Stefan Zweig - The Royal Game

The very extravagance of Zweig’s admiration for Freud eloquently attests to his own aspiration to be the psychologist to his culture. In return, Freud’s enthusiasm for Stefan Zweig’s work may have been a little excessive. He declared Zweig a “personal friend” and his novella, Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau ( Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman , 1927), which closely resembles Chess Story , a “little masterpiece.” Zweig’s analyses were not quite psychoanalyses, but the characters he so freely invented in his fictions often seem like the subjects of gracefully presented case histories.

Without literally repeating himself, Zweig frequently turned in his novellas to a narrative device— a form of presentation he might have patented, he employed it so frequently—that I might call a secondary narrator. He tends to enforce the intimacy of his “case histories” by resorting to a first-person narrator and at the same time keep this intimacy under control by having the events of his tale largely presented by a third person, who exploits the narrator as the recipient of a fascinating tale.

In Chess Story , Zweig uses this distancing technique twice. In relating the background and the education of Mirko Czentovic who, as a kind of idiot savant, is ignorant of everything except chess, he employs a friend of the main narrator to fill in the indispensable details. And then, later in the novella, he has Dr. B. tell the narrator the story of his terrible schooling in chess by the Nazi conquerors of Austria. This crucial story oddly parallels the information the narrator had received about Czentovic’s apprenticeship: there is more than one way of growing into a master chess player. And this echo underscores Zweig’s indirect manner of getting the story underway and keeping it alive through the denouement. It permits him to be at once revelatory and discreet. He can be as liberal as he wishes to be, and no more.

A look at Zweig’s Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman , the one that Freud called a “little masterpiece,” should clarify his use of this technique of the secondary narrator. A distinguished widow in her early forties who has remained faithful to the memory of her late husband, on holiday in Monte Carlo, visits the casino and is fascinated by the sight of a young gambler’s hands. He is handsome, the age of the lady’s elder son. As he leaves the casino in despair, having lost a great deal of money, and possibly intending to kill himself, she follows him and tries to save him. She talks to him, gives him money, goes to his room, eventually spending the night with him, having exacted his guarantee not to gamble anymore. She promises to say goodbye to him at the railway station but misses his train. She then make a final visit to the casino, where once again she catches sight of the gambler’s hands. She reproaches him angrily and he throws at her the money she had given him for the trip home. The novella does not end until Zweig lets the reader know that her mission had failed: the young man committed suicide.

The narrator does not expound the story directly; rather, he visits the lady at her invitation and she volunteers the story of her fateful twenty-four hours. In a paper of 1927, “Dostoyevsky and Parricide,” Freud praised the story for being “brilliantly told, faultlessly motivated,” but he also acknowledged that it was not a psychoanalytic story—Zweig had, to Freud’s mind, laid out the motives of all the actors “faultlessly,” but had concealed these motives from himself as well as his readers. Freud also recognized that the “ façade given to the story by its author”—the secondary narrator—“seeks to disguise its analytic meaning.” By having the reputable middle-aged woman pour out her tale, which the narrator then retells as he was told it, the author and his narrator both stand protected. The lady, who has been excessively frank about all sorts of intimate physical and psychological details, refuses to tell him whether she and the stranger whose life she had wished to save made love. Freud, in summarizing Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman , obviously thinks that they have. But the text is equivocal, and Zweig avoids fully disclosing an oedipal entanglement of mother and son that Freud sees as his true subject. Thus Zweig draws a last veil of reserve over his story, which is anything but a case history.

This reserve haunts Chess Story as well. The author tells his readers through his primary narrator that Dr. B., who has become the principal figure in the novella, “would never again touch a chessboard.” Is that all? Will he eventually deal with his trauma and live, or, like Stefan Zweig, defeated by exile and depression, let his past conquer him and die? We know that Zweig’s world, the liberal culture of Central Europe, was no more; for a writer who could always count on a sizable and admiring audience, this was an ordeal hard to acknowledge and hard to survive. Before the all-too-final act of suicide, Zweig, writing Chess Story , might have included his readers more frankly, more openly, about the desperate struggles within him. But his discretion, so typical for him, kept him from such confessional candor. It is as though Chess Story is a message from an earlier age, from the World of Yesterday.

ON THE great passenger steamer, due to depart New York for Buenos Aires at midnight, there was the usual last-minute bustle and commotion. Visitors from shore shoved confusedly to see their friends off, telegraph boys in cocked caps dashed through the lounges shouting names, trunks and flowers were carried past, and inquisitive children ran up and down the companionways, the orchestra playing imperturbably on deck all the while. As I was standing a bit apart from this hubbub, talking on the promenade deck with an acquaintance of mine, two or three flashbulbs flared near us—apparently the press had been quickly interviewing and photographing some celebrity just before we sailed. My friend glanced over and smiled. “That’s a rare bird you’ve got on board—that’s Czentovic.” I must have received this news with a rather blank look, for he went on to explain, “Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s crisscrossed America from coast to coast playing tournaments and is now off to Argentina for fresh triumphs.”

In fact I now recalled this young world champion and even some details of his meteoric career; my friend, a more assiduous reader of newspapers than I, was able to add a number of anecdotes. About a year previously Czentovic had overnight entered the ranks of the greatest masters of the art of chess, such as Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker, and Bogoljubov. Not since the appearance of the seven-year-old prodigy Reshevsky at the New York chess tournament of 1922 had the penetration of a complete unknown into that circle of luminaries caused such a wide sensation. For Czentovic’s intellectual traits certainly did not seem to promise a dazzling career. It soon emerged that, chess champion or not, in private Czentovic was unable to write a correctly spelled sentence in any language, and, as one of his irritated peers gibed, “his ignorance was just as absolute in every other area.”

Czentovic’s father, a penniless Yugoslavian Danube bargeman, had been killed in his tiny boat when it was crushed one night by a grain steamer in a remote area; the twelve-year-old boy had then been taken in by the local parson out of pity. The good reverend coached him at home, doing his level best to make up for what the lumpish, taciturn, broad-browed boy was unable to learn at the village school.

But the parson’s efforts were in vain. The letters of the alphabet had been explained to the boy a hundred times, yet still he stared at them as though he had never seen them before; no matter how simple the subject, his brain labored heavily but retained nothing. At the age of fourteen he still counted on his fingers, and, though he was now an adolescent, he could read books and newspapers only with great difficulty. Yet Mirko could not be called reluctant or willful. He obediently did what was asked, carried water, split wood, helped in the fields, cleaned the kitchen, and reliably (though with annoying slowness) finished any task he was given. But what irritated the good parson most about the awkward boy was his total apathy. He did nothing unless specifically told to, never asked a question, did not play with other boys, and undertook no activity that had not been explicitly assigned to him; once Mirko had finished his chores, he sat around listlessly indoors with the vacant look of sheep at pasture, taking not the slightest interest in what went on around him. While the parson, puffing on his long peasant pipe, played his usual three evening games of chess with the local constable, the lank-haired blond boy squatted silently beside them and gazed at the checkered board from beneath his heavy eyelids, seemingly somnolent and indifferent.