Paul Zweig (1935–1984)

Paul Zweig's DEPARTURES is a book I picked up at a going-out-of-business sale at a local bookstore. I'd never heard of him, but the cover copy and blurbs depicting him as a "Wandering Jew who left New York for France" and spent a decade there sounded intriguing. During those ten-plus years he taught himself French, became fluent, engaged in numerous affairs, married and divorced, dabbled in Communism and traveled around Europe extensively.

But here's the most intriguing part of Zweig's story. He wrote this book near the end of his life while he was under treatment for lymphoma and leukemia. He knew his time was running out and he chose to keep writing. In fact, the last several years of his life - when the cancer came and went and came back again - were the most productive of his writing career. He wrote an in-depth critical study of Walt Whitman and other things, including this book. He chose to try to get down all of those experiences of his twenties, which included his intellectual development (as he read his way through as many French classics as he could), and his sexual education too. And there are some very erotic episodes here. Like this one -

"My mattress with its deep crevice was our river. There Claire gulped with amazement; there I was a spectator to my body's nervous ability to engender this quicksand of a trance which drew me down, and yet - was I imagining it? - seemed to exclude me. Claire, freckled and wild, was like a chick, its mouth unhinged and gaping for a worm. I deposited the worm over and over again; I was inexhaustible. I wondered if I would become dehydrated from loss of body fluids."

Passages like this brought to mind Philip Roth's young Alex Portnoy, who had similar worries about his own guilty solitary sex. Indeed Roth and Zweig were contemporaries, although Roth grew up in Newark, and Zweig in Brighton Beach. The similarities and parallels are unmistakable. But Zweig's story here is mostly about that decade he spent in Paris and Europe, which also included several years of fringe involvement with the Communist party, which was associated with helping the Algerian rebels in their revolution against France. Zweig dwells long on this part of his life, and talks of all of his reading and studies too, which I sometimes found rather tedious and skimmed over.

Parts 2 and 3 of the book are especially poignant, as they cover his later years and return to New York, where he marries, has a daughter, and divorces again, just as he learns of his cancer. He also maintains a home in France, which he escapes to periodically, even during his treatment. Zweig continued to write throughout the several years of his illness and remissions, but he finally lost his battle to cancer at the age of forty-nine. He was not quite finished with this book when he died, but what he had finished was carefully edited and completed by his friend and editor, Ted Solotaroff.

Paul Zweig packed a lot into his short life. In witness to that, I'm going to attach his 1984 obituary from the NY Times archives. R.I.P., Paul.

"Paul Zweig, a poet and critic whose recent study of Walt Whitman was highly acclaimed, died in the American Hospital in Paris on Wednesday. The official cause of death was not disclosed, but Mr. Zweig had suffered from lymphatic cancer for the last six years. He was 49 years old.
Mr. Zweig was abroad to research a book on cave paintings in France, ''The Quest for the Beginning,'' which is expected to appear in The New Yorker.
Mr. Zweig, a native of Manhattan, was the chairman of the department of comparative literature at Queens College in alternating years, and was scheduled to head the department this fall.
Aware of his illness, he appeared to his friends to be more prolific than ever in recent years. A fellow poet, Galway Kinnell, said, ''He was an inspiration to me.'' A new book of his poems, with the working title ''Eternity's Woods,'' will be published in February by Wesleyan University Press.

Mr. Zweig's ''Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet,'' was published last spring. Reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review on May 6, Quentin Anderson wrote, ''This is no ordinary book on Whitman; it is the first successful attempt to show the nature of the chrysalis 'Leaves of Grass' burst out of.'' The reviewer concluded, ''Mr. Zweig's book will hereafter be indispensable.''

His books of poetry and criticism included ''The Adventurer,'' ''Against Emptiness,'' ''The Heresy of Self- Love'' and ''The Dark Side of Earth.'' An autobiographical work, ''Three Journeys: An Automythology,'' recounted his experiences and thoughts while on a solitary journey in 1974 into the African desert, his inward journeys as a young intellectual in Paris, and his conversion to the teachings of an Indian guru.
Mr. Zweig reviewed many works of poetry, criticism and fiction for The New York Times Book Review in the last 10 years.
He is survived by his wife, Vikki Stark of Manhattan; a daughter, Genevieve, from a previous marriage; his parents, Samuel and Celia Zweig of Brooklyn, and a sister, Ruthellyn Weiner of Manhattan.

I will recommend this book, DEPARTURES: MEMOIRS, very highly.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)

M. Davidson, New York Times, 30/11/1986: In his memoirs collected in ''Three Journeys'' (1976), the poet and critic Paul Zweig, who died in 1984, identifies himself with an image from Hieronymus Bosch: a figure sealed inside a transparent globe who floats serenely above the world. For Zweig it is an image of the artist, one who ''possesses everything, and also nothing. He has been offered a key to the myth, but the vehicle of his vision is also his prison.''

Quotes:
This feeling of man’s nothingness in the face of the Divinity […] is undoubtedly an element in all religious experience. […] Because God seeks Himself, man must flee himself. Such is the moral dilemma of Christianity. (pp . 30/31)

The effect, according to De Rougemont, is that Tristan and Isolde need their despair. [...] One conclusion is that Tristan and Isolde do not in fact love each other (pp. 74/75)

But the love poetry of
Provence contains a mystery of another sort. For one hundred years this tradition of vernacular poetry flourished, expressing a new style of life: a refined attentiveness to the grace of the emotions and to the virtues of individual merit. Then the crusading armies of Simon de Montfort brought to the south the new dispensation of the thirteenth century: the intolerance, bloodshed, and inquisitory vigor which all but destroyed whatever the twelfth century had promised. For the troubadours were not only poets; they had been the spokesmen and arbiters of an entire civilization. (p. 86)

For Spinoza, “self-satisfaction…is the highest thing for which a man can hope.” (p. 138)

For a moment the harmony of seeing and being se en would pass from the words into the living community of his audience. Jean Jacques [Rousseau] would show to his friends a man engaged in the pure delight of ‘being himself’; and this show would be, in turn, a mirror in which each could admire his own true self. In this way Narcissus would create a society of brothers from which the loneliness and vanity were banished. (p. 157)

The nature of my subject has led me to consider works of religion, philosophy, literature, and social criticism as if they were elements of a single discourse. (Conclusion, p. 265)

Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, the high traditions of Hinduism, offer a philosophy of self-liberation which is founded on the ancient mystical precept: in order to gain the self, you must lose it. (p.267)… (altro)