Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (53 page)

In Ossining he was frequently visited by Friderike, and they talked about old times, which proved very helpful when he was putting his memories down on paper. But it was already becoming clear in this draft that the book was not going to be an autobiography in the strict sense of the word. The opening sentences were already very close to what eventually appeared in print:

I have never ascribed sufficient importance to my person ever to be tempted to tell the story of my life to others. A great deal had to happen, infinitely more in terms of events, catastrophes and trials than has fallen to any other single generation, before I found the courage to embark on a book in which I myself am the main character, or rather the focal point. But nothing could be further from my mind than the desire to thrust myself forward, unless it be in the role of one who presents a slide show. The images are furnished by the times, I merely speak the words to accompany them: and the story I shall tell will not be so much my own personal destiny, but rather that of an entire generation—a unique generation, that has been burdened with destiny like no other in the course of history.

This is followed by chapters on his childhood and adolescent years in Vienna, his early travels to Paris and other continents, the First World War and the years in Salzburg, culminating in the police search of his house and his retreat to England. The book ends on the first day of the Second World War, with his description of the scene inside the registry office in Bath (and Zweig merely notes that he was about to get married there for the second time; neither Lotte nor Friderike is specifically referred to or mentioned by name anywhere in the book). The passage on the preparations for the wedding does not appear in the Ossining manuscript, but at the point where it would have stood there is a page reference to an earlier draft, from which the paragraphs in question were evidently to be lifted. And sure enough, the full account is included in the published book. For dramatic effect Zweig has the English registrar—whom he had so admired in his diary for his calm and collected demeanour—informing the happy couple there and then that they would henceforth be classed as enemy aliens, whereas in fact
Stefan and Lotte only learnt of this three days later, when they went to the police station to register their personal details. When the door of the registry office was opened and they heard the news about the outbreak of war, the story continued as follows:

Meanwhile the other official, who had already started to write out our marriage certificate, had put down his pen, struck by a thought. The fact was we were foreigners, it now occurred to him, and in the event of war we would automatically be classed as enemy aliens. He was not sure whether a marriage was admissible in this case. He said he was sorry, but he would have to contact London for instructions. Then followed two days of waiting, hoping and fearing the worst, two days of agonising suspense. On the Sunday morning the radio broadcast the news that Great Britain had declared war on Germany.
⁹

At the end of the sixteenth and last chapter, below where he had written the date, Zweig had appended the following sentences in the manuscript, which he later crossed out and did not include in the final draft: “This was the first day. Others followed, light and dark, stale and empty, and the whole rolling time of the war, which I shall not speak of. As I write these pages, its hand is inscribing its iron chronicle with ever more cruel and bloody script, and still we are only at the beginning of the beginning. Only when it ends will it be fitting for us to begin again.”

After Lotte had typed up the complete text and all the corrections had been incorporated, Stefan donated the handwritten draft to the Library of Congress in Washington DC—a gesture of gratitude for the many instructive hours he had spent in public libraries in America, as he noted in a dedication on the title page.

The work progressed well, and even Lotte found the hours spent in Friderike’s company not unpleasant. It looked as if they had been able to find a modus vivendi. Even Suse now came to visit, and took a whole series of photographs with her camera showing Stefan sitting in a basket chair on the front lawn of his house at 7 Ramapo Road. His gaze in these pictures seems distracted and frozen. He tries to manage a smile in some of the photos, but his face wears a tired and stony look.

During their time in Ossining Lotte discovered through spending time with other writers that Stefan was not the only one to be afflicted with depression; sooner or later, it seems, every author in exile had to struggle with it. On the evenings when Stefan’s colleagues called round the topics
of conversation often ranged from the gloomy to the outright macabre. René Fülöp-Miller recalls how at one such gathering Zweig talked at several points about the psychology of the final hours of life, the use of lethal poisons and the dosage required. Lotte grew very worried about his state of mind, and was not in the best of health herself, having undergone treatment for her allergic asthma that had left her with troubling side-effects. On 21st July she wrote to her sister-in-law in London:

