Posthumous Portrait

BALZAC (404 pp.)--Stefan Zweig, translated by William & Dorothy Rose --Viking ($3.75).

When Austrian-born Biographer Stefan Zweig committed suicide (together with his wife) in Brazil almost five years ago, he had been working on Balzac for a decade, referred to it as "the large Balzac" that was to become his magnum opus. Now published, his passionately sympathetic portrait of the prolific French novelist is clearly handicapped by the sudden death of its author.

As edited and somewhat rewritten by Zweig's friend Richard Friedenthal, it still exposes its incompleteness, especially in the sketchy final chapters. Balzac is the December choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which 13 years ago singled out Zweig's Marie Antoinette.

Zweig has two explanations for the vast productivity of the squat, ugly writer who became the acknowledged master of the 19th Century realistic novel. One was Balzac's feverish lust for power. "If the opportunity had offered, Balzac might equally well have become a businessman or a slave-dealer, a speculator in real estate or a banker. It was mere chance that directed his genius into the channel of literature. . . ."

Helens in Hecubas. The second impulse that led Balzac to write the 90-odd novels of The Human Comedy, says Zweig, was his passion for women. In his early books, while still in his twenties, he had fiercely championed loveless ladies entering frustrated middle age, the married woman whose husband took her for granted and seldom into his arms. Women became his first devotees, wrote him letters by the thousands, frequently offered themselves to their indiscriminate advocate. Wrote Zweig: "This man could see a Helen in every woman, even in Hecuba, as soon as his will power came into play. He was inhibited by neither loss of youth, nor faded beauty, nor corpulence, nor any other female blemishes. . . . He loved any woman whom he wanted to love and took whatever he desired to take."

Yet on Zweig's own testimony, Balzac's load of debt from his business failures and love of high living seems to have driven him on to writing as much as women or the urge to power. The ill-mannered, unkempt son of a tight-fisted petit bourgeois, he was at heart a snob and a social climber who faked a claim to nobility. To keep up with the post-Napoleonic Joneses, Balzac sat at his table for twelve hours a day, years on end, turning out alternately tripe and masterpieces. Before he was 40 his fame was such that publishers bought and paid for his novels before they were written. But earlier, says Zweig, "there was no literary iniquity that he could not stomach. He was a harlot serving simultaneously two or three literary pimps.

Even when his Chouans and La Peau de Chagrin made him an outstanding figure in French literature, he continued--like a married woman secretly visiting a maison de rendezvous to earn some pin-money--to frequent his former low haunts and degrade the famous Honore de Balzac to the status of a cheap hack. . . ." In fact, Zweig does a better job of explaining the hack in Balzac than he does in explaining his greatness.

Balzac's hunger for money and social status finally led him to marry one of his admiring correspondents, Madame Eve de Hanska, a wealthy noblewoman from the Ukraine. She gave him the position he had scrambled for all his life, but he died only five months after their marriage. Balzac's 17-year courtship was the most violent chapter in the fantastically turbulent novel that was his own life. Readers will wish that Stefan Zweig had kept himself alive long enough to have finished the proper telling of it.

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