Joseph Roth - Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters

St. Z.

1. Berthold Fles, a Dutch literary agent in New York, represented many of the exiled German writers.

2. Mexico: “pyre of Bierce and springboard of Hart Crane,” where Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957) was currently at work on his epochal novel of alcoholic decline, Under the Volcano (1947). It must be considered doubtful whether JR could have thrived there for any length of time.

3. exhibition: the World’s Fair Exhibition in Paris in 1937. Here, as so often, one gets the impression that Zweig and Roth simply inhabited different planets, and couldn’t open their mouths without wounding each other — Roth with acuteness, his intemperate malice and fury, Zweig with obtuseness, a kind of airy and spoiled imperviousness to everyone and everything. It is really hard to imagine the penurious Roth, whose orbit was down to one or two bars in what he called his république Tournon (the area around the café in whose upstairs he had a small bedroom), with swollen feet and in the last stages of alcoholism, doing something as otiose as taking himself to a literary exhibition.

4. the Magellan: Magellan, der Mann und seine Tat (Vienna, 1938).

437. To Rudolf Olden

Paris, October 1937

Dear friend Olden,

thank you very much for the obituary of Karpeles. It’s an obituary for us all: the last ten of the fourth regiment. Hail to you, the ninth, in sincere comradeship.1

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. This note, written on the letterhead of the Neues Tagebuch (New Diary), the Paris-based exiles’ paper, suggests a group elegy. Benno Karpeles was the initiator and editor of the paper, to which Roth and Olden and others — Tschuppik, Kisch, Polgar, etc. — contributed. Almost twenty years before, they had all worked together on another paper, in Vienna, Der Neue Tag. Rudolf Olden died on the crossing to the United States, when the ship he was traveling on, The City of Benares, was torpedoed by the Germans on 17 September 1940.

438. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Paris-Dinard

2 November 1937

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, London W 1, 49 Hallam Street

Dear friend,

this isn’t a letter, just a notification of my new address.

The Hotel Foyot is being demolished on the instructions of the city magistrates, and yesterday I left it as the last of its guests. The symbolism is all too apparent.1

I am very much afraid that something of yours on its way to me may have gotten mislaid. I will be grateful for a prompt reply.

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. all too apparent: see Roth’s piece “Rest While Watching the Demolition,” first published in the Neues Tagebuch on 25 June 1938, included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.

439. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Paris-Dinard

3 November 1937

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, London W 1, 49 Hallam Street

Dear friend,

in haste: the two manuscripts I sent you today are the only things I have found that might qualify as short stories.

Thank you very much. A proper letter will follow.

Your old

Joseph Roth

440. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Paris-Dinard

14 November 1937

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Hallam Street, London W 1

Dear friend,

please excuse the hurried dictation. I hear from Mr. Fles that fourteen Jews were organized to help me, among them apparently yourself.

I find firstly the fact of it unbearable, and secondly the circumstance that you did not inform me of this yourself.

Sincerely, your old

J.R.

441. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Paris-Dinard

23 November 1937

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, 49 Hallam Street, London W 1

Dear friend,

I’m sorry, typewriter again. I was bedridden until yesterday, with a sleeping-pill poisoning. I am still barely able to eat anything. Work is out of the question.

Drop me a line if you would, to your old

[Joseph Roth]

442. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

[December 1937?]

Dear friend,

I am shocked and alarmed at your letter — I had so hoped Paris would focus and stimulate you, instead of offering you endless irritations. I often think of you, always with love, and usually with concern. What will become of us? The plan that so upset you seems to have fizzled out, and I was sadly not at all sure I could participate fully in it — if Austria folds, then we are all done for. No more books of ours will appear in German and what I own there in stupid decency and honest patriotism will be futsch , and I have a dozen people’s welfare depending on me. I too took sleeping pills tonight — the notion that the “democracies” would give us up just like that I simply can’t get over, and Russia alone is unfortunately not strong enough to oppose that rapaciousness. I will probably go to Vienna this week1—I want to see it once more (and my old mother). Then back here, and in January a little place in the south. I don’t want to see anyone, I don’t want to read any newspapers, I’ll probably go to Portugal, where my knowledge of the language is poorest. Dear friend, everything is at stake now, we are almost at the end! Gather up all your strength, don’t waste yourself — the ultimate stands before us.

your St Z.

1. Vienna this week: The Anschluss , the annexation of Austria to the German Reich, occurred in February 1938.

443. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

[London, January 1938]

Dear friend,

I feel a little calmer, because your latest letter (which I wish had been longer) once again was written in your clear firm hand; if everything goes well, we’ll be seeing each other in just a fortnight, and then I hope (!!) all will be well with you. I have had problems with Reichner;1 not only that he is ungrateful toward me and sometimes impossible, he does things that revolt me. It’s a shame that being persecuted has brought out the worst in the Jews. I really don’t know how I should assert myself in this relationship, not least as he has almost my entire opus in his hands — his continual truckling to Nazi Germany (which I don’t profit from, I have my own number on the German index) turns me into someone who in his particular case is compelled to agree with Streicher. Ach, my friend, when I think of all the disappointments I have endured in these years, and you refuse to understand how painful your remoteness and silence are to me; that two friends each scrape open their own hearts without being brought closer doesn’t make sense to me. Well, in a few weeks — I’ll be going to Portugal, where there are no newspapers and no mail (everything a week old and more digestible in its staleness).

Sincerely

your loyal St. Z.

1. Reichner: but JR, by his own inspired methods, had reached the same conclusions 4 years earlier. See no. 321.

444. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Paris-Dinard

Monday [postmarked: 10 January 1938]

Dear friend,

it’s good that you’re going somewhere where you won’t get letters. That way, you’ll be spared possible news of me. Go with God! It’s in His hands whether we see each other again or not.

Sincerely, always

Your old

Joseph Roth

445. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

49 Hallam Street

London W 1

[January 1938?]

straight after getting your letter.

Dear friend,

I am terribly alarmed by your letter: the handwriting looked really sick to me, and I’ve sensed for a long time that you are desperate (perhaps still more than I, who is being driven demented by this time, in which EVERYTHING our arch-enemies attempt seems to come off). Can I do anything for you? It’s so hard, because I know nothing of what you’re going through. Couldn’t kind Irmgard Keun1 write to me about you — you have no idea (quite irrespective of your feelings for me) of how I cling to you, and am really permanently concerned about you. Perhaps I will come to Paris now, I had intended to go first to Lisbon, Estoril, and then work on the quiet Riviera there. The novel is basically done in outline, a first draft is also complete, but now it’s at the second stage. But I am still unhappy about much of it, the dialog, the style. Tired as I am, it will take me longer than I thought, and I admire your penetration — though admittedly you’re 15 years younger than me, and what years! My dear fellow, I’m blathering, but that should show you my deep need to sit with you again, to talk things over, and above all to hear about you and your work. I know nothing of you, and I don’t want to lose you, it offends me when a new book comes out, that you, my friend, have struggled over for a year, and I don’t know about it, I am the last to get to hear of it, when once I was proud to be the first and nearest and most involved.