Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  BY JOSEPH ROTH

  Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925–1939

  What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933

  The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth

  The Wandering Jews

  Rebellion

  The Tale of the 1002nd Night

  Right and Left and The Legend of the Holy Drinker

  Job: The Story of a Simple Man

  The Emperor’s Tomb

  Confession of a Murderer

  The Radetzky March

  Flight Without End

  The Silent Prophet

  Hotel Savoy

  Tarabas

  The Antichrist

  Weights and Measures

  Zipper and His Father

  The Spider’s Web

  Frontispiece: Joseph Roth on a railway platform, somewhere in France, in 1925.

  For my friend Rosanna Warren

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART I

  1894–1920

  Youth, War, Brody, and Vienna

  PART II

  1920–1925

  Berlin, Newspapers, Early Novels, and Marriage

  PART III

  1925–1933

  Paris, Points South and East, Disappointment, Tragedy, and Triumph

  PART IV

  1933–1939

  After Hitler: Work, Despair, Diminishing Circles, Work, and Death

  Bibliography

  Index

  Joseph Roth, age three

  Joseph Roth’s student ID at the University of Vienna

  Joseph Roth’s military training company

  Friedl Roth with dog

  Joseph Roth in Paris, with two friends from Brody

  Joseph Roth with the trademark newspaper

  Joseph Roth with Heinrich Wagner

  Joseph Roth with Bernard von Brentano in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris

  Joseph Roth in Albanian folkloric costume, in 1927 in Albania

  Joseph Roth with Friedl in Berlin, in 1922

  Joseph Roth with Paula Grübel and a friend

  Joseph Roth in the company of Dutch writers in a café in Amsterdam in 1937

  A signed portrait of Joseph Roth

  Introduction

  Nothing to parents (but Joseph Roth never saw his father, Nahum, who went mad before he knew he had a son, and reacted to his overproud and overprotective mother, Miriam, or Maria, to the extent that he sometimes claimed to have her pickled womb somewhere). Nothing to his wife (poor, bewitching Friedl Reichler, who after six years of a restless, oppressive, and pampered marriage disappeared into schizophrenia, and left him to make arrangements for her, and pay for them, and wallow in the guilt and panic that remained). Nothing to the lovers and companions of his last years—the Jewish actress Sibyl Rares, the exotic half-Cuban beauty Andrea Manga Bell, the novelist Irmgard Keun, his rival in cleverness and dipsomania—nothing to perhaps his very best friends (with such a protean, or polygonal character as Roth’s, who contrived to present a different aspect of himself to everyone he knew, it’s hard to tell for sure)—Stefan Fingal, Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Gottfarstein. Except to family, very few—initially, I had the sense, none at all—in the intimate Du form, and most of those there are, ironically, to near-strangers, because they had served, as he had, briefly, in the Austrian army, where it was form to address a brother officer, even if one didn’t know him from Adam, as Du. Very few early—barely a dozen before 1925, when Roth, thirty, a married professional, a published novelist, and an experienced vagrant already on to his third country and maybe his fourth newspaper, gets his big break as a journalist, in Paris, for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung. Very little explicitly or frontally about aesthetics, ambition, writing, shop (references to the novels, when he does talk about them, are so grudgingly or airily unspecific, it’s often impossible to be sure which one of them he’s talking about). Little in the way of chat, description, narrative, confession, or scandal—this was a man with books to write, and columns to fill.

