Zweig MS 137

Autograph draft. The review relates to novels by three European writers newly published in English translation.

Begins: 'Not long since I saw an advertisement of [deletion] a novel . . .'

Ends: ‘It has sparks of the divine fire’

The works discussed are:

Thomas Raucat, L'Honorable Partie de Compagne (Paris, Gallimand, c. 1924), translated by Leonard Cline as The Honourable Picnic (London: John Lane, 1928). Mentions also Raucat's Loin des Blondes (Paris: Gallimand c. 1928).

Julien Green, Mont-Cinère (Paris, [1926?]) translated by M. A. Best as Avarice House (New York and London: Harper Bros., 1927). Mentions also Green's Adrienne Mesurat (Paris: Plon, 1927) and Le Voyageur sur la Terre (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Français, 1927).

Stefan Zweig, Verwirrung der Gefühle (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1927), part 3 of Die Kette: Ein Novellenkreis, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul as Conflicts: Three Tales (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928).

Signed at head 'Arnold Bennett'. Many autograph deletions and insertions. The names RAUCAT and MORAND entered in the left-hand margins together with crosses and word-counts.

The novelist Arnold Bennett began writing weekly articles on books for the Evening Standard in 1926 under the heading 'Books and Persons’. The headline in print for this review (not present in the manuscript) is 'New Authors Discovered. A "Genuinely Interesting" French novelist' [referring to Thomas Raucat as the main subject]. Though capable of reading the originals in French and German, Bennett mainly discusses the translations. In the review of Zweig's Conflicts, he shows familiarity with the earlier work of the translators, (Maurice) Eden Paul (b.1865, d.1944) and his wife Cedar Paul (b.1880, d.1972). The couple published translations from German, French, Italian and Russian, including Karl Marx's Kapital, and became the chief contemporary translators of Zweig's work. However, Bennett has never heard of Zweig himself, and he castigates the publishers for not providing biographical details about the 'new foreign author'. They claim that Rolland and Gorky 'have recognised [him] as one of the great story-tellers and psychologists of our day' but Bennett wants to know facts and to validate their opinion. He compares and contrasts Zweig's tactful approach to the subject of homosexuality with Proust and Gide, and draws parallels with Thomas Mann and Goethe in his 'sententious semi-sentimentality' which is 'characteristic of good German literature'. He concludes 'But the book is more than respectable. It has sparks of the divine fire.'

Bennett seems unaware that several of Zweig's works were already published in English by 1928: Paul Verlaine (1913), Emile Verhaeren (1914), Roman Rolland (1921), The Burning Secret (a translation of Brennendes Geheimnis, 1921), Jeremiah (1922) and Adepts in self-portraiture: Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy (1928). Like Conflicts, three of these were published by Allen and Unwin, and Rolland and Jeremiah were also translated by Eden and Cedar Paul.

This is the only manuscript in the British Library Zweig collection which refers to Zweig’s own work