Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  It’s incredibly difficult to write newspaper pieces about Russia, unless you stick to processing other people’s research, like Kisch. I won’t do that at any price. You were right about that too, when you said the time for that sort of journalism was over. I’m glad you were right on those important things, and I was wrong. That shows me I judged you correctly, which pleases me more than merely being right about something.

  I’d like to know what you’re working on, how you’re living. The Frankfurter Zeitung is nowhere to be found here, of course, unlike the Vossische, or the Berliner Tageblatt. Which means it has an incredibly exalted, if somewhat legendary, reputation.

  Give my regards to Dr. Guttmann, I think about him sometimes and how useful his bitter clarity would be in reportages from Moscow. Scheffer from the Berliner Tageblatt enjoys an unfair prominence, as the one-eyed among the blind.

  Regards to your wife, regards to Dr. Guttmann, and don’t forget

  Your old

  Joseph Roth

  1. The novel I’ve waited for for so long: perhaps the first glimmerings of Job?

  2. Toller: Ernst Toller (1893–1939), prominent left-wing playwright, poet, essayist. Leader of the Bavarian revolution in 1918, for which he was imprisoned for five years. It was news of the despondent Toller’s suicide in New York that prompted Roth’s final collapse in May 1939.

  39. To Benno Reifenberg

  Odessa, 1 October 1926

  Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

  it’s hard to describe my pleasure on receiving your letter. A day ago I got an old letter (August) from Mr. Geck, asking—oh so discreetly—whether I was ill, why they had heard nothing from me. I gathered from that that 2 pieces I dispatched from Poland, and 1 letter and one book review have failed to arrive. It turns out that the Poles have an occasional, but then all the more inflexible, censorship. I wrote back right away, you’ll see the letter, just asking for confirmation of arrival. I’d had a nightmare, namely that my articles on Russia were all appearing in the Bäderblatt.1 It was a hideously real nightmare, my articles were on page 2, column 4, over a large ad for Bad Nauheim, and I was cross that the photograph of the Kremlin had been stuck on page 4. You said just one word: “misplaced!”—dolorously, as if on stage. Only one creature is endowed with dreams like that, namely a reporter on the Frankfurter Zeitung. I’m sure I’m more afraid of your restraint than you are of a scoop. What a happy awakening when your copies arrived, with that dignified, if rather flattering byline. Thank you! But isn’t it too chancy to settle on a particular day? What if I have no ideas, can’t write anything for 3 weeks? Have you got all 7 articles? The tenth is already done, I keep putting off making a fair copy, it’s torture for me, I have to keep thinking about the blond sub with the academic qualification—geology, wasn’t it? I dread misprints, two jumped up at me just now like fleas from the type.

  It was very funny to read about your brother Hans. You nailed him in your article. I think of you calmly watching him, you must have been writing the piece in your head already. What material! I’m envious of both material and execution. It’s an excellent piece in literary terms, almost a reportage, I can see you growing out of literature and becoming a proper journalist, and then Maryla will no longer be able to say “a smart journalist!”—How is she? Give her my regards! And your mother-in-law. You don’t say anything about her, or JAN. I asked specially. What’s Jan up to? How is he? Will he still recognize me? Or is he growing up too fast?

  As I am myself. I won’t stay as long as I thought I would. The money hurts. I would like to save it all, and spend all of it instead. I’m going to ask for damages for all the torments of this exotic journey in the Caucasus, on mule, bus, bumpy carts, for seasickness, mountain paths, Ararat—Leopold Weiss2 rides on camelback and has his wife and child with him, and I’m dreaming of a room at the Frankfurter Hof. Oh, for running water! Hot and cold, telephone, ten bells, three lights, bathroom ensuite, fleecy towels, cars, white napkins. Hausenstein3 asks whether there might be interest in Russia for his work on Rembrandt. I can’t give him an answer at the moment, tell him it’ll be another decade before they acquire an interest in Rembrandt. How little we know about Russia. Everything we say about it is mistaken. I read Lenin and Victor Hugo alternately, political authors both, chance purchases, cheap, secondhand editions. Perhaps it shows in my articles. Lenin is a great dialectical brain, Victor Hugo a great dialectical heart, and he writes a better style. I long for Paris, I have never given up on it, ever, I am a Frenchman from the East, a Humanist, a rationalist with religion, a Catholic with a Jewish intelligence, an actual revolutionary. What an oddity! (Please excuse this outburst!)

