Beware of Pity!

I discovered the only novel Stefan Zweig finished and published in his lifetime, Beware of Pity (the original title is Ungeduld des Herzens) by sheer chance when working in the Massolit Café and bookstore. First it was the title that glued my gaze to the bookshelf and I immediately thought I must look into this book and most probably even buy it because irritation with being pitied is something I have been giving a lot of thought recently. Then I realized that this book was written by Stefan Zweig which made it even more irresistible, since his The World of Yesterday was a very formative reading experience for me. I am also generally a big fan of that generation of Austrian Jeish authors, including Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler and Joseph Roth. 

This post is going to be something like a book review without spoilers, so you can both read this and the novel afterwords. However, this post will also include a lot of personal reflection on my own life experience through the literary prism of the novel. 

Beware of Pity is on one level indeed the story of how pity destroys the life of the one who pities and the one being pitied, for

"there are two kinds of pity. One, the weak-minded, sentimental sort is really just the heart's impatience to rid itself as quickly as possibleof the painful experience of being moved by another person's suffering. It is not a case of real sympathy, of feeling with the sufferer, but a way of defending yourself against the sufferer's pain. The other kind, the only one that counts, is unsentimental but creative. It knows its own mind, and is determined ti stand by the sufferer, patiently suffering through too to the last of its strength and even beyond. Only when you go all the way to the end, the bitter end, only when you have that patience, can you really help peole." (pp. 242-243.)

On another level it is a story of a certina personality type that is unable to make decisions and even if they make up their mind, in the first moment someone tells them it is a bad idea, they slip into another decision suggested by this person and basically all their life is a stream of slipping from one situation to another, thus the type of people who do not live their life but to whom life happens. Lieutenant Hofmiller, the main character (and narrator for most of the time) is a extreme example for this, and this is to a large extent due to his being brought up in a military environemnt, isolated from civilian life. When the main story happens, he is 25 years old and he spent 15 out of 25 years of his life in military schooling and in the army, thus he was told what to do all the time and was deprived of responsibility. It is emphasized several times how extreme things military officers perform in defense of their "word of hounour" and in order to obey their superiors' order no matter how absurd it may be, even while being aware of the absurdity. According to the translator's afterword with this harsh criticism of the military Zweig wanted to make a pacifist point. In addition, after reading about all those "I just executed orders" type of defenses in Nuremberg, I can really embrace this criticism of military drill as something almost prophetic. This leads to another feature of the novel I like very much: it is not nostalgic of Austr-Hungary and the pre-1914 "happy peaceful time" at all! For a novel written by an Austrian Jew in exile after the Anschluss and for the author of The World of Yesterday this is a huge thing. In the framing story Lieutenant Hofmiller narrates his tragic story in a dark self-reflective key, making the point that this shameful past of his sank into oblivion just because WWI with its uncoceivable ocean of horror buried pre-war tragedies under itself. 

It was impossible for me to identify myself or sympathize with any of the characters of the novel, I felt very much like an outsider who is just intellectually curious where will all these events lead to. I missed the illusion that the story is a natural flow of events, for my taste it is a too obviously built up narrative, it alienated me a little, but I suppsoe this was intended by Zweig. After all the reader is not supposed to feel pity for anyone. Unfortunately it is hard to feel anything at all towards them. Mostly irritation. 

It was obvious from the beginning that the outbreak of WWI would be the turning point that would decide everything. However, it was possible to hope for a long time that it would simply enable Lieutenant Hofmiller to cowardly escape  from the town where he slipped into engaging the paralysed Edith von Kékesfalva out of pity. However, WWI turns out to be a gamechanger for every character's life in a different way than expected. 

