Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters
Page 24
Joseph Roth
1. Doctor: Otto Forst-Battaglia (1889–1965), publicist, writer, scholar, diplomat. Ended his life as professor of Polish literature at the University of Vienna.
2. This and the following sentences are very often quoted in writing about Roth.
169. To Félix Bertaux
Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
14 November 1932
Dear esteemed friend,
I’m surprised you never got my letter from Ascona. I have been back from Switzerland for just two days. I expect to be in Berlin later this month. Please give me Pierre’s address, I’ll be only too glad to look him up.
Mrs. Manga Bell won’t have money to move her son until December, and so I hope we’ll be able to see each other early in January in Paris. Perhaps I’ll even enlist the Parisian boulevards to help me forget about the dreary celebration of Christmas. So I might be in Paris as early as the 22nd. Admittedly, I’ll be short of money, and living in pretty reduced circumstances. The income from the Radetzky March won’t come through until next spring.1
I’m very glad the book means something to you. I think it’s time I thought about people “of today” once more—and I hope, come January, when I’m better, to start on a big novel set in the present. To that end I think I’ll be resurrecting my old friend Franz Tunda.2
For a week now I’ve been drinking only wine, no schnapps, because I’m unfortunately getting a cirrhosis, albeit only in the initial stages. It can still be tamed. I’ve promised to look after myself. I feel I still have something to live for.
Give my best wishes to your wife.
Ever your old and grateful
Joseph Roth
1. In view of what happened then, it never did.
2. Franz Tunda: originally from Flight Without End.
170. To Jenny Reichler
5 December 1932
Dear Mother,
my condolences on grandfather’s death. I adored him all his life, he was like a natural grandfather to me. I’m thinking of you and your pain, and hope that Friedl’s return to health may comfort us all.
I will write in more detail from Leipzig, where I am going now.
Your loyal son
171. To Stefan Zweig
Hotel-Pension Savigny
Berlin
5 December 1932
Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,
your letter came winging its way to me yesterday—I always see your letters as somehow winged. They are as bright and agile as swallows.1 I’m not sure I’ll be able to come to Munich. You know it’s a long way from Berlin—and I’d need to go back as well, to join my girlfriend in Hamburg. Very early in the New Year, I’m bringing her son to Paris—I’ve probably told you this already. That’s a lot of silly to-ing and fro-ing—and I need to be mindful of costs as well. I’m sure you know how much it goes against the grain for me to advance arguments against a suggestion that would allow me to enjoy your dear, good, dear proximity. I will be even coarser now, because I would like to see you for just one day, soon: could you see your way to being in Berlin 2 days before the Christmas holidays? I’m sure you could easily, forgive me for putting it like that. Alternatively: do you think you could meet me somewhere in January, any day before the 10th? Again: Hamburg is probably too far and too inclement at this time? Forgive me for being unable to find more diplomatic expressions in my haste. I know you won’t mind. You know I want to see you whenever possible. Your great friendship has been lucky for me. And my great fear that it might be unlucky for you turns out not to have been justified. I really was afraid of that! I thought of all sorts of unlikely, partly ridiculous but also serious things between the two of us. Thank God! I’m so relieved! I want to get back to work at the end of January, but need to talk to you first. Three old themes are circulating in my head. My book is selling about 100 copies a day. Everything would be fine, in material terms anyway, so long as the publisher is able to enjoy a bit of success. But none of their other authors are shifting at all, including Arnold Zweig, for whom they paid the most money.2 Just between you and me, it’s a silly book too, internally and for gloomy reasons. The Jews are so stupid. It takes the even stupider anti-Semites to come up with the notion that the Jews are dangerously clever. At the end of 2,000 years, they still managed to be sympathetic—and they’re perverse enough to take themselves and their Judaism for the center of the world. Like the Neue Freie Presse really. How petty and stupid it all is—and how easily one has slipped all chains, all of them. To my regret, I no longer find myself able to solidarize myself with this form of continually self-abnegating Judaism. Arnold Zweig is a very talented chatterer. Through an aperture of precisely one and a half degrees, he proposes to take in the entire cosmos! There’s chutzpah for you! Cosmic chutzpah!—But as far as I’m concerned, I owe the publisher 22,000 marks. He’s living entirely off of what I bring in. All I have is a better conscience vis-à-vis accepting advances.—My wife—and the lasting grimness of her illness—that’s something I’d rather speak to you about. I’m unable to set it down.
