Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

424. To Blanche Gidon (written in French)

Ostend

Hotel de la Couronne

13 August 1937

Dear friend,

thank you, thank you for all the good you do me, I don’t deserve it.

My life is constant trouble. I would like to see you in Paris again. But it’s out of my hands.

The little I write to you — it comes from a good heart, and a silent heart. It’s the first time I’ve experienced a deepening attachment. To this point all I’ve known of other people were either the stable ones or the others who slowly weaken and lose their way.

Excuse my French! Give the doctor my best wishes. Your devoted old

Joseph Roth

I am just completing a book you will like very much. I know it — in the midst of my misfortunes I know it.

425. To Stefan Zweig

18 August 1937

Kind thanks from an oppressed heart,1 my friend! Don’t reproach me for railing at myself. It’s the only thing I can do, I involve you in my catastrophes, which I probably deserve, though I do nothing to provoke them. Instead of the most exalted, I make merely the most putrid demands of you. I want to be near to you, and probably only succeed in being intrusive. Next follows a break-in to your restricted bank account, and the shameless imposition of further economies, all caused by me. I know you take far greater pleasure in sensual things than I do, a good express train, a decent meal, a spoonful of caviar, and I take the spoon away from you and I know what it feels like, to have one’s wine glass taken away. No brother would do that to you. The counterweight is this: you have to imagine suddenly, with the help of one banknote, waking up from a coma, the women are once more walking down the avenues, the trees are green again, laughter and tears are back, the beloved pain returns that had been anesthetized by banal squalid worries. Your life returns to you, the hotel was a prison in which one was not allowed to be locked up, worse thereby than the others. Suddenly it becomes your airy bower again. These are actual sensations, my dear friend, if only I weren’t so desperate to have them. It’s too much, too often, I rack my brains for ways of breaking free of my publisher, but racking one’s brains doesn’t produce miracles. It’ll be the death of me, this mixture of brain, hand, begging, advance, eager promises of works that my head isn’t certain of being able to write — and all in vain, without readers, without the trust that comes from outside, an echo to the one within. I can feel myself having to violently regenerate morally and physically, in two months I have to be well, then abysmal feeling, panic and derangement, anguish, heart pain, darkness. Two or three proper catastrophes, the death of someone near to me, and I’ve had it.2 Such loose talk as Lion’s is very detrimental to me — in monetary terms too — believe me, it damages me with publishers, with Oprecht,3 with Huebsch, with Querido, in Vienna, it builds up like an avalanche, and it crushes me. My productivity is taken amiss, my blocked colleagues take it for proof of lack of talent.

We will [see] each other whenever it suits you, God knows how I need to have you there, at hand, and how much I need you to need me. Even though the unhappy propensity to see each meeting as a farewell is becoming a real disease. I am half done in, and at the same time eerily taut. It doesn’t go.

Please confirm receipt of this letter, and the date of your departure.

Your warm and trusty

Joseph Roth

1. an oppressed heart: JR’s old friend on the FZ Friedrich Traugott Gubler used to say, half jokingly, that Roth should always be sad; the sadder he was, the better he wrote.

2. and I’ve had it: indeed, it was the news that Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York that brought on JR’s fatal collapse in May 1939.

3. Oprecht: Emil Oprecht, publisher and bookseller in Zurich.

426. To Stefan Zweig

Ostend

Hotel de la Couronne

26 August 1937

Dear friend,

I am VERY disquieted, because I have no reply.

Cordially,

your old J.R.

427. To Stefan Zweig

Ostend

Hotel de la Couronne

29 August [1937]

Dear friend,

where will you be going?

Perhaps we could meet anyway?

Loyally, to you both

Joseph Roth

428. To Blanche Gidon

Ostend

Hotel de la Couronne

[postmarked: Ostend, 3 September 1937]

My dear friend,

no good news. Au contraire! I force myself to write, purely so that you know I am loyal, and that I’m resting. My worries are unending. I’d like to talk. I can’t write any more.

Wretched, and very sad

your old Joseph Roth

429. To Stefan Zweig

Ostend

Hotel de la Couronne

4 September 1937

Dear friend,

if you want to see me, it will be possible only in Brussels. I have to go to Amsterdam on the 18th, at the latest . On the 15th I have to have the bulk of my novel finished. (My publisher still isn’t back yet.) I should have had it ready on 20 August (at last I got some ink) — I’m unable to finish it, and then I won’t have any money, not even through November, wretchedly. My Belgian visa (extended) runs out on the 20th inst. I have to write 10 pages a day, for the next 10 days here. I can only get to Brussels, and for one or two days. You can easily get a transit visa for 3 days. If you should need to extend it, it’s inexpensive. All we need is a 4-hour block of time, intensive, undistracted , for our most important things. Dear friend, wouldn’t it feel absurd to be flying over my head, or rattling past me in a train. — You write, “above all, tell me what your plans are”—and you don’t feel how that pains me. What plans could I possibly have? The man won’t pay me anything, he’s on vacation. What am I supposed to do? My freedom just about stretches as far as Brussels; and then only until my visa gives up the ghost. I’m expecting your answer to the effect that you’ll expect me in Brussels BEFORE the 20th. Place? Hotel? Time and place? — If you can’t , then please drop me a line to say so. I’m on tenterhooks.

Warmly and sincerely,

your J.R.

430. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel de la Couronne

Ostend

7 September 1937

Dear friend,

thank you for your card. You should have heard from me by now. I can’t get to Paris, but you can very well go to Brussels. I need to go there on the 20th to renew my visa again. Which is absurd, seeing as I have to go to Amsterdam from here. I can only sketch things in, it’s a waste of ink to go into detail. I hope very much that we do see each other. At least for a single day. But it mustn’t be wasted either. So let me now talk about my essay in the Christliche Ständestaat that you were critical of, I don’t quite know why. I didn’t “adopt” the distinction between Christian and Jewish publishers; it was the Jewish publishers in Austria who were the first to adopt Hitler’s distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan authors . It was the publishers who undertook that discrimination, not me. It’s my duty to call to order those Jews who do Goebbels’s bidding for him. Zsolnay, Horovitz, the silly idiot Tal, your jumped-up Reichner, who had the chutzpah to advertise you in Germany: they’ll wreck the last few “Aryan” writers and publishers. Because these rightly make appeal to the fact that even the Jews follow the demands of the Reichsschrifttumskammer.1 Quite the contrary: it’s my duty to put a spoke in the wheel of those Jews who are making the calamity worse. And that’s what I’ll do.