Twilight of the Renaissance: The Life of Juan de Valdes Book

If you had to live inside one of the following pictures, which one would you choose?

Choice A:



Choice B:




.... I am going to assume that aside from either the excuse of insanity or... no I really can't think of another excuse, we're all on board with Choice A, yes?


Let's try this one more time. Just to make sure, okay? One more time. You have two choices:

Choice A:



Choice B:



... Honestly, I am not trying to trick you. Once again, unless you are crazy, we're good with Choice A, yes?


All right then. I'm just making sure. And so is Zweig. Because unfortunately, he lived through an era when enough people decided that they had some reason that would justify Choice B. Twice. He's written hundreds and hundreds of pages asking, at an increasingly loud volume and withrising hysteria, whether we are really sure that we wouldn't like Choice A after all. Because he's not insane. He just had the misfortune to live at a time when it seemed like the world had become insane.

* * *
Stefan Zweig was born into the world of Belle Epoque Vienna, in the last glory days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was a precarious, creaking political enterprise, with several different nationalities, ethnicities, languages and administrative systems all cobbled together under Emperor Franz Joseph in its capital of Vienna. But there, like the Belle Epoque era in Paris, another creaky empire/republic/whatever they were at the time that was enjoying a long era of relative peace, there was no reason to know any of this. He was born into a Jewish family (which as you can imagine will become important later) in Vienna and lived the somewhat spoiled, pampered lifestyle of the upper middle class of the city. He was able to spend his young years devoted to reading and exploring as much of the rich intellectual life of the city as he desired, to spend his teenage years lusting after the celebrities of the Viennese stage and concert halls(there's a wonderful chapter where he describes the proto-fanboy culture of the time), and to indulge his Serious Debates of Ideas with his friends as often as he liked. He also, of course, was free to begin developing his writing, which would become his Art. (Always with a capital 'A', and he will thank you to remember it.)

Sure, there were conflicts, but generally as for what went on with the outside world, fundamentally that was only something they read in the newspaper, it did not come knocking at their door. There was probably a war of some kind in progress somewhere in their time, but only a little one. In that era, the world was honestly convinced that it was on the direct and infallible road to the best of all possible worlds. A general opinion existed that we had entered the 'Age of Reason' or what Zweig calls the 'Age of Security': for the individual, not the state.

The life Zweig describes living in pre-WWI Europe is strikingly similar to a modern, privileged upbringing (if one is particularly smart or talented that is). His childhood years were boring and safe, in the care of a somewhat repressive school that tried to 'mold' him, he rebelled (within reason) in his teenage years and chose to become a writer rather than a businessman, and after a rather astonishing early success, went on study abroad in turn-of-the-century Berlin, doing a small grand tour of Paris, London, and other cities in the meantime. He goes so far as to earnestly tell the reader that he had read, I swear to God, Scenes de la vie Boheme and came to Berlin to live them out in reality while pretending to go to college (and in reality going to the "university of life"- again, I swear to God). He meets writers and editors and artists and develops an international colleague base for himself while he is sewing his version of wild oats (which mostly seems to involve interacting with women who were "free and natural" and kneeling at the altar of various artists he meets.) He could have been any Serious Intellectual college student of today, with very similar values and a very similar lifestyle.

As with most memoirs when a writer looks back on their young days, there is a very strong rosy-tinted hue to these reminiscences. Here, Zweig takes that tendency to an extreme. Practically every place he goes and every person he meets is described with the strongest possible adjectives. Something doesn't interest him, it "fascinates him inordinately", he decides not to go to class because "I did not meet a single man there whose knowledge would have held me spellbound". In Paris, this is how he describes the scene: "workers cheerfully went on about the smartest of boulevards in their blue blouses... a young couple might start dancing in the street any time, not just on the fourteenth of July, with a policeman smiling at them- the street was common property!" A sentence is not complete without some form of emphasis on a word, some adverb or adjective. I can't count the number of times he is "fascinated" or feeling "extremely" something-or-other, or a man he meets is the most "brilliant" and "indescribably" wonderful something. One famous Viennese actor, for example, is described as "even in private conversation, articulating every word clearly, every constant being sharply pronounced, every vowel full and clear." He claims that he still hears poems he read then, twenty years before, in this actor's voice. Normally, this would mostly be the sign of an old man looking back to the Good Old Days, like I said. And that aspect did wear on me after awhile, I have to say. (Too many adjectives spoil the broth.)

However, it also obviously serves a political purpose. This memoir was written in 1942. He is looking back over an era so different by comparison that every single adjective must have seemed justified at the time. It is hard not to remember that when reading this. It's that old story about how beautiful the summer of 1914 was (doesn't everybody say that?), but just stretched out over hundreds of pages. It's an argument and a lament for a world that doesn't seem to understand what it has lost- not just once, but twice. Even for a modern reader, with all my skepticism of unreliable narrators and biases, it actually did give me pause to think about what progress might have been like in every day life if Zweig can describe something so close to how we live today happening nearly a century ago. It makes me wonder, in a Spengler-esque sort of way, if we're nearing the same stage his society was at in the cycle of our culture, if we just took a big step back and are just getting back there now, or perhaps just how long it takes ideals developed in certain liberal corners and circles to develop.

