Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  It would be serious if you couldn’t come to Brussels. You are removing yourself from me before my very eyes, you are becoming too worldly, I love you and your cleverness, but I will cease to love you the moment you become a child of the world. For a long time, for some 8 months, I had that suspicion, and kept my distance from you. I’m embarrassed for you that you think you can tell me that publishers do sums—I know that, that’s why I denounce them as sons of bitches—and the easy indulgence with which you accept a given set of circumstances strikes me as every bit as sterile as the hatred you warn me against. I have the feeling you don’t seem to realize how much of your personal and professional dignity is sacrificed when you begin to show comprehension of the swine. Tout comprendre c’est tout confondre.1

  I don’t like it when you become complaisant, you least of all. And please forgive me if I’m being unfair, perhaps.

  I’m writing you all this, purely so that we don’t waste any of our precious time together, if we meet.

  Be assured I know neither hatred nor resentment. They are mortal sins.

  I hope we do meet up.

  My situation is desperate. But I don’t want to burden you with that, in this context.

  Your loyal

  Joseph Roth

  1. Tout comprendre c’est tout confondre: (To understand everything is to mix everything up, or get everything wrong), JR’s personal variant on the familiar Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.

  432. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel de la Couronne

  Ostend

  21 September 1937

  Dear friend,

  I am leaving today. I have hung on in vain, in the hope of seeing you.

  Thanks to your secretary’s mistake, your last letter (dated the 10th) only reached me on the 18th. But that was about a Zweig-Toscanini1 meeting, not one between Zweig and Roth. The splendidly furious outburst of the old man against Furtwängler2 reminded me somehow of you. Toscanini was certainly not “embittered.” One has to oppose meanness, dilution, cowardice. In my place, Toscanini would have written exactly the same things against the Austrian publishers as I did. I am sure you didn’t remonstrate with him.—When will you finally see what posture accords to your dignity and my love for you?

  I am always your friend

  Joseph Roth

  1. Toscanini: Arturo Toscanini was opposed to Fascism and National Socialism.

  2. Furtwängler: Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886–1954), who was often compared with Toscanini, was the most successful conductor in the Third Reich. His support for the Nazis and his decision not to leave Fascist Germany made him a deeply contentious figure after the war.

  433. To Stefan Zweig

  [Amsterdam] 23 September 1937

  Dear friend,

  I’ve just received the address from your card sent to Querido. I have waited till now (7 in the evening, 23 September, Thursday). If I succeed in getting a contract in Amsterdam, I’ll come to Brussels or Paris.—I’m faring very badly, dismally in fact. I don’t understand why you preferred seeing Toscanini to me: or were prepared to miss seeing me for his sake. I’ve written to you in London, to tell you how much I admire and endorse his position.

  Sincerely your

  J.R.

  434. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  25 September 1937

  Dear Roth,

  why, oh why are you so easily offended—aren’t we beaten about enough without baring our teeth at one another, even if . . . I am so consumed by my own fallibility that I have no more strength to defend myself against others. No, my friend, not articles now—for us it would be best to get ourselves wiped out by a gas bomb in Shanghai or Madrid, and maybe rescue someone with more joie de vivre. I was only in Paris for a day and a half, didn’t see anyone except Masereel1 and Ernst Weiss, saw some wonderful paintings, and am now back at work. This year ’37 is a bad one for me, everything claws at me, I feel half flayed, my nerves are exposed, but I carry on working, and I would do better if it weren’t for family and others’ affairs that lame me, and demand twice the energy I have. Don’t forget that I’m past 55, and since we seem to be living in wartime, I get tired some of the time—I positively fled back to my desk, the only support for the likes of us. You have no idea how much I needed to speak with you, I’ve just gotten another blow in the guts from a so-called friend, and I’m choking back gall with clenched teeth. It would be important to spend good time together, and if the conspiracy between dictators doesn’t lead to the planned concentric assault on Russia (first the Bolshevists, then the Democrats, that’s the way it was done in ’33), if a frail sort of peace still endures, then I want to go to Paris in January for a month; I need my friends as never before and there are a few there, and you would come too, it would be lovely! From time to time I need to breathe in the air of conversation, and strengthen and intensify myself: we forfeit too much of ourselves in the current madhouse. Toscanini was forced to stay in Gastein at the last moment, I’m seeing him here; I am continually shaken at the way he, who celebrates the greatest “successes” on the planet, instead of egoistically enjoying them, suffers from all that happens around him—well, my novel2 may have something to say about the suffering from pity. No, Roth, don’t grow hard from the hardness of the times, that would mean assenting to it and strengthening it! Don’t get pugnacious, implacable, just because the implacable ones are triumphing through their brutality—rather refute them by being different, permit yourself to be mocked for your weakness, instead of going against your nature. Roth, don’t become bitter, we need you, for the times, however much blood they drink, remain anemic in terms of their intellectual force. Preserve yourself! And let’s stay together, we few!

  Your St. Z.