  So why read them? If they have little bearing on his literary output, and are not even addressed to the people who mattered most in his life? Well, to get a sense, first of all, and in the absence of a biography in English, of the stations of the man’s life, his classic westward trajectory (like that of Flight Without End or The Wandering Jews) from the Habsburg crown land of Galicia just back of the Russian border, on the edge of Europe if not of the civilized world, in quick, brief stages to Vienna, to Berlin and Frankfurt, and then to Paris—a sort of schizoid Paris, first (in 1925) the paradisal place of the fulfillment of hopes and dreams, and then, after 1933, the locus of exile, disappointment, trepidation, punishment. It was like day and night. And, within the context of that broad, simple, westward movement, the endless, frenetic stitching back and forth among Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam to wherever he had temporarily pitched his tents; the long, journalistic visits to the south of France in 1925, to the Soviet Union in 1926, Albania and the Balkans in 1927, and Italy and Poland in 1928; the many tours the length and breadth of the German regions throughout the 1920s, for what became a sort of dreaded and dispiriting enemy terrain to which his newspaper bosses were quite deliberately dispatching their acutest, most high-strung war correspondent (the atmosphere in one particular town, Roth noted, was like that “five minutes before a pogrom”); the number of places (eleven, by my count) where he stopped to compose his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, between 1930 and 1932, on the face of it, his most comfortable circumstances ever, with a monthly retainer, less journalism, and Friedl cared for; and then the places of exile, where one has to picture him practically as a mendicant, borrowing or scrounging train fare, leaving Paris for Amsterdam to haggle over a new—and newly ruinous—publishing contract, or for Marseille because there was the prospect of free accommodation, albeit of a sort detested by this self-described “hotel patriot,” or Ostend, so that he might have daily access to his, alas, always pedagogically minded patron, Stefan Zweig. This swarming movement is one of the points of these letters.

  Then to get something where the writer’s own character and predicaments are front and center, neither adapted nor softened nor broken up among his stories and novels. To understand something of the circumstances in which these stories and novels were written; first, up to around 1930, competing for breath with hundreds upon hundreds of iridescent-colored soap bubbles (his metaphor) of articles for daily newspapers (most of his life, Roth was much better known as a columnist and feuilletonist than as a novelist); then against the clock, both his personal clock and the unignorably ticking collective clock of the 1930s, bringing (as Roth in particular very well foresaw) war and genocidal murder to millions. Writing novels no one realistically wanted; for publishers as hard up as he was, who wrote him (the Dutch ones) flinty, respectful letters in broken German; a diminishing number of readers; in return for desperately small advances already received, spent, and borrowed against. At one stage, he had the haunting sense of being able to read the begging letters through the surface of the narrative prose. To see him correctly, as a sort of lemming among lemmings, an unusually farsighted and fearless and bloody-minded lemming, quick to sink his teeth into the flanks of René Schickele or Stefan Zweig or Klaus Mann when they stepped out of line. Some of their wounded, plaintively reasonable, or plain defensive replies are included. To understand that this grievously disappointed and multiply broken man somehow continued to align himself toward the true and the beautiful in his art
icles, and the beautiful and the true in his books; that, long past having anything himself, he went on helping others—a tailor, a charwoman, a doctor, a fellow veteran stuck in Switzerland; that even as he seemed to lapse into unreality—a scheme on the very eve of the Anschluss, in February 1938, to meet the then Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg, to talk him into backing the restoration of the Habsburg monarchy—in other parts of his mind he was as mordant and accurate and graceful as ever.

  Roth is both contradictory and changeable, and always, always vehement with it. Something in him can’t abide and doesn’t understand hierarchies; that’s why he was never able to find a niche and defend it at the FZ—that newspaper that was all niche and pecking order. He doesn’t pace himself or moderate himself or disguise himself. “I am wriggling in a hundred nets,” he brilliantly puts it. There is turbulence, emergency, thrashing around, panic wherever he is. He doesn’t deal in anything less than an ultimatum. The letters are anxiously registered, or they demand instant acknowledgment, or they go by expensive wire or pneumatique. They are what the diplomats call démarches. (He is no sort of diplomat, though he does love his Old World courtesies.) All he seeks, on the face of it, is fair recompense, and calm in which to work. The work itself is contradictory and changeable. He is Neue Sachlichkeit, and he is a poet and a fabulist, you can find him on both sides of both arguments—though “romantic” is always a dirty word for him. I described him once as mysteriously managing “to combine a novelist’s oeuvre with a journalist’s calling and habits.” He drinks to dull his nerves, and writes to understand the world. He is industrious from despair, assiduous and ineffectual, a tireless, incorruptible, terrifying, and quixotic moralist:

