On Stefan Zweig’s novel Beware of Pity, eloquent and raw
At the beginning of this month, I devoted a column to a novel by Stefan Zweig: The Post-Office Girl. Brilliant work (from a brilliant mind, and pen). I ended that column by saying, “Next in my hands is another of his novels: Beware of Pity.”
And this column, I will devote to that.
Zweig was a versatile writer, producing biographies, essays, plays, poems, short stories, novellas — an opera libretto for Richard Strauss (Die schweigsame Frau). He was one of the most popular writers in the world. His star dimmed after his death, but it never stopped shining for his devotees.
Could he write? Let me paste a paragraph from my previous column (maybe an offbeat one):
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. He lived many years in Salzburg. Last month, the Salzburg Festival staged a play about Zweig, incorporating a book of his, Decisive Moments in History.
That book appeared in 1927. Zweig wrote Beware of Pity in 1939. He died in 1942 (by his own hand). (He and his wife committed a double-suicide.) The day before, he had finished his memoir, The World of Yesterday, soon a classic.
An intriguing title, “Beware of Pity.” The book’s title in German is “Ungeduld des Herzens,” i.e., “The Heart’s Impatience.” In the book, Dr. Condor, a marvelous, affecting character, says “there are two kinds of pity.”
One is “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.” The other is “the unsentimental but creative kind,” and “the only kind that counts.”
Beware of Pity has been made into several movies and at least one play. I have not seen any of them. But I doubt anything could substitute for Zweig’s rich and detailed prose.
What’s the book about? Oh, you know: life. Love, war, sickness, health, money, growth, volition, death. The works.
You read a writer such as Zweig — not that there are many — and you wonder, “How does he know that? How has he perceived that? How has he come to understand it? Sure, he has done some living. But he can’t have done that much living. There must be gifts of sympathy and imagination.”
Zweig esteemed Dostoevsky (who died the year Zweig was born). Dostoevsky had “the magnifying power of a microscope and the clarifying insight of a seer,” said Zweig. He himself had similar capacities.
You suspect that Zweig took great pleasure in life — even in its negative aspects. His writing is full of life, bursting with life, as he observes the human scene and diagnoses it.
Beware of Pity can be read on three levels, I would say. You can enjoy it for its philosophical and psychological points. You can enjoy it for its story, or stories — the small stories within the overall story. Personal histories of the characters, for example. And, third, you can enjoy the book for its sentences. Its simple power of expression.
Above, I asked, “What’s the book about?” I gave kind of a flippant answer, but a true one. More prosaically, the book is about an Austrian cavalry officer, Anton Hofmiller, just before World War I. He becomes friends with the Kekesfalva family, which includes a 17-year-old girl, Edith, who is crippled. The relationship between “Toni” and Edith is . . . complicated. Oh, what a drama.
The book opens in 1937, after the fact. (The story, almost in its entirety, will take place in 1913 and ’14.) I will quote the initial narrator, who is a stand-in for Zweig, we can assume. The narration will soon be taken over by Lieutenant Hofmiller. Here we go:
Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavouring to unburden itself in speech.
You may have noticed the British spelling, “endeavouring.” I am using the translation of Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt. The English of this translation is very British, down to the slang (which is no criticism, of course, but simply a note).
In ’37, people don’t believe — or don’t want to believe — that a second war is coming. Says the narrator,
. . . the instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent . . .
But will the public, or publics, support a new war? Hofmiller, a veteran of the first war (as we will come to know it), says this:
Don’t let us deceive ourselves. If in any country whatever a recruiting campaign were to be launched today for some utterly preposterous war, a war in Polynesia or in some corner of Africa, thousands and hundreds of thousands would rush to the colours without really knowing why, perhaps merely out of a desire to run away from themselves or from disagreeable circumstances. But as for any effective opposition to a war — I wouldn’t care to put it above zero.
Why is that?
It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd . . .
Let’s go back, now, to 1913 and the beginning of the story, with Hofmiller in charge of narration. He was a content cavalry officer:
Whenever I was in the saddle I felt fine, and my thoughts did not travel far beyond my horse’s neck.