  1. Masereel: Frans Masereel (1889–1972), Flemish illustrator and etcher, friend of Zweig’s.

  2. my novel: Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity).

  435. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  [autumn 1937]

  My dear fellow,

  got your letter a moment ago. It saddens me. I remember how we once wrote to each other; telling each other of our plans, celebrating our friends, and rejoicing in our mutual understanding. I know nothing now of what you are working on, what keeps you busy; in Italy people were telling me of a new novel of yours, and had read it, and I didn’t know about it. Roth, friend, brother—what does all the shit going on have to do with us! I read the paper once a week, and that’s enough for me of the lies of all countries, the only thing I do is try here and there to help an individual—not materially, but to try and get people out of Germany or Russia or out of some trouble: that seems to be the only way in which I can remain active. I won’t deny it when you say I’m hiding. If you are unable to impose your own decisions, you should avoid them.—You forget, you, my friend, that I state my problem PUBLICLY in my Erasmus, and only stand by one thing, the integrity of individual freedom. I’m not hiding myself, there is Erasmus, where I portray the so-called cowardice of a conciliatory nature without celebrating it—as fact, and as DESTINY. And then Castellio—the image of a man I SHOULD LIKE TO BE.

  No, Roth, I was never disloyal to a true friend for a second. If I wanted to see Tosc., then it’s because I honor him, and because one should take every opportunity one gets of seeing a 72-year-old, and then in the end I didn’t even see him (you must have missed that in my letter) because I had to go, Amsterdam wasn’t anywhere on my route, and I had no idea if you were there or in Utrecht. Roth, there are so few of us and you know, however much you push me away, that there can be hardly anyone who is as devoted to you as I am, that I feel all your bitterness without opposing it with any bitterness of my own: it doesn’t help you, you can do what you like against me, privately, publicly diminish me or antagonize me, you won’t manage to free yourself of my unhappy love for you, a love that suffers when you suffer, that is hurt by you
r hatred. Push me away all you like, it won’t help you! Roth, friend, I know how hard things are for you, and that’s reason enough for me to love you all the more, and when you’re angry and irritable and full of buried resentments against me, then all I feel is that life is torturing you, and that you’re lashing out, out of some correct instinct, perhaps against the only person who wouldn’t be offended thereby, who in spite of everything and everyone will remain true to you. It won’t help you, Roth. You won’t turn me against Joseph Roth. It won’t help you!

  Your St. Z.

  436. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  17 October 1937

  Dear unfriend,

  I just wanted to tell you that, finally, thanks to Berthold Fles,1 whom I saw yesterday, I’ve managed to get some news of you, and I’m delighted to hear that you are so hard at work: I know you will manage to write those two books, and they will be a success. He told me you’d had an invitation to Mexico,2 and I can’t tell you how important it would be in my view for you to get a change of air, of scene, of place, to fill your lungs again, and how wonderfully you would depict such a new world—something like that, as I said to Fles, must be reasonably easy to finance as well. The smell of Europe’s putrefaction is in all our nostrils: a little fresh air and you, my dear, my important friend, would feel refreshed in your soul. I am glad that at least you are in Paris—don’t forget to take a look at the literary pavilion in the exhibition3 (“ébauche d’un musée de littérature”) the most impressive in the whole exhibition for me. Yesterday I completed the first draft of my novel, 400 pages, of course a completely inadequate rough sketch, the proper work will begin now, and how useful it would be for me to be able to consult you at such a moment! But you won’t come to London (even though it would be important) and I will have to sit here till mid-December, when I will go to Vienna for a fortnight, and then maybe Paris for a month. When will we see one another? Now you know all my plans. In the next few days, you will get copies of two of my books, the essay collection and the Magellan.4 I’ve really been hard at work these last few years, and done what I could in terms of quantity and energy; I hope the quality is acceptable! This is just a hello to the Foyot, and don’t forget your unhappy lover, and discarded friend

  St. Z.

  1. Berthold Fles, a Dutch literary agent in New York, represented many of the exiled German writers.

  2. Mexico: “pyre of Bierce and springboard of Hart Crane,” where Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957) was currently at work on his epochal novel of alcoholic decline, Under the Volcano (1947). It must be considered doubtful whether JR could have thrived there for any length of time.

  3. exhibition: the World’s Fair Exhibition in Paris in 1937. Here, as so often, one gets the impression that Zweig and Roth simply inhabited different planets, and couldn’t open their mouths without wounding each other—Roth with acuteness, his intemperate malice and fury, Zweig with obtuseness, a kind of airy and spoiled imperviousness to everyone and everything. It is really hard to imagine the penurious Roth, whose orbit was down to one or two bars in what he called his république Tournon (the area around the café in whose upstairs he had a small bedroom), with swollen feet and in the last stages of alcoholism, doing something as otiose as taking himself to a literary exhibition.

  4. the Magellan: Magellan, der Mann und seine Tat (Vienna, 1938).

