Joseph Roth: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

Then to get something where the writer’s own character and predicaments are front and center, neither adapted nor softened nor broken up among his stories and novels. To understand something of the circumstances in which these stories and novels were written; first, up to around 1930, competing for breath with hundreds upon hundreds of iridescent-colored soap bubbles (his metaphor) of articles for daily newspapers (most of his life, Roth was much better known as a columnist and feuilletonist than as a novelist); then against the clock, both his personal clock and the unignorably ticking collective clock of the 1930s, bringing (as Roth in particular very well foresaw) war and genocidal murder to millions. Writing novels no one realistically wanted; for publishers as hard up as he was, who wrote him (the Dutch ones) flinty, respectful letters in broken German; a diminishing number of readers; in return for desperately small advances already received, spent, and borrowed against. At one stage, he had the haunting sense of being able to read the begging letters through the surface of the narrative prose. To see him correctly, as a sort of lemming among lemmings, an unusually farsighted and fearless and bloody-minded lemming, quick to sink his teeth into the flanks of René Schickele or Stefan Zweig or Klaus Mann when they stepped out of line. Some of their wounded, plaintively reasonable, or plain defensive replies are included. To understand that this grievously disappointed and multiply broken man somehow continued to align himself toward the true and the beautiful in his articles, and the beautiful and the true in his books; that, long past having anything himself, he went on helping others — a tailor, a charwoman, a doctor, a fellow veteran stuck in Switzerland; that even as he seemed to lapse into unreality — a scheme on the very eve of the Anschluss, in February 1938, to meet the then Austrian chancellor Schuschnigg, to talk him into backing the restoration of the Habsburg monarchy — in other parts of his mind he was as mordant and accurate and graceful as ever.

Roth is both contradictory and changeable, and always, always vehement with it. Something in him can’t abide and doesn’t understand hierarchies; that’s why he was never able to find a niche and defend it at the FZ —that newspaper that was all niche and pecking order. He doesn’t pace himself or moderate himself or disguise himself. “I am wriggling in a hundred nets,” he brilliantly puts it. There is turbulence, emergency, thrashing around, panic wherever he is. He doesn’t deal in anything less than an ultimatum. The letters are anxiously registered, or they demand instant acknowledgment, or they go by expensive wire or pneumatique . They are what the diplomats call démarches. (He is no sort of diplomat, though he does love his Old World courtesies.) All he seeks, on the face of it, is fair recompense, and calm in which to work. The work itself is contradictory and changeable. He is Neue Sachlichkeit , and he is a poet and a fabulist, you can find him on both sides of both arguments — though “romantic” is always a dirty word for him. I described him once as mysteriously managing “to combine a novelist’s oeuvre with a journalist’s calling and habits.” He drinks to dull his nerves, and writes to understand the world. He is industrious from despair, assiduous and ineffectual, a tireless, incorruptible, terrifying, and quixotic moralist:

I am not in a tizzy about the letter from [. .] In view of the approaching end of the world, it’s no big deal. But even then, in the trenches, staring death in the face 10 minutes before going over the top, I was capable of beating up a son of a bitch for claiming he was out of cigarettes when he wasn’t, for instance. The end of the world is one thing, the son of a bitch is another. You can’t put the son of a bitch down to the general condition of things. He’s separate.

He works to bring about practical remedies, on refugees’ committees, and so forth, and he is the most impractical man who ever lived. He has no money, no books, no bank account, no clothes. What doesn’t falter is tone and imagination in his importunings: “Kesten got the 10 pounds. He gave me none of it. I am torn, so to speak, between shirts and a suit.” And then: “I’m thinking a shroud would be a useful acquisition.” He lives out of two suitcases (by some accounts, three, but I prefer to think of him with two), a large one and a small one. He collects penknives, watches, and canes. Every relationship with every correspondent is tested to its destruction; it’s hard to think of one who comes through (all right, the Bertaux, father and son, do; all the others are put through usually terminal crises). Not the personally disappointing Brentano, or the over-optimistic and compromising Reifenberg; not the loyal and persistent Mme Gidon, whom he begins by trying to fire as his translator, or the ever devoted, ever inadequate Stefan Zweig; not Kesten or Schickele; not Landauer or Landshoff. He mocks his publishers — it doesn’t matter which ones — appealing with mounting irony, “not only to your publisher’s conscience, but to your human feelings.” Roth’s existence feels syncopated throughout; he is a Jew in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a German in France. He is “red Roth” and a royal and imperial loyalist; he is an Eastern Jew and an Austrian; he is gallant and passionate — both a kisser of hands and a kisser of feet; he is generous and unforgiving; he demands hope, and sees despair as a badge of reason. He drills through the newspaper world in the 1920s and in the 1930s tunnels through the world of books; by the end, he stands there without anything and beyond everything, illusionless as Rimbaud. In 1938 again, it is unclear whether he will enter a monastery, pack his ancestral bundle and take to the road like his Jewish forefathers, or rejoin the Austrian army — all three are mooted. Or failing that, Mexico, or Rio, or Shanghai, or Baudelaire’s favorite destination, “anywhere out of the world.”

