646
PARTISAN REVIEW
my genes, and 1 would start on some baffling new course: a mar–
riage, a religious conversion, an obsession that filled my life with
strangeness ."
Yet midway through his forties comes "another sort of shove–
even darker, more arbitrary" when he discovers that he is suffering
from cancer. Now death was no longer "a neurotic tune 1 wrote
about in poems," but rather a heaviness that invades his whole body.
He enters into the struggle a bit dazed but hoping for a good
fight. The randomness that has characterized his life, he believes,
has prepared him for his entrance into the life of dying - "the life of
all life, perhaps, but starker and more intense in [his
1
case ." Zweig
speaks of his illness as possibly his "final incarnation."
From this point on, the writing becomes extremely terse, unlike
the sometimes heady, sometimes overwritten passages devoted to
sex. Zweig is not being cold and clinical, but rather exact, wishing to
get every detail right. "I remember the sizzling of the electric knife;
the odor of burnt blood; the pushes and clips of the tools in the
freshly opened slit. 1 lay there as if clubbed, not thinking, not think–
ing. Then the doctor lifted out the rubbery clot, dropped it into a
container, and went down the hall to get a quick reading by the
pathologist. "
There are desperate and despairing moments as the writer sub–
mits to battery after battery of tests and the inevitable chemo–
therapy. But near the end of this brief-because incomplete - essay,
there comes a moment of illumination and peace that is directly in
line with the history of self-creation in Zweig's work . "I saw that a
writer's immortality exists in the moment of conception, in which
language has seized hold of him, and not in the posterity which few
of us believe in.... A work is not a life, but writing is living, and
now especially 1 wanted to live with all my might. 1 wanted to fight
off the shrinking effect of fear. Therefore , I wrote my book, while I
waited for the blood tests to speak ."
In
Departures
and in the last book of poems he wrote during the
period of his illness,
Eternity's Woods,
Paul Zweig rose to the occasion
with mastery and wit, and without a drop of self-pity.
ROBERT LEITER