  437. To Rudolf Olden

  Paris, October 1937

  Dear friend Olden,

  thank you very much for the obituary of Karpeles. It’s an obituary for us all: the last ten of the fourth regiment. Hail to you, the ninth, in sincere comradeship.1

  Your old

  Joseph Roth

  1. This note, written on the letterhead of the Neues Tagebuch (New Diary), the Paris-based exiles’ paper, suggests a group elegy. Benno Karpeles was the initiator and editor of the paper, to which Roth and Olden and others—Tschuppik, Kisch, Polgar, etc.—contributed. Almost twenty years before, they had all worked together on another paper, in Vienna, Der Neue Tag. Rudolf Olden died on the crossing to the United States, when the ship he was traveling on, The City of Benares, was torpedoed by the Germans on 17 September 1940.

  438. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Paris-Dinard

  2 November 1937

  To Mr. Stefan Zweig, London W 1, 49 Hallam Street

  Dear friend,

  this isn’t a letter, just a notification of my new address.

  The Hotel Foyot is being demolished on the instructions of the city magistrates, and yesterday I left it as the last of its guests. The symbolism is all too apparent.1

  I am very much afraid that something of yours on its way to me may have gotten mislaid. I will be grateful for a prompt reply.

  Your old

  Joseph Roth

  1. all too apparent: see Roth’s piece “Rest While Watching the Demolition,” first published in the Neues Tagebuch on 25 June 1938, included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.

  439. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Paris-Dinard

  3 November 1937

  To Mr. Stefan Zweig, London W 1, 49 Hallam Street

  Dear friend,

  in haste: the two manuscripts I sent you today are the only things I have found that might qualify as short stories.

  Thank you very much. A proper letter will follow.

  Your old

  Joseph Roth

  440. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Paris-Dinard

  14 November 1937

  To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Hallam Street, London W 1

  Dear friend,

  please excuse the hurried dictation. I hear from Mr. Fles that fourteen Jews were organized to help me, among them apparently yourself.

  I find firstly the fact of it unbearable, and secondly the circumstance that you did not inform me of this yourself.

  Sincerely, your old

  J.R.

  441. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Paris-Dinard

  23 November 1937

  To Mr. Stefan Zweig, 49 Hallam Street, London W 1

  Dear friend,

  I’m sorry, typewriter again. I was bedridden until yesterday, with a sleeping-pill poisoning. I am still barely able to eat anything. Work is out of the question.

  Drop me a line if you would, to your old

  [Joseph Roth]

  442. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  [December 1937?]

  Dear friend,

  I am shocked and alarmed at your letter—I had so hoped Paris would focus and stimulate you, instead of offering you endless irritations. I often think of you, always with love, and usually with concern. What will become of us? The plan that so upset you seems to have fizzled out, and I was sadly not at all sure I could participate fully in it—if Austria folds, then we are all done for. No more books of ours will appear in German and what I own there in stupid decency and honest patriotism will be futsch, and I have a dozen people’s welfare depending on me. I too took sleeping pills tonight—the notion that the “democracies” would give us up just like that I simply can’t get over, and Russia alone is unfortunately not strong enough to oppose that rapaciousness. I will probably go to Vienna this week1—I want to see it once more (and my old mother). Then back here, and in January a little place in the south. I don’t want to see anyone, I don’t want to read any newspapers, I’ll probably go to Portugal, where my knowledge of the language is poorest. Dear friend, everything is at stake now, we are almost at the end! Gather up all your strength, don’t waste yourself—the ultimate stands before us.

  your St Z.

  1. Vienna this week: The Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, occurred in February 1938.

  443. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  [London, January 1938]

  Dear friend,<
br />
  I feel a little calmer, because your latest letter (which I wish had been longer) once again was written in your clear firm hand; if everything goes well, we’ll be seeing each other in just a fortnight, and then I hope (!!) all will be well with you. I have had problems with Reichner;1 not only that he is ungrateful toward me and sometimes impossible, he does things that revolt me. It’s a shame that being persecuted has brought out the worst in the Jews. I really don’t know how I should assert myself in this relationship, not least as he has almost my entire opus in his hands—his continual truckling to Nazi Germany (which I don’t profit from, I have my own number on the German index) turns me into someone who in his particular case is compelled to agree with Streicher. Ach, my friend, when I think of all the disappointments I have endured in these years, and you refuse to understand how painful your remoteness and silence are to me; that two friends each scrape open their own hearts without being brought closer doesn’t make sense to me. Well, in a few weeks—I’ll be going to Portugal, where there are no newspapers and no mail (everything a week old and more digestible in its staleness).

  Sincerely

  your loyal St. Z.

  1. Reichner: but JR, by his own inspired methods, had reached the same conclusions 4 years earlier. See no. 321.

  444. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Paris-Dinard

  Monday [postmarked: 10 January 1938]

  Dear friend,

  it’s good that you’re going somewhere where you won’t get letters. That way, you’ll be spared possible news of me. Go with God! It’s in His hands whether we see each other again or not.

  Sincerely, always

  Your old