Stefan Zweig and the Mad King

Two copies of the Sonderfahndungsliste GB – the only two – were retrieved in September 1945 from a wrecked government building in central Berlin. Dated 1940, this ‘Special Search List’ named individuals to be arrested should the invasion of Britain succeed. It is a draft plan for cultural and political decapitation: Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Pankhurst, Winston Churchill, E.M. Forster. Penguin’s recent title Germany: What Next? is cited and the company marked down for a visit. After its publication in the Guardian, Rebecca West described the list to Noel Coward as ‘the people we would have been seen dead with’.

what was, to some, an occasion for the exercise of sparkling wits, was for others too late. The prospect of Nazi victory had plunged both Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig into depression from which they saw no way out. They had not known each other, though briefly corresponded about a petition to nominate Sigmund Freud for the Nobel Prize (Freud was also on the list).

Competence and bungling are curiously blended in this catalogue of those who were to expect trouble. How would John Lane, one wonders, founder of the Bodley Head and publisher of ‘The Yellow Book’, a bon vivant who died in 1925, have answered the charge in 1940 that he was a ‘Marxist’? Its compilers appear unaware that Freud, too, was already dead, but they did at least know their alphabet: Zweig’s entry comes second to last. He is summarised as: ‘(Jew), writer, emigrant’. There is also, unusually, an exact address given – 49 Hallam Street. In London from 1933, Zweig was at that address from 1936 until 1939, when he moved to Bath. By 1940 the Gestapo would not have found him in.

His association with the street, though, remained strong enough that his English publisher, who had become a close friend, issued a post-war ‘Hallam Edition’ of his works. A campaign in 2012 to commemorate his London years with a plaque at that address had failed a few years earlier when I began, in the autumn of 2016, to cast around for some way to respond to Brexit (PNR 240, 259). Ten years on, after an effort which has drawn support from Zweig’s many admirers (and some of his critics), a plaque will finally be unveiled at No. 49 this July.

Over the years he met W.B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw and Aldous Huxley. One thing the last decade has taught me, though, is that Zweig’s relationship with Britain was a subtler, stranger affair than any names of famous acquaintances can convey. It began early, too: a character sketch of Hyde Park, written on a first visit in 1906, appeared when he was still in his twenties. A description of Oxford during the vacation likewise. Through his account of how Handel wrote The Messiah, he described the creative process as a form of redemption – a theme to which he would return. The interweaving of English and German in that text is suggestive.

So when in 1933 he chose England for its relative calm, his choice was also part of an effort, as he entered his fifties, to revisit and revive an earlier self. Over an essay on Tolstoy, written in his mid-forties, the prospect of turning fifty already casts a heavy shadow. His output from the London years that followed that milestone were more novellas, a full-length novel and historical portraits, as well as further reflections upon British mores. There was in due course his description of the ‘House of a Thousand Destinies’, a refugee hostel in Whitechapel. When he moved to Bath in 1939 to escape Nazi bombs, it was to the city ‘where much of England’s glorious literature, above all the works of Fielding, was written’.

But perhaps more telling than any of this is a single page he wrote in a small town in upstate New York, having rented a house there in the summer of 1940. He had boarded the liner at Liverpool that June with just two suitcases, still hoping to return. The following year, he made inquiries about doing so, but flights by then were full for months and the crossing by sea was too dangerous. His books and a prized collection of manuscripts, built up over decades (some of it later donated by relatives to the British Museum), were still in Bath.

There was one object, he wrote now, which he missed more than any other. He acquired it as a young man on that first visit to London. To understand its hold on him we need to travel further back in time first. For several years after 1819 William Blake was ‘visited in his imagination’ by the spirits of remarkable figures from history: Socrates, Mohammed, King Solomon and Owen Glendower, among others. He wrote to a friend about the visions he saw, the futures he had looked into in the company of these ‘messengers’ – Voltaire, Robin Hood, William Wallace. He drew them, too, and his ‘visionary portraits’ are the result. Zweig was so struck by an exhibition that included some of these that he translated a booklet the curator had written about Blake’s philosophy as an artist.

