel, which now seems a planet away:
Christine throws the window open. The smell is suffocating, the smell of stale cigarette smoke, bad food, wet clothes, the smell of the old woman’s dread and worry and wheezing, the awful smell of poverty.
You know what is a perpetual problem of the poor? To keep clean. Always has been, always will be.
Again, Stefan Zweig speaks of time. The post-office girl is back at her post:
For the first time she saw that the clock never advanced, but ran in circles — from twelve to one, from one to two, and on to twelve, and then the same thing again, always the same progression without any progress, wound up again and again for the day’s work without ever getting a break . . .
Maybe we can have one more sentence (concerning, of course, Christine):
In sleepless agitation, she lay in bed, listening to the coming and going of her breath and wondering why.
What a mind, Zweig’s. What a book, flawed and truncated as it may be. Next in my hands is another of his novels: Beware of Pity.
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