Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

Secondly, I’ve failed to do all the bureaucratic police stuff on time, and am forced to hang around waiting for a visa extension. Don’t snigger — it’s not the French who are to blame, it’s purely my fault.

Third, don’t give the O.2 episode any more importance than it has. Don’t bother your head about him, or Mr. Stark,3 or any of the rest of them. The Illustriertes Blatt 4 is none of your beeswax. If someone tries to accuse you, shrug your shoulders. I can’t understand your worrying about it. Ott is a fanatic of bad behavior. Be distant to him. Don’t get “cross.” Be “nice” to him. Be like a father, or a nobleman: remember, distance. Basically he’s just a soft and decent human being, just a little “nervous.”

4. Be as industrious and objective as you can. Write, write! Then none of the others will get a look in. Why don’t you have anything for me to read? You’re my hope, and I’m too proud to admit you’ve let me down.

5. Thank you for giving me news from Frankfurt. It sounds rather favorable. I have no plan and a guilty conscience. I feel as though I’ve duped the paper.

6. We’re writing to your wife now.

7. I’ll write at greater length when I’m through with the police.

8. The mail is so unreliable here, if you could, let me know you’ve received this.

9. Even if I don’t get to Germany, I’ll always be your friend.

10. My wife sends her regards

Yours Joseph Roth

Hotel de la place de l’Odéon,

VIe, place de l’Odéon 6.

You’re wrong to think people are the same the world over. The French simply are different. Yes, they whistle and clap during war films. But trust a fanatic and a “subjective” like me: I’ve never heard such feeble applause.

1. Brentano: Bernard von Brentano (1901–1964), publicist, essayist, and novelist. Descended from the Romantic poet Clemens von Brentano. From 1925 to 1930, Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung . He owed his introduction to the paper to JR. There was a violent breach in the relationship in the late 1920s when Brentano swung first left, then hard right. JR was described as “foaming with rage” when BB’s name was mentioned. See no. 83.

2. O episode: Ott episode?

3. Stark: Oskar Stark (1890–1970) journalist. From 1920 to 1931 in the Berlin office of the Frankfurter Zeitung , from 1935 to 1943 in head office, after the war with the Badische Zeitung in Freiburg.

4. Illustriertes Blatt : magazine produced from the same stable as the Frankfurter Zeitung .

16. To Bernard von Brentano

Paris, 14 June 1925

Hotel de la place de l’Odéon

6. Place de l’Odéon

My dear Brentano,

many thanks for your letter. I haven’t seen your articles. It’s hard to find the Frankfurter Zeitung in Paris, it gets here a week late, and not always then, even to Dr. Stahl, its representative here. Put some clippings in an envelope, and mail them to me. Work harder! Three pieces a week. Practice that manner that’s eye-catching and load-bearing at the same time.

Thanks for your crossed fingers, my bureaucratic hoopla is looking reasonably promising just now. My wife went along to the Interior Ministry, and Frenchmen will do everything for a woman. Germans just get impatient. .

I’m just as enthusiastic as before, and just as depressed about Germany. I can understand a German poet1 coming here, digging himself a mattress grave, and giving up the ghost. Before we get around to making a German nation, we may find there’s a European one. Perhaps to the exclusion of the Germans.

I’m taking my novel to Provence round about the 20th. I’m probably going to write a book about Marseille. My book has been translated into Russian 4 times. I have 200,000 Russian readers. And 4½ in Germany. Does that make me a German writer? I’d say of those 4½, 2½ are Russian Jews anyway.

I don’t know how things are going to go on. I think I’ll be back at least once, for practicalities. But I’m a different person, and it won’t be for long.

Will you ask your wife whether she got our postcard?

Give my regards to Dr. Guttmann,2 who behaved scandalously badly here — to me as well.

Regards to the great Sonnemann.3

Don’t go anywhere yet, and don’t talk about it either. I hear a schoolboyish eagerness has come over Otten.

I shake your hand and remain

Your old4

Joseph Roth

My wife says make sure to send her best.

1. The reference is to Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), who died in Paris. In 1848 he was suddenly paralyzed, and spent his last eight years in agonies in what he called his Matratzengruft .

2. Guttmann: Bernhard Guttmann (1869–1959). Before 1914 London correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung , from 1918 to 1930 head of the Berlin office, then Frankfurt, retired in 1933.

3. Sonnemann: Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909). Founder and co-proprietor of the Frankfurter Zeitung . JR is being whimsical/facetious.

4. Roth, who will usually sign like this in his remaining years, is just thirty years old, younger than Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great.

17. To Benno Reifenberg

Lyon, 25 July [1925]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

thank you so much for your letter. With the same post I’m sending a feuilleton to the office, entitled “On the Road in France”1—it’s your title, and I’ve borrowed it — hope you don’t mind. I’m putting these business things in a personal letter, because I can’t trust the post, and I always worry a letter to a German official address wouldn’t get there.2 Please drop me a line at the Hotel de la place de l’Odeon, where they’re keeping my mail for me, just to confirm its safe arrival.

Splendid is such an overused word, but if you were here, you’d understand why I had to reach for it. Lyon is splendid in the old way, majestic and lovely, but without pomp. The Rhone is an old wide river but frisky as a stream. It doesn’t know the meaning of the word gravity, it’s a French river. I walk through the streets of the town, and the country roads about — everywhere you see the Roman flowing into the Catholic, and you see (what you must never write!) the continuation of something archaic and heathen that has found a form for itself in Catholicism, but still exists.

The people are wonderful, very open, mild, with lovely irony, the women terribly delicate, always young, always naked, a lot of Oriental blood, Negro mixed race, the middle classes quieter than in Germany, politically on the left, the men practically as well dressed as the women in Paris. The women still better, silk everywhere, wonderfully adaptable material, soft, coarse, simple, imposing — all silk.

I kiss your wife’s hand, and shake yours. I must say, Paris felt a little empty after you went, your old

Roth

Hug your little boy for me. He must learn French. It will make a European of him.

1. “On the Road in France”: this became Roth’s series of articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung “In the South of France,” which ran from 8 September to 14 November 1925, and was to have been reworked into a book called “The White Cities.” See letter no. 19. See Report from a Parisian Paradise (W. W. Norton, 2003).

2. wouldn’t get there: a habitual anxiety of JR’s. Then again, we are just seven years after the end of World War I, and the bad atmosphere between Germany and France lasted into the 1950s and beyond. Cf. de Gaulle’s dictum that he liked Germany so much, he preferred there to be two of them.

18. To Benno Reifenberg

Avignon, 1 August [1925]

My dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I’d like in this letter to tell you about my great good fortune, only I have such a fear that my pieces aren’t reaching you. It’s a sort of illness, of course, but it threatens to make me sterile, and that’s my excuse in perpetrating such a breach of decorum as to ask you in a personal letter to send me confirmation at the Hotel de l’Odeon that you have safely received the 6 or 7 feuilletons from France. My mail is being forwarded to me.