This same curator told Zweig that one of the drawings was for sale. Blake’s portrait of King John became a prized possession – Zweig called it ‘the most beautiful drawing I have ever seen, worthy of a Leonardo’. He asked for it specially to be sent on from Vienna to London and it certainly hung at Hallam Street: ‘Of all my books and pictures, that single sheet of paper was my companion for thirty years,’ he wrote from America in 1940, ‘and the magically inspired face of the mad king has looked at me again and again from my wall. It is this drawing that, in my wanderings, I miss more than any other of my possessions now lost and far away. I had tried to recognise the genius of England in its streets and cities; suddenly it was revealed to me in the truly astral figure of Blake.’

Only after his departure from the country itself, only after separation from this talismanic image, was the meaning of his affection for ‘the genius of England’ disclosed to him. Attachment to a place is not, after all, self-evident. It may be retrospective: you cannot always see its meaning while you are literally in a place. Or for Zweig at least what England meant remained a work in progress, even when he was thousands of miles away from it. It is in England and with England that his famous autobiography, The World of Yesterday, ends.

It has grown so optional for so many that it feels old-fashioned to even ask how attachment to a country works. Yet the question is a stubborn one. Some people would like the next election to revolve around nothing else. With national identity being made to stand in for so much, it is perhaps worth taking this complex question as seriously as it can be taken, so as to distinguish it from those other questions with which it is easily
confused.

Exiled writers may acquire fluency in a language which comes in surprisingly helpful here. That this exile was Jewish makes his testimony all the more relevant just now. Polls suggest that the United Kingdom’s next Prime Minister will be a man who can see no reason to apologise for the anti-Semitic and other racist taunting in which he engaged as a teenager. This matters principally because of the obvious calculation behind it: that this refusal ‘speaks to’ a majority of English people.

Blake was visited by the spirits of more than one character from Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John. He had earlier written his own prologue to the play, which called on Albion to resist tyrants, and had illustrated the scene where John abases himself before the Pope’s legate. It’s unclear how literal were the visits of and his conversations with these spirits. The image owned by Zweig remains, for all that, a startling one. The features are those of an unstable but finely wrought face. The crown on his head appears almost to have grown out of it, antler-like. His eyes are black jewels trained warily on the viewer.

The epigraph to Zweig’s autobiography – ‘Let’s withdraw / And meet the time as it seeks us’ – is from Cymbeline. George Prochnik, in a largely sympathetic account of Zweig, The Impossible Exile, nevertheless reads this ironically, as ‘the precise opposite of Zweig’s actual life course’. But for as long as he sat beneath that drawing he was surely, in his way, ‘meeting the time’, whether or not he was literally writing from the front. Zweig’s Mary Stuart, written in London, devotes a chapter to the parallels between Darnley’s murder by Boswell and the murders of Hamlet’s father and King Duncan. Shakespeare is a regular point of reference for Zweig and central to his relationship with England, in the novella Confusion and his portrait of Dickens as in the autobiography.

The phrase ‘mad king’ is from King John, which Zweig would certainly have read, though he is not known to have seen it performed. One of the ‘unacted plays’, it was in fact staged in 1941, as it had been in 1899 (during the Boer War, a production attended by the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain). In 1980 an East German theatre set this distress flare of a play in a landscape reduced to radioactive rubble. The indiscriminate quotation of its concluding couplet on both sides of the Brexit debate (‘Nought shall make us rue, / If England to itself do rest but true’) suggests that these rousing lines have by now floated clear of any familiarity with where they are from.

The England of King John is a country ruinously at odds with itself. The ‘cynical veerings of power-figures given over to the pursuit of advantage’ set the tone. From the first scene, even his own mother acknowledges that John’s rule is without legitimacy. John is a cypher king who knows only that he wants power. He will say or do anything to win it and then keep hold of it. It’s a play about the devastation such a ruler visits on his country.

The spirit of King John attended also upon a contemporary of Blake’s, a very different kind of artist. In his Ivanhoe, Walter Scott would dramatise the ‘contagious disorder’ of this king’s character. Unlike Shakespeare’s play, the novel is a study in what does make for legitimacy in a ruler. If the cyber-champions of ‘cultural coherence’ can put their phones down for long enough, they might usefully refresh their acquaintance with this work. Its hero is a disinherited Anglo-Saxon nobleman. He also speaks Arabic and shows throughout a discriminating commitment to what is best about his national community. A neglected-looking copy of Ivanhoe may be found priced £0.99 or thereabouts in most charity shops.