Please write back by return!
Good luck with the Strauss business!3
Your old true cordial
Joseph Roth
1. See Roth’s tremendous story “Stationmaster Fallmerayer,” in Collected Stories.
2. isn’t shifting at all: Arnold Zweig’s novel De Vriendt kehrt heim.
3. Following the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929, Richard Stauss turned to Zweig for the liberetto to his Die schweigsame Frau.
172. To Albert Ehrenstein
29 December 1932
Dear Albert Ehrenstein,1
as God is my witness (though He is the only one), I’ve thought of writing to you every day since I left Ascona. But I’ve given up—had to give up—schnapps, and I spend my days sick as a dog. I have a cirrhosis in its early stages—all I can do is hope to slow its progress. I hope you’ll forgive me. 3 of my books—I don’t have copies of the others—will be sent to you sometime from the warehouse in Leipzig. I don’t have your book either! Lio2 has become a strong and stubborn critter. Mrs. Manga Bell sends you her gratitude and best wishes. She’s (rightly) fonder of the cat than of me. Write, and don’t be offended if I don’t write back. The address is: c/o Englischer Hof, Frankfurt am Main. Financially, for all the success of my novel, my situation is lousy, because the publisher can’t afford to let me stay in debt. Sick, wretched, old, lonely, pathetic—and somewhere up above strolls my name or fama, which is not at all the same as my real existence. Don’t be cross with me.—Best wishes to Mrs. Sommerfeld—
Cordially your
Joseph Roth
Would you please get my coat (plus invoice) sent to me, Jos. Roth, c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Kantstrasse 10, Berlin (Charlottenburg), it’s getting cold. Thanks again!
1. Albert Ehrenstein (1886 Vienna–1950 New York), poet, novelist, essayist.
2. Lio: Ehrenstein’s pet tomcat.
173. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth
29 December 1932
To Mr. Joseph Roth, c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Berlin
Dear Mr. Roth,
I don’t hear from you. But perhaps you’d like to hear this sentence from a letter of Hausenstein’s on the Radetzky March: “The book is so lovely, that one has to cry, like Picard, when reading it; so lovely that I don’t know what other book of recent times one could set alongside it.”
Cordially your old
[Benno Reifenberg]
174. To Stefan Zweig
[Berlin] 12 January 1933
Dear, esteemed friend,
I’m going to Paris round about the 20th, don’t know yet where I’ll be staying, as the Foyot is closed, and will stay till about the 10th February. Can we meet? Returning to Berlin probably round about t
he 20th February.
Cordially,
your old friend Joseph Roth
175. To Blanche Gidon
Berlin, 12 January 1933
Dear, esteemed Mrs. Gidon,
About the 20th I hope to be in Paris with the little pickaninny, and talk to you and your dear husband. I don’t doubt for a second that you have translated my book1 splendidly. I am very grateful to you.
Till soon! Your humble
Joseph Roth
1. my book: The Radetzky March.
176. To Stefan Zweig
[Hamburg] 18 January 1933
Very dear and esteemed friend,
so I will be going to Paris on about the 25th, and then Switzerland, and meet you in Munich. I cannot embark on anything new without first talking to you. I require your goodness and cleverness. A couple of people on the “right,” who have heard about my “left-wing” Jewish origins, are just starting to agitate against me too. In the same right-wing journals where they praised my book, they’re now starting to attack me. The Jews and the Leftists are no better, if anything worse. Forgive a friend for blurting out something he just intuits: some of what the Right is saying against you will have been given to them by the Insel Verlag itself; just a hunch, nothing more. Be on your guard. You may be smart, but your humanity blinds you to others’ wickedness. You live on goodness and faith. Whereas I have been known to make sometimes startlingly accurate observations about evil.
Warmest best wishes!
Your old
J.R.
Please don’t be too “amused” by my meanness1 here.
