Worry makes the best literature

Why pick worry as a topic?

Indeed. One of the few benefits of anxiety is the creation of fictional worlds or alarming perspectives wherein writers can indulge and play out their fears. This may heal, it may exacerbate, I’m not sure. Nevertheless, a writer’s worries, which come in many flavours, are a boon to readers with similar tastes.

Your first choice is Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys. What’s the flavour of worry here? 

Powys was one of 11, several of whom also published, and was an extremely sensitive soul. He was born in the 1870s, which meant he suffered the shocks of a new noisy century when he was old enough to worry properly. His medium was more existential angst and self-doubt, offering an antithesis to Whitman’s universe-embracing enthusiasm. Powys started out teaching at girls’ schools in England, which he somehow parlayed into an ongoing gig on the American lecture circuit, where he spent his middle years. He had a wife and child in England and a common-law wife in the US. His autobiography doesn’t mention either of these women, and just barely, his mother. He was an anti-vivisectionist and a vegetarian. He enjoyed long walks and mistrusted airplanes. Depending on whom you ask, he was a notable footnote to 20th-century literature or an overlooked genius.

And the book? 

So our hero, Wolf Solent, is, coincidentally, an extremely sensitive soul, alive to every blade of grass and housefly, and he suffers for it. He’s in his 30s when he returns from teaching in London to work in the small town of his youth, where his deceased, free-loving father had disgraced the family by having an affair. He is coming to a presumably serene writing assignment for the local squire, to escape the intensity of the city, to understand his past, and to somehow vindicate his tightly wound mother. Nothing goes to plan. A battle between his father’s joie de vivre and his mother’s nervousness rages in his head. He becomes sympathetic to his father’s mistress, becomes attracted to his half-sister. The job he’s come for is not at all what he’s expected. In fact, nothing in this town provides relief from intensity. There are many contemplative walks through the English countryside where he plays out every reading of his life in order to make some sense of it. His reverence and concern for the natural world is laudable and, admittedly, hard-going in places. Powys hated most things modern – such as, say, technology and capitalism – so he lingers where others might move along.

Wolf falls for the local tombstone carver’s daughter, but even this isn’t a totally healthy plot. Part of his attraction to her hinges on his hearing about a photo of her straddling a headstone. Her name is Gerda. You could read the book just for the delight of the names.

Why do you love it? 

For an adult, Wolf has epiphanies with the frequency of a 15-year-old, which leaves him perpetually resolute and perpetually changing his mind. His constant revelations of nature’s bounty and his miserable doubts of reality itself run in counterpoint to the actual events of the book. Read the first chapter for the feel of things. It traces his thread of exultation and despair as he sits quietly in a train on his way out of London. There’s another marvellous chapter where Wolf and Gerda court each other with zeal and only the reader can hear how poorly they understand each other. This manic perspective feels at odds with all the pastoral indulgences, but it makes the book a unique record of the literary moment of the late 20s.

Your next book is Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. 

I generally object to a title being such a fortune cookie, but Beware of Pity works somehow. Zweig was an Austrian Jew, born in the 1870s, a pacifist, who fled Austria in 1934 and later he and his wife killed themselves because of Europe’s prospects in 1942. His concerns were quite real and moral.

What’s the story? 

Just before the First World War, Hofmiller, a young Austrian officer from a modest background, finds himself stationed in a town where he knows few people. He scores an invitation to the home of the richest local family and, at the end of the evening, realises he has not spent time with their attractive daughter, Edith. He invites her to dance, but realises – to everyone’s horror – that she is sitting in a wheelchair and can’t even stand. The worst faux pas imaginable, and he flees. But he is given another chance, which he eagerly accepts. To be nice he starts spending more and more time with the family, focusing on Edith, keeping her company – keeping himself company too. Relationships seem almost balanced at first. She’s sweet, if a bit over-eager for his attention. It is the father, though, who compels Hofmiller to involve himself more, to help find treatment for her condition, to lie to her about its effectiveness, to let her believe she has a chance of recovery. It’s all, of course, in the name of keeping her happy. Hofmiller’s eagerness to please, Edith’s father’s eagerness to please – beyond what is practical or real – subtly becomes a ticking bomb of anxiety. Where it naturally leads is to Hofmiller’s proposal of marriage. A good soldier, he will do everything he can. Devastation everywhere.

Where’s the fun?

It’s a tense, emotional thriller for the well-meaning. All the flickers of behaviour in this family are brought into focus; all the tiny efforts Hofmiller makes to do the right thing are understandable in their urge to appease. And it’s all so excruciatingly felt, even as the plot drums along, taking you through drawing-rooms and barracks. But it’s more than a melodrama. Beware of Pity was first published in 1938. It is an ethical story and a dark one: every good intention and social nicety leads him further from the truth and leads Edith further astray.