This is both a patriotic novel and the work of a serious artist. It gives to a Jewish doctor the clearest expression of what is best about this particular national community: ‘It cannot be that in merry England, the hospitable, the generous, the free… there will not be found one to fight for justice’. Yet this doctor and her father have, by the novel’s end, had their fill of the casual anti-Semitism they meet with at every turn, represented here as a chronic flaw in English culture. They finally leave for the greater tolerance of Islamic Andalus. These are fictional characters but it is true John practised violent extortion against the Jewish community. Whether he thought it was a bit of harmless fun is not recorded.

*

Austrian and English friends alike have expressed surprise, incredulity even, that the campaign to celebrate so cosmopolitan a figure as Zweig should be co-ordinated from a country town. I tell them my surroundings seem to me as well suited as any to exploring this (or any other) refugee’s relationship with the idea of home.

That private emblem of ‘the genius of England’ which Zweig kept with him all those years, the King John who watched over that endless sequence of hotel rooms and rented accommodation, has come to mean steadily more to me over the past decade. The royal standard of home, which he ran up in one temporary lodging after another, allowed for rather more complexity in the matter of what a home is than any flag can. That’s a complexity I can explore without needing to stir very far.

John’s passion for hunting was well known and was associated in the popular imagination with his tyrannical nature. Wolves, wild cats and wild boar were to be found across Dorset in the thirteenth century, a far more thickly forested landscape then than it is today. Accounts show his purchase of and extensive restorations to a small castle in the hills behind my hometown. They show too the barrels of wine from Anjou which he ordered for his brief visits.

Of this hunting lodge there remain today only grassy humps in a field at the top of an unmarked track. Take small children there on a walk and they see in it at once a kind of naturally occurring play area. But beneath it lie the remains of one of a chain of properties around the country between which the mad king once roamed restlessly. You can do lostness anywhere and he did his as much ‘at home’ in England as he did it abroad. The place fell into disrepair after his death and much of its dressed stone is said to have been reused to build a house nearby.

I don’t even have to go that far. Ropemaking was my hometown’s economic mainstay until the 1960s (PNR 271). The first recorded mention of this comes from 1213, when John gave orders that there ‘be made at Bridport, night and day, as many ropes for ships both large and small and as many cables as you can, and twisted yarns for ballistae’. This was to equip the fleet with which he then failed to retake the provinces he had lost in France. John came to terms with rebellious nobles and signed Magna Carta two years later. The country was in its turn invaded by France the year after that.

Winston Churchill might have chuckled that England would always ‘owe more to the vices of King John’ than to the ‘labours of virtuous monarchs’. But it would do so of course only for as long as it remembered those vices and their consequences. Zweig, haunter of London’s great libraries, came in search of a country which had not yet scorned the past, even as the rest of Europe succumbed to the political fevers of the hour.

That text he had translated as a young man praised William Blake for ‘standing aside’ from his age, for insisting on his spiritual vision even when it appeared absurd to others. London was where Zweig imagined he might acquire sufficient distance from Europe’s building storm to get some perspective on it. Part of the city’s appeal was precisely his being less well known there. Obscurity would help to renew and deepen his vocation, ‘commit him to the permanent work’. When he applied for British citizenship in 1939, the Blake specialist he had translated more than thirty years earlier, who tipped him off about that drawing, wrote one of his character references.

From the wall of his flat in Hallam Street, as from so many walls before it, stared always the mad king and his unsettling story. Captivated young by ‘the genius of England’, and for all his later admiration of its calm as war was declared, was Zweig at some level aware, not least from the testimony of its own writers, that this was a country immune neither to sottish prejudice nor slick power-mongering? Those ‘patriots’ who call now for our children to be taught ‘British history’ might start by following their own great Bard’s matchless example, or Walter Scott’s, or indeed Stefan Zweig’s, that ‘(Jew)-
writer-emigrant’.

They will find useful guidance there to some of that history’s darker alleys and quieter byways. The legacy of King John is there for anyone who cares to look for it, in drawings and plays, in novels, in law, in history books and the fields of West Dorset. His tyrannical rule taught generations to keep a sharp eye out for the unscrupulous and the talentless in pursuit of power. It can do so still. Or, if it cannot, it is our own feeble attention spans which are to blame and nothing and nobody else.