The important thing would be to make a new beginning with something new, a different way of life, to have different ambitions, to have a different relationship to being, to emigrate but not merely in the physical sense of the word.” two years later he wrote, “I feel as if the screws are coming loose in the machine: the best thing would be to switch it off completely in its fiftieth year and make another attempt to experience the world again instead of describing it.” when the dreaded fiftieth came round, Zweig avoided the formal public homage that would have been conventional on the occasion and slipped away to a fusty Jewish restaurant in Munich for a meal of blue carp and schnapps with his younger friend Carl Zuckmayer. “The only direction the future can hold is down,” he declared to Zuckmayer, who later wrote that he had never seen the fear of aging “so intense in another person, not even in women.”

This profoundly troubled state of mind is what Zweig puts on display in Confusion, a novel in which a range of characters struggle with the question of what it means, as Zweig remarked to zuckmayer on another occasion, to “live on as one’s own shadow,” reduced to being “only ghosts—or memories.”

II

Confusion is centered on an older man’s memories of the young man he once was and of that young man’s relationship to an older man he believed, for a time, he wanted to become. The narrator of the story is an esteemed professor of the humanities whose career and accomplishments have just been honored in a ceremony much like the one Zweig himself went out of his way to avoid on his fiftieth birthday. But the version of his career that has been commemorated on this occasion, the narrator knows, has nothing to do with the private passion that made it possible. Gazing back, the narrator pays homage to his long-dead, forgotten teacher and unveils the truth of how he found his calling. In doing so, he exposes confusions that range from embarrassing (there are even elements of slapstick comedy) to poignant to excruciatingly painful.

Roland, the narrator, cared nothing for the life of the mind when he was young. His enthusiasms were all physical, and sent to university in Berlin, he lazed away his days and plucked up stray girls from dance halls at night. Wrenched out of this life by his indignant father (who—a first instance of confusion—pays him a visit and surprises him in bed with a girl), Roland goes to a provincial university where he stumbles into a lecture being delivered by an aged professor of English languages and literature. The professor is in a state of furious exaltation. The audience is spellbound. Roland himself is filled with “what Latin scholars call a raptus, when one is taken right out of oneself.” there are passions, he realizes, of the mind as well as the body.

The professor becomes Roland’s mentor and Roland grows steadily more obsessed with him, even moving into his apartment building. He learns that the professor had begun a two-volume masterwork, The Globe Theatre: History, Productions, Poets, twenty years earlier, but abandoned the project. The professor declares, “that’s over now—only the young make such bold plans. I have no stamina these days.” Roland volunteers to become his teacher’s amanuensis if he will consent to resume the project. Their experiment in dictation flourishes. The professor’s powers of composition are restored and Roland’s literary enthusiasms wax ever brighter, and yet—something is not quite right. Something in particular is wrong with the professor’s marriage to a younger woman who hovers persistently in the background as an “alarmingly enigmatic” impediment to the student-teacher relationship—a distraction to whom Roland finds himself growing increasingly attached. This triangular relationship moves toward a climactic revelation that is powerful precisely because—as in some classic suspense film—we track every creaking step of its advance to the garish moment of truth. One way or another, we discover, everyone in the story is not only leading a hidden life but hiding from life, though Roland of course will emerge from this crucible of shame and denial to don the garb of the elder eminence who serves as the reader’s Virgil.

Throughout the tale, passions of the mind and passions of the body oscillate—they are confused. The desire for knowledge proves to be riddled with all sorts of unacknowledged desires: sadism and masochism, voyeurism and exhibitionism, among others.

Zweig’s novella is finally less about confusion as such than it is about metastasizing confusions. This is what gives the story its true weird power. (Indeed, the book’s German title, Verwirrung der Gefühle, might be better translated as “emotional Maelstrom.”) in Confusion, people are befuddled about their feelings, their work, their duties, and their drives. Events spin round and round in a mad dance of discombobulation. Zweig brilliantly evokes the way that confusion can function as a pathogen—taking over the life of one person who then spreads that misapprehension willy-nilly among his intimates and on down through generations.

One of the ways this process is dramatized is through the characters’ obsessive eavesdropping. They are always listening in, trying to find out about or channel somebody else’s desires and creative force. Roland speaks of how, when his teacher came near to him, “it was never close enough ... his nature was never entirely revealed,” while the professor argues that Shakespeare’s inspiration came from his bodily proximity to the blood sport formerly staged in the buildings that became Elizabethan theaters—along with the violent wanderlust of the young English nation still audibly lapping at those boards. Sensing something awry in the professor’s home life, Roland develops an “auditory system that caught every give-away tone.” and at the critical moment when the professor has completed the first part of his work and wishes to celebrate this victory over two decades of writer’s block, Roland exits the dim study where they work to fetch a corkscrew and collides with the professor’s wife, who’s been eavesdropping at the door.

And yet the characters never hear quite what they want or need to hear, and the reader is never quite sure that they really want to solve the mysteries anyway. This is a story in which secrets operate as engines of ecstasy. There’s a wonderful, farcical, torturous scene in which Roland and the professor’s wife goad each other into a frenzy that encapsulates the savage game of revelation and evasion that all Zweig’s hyper-civilized characters are caught up in.