“We’re doing wonderfully here,” Franz informed his parents, “even though we pay for our happiness with a bad conscience.”[635] A few days after their arrival, the American edition of Embezzled Heaven had been published and become an instant best-seller. It had been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and within a week Viking Press sold over 150,000 copies.[636] “My latest book... is a hit,” he wrote to his parents. “For the time being, this good fortune has freed us from all worries. I regard my success and fame here as undeserved; most of the others are in poor shape and have to fight hard for their livelihood, with little hope.”
During his first weeks in the United States, instead of relaxing as he had planned, Werfel charged from one meeting or reception to the next, speaking at fund-raising dinners[637] and writing essays. Aufbau published his article “Our Road Goes On” (“Unser Weg geht weiter”)[638], a passionate appeal to the Jewish people to recognize World War II as the “greatest and most dangerous moment” in the history of Israel, one that demanded, from each and every one of its members, determination and readiness to fight: in this “most terrible religious war of all time,” the enemy’s goal was “the complete extermination of the Jewish spirit on this planet,” and it was now imperative for all democratic forces to make a concerted effort to save the Jews. According to Werfel’s thesis, Israel’s destruction would cause “the Christian churches [to] fade into empty shadows and oblivion,” and the entire civilization to subside to the lowest level of its history. Thus all of mankind’s political as well as spiritual fate depended on the existence of Israel: Werfel said that the recognition of this link made him “shiver to the roots of my being.”
Werfel regularly sent food packages to his parents from New York. His sister Mizzi even toyed with the idea of traveling to France in order to escort their parents personally from Bergerac via Spain and Portugal to the United States. “But that is just fantasy,” Werfel admitted to them.
In and around Los Angeles[639], along the Pacific Coast, many German-speaking émigrés began to settle within easy reach of each other, establishing a colony once again, like the one in Sanary-sur-Mer. The refugees were attracted there by the mild climate, California’s easygoing ways, and not least the great movie studios. Hollywood had already put a number of German authors under contract, encouraging them to hope for financial security for the duration of their life in exile.
Thomas Mann was planning a move to Los Angeles, as was his brother Heinrich. The writers Alfred Döblin, Bertolt Brecht, and Lion Feuchtwanger moved there, and Ludwig Marcuse, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold[640], and Max Reinhardt were already established residents. Ernst Deutsch, whom Werfel knew from his schooldays, had settled in the movie metropolis with his wife, Anuschka.
“Before Christmas we’ll probably move to California,” Werfel told his parents.[641] Alma asked two friends, Venetian antique dealers who had moved their business to Los Angeles in the 1930s, to look for a suitable dwelling. The couple, Mr. and Mrs. Loewi[642], soon found the right place, a small house in the Hollywood hills, high above the largest urban sprawl in the world. They furnished it lovingly with all the basics and told the Werfels in mid-December 1940 that all was ready for their move to Los Angeles. The Loewis had even found a butler for the Werfels, a young German operetta tenor who had left his touring ensemble and remained in America.
One day before the end of the year, the Werfels moved into their new house at 6900 Los Tilos Road[643], a very narrow, winding street in the Outpost district. The warm air was fragrant with orange, acacia, and oleander blossoms; there were fruit trees and rosebushes in their own garden as well as in the opulent gardens of their neighbors. In the evenings, natural acoustics[644] permitted them to enjoy concerts and performances of operas and operettas — their house sat on a slope immediately above the Hollywood Bowl and its “Music Under the Stars.”
Their butler, August Hess[645], chauffeured his employers through the endless city in a roomy Oldsmobile and ran all their errands. Franz Werfel thought he had found paradise. It was spring in the middle of winter, things greened and flowered in every season, the ocean was nearby, and in less than an hour’s drive one could reach sandy deserts and snowcapped mountains. “The Riviera is just trash compared to this,” Werfel wrote to his parents in his first impressions of California.[646] He was quite overwhelmed by American comforts: “You push a button, and it gets warm in ten seconds.” Every room, even the servant’s, had its own bathroom. And food was delivered to the house “almost ready to eat.”[647] The climate was “so marvelous” that he “felt ten years younger” and had no circulatory problems whatsoever. “If only I could get you here! I would give years of my life for that.”