Soon, however, he goes to the Kekesfalvas’, for a party. He meets Edith and her companion, her cousin, Ilona. At the table, he is seated between Ilona and another attractive young woman (unnamed). Later, he wishes to dance. (No one is on the floor yet.) And when Zweig writes about dancing, the prose itself dances:
I turned to Ilona. She laughed and understood. Her eyes had already said “Yes,” and in a moment we were whirling round, two couples, three couples, five couples, over the smooth parquet, while the more cautious and the more elderly looked on or chatted. I loved dancing, and, what is more, was a good dancer. Our bodies interlocked, we floated along; I felt I had never danced better in my life. I asked my other neighbour for the next waltz; she too danced superbly, and my senses reeled as, bending over her, I breathed the perfume of her hair. Ah, she danced wonderfully, everything was wonderful, I had not been so happy for years. I scarcely knew where I was, I felt like embracing everyone, saying something kind, some word of thanks to each one of them, so light, so rapturous, so blissfully young did I feel. I went whirling from one to the other, I talked, I laughed, I danced, and, carried away on the stream of my own happiness, I lost all sense of time.
How about Hofmiller in the saddle, back in the saddle? When a squadron goes for a ride — so does the author’s prose:
“Gallop!” I ordered my squadron, and at one breathless bound the snorting horses were off. They recognized at once the soft, springy turf, the clever beasts; there was no further need to urge them on, we could let the reins hang slackly, for scarcely had they felt the pressure of our legs than they were off like the wind. They too craved excitement and distraction.
I rode on ahead. I am passionately fond of riding. I could feel the blood flowing from my hips, coursing through my relaxed limbs in a warm, pulsating, life-giving stream, while the cold air whistled round my brow and cheeks. Marvellous morning air: one could still taste the dew of the night in it, the breath of the loosened soil, the smell of the blossoming fields; one was enveloped in the warm, sensuous steam of snorting nostrils. I was always thrilled afresh by this first morning gallop, which so agreeably shook up one’s fusty, drowsy body and chased away one’s stupor as though it were a suffocating fog; the feeling of buoyancy which bore me along automatically expanded my lungs, and with mouth wide open I drank in the rushing air. “Gallop! Gallop!” I felt my eyes brighten, my senses quicken, and behind me I could hear the rhythmic clank of the swords, the spasmodic snorts of the horses, the faint creaking of the saddles as they rose and fell, the even thud of the hoofs. It was one single Centaurian body, this charging group of men and horses, carried along by one single impetus.
What do you think of this sentiment — this thought, this belief?
It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.
Anton Hofmiller lives in a very male environment, and always has — from the military academy on up. He is “extremely fond” of most of his comrades, but . . .
But there was one exhilarating element that this male atmosphere lacked; it contained, as it were, insufficient ozone, insufficient power to rouse, invigorate, stimulate, quicken, electrify; and just as our excellent military band despite its exemplary rhythm and swing, nevertheless remained a brass band, its music therefore harsh, blaring, depending solely for its effect on rhythm, because it lacked the delicately sensuous tones of stringed instruments, so did even our jolliest times in barracks lack that element of subtlety which the presence or even the mere proximity of women invisibly adds to all social intercourse.
Or as Oscar Hammerstein was to put it, “there is nothin’ like a dame.” (“There is nothin’ you can name / That is anythin’ like a dame.”)
An interesting statement about a man caught in a life of drudgery:
. . . a poor devil who felt himself lucky if the month had thirty instead of thirty-one days.
Another statement to consider:
The fact that a man who is at once hard-working, clever and thrifty will sooner or later make money seems to me to be so obvious as to require no particular philosophical meditation . . .
A character in the book is a rich old lady whose relatives are waiting for her to die. She can’t stand them. And she refuses (to die).
. . . spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.
Eventually, the rich old lady — no longer sustained by spite — dies. But she leaves those relatives without an inheritance. She bequeaths her fortune to her handmaiden, who is none too liked by the relatives, of course, but who is positively despised by the other servants:
No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbour lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth rather than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.
To consider:
The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.
The Kekesfalvas take a long drive, with Hofmiller in tow, and come upon a peasant wedding, a Hungarian wedding. Let’s have some more dancing:
At the first note of the zither all reserve was thrown to the winds. In a trice couples formed, and the dancers whirled away more wildly, more extravagantly than before, for all the lads and lasses were fired with ambition to show us how real Hungarians could dance. In a moment the room that had been wrapped in awed silence was transformed into a riotous maze of swaying, leaping, stamping bodies; at every beat all round the room the glasses shook and clattered, with such wild abandon did the enthusiastic young people throw themselves into the tumultuous rhythm of the dance.
Have you ever carried books around — from residence to residence — without reading them?
