Joseph Roth: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

2. The full version of Roth’s nickname; faktisch —actually, or in point of fact — was something he was much given to saying when he was still a young pedant and “A” student.

6. To Paula Grübel

Vienna, a Thursday [1916]

Dear Paula,

it’s summer outside, and a holiday, and a scent of lime blossom has snuck in from somewhere, and perched on my windowsill. Alas, my neighbor is a Jewess, and scares away my lime blossom with her appalling squawks. Her voice is shrill, and smells of onions. There is little sign of the holiday in my courtyard. At best, its denizens have rest days. They can only rest, not be holy. Outside, meanwhile, girls dressed in white sell badges. I was approached by a score of them, and I didn’t buy. Then one came — and I bought. For I am an individualist, and despise the mass. And the girl from whom I bought was an aristocrat. She walked alone, and offered her wares to no one. She was like a priestess among temple prostitutes.

There is something of Venice1 in the air today, as there sometimes is on summer days, and I am in a mood as if after lunch I were going by gondola to some wharf. Open before me is a book: Vischer’s Aesthetics ,2 I was reading it yesterday and the day before yesterday, but I am too uncultivated to understand it. It’s so terribly learned, and only when Professor V. condescends to climb down from the dizzy heights of his lectern — which is rarely enough — do I understand him. The things I do understand in the book give me little pleasure, because I knew them all anyway. I will give it back to my colleague, who won’t understand it either, but even so we will discuss it endlessly between ourselves, and one day I will give my colleague a fearful slap, for being such a liar.

I am going to have my lunch soon, and am looking forward to it. Today we are having something cheesy and prosy, but the Venetian element in the air today will ennoble and Italianize it, and I will eat nothing cheesy or prosy, but macaroni. And then I really will go out on a gondola, past the Ring and the Volksgarten, and I will encounter a pretty Venetian girl, and will accost her thus: May I bore you, Signorina? And the pretty Venetian girl will reply in purest Viennese: See if I care. And for all that, I am in Venice today. Today, today only, I am the doge of Venice and an Italian tramp rolled in one, but tomorrow, tomorrow I will go back to being the dreamy German poet, art enthusiast, and 3rd year German student studying under Professor Brecht. Tomorrow Faust is being performed at the Burgtheater — the play, not the horrible opera! — with Ludwig Wüllner in the title role. And I will stand up in the gods, dog-tired or god-tired, and will imagine I shall have seen Faust .

Lunch wasn’t good, because firstly, my neighbor beat his wife with a broomstick. Secondly, the macaroni weren’t proper macaroni at all. And thirdly, Auntie Rieke ate cheese off the point of her knife. Just as well Aunt Mina confiscated my revolver in Lemberg, otherwise I might have committed tanticide.

A Christian is a rarity in my courtyard. But even so, there is one living here. The window across the courtyard from me is very pretty. A fair-haired boy is doing his homework. His dog is beside him. Does a Jew keep a dog? The fair-haired boy, the dog, and I — we are the only decent people in the whole building.

Last week, I went to hear Professor Brecht every day, and watched Miss Lumia write everything down with her awful industry. She looks so comically serious when she does that, and she’s so serious, I can feel it against my back — because she sits behind me. There are women who are moving in their beauty. Lumia is moving, too — but in her dimness.

I have a pretty red sofa with yellow trim, which I am about to go and lie down on. It’s 3 o’clock now, and I’ll remain horizontal till 5. Then I’ll wash and go for a walk. No, take a gondola. Because it’s still Venice.

Maybe I’ll come to Baden next week. If I have any money, I’ll bring Wittlin3 along, so you can see there are other young men than Baden lawyers.

Now write and tell me about the three pines.

Byebye!

Muniu

And in this space you can draw me something pretty: 4

1. Venice: this refers to a contemporary feature in the big Viennese funfair, the Prater, an installation called Venice in Vienna.

2. Vischer: Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887). Author of On the Sublime and the Comic (1837) and Aesthethics, or the Science of Beauty (1846–1857).

3. Wittlin: Jozef Wittlin (1896–1976), friend of JR’s. A Polish author and essayist, Wittlin studied in Vienna with Roth, and served in the same regiment in World War I. Lived in exile in Paris after 1939, after 1941 in New York. Wrote Salt of the Earth (1935), and translated several of Roth’s novels into Polish. Paula, JR’s favorite cousin, never married.

4. The page was left blank aside from this injunction.

7. To Paula Grübel

Field Post 632 on 24 August 1917

Dear Paula,

among the accumulated mail of four weeks I found your letter, which I was all the more pleased to see because of the quite astonishing maturity of its language, and its thought. Have you really become so old?

I am currently in some Augean shtetl in East Galicia. Gray filth, harboring one or two Jewish businesses. Everything’s awash when it rains, and when the sun comes out it starts to stink. But the location has one great advantage: it’s about 6 miles behind the lines. Reserve encampment.

Materially, I’m not so well off as I used to be. Our newspaper is failing, and once the aura of reporter has faded away, there’ll be nothing left of me but a one-year volunteer. And I’ll be treated accordingly.

But for the likes of me that doesn’t really matter. The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty. Little opportunity for active creation, aside from a couple of lyric poems, which were more out of passive sensation anyway.

What you have to say about reading with Frau Szajnocha1 makes me very happy — by the way, said reading is clearly manifested in the stylistic quality of your letter. Please salute the lady for me, and give her my best.

I enclose a poem at your request, kindly read it carefully. Its beauty lies in the originality of its imagery. I consider it one of the few of mine that have completely succeeded.

On August 5 I had a poem in the Prager Tagblatt .2 Please, order up a copy. I should like to have it for reference for some possible future collection.

I hope to be in Lemberg sometime in the next few days. I view your decision to go there as a little premature. I’ll have more to say on the matter in a letter to Uncle.

I think I’ll be gone from here in 2 to 3 weeks. I may be transferred to Lemberg, to the Record Office, or possibly Sternberg. It’s also possible that our office will be moved to Albania, to start a paper there, in which case it’s Albania here I come.

Best wishes

Your M.

1. Szajnocha: Helena von Szajnocha, née Baroness von Schenk (ca. 1863–1945), lived in the same house as the Grübel family in Lemberg/Lvov, Hofmana 7. The divorced wife of a university professor in Cracow, she was a French tutor. A personal and literary influence on Roth and Wittlin. Chronically infirm, she made her rooms a sort of literary and musical salon.

2. The Prager Tagblatt was a leading German-language newspaper in Prague.

8. To Paula Grübel

Vienna, 24 February 1918

Dear Paula,

when I came here, it was freezing cold and clouded over, you could stare at the sun with your naked eye, it was small and round and red like a Christmas blood orange. On Friday, it suddenly warmed up, a hot wind, the foehn. It was very pleasant on our street, among other things I saw on the streetcar a man in a stiff hat, and a wreath around it, presumably of paper, attaching it to his chin, like two bonnet strings. A young lady ran into my arms on the Ring. She presumably took me for a lamppost. Another lady’s skirts flew up in the wind, you could see her stocking was ripped, and she had a provisional red garter. Nice.