  What’s Dr. Simon up to? At this distance, he seems even stranger to me than he does in Germany. He is very much a Westerner, I think, the farther east I go, the farther west he seems to recede in my mind. The last time I saw him was in Paris, six months ago—five months—an eternity. Time is little, space is everything! I took his wife to Moulineux. How far Moulineux is from Russia . . .

  1. Bäderblatt: literally the “bath” or “spa” paper. A low-brow, commercial supplement that features repeatedly in Roth’s nightmares.

  2. Weiss: Leopold Weiss (1900–1992), the FZ’s special correspondent in the 1920s. He converted to Islam ca. 1926.

  3. Hausenstein: Wilhelm Hausenstein (1882–1957), art critic and essayist, worked for the FZ from 1917 to 1943. Later was the German ambassador in Paris.

  40. To Bernard von Brentano

  18 October 1926, Moscow

  Dear friend,

  I am back in Moscow, here for another two weeks, an airmail letter would reach me in time. In the German embassy I got an old letter of yours, with enclosure. Thank you for the feuilleton, it’s good, in places very good, but unjournalistic, by which I mean it didn’t have to be written. Journalism has little tolerance for an indirect form, i.e., the disguising of an observation or an event. Your letter attests to your needless nervousness. What you think about me is mistaken, what you think about my wife is triply mistaken. She doesn’t dislike you. At the same time as yours, I got a letter from her where she wrote about the moving way you were waiting for my articles. (I quote: “B. is incredibly moving, the way he waits for your articles.”)

  It’s been a while since I felt completely well. I think I’ll leave Russia earlier than planned.

  I hope you’re well.

  I shake your hand. Write soon

  to your Joseph Roth

  41. To Benno Reifenberg

  [October 1926?]

  Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

  unfortunately I’ve mislaid the original of my article on petroleum. I want to ask you for certain reasons to cut the sentence where I refer to workers of the Krupp dependencies. If there’s a lacuna, fill it. Please. The piece can come out after the one about the Jews, after or before, it doesn’t matter: The Street.

  For some weeks now, I’ve heard nothing from my friends. Even Brentano, to whom I wrote an incredibly cordial letter, won’t answer me. I’d be sorry if things had gotten to that pass. I pride myself on not being wrong about people. Anything but that.

  At this distance, everyone seems transformed anyway, all the Western men and Fräulein Weber as the prototypical Western woman. Only you remain tall and handsome, and Kracauer small and miserable. Dr. Simon, Geck, Diebold, Nassauer, Dr. Guttmann, and Rudolf Guthmann1 look like mirror images to me, they loom out of the mercury. I see a framed Geisenheyner on a desk, resting his hand on the back of an armchair, Dr. Lothar is in the corridor, I can see him on the other side of the glazed door, he has lost weight, and is looking sporty in tennis shorts. For some reason, Max Beckmann2 is often in my thoughts. His legs are stretched out in front of him as though he were sitting down, but he’s standing up. I am going slightly potty, have vivid dreams, am living in tremendous isolation, in a state of not-hearing. Snow falls and melts, the wind
blows, my feet are always wet, I’ve ordered a second pair of boots and will need a new wardrobe. I now have the ability to sit somewhere for two hours, and look at all the people, near and far, I wind them up, and they process past me, part of some mechanical toy. My wife is coming ever nearer, writing me strange love letters: lots of grumpy, dissatisfied, almost angry reviews of my articles. Perhaps she means me and doesn’t know it. I must have become very sentimental. Hausentein is always turning his back on me. That offends me. You are closer to me as well, but generally chilly. Still a little objectivity. I am always on the point of giving in to you, but hesitate—a fox who’s read Plato, the older Brentano put it. You have your hand extended but won’t give it to me, your big hand. There’s tension now between you and Kracauer. He is angry with me at some level. Because I’m in Russia. Cheers!

  I’m working on a novel. I work very hard on my articles, writing them slowly and entirely subjectively. Each one takes me 3–4 days. Some I’ve torn up.

