Joseph Roth: The Hotel Years

The colour of the age is white, laboratory white, as white as the room where they invented lewisite, white as a church, white as a bathroom, white as a dissecting room, white as steel and white as chalk, white as hygiene, white as a butcher’s apron, white as an operating table, white as death, and white as the age’s fear of death! Let’s brighten up the ceiling! — Because it is the age’s belief that white is cheerful. It wants by brightness to attract cheerful people. And the people are as merry as patients, and the present is as merry as a hospital.

— and his feline way with form: “The Wonders of Astrakhan” works like an auction: first the fish have it, then the flies, then, with a surprising late bid, the beggars. It is with his variable thoughts on exile, on monarchy, on literature, on the military, on nations, on East and West, that he regales us. He is capable of hanging a set of political opinions on a quirk of facial hair styling (“a large blond moustache that went out into a couple of butchers’ hooks”) and of turning a manicure into a threat (“a hand with flashing pink nails dangled over the chairback”); of inferring the state of the nation from a chance observation (the railway conductor wolfing chocolates), and of shrinking another nation into a natty synecdoche (“on the right a mosque, on the left a rudimentary café terrace where guests bake and fezzes talk”). He has at times a wonderfully simple, radical imagination: Grillparzer’s visit to Goethe (one of the great humiliations in literary history, and not the only one involving Goethe) is like Friday visiting Sunday, “and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”; the scene at Boryslav — the primitive oil-wells — makes him think of capitalism lurching into expressionism. A hotel can be either a canny form of post-national organization, taking its inspiration from the sadly defunct Dual Monarchy (“He is an Italian. The waiter is from Upper Austria. The porter is a Frenchman from Provence. The receptionist is from Normandy. The head waiter is Bavarian. The chambermaid is Swiss. The valet is Dutch. The manager is Levantine; and for years I’ve suspected the cook of being Czech”), or sometimes just a motiveless and fantastic gyre:

The “Hotel Kopriva” is always between trains. Its eighty rooms and hundred and twenty beds whirl round and round. The “Hotel Kopriva” doesn’t exist. It merely seems to exist. The gramophone tumbles upstairs and down. The sample cases fly through the air. The manager rushes from room to room. The room-service waiter runs to the train. The porter is knocked for six. The manager is the room-service waiter. The porter is the manager. The room-service waiter is the porter. The room numbers are departure times. The clock is a timetable. The visitors are tied to the station on invisible elastics. They bounce back and forth. The gramophone sings train sounds. Eighty makes a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty rooms trundle through eighty beds.

Roth may indeed have sketched the portrait of his age, but these pieces also make a portrait of their author: wilful and versatile, aggressive and benign, beautiful and drawn to ugliness, everywhere and nowhere (Tirana and Baku and the railway junction at 4 a.m.), philanthropical and misanthropical, endlessly spooked and endlessly observant. Surely among other more-or-less intended self-portraits (the grave Grillparzer the obvious example) he is also Grock, the musical clown, the multi-instrumentalist in a world of “exemplary mediocrity”, who plays everything, even his balled-up gloves, and is finally incapable by himself of finding his way offstage:

a sad face full of noble ugliness, an aristocrat in a crude world, a man of noble truth betrayed a thousand times, an honest, yes, a humble striver who always comes a cropper, a man born for despair who forces himself to believe, a clumsy so-and-so, a hero, a lofty man in the depths, defeated a thousand times but always victorious.

MICHAEL HOFMANN

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

FEBRUARY 2015

The expression on the face of the newspaper reader is serious, sometimes tending to grim, occasionally dissolving in smiling hilarity. While his slightly bulbous pupils in their sharp oval spectacles slalom down the page, dreamy fingers play on the café table and perform a silent trill that looks like a form of grief — as though the fingertips were feeling for invisible crumbs to pick up.

The newspaper reader has a long, well-trimmed shovel beard that covers the feuilleton page while he attends to the political news. Half-obscured by the beard, in sumptuous purple splendour, shimmers a bow tie whose knot I am unable to see, except when the newspaper reader thoughtfully strokes his Adam’s apple.

I can see what is engaging the newspaper reader’s attention: the recent sensational reports from Budapest. They have been given a bold headline. They are presented in a fluffy, tempting, positively beguiling layout, in numerous little paragraphs, each one of which has its own alluring subtitle. Like all news, they give themselves away before they can be transmitted: and they give away more than they can possibly keep.

It is impossible to see them as anything but sensationalist. They are about the passing of false bills, but they don’t tell the whole story. They are scrupulously accurate and yet still they withhold a few details. They describe the character of the counterfeiter, but they don’t know his name. They refer to “well-placed sources”, but where and how they are placed they don’t say. Of course, it’s the things you’re not told that arouse your interest. The gaps in the news are the interesting bits.

So what happens now in the newspaper reader? How will he react to what he has not read? Is he pleased to learn about the false bills, or upset, or is he even from Budapest himself? Surely he may be numbered among the great horde of the morally indignant, who feel vicarious anger at any news of criminality. All the fuses that were slowly burning in him