The Impossible Exile by George Prochnik

Author:George Prochnik [Prochnik, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-613-3
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

GLOBAL ROULETTE

After a time, the only thing that mattered was to get out of New York.

In June 1941, Stefan and Lotte visited Atlantic City, where Stefan had business with a lawyer who helped with their personal affairs. The errand was partly an excuse for their two-day trip; they’d been wanting to survey the town. The couple walked along the boardwalk, between the dolled-up promenaders, past mammoth pavilions of entertainment where acrobats danced manically on high wires and horses were made to perform cruel, heart-stopping leaps from elevated platforms into the sea.

Even here, it seems, Stefan and Lotte bandied back and forth the possibility of coming to rest for a time. It was very pleasant in this “Super-Brighton of the USA,” Lotte wrote the family in England. Might Atlantic City be somewhere Stefan could work in peace? Might this place have the elements from which they could compose a life? Where they could find a little house to rent, be left alone, yet not be left too far out of anything? It was good to feel the wind off the sea, and it was essential that they find somewhere away from the heat of Manhattan.

But then they began to imagine what the mobs would be like once the season really got going. That would not be so pleasant. And Stefan could only have scorn for the bombastic grand hotels and tawdry pomp of the casinos. In New York, even though he’d calculated that a hotel with air-conditioning would give him four extra hours of work a day, he declared the few hotels that had such rooms “too expensive and too fashionable for my taste. I could not feel allright in such a Claridges—I never did even in the times when it was possible.” Atlantic City would not do. They would have to seek another haven.

On a number of occasions they traveled out to Long Island Sound to visit the jovial Dutch-American historian and illustrator Hendrik van Loon, a huge man whose fleshy nose and enormous hands resembled those of Erasmus, his possible ancestor. Van Loon had been banished from German soil after publication of his 1938 book Our Battle—Being One Man’s Answer to “My Battle” by Adolf Hitler. The author’s prodigious output, commitment to political tolerance, and unfailing popularity with the broader public placed him on familiar ground with Zweig—as did the indignation his work sometimes provoked from stringent reviewers. The Zweigs and the Van Loons enjoyed many hours of wide-ranging conversation around the latter’s cozy hearth in their large white house with blue shutters overlooking the waters of Greenwich Cove. Like Zweig, Van Loon felt that he’d been forced to become a one-man charity society. The previous summer he’d tallied up his contributions in food alone and realized he’d served up an extra 647 breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners in two months. “I’ve had every damn refugee in America here for a meal,” he said, “and half of them came late for the meal. Why can’t refugees learn some manners?”

Van Loon’s irascibility was good-humored, but it struck a deep chord in Zweig; the two drew closer.

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