Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

I kiss your hand, and thank you again, and send the professor my warm regards.

In old true friendship, your

[Joseph Roth]

415. To Mr. and Mrs. Gidon (written in German and French)

Hotel Cosmopolite

Brussels

20 June 1937

Dear friends,

you don’t know what a pleasure you gave me. It was wonderfully generous of you to send me the photos, and at a moment when I was very ill, toxified, with swollen legs and bloodshot eyes, and my heart full of anguish. I’m a little better now. There is some hope from Holland.

You didn’t understand me: I know that Candide paid 8,000 francs, and that of these, 4,000 are going to de Lange. But he WON’T pay me 2,000. He only wrote loosely to say he would give me “something” once the money has arrived. All I want to know is whether the 4,000 has already been paid to him. Even if he only gives me 500 francs, I’d be satisfied — though it’s all flagrant breach of contract.

I got through the winter by giving talks, and in Austria by writing articles for Legitimists, on whose instructions and at whose expense I have come here. The books no longer bring in anything. A new one has just been set: The Story of the 1002nd Night , but not yet corrected and revised. I’ll have to start a third, if I’m to stay alive. There’s nothing else I can do. In Vienna my wife’s sanatorium set the bailiffs on me. I do believe it is absolutely impossible to know or understand the folly in which I live my life. — But don’t let me talk about those things! We’ll speak in Paris. Are you going away this summer? Where to?

I’m looking at you both at the moment, your picture is on my desk. I have the feeling you can see me too.

Thank you for your friendship and LOYALTY.

Thanks to Mr. Matveev as well. He hasn’t forgotten me. That’s a further consolation.

Very warmly in old troth, to you and the dear doctor. His spectacles are glinting in the picture. His beard gleams, and his kindly skepticism shines forth

To your old

Joseph Roth

416. To Hermann Hesse

Brussels

5 July 1937

Esteemed Mr. Hermann Hesse,

today I got your sweet book of poetry. It had taken its time getting to me. It shames me as much as it honors and delights me. Because it seems that I am left owing the now sexagenarian poet of my youth respectful and comradely congratulations. Please accept the word “comradely” as the expression of my happy feeling to have consecrated myself to the service of the language whose sweetness and strength I learned to love in your writings twenty years ago. Back then I was a soldier in the trenches, [. . illegible] and resolved to remain in the army, and end my life as a major in Teplice or Brunn, if I should be spared. It was therefore as a layman twice over that I read your works then: not only was I not a writer, but I was a soldier. I will admit to you today in your festive year, that I reread your early works ten years later, then already an aspiring writer myself. They were as fresh as on the day they were printed, and they offered the “expert” the noble satisfaction of enjoying your “craft” and mastery with insightful admiration. — I beg you, to whom I owe so much, to forgive me for not having sent you a birthday telegram. For weeks I’ve been lying in bed with swollen feet, not so much unhappy as almost in despair and sometimes furious at my disobedient body. It’s only in the past few days that I’ve recovered a little alertness. Alert enough to feel the doom doubly that threatens our world, our little islet of world where we will die, the last 10 of the Fourth Regiment.1

In continuing gratitude and admiration,

your Joseph Roth

1. the last 10 of the Fourth Regiment: from an Austrian soldiers’ song. One imagines that the pacifist Hesse (then celebrating his sixtieth birthday) will have been bemused and alienated by the martial reference in particular and the letter altogether.

417. To Stefan Zweig

Grand Hotel Cosmopolite

Brussels

10 July 1937

Dear friend,

I received your grumpy letter. Why are you so afraid of words that won’t come? They have less meaning than pebbles dropped into the sea. Haven’t I written you worse things before? I’m a little concerned about you, and your letter added to my concern. Silly your suspicion I might have crossed your name off the list. I don’t keep lists. With the number of friends I have, I don’t need a list. But for a year now, since our melancholy goodbyes in Ostend, and more particularly since your return from South America, you’ve been in a state where either you don’t respond at all to my communications, or you respond badly. You react a little egocentrically. You blame God for your aging, instead of thanking Him for it. You don’t understand that people have gotten worse, because you were never willing to see them as good and bad and as human until Judgment Day, which you are so slow to believe in. How can I talk to you? Because you notice it getting darker, you stand there bewildered by the approach of night; and you think, furthermore, that it’s something personal to do with you. Even currency devaluations you take as a personal affront, because you had thought you could save yourself by living in the isles of the blessed. Now, for the sake of money, you want to return to the Continent, and to its darkest part. (Mind you don’t stay there too long!) You are independent of publishers and advances. You can afford to write nothing at all for two years. You truly are a “freelance.” Who else can say that of himself? Rolland has disappointed you. My Lord! He always was a false prophet and in thrall to noble errors and idealistic self-deceptions. Just before the World War he idolized the Germans and put to sleep whatever alertness the Continent had. After the war he proclaimed the absolute goodness of humankind, and today he’s a lackey of the Russian executioners. In the truest sense of the word, he has never known where God dwells, and he never will till his dying day. You already have a clear notion — being of the tribe of Asra, who have God, even if they never get him — of the inadequacy of all human idealisms that you bathed in from the time of your youth, and in which you have steeped yourself. You’re bound to be disappointed. The nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi is just as unhelpful to me, as Hitler’s violence is detestable. Of course you shouldn’t sign up for any party or group. I don’t see why that should even occur to you. You are an unregistered member of a motley group as it is, with tumblers, men of the world, rascals and dilettantes and liars, all coexisting with a small handful of decent individuals. You think you have already withdrawn from it. Oh no, you haven’t! Why for instance did you send a statement to be read out at the PEN Club? An organization where Communists and Fascists shoulder the yoke of politics and the state, and you come along and intone your: Down with politics! You’re not serious. Don’t you understand? That might be the way to speak in front of a republic of ghosts, but not to a lurid organization where assholes have seats and votes alongside brains. Do you think you’ll tug at Feuchtwanger’s conscience? Will you hell! Why do you do these things! You can’t get over the loss of Germany! It’s only if Germany exists that you can be a cosmopolitan.1

Show equanimity to the world and give what you have in the way of goodness to three or four individuals, not to “humankind,”

your old

Joseph Roth

I am going to Ostend again. It will remind me of you.

1. a cosmopolitan: these are all wounding and pertinent strictures to Stefan Zweig.

418. To Blanche Gidon