1. meanness: JR is alluding to his (terribly discreet) adverting to alleged remarks by Zweig’s publisher, Anton Kippenberg, director of the Insel Verlag since 1905 and soon to become a Nazi, that he had to correct the German of his (Jewish) author Zweig.
PART IV
1933–1939
After Hitler: Work, Despair, Diminishing Circles, Work, and Death
JOSEPH ROTH IN THE COMPANY OF DUTCH WRITERS
IN A CAFÉ IN AMSTERDAM IN 1937
On the morning of 30 January 1933, the day Hitler was appointed chancellor, Joseph Roth boarded the Berlin–Paris train, and never set foot in Germany again. The hair-fine precision of the timing might have been an accident; the rigor with which Roth drew his consequences assuredly wasn’t. His immediate attention—in the letters, at least—was needed for matters closer to home: what was to become of Andrea Manga Bell’s son, and worries about the quality of Blanche Gidon’s French translation of The Radetzky March. By mid-February, though, events in Germany had fully claimed their place, which they were to keep for the remaining years of Roth’s life: “It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe,” he wrote to Stefan Zweig, to whom this may have been far from clear, and who—like many of the most “assimilated” Jews—continued to believe in the intactness, and quite possibly the immunity of his personal arrangements. Roth had no such illusions, and went on, “Quite apart from our personal situations—our literary and material existence has been wrecked—we are headed for a new war. I wouldn’t give a heller for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”
The intensely dramatic, complicated correspondence between the two unequal friends takes up most of the latter part of this book. Roth begins writing to Zweig in no. 49; starting at no. 216, some of Zweig’s letters are also included. You could say that Zweig picks up where this or that publisher of Roth, or the Frankfurter Zeitung, leaves off; he is, so to speak, the one in the blue corner; he is not really an adversary, but—like the publishers, like the FZ—he comes to be seen in the role of an adversary. Roth simply carries on as before. His own letters are always uphill. He is always the underdog, always indomitable, always David to the other’s Goliath. By the same token, he is always the better writer, and he is always in the right. The other is the one with money, power, authority, patronage, prestige. Roth has nothing, is nothing, all he can do is make a noise, and issue threats. He can withdraw his labor, or he can tell the other—tell Zweig—how badly he is doing, how desperate he is for money, medicine, tranquillity, affection, understanding. In the early letters, up until, say, 1928—up until the catastrophe with Friedl—Roth was always reserved, dignified, keeping things back until there was a chance to say them, face to face, in a meeting; keeping them out of letters, where he felt they didn’t belong. This gradually is turned on its head. First, they come with apologies (“I come to you with a revolting request”), and by the end, they come anyway. Eventually there is nothing that Roth will not write; a letter, in his hands, is an instrument of necessary terror. The extremity of his situation justifies it. Anything less is the waste of a stamp.
When the calamitous events of 1933 happened, no one was perhaps better prepared for them than Roth. He had been building up his Feindbild of Germany and the Germans—of Prussia and the boches—for the best part of fifteen years. He knew from repeated bitter experience that life was a catastrophic sequence of losses, betrayals, and disappointments. His birthplace had been ceded to Poland, his country—the supranational Dual Monarchy comprising seventeen nationalities—was a figment of history, and he lived off his wits, out of a couple of suitcases. He expected nothing else. He may have thought he had little left to lose (he was wrong). And conversely, perhaps no one was worse prepared for them—or had more to lose, was more invested in the fiction of a heile Welt where not only was there no 1933, there was no sure sign that 1914 had happened—than Stefan Zweig, whose “world of yesterday” had not fallen about his ears, not any part of it: who was born on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, and was free to go back there whenever he liked; who grew up in the bosom of a wealthy and sympathetic Jewish manufacturing family; studied in Berlin; had traveled around the world; was a pacifist and an internationalist during the war; lived, when he cared to, in a fourteenth-century bishop’s palace above Salzburg that his lovely and capable wife had found for him; was on close personal terms with a who’s who of European intellectuals; and was the mainstay and virtual editor-at-large of a German belletristic publishing firm with extraordinary production values called Die Insel (the Island—sic), where for the best part of thirty years he had been a best-selling author of error-free books snapped up by an especially devoted and largely female readership. Roth, one might say, was all instinct (albeit the instincts were not always correct); Zweig had none, and duly experienced—at the proper time, so to speak—all those losses and disappointments that Roth had suffered proleptically.