The High Song of Bernadette (Das hohe Lied von Bernadette)[648] was the title of the first version of the Lourdes novel on which he started work in mid-January 1941 in the house on Los Tilos. On the voyage from Lisbon to New York, Werfel had written in his notebook: “Almost decided on Bernadette”[649] — clearly not as certain about the undertaking as he later claimed in his preface, when he called the book “the fulfilment of a vow.”
Georg Moenius, a German priest whom the Werfels knew from Europe and who now shared their exile in California, advised Werfel on all theological questions and provided him with pertinent literature, such as a work by the French canon Joseph Belleney, Our Holy Shepherdess Bernadette[650] on which Werfel based much of his own text.
He worked as intensely and happily as he once had in Breitenstein and later in the round room at Sanary, devoting himself to the novel eight hours a day, every day. At first he did not believe that the book would be a commercial success: Protestant America would hardly be interested in a Catholic miracle, a subject that was doomed to seem quite irrelevant in the midst of a world war. Ben Huebsch, Werfel’s American publisher, shared his misgivings[651]; he, too, was convinced that the story of Bernadette Soubirous would not do well but nevertheless declared himself willing to publish it, since all of Werfel’s other books had come out under his imprint, Viking Press.
During the months of work on Bernadette, Werfel continued his efforts to get his parents to the United States. Varian Fry was involved in the project[652] and had already found an ambulance in which Rudolf and Albine Werfel were to be taken from Bergerac to Lisbon. But Fry was worried that Werfel’s aged father would not be physically strong enough for the hardships of the journey. “I want you to know,” Franz wrote to his mother, “that all of us are pondering, day and night, what would be best for you and how we should arrange it all... I would give my right hand if we could spare you all that.” If he weren’t so well known, he would immediately take the plane back and try to save them in person. “I notice, with great envy, that many people here have managed to bring their parents over, among them people in their eighties.”
In mid-March 1941, NBC broadcast a radio interview with Werfel in its program series “I’m an American.”[653] Every week a well-known European immigrant who had applied for American citizenship appeared in the studio to be interviewed by a prominent official on behalf of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles. Werfel’s move to the United States was a great gain for the cultural life of the country, stated his interviewer, W. A. Carmichael. Werfel replied that the United States was “more than a country and a people. It is a huge continent and a unique amalgam of strong races. Its size, its freedom, its way of life overwhelm me.” He thus wanted to become a U.S. citizen “not only out of necessity but out of a recognition of this greatness.” “Many years ago” he had “in a few essays” expressed his “firm belief that America has been called to defend, victoriously, the eternal values, the Christian values against Satan’s Blitzkrieg. America will be the radiant phoenix that rises triumphantly from the world conflagration... If ever a Christian has seen into the furthest depths of the Antichrist’s treacherous heart, it is President Roosevelt. And as long as this champion of God lives and acts, he will not permit the entire globe to fall in
to the hands of the murderers of humanity.”
A few days after that broadcast, on March 22, 1941[654], Werfel crossed the border between Mexico and Arizona near the small town of Nogales: he had to reenter the United States as an immigrant after the expiration of his visitor’s visa so that he would be able to apply for citizenship.
In May, after working for four months, Werfel completed the first draft of his life of Bernadette. “I have dared to sing the song of Bernadette,” he said in the preface, “although I am not a Catholic but a Jew.” He had been encouraged in his endeavor by a “far older and far more unconscious vow” than the one made in Lourdes: “Even in the days when I wrote my first verses I vowed that I would evermore and everywhere in all I wrote magnify the divine mystery and the holiness of man.”
