Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters
Page 21
In haste and old cordiality
your old [Joseph Roth]
1. The Radetzky March was serialized in the FZ, beginning on 17 April 1932, before Roth had finished writing it. The book was published by Kiepenheuer in August 1932.
138. To Stefan Zweig
Frankfurt am Main
28 August 1931
To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg, Kapuzinerberg 5
Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,
Don’t expect to hear from me for a while. Mr. Landauer of the Kiepenheuer Verlag will call on you. I was doing badly for a long time. I seem to be doing better now. I’m working very hard. I need to write almost an article a day for the paper. I hope it doesn’t stay that way.
Write to me as before to the Englischer Hof.
Very cordially
your old Joseph Roth
139. To Stefan Zweig
Frankfurt am Main, 2
September 1931
To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg, Kapuzinerberg 5
Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,
thank you for yours of the 31st.
Landauer has been here since yesterday. We talked about you a lot, very warmly. He’s not paying me any more money, because of the large advance I had, and I’m just negotiating with him about the possibility of getting to finish the novel without writing more articles. I need at least 1,000 marks a month. You can hardly imagine what (even without the 1,000 marks) the prospect of financial independence means, especially for these weeks. When I heard the news,1 I felt as if I’d just gotten my exam results. I’ll let you know in a couple of days where I decide to go.
My wife has been in a state that makes it impossible for me to go to Austria.
Nor can I hide anywhere.
I have a horribly bad conscience. But if I am to finish the novel this year, then I can’t go to Vienna. It would set me back weeks. I’ve been stuck of late anyway. Maybe it will flow again next week.
Cordially,
your old Joseph Roth
1. the news: an advance on the American edition of Job.
140. To Jenny Reichler
Thursday [1931]
Dear Mother,
I was very glad to see Friedl’s handwriting is unchanged. Please don’t take anything away from her, she’s sure to notice if something’s gone missing.
Warm hugs
Your son
Happy New Year!
141. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler
[September 1931]
Request proofs!
(The Palace of Scheherazade.) by Joseph Roth
Dear friend,
this is the best thing I have written for the paper for years, it’s about Alcazar, and I want to dedicate it to you. You must decide if it’s alright to put f.t.g.1 over it. Otherwise I’ll include it in a book, with the dedication.
Am in Paris, hope to rent a furnished apartment.2 Unable to give you further personal details just now. Need money, am very sober, sensible, and content.
Did your son go to Switzerland? Please write to confirm,
your old
J.R.
Warm regards to your wife!
Foyot, rue de Tournon
1. I.e., Friedrich Traugott Gubler.
2. furnished apartment: this, for JR completely outlandish, aspiration perhaps hints at the new woman in his life (and her children), Andrea Manga Bell. See no. 143 and note.
142. To Stefan Zweig
Friday, 25 September [1931]
Paris 6e
Hotel Foyot
Dear and esteemed Mr. Stefan Zweig,
my friend Landauer has just written me that the Insel Verlag is in trouble, and is entering a partnership with the Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen Verband.1 He doesn’t dare mention it to you himself, and wonders if it is appropriate for me to tell you. In accordance with my principles, I have no alternative but to do so immediately. I should count myself overjoyed to share a publisher with you, for whatever reason. Please think about it.
I’m doing badly, in spite of America.
Your very old
Joseph Roth
1. The Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen Verband was a highly conservative commercial organization that had recently bought up the Langen-Müller Verlag in Berlin; it was rumored to be interested in buying the Insel Verlag.
143. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler
Hotel Foyot
Paris 6e
Thursday, 8 October 1931
Dear friend,
thank you so much for your letter. I hope to get the account from you one day soon. It’s very important for me, I need MONEY urgently, and I must get my finances straightened out. I’ve had nothing from America yet. America itself is probably under just as much pressure as Kiepenheuer; sometimes I’m egocentric enough to suppose that it’s me and my success that have sparked off the world financial crisis. Certainly, every one of the laws of this horrible world had to be overturned for me to have a success.
That’s how I’m living, beset with money worries, and worries too about what’s to become of my wife. She’s become more lucid of late, asks after me occasionally, and I don’t have the strength to go to Vienna. What will that do? And if my wife becomes completely lucid, do I then go back to her? My present is murky, and my future inscrutable. I have worries in all directions, sometimes I feel I have ten horses running every which way, and it’s up to me to hold them together. And I myself am just a silly horse, running away from myself.
What a fine Shakespeare review you wrote there, my friend! My, you’re a real author! I wouldn’t have made the piece on the Taunus so lyrical, though, I think lyricism needs to be masked or stifled.
Hauser’s article was an unbearable show of fresh youthfulness and civilizational insolence. Style was false too, not just putrid. Sieburg: dazzlingly masked gaucheness. Picard’s graphology as ever an honest sermon, pen in hand, a sweet, great man. (He doesn’t answer my letters.)
Your little girl will get better, just give her time, and I dreamed about your son yesterday. He was sitting on a swing that was a ship, and said: I’m on Lake Constance!
