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"Beware of Pity" and the Claims of Sympathy
Beware of Pity is the only completed novel by Stephen Zweig, an Austrian novelist, playwright, and biographer. I never heard of the guy before a French friend mentioned the book in an e-mail, but evidently he was hugely popular in the 1920s and 1930s. I was glad to have discovered his novel, which is a psychological epic, high drama, and nail-biting suspense all in one. I have read the new Anthea Bell translation, which I highly recommend.
The question that haunted me throughout the reading was this: How much of a claim does one person have over another? Or, to phrase it the way it actually occurred to me while I read, "Oh God, make it stop." We've probably all been in situations where we felt put upon yet were dragged along because we felt like we owed something. In this work Zweig took all those situations and amped them to the Nth degree, all the awkwardness, all the resentment, all the apprehension, and slammed them into an emotional trainwreck that fascinated me with the force of every cramped and uncomfortable moment in my life.
It's interesting to think about the claims that bind the hapless cavalry officer Anton Hofmiller to the temperamental heiress Edith Kekesfalva. The liberal view of individuals, according to Michael Sandel, admits two main types of obligation. (How far one chooses to trust Sandel on liberalism is a matter of debate, but I think he gets the main points right even if he subtly misunderstands/misconstrues others.) One type of obligation is incurred by choice, as in a contract. The other is the universal negative obligation not to violate others' fundamental rights, such as the obligation not to murder or steal. Is Hofmiller bound to do everything he can for Edith because he chose to keep her company in the first place? Or because she would be grievously psychologically wounded if he parted ways with her, and so whatever she did would be on his conscience?
The arguments for Hofmiller to be there for Edith even when the situation becomes untenable for him seem to have elements of both the contractual and negative/universal obligation, but neither quite seems to fit. On the first class of contractual obligation, the young lieutenant had no idea what he was getting into when he chose to start visiting what he saw as a poor crippled young girl (oh yeah, there's ablism in this baby all right) and arguably never signed on for quite so much. On the second class of negative obligation, how can he be responsible for her special emotional vulnerabilities if he didn't do anything objectively offensive and so couldn't have violated her rights?
So goes liberal thought. As I progressed through the story, though, I could sense that the characters were operating under a very different set of morals than the liberal one. Maybe it's the time period, Europe before World War I, which is more accurately called the end of the nineteenth century than the beginning of the twentieth. Maybe it's Zweig's own neurosis, which seems to closely track Hofmiller's, that made him/them conscious of guilt for everything under the sky.
Whether the cause is historical or personal, my sense of the world of Beware of Pity--and every good book has a world of its own, it's not just genre books that have to build worlds--is that in this fictional space, people are much more interconnected than the liberal world of self-sufficient and self-responsible individuals would allow. Much of the way Edith Kekesfalva and her father make demands of Hofmiller would be categorized under "boundary issues" today, but aren't those boundaries cultural and personal constructs? Where does one person end and another begin? That, to me, was the most provocative question this book raised.
Since the book is about interconnectedness and not the myth of the independent self, it devotes itself to relationships. And any deep exploration of relationships, like it or not, has to talk about power dynamics. That was something else I liked about the work, the disparities of power and status. Zweig resists easy categorizations: Hofmiller is poor but able in both body and mind, being a strapping young man, but having the emotional resources of acceptance and sympathy which the Kekesfalvas crave.
Edith and her father on the other hand are rich enough to buy this penniless officer's ass many times over, but emotionally they are the needy party, and in fact they spend much of the book begging for Hofmiller's social and emotional riches. Hofmiller himself thinks of Edith as a helpless and innocent little thing due to her age and disability, until he is forced to face the reality of who she is. The book is full of these paradoxes of power that both anticipate and subvert the ongoing modern dialogue about class, ablism, and privilege. It's a story without easy answers and facile categories, which is why it feels genuine.
Even the moral divisions of victim and aggressor, selflessness and selfishness, are suspect. Much is expected of Hofmiller in regard to his obligations (whatever their source) to the Kekesfalvas, but the book also makes it clear that he gained a new sense of purpose and self-worth from the fact that he had people who needed him, to whom he was irreplaceable. Dr. Condor, the force of reason and compassion in the book, makes it clear that he himself finds life meaningful because of his supposedly selfless life and choices.
Of course, giving emotionally to others is a difficult road. It's hard to be enmeshed in another's life and be responsible for them, certainly, but is it too high a price? Maybe the boundaries of our liberal selves keep out more joy than they keep in. Maybe meaning is the price we pay for freedom in our liberal world, and vice versa.
