Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  Dear Mr. Bertaux, I am so indebted to you that every word I write seems hollow and formulaic to me. I cannot tell you what it would mean to me to be read by a generation of young Frenchmen. If I were a master of pathos à la pacifist Curtius,1 and “Europeans” of that ilk, I would beat my breast with pride. But I have not those means to hand. I am not one to overestimate “nations” or the relations between them, and don’t feel called to “represent” anything at all. My modest personal relationship to “France” (every other word has to go in quotation marks, that’s how damaged I feel they are) is approximately this: the fond hope that simple human freedom will never be lost in this country, as it has been in others. Maybe I can convey to the odd young Frenchman what a terrible thing unfreedom is for the individual. By way of warning!

  I’ll be staying here for about 4 weeks, to write the last 30 pages of my novel at a page a day. Is there any possibility of our meeting? Perhaps we could have lunch somewhere (although my stomach is bad, and I’m not much of a companion at mealtimes)?

  My wife sends her regards to you both.

  What news of Pierre?

  I kiss your wife’s hand, and salute you cordially,

  your grateful Joseph Roth

  1. Curtius: Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), German essayist and thinker on European matters.

  81. To Félix Bertaux

  Hotel Foyot, Paris

  Friday

  [postmarked 1 March 1929]

  Dear Mr. Bertaux, mon ami,

  thank you. I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow then at half past 12. I’m sending you a note, because I’m having so much trouble with the telephone. 12 young Germans, teachers or students, aspiring Curtii the lot of them, have broken into the hotel, and spend half the day on the phone, forging pacifist links with France.

  Thank your wife for me. Mine will be very pleased.

  Till soon,

  Ever your

  Joseph Roth

  82. To Pierre Bertaux

  7 March 1929

  Hotel Foyot, Paris 6

  rue de Tournon

  Mon bien cher ami,

  it’s not enough to “thank you sincerely.” It may be more to tell you that your letters are a real comfort to me—as they say, a reconfort—and that I have a physical sense of your friendship. It’s correct that one may not share griefs, that only redoubles them. But there is an infinite solace in that redoubling. My grief leaks out of private things into the public realm,1 and that makes it easier to bear, just as, for instance, a war appears more bearable to an individual than a bout of pleurisy.

  So far as my wife is concerned, her present illness is only an acuter version of her chronic weakness, a complete lack of resistance, in which I am not without blame. There are various causes. These things, of which I have been unable to speak for months, if not for years, oppress me more than the form of the illness itself. Perhaps in another ten years I will be able to write about them, if I am still a writer then. For now, I drag them around with me, and torment myself.

  Ernst Weiss,2 whom you mentioned, is to me a sort of cas typique, if you are interested in Prague and the Jews of old Austria. He is from the ghetto. A man who sailed past foreign shores as a ship’s doctor, without ever setting foot on them, who stayed in his cabin to write. A mind that is ashamed of being a mind, and so instead, without realizing it, plays a “folly.” It seems to me the man is incompetent, crippled, infantine, never left puberty, and dwells in it still happily. Read his books Nahar and Animals in Chains. You will see that this highly gifted writer joined the expressionistic bandwagon for no very good reason, other than his shame at “normality.” He always lacked courage. He was always ashamed of having courage. Courage is a brother of sense, and Ernst Weiss chose folly instead. He was a German writer. The best thing he’s written is the novella Franta Slin.

  Have you met Mrs. Coudenhove?3 A rare instance of a robust hysteric. It’s not possible to like her, because she’s so ill-mannered. But she’s head and shoulders better than her husband and the pan-Europeans, and the society where she is disliked. She is a pan-Jewess. A daughter of Jehovah’s.

  You will have enjoyed stammering with Kracauer. He’s a sweet boy, only cowardly, extraordinarily cowardly. He’s capable of betraying you, and becoming a bastard out of cowardice. A beaten-up-on (outside) and pampered (indoors) Jewish boy.