The story of the years 1914-1939 has been drilled into all of our heads too much to need it to be told again. If asked, I am sure we'd all tell the same sort of elegy and once upon a time tale that's been passed on to us. (It starts with bourgeois security and economic expansion, industrial advancement and socialist slogans, and then provides shades of nationalism on the rise and border brushfires growing larger in the Balkans, builds to entangled alliances and desperate telegrams and the shot heard around the world. And that's just chapter one.)

But what Zweig provides is not only the first hand account of someone who lived through it all, and did it in a few different countries under several different governments, but he specifically provides a first hand account of much of the creative, literary life of this era. He was a very popular writer in the interwar era, so I understand, and was given welcome and friendship by many other artists and important people of the era. He developed close relationships with many of them over the years and is able to give first-hand reports of the character and and thinking of many of them. Some examples of people he had a personal acquaintances or interactions with are: Theodore Herzl, Romain Rolland, Rilke, Yeats, James Joyce, a Belgian artist called Emile Verhaeren who he works for for a time, Rodin, Paul Valery, Gorky, Sigmund Freud, Shaw and HG Wells and Richard Strauss.

Zweig comes from an earlier era that worshiped the idea of individual genius. You know that scene in Proust where Marcel is talking to all these military friends of Saint-Loup's about battle strategy, and he isn't really interested in it until someone can show him how the whole thing is the work of an individual genius, a Napoleon? Zweig is like that. He collects famous signatures and, later, the efforts of the "creative mind at work" of artists (generally their edited manuscripts.) He wants to see the moment when "genius" and "the immortal" comes into being. It's actually quite sweetly idealistic, the way the he worships Art as this thing outside of the brain that is almost spiritual, that comes from the ether somewhere. But it also makes sure that he can't interact with these guys without bowing before them. His love of adjectives is all over the place here. Each one of these guys is described in painstaking and breathless detail. It is just striking how much of a fanboy he still is, even in his adult years (one must remember he is writing this at 60). He had a real belief in the idea that these artists were like little gods come to life. Not a single one of them comes off the worse for wear under his pen- most of them have their positive legends added to, as a matter of fact. Nothing could be more glowing than his reviews of each and every one of them. It was a little famewhore-y, actually, I have to say. He seems like he'd be one of those guys in Vogue or Vanity Fair who get paid to write about going to parties with fabulous famous people, mentioning all the big names and places in bold letters just to make it clear how In The Know they are.

It was interesting though. I learned that Rilke was a sensitive sort who couldn't bear loud noises but tried to volunteer to go to the front in 1914 anyway. James Joyce was exactly the sort of person you'd think he would be. Romain Rolland was a pacifist, Herzl a literary editor who grew only gradually into his role as a leader of the Zionist movement. There's a great story about how he goes to Rodin's studio and stands there, forgotten, while Rodin obsessively fixes some perceived error in his statue, basically orgasming in place at the thought of seeing the god Genius at work again. Sigmund Freud comes off as a brilliant Cassandra that Zweig ranges himself with on the subject of the war and the inevitable nature of the beast inside us we all repress. There's a scene with Shaw and Wells that made me laugh. It sounded like me, at sixteen, going to see The Importance of Being Earnest for the first time. Zweig has a similar appreciation of polite English word fencing. Apparently they enacted the tea-and-cakes scene, but, you know, over books instead of men. It sounded really awesome, don't get me wrong. I just wish that he'd been a tad less breathless and crazy-eyed about the way he reported it. It might have actually served his purpose, which I assume was to make me regret that this wonderful literary world with all its gorgeous Genuises, no longer exists or can exist because of the wars, much better if he had been able to seem more clear eyed about it. I completely understand why he couldn't, and why he would have been in raptures about it all at the time- the contrast between that and his present life was just too much- but at some point it does make you want to sit back and ask what he's leaving out. Maybe it wasn't that wonderful after all, you know?

But because of his tone, I think perhaps my favorite scenes were the one or two times that he let himself be ambiguous about someone. These were the one or two times he let himself admit that he associated with someone or was involved, even peripherally, with something that wouldn't pass moral muster or doesn't deserve five-star reviews.

One story involved his association with Richard Strauss. Strauss, by Zweig's estimation is the "greatest living musician," in Germany at the time that the Nazis take over. He's also a man with a family trying to get by and stay on the safe side of the line he can walk in defiance of them. He gets in good with the Nazis early, so he can be secure of their support, and because of that he is tarnished with that brush. But Zweig, I think in large part because Strauss qualified for his pantheon of geniuses, wants to defend him. He knows he can't do so in an unqualified way, but he twists and turns himself into contortions trying to worship him as much as possible in spite of him. He praises him repeatedly for the work they did together on an opera in 1934 and especially his loyalty during that process. Strauss refused to have Zweig's (Jewish) name taken off the opera's program, despite the express displeasure of Goebbels and resigned from the National Council of Music he was on after they let the performance go forward and then quickly changed their minds after the opening. He offers tempered praise for the "at times enchanting" opera that the public was thereby deprived of from their "greatest musician." He mentions that descriptive phrase many times in those few paragraphs that he deals with this story. Even with the brush of the Nazis on him, Zweig is incapable of fully letting go of his urge to engage with the Art and ignore the rest.