We read for knowledge and atmospheres, but also for the chance to develop and exercise empathy, to extend the weft and warp of our emotions and nerves over the situations of others. In these letters — these IOUs and SOSes — we have something like the protocol of a man going over the edge of the world in a barrel. How can we not be amazed, harrowed, quickened, awed?

THE BASIS OF the present selection is the volume Joseph Roth Briefe, 1911–1939 (1970), edited by his friend, housemate, fellow writer, and sometime editor, Hermann Kesten. It is a little strange that there has been no subsequent, fuller, or more authoritative edition in the forty years since — the Rothian Heinz Lunzer has spoken to me of Kesten’s occasional grave errors of transcription — and reading, say, David Bronsen’s biography, one is made aware that many interesting letters are unfortunately not included. Kesten, though, was not a scholar — and nor am I. For my book, I chose as many of the letters as I thought might be comprehensible and of interest to an English readership, erring always on the side of generosity; it’s my sense that I have included upwards of 90 percent of them, 457 in all — I through-numbered them, for ease of reference. Two individual volumes of correspondences have been brought out since 1970 in German, containing Roth’s exchanges with his Dutch exile publishers: one with Querido and Allert de Lange, the other with De Gemeenschap. These, in my view, were too specialized and — as perhaps may be imagined — too repetitive, and too arduous to warrant inclusion.

A letter — perhaps especially in our time, when letters are no longer written much, and when Hey Mike! is presumed to be a proper form of address from a complete stranger — is situated somewhere between speech and script. (Perhaps especially these letters, remote from book-lined studies and desks, written or dictated in public places, in cafés or bars, at all hours, and in the midst of friends and hangers-on and conversation.) This was a novel and a lovely challenge to the translator, who values voice in all writing: “Nothing but men is like a desert full of sand,” “It’s shocking, I have no copies of any of my books,” “Haven’t you got that yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs,” “Even a letter is a colossal effort. Don’t be cross if I don’t write. Frankly, even a stamp is a significant item for me.” As I mentioned earlier, Roth does not go in for the Du form much, but that doesn’t mean that he is a hidebound or kid-gloved letter writer. Most of the people he wrote to were known to him, some of them very well, and most of the subjects or occasions of the letters were of intense importance to him. This is perhaps the single most striking quality of Roth’s letters: their fervor, their temperature. Even if they are set out in little numbered and lettered sections — perhaps especially then — they burn off the page with their indignation, their desperation, their indifference to excuses, their terminal wretchedness, and combusted dignity. Roth was, moreover, a great and passionate hater (it’s yet another one of the many, many, unbridgeable differences between him and Zweig, who wasn’t, and who wasn’t easy in the presence of hatred either). Even so, I was surprised by the occasionally cloacal forthrightness of his language, especially in the later letters; in his fiction and feuilletons there is no suggestion of such language (he is not Joyce, not even Hemingway), but then we are talking here about his most intense private and personal communications. German — and Roth when wrought up — is liberal with Scheisse and also with animals; Hund, Schwein, Sau , but also Tier, Biest, Bestie are all strong terms. English, evidently, a little less so. Anyway, this is by way of saying that “my” Roth in English says “fuck” as he doesn’t in German; it’s a perfectly natural and reasonable vehicle — one might even claim a sine qua non — for the way strong feelings are expressed in English, since Tynan and Hitchens and too many others to mention. It’s a necessary cultural adjustment in the translation and, in its way, perfectly faithful.