  My isolation is enormous, unendurable. I need a letter now and again. People, people, all day long, politicians, journalists. No women. Hence the isolation. Nothing but men is like a desert full of sand. Lots of unimportant men. I’ve just been with Scheffer, the BT’s man in Moscow. A clever fellow, but something I don’t quite like about him. He’s too evangelical. He is married: a very nice, distinguished, no longer young Russian woman. She took him because her German isn’t good enough to work him out. He took her because he knows next to no Russian, and sees her as something entirely different from what she is. And so they sleep together. How is it possible? I keep meeting foreign journalists and diplomats there. All banal! I get a lot of invitations. Don’t speak a lot of Russian, but what I do say has a Slav accent, which makes me a miracle man. I’m getting vain in my old age. Tomorrow I’m going to visit a lady from the Old World, who has turned Communist. All sorts of people turn up there, and I’m very curious.

  Presumably the party season is getting going in Germany. Do you remember the time when you, Kracauer, and I went to the Christmas market together? And you went to the watchmaker?3 There is something terribly affecting about Germany when everyone goes soft, and the Jews decorate Christmas trees, and the theaters put on Christmas pantomimes.

  Something astounding has happened: get this: my dear German professor, Dr. Brecht, who is going to Breslau now, hasn’t written me in 6 years. At the time I was his student, I was a German nationalist, as he was. Of course I assume that as a result of what I’ve published, I assume he will have effaced me from his heart. Then in an old newspaper in the Caucasus, I read that he’s turned 50. I write to congratulate him. And today the FZ forwards me a letter from him: he sends me his photograph. I was his student in 1912–13. He is completely unchanged. And he has just put me forward for a prize for young authors. He’s read everything I’ve written. He is just tidying up, and he packs—he packs my papers I wrote for him as a student. HE’S PACKING THEM! He’s taking them to Breslau with him! He put me up for scholarships then, and for prizes now. A German nationalist! Son of a professor, son-in-law of a professor, a friend of Roethe’s!4 There’s a German professor for you.

  What do you say to that? The older you get, the better people become. At some level feeling is what counts. You can only hope to judge the Germans when you’re past forty.

  Alfons Paquet5 is fondly remembered here. Give him my regards when he comes, with a greaseproof parcel in his briefcase that he leaves in the secretary’s office. He picks up review copies of books, and needs packing paper for some purposes of his own.

  I’d be grateful for a line, and send my sentimental greetings

  Your Roth

  1. Guthmann: Rudolf Guthmann, a manager on the FZ.

  2. Max Beckmann (1884–1950), generally regarded as the greatest German painter of the twentieth century. He went into exile in Holland in 1937, and died in New York City. Reifenberg was a long-term admirer of the painter’s, and wrote his biography. See also letter no. 136.

  3. watchmaker: JR loved and collected (and gave away) watches. Watches and knives.

  4. Roethe: Professor Gustav Roethe (1859–1926), Germanist.

  5. Alfons Paquet (1881–1944), poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist. Traveled extensively, and wrote for the FZ.

  42. To Benno Reifenberg

  23 April 1927

  Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

  thank you for your letter. I’m late with my reply, because ever since Vienna I’ve been caught up in a steady stream of nasty banalities. The deal with the novel must have put you to so much trouble that I’m embarrassed to think about it—that, and the sheer impossibility of ever paying you back in important things what you expend on unimportant ones. What’s depressing about having you as a guardian angel—as you are to several of us in that firm—is the fact that you achieve tiny results with colossal expenditure of effort. Your friendship deserves greater outcomes, just as your talents deserve a better and nobler setting. I am continually moved, but rarely assuaged. I know that a big part of Dr. Simon’s decision was the consideration “you can’t do that sort of thing to Roth” when even you know how little vanity I have, and how difficult it is to offend me.

  Anyway, your proposal seems impractical to me. The novel—let’s just say for the moment that it’s a flawless piece of work—given that sort of publication will not only get no attention, but no interest, either from readers or from publishers. It will drop out of the structural, as we’d intended, and be left with the chance and circumstantial, which will do more harm than good. So, I’m against it—in favor only because I need money badly. But then something else comes into play: namely that I don’t think the novel is at all flawless—this has nothing to do with the objection advanced above—and I am having to add another 40 pages or so of Parisian meat to the bones. I have been in negotiations with Ullstein about it. Kurt Wolff1 has spoken to his director Meyer, whom I saw in Berlin, of the necessity of publishing me. Max Brod2—who will already have sent you his novel, which I started (in Prague) and endorse—has recommended me to Zsolnay.3 If I accept your proposal, that means losing Ullstein. He’s not yet decided—and I need money. I’m now embarked on another novel, which is going absurdly smoothly, a book with plot, tension, hooks, twists, something even suitable for the Illustriertes Blatt. I hope to bring it with me, completed. I would far prefer to have that appear as my novel with you. At any rate, you should send me money. I guarantee that you will have one novel manuscript.