I couldn’t leave Mrs. M.B.1 At the last moment, my heart felt sore, and my conscience, which is situated somewhere in its vicinity, did too—and now I’m thinking I can make amends with the one for what I did wrong with others—and with myself, for that matter—(and she says to send you her regards, and sometimes we both say affectionate things about you together).
When will I see you next? I only want to write good and lovely things that make for greater clarity in me, and perhaps in the odd reader.
Give Simon Heinrich my best. I like him, the more I think of him.
Write to me, I like to hear from you.
Say hello to Krenek.2 Tell him he’s worthy of me.
Do you know J. P. Hebel’s Essay about the Jews?
Should be reprinted each time there’s a pogrom. It begins roughly like this: “That the Jews are scattered among the host peoples and . . . live from the sweat of their brows is well known to the Lord, and grieves him . . .”
Very cordially, your old and ever older
Joseph Roth
1. Mrs M.B.: Andrea Manga Bell (born 1900 in Hamburg). Father Cuban, mother from Hamburg. After World War I, married Manga Bell, the king of Duala (former German Cameroon, whose father had been killed by the Germans), lived with him in Versailles, but then didn’t accompany him back to Duala, but ran a women’s magazine in Berlin. Was JR’s companion from 1931 to 1936. In a further, scarcely credible twist in her story, she was convinced that her ex-husband, then a member of parliament in Cameroon, murdered their son on his arrival there. See Der Spiegel, edition of 24 August 1950.
2. Krenek: Ernst Krenek (1900–1991), composer (of the ope
ra Jonny spielt auf) and author. Wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Went into exile in the United States in 1938.
144. To Blanche Gidon (written in French)
25 October 1931
Dear Madam,1
thank you very much for your letter. I can understand you very well on the telephone, which is what matters, because I don’t say much myself. Thank you for your invitation. My amie’s illness will probably keep me from accepting it. She is alone and bedridden, and I can’t very well leave her on her own in the middle of the day. But I hope she may be up and about by Thursday, in which case I’ll send you a pneumatique. It would be nice to see Mr. Poupet2 again, and I would very much like to make Mr. Gidon’s acquaintance! Mr. Reifenberg told me a lot about you. But with my worries—too much for a single man, and for 2 years now—I am a gloomy sort of guest, upsettingly poor, and with remote and eccentric thoughts.
Please Madam, forgive me this rather hand-wringing declamation!
With best wishes
Joseph Roth
1. Blanche Gidon (born 1883), French translator. Married to Dr. Ferdinand Gidon (died 1954), well-known radiologist, who fell victim to his occupation. The Gidons were devoted friends of Roth; he met many French authors in their house in the rue des Martyrs. Mrs. Gidon was responsible for rescuing JR’s papers on his death, which were later transferred to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York by Fred Grubel, JR’s cousin. The works of his that she translated include most of what he produced in his last 6 or 8 years: The Leviathan, The Bust of the Emperor, The Triumph of Beauty, His Apostolic Majesty (stories that appeared in various newspapers and journals), The Radetzky March, The Hundred Days, Confession of a Murderer, Weights and Measures, The Emperor’s Tomb.
2. Mr. Poupet: the director of the publishing house of Plon, in Paris.
145. To Stefan Zweig
28 October 1931
Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,
don’t make me itemize the sorrows that are besetting me. Sick girlfriend, creditors, pharmacies, doctors, I myself am still going to the clinic twice a week on account of my eyes, I avoid people, have destroyed six completed chapters, they were rotten, now I’m rewriting them, Kiepenheuer doesn’t know.
When are you coming? When will you be finished? Do you know the rumors about the Insel Verlag are getting more insistent?1 Do you know how proud I would be if my friend Landauer were to be the steed for us both?
Very cordially, please don’t put down my silence to lack of friendly feeling,
your old Joseph Roth
1. See no. 142.
146. To Benno Reifenberg (written in French)
Hotel Foyot, Paris
[postmarked Paris,
31 October 1931]
Dear friend,1
I won’t be coming to Koslowski’s today, but I will be at the Coupole at around 10 p.m. I would like you to come because I am fond of you, my dear friend, and because I would like to see you. I am very unhappy these days, in French you can say such a thing.
All yours, as ever.
Bring the special edition of the Frankfurter Zeitung, if you will. I saw the announcement of Gerhart Hauptmann’s idiocies, and sundry others as well.
Heil, Temp et Tucho!2
Joseph Roth
1. Writing to Reifenberg in French is some suggestion of Roth’s alienation from developments in Germany (“Gerhart Hauptmann’s idiocies”), and even from his old friend and sometime employer and sort-of successor.
2. Heil, Temp et Tucho: obscure, but perhaps a boisterous toast wishing for health, wealth, and time? Like the Spanish salud y pesetas.
147. To René Schickele
Hotel Foyot, Paris
3 November 1931
Dear esteemed Master Schickele,
I have just set down your new book,1 Fischer had it sent to me. It stuns me with its strength and clarity. I needed to tell you right away. These days, I fear not that many people will tell you. You are among the last of the real writers in Germany, dear René Schickele. I have always liked and admired you, and now, at the end of three days with your book, I like and admire you doubly.
