Stefan Zweig, Ideas, and the Importance of Reading
If you’re a devoted reader — or you love Wes Anderson’s ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ you might know Stefan Zweig already.
He was a writer and one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, producing biographies (his ‘Casanova’ is a wonderful read) and long, discursive books (such as ‘Beware of Pity’, also available through Pushkin) and delightful short stories and novellas.
His own story is a tragic one, and has been the interest of generations of writers since he died. The last months of his life are told with much beauty and empathy by Laurent Seksik in his book, ‘The Last Days.’
Zweig saw earlier than most what the Nazis would be capable of when they came to power. He fled Austria, first to England and then to New York, before finally landing in Petrópolis, Brazil. But he lived in fear of two things: that he was thought a coward for abandoning his people, and that the war would soon arrive on Brazilian shores. He dreaded the indignities he would suffer at the hands of the Nazis, and that he would be exterminated as so many of his friends and family had been in the Holocaust.
In 1942 Zweig took his own life, his wife Lotte joining him ‘in the abyss.’
It is a miserable story when presented on so small a scale, but Seksik’s book is anything but a miserable read. Instead, it is a testament to Zweig’s life and career — not a hagiography, to be sure, but an empathetic reading of what it meant for Zweig to write, and to have ideas.
On the subject of having ideas, Seksik has produced an excellent summary of the genesis of plot and character . To take us here, he relates the way in which the story that would become the novella ‘Chess’ arrived in Zweig’s mind.
In Petrópolis he meets his friend Feder, and Zweig suggests that they play a game of chess.
“Stefan was a mediocre player, even though he had recently picked up a little book that summarized the games played by the greatest grandmasters, a book he’d brought with him from New York without really knowing why. He had begun reading it on the boat that had brought them to Brazil and a new idea had come to him. He didn’t know what he would do with this story once he’d finished writing it. The plot had taken shape, at first in his head, then the words had come to him, almost effortlessly.” (p84)
There are, for writers, two things worth noticing here.
First, the idea for Zweig’s story was born of the book he was reading.
Does this mean that he stole the idea from someone else? No — certainly not. He was instead carrying on a fine tradition, a technique that any writer might avail themselves of.
Madeline Miller, winner of the last-ever Orange prize for fiction, was inspired by her mother reading Homer to her at an early age; Emma Donoghue was inspired to write ‘Room’ based on an earlier reading of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’ In the first case, exposure to a topic through literature sparked the creative process; and in the second, the work of one writer proved to be the launchpad for another. The two examples I give here are purely that — they are examples, and there is an abundance of others out there, only a Google search away.
There are many, many ways that inspiration can come to the writer, but it is undoubtedly true that good ideas for stories often come from other stories.
The second thing worth noticing about Zweig in ‘The Last Days’ is that he actually followed through with his idea.
This is the crucial part, one that many would-be writers perhaps under-appreciate.
Ideas are not so hard to come by.
Take a book out with you the next time you go to a cafe, or for a walk in the summer sun if you’re in a place still under lockdown, and you are almost guaranteed to return home with a usable idea in your head. Perhaps it will have come from the topic you are reading about, as with ‘Chess’, or perhaps, like Donaghue’s ‘Room’ you will see something lurking in the gaps left by another writer’s execution of an idea.
But when you get home, sit down and make a note of the idea. Start to develop it. Write as much as you can, and then think about what you have written.
Don’t file the idea away, or be one of those who say, “I have lots of ideas — I should be a writer.” There are many of ‘ideas’ people — in my experience, everyone is an ideas person. Be the one who takes the idea further, and get it down on paper.
And don’t think any less of your idea for whence it sprang. As Seksik continues:
“[Zweig] had never been prey to writer’s block. He would have certainly preferred to be better acquainted with the agonies of writing. He wrote like he thought. He sketched out the characters quickly, adventures would pop into his mind and the plots, which were all alike, would begin to take shape.” (p84)
There is enough room for the struggle that one might poetically call the writer’s craft; but getting the ideas you need to make a start need not necessarily be part of that.
And for those for whom the ideas do not come so easily, the cure, as Zweig knew, is simple: read.