Once in a while I must write a letter which Stefan does not “censor” before I send it. I am a little worried about him at present, he is depressed, not only because it is really no pleasure to lead such an unsettled life, always waiting what will happen the next day before making another short-term decision, but also because the facts of the war, which is now becoming a real mass murder, and its seeming endlessness weigh upon his mind. I hope this mood will pass soon and I wish I had something of those people who can talk others into cheerfulness and somehow inspire courage and hope. [ … ] But I cannot talk him out of his present mood and can only wait until he gets over it himself—as he usually did in previous cases. Fortunately this does not prevent him from working but in the contrary induces him to more and more work. And I hope that he will feel better when the decision which has once again to be taken now between the States and Brazil, has finally fallen.

In order to help Stefan out of his depression, Lotte asked her sister-in-law to arrange for the already completed chapters of the Balzac biography to be sent to New York via Stefan’s London publisher, Newman Flower: “Stefan says he does not want it, but I am convinced he will be quite happy when he gets it …”
¹⁰

In a bad state, Lotte and Stefan returned to the Wyndham in New York earlier than planned. He wrote to Heinrich Eisemann in England: “I feel extremely tired and depressed [ … ]. Never I know where the next two months to stay, all sorts of difficulties arise and the idea that the war may continue for [
illegible
] years drives me nearly mad. Sometimes—you will not believe it—I am longing to return to my home and to sit with my books and to continue my Balzac, which I have left ‘at home’ [ … ] I am frightfully tired and sometimes I pity poor Lotte that she has to go through all my sadness.” Zweig added that he didn’t think he would be able to start a new life even if Hitler were to be defeated. And he could well understand why people retired at the age of sixty.
¹¹

Soon after this they had made their decision to go back to Brazil. If the Zweigs had wanted a permanent residence visa for the USA they would have had to leave the country first on their existing transit visa, then make the necessary application through a US consulate or embassy abroad. This procedure would have been possible by going to the neighbouring states of Mexico or Canada—the latter being relatively close—but for that they would first have needed visas for these countries. But once it was all over—once they had the vital stamp in their passports—what were they actually going to do in the USA?

A few days before they were due to leave for Brazil the Zweigs had a steady stream of visitors to their suite in the Wyndham Hotel. As so often in the past years, it was time to say goodbye. One of the visitors was Joachim Maass, whom Zweig had invited by telegram to come and see him one evening. As Maass arrived at the hotel, Zweig was just then walking to the door with Berthold Viertel, while Lotte was in the other room, typing away on her Remington portable. Zweig appeared tense and distracted, something that Maass noticed immediately, for he had never seen his colleague like this before: “his usual jovial attentiveness somehow eluded him now, although he was clearly trying to be his old self; but he only managed it for a few moments, before this distracting inner preoccupation took hold of him again.” In the end Stefan, Lotte and their guest went off to eat in a Viennese restaurant. But Zweig was unable to relax here either, complaining instead about “stupid travel formalities” and “customs idiots” who were taking up his precious time. All attempts to make light of the subject and calm him down were in vain. Maass recalls Zweig’s reaction:

“It’s all a waste of time,” he said with an angry toss of the head, drew his left hand wearily across his brow, and suddenly pushed his chair back from the table, even though we two were still eating. The image is indelibly imprinted on my mind: with his left elbow propped on the tablecloth he sat there with his legs crossed, flexing his knee and his foot the whole time, rubbing and kneading his hands together—those elegant, manicured hands of his—while his malcontented gaze wandered around the room. He had always been a courteous man with a keen sense of enjoyment. I changed tack and enquired after his new book [ … ], about which we had talked a great deal. “That’s finished,’ he said vaguely, “over and done with. Believe me, I’m sick to death of it.” There was no way to get through to him.