Departing from his usual practice[655], Werfel dictated the second draft of the novel. His secretary was Albrecht Joseph, a literary historian and former theatrical director, recommended to him by the writer and fellow immigrant Bruno Frank. In the summer of 1941, as German troops marched into the Soviet Union, at first proceeding speedily and victoriously toward the interior, Werfel finished his Lourdes book, dedicating it “To the memory of my stepdaughter Manon.” Now he announced the novel to G. B. Fischer as the story of a “true genius of a girl.”[656] “In a certain sense Bernadette is a personification of the magical powers that do not die out in humanity, any more than poetry does.” He confessed to his sister Hanna, now living in London, that he had worked harder on this novel than on anything else in his life. He said that he had been laboring on the huge book day and night for the past months, “bringing it into being by means of daily, hourly self-mortification.”[657] To get on in the United States, one had to work three times as hard as in Europe. “I’ve agreed to a terrifying lecture tour in the fall. I’m frightened. My English isn’t first-rate yet.”[658]
In the meantime Werfel’s parents in Marseilles had been waiting for several weeks for their Portuguese visas in order to board the ship Serpa Pinto, scheduled to sail from Lisbon to New York in September 1941. “Mr. Fry cabled that Papa is getting weaker and that the doctor thinks he’ll soon be unable to travel,” Werfel wrote to Hanna, adding that there was an acute food shortage in Marseilles. “That our poor parents, after a life of calm and security, are subjected to this horrifying trial... is an inconceivable torment to me... Perhaps there will be a miracle.” On July 31, 1941[659], ten days after his son had wished for a miracle, Rudolf Werfel gave up the struggle for survival — in Marseilles, a few weeks before his eighty-third birthday.
Werfel’s grief for his father was now mingled with the fear that his seventy-year-old mother might not be able to cope with the flight from France by herself, but he soon received the reassuring news that Albine Werfel was already in Portugal and would shortly arrive in New York. Franz was able to embrace his mother at the end of September, after more than a year of ceaseless anxiety about her survival. He stayed for some time on the East Coast, living with Alma, at his favorite hotel, the St. Moritz on Central Park South, and helped his mother to the best of his ability to recover from the shock of her husband’s death and to feel somewhat at home in the United States. Alma started up her salon[660] again in their hotel suite; as if she were back in Vienna, she entertained Austrian princes and princesses, politicians and artists, happy once again to see herself as a social focus but nevertheless subjecting her husband to bitter recriminations[661]: only because of him did she have to leave her beloved Austria; by herself she could have remained at Hohe Warte in happy security and freedom from worry. Franz’s Jewishness was the reason she had lost her homeland — which she now glorified from afar. Only because of Werfel was she forced to live a deplorable life in exile, in a country lacking culture and spirituality. Helpless and miserable, the target of these attacks endured the rages of his wife. There was only one escape route from Alma’s bad temper: work.
While busy looking for a New York apartment for his mother, he prepared himself for the lecture tour that would take him to several states, among them Nebraska, Missouri, and Texas. Like an actor studying his part, Werfel now learned his lecture on belief in God, originally written in 1932, which he retitled “Can We Live Without Faith in God?” (“Können wir ohne Gottesglauben leben?”) Before setting out, he gave a couple of interviews and said in one of them that he was now familiar with both the East and West coasts of the United States, and had arrived at the conclusion that the American nation was “relatively without hatred.” He had rediscovered the feeling of “sunshine” that he had experienced as a boy in the wonderful poems of Walt Whitman. While Europe and Asia were becoming increasingly godless, the ideals of religion and morality were evidently preserved in America, and he assumed that after the war the United States would have to shoulder the responsibility of initiating a moral renewal of the rest of the world.
In December 1941, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent declaration of war against Japan, and Germany’s declaration of war against the United States, the German edition of The Song of Bernadette[662] was published by Bermann-Fischer Verlag in Stockholm, with simultaneous publications in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian. The American edition was scheduled for the spring of 1942. After Werfel had finished “the difficult task of proofreading the translation,” he wrote from Los Angeles to his mother, who had stayed in New York, “People here... feel directly threatened by the Japanese, but I think that is nonsense. Some are leaving the coast.”[663] Even Alma, who “always expects the worst,” was considering a move inland, perhaps to Denver or Colorado Springs. “For my part... I’d rather stay here.” Admittedly, economic survival would become increasingly difficult for Europeans: “American nationalism is in full flower, and one will have to work hard and with deliberation if one wants to stay on top. One can sense it particularly here, in the movie city... The hardest year in American history has just begun.”