  You can tell me what your “project” is. I won’t be in Berlin till mid-April at the earliest, I’m working on my novel till the end of March.

  My wife sends cordial regards.

  I had dinner with your father, and mean to telephone him one day soon. He is dear, distinguished, and moderate, as always.

  Write me soon. I suffer from the idée fixe that the post is unreliable.

  In friendship, your grateful

  Joseph Roth

  1. into the public realm: this strikes me as a remarkably acute self-diagnosis. There is something terrible, even tragic, about JR’s susceptibility or responsiveness to public events, from the mid-twenties into the thirties; one feels it continually exceed its “cause.”

  2. Ernst Weiss (1882–1940), doctor and author. He committed suicide in Paris on the eve of the German occupation. Several of his novels have been translated into English, most recently Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, in 2010.

  3. Mrs. Coudenhove: Ida, wife of Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the pan-European movement and the European Parliamentary Union.

  83. To Pierre Bertaux

  Hotel Foyot, Paris

  28 March [1929]

  Dear friend,

  thank you for your letter. I hope to see you here before my departure for Berlin. So it won’t be possible for you to come to Russia—I shall feel lonely on my trip, having prepared myself with the thought that you would be coming with me.

  Your description of your meeting with Brentano was very amusing. I know exactly that you will have gotten excited to no end with him, because he is one of those people who will go on and talk to others, using your arguments, and simultaneously bad-mouth you. If Brentano is as unhappy as you say he is, then with every reason. No one has merited unhappiness as much as he. I only fear he won’t be unhappy enough. Another thirty years of life for a creature like that are in my view too many. In thirty years, he can wreak much more destruction. He is one of three or four people I would happily murder, with no more compunction than putting out a cigarette. I don’t know if you’re acquainted with the feeling that removes any so-called humanity in you, and renders absurd the notion that killing a human being was anything special. Sometimes I feel the murderer in me is as natural as the writer, and if I were arrested and put on trial, I would be utterly perplexed.1

  I’m fairly sure that my name will have been sufficient cause for an argument between you and him. I am a red rag to him, just as he to me is a slavering dog. His brain is mad, his heart is weak, his tongue is glib and stupid. I have no sort of magnanimity or “Christian feeling” for those who dislike me, and not sufficient dignity. I will hurt them as much as possible, with cunning and violence, and am only waiting for the opportunity of murdering them in a deserted alleyway.

  Yesterday I finished my novel. I’m happy with it. Did the silent prophet make sense in the NR?2 I fear it may have made a muddled impression.

  You should work or let yourself go. You are one of those people who never lose their senses, and whose brain will keep going even after your (physical) heart in the hour of death.

  Greetings in old and cordial friendship.

  (Do you ever see Bermann? He doesn’t answer my letters.)

  Joseph Roth

  1. Roth’s friend, sometime roommate (see no. 313), and editor, Hermann Kesten, is troubled by this letter, and gives it a long note, to the effect that one shouldn’t take it seriously, and that Roth never actually hurt a fly. Acc
ording to Kesten, Roth turned on most of his friends at some time or other, but more in the spirit of a literary joke, playing with them as with the characters in a novel. “He was more concerned with artistic truth than with reality. Roth had a very strict artistic conscience.” While accepting this—especially the last sentence—one shouldn’t shy away from accepting that Roth all his life was quick to take offense, and was, as Irmgard Keun and others noted, a ferocious, gifted, principled, and implacable hater.

  2. in the NR: the Neue Rundschau ran a chapter of JR’s “Trotsky novel,” The Silent Prophet.

  84. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Foyot, Paris

  Friday

  29 March 1929

  Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

  I hope you’re back at home already, and that this letter, which for once I haven’t sent registered, won’t get lost in following you about. I read a short and admiring article on your talk in Brussels.

  I finished my novel the day before yesterday. I’ll be happy to give you the manuscript.