The other incident that intrigued me was the one with Mussolini. Yes, that's right. Mussolini. Sometime in the '30s, Zweig is asked to be involved with a weird case. An Italian doctor's wife calls him and tells him that her husband has been sentenced to ten years' hard labor in a distant colony for one of those crimes that the Fascists mostly made up in those years. So she calls him to see if he can use his influence (?) which I guess she thinks he has, with friends at ministries, to get his sentence commuted. Understandably, none of his friends want to get involved. So Zweig writes Mussolini himself (because apparently he's a fan), setting out an argument for the guy. And Mussolini... agrees! Promptly! The guy's sentence is lessened, then halved, then done away with all together in the space of a year. And hilariously, Zweig's reaction is like: "Well, he may be a fascist and fascists are bad, but he did do this one cool thing one time and it wouldn't be fair of me not to tell you about that! So there! Mussolini! Helped me out one time!"

Both those stories seemed like they were a lot more indicative of the morally blurry, bizarre, arbitrary atmosphere that it is my understanding really existed at this time period, and especially the rather slippery personas that a lot of the "modern" artists of the time exuded. A lot less like Immortal Genius Come From Heaven, and a lot more like people riding the wave and using what they've got to get by. That and a lot of the stuff Zweig didn't talk about. Like how he supposedly fled Vienna ahead of the Anschluss in dread, seeing shades of things to come.... and left both his wife and his mother there, apparently not feeling the same urgency for them. Like how he tried to get married but couldn't because of the bureaucratic complications of being a "stateless person" in London in 1939. Like his odd friendship with Rathenau, apparently conducted entirely in moving vehicles and the spaces between appointments, watching a powerful mind NOT engaged exclusively with Art (but able to understand it), navigate the world. His pages long justification for going to the Front to see it for himself during WWI (sort of an early version of disaster tourism avant le mot) without sacrificing his pacifist stance was pretty fascinating as well.

I wish that, in addition to providing us with the glowing memories so that we knew what we were missing in 1942 as well as the dramatically staged tragedies at appropriate moments, he had felt able to tell us more about those messier moments in between more often. There was a lot of honesty here, a lot of joy and passion and delight and sorrow. I just wish he felt more comfortable complicating things for us and showing more things as they really were.

I feel like a little bit of an asshole for saying a lot of this. I think maybe its just that Zweig and I disagree a little bit about what the best way to make people want something or regret something is or differ in the ways that we say goodbye. Or, I am reading this in a far different headspace than he wrote it in. That could also be the problem. He is trying so incredibly hard to get me to cry over a world that is gone, full of angels on earth and wise men who will never come again, full of laughing cafes and women who cut their hair and raised their skirts, and he thinks the best way to do this is to praise Caesar, rather than bury him. He never got a chance to move beyond that. Perhaps that's the real tragedy here. He couldn't bear to get to the next part- the part where you wake up the next morning and remember the faults of the past. You remember all the other times that you thought it was all over and it could never be fixed again. You smile and remember how you danced once more, that the first war indeed did end. You look towards the future and towards a free, dancing Paris once more. Which, tragically for him, he never got to see again. And it did happen not so long later. But he never got to that part. He just got to the first stage of grief, I think.

I wanted so much to see him come out that other side and realize that it had never been that good. Which means that right now, as horrible a nightmare as it is, is not such a far fall. Which means that it can get better, and it has before. People are people with awful flaws who do just terrible things to each other and they will do that, probably forever. And that is being human. Even those geniuses he worshiped do not descend from Mount Olympus, which I imagine, if he thought for a minute, he knew. Everything was so black and white in his mind when he wrote this. One of the signs of severe depression, so I'm told.

Another sign is magical thinking. Which I guess is what this is, in the end. It seemed almost like he was trying to sprinkle the fairy dust of these better times all over himself, as if if he could paint the most flattering, shining portrait of it possible on the page, he could somehow conjure it up again. As if, before he was through, it might appear once more, or perhaps it might give him courage enough to go on. I don't know whether this is true or not, but it seems that way.

It's tragic that he didn't find it. I wish he had. I wish that he had let himself wake up another day after this one and see that suicide wasn't the only way out. Sometimes I wonder whether this would have been better. He died, as the translator of his volume notes, with no knowledge of the Holocaust. How would he have reacted to this further descent into depravity? But he also didn't get to see the world reborn. And, with all the joy and passion he displayed here, he certainly deserved that.