The previous fall Werfel had received a very depressing letter from Stefan Zweig[664] in which his friend told him about his nervous breakdown: the pain caused by the loss of his language and of his identity had driven him to the verge of despair. Zweig had since settled in the Brazilian city of Petropolis and now, in another letter, enthused about the magical beauty of his new refuge, praising the landscape that surrounded him. He seemed to have come through the crisis and even invited Werfel to visit him the following summer. He felt that Werfel would find Brazil far more stimulating than Hollywood.[665] But Werfel would never make the trip to South America: at the end of February 1942, Stefan Zweig and his wife Lotte committed suicide. “It is appalling! He wrote us desperate letters, but unfortunately I didn’t really take them seriously,” Werfel wrote to his mother.[666] At a memorial service[667] in a Los Angeles synagogue, Werfel stressed that he found Zweig’s suicide particularly hard to comprehend because his friend had handed the archenemy a triumph: German newspapers celebrated the exile’s decision to die “like the sinking of a British cruiser.” Nevertheless, Werfel went on to say, Zweig’s suicide was evidence of “a secret greatness” behind which lay an unfathomable mystery. “Later generations will judge the tragedy of those poets and writers who have been exiled from their language to cower, like Ahasuerian beggars, before the threshold of an alien grammar and culture.” In one of his last letters to Werfel, Zweig had said that whenever he heard about bombing raids and collapsing buildings, he himself collapsed along with them. “His death proves that those words were truly not exaggerated... No, he sensed, he knew that things would and must become worse from one day to the next.”
As he had feared, Werfel’s financial position deteriorated after America’s entry into the war. The Book-of-the-Month Club showed no interest in Bernadette, and that depressed its chances on the movie market. No producer or studio made an offer. In this sudden crisis, Werfel tried to refurbish some older works for Hollywood: thus April in October was turned into a treatment[668] and made the rounds of the studios. The dir
ector Robert Siodmak showed some interest in the project, but nothing came of it.
Werfel’s best friend in Los Angeles, apart from his Piarist schoolmate Ernst Deutsch, was the Viennese writer Friedrich Torberg, whom he had known slightly in the Café Herrenhof days; back then, he had rather avoided Torberg because of the latter’s admiration for Karl Kraus. They had met in Estoril while fleeing Europe, and Torberg had been living in Hollywood since the previous fall. Werfel recognized him as an equal and a kindred spirit. Thirty-four years old, Torberg was full of humor, a spiritual product of Imperial Vienna. Werfel opened up to him without reservation: only Willy Haas and Ernst Polak had ever been as close to him as this new friend. At least in a small way, Torberg provided Werfel with the sense of familiarity and coffeehouse atmosphere that the latter missed so much in his exile. When they were together, the hard fate of exile, of being cut off from the cultural life of Austria, did not seem quite so tragic as before.
In the spring of 1942, Werfel and Torberg collaborated on a “film story” based on the life of Zorah Pasha, the sultan’s daughter. It was a blood-and-thunder subject, one that Werfel had made a note of as long ago as 1925 on his trip to Egypt. They produced a detailed treatment, “The Love and Hatred of Zorah Pasha.”[669] To make this rather embarrassing dime-store stuff look a little more interesting, Werfel wrote a brief foreword in which he claimed to have written a first draft of this work in Europe but to have lost it on his flight through France, Spain, and Portugal.
About six weeks before the publication date of The Song of Bernadette, the Book-of-the-Month Club made a surprise decision to select the novel after all and to recommend it to its members in July as the most important new book on the American market. Viking Press printed a first edition of 200,000 copies, and Ben Huebsch’s initial skepticism instantly turned to boundless optimism. “Now the chances for a movie are much better,” Werfel wrote to his mother. “Negotiations are going on constantly.”
Franz Werfel: A Life in Prague, Vienna, and Hollywood Page 28