  Thank you for your kind offer to promote Flight Without End in Russia. With its content and its philosophy, I fear that won’t be possible. On the other hand, you could certainly help me in France. Flight is appearing from Gallimard this year—and if you were to mention me to your literary friends in Paris, along with Fuite sans fin, I would be very grateful to you.

  I feel some compunction in voicing such a request. The least resemblance to those individuals who seek your literary patronage is something I would like to avoid.

  I’m still not sure when I’m going. Now the Münchener Neuesten1 have sent me an invitation, obviously they want to get me on board. I have so little money, and hate all newspapers equally, I wonder if I shouldn’t take their offer when it comes.

  It would be good to talk to you. I hope to be in Salzburg at the end of April.

  With cordial greetings from

  your Joseph Roth

  1. The conservative daily the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten made Roth an offer, which he, cash-strapped and at various times eager to get away from the FZ (or from newspapers altogether, he wasn’t sure), briefly accepted. See nos. 75 and 90.

  85. To Stefan Zweig

  Berlin, 2 September 1929

  Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

  I don’t want you to think there’s any trivial interruption in our correspondence. Since we last saw each other, a lot of very grim things have happened.1 My wife was taken to the psychiatric hospital at Westend in a very bad state, and for some weeks I’ve been unable to write a line, and compel myself to scribble just enough to keep body and soul together. I’ll spare you any more detailed account of my condition. The word “torment” has just acquired a very real and substantial content, and the feeling of being surrounded by misfortune as by high black walls doesn’t leave me for a second. I had hoped to be able to give you my manuscript in pleasanter circumstances. I am sending it to you now under the very worst and most grievous. Be well, and drop me a line c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Altonaerstrasse 4, Berlin NW 87.

  Sincerely and warmly

  [Joseph Roth]

  1. Friedl’s weakness and unhappiness had lately taken the form of erratic behavior, hearing voices, and physical frailty. There were various diagnoses, culminating in schizophrenia, and JR for the rest of his life was frantically trying to get her cared for, long after he saw that a cure was unlikely. From here on in—not to deny that both may have had their attractions for him before—he was never off the twin treadmills of alcohol and work. The “manuscript” he mentions here to Zweig may have been that of Job (published in 1930), which has harrowing descriptions of the dementia of Deborah, the wife of the central character, Mendel Singer. Zweig, as with Roth passim, gave all the help he could.

  86. To Stefan Zweig

  Berlin, 16 September 1929

  Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

  I have just gotten a copy of your Fouché.1 I would have liked to wait to thank you for the book, your inscription, and your warm and friendly letter, but I have no idea when I’ll be able to concentrate in front of a piece of paper. It seems impossible for all eternity, and impossible the hope that I might amount to more than any Tom, Dick, or Harry, and owed more obligations to the world than to my suffering nearest and dearest. Thank you again. Maybe I’ll find the strength to come to you in Salzburg, and shake your hand. Most probably mutely, but a little closer to you.

  Your humble servant

  [Joseph Roth]

  1. Fouché: Joseph Fouché: Bildnis eines politischen Menschen (1929).

  87. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel am Zoo, Berlin

  17 October 1929

  Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

  in the middle of my wretchedness, I hear that you are being prodded to write about my book. I hasten to tell you that your silent friendship is much more precious, valuable, and dear to me than the trouble you would be put to even to write to an editor on my behalf. Please don’t trouble yourself! My books are not destined for popularity in any case!

  Thank you for the Fouché, your language glittering as ever. In my rush I can think of no more felicitous phrase: brilliant, dazzling history. I know there is more there, more heart, your good, tender, noble heart, which I love.

  My wife is beginning to improve. Three days ago they operated. She is still in danger. I am beset by worries, coarse and trivial for the most part, but by higher ones too, completely befuddled, and with a bad liver.