Yours aye
Joseph Roth
1. Der Wolf in der Hürde, third part of the trilogy Das Erbe am Rhein.
148. To Benno Reifenberg (written in French)
Joseph Roth
Hotel Foyot, Paris 6e
Saturday [postmarked:
Paris, 7 November 1931]
Dear friend,
I hope you’ll have the money for me today from the Frankfurter.
If not, could you help me out with 100 francs (this evening at 7 at Mahieu’s),1 to get through the terrible Sunday that is approaching, always the worst of my days?
If you can’t come to Mahieu’s in person, please leave the money with Mr. Wolfe, who seems reasonably trustworthy. Don’t you think? I’ve been full of cognac since morning.
In this state of mind and body, I haven’t managed to telephone you. Otherwise, I hope you’ve gone out sad and lonely, just as I have stayed in to drink, sad and lonely and full of literary and humanitarian duties. Always your devoted friend, and with cordial greetings for the ladies (that’s German, I know)
Joseph Roth
1. Mahieu’s: a café on the Boulevard St. Michel.
149. To Félix Bertaux
20 March [1932]
My dear friend,
I am moved by your concern. I was sick and miserable for a long time, and I’m working desperately on the Radetzky March. The material is too much, I am frail, and unable to shape it. On top of that there’s the material misery in which I’m obliged to live. Otherwise I’d have been in Paris long ago. Maybe I’ll manage to be there in early May. It’s indescribably hard to live here, for me in particular, and in every respect. Things were better for me during the war.
I embrace you and Pierre, and please greet Mrs. Bertaux humbly from me. More after the novel is done (another 2 weeks, with luck).
your old Joseph Roth
c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag
Kantstrasse 10
Charlottenburg Berlin
150. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler
Sunday
Dear friend,
your letter cheered me up. I am unhappy, confused, wholly unable to leave the four walls I’ve thrown up around me and the book, though it feels more like a mountain range in which I wander about in terror. One day, everything comes off, the next day it’s all shit. Tricky, treacherous business. I don’t even want to talk about the fact that in material terms I’m short of practically everything, I have nothing to eat unless someone asks me out, basically I don’t care. I’ve tried to take refuge in the prewar era, but it’s desperately difficult to write about when you feel the way I do. I’m very much afraid I’m a bodger. I take a few minutes off to scribble you these lines. Please remember, it’s as important to me as the book, and as my whole life, that you not forget me (you and my few friends, Picard and Reifenberg, give them both my best wishes), and not be forgetful yourself. I will devote myself entirely to you when I’m finished. Promise!
I love you all, please bear it in mind.
your J.R.
151. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler
Wednesday
My dear good friend,
I’m taking a quarter of an hour off, to reply to your kind letter right away, because I’m very worried. Your idea of getting episodes in Goethe’s life written up by various hands worries me. With all due respect for those involved, it can’t be more than something confected and “made up,” and I fear both for the subject and for those working on it. It would pain me if you and Reifenberg and Simon wound up in some distant relation to purveyors of “biography.” And as far as I’m concerned, I can on no account be involved. I don’t dare “identify mys
elf” with anything that Goethe experienced. If I should have the honor to be involved in the whole project, then I will willingly break off my novel. Nothing would sooner induce me to break it off. But all I can write is this: how I was young, and used to walk past the Goethe statue in the Volksgarten in Vienna every day, and the pigeons cacked on its head, and I froze with respect, and took off my hat, without anyone there to see. It seems more proper to me if everyone were to write about his own personal encounter with Goethe.1
I’m working like a fiend, it’s horrible, I am incredibly afraid the novel will end up no good. I have a feeling for what is good, but whether God will give me the strength to actually make it good is something else. In two weeks a big section of the book will be set, and I’ll send you a copy.
(Request for news. What’s going on with Reifenberg?)
I see Krenek wrote about Sochaczewer.2 Why didn’t you wait for my piece? Really, please, please: can you keep all those books you’ve set aside for me till I’ve finished my novel. The thing Krenek’s writing about, “the moment where objectivity threatens to turn into penury is not far off, and soon . . . etc. etc.” I wanted to write exactly the opposite about Sochacz’s novel. Where does the optimism come from? Where, tell me? Those so-called activist bastards just get cheekier all the time. “Subjectivism” is more arrogant than ever! Can I reply to dear Ernst Krenek, with all the love I have for him through you (in spite of “the malignant rabbit”)?3
Where is your wife? Is your daughter better? Where is Picard? Are you on good terms with Reifenberg? Be good to him! He is a wonderful man. He is honorable, even if he’s not always truthful! I want to see you all again! I am desperate and poor and beset with a hundred worries that I can’t write about now.
Hugs,
your old Joseph Roth
1. There is perhaps no better instance of Roth’s superb and aggressive pure-mindedness (which was certainly the death of him as much as anything else) than this refusal to participate in such a venture, which so characterizes our “postmodern” epoch.
2. Sochaczewer: Hans Sochaczewer, brother-in-law of Arnold Zweig, an author with the Kiepenheuer Verlag.
3. “the malignant rabbit”: someone’s nickname? But whose? JR’s, FTG’s, or “Kren’s”?
152. To Annette Kolb