Bookplanet: Paul Zweig

Paul Zweig's Journeys Into the Self -- by LEE SIEGEL

RILKE once said that fame is the sum of misunderstandings that accrue around a name. Though the poet, critic and memoirist Paul Zweig was admired in literary circles during his lifetime, he slipped through fame's embrace. That may have been his misfortune, but you can read the books of this "fierce little man" — as his friend, the poet Robert Bly, called Zweig at a tribute held last month at Poets House in Manhattan — unclouded by commentary and judgment, fresh, as if they had just appeared. And Zweig, who died of lymphatic cancer in 1984 at the age of 49, is well worth revisiting. At a time when writers often write with calculated eccentricity rather than out of a fateful obsession, and compose memoirs that seem devoid of self-understanding, his raw, original studies of culture and his masterly autobiographies provide a rich diet for famished readers. Zweig may have spent much of his life in the academy, but he wished to throw himself into the world and test his ideas against experience, and then measure himself against the results. He wanted a destiny, not a career.

As a student and later a teacher at Columbia, Zweig was surrounded by figures who seemed to raise abstraction to the level of action. Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, Robert K. Merton — these were the men who invented the Morningside Heights style of what you might call dramatic thinking. In books like "Sincerity and Authenticity," "Darwin, Marx, Wagner" and "On the Shoulders of Giants," they showed ideas affecting culture and society in a way that gave you the illusion of acting on the world simply by thinking as you read. Though Zweig's poetry is inspired — especially his stunning last volume, "Eternity's Woods" (1985) — his main achievement lies in his prose works, which include two remarkable volumes of memoir — "Three Journeys" (1976) and "Departures" (1986) — and two brilliant instances of dramatic thinking: "The Heresy of Self-Love: A Study of Subversive Individualism" (1968) and "The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World" (1974).

Zweig's studies lack the conceptual heft of those by Trilling and company. They seem, rather, to be borne along on poetic intuitions. Beginning with the Gnostics and ending with Baudelaire, "The Heresy of Self-Love" lyrically traces the idea of narcissism as a private stronghold against a hostile, mechanized modern world. For Zweig, withdrawal into the self wasn't necessarily an isolating pathology; it could provide essential strength and sustain one's original nature. "The Adventurer," another broad cultural history, explored the idea of travel and action, from Homer to Nietzsche, as a movable fortress against dehumanizing reality — a kind of portable narcissism.

The idea of individuality was Zweig's intellectual passion: individuality either as buttress against impersonal forces or as portal to a more meaningful life. Yet he feared that this grand obsession derived from his inadequacy. "An experience became real for me only when I identified and shared it by giving it a name," he observed ruefully in "Three Journeys." The impossibility of having an experience and making sense of it in words at the same time tormented Zweig. He wanted to live out dramatic thinking.

For him, the desire to be elsewhere presented itself literally at the moment of birth, in the form of "the mystic bloom one set out in search of on that fateful day of red-faced weeping and vulnerability." Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, only inflamed his inborn yearning for flight. "Why had this place become the symbol of not living to me, so that I had to get out or die?" he wrote in "Departures." After graduate school, Zweig pursued his "inner gallop" to France. Yet instead of transformation, he found himself ducking a boomeranging self: "During all the years I lived in Paris, I had almost daily flashes of the poolroom one flight up on Brighton Beach Avenue." New experiences seemed to arrive with his name already on them. Torrid love affairs, a fleeting marriage to a tempestuous painter, adventures with French Communists during the Algerian war — none of this satisfied the avid, restless Zweig. "I couldn't get far enough away," he wrote, "because I couldn't become someone else."

Zweig returned to Morningside Heights in 1966, remarried, began teaching at Columbia and then Queens College and established himself as a significant literary figure with "The Heresy of Self-Love." But his intellectual triumphs also marked crisis points in his life. The anxiety that he was not fully living returned to haunt him. In 1974, shortly after finishing "The Adventurer," Zweig took off for the Sahara, where he spent a month driving through sandstorms, encountering Christian ascetics, camping at desert oases and trying to plunge beyond words into indescribable experience. Later, though, he confessed that adventure had escaped him in North Africa. "Coming into the desert," he wrote, "I had taken my world with me, as a double of worries and longings."

It wasn't long before adventure beckoned again, in the dubious form of an Indian guru called Muktananda. After a friend arranged an audience with the swami, Zweig became an enthralled follower. Muktananda, a master of Siddha Yoga who was said to have achieved a state of perfect bliss through meditation and other spiritual practices, attracted many famous followers. With Muktananda, Zweig thought he had finally found the bridge over the chasm separating thought from experience, the effective "departure" from his narrow self: "During the first few weeks after I met Muktananda," he wrote in "Three Journeys," "my exaltation was so intense, so sustained, that I wondered, almost wistfully, whether I had stepped outside the human condition."

Under Muktananda's influence, Zweig installed a shrine in his bedroom. He traveled to the swami's ashram in India. Gradually, he found himself unable to write poetry. His marriage began to fall apart. Only in 1978, when his cancer was diagnosed, did Zweig's attachment to Muktananda — who was later accused of coercion and sexual abuse by some of his followers — come undone.

Zweig started to die in an apartment on Riverside Drive, then went to his farmhouse in the Dordogne, finally succumbing at a hospital in Paris. The critic Morris Dickstein, in a wise and beautiful introduction to "Departures," painfully remarks that dying made his friend a fuller person, more empathetic, productive and eloquent. Zweig's biography, "Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet," published in the last year of his life, remains one of the finest books on its subject. But ideas and death occupy two opposite sides of nothingness. Zweig had lived on ideas. Perhaps, in some mysterious way, the process of dying — of an ultimate "departure" — consummated his preternatural abstractness.

Zweig wrote about his inner and outer tumult with absolute, unsparing, unsentimental control. The prose flows through his thoughts and feelings like a clear stream dappled by shadows and light. His words seem to have fermented in his self-understanding. Yet it may be Zweig's insightfulness that invited his tragic obscurity today. In his landmark book "The Culture of Narcissism" (1979), Christopher Lasch cited Zweig as a case study in feelings of emptiness and inadequacy, thus transforming Zweig from the prescient chronicler of a condition to its generic result. But this misses Zweig's accomplishment, and his originality. Zweig registered, with creative joy, his psychic constrictions just before self-obsession became an all-pervasive cultural style. He wasn't just one of the pioneers of contemporary memoir. He was one of its ideal practitioners.

Walking around Morningside Heights, I occasionally think of Zweig as I pass the luxury apartment buildings, the upscale restaurants, the shiny new boutiques and hair salons. The self-enclosure that he analyzed and navigated by — and to which Lasch unfairly sentenced him — has become a part of our lives in countless ways. "Self-love" is no longer a heresy, and narcissism is no longer a subversive position. Dramatic thinking, which depends on a fundamental detachment from self, does not currently animate the sidewalks around Columbia. But you can still find it glittering and simmering in the work of Paul Zweig, that fierce man who searched for the undiscoverable place where words and experience are one.

(Lee Siegel is a senior editor at The New Republic. His collection "Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination" will be published in the fall.)