  Ever your grateful old

  Joseph Roth

  88. To René Schickele

  10 December 1929

  Dear esteemed Mr. Schickele,1

  thank you for your dear kind letter. Why are you surprised by my inscription—as it seems you are? Brandeis is the main character in my next novel, “No Entry, the Story of an Immoderate Man.”2

  I am writing in a desperate plight. Yesterday I fled to Munich. My wife has been very sick since August. Psychosis, hysteria, suicidal feelings, she’s barely alive—and I’m chased and assailed by black and red demons, without a mind, unable to lift a finger, impotent and paralyzed, helpless, with no prospect of ever getting out. Perhaps I can crawl away somewhere in Salzburg for a couple of weeks, alone with my misfortune. I don’t know what the coming days will bring, but would like to see you.

  Kind regards your

  Joseph Roth

  1. René Schickele (1883–1940), Alsatian novelist, essayist, and magazine editor (Die Weissen Blätter, 1915–19). In 1932 went into exile in France, where he died—like D. H. Lawrence—in Vence.

  2. It seems Roth wanted to take Nikolai Brandeis (who appears halfway through Right and Left, and takes it over) and put him in another book, to be called Eintritt verboten, which was never published, and perhaps never begun. Tunda, Baranowicz, Mizzi Schinagl, Trotta, Kapturak, and many others—Roth has a way of injecting names and characters into more than one book; it is one of the things that make his writing seem more like a whole world than something merely excogitated.

  89. To René Schickele

  20 January 1930

  thank you for your dear good letter, and kind invitation, which I gladly accept. Only I cannot leave Berlin before my wife’s situation has stabilized, at least to the point that I know where she’ll be looked after. At the moment, she’s with a friend.1 Every day I need to scrape together money for her, for the nurse, for other necessities. I’m angling for a big travel assignment, so I can leave a couple of thousand marks here, at least in prospect, and wander off. The other thing, the emotional pressure, I shall have to deal with alone. Being an author is actually no help at all. That may be my official designation, but privately I’m just a poor wretch who’s worse off than a tram conductor. Only time and not talent can provide us with distance, and I don’t have much time left. A ten-year marriage ending like this has the effect of forty
, and my natural tendency to be an old man is horribly supported by external misfortunes. Eight books to date, over 1,000 articles, ten hours’ work a day, every day for ten years, and today, losing my hair, my teeth, my potency, my most basic capacity for joy, not even the chance of spending a month without financial worries. And that wretch literature! I come from a time when you were a Greek and a Roman if you followed an intellectual occupation, and I stand there now like a stranger in the midst of this ghastly Anglo-Saxonism, that sentimental Americanism that rules the roost in Germany. I am sorry you’ve had such a ghastly boring thing yourself.2 Go to a miracle man, not a doctor! Believe me, it just needs time and rest to cure it. One day it’ll go away as suddenly as it came. I’ll give you a couple of weeks’ notice before coming. How long will you stay in Badenweiler? Are you not going to leave?

  Kiss your dear wife’s hand for me.

  In heartfelt warmth, your sad

  Joseph Roth

  1. friend: the journalist Stefan Fingal.

  2. ghastly boring thing yourself: Schickele suffered from eczema and asthma.

  90. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel am Zoo, Berlin

  1 April 1930

  Dear and esteemed Mr. Zweig,

  for a long time I held off replying, because I was going to wire you any moment that I was on my way to Salzburg. Now I can confirm that I’ll be on my way on Thursday or Friday. I’ll wire again before I leave, and ask you for telegraphic confirmation. Maybe I’ll stop off in Magdeburg for a couple of days.

  Last week I finished a novel for serialization in the MNN.1 For the past three days I’ve been back on Job, and find myself continually interrupted: by farewell visits. I’ve always found it hard to break with a place I have no great feelings for. This is my ninth month in Berlin, and it’s been the worst time in my life. Never have I cared less about people. Never did they seem more intrusive and less inclined to leave me alone. And they can’t have given much for what happened to me.