Reading Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday" right now, and I'm almost finished. It is part biography, although the subject reveals virtually no details of his private life, much as Chaplin did in his own biography, and partly a cultural history of Europe from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the second world war. In this absorbing work, we gain a flavour of Austria at the time of Zweig's bildung, and a very clear look at the ideas and guiding principles of the author.
Zweig also gives us a glance at his artistic process; how he first "puts no stops on his pen", and then, after the first draft is done, goes over it once, twice and three times to remove anything that is extraneous, anything that doesn't move the story along. I was personally comforted to hear that he was an easily distracted reader himself, and boring passages in others' works were difficult for him, and that this drove him to never want to bore his readers. Perhaps this explains why he became one of the world's best-selling authors. It also made me remember the first pages of Egdon Heath by Thomas Hardy, which I could not get past. I just wanted someone to tell me a story, not describe a gloomy landscape for interminable pages.
I say he says little of his private life, but at the same time, one gains a view of his mental processes and attitudes. His dream of a unified Europe, for example, is a key concept, as is the active appreciation of the work of others. He celebrates those by translating them, and celebrates other notable lives by writing biographies. As well, he is a poet and novelist, and in one important instance, an opera librettist. His collaborator for that project was Richard Strauss, and the window he opens on the great composer's work was new to me. The Strauss Zweig shows us is fully aware of his own shortcomings, and able to criticise his own work, even ruthlessly. As one who is sometimes creative, I know it is difficult to frankly assess one's own output. Like Pygmalion, I sometimes fall in love with my own notes, and have been devastated when it has been cut, or otherwise messed about with by another.
I love artists who know how to appreciate the work of others. When Zweig rhapsodises about a particular poet or novelist or musician, the praise is effusive, "pressed down, shaken together, and running over". It reminded me of Gunther Schuller's great book on the Swing Era; when there is something he likes, he really lets you know it. It is an antidote to what we usually hear; devastating and withering criticism, whether in print or speech.
I sometimes sigh inwardly when I think about the meeting of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, each of whom detested the other's work, and wished they had somehow "gotten along". But artists love what they love, and so often, work that is foreign to their aesthetic is hated on a fundamental level. It is wonderful to read one giant appreciate another sincerely. Here are Zweig's words on Hugo von Hoffmansthal:
The appearance of the young Hofmannsthal is and remains notable as one of the greatest miracles of accomplishment early in life; in world literature, except for Keats and Rimbaud, I know no other youthful example of a similar impeccability in the mastering of language, no such breadth of spiritual buoyancy, nothing more permeated with poetic substance even in the most casual lines, than in this magnificent genius, who already in his sixteenth and seventeenth year had inscribed himself in the eternal annals of the German language with unextinguishable verses and prose which today has still not been surpassed. His sudden beginning and simultaneous completion was a phenomenon that hardly occurs more than once in a generation.
That Zweig doesn't give us the "nitty gritty" on his personal life makes me think of Montaigne, who seems to take the exact opposite tack: “And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.” Zweig instead, puts you in the shoes of his young set growing up in the Austria of the 1880s and 90s, or invites you into the homes and salons of his famous contemporaries and friends, he lets you in on the mood of the time, the concerns of the people at large. His portrait of himself is made in the portrait of a generation.
It has been an absorbing comparison to quite another book I read last summer concerning roughly the same time period: William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". Hitler casts a long shadow over both books, and they give off an uncomfortable resonance with the period we are currently living through, where madmen and fools have hoodwinked millions of credulous people into giving in to their worst impulses. I won't get into politics here, (of course many things desperately need changing right now), but we are in a similar period of upset, flux and uncertainty.
Let us hope we are heading towards a brighter future.
Excellent observations, my dear!
ReplyDelete