Lifelong death wish

In February 2009, in a review in these pages of Stefan Zweig’s unfinished novel, The Post Office Girl, I wrote: ‘Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers “to see.’’  In The Post Office Girl Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart.’

Especially the details of loneliness, I should have added. Intimations of suicide darken this novel, and in 1942, with the manuscript incomplete, Zweig, age 60, and his much younger second wife, Lotte, poisoned themselves in a small Brazilian town and died in bed with her embracing him.

It is telling that she did the embracing. Zweig, we learn from this biography, was a self-confessed loner, quite cold in person while passionate about certain kinds of things he collected all his life: rare manuscripts — he had a Handel score; objects, such as Beethoven’s desk and violin; and drawings — he had two by Rembrandt.

Who reads Zweig now? Of course anyone literate should read his only two novels, Beware of Pity and the unfinished The Post Office Girl. But from at least 1904 until his suicide, Zweig became an increasingly celebrated author, stupendously famous even in Latin America, who filled Carnegie Hall with 2,800 listeners, and spoke at Freud’s funeral.

Most of his oeuvre consisted of biographies of famous past and living men, plays, essays on literature, and the avalanche of letters he wrote from his late childhood until his death. He knew writers like Schnitzler, Hesse, and Thomas Mann, and once watched Rodin at work, a rare example of the biographer telling us what something was really like. Periodically he kept a diary. Even just before his final fatal moment he wrote letters to friends and acquaintances and to his first wife, Friderike.