I can't make that decision in any meaningful way for anyone else, though. I'm not sure I've made up my own mind. In the best tradition of liberalism, therefore, I can only invite readers everywhere to ask their own questions and perhaps discover their own answers within the terrible fascination that is Beware of Pity.
The question that haunted me throughout the reading was this: How much of a claim does one person have over another? Or, to phrase it the way it actually occurred to me while I read, "Oh God, make it stop." We've probably all been in situations where we felt put upon yet were dragged along because we felt like we owed something. In this work Zweig took all those situations and amped them to the Nth degree, all the awkwardness, all the resentment, all the apprehension, and slammed them into an emotional trainwreck that fascinated me with the force of every cramped and uncomfortable moment in my life.
It's interesting to think about the claims that bind the hapless cavalry officer Anton Hofmiller to the temperamental heiress Edith Kekesfalva. The liberal view of individuals, according to Michael Sandel, admits two main types of obligation. (How far one chooses to trust Sandel on liberalism is a matter of debate, but I think he gets the main points right even if he subtly misunderstands/misconstrues others.) One type of obligation is incurred by choice, as in a contract. The other is the universal negative obligation not to violate others' fundamental rights, such as the obligation not to murder or steal. Is Hofmiller bound to do everything he can for Edith because he chose to keep her company in the first place? Or because she would be grievously psychologically wounded if he parted ways with her, and so whatever she did would be on his conscience?
The arguments for Hofmiller to be there for Edith even when the situation becomes untenable for him seem to have elements of both the contractual and negative/universal obligation, but neither quite seems to fit. On the first class of contractual obligation, the young lieutenant had no idea what he was getting into when he chose to start visiting what he saw as a poor crippled young girl (oh yeah, there's ablism in this baby all right) and arguably never signed on for quite so much. On the second class of negative obligation, how can he be responsible for her special emotional vulnerabilities if he didn't do anything objectively offensive and so couldn't have violated her rights?
So goes liberal thought. As I progressed through the story, though, I could sense that the characters were operating under a very different set of morals than the liberal one. Maybe it's the time period, Europe before World War I, which is more accurately called the end of the nineteenth century than the beginning of the twentieth. Maybe it's Zweig's own neurosis, which seems to closely track Hofmiller's, that made him/them conscious of guilt for everything under the sky.
Whether the cause is historical or personal, my sense of the world of Beware of Pity--and every good book has a world of its own, it's not just genre books that have to build worlds--is that in this fictional space, people are much more interconnected than the liberal world of self-sufficient and self-responsible individuals would allow. Much of the way Edith Kekesfalva and her father make demands of Hofmiller would be categorized under "boundary issues" today, but aren't those boundaries cultural and personal constructs? Where does one person end and another begin? That, to me, was the most provocative question this book raised.
Since the book is about interconnectedness and not the myth of the independent self, it devotes itself to relationships. And any deep exploration of relationships, like it or not, has to talk about power dynamics. That was something else I liked about the work, the disparities of power and status. Zweig resists easy categorizations: Hofmiller is poor but able in both body and mind, being a strapping young man, but having the emotional resources of acceptance and sympathy which the Kekesfalvas crave.
Edith and her father on the other hand are rich enough to buy this penniless officer's ass many times over, but emotionally they are the needy party, and in fact they spend much of the book begging for Hofmiller's social and emotional riches. Hofmiller himself thinks of Edith as a helpless and innocent little thing due to her age and disability, until he is forced to face the reality of who she is. The book is full of these paradoxes of power that both anticipate and subvert the ongoing modern dialogue about class, ablism, and privilege. It's a story without easy answers and facile categories, which is why it feels genuine.
Even the moral divisions of victim and aggressor, selflessness and selfishness, are suspect. Much is expected of Hofmiller in regard to his obligations (whatever their source) to the Kekesfalvas, but the book also makes it clear that he gained a new sense of purpose and self-worth from the fact that he had people who needed him, to whom he was irreplaceable. Dr. Condor, the force of reason and compassion in the book, makes it clear that he himself finds life meaningful because of his supposedly selfless life and choices.
Of course, giving emotionally to others is a difficult road. It's hard to be enmeshed in another's life and be responsible for them, certainly, but is it too high a price? Maybe the boundaries of our liberal selves keep out more joy than they keep in. Maybe meaning is the price we pay for freedom in our liberal world, and vice versa.
I can't make that decision in any meaningful way for anyone else, though. I'm not sure I've made up my own mind. In the best tradition of liberalism, therefore, I can only invite readers everywhere to ask their own questions and perhaps discover their own answers within the terrible fascination that is Beware of Pity.