I was in general a poor reader, and the rickety shelves of my barrack-room contained, apart from the six or eight military volumes, such as the cavalry drill manual, which are the alpha and omega of army life, the twenty or so classics which, ever since I had been gazetted, I had trailed around from one garrison to another without ever opening — perhaps only in order to invest the bare, strange rooms in which I was obliged to take up my quarters with the semblance and shadow of personal ownership.
Talk about something to consider, something to ponder:
For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.
Let’s take a break for some words — some words I did not know, and learned from the Blewitts’ translation.
The verb incommode: “to give inconvenience or distress to.”
The verb funk: “to become frightened and shrink back.”
The verb blench: “to make a sudden flinching movement out of fear or pain.”
The adjective mettlesome (not to be confused with “nettlesome”): “full of mettle; spirited.”
The noun paralipomena: “things passed over but added as a supplement” (as in “Schopenhauer’s wise paralipomena”).
Okay, a German word — or rather, a word from Viennese dialect: Sumper. Zweig tells us that a Sumper is “a good-natured, roistering sort of fellow, without a thought above eating and drinking.”
A sentence gave me a memory of many years ago. Here is a fragment of that sentence: “on an observation flight over the Piave, when he had shot down three planes single-handed.” When I worked at The Weekly Standard, in the mid 1990s, my dear friend Claudia Anderson, who was a managing editor, said, “Why do people say ‘single-handedly’ — ‘He did it single-handedly’ — when the classic and right and normal thing to say is ‘single-handed’?”
I have never forgotten (as you can tell).
Now and then, you see the word holocaust, written before World War II, and the holocaust with a capital “h.” In Beware of Pity, World War I is described as a “holocaust,” and the “most appalling” in history.
All right, I’m going to parachute into a paragraph, without any context, really. I will just parachute:
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 only justify their earthly existence by loving and being loved. That it is precisely from the lowest abysses of despair that the panic cries and groans of those hungry for love ring out most gruesomely . . .
Try this out as well:
In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one’s will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another’s passion.
“Heavy,” as we said in the ’70s, I believe.
Have you ever received a letter — or an e-mail, or a text — and thought, “Don’t read it now. Don’t read it now. It will only upset you. You have other things to do at the moment. Put it aside, read it later”? Well . . .
Later, later! — a sudden instinct warned me. Don’t read it, don’t read it now. But against all the dictates of my reason I tore open the envelope and read, read the letter, which seemed to crackle more and more violently in my hands.
Sure.
Is the below something you can relate to, something you have ever experienced?
. . . there is no escape. The dark thoughts, those restless rats, gnawing their way through the black shell of sleep, burrow even into your dreams, the same thoughts over and over again, and when you awake in the morning you feel as though you have been drained and sucked dry by vampires.
What a solace then is reveille, what a solace your duties, that far milder form of bondage!
Earlier, I mentioned Dr. Condor, a character who leaves a deep impression. He married a blind woman, and they have a tender — an exceptionally tender — relationship. Dr. Condor tells Hofmiller,
If anyone can understand a man’s fear of his fellow-men the moment their preconceived ideas are flouted, I can. You’ve seen my wife, haven’t you? No one could understand why I married her. Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line makes people first curious and then indignant.
So true. So true.
I could go on quoting — sampling — but I have quoted — sampled — enough. More than enough. This book is so packed with emotion — it cuts so close to the bone — that a reader may have to put it aside, now and then. Put it aside before facing it once more.
When I read a story, or go to a movie, or what have you, there is this problem: I want to revise, to edit, to steer — to make things turn out right (as I conceive “right”). But storytellers go in their own directions, damn them.
Do I have criticisms of Beware of Pity? Oh, sure. But they are minor. Sometimes the characters talk too eloquently — with too much wisdom and intellect and eloquence. They can seem more Zweig than themselves.
In 2014, Roger Scruton published a novel, Notes from Underground (speaking of Dostoevsky). Wonderful book. He asked me to blurb it. The blurb appeared on the front cover. If the novel had a flaw, I thought, it was that the characters talked like Roger Scruton (one of the best talkers you could imagine).
Is that all right? You know, I don’t mind.
Critics tend to be snotty about Stefan Zweig. I think I know why: He has much more talent than they and he sees more. He is full to bursting. Words and ideas and perceptions just tumble out of him. His pen can barely keep up with his mind. Also, he is not afraid of emotion, the rawness of life. That puts off those who like cool.
Anyway, gnats are always biting at the ankles of elephants.
An amazing thing that novelists can do is take us away from life — give us relief from life, particularly our own — while putting life right in our face.
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