  I am flat broke. I was in the rotten position of having to take an advance from the Prager Tagblatt—I can’t stand to travel on that basis. I am slow, thorough, full of fear that I might see something wrong, my so-called style is based on nothing but an exact understanding of the facts—I write badly without that—like Sieburg in the Easter issue. I don’t have “ideas,” only understanding. I am incapable of vacuous writing. I need money, and won’t be finished with the Balkans4 till June. Four weeks is not enough time to understand anything. Four weeks might do for one reportage or lead piece. So I will have to live off my royalty, and when I’m back, resume my campaign: either an unambiguous relationship with the newspaper, or else 6 articles a month, free agent, small retainer. The firm puts out a history of the age, not a newspaper, it has no idea of how to treat a journalist. You’ve seen yourself how little the editors are able to do. I won’t spend another 3 months sitting in the Englischer Hof, twiddling my thumbs. It’s a waste.

  I’ll wire the address from Belgrade. I’ll be there for 6–8 days. If you have a moment, write me as soon as you get my wire.

  Please tell the editorial conference that I won’t be able to write anything about the Yugoslav–Italian conflict before my visit to Albania—for fear of the trouble the Italians can make for me in Albania, where they are effectively in control.

  Best regards to Dr. Kracauer, and tell him his Parisian article caused a real stir, and that people ask me about him�
��people in Berlin, Prague, Vienna.

  [. . .]

  1. Kurt Wolff (1887–1963), publisher. In 1913 started the imprint bearing his own name known mainly for bringing out Expressionist writers. The Kurt Wolff Verlag was sold in 1931, and in 1933 Wolff went into exile, to Florence, Paris, then New York. In 1942, he founded Pantheon Books with his former secretary and wife, Helen. (The novel at issue here, Flight Without End, was duly published by Kurt Wolff.)

  2. Max Brod (1884–1969), novelist, essayist, translator. Editor and friend (and executor) of Franz Kafka.

  3. Zsolnay: the Paul Zsolnay Verlag, in Vienna.

  4. the Balkans: Roth traveled to Albania for the paper and wrote a series of articles.

  43. To Ludwig Marcuse

  Paris VI, rue de Tournon 23

  Hotel Helvetia

  Paris, 14 June 1927

  Dear friend Marcuse,1

  I owe you a long letter, but since I have only grim news to report, I’m going to keep this as short as I can. I was in Berlin, but didn’t get to speak to anyone at Ullstein. Apparently it takes two weeks to get hold of anyone authorized to take a decision. So I decided to give it one last shot after my return here. Now Reifenberg has written to say he does want my novel after all. I made no great efforts therefore with Krell, the novel isn’t for the Vossische Zeitung.2 While I was away in Albania—as you know—Black Friday happened on the stock exchange.3 Dr. Simon seems to have taken that very much to heart. Even though I’d only been furnished with 1,000 marks, they wired me to say they were sorry I hadn’t written anything. It was a snotty, provincial, and wounded telegram, and hurtful too. I requested another 400 dollars—life is very expensive there. They wired me back that I’d had all I was going to get, the expenses account was empty, and I should come home. I got sick, got on a ship, I didn’t have enough money to go via Berlin, I went straight back to Paris, sent them another rude wire, asking whether they’d meant to get rid of me, and whether that were still their intention. I came back from that trip with 14 articles, of which just 2 have appeared. I had no reply, no money, I expect I’m too expensive and too demanding for them—now that old Mrs. Simon has probably lost money on the stock exchange. I wrote to Kaliski4 in Berlin, about Ullstein—no answer. I wrote to Lania,5 about the BC6—no answer as yet. I am desperate, sick, penniless. I’m wondering whether to write to Dombrowski about Ullstein—whether he would write to Magnus, or whether I should wait for Kaliski to reply. The novel has gone to Kurt Wolff.