Dave's Book Blog: "Beware of Pity" by Stefan Zweig

There is a frame story in which an author meets a young man who has served with distinction during the First World War and become a war hero ... and who then explains why he isn't heroic.

The main narrative is then told, conversationally, in one long monologue, unchaptered, with some repetition (although it is too polished for real speech). In this way it reminded me enormously of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, although that conversation is more of a meandering ramble and this is chronologically and narratively straightforward, although there are one or two excursions into sub-stories that add little to the main narrative.

Fundamentally, the triggering incident is when a young army officer, sexually naive, socially innocent, makes a faux pas. And the consequences follow like a line of dominoes, each triggering the next with the inevitability of fate. It's like watching a car crash happening in slow motion and it is mesmerising. I certainly wanted to turn the pages and discover what would happen, even though I was sure what the outcome must be. And I was wrong! The ending was exactly as Aristotle recommends in his Poetics (6.1) when he says that a twist should causes astonishment yet nevertheless have, in retrospect, a causal connection the the plot, like the denouement of a good murder mystery.

The major theme of the book is set out when the young army officer reads The Thousand and One Nights: “I read the opening story about Scheherezade and the Sultan ... I had come to the strange story of the young man who meets a lame old cripple on the road ... In the story, the cripple calls out desperately to the youth, complains he can't walk and asks if the young men will let him sit on his shoulders and carry him for a while. The young man is sorry for him ... he helpfully bends down and takes the old man on his shoulders. However, the apparently helpless old man is a djinn, a wicked magician, and as soon as he is on the young man's shoulders, he suddenly winds his bare, hairy legs around his benefactor’s throat and cannot be thrown off. Mercilessly, he rides the helpful, sympathetic lad as if he were a horse, whipping him on without mercy or consideration, allowing him no rest. And the unfortunate youth has ... to go on and on, the victim of his own pity, carrying the wicked, cunning old man on his back.” (pp 250 - 251) Beware of Pity, indeed.

The second major theme is that of unrequited love ... but from the point of view of the love object. What responsibility does he have to respond to the love?

Selected quotes: I had to give page numbers because it was unchaptered.

There are some tremendous descriptive passages of which my favourite are of a full moon and of a storm:

“A huge full moon stood overhead, a shining, polished silver disc in the middle of the starlit sky ... a magical winter seemed to have descended on the world in that dazzling moonlight. The grave looked white as freshly fallen snow ... and the trees themselves seem to be holding their breath, standing now in the light and now in the dark, like alternating mahogany and glass. I cannot remember ever feeling moonshine is haunting as here in the total peace and stillness of the garden, drenched in the icy light of the moon, and the spell it cast was so deceptive that we instinctively hesitated to set foot on the shining steps as if they were slippery glass.” (p 135)
“Shop signs were rattling and banging, as if woken in alarm by a bad dream, doors slammed, the cowls of chimney pots creaked ... the few late passers by hurried from one street corner to the next as if blown on a wind of fear ... the Illuminated town-hall clock gaped at the unaccustomed void with a foolish white gaze.” (pp 206 - 207)

Other quotes:

“The conversation was drowsy, and as slow as the smoke from a cigarette burning down.” (p 36)
“She has eyes like coffee beans, and indeed when she laughs it's with a softly sizzling sound like coffee beans roasting.” (p 43)
“Theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.” (p 72)
“All that I myself expected and wanted of life was to do my duty properly and not incur disapproval.” (p 80)
“Just as our excellent military band, in spite of its rhythmical verve, played nothing but music for brass - hard, cold, down to earth, intent on nothing but keeping time, lacking the tender and sensuous tone of stringed instruments - so even our most cordial regimental occasions had none of that muted fluidity that the presence or even the mere proximity of women adds to any social gathering.” (p 83)
“In the same way as there is an ineradicable awkwardness between a creditor and a debtor, because one inevitably gives and the other takes, a sick person always nurtures a secret irritability and is ready to flare up at any visible sign of concern.” (pp 85 - 86)
“In general a long illness wears out not just the invalid but the sympathy of others.” (p 86)
“Our whole world, street by street and room by room, is fill of sad stories, is always flooded with terrible misery.” (p 88)
“This creative magic of pity.” (p 89)
“We often accuse him of suffering from chronic quotationitis.” (p 92)
“We always fall hopelessly prey to the delusion that nature endows the particularly gifted with a particularly striking appearance.” (p 125)
“Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.” (p 241)
“At the age of twenty-five I had never entertained any idea that women who were sick, disabled, immature, old, outcast, marked out from other women by fate would dare to love.” (p 276)
“Only at that moment did I faintly begin to understand ... that the outcasts, the ugly, the faded and afflicted, the social misfits desire with a much more passionate and dangerous longing than those who are happy and healthy, that they love with a dark, fanatical, black love, and no passion on earth is felt more greedily and desperately than by those of God's stepchildren who have no hope, but feel that their earthly existence can be justified only by loving and being loved.” (p 277)
“Pity is far too lukewarm a feeling, an emotion to be felt between a brother and sister, a poor imitation of real love.” (p 278)
“Every form love takes, even the most ridiculous and absurd, involves the life of another human being.” (p 287)
“A lame creature, a cripple has no right to love ... someone like me has no right to love anyone, and certainly none at all to be loved. She ought to crawl away into a corner and die, not upset other people's lives with her presence.” (p 293)
“As you hear bells ringing in church towers when you are drowsy.” (p 362) Did Zweig have tinnitus?
“Love detects rejection in every inhibition of the beloved, every evidence of restraint, it suspects unwillingness in any reluctance to make an unconditional commitment, and it is right.” (pp 363 - 364)
“Lazarus must have looked like that when he rose from the grave, bemused, to see the sky and the blessed light of day again.” (p 389)
“The only effect of those three cognacs was to make my feet feel leaden and set off a buzzing sound inside my head, like the high-pitched noise of a dentist’s drill before it hits a truly painful spot.” (p 391) More evidence on tinnitus.
“I was God that evening. I had created the world, and behold, it was full of kindness and justice.” (p 397)
“It was not exactly walking, more like flying close to the ground, the unsteady, tentative flight of a bird with broken wings.” (p 402)