Sunday Morning, 2023! “Chess Story” by Stefan Zweig

For the longest time, Stefan Zweig was little-known and much forgotten in the English-reading world. And then, he was “rediscovered,” which is all for the good (although I hadn’t known he was ever forgotten). It’s a bit hard not to wonder, though, to what extent his sparkling prose and tight, clever stories are still overshadowed by the details of his death. Like Walter Benjamin, whose suicide may have elevated his philosophical stature a notch, taking one’s own life can also imbue an artist’s work with a tragic shadow that might dim its light a few lumens. Certainly, the end of Zweig’s life, inspired as it was by a feeling that the brutality of the Nazi era had forever snuffed out the radiance of Viennese Enlightened high culture even as Hitler was defeated, poses a certain challenge to those of us still living on the side of civilization: what if he was right? 

On the other hand, we certainly shouldn’t forget that Zweig’s prose is worth returning to because, like Proust or Collette, it’s pure pleasure to read him. His stories are clever and unique, the characters are vivid and memorable, and there’s seemingly no extra fat left in the plotting. While the stories fly by, they contain hidden depths. Zweig makes it look easy.

Certainly, the first thing that strikes me about “Chess Story,” the last piece of fiction Zweig wrote, is how well-constructed it is: a group of men meet on a ship to Europe from New York. One of them is a world-champion chess master, a crude and uneducated orphan who picked up the game while watching the parson who took care of him play with friends. He is a familiar type in Zweig’s stories: a monomaniac who knows one thing inside and out, and can barely function otherwise. No one can beat him, although a macho cutthroat businessman just about goes nuts trying. Our narrator, about whom we know nothing, acts as a sort of faceless recording device for the boy’s story.

(They’re having more fun.)

Into their game steps a stranger: the son of a well-connected Austrian family from the old dual monarchy, not unlike Zweig himself, he learned to play the game from a purloined book, while being kept in a bleak place of solitary confinement by his Nazi torturers. With no other stimulation, the stranger played every game in the book and then every game he could think up in his mind, eventually taking both roles in a sort of endless schizophrenic competition. He eventually snapped, and was released by the psychiatric doctors as too broken to confess anything of any use. The Nazis were done with him anyway.

Now, these two chess masters have wound up on the same ship: one, a moral idiot who has never lost a match; the other a remnant from the enlightened high culture of Europe driven half-mad by the emotional and moral vacuum of fascism. They’re both slightly one-dimensional characters. Naturally, their match assumes the features of a battle between good and evil, a sort of proxy war for what Europe had just been through. It is, in other words, hard to read this novella as anything but a parable, its ending as in any way removed from Zweig’s own end.

(“The Chess Players” by Honoré Daumier)

And that’s leaving aside the fact that the novella was, in fact, published after Zweig’s death. Was the cold and calculating chess master an avatar of the technocratic planners behind the Final Solution? Coldly strategizing while unencumbered by anything like basic decency? Was the stranger who survived by living in his own imagination a proxy for Zweig himself, finally driven insane by the schizophrenia of total lonesomeness in the moral desert of evil? Is it actually possible for a man of culture and feeling to stand up to a society-wide death of affect? Would they just go mad trying? Or is this stance just a sort of mental game-playing while the ship sinks?

I don’t know. Honestly.

In the end, though, I do have to wonder if maybe the only worthwhile stance in the face of the instrumentalist meatgrinder of technocratic modernity is one of complete and total uselessness. Cultivate mental gardens. Perhaps we should all aspire to be of no use in 2023- especially to those who would press us into the corvée labor of “essential” workerdom. Learn things with no practical application. Write books and paint pictures that will be forgotten and rediscovered a million times. Fade into irrelevancy.

My New Year’s Resolution, therefore, is to finally finish learning Latin and Greek, relearn French, do a bunch of other things that will never earn me a dime, and make myself as close as possible to completely “irrelevant” once and for all. Hopefully, you will all join me.

And so, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, or pretending to play this New Year’s Day?