The Post Office Girl
by Stefan Zweig
A Review by Ursula K. Le Guin
First published in The Literary Review, London, 2009
Artists work so hard, expending themselves with such
unselfregarding energy, that it seems unfair to demand of them that they also
be sick. But the 19th century notion that genius is illness laid the
onus of malaise on artists, particularly writers and composers. Before long, if
you didn’t boil your teenage brain in absinthe or withdraw to a cork-lined
room, you were expected at least to indulge in alienation, alcoholism,
bullfights, or suicide. German and Austrian artists started with an unfair
advantage, in that their whole society was a bit toxic. Mahler, Richard
Strauss, Thomas Mann, even Rilke: men of immense talent immersed in a cultural
neuroticism, a wooing of perversity, disease, and death. Now, at this distance,
their work appears stronger as it yields less to the mystique of
hypersensitivity, ceases to swoon over the sick hero-self, and reports with
sober clarity on their keen perceptions of a world out of balance. Mann’s story
“Disorder and Early Sorrow,” the tiniest of household dramas, catches an entire
historical moment in a few vivid, tender pages. On a larger scale, with a
darker palette, but comparable emotional power and control, Stefan Zweig’s
novel The Post Office Girl tells us a dark fairytale of Austria in 1926.
The book is an anomaly in Zweig’s work. His fame was based
on highly “psychological” biographies, and to a lesser extent on his fiction,
written in a high-strung, rather overwrought style. The Post Office Girl
was not published, perhaps not finished, during his lifetime. Evidently he
wrote most of it in the Thirties, took the manuscript with him when he fled
Nazism to Brazil, and was perhaps still working on it there before he killed
himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1942. Forty years later it was
published in German, and now, thirty years after that, in English. There is
nothing dated about it. It strikes no self-conscious poses; the language is
straightforward, precise, delicate, and powerful. The flow of the story, now
lingering, now fast and lively, is under perfect control. A postmodern reader
expecting linear exposition and descriptive passages to lead to “old-fashioned”
resolution is in for a shock. Perhaps because the book is a work in progress,
perhaps because Zweig’s conception of it was essentially ambiguous, there is no
“closure” at all. The moral desolation of the novel is unsparing, accurate, and
absolute. It is far beyond cynicism. It is as irrational and unanswerable as
Dostoyevsky.
The story begins in a dreary Austrian village, where
Christine, whose bourgeois family fell into poverty during the war, barely
supports her sick mother by her soulless job in the post office. Suddenly, a
telegram from the aunt who went to America before the war — and Christine is
transported to the magical world of a luxury hotel in the Alps, where wishes
she never knew she had are granted before she makes them. This long section of
the book is marvelously written, bright as mountain air, vivid with delight.
But the delight begins to be excessive, verges on hysteria. And so the reversal
comes — again, wonderfully told, unforgettably real. Back down into the ashes,
Cinderella.
And there she meets her Prince, Ferdinand, a bitter,
bad-luck veteran of a lost war and a Siberian prison camp. Where can these two
make a life together or find a life worth living?
Christine’s world consists of irreconcilable extremes —
hopeless need, obscene wealth — and she, wildly volatile and helplessly
impressionable, is tossed between these extremes with no chance of establishing
selfhood. The villagers, even the kind, ugly schoolteacher who adores her, are
hopelessly coarse, cowardly, and humdrum. Loathing them, she behaves as they
do. In the Alpine hotel, the wealthy guests live solely for the immediate
gratification of physical pleasure; adoring them, she learns within a day to
behave as they do. There is no middle way in her world. There is no middle
class. What Lao Tzu called “the baggage wagon” is simply not there. Nobody has
a profession — they merely scrabble after money. Nobody looks beyond self or
has the faintest spiritual striving or intellectual interest. All that, it
seems, was burned away by the war and the dreadful postwar years of inflation
and famine. She exists in an unspeakable poverty of mind and spirit.
Is this deprivation, this absence, what made Hitler
possible: the void that Nazism filled? Missing from Christine’s world is the
immense and apparently unremarkable middle element of life, the moderation of
the middle class, whose ethical standards she follows by rote, but without any
standard of intellectual or spiritual honesty to support the muddled, ordinary
decency that adolescents rage at, sophisticates sneer at, saints surpass, and
warriors, if they can, destroy.
The ultimate goal of war is to make slaves. Ferdinand the
ex-soldier/ex-prisoner knows that. He knows he has been not only permanently
damaged but permanently enslaved. At the end of the story he plans a desperate
effort with Christine to escape the bondage they both live in. But at what
cost? Perhaps they can buy justice, but can they steal freedom? What I see in
their future, if they have any — and I don’t want to see it, because after all
Christine is so vulnerable, so pitiable, so likable — is the two of them
standing wide-eyed and enthusiastic amid vast, massed crowds, screaming Heil,
Heil, Heil... But that is only what I see; what you may see, the author
of this beautiful, risk-taking novel leaves up to you.
NYRB Classics
April 15, 2008
ISBN 978-159017262
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