Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

Even as I write this, I’m unsure whether you will get it. But even if you don’t, I still hope you will somehow sense that I am enjoying — seems wrong, quaking, yearning, crying — the best days of my life. I shall never be able to describe what has been vouchsafed to me here. You will probably best assess the scale of my good fortune by the way I see how small and powerless I am, and yet seem to live thousandfold. I love the rooftops, the stray dogs that run around the streets, the cats, the wonderful tramps with their red leather complexions and young eyes, the women who are so terribly thin, with long legs and bony shoulders and yellow skin, the child beggars, the mix of Saracen, French, Celtic, German, Roman, Spanish, Jewish, and Greek. I am at home in the Palace of the Popes, all the beggars live in the most wonderful castles, I should like to be a beggar and sleep in its doorways. Everything we do in Germany is so stupid! So pointless! So sad! Come to me in Avignon, and I promise you you’ll never set another article of mine. I’m learning French poems by heart for the fun of it. Kiss your wife’s hand, greet your son from me in a way he’ll understand, and write a personal letter to your old

Joseph Roth

19. To Benno Reifenberg

Marseille, Hotel Beauvau

rue Beauvau, 18 August [1925]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I am making one last effort to find out whether I haven’t sent 6–7 feuilletons to the FZ for absolutely nothing, and haven’t written a further 3, which I’m not sending until I get a reply from you or the board. You know as a rule I couldn’t care less what they do with my stuff. But one thing I cannot be indifferent to is if all reports of a journey whose fruits are a moral victory for me, disappear without trace. I don’t know if it’s the post that is to blame, but I’m presuming I must have breached one of the unwritten Hindenburg laws that even decent people now follow in Germany, from what I hear. Perhaps an infraction of tone, a word, a suggestion, who knows. Anyway, I want to know. If so, then continuing this journey makes no sense — because I can’t deal with events in Germany, perhaps I’m not equal to the politics of the newspaper either. I can’t change my tone. Maybe the newspaper would like to be rid of me — well, fine by me. I can understand that there’s no wish to put up incendiaries in a burning house.1

I have material for a beautiful volume with the title “The White Cities”2 for the book-publishing arm. But I don’t know whether the house will still print books that make a sound like mine. I understand the air has become fairly unbreathable in Germany. That fact, combined with the circumstance that you’re not printing anything of mine, prompts me to address to you these admittedly somewhat bitter, but personally beholden lines — and address them to your private address, so as to put off for the moment a needless public kerfuffle.

I intend to wait here until I get word from you.

Till that time, I remain your — and your wife’s — old

Joseph Roth

1. The office wired JR back, “No pink elephants, all articles arrived safely, write just exactly what you want, pay no regard to anything.”

2. “The White Cities”: which sadly never came out in that form, though the revised sequence of pieces, some of Roth’s finest, happiest, and most boisterous writing, is included in Report from a Parisian Paradise .

20. To Bernard von Brentano

Marseille, 22 August 1925

My dear friend,

I’ve received one typed letter here, and another rather hasty one. A third therefore seems to have gotten lost.

If I can begin by setting your mind at ease regarding our relationship: your income doesn’t stand between us, rather it connects us. A relationship between two people isn’t based on bread, but it remains important that both should have enough to eat. Hunger trumps sentiment. It’s important that neither of us should starve. That’s why I raised the matter, and that’s why I mentioned you to Reifenberg and Simon.1 I think you’re over the worst. I think I’m headed straight for it.

I have sent the FZ 7 articles. So far as I know, not one of them has appeared. I think I can no longer hit the democratic tone. In every line of mine the republic gets slapped around — whatever I’m writing about. The paper is cowardly. It won’t print my articles, and it won’t tell me why. I think its behavior is immoral. I wrote to Reifenberg to say so. If the publisher has the courage of his convictions, he will give me the boot. Then I will be free, as I was for twenty years of my life. I’ll go to Mexico. If he wants to be a coward, then I’ll demand that he pay me properly for his cowardice. If he doesn’t publish me, I want to see money. And even so I’m going to go to Mexico one day, in the not too distant future. I’ve been established for too long. You see: I really don’t care about an income. I don’t care about a bourgeois base. It gets in the way. It makes me ill. I am ill already.

Name and reputation in Germany — what’s the good of that? I can see past the nationality. But not the language. German is a dead language, as dead as late Latin. It’s only spoken by scholars and poets. By Jews. In the Middle Ages a man had power if he wrote in that language. In our democracy today he’s nothing. I can cope with the fact that the Germans are barbarians. But not with my inability to convert them. We’re like missionaries addressing heathens in Latin, to convert them. Futile endeavor.

To move from proletarian to human is easily said. But what if I’m only having my first experience of human beings now, at the ripe old age of 31? What if I met my first humans here in France? Germany is populated by geniuses and murderers (half animals). Humans begin at Aix. I would have to live and study for another twenty years before I could write about humans. And even then I wouldn’t be sure it was possible to do it in German.

Tomorrow the Socialist Congress begins here. I have spoken to acquaintances from Berlin and Vienna. It’s a terrible thing to see those people in this setting. The sun shows how much dust there is on them. They have landed here, like the Lombards a thousand years ago. With Schiller collars! With briefcases! With umbrellas! With fat flat-footed wives! And hatless! They sweat. They smell. They drink beer. They are noisier than the many Orientals who make a deafening noise here in the port city. Social Democrats always look German. Even when they’re technically Lithuanians. Because the type is native to Germany: honest, hardworking, beer-bibbing, world-improving. A socialist and a democrat. “Justice!” Hope for evolution. German through and through. The aspiration of the German woman to march through a busy life on flat heels is already halfway to socialism. They all carry on as though they had to determine world history in the next decade. They have come together to fight for Ibsenite ideals. Not knowing how antiquated those are. I saw Friedrich Adler,2 my great compatriot. A tyrannicide on his uppers. No pistol in his briefcase any more. Features shaped from the mealy dough of humanity. The monarchies are dead — here are people with nothing left to slay. They haven’t a chance against industry.

I have visited so many towns in Provence, I could write a book about them: “The White Cities.” But do I know if I still need to write it? It’ll be settled one way or another in the first half of September. Write to me in Paris.

Regards to your wife. Mine is in bed with a fever. Brought on by the climate, obviously. I’m just off to spend the night in the old port. That’s the world I feel really at home in. My maternal forefathers live there. We’re all kin there. Every onion seller is my uncle.