644
PARTISAN REVIEW
ON PAUL ZWEIG
DEPARTURES. MEMOIRS.
By
Paul Zweig.
Harper
&
Row. $16.95.
Sex and death. They are everywhere in
Departures,
the late
Paul Zweig's second book of memoirs. In
Three Journeys,
the poet's
earlier work of reminiscence, sex (interlaced with left-wing politics)
was already an obsession, with Zweig meticulously cataloguing his
numerous carnal triumphs in the Paris of the sixties.
Death, however, was a subject new to the writer, not quite an
obsession, but, in light of the lymph cancer that eventually killed
him at the ripe age of forty-nine, yet another "endeavor" he took up
with gusto in order to recreate himself.
From the start of his career, Zweig's great theme was self–
creation. Yet he did not merely write about the subject repeatedly in
such works of criticism as
The Heresy oj Self-Love, The Adventurer,
and
his study of Whitman, the greatest of all self-creators . Zweig was, in
reality, always fleeing to exotic climates in search of a more suitable
identity, one more to his liking.
He wished to be anything but what history had dealt him: a
Jew, an American, a Brooklynite. "I possessed a mobility," he writes
in
Departures,
"that could thrust me into any character but the aban–
doned one of a boy born in Brooklyn who, in his flight from home,
had gone too far; who always seemed to go too far."
Wherever Zweig settled, though, he tended to be restless, dis–
satisfied. Nothing assuaged his quest for identity. Though he writes
of sex as the means for the complete dissolution of self, it proved to
be only temporary solace. In
Three Journeys ,
he states that when it
became clear to him that he and his fellow communists would not
"bring down" capitalism, he sought "to cure (his) anxiety by making
love as frequently as possible. Fucking became a form of exercise, an
erotic jogging."
The theme is embellished in
Departures .
"When we made love ,"
Zweig writes, "Claire would seem to bend into a depth, holding her
breath and reaching, and then, with a helpless gulp, find what she
had been reaching for, and expand. At that moment, I felt that I had
spooned something rich and sweet from inside a deep cup and drank
it , and had become her as she had become me.
It
was that exchange
of selves I reached for; to cast myself away and receive in my place
another me, a woman-self whose body took in , took in endlessly."
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