Beware of Pity (51 page)

When those four endless years were over at last, I found to my own surprise that I could go on living in the world as it then was all the same. For we who came home from Hades judged everything by new criteria. To a man who had fought in the Great War, the death of another human being no longer meant what it did to a man in peacetime. My own private guilt had been dissolved in the huge bloodbath of general guilt, for the same man, the same eyes and the same hands, had also set up the machine gun that mowed down the first wave of Russian infantry to attack our trenches at Limanova, and I had even seen, through my field glasses afterwards, the glazed eyes of the men I had killed, and the men I had wounded who lay for hours in the barbed wire, still moaning, before they perished miserably. I had brought down an aircraft outside Görz and seen it turning over three times in the air before crashing on the rocks and going up in flames, and with our own hands we had then searched the charred bodies of the airmen, still smouldering horribly, for identity discs. Thousands upon thousands of the men who marched beside me had done the same, with rifles, bayonets, flame-throwers, machine-guns and their bare hands, hundreds of thousands and millions of my generation had killed enemy soldiers in France, Russia and Germany—what was a
single murder beside all that, what was a private, personal guilt within the cosmic, thousandfold guilt, the most terrible mass destruction and mass annihilation yet known to history?

And then—another relief—there were no witnesses against me left in the post-war world. No one could accuse a man decorated for outstanding courage of his former cowardice, no one was left to reproach me with my fatal weakness. Kekesfalva had survived his daughter’s death by only a few days. Ilona was now the wife of a little notary in a Yugoslavian village, Colonel Bubencic had shot himself on the banks of the River Save, my comrades of the time had either fallen or had long ago forgotten one insignificant episode—everything “before the war” had become as unimportant and invalid as the old pre-war currency in those four apocalyptic years. No one could accuse or judge me now. I felt like a murderer who has buried his victim’s body in a wood where snow begins to fall on it, thick, white and heavy. The protective blanket of snow, he knows, will lie over his crime for months on end, and then every trace will be lost for ever. So I plucked up my courage and began to live again. Since no one remembered me, I soon forgot my own guilt. For the heart can forget very well and very deeply what it really wants to forget.

Only once did a memory come back to me from the opposite bank of the river of Lethe. I was sitting in the stalls of the Opera House in Vienna, in a seat at the end of a row, to hear Gluck’s
Orpheus
again; its pure, restrained melancholy moves me more than any other music. The overture was just ending, the lights in the dimmed auditorium did not go up in the brief pause which gave a few late arrivals a chance to take their seats in the dark. Two of these latecomers, a lady and a gentlemen, cast their shadows on my own row.

“Excuse me, please,” said the man, with a civil bow to me. I stood up, without really noticing or paying any attention, to let them pass. But instead of sitting down in the seat next to mine, he first guided the lady ahead of him carefully with the touch of affectionate hands, easing the way for her, so to speak, and folded the seat down for her with care before helping her to sit down. The nature of his concern was too unusual not to strike me. Ah, a blind woman, I thought, and looked at her with instinctive sympathy. But now the rather stout gentleman was sitting down beside me, and with a pang of the heart I recognised him. It was Condor! The only man who knew the depth of my guilt was sitting close enough for me to touch him. Condor, whose pity had not been murderously weak, like mine, but was a
self-sacrificing
force for good, the one man before whom I must still feel ashamed was here! When the lights came up again in the interval he would be bound to recognise me at once.

I began trembling, and quickly put my hand up to shelter my face, so that I would be safe at least in the dark. My heart was hammering so hard that I did not hear another bar of the music I loved so much. The proximity of this man, the only person on earth who really knew me for what I was, troubled me deeply. As if I were sitting stark naked in the middle of all these prosperous, well-dressed people, I was already shuddering at the thought of the moment when the lights would go up and reveal me. And so in the brief moment between darkness and light in the auditorium, while the curtain began to fall on the first act, I quickly ducked my head and made my escape up the central gangway—I think quickly enough for him not to see or recognise me. But since that hour I have known that no guilt is forgotten while the conscience still remembers it.