Until then the gist of the story is that  Lieutenant Hofmiller out of ignorance and lack of experience disregards that Edith is a woman and as a lame woman she also has sexuality, just like other women. Therefore he keeps on being friendly with the Kékesfalva family out of pity, keeps company to the "poor child" out of pity, fulfills all requests of the lame girls' father out of pity. However, there is a point when Edith makes her love and sexual desire for him obvious. Here Hofmiller misses the last chance to withdraw from this entirely assymmetrical relationship, and sinks in it more and more deeply, out of pity. His shock over the discovery that lame women have sexuality, is the most important part of the text for me: 

"At the age of twenty-five I had never entertained any idea that women who were sick, disabled, immature, old, outcast, marked from other women by fate would dare to love. A young, inexerienced man facing real life nearly always forms his ideas of the world on the model of what he has heard and read, and inevitably dreams of his own experience in terms of other people's images ande examples. And in the books and plays I knew, or at the cinema (where everything is two-dimensional and simplified), it was exclusively young, attractive people who desired each other...." (pp. 276-277)

At this point I must say that I felt a bit of satisfaction that I am so much more "enlightened" at 27 than this guy was at 25. Of course this is an unfair comparison, as my generation has much more chance to get knowledge about sexuality than the generation born around 1890 had. However, I was from the beginning interested how those people who are not the typical Hollywood-movie and classical novel heroes, live their life, in terms of sexuality and everything else. My grandmother  spent the last 17 years of her life paralysed, her ability to move gradually deteriorating. Unfortunately she died young and I did not get to know her. However, my mom did talk to me about my grandma's life, feelings, thoughts, and hopes. Just like Edith von Kékesfalva, she believed the progress of medicl science would very soon find the means to heal her. So, I have some family history with disability and never thought of disabled people as alien who would not be interested in such things in which most people are -like sex. When I had a blind boyfriend, actually most people reacted in a very normal way, meaning they were not weirded out. But I did face two disturbing kinds of reaction as well: 

1. the "what a waiste of beauty, your self-confidence must be SO low if you do this" approach 
2. and the "OMG, you are such a good person" approach. 

Now, after reading Beware of Pity, I can put it in words much better than at that time what my problem with these approaches is: both of them assume that the disability of the person made me feel my feelings and that our relationship was not an as natural thing as a relationship between two healthy people. The second version specifically includes that my love was based on pity. 

Nowadays I educate myself and strive to be enlightened in other atypical and non-mainstream perspectives on love and dating, therefore I attend the Love Café and also participated in organizing a few of them, for example one on "dating as parents/dating with someone who has (a) kid(s)".

On the note of whether one loves those who  are easy to chose and those who are not there is a part in Beware of Pity that I find very nice, I disagree with it though:

"Why love the healthy, confident, proud and happy? They don't need it. They take love as their rightful due, as the duty owed to them, they accept it indifferently and arrogantly. Other people's devotion is just another gift to them, a clasp to wear in the hair, a bangle of the wrist, not the whole meaning and happiness of their lives. Love can truly help only those not favored by fate, the distressed and disadvantaged, those who are less than confident and not beautiful, the meek-minded. When love is given to them it makes up for what life has taken away. They alone know how to love and be loved in the right way, humbly and with gratitude." 

In the end, on a ligher note, as a Hungarian, it is fun to read about Hungarians from an Austrian perspective with Austrian preconceptions. The Kékesfalva family is Hungarian and so is Edith's friend, Ilona, whose "full lips, ripe for kissing" embody "Magyar sensuousness" for Lieutenant Hofmiller (p.84.) . I heard about Jewish sensuousness, but if "Magyar sensuousness" exists, then I should feel even better about being a Hungarian Jew. :)

Then, when Lieutenant Hofmiller expresses his surprise over Herr von Kékesfalva's kindness:

"and in the regiment we've always had the Hungarian gentry described to us as  particularly arrogant. But....I...I never met a kindlier man...." (p.139.)

at which point Doctor Condor enlightens our young naive Austrian that Herr von Kékesfalva is not a Hungarian noblemen at all, but a Jew. :)

Not on a Hungarian note, but something to remember from this book is the phenomenon of suffering from "chronic quotationitis" (p.92.). I particularly suffer from this in English conversations which for some reason make me quote translated Hungarian sayings to give examples to my point - a very weird habit which I don't have when I talk in Hungarian.

Apparently Beware of Pity has a film version from 1946!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/15/beware-pity-stefan-zweig-rereading

The page numbers of the quotes are from this edition: Stefan Zweig: Beware of Pity. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Pushkin Press, 2013.