They left the restaurant early and all the way back to the hotel Stefan walked half a step ahead of his two companions. Back at the hotel he said he needed to rest for a while and suggested that Lotte and Maass go and have a drink in the hotel bar—they could meet up later in their room and say their goodbyes there. And that is what happened. Maass continues his account thus:

When we entered the bedroom to see him he was lying on one of the beds in his white pyjamas, but not under the bedclothes (it was still hot). He put down the book he was reading and looked a lot more relaxed now than he had earlier. I sat by him on the edge of the bed, and we chatted just like old times, about the thing I was working on at the time, about my activity as a literary mentor to pretty young ladies [ … ], he joked about that and talked excitedly—how different from a couple of hours earlier—about Brazil, about the hospitality and beauty of the country, which had made him feel so much at home there.
¹²

When they had said their goodbyes and Maass was already halfway to the door, Zweig called him back and gave him a special gift: the Remington typewriter on which Lotte had previously been working. Rather than take it to Brazil with the rest of the luggage, it would be easier to buy a new typewriter when they got there, said Zweig, and bade a final farewell to his guest. Maass could see the sense of the argument, but on the way home he may well have wondered about a writer who needlessly gave away the typewriter on which large portions of his autobiography had just been typed up. Had the machine really meant nothing more to him than that—just a tool of the trade?

On 27th August the steamer
Uruguay
entered the harbour of Rio de Janeiro with Stefan and Lotte Zweig on board. As Stefan had almost come to expect by now, a reception committee was waiting with officials from the Foreign Ministry, even though he had told very few people about his arrival. But hardly had they shaken hands with him and Lotte before it emerged that the real reason they had come was to welcome a foreign diplomat.

Mirroring the moves from Vienna to Salzburg, from London to Bath and from New York to New Haven and Ossining, Stefan now looked to escape from Rio to a smaller town. After living in their hotel for three weeks, Lotte and he moved to the town of Petrópolis up in the mountains outside Rio, the area that had reminded Stefan on his first visit of the Semmering
in Austria. Here they rented a small furnished bungalow, for six months initially, at 34 Rua Gonçalves Dias. The region was a favourite place of retreat for wealthy residents of Rio, who were drawn to the mountains by the milder climate, particularly in the summer months. The seclusion and the very agreeable winter temperatures in the southern hemisphere gave Stefan and Lotte some hope of enjoying the rest and relaxation they so sorely needed. Before leaving Rio he had written to Heinrich Eisemann from their hotel: “I had a kind of breakdown and the United States were too big for me. I could not stand this life in hotels [ … ] I never think more of books and autographs, all this belongs to a former life which will never come back again, a life, where beauty had its value and one has time and open thoughts to enjoy it.”
¹³
His interest in old books and manuscripts had indeed sharply diminished since his departure from Europe. All the more precious volumes in his library had been left behind in Bath, and in New York he had acquired only a few new books as reference material for his work—and brought hardly any of them with him to Brazil. Very few of his manuscripts were still with him either, two exceptions being Mozart’s
Veilchen
and one of the Balzac galley proofs. Prior to his departure Stefan had sorted out some financial matters with Alfred, and in payment for the expenditure incurred in previous years he had given his brother two Rembrandt drawings that he had acquired fairly recently through Eisemann—in the absence of any high-quality autograph manuscripts that he would otherwise have bought for their investment value.

After the recent dispiriting weeks in the USA, much depended on whether Brazil and its charms would still have the same hold over Zweig. In the first few weeks his positive image of the country was already in danger of being tarnished. His book
Brasilien—Ein Land der Zukunft
had been published under Koogan’s Guanabara imprint, and despite good reviews had been the cause of some resentment. Zweig had produced a persuasive portrait of the country’s history and culture—but very few readers recognised their “Land of the Future” in what he had written. Technical achievements that were a source of great pride to Brazilians received barely a mention in Zweig’s book, which reserved its enthusiasm instead for natural wonders and idyllic locations. Much worse than this mutual misunderstanding was the persistent rumour that he had not written the book on his own initiative, but had been commissioned to write it by the government as payment in kind for the permanent residence visa issued to him and his wife. There is no evidence at all to support the allegation, but quashing
the rumour proved extremely difficult, especially when the revelation that the Brazilian government had paid for flights by the couple on their last tour of South America handed fresh ammunition to his critics.