Stefan Zweig’s novel
Beware of Pity
, not a literal translation of the original title,
Ungeduld des Herzens
(Impatience of the Heart), was first published in German in 1939. As he was among those Jewish writers whose books were burnt by the Nazis, publication was not in Germany or Austria but in Sweden, when his publishers had moved to Stockholm for the duration of the war. It must have gone straight to its English translators Trevor and Phyllis Blewitt, since their version appeared in the same year. In his lifetime Zweig was an extremely popular author, so the swift translation is no surprise. When he wrote the book he was living in England, first in London and then in Bath; he and his second wife left the British Isles on the declaration of war in 1939, for fear of internment as enemy aliens, and went first to the United States and then to Brazil, where they committed suicide together in 1942, just after Zweig had delivered the manuscript of his memoir
The World of Yesterday
to the same temporarily Stockholm-based German publishing firm. The memoir too was quickly translated, and its first English version, by an anonymous translator, appeared in 1943.

The first translation of this, Zweig’s only completed novel, is therefore over seventy years old, and as translations do tend to date (a sobering reflection for translators), after that length of time the moment seemed to have come for a new version of this very powerful work. A sense of historical period is important
in the book, both now that we can look back at the twentieth century as a whole, and surely also at the time of writing, when the Second World War was about to break out. Zweig, himself a lifelong pacifist, draws a graphic picture of the extraordinary elitist world of the officer class of the Austrian army, especially the cavalry, at the time when the main narrative is set, early 1914. The note he wrote for the first English version, also included at the start of this new translation, elucidates it for English-language readers; one is tempted to reflect that its arcane rituals, baffling to the non-initiated, are reminiscent of those of the old-fashioned British boarding school. It is a telling presentation of a little world sufficient unto itself. The hapless young protagonist, Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, idealistic but irresolute, and without the financial means of many of his young fellow officers, suffers the terror of social ostracism as he finds that he has offended against its unthinkingly arrogant ethos.

The main narrative is set inside a framework story, a device much used by Zweig. As the book opens an anonymous writer, clearly a version of Zweig himself, encounters the now older and wiser Hofmiller, who fought with distinction in the First World War, and who ranges himself on the framework narrator’s side at a supper-party discussion in 1938 of the possibility of another war. The whole book, therefore, spans the imminent outbreak of the two world wars of the twentieth century.

The main part of the novel, told by Hofmiller to the framework narrator, deals with situations and characters of great emotional intensity. The disabled girl Edith, whom young Hofmiller pities and who hopes his pity will turn to sexual love, is memorable, and reminds the reader that Zweig knew Freud well, and visited him in his last illness in London as another exile from the Nazis. Freud’s case histories of hysteria come to mind
at times, as Edith (for whom there is every excuse) shows herself by turn pathetically self-immolating and demandingly petulant. Another notable character is the physician Dr Condor, who acts as the touchstone of good sense and right thinking. Some of his medical theories also seem tinged by the development of psychoanalysis of the time.

The main narrative also contains two stories within its own story; one long enough to be a novella on its own, the tale of how Edith’s father, starting from poor Jewish beginnings, became a wealthy supposed Hungarian aristocrat; the other a shorter story, about a former member of Hofmiller’s regiment who had to resign his commission for some unspecified offence, but retrieved his fortunes by a stroke of luck. Most unusually for Zweig, whose stock in trade does not include happy endings, both men appear to have made happy marriages. In translating, I have wondered whether Zweig felt that these episodes would offer some relief from the painful if fascinating development of the main plot, where flaws of character and unfortunate coincidences lead inexorably to disaster. The news of the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for instance, plays the part of a malevolent deus ex machina in preventing a reconciliation between the protagonists.

There remains, intriguingly, the question of why this is the only work that Zweig allowed to leave his hands as a complete novel. His method, as he records it in his memoir, was to cut and cut at his first draft, until he was almost always left with a narrative no longer than a novella or a short story. Many of these short works of fiction could easily have become fulllength novels in another writer’s hands. I think in particular of the powerful
Amok
, with its framework setting on board an ocean-going ship and its exotic Far Eastern setting for the main
narrative, which strikes dark Conradian notes. And it seems very possible, although we cannot know, that the unfinished
Rausch der Verwandlung
(Intoxication of Metamorphosis), published in German after his death and recently in English as
The Post Office Girl
, might have undergone the same drastic cutting process. So why not
Beware of Pity?
After translating it, I tend to think it was because, in the circumstances of the late 1930s, Zweig wanted to get his anti-militaristic message across as quickly as possible, and he did not have much time left for writing, for cutting what he had written, or indeed for living. I am glad that he did allow the publication of this one full-length novel.

ANTHEA BELL 2011