Clad in tight bathing suits, Roland and the young woman (described as a boyish ephebe) engage in horseplay when he refuses to join her in a swimming race. She breaks off a branch to serve as a switch and strikes him, playfully but accidentally too hard. She draws blood; then, when he continues to defy her will, she gives him a burning blow. At this point, as the two begin wrestling for possession of the switch—“our half-naked bodies came close”—she twists back to evade him, and there’s “a sudden snapping sound—the buckle holding the shoulder strap of her swimming costume had come apart, the left cup fell from her bare breast, and its erect red nipple met my eye. I could not help looking, just for a second, but I was cast into a state of confusion—trembling and ashamed.”

The distinguished scholar who tells this story of scrambled exhibitionism is still trembling, ashamed— and fascinated, as he revisits his past, wondering, we might surmise, if in gaining his place in the world he has not sacrificed his true passion as much as the neglected mentor who put him on the path to doing so. Here, in any case, the narrator is aching for a youth he can never possess.

Perhaps Confusion is not, after all, the tale of a young man acquiring the insight that turns him into an adult but the reverse: a surreptitious effort to conjure back to life the narrator’s benighted student days, in which the pursuit of knowledge was polymorphous, when every intimacy quivered with possibility and peril.

III

In September 1930, the Nazis stunned the world by winning almost 6,500,000 votes—up from 810,000 two years earlier. Zweig justified Hitler’s victory as “a perhaps unwise but fundamentally sound and approvable revolt of youth against the slowness and irresolution of ‘high politics.’” Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann’s son, felt driven to write an open letter refuting Zweig’s muzzy response to the vote: “not everything youth does and thinks is a priori good and pregnant with future,” Mann declared. “It may seem paradoxical that i should remind you of this; for i am young myself. However, many of my contemporaries—let alone the even younger ones!—are now engaged in propagating retrogression and barbarism with all that élan and determination that ought to be reserved for finer purposes. The revolt of youth can be in the service and interest of noble and ignoble forces.”

Zweig’s misguided hurrah was one in a series of last-ditch bids to stave off superannuation by actions as forceful as they were erratic. “I seem to myself like a hunter who is actually a vegetarian and can take no pleasure in the game he must shoot,” he wrote a friend two months before the vote, adding that only flight remained for him. Soon, he acted on his prognosis, fleeing the Nazis and domesticity both. His marriage disintegrated. In 1934, he hired a new secretary, Lotte Altmann, who at twenty-six was almost exactly half his age; the two became lovers and eventually married. Exiled from Austria, Zweig traveled to Brazil, falling in love with its natural, passionate beauty and racial tolerance, while also writing dismissively about the country’s absence of higher culture. Back in Europe, he moved for a time to Bath, saluting England’s even-keeled rationalism, but he could not acclimate to the chill of its emotional reserve and felt humiliated by having to register as an enemy alien. He then moved to Manhattan, from Manhattan to new haven, from new haven to Manhattan, then from there up the Hudson to Ossining where, perched in a humble bungalow a mile up the hill from sing sing prison, he wrote much of his autobiography, The World of Yesterday. Once again, however, he pined for Rio’s colorful embrace, to which he and lotte soon returned. In September 1941, as the Brazilian summer heat intensified, he moved upland to the tiny hamlet of Petropolis, where at first he was happy to be so far removed from the storm of world events. But then the distance from Europe began to make him feel guilty. Moreover, the fact that he could not get the books he wanted weighed on him, and the isolation which had first been so calming began to grow oppressive.

In one of his final letters to friderike, written just after seeing Rio’s carnival, he declared, “all i have been able to give was thanks to a certain interior élan; i could seize the imagination because i was seized myself and that produced a warmth that could communicate. Without faith, without enthusiasm, reduced to the sole power of my brain, i walk as though on crutches.” in February 1942 he and Lotte took a lethal dose of Veronal.

For years, Zweig had been haunted and sustained by memories (and fantasies) of an intellectually vibrant youth. Now, with his books legally forbidden to the German-Austrian public for whom they’d been composed, Zweig’s epicurean nostalgia itself became a secret that could not be shared. He was unwilling to “live on as [his] own shadow.” the question of how he could allow his much younger and cherished second wife to follow him into the realm of the shades is the only real outstanding mystery of his death.

Ultimately, Zweig’s gifts as a writer were bound up with his self-tormenting, and this misery, in turn, was fueled by a conviction that the secret of creation itself glimmered palpably before him, yet beyond his reach—at a distance that yawned ever wider with the passage of years. The accusations of inauthenticity that have been leveled against Zweig since the first publications of his work and continue to crop up to this day fail to register the potency of this unfeigned anguish—or the ways that Zweig’s anguish made him acutely sensitive to the craving for self-transcendence in others. Confusion captures this dilemma. If we can see past both Zweig’s successes and his failures to the struggling figure at their heart, we discover a writer who deserves to be admired for the ardent, unflagging compassion he felt toward human weakness in all its guises. Empathetic confusion suffuses his work. In this sense, he knew himself, and us, very well.

—GEORGE PROCHNIK

CONFUSION

For J. A.