[NYRB Classics; 2012]
Confusion, like other Stefan Zweig novellas recently published by the New York Review of Books Classics, is a deceptively simple tale. In prose that is swift and easily readable in one long sitting, Zweig narrates the story of a professor named Roland as he looks back from the other end of a productive and impactful career, recounting the central relationship — heretofore unknown by colleagues on the occasion of presenting him his Festschrift — that set him on a scholarly path.
After a rather libertine initiation into Berlin student life, brought to an abrupt end when his father turns up only to discover his son’s primary vocation (“As usual in the evening, I was entertaining a girl in my cheap student lodgings”), Roland transfers to a provincial university to give his studies another go. There, in a strange inversion of his father’s surprise visit, Roland walks in on the lecture of a particularly impassioned English professor and is immediately smitten with the unique form of pathos and depth that he sees on display. The professor suggests that Roland move into his spare room, and thereafter they develop a bond of mutual attraction that draws Roland under the thrall of his professor’s ideas about aesthetic beauty, and draws the professor out of a prolonged period of inactivity to begin anew on his shelved magnum opus on Shakespeare. Yet their relationship is plagued by an inexplicable alternation of warmth and coldness from the professor towards his student, the source of which is revealed in a confession that draws the novella to a close.
In his introduction, George Prochnik tells the reader that a more suitable translation of the novella’s title might be “Maelstrom of Emotions.” Confusion has the feel of a stripped-down bildungsroman and this alternate translation accentuates the fact that the uncertainties that Roland feels throughout the book have their sources in the awkward transition from youth to adulthood. This is played out especially in the odd triangle that develops between Roland, the professor, and his wife, and which has at its root the professor’s repressed (suppressed may be more apt) homosexuality. At the story’s climactic revelation, this transition reaches a tentative resolution, the professor’s confession more or less calming Roland’s nerves and leading him to a heightened understanding of himself and how the world works (evidenced by the measured way in which he can retell these events so many years on).
The “confession” that closes the book is brave if we think about the cultural context of Germany in the 1920s. The professor’s passions displace him from the center of the lecture hall, where, despite the interruption of WWI, German academics had built a considerable amount of class power and prestige. His occasional disappearances bring him to the outer edges of German society (physically at the edges of towns and in the dark and dangerous interstices of the urban fabric; symbolically at the liminal space of recognition by the community, opening himself up to scorn, censure, professional suicide). Roland comes to understand that his beloved professor’s desires are diffuse (or confused) for a complicated set of reasons and that the end of education is not as straightforward as a Platonic turning around of the soul towards the light.
Or is this choice of subject matter as brave and nuanced as I’ve just presented it? There is another side to Zweig’s resurgence that I think is worth noting, partially because it is amusing, partly because it raises a key issue about Confusion. In an interview with Full Stop, the English novelist Lars Iyer claimed that he wanted his work be subjected to the same kind of take down that the critic Michael Hoffman so dazzlingly performed on Stefan Zweig in The London Review of Books. “I have a desire to be told off, to be not allowed to get away with it,” Iyer wrote.
What has a sentimental and indulgent reading community allowed Zweig to get away with? According to Hoffman “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing.” Hoffman finds confirmation of his assessment from Zweig contemporaries like Elias Canetti (“I believe nearly all his teeth were extracted”), Leopold von Andrian (in reference to reading Confusion: “reluctantly, a spoonful a day, like a nasty-tasting medicine…each sentence incredibly pretentious, false and empty – the whole thing a complete void”), and even Joseph Roth, who lived off of Zweig’s patronage for a decade (see his letters to Zweig here). The list could go on (Hoffman relays stories of Thomas Mann passing his evenings in Princeton “debating which of Zweig, Ludwig, Feuchtwanger and Remarque was the worst writer”), but you get the point — an uninteresting bourgeoisie writer more interested in chasing audiences and personal enjoyment than saying anything that is meaningful or reflects political commitments.
This is surely an unsympathetic and unfair reading of Zweig, whose fame and growing popular readership during his lifetime and now is bound to disquiet some critics. There is much in Confusion that comes across as formulaic (e.g. it won’t take long to figure out the climactic confession) and Zweig’s exploration of the exclusionary and petty aspects of European society cannot compare to an Austrian with teeth like Thomas Bernhard. But the fact that these novellas trade in some well-vetted crises does not make them uninteresting, and Hoffman is, I think, in the minority in disparaging Zweig’s ability as a stylist (though my sympathies do tend to align better with Hoffman’s set of malcontents). Despite the precipitous shifts that hurry along novellas like Confusion and The Post-Office Girl there are episodes that open onto dark or surprising horizons, ones that cause you to linger. And, of course, these are novellas, a form that has different constraints and potentials than novels or more experimental narrative forms.
All this is to say that Confusion, like Zweig’s other recently republished novellas, has enough of an edge and enough moments that punctuate the straightforward narrative structure to attract new readers. Confusion will resonate with anyone who has felt the tension between desire and knowledge that sits at the heart of pedagogical relationships.
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