  I am not in a tizzy about the letter from [. . .] In view of the approaching end of the world, it’s no big deal. But even then, in the trenches, staring death in the face 10 minutes before going over the top, I was capable of beating up a son of a bitch for claiming he was out of cigarettes when he wasn’t, for instance. The end of the world is one thing, the son of a bitch is another. You can’t put the son of a bitch down to the general condition of things. He’s separate.

  He works to bring about practical remedies, on refugees’ committees, and so forth, and he is the most impractical man who ever lived. He has no money, no books, no bank account, no clothes. What doesn’t falter is tone and imagination in his importunings: “Kesten got the 10 pounds. He gave me none of it. I am torn, so to speak, between shirts and a suit.” And then: “I’m thinking a shroud would be a useful acquisition.” He lives out of two suitcases (by some accounts, three, but I prefer to think of him with two), a large one and a small one. He collects penknives, watches, and canes. Every relationship with every correspondent is tested to its destruction; it’s hard to think of one who comes through (all right, the Bertaux, father and son, do; all the others are put through usually terminal crises). Not the personally disappointing Brentano, or the over-optimistic and compromising Reifenberg; not the loyal and persistent Mme Gidon, whom he begins by trying to fire as his translator, or the ever devoted, ever inadequate Stefan Zweig; not Kesten or Schickele; not Landauer or Landshoff. He mocks his publishers—it doesn’t matter which ones—appealing with mounting irony, “not only to your publisher’s conscience, but to your human feelings.” Roth’s existence feels syncopated throughout; he is a Jew in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a German in France. He is “red Roth” and a royal and imperial loyalist; he is an Eastern Jew and an Austrian; he is gallant and passionate—both a kisser of hands and a kisser of feet; he is generous and unforgiving; he demands hope, and sees despair as a badge of reason. He drills through the newspaper world in the 1920s and in the 1930s tunnels through the world of books; by the end, he stands there without anything and beyond everything, illusionless as Rimbaud. In 1938 again, it is unclear whether he will enter a monastery, pack his ancestral bundle and take to the road like his Jewish forefathers, or rejoin the Austrian army—all three are mooted. Or failing that, Mexico, or Rio, or Shanghai, or Baudelaire’s favorite destination, “anywhere out of the world.”

  We read for knowledge and atmospheres, but also for the chance to develop and exercise empathy, to extend the weft and warp of our emotions and nerves over the situations of others. In these letters—these IOUs and SOSes—we have something like the protocol of a man going over the edge of the world in a barrel. How can we not be amazed, harrowed, quickened, awed?

  THE BASIS OF the present selection is the volume Joseph Roth Briefe, 1911–1939 (1970), edited by his friend, housemate, fellow writer, and sometime editor, Hermann Kesten. It is a little strange that there has been no subsequent, fuller, or more authoritative edition in the forty years since—the Rothian Heinz Lunzer has spoken to me of Kesten’s occasional grave errors of transcription—and reading, say, David Bronsen’s biography, one is made aware that many interesting letters are unfortunately not included. Kesten, though, was not a scholar—and nor am I. For my book, I chose as many of the letters as I thought might be comprehensible and of interest to an English readership, erring always on the side of generosity; it’s my sense that I have included upwards of 90 percent of them, 457 in all—I through-numbered them, for ease of reference. Two individual volumes of correspondences have been brought out since 1970 in German, containing Roth’s exchanges with his Dutch exile publishers: one with Querido and Allert de Lange, the other with De Gemeenschap. These, in my view, were too specialized and—as perhaps may be imagined—too repetitive, and too arduous to warrant inclusion.

  A letter—perhaps especially in our time, when letters are no longer written much, and when Hey Mike! is presumed to be a proper form of address from a complete stranger—is situated somewhere between speech and script. (Perhaps especially these letters, remote from book-lined studies and desks, written or dictated in public places, in cafés or bars, at all hours, and in the midst of friends and hangers-on and conversation.) This was a novel and a lovely challenge to the translator, who values voice in all writing: “Nothing but men is like a desert full of sand,” “It’s shocking, I have no copies of any of my books,” “Haven’t you got that yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs,” “Even a letter is a colossal effort. Don’t be cross if I don’t write. Frankly, even a stamp is a significant item for me.” As I mentioned earlier, Roth does not go in for the Du form much, but that doesn’t mean that he is a hidebound or kid-gloved letter writer. Most of the people he wrote to were known to him, some of them very well, and most of the subjects or occasions of the letters were of intense importance to him. This is perhaps the single most striking quality of Roth’s letters: their fervor, their temperature. Even if they are set out in little numbered and lettered sections—perhaps especially then—they burn off the page with their indignation, their desperation, their indifference to excuses, their terminal wretchedness, and combusted dignity. Roth was, moreover, a great and passionate hater (it’s yet another one of the many, many, unbridgeable differences between him and Zweig, who wasn’t, and who wasn’t easy in the presence of hatred either). Even so, I was surprised by the occasionally cloacal forthrightness of his language, especially in the later letters; in his fiction and feuilletons there is no suggestion of such language (he is not Joyce, not even Hemingway), but then we are talking here about his most intense private and personal communications. German—and Roth when wrought up—is liberal with Scheisse and also with animals; Hund, Schwein, Sau, but also Tier, Biest, Bestie are all strong terms. English, evidently, a little less so. Anyway, this is by way of saying that “my” Roth in English says “fuck” as he doesn’t in German; it’s a perfectly natural and reasonable vehicle—one might even claim a sine qua non—for the way strong feelings are expressed in English, since Tynan and Hitchens and too many others to mention. It’s a necessary cultural adjustment in the translation and, in its way, perfectly faithful.

  As I read and translated, and reread and retranslated, I was repeatedly reminded of a couple of lines of Goet
he’s Faust—Malcolm Lowry used them as one of the epigraphs for Under the Volcano—“wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen,” roughly, whoever strenuously endeavors, him can we rescue. No more strenuous trier before the Lord than Joseph Roth.

  Michael Hofmann

  Gainesville, Florida

  January 2011

  PART I

  1894–1920

  Youth, War, Brody, and Vienna

  JOSEPH ROTH, AGE THREE

  [Moses] Joseph Roth was born in Brody in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 2 September 1894, “under the sign of the Virgin,” as he writes drily in no. 98, “to whom my given name of Joseph stands in some vague relation.” He was Joseph, Mary in this instance was his mother, but there was no immaculate conception, no baby Jesus, and no man in the house. While “Mu” remained an only child, his mother was one of seven, and he had many Grübel or Grubel uncles and aunts and cousins, with some of whom he remained in touch all his life. (After his death, his favorite cousin, Paula Grübel, traveled to Paris, to give her stock of his early manuscripts and offprints to Blanche Gidon, his translator into French, who kept them safe during the occupation and the war.) They were not exactly poor (there were visits to the photographer, smart clothes, violin lessons, even a maid, at least some of the time), but Roth’s lifelong aversion to the idea of home will have dated from then (a lodger, his mother’s brave face and forbidding bosom, and pride and shame and continual anxiety); the town—whose very name he was often careful to suppress later, in favor of the more German-sounding “Schwaby,” or even “Schwabendorf,” so redolent was Brody (anti-Semitically evoked in a 1900 English Baedeker: “They differ in their dress and the mode of wearing their hair from the other inhabitants, who despise them”)1 of Galicia and the poor, dirty, and, above all, Jewish east; while dealings with his uncles will have left him neuralgically sensitive to any subsequent combination of money and advice (when forthcoming from Stefan Zweig, say).