[A few years ago I started a blog to keep track of my scattershot thoughts about books I was reading. At some point a malicious hacker or computer virus wrecked the whole damn thing and I gave it up. Recently I fished a couple of pieces I wrote out of the Internet Wayback Machine, so here’s one of them. I still recommend the Stefan Zweig book , and think about it a lot, but the Henry James story is mostly lost to me.]
Two books I’ve read recently have had me thinking about pity. The first is Stefan Zweig’s amazing novel Beware of Pity, which may be the most beautifully cruel title I’ve ever heard. I don’t think Zweig is quite as well-known today as he should be. In the early decades of the 20th Century he was a real literary superstar. “In the 1920s and 1930s Stefan Zweig was an immensely popular writer, a man who had to barricade himself in his house in Salzburg in order to avoid the fans lurking around his property in the hope of waylaying him,” Joan Acocella writes in her introduction to the New York Review Books edition.
Zweig was a product of that magical Viennese, late-Hapsburg era I’ve always loved. Though his prominence post-dates it, one of his best-known works today, The World of Yesterday, concerns itself a world already mostly lost in the ’30s and ’40s when he wrote it, and which is today of course just the memory of a memory. Yesterday was written during Zweig’s post-Nazi-ascension exile in Brazil. He and his wife committed suicide there in 1942.
Okay, we’re getting away from the book, although I want to also note that Zweig wrote the novella Letter From an Unknown Woman, which Max Ophüls would later adapt into one of my favourite movies.
Beware of Pity opens with this interesting note:
There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness…; and the other, the only kind that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.
The book tells of cavalry officer Hofmiller, stationed in a small town somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian empire. One night Hofmiller is invited to the house of a wealthy local man..or maybe I should say the wealthy local man. He has a fine old time, an intoxicating time, really, until he commits a horrible faux pas: he invites the man’s young daughter Edith to dance, not realizing that she doesn’t have the use of her legs.
The rest of the novel tells of the consequences of that one mistake, a social error that leads to madness, misery, ruin and death. The horribly shamed Hofmiller apologizes and quickly (you might say guiltily) befriends the family, ignorant of Edith’s growing passion for him. His inability to detach himself from the fate of the girl, who Zweig characterizes rather without pity himself (she’s vividly selfish, spoiled, prone to throwing tantrums), and his inability to be honest with her, her increasingly pathetic father, and of course, himself, is the source of all the trouble. That dishonesty seems to really be the distinguishing characteristic of that “second kind” of pity, which is why I suspect Zweig used the strange descriptor “creative.”
I also just read Henry James’s short story “A Most Extraordinary Case,” which doesn’t really deal with pity per se..at least not in the same searing detail. But it’s so similar in some ways that it occurred to me that a comparison could be interesting. I’m going to warn you right now that I have no idea if this is going to prove fruitful whatsoever, and that this blog post might end up a complete flame-out. But hey, it’s not like you’re paying me by the word for this stuff. In fact, “you” might not exist at all as I have no idea if anyone will ever read this.
But we’re getting off-track again. The protagonist—”hero” might be too strong a word*—of “A Most Extraordinary Case” is, as in Beware of Pity, an officer, albeit an American one, Colonel Ferdinand Mason, a young veteran of the Civil War. As the story opens he’s suffering in a run-down New York City flophouse, victim of some unnamed wasting disease (tuberculosis would be a good guess), in the months following the war.
Mason is discovered by his aunt (not a blood relative, James makes clear, but the widow of his uncle), who whisks the invalid off to her estate in the country, where he meets her lovely niece (no relation to him) Caroline, and is attended to by a kind young country doctor, Horace Knight.
The weak Mason begins to fall in love with Caroline, exerting himself to, if not win her attentions, at least seem worthy of it. It is obvious to the reader that she doesn’t reciprocate, and that she and Knight have begun a romance. Their engagement is announced. Mason acts brave, goes out to a ball, over-exerts himself, and almost immediately, falls much more ill and dies. (It is also obvious to the reader that Mason’s lapse in health is in some way a failure, or retreat, of his will to live, and the story’s title refers to Dr. Knight’s astonishment at his quick collapse).
Edith and Mason are both invalids in love with someone who will never return their affections (although both societal role and gender are reversed in the two stories). Both of their passions lead to tragedy of some sort, although the implications of Edith’s affect far more characters than herself, and we get the sense, in the James story, that Mason’s loss will not be felt too keenly by anyone, save perhaps by Caroline in some small sentimental way.
Maybe this is because Mason consciously avoids using pity to manipulate the people around him, while Edith actively courts it, and encourages the dishonesty and delusions, however well-intentioned, that come with it. I was going to say that pity isn’t really an important element of James’s story, but I’ve changed my mind; it is, only on a much more implicit level.
I’m not sure if there’s anything profound to be gotten out of comparing these two stories, but their parallels really jumped out at me as I was reading The New York Stories of Henry James this week. Honestly I think the Zweig book is a lot richer and more involving than the James story, although it’s also a lot more melodramatic, a lot more sturm und drang. More people should read it.
And those are some scattered, incomplete thoughts on the subject of pity. Maybe I’ll find some tidier way to wrap it up and revise this entry later [I never did], but this window has been open on my computer [should have used a word processor instead of composing it in my browser] way too long, so that’s all I got for now.
*Although strictly speaking Mason is far more a hero, at least in the field of war, than Hofmiller; it’s not clear if Zweig’s protag has ever seen actual combat.
**At least not clear to me because I can’t remember.