To Roth it will have looked as though Zweig’s advantages were such that he would never stop defending them, whatever the moral cost; Zweig will have thought that Roth, shifting and transient, with no real sacrifice to make, had no proper understanding of the painfully slow accrual of property or reputation. The exchange goes through all sorts of phases: sometimes it is a dialogue of the deaf, sometimes we have two competing prophets (or egocentrics); then Roth blusters and wails, Zweig pleads, reasons, extenuates. Zweig evokes his freedom and his good intentions as an individual; Roth assures him that anyone continuing to have dealings with the enemy had no further claim on his friendship. The very quick and fiery and aggressive Roth and the obtuse, decent-minded, and squirming Zweig are a fascinating—and distressing—study in contrary temperaments. Their relationship was further complicated by the fact that Roth was monetarily—one could almost say physically—dependent on Zweig, and handled his dependency predictably badly, with histrionic begging, intermittent gratitude, and shorter and shorter intervals. When Paula Grübel offered to buy her cousin a new set of teeth, Roth straightaway refused: “If she pays for my teeth, she will own a bit of me,” he is said to have reasoned. He took Zweig’s money, but refused to be bought. On the one hand, his need for more was basically unappeasable; on the other, he maintained his natural dominance in the relationship, in spite of all Zwei
g’s advantages.
Hermann Kesten tells a superb story of the time1 they were all together in Ostend in 1936, how they would work during the days, and in the evening Zweig would take Roth out to expensive restaurants and bars, Roth in his only pair of, fraying, trousers. One day Zweig took Roth to a tailor, and had him fitted for a new pair of trousers. They turned out to be terribly expensive, because the tailor needed to be bribed to make the trousers the way Roth wanted them, in the style of Austrian cavalry trousers, very narrow below the knee. To Zweig’s satisfaction, Roth turned out that evening in his new trousers. The next day, Kesten relates, he came upon Roth sitting with Irmgard Keun at a bar in the market. The waiter brought out three glasses of brightly colored liqueurs. Roth took his, and slowly and deliberately, and to applause from Keun, emptied it over his jacket. Kesten asks Roth, “What are you doing?” “Punishing Stefan Zweig,” replies Roth, emptying the next lurid glass over the jacket. Roth explained to Kesten that that evening he would shame Zweig with his stained jacket. “Millionaires are like that! They take us to the tailor, and buy us a new pair of pants, but they forget to buy us a jacket to go with them.”
There is a photograph of the time, taken on a café terrace in Ostend: a Great Dane with a terrier. Zweig, big, sleek, friendly, glossy, leans in toward his friend affectionately and indulgently; he looks animated, enthused, warm; he is about to say something kind and perhaps ever so slightly witty. Roth looks like an old boxer or wrestler, a square head on thick shoulders, slumped, pouchy, impervious, a lumpy jack-o-lantern face under a few damp squiggles of hair squeezed out of an icing bag, the eyes between blinking and glowering. No one looking at the picture would guess that Roth is the younger by some thirteen years. Nor could anyone be oblivious to the fact that he is the dominant personality. Soma Morgenstern describes his friend in these terms:
As he took a sip of cognac to recover from his coughing laugh, I studied him closely. The changes to face and form staggered me. He was not quite forty-three years old, and—my heart won’t forgive me for saying so: he looked like a sixty-year-old alcoholic. His face, once so animated and alert, with its prominent cheekbones, and short jutting chin, was now puffy and slack, the nose purple, the corners of his blue eyes rheumy and bloody, his head looking as if someone had started plucking it and given up part way, the mouth completely covered by heavy, dark red, Slovak-style drooping mustaches. But when summoned to the telephone, he slowly hobbled away with the aid of a stick, his thin legs in narrow old-fashioned pants, his sagging little paunch at odds with his birdlike bones, the east Galician Jew made the impression of a distinguished, if somewhat decayed, Austrian aristocrat—in other words, exactly the impression he had striven all his life to give, with every fiber of his body and soul, by means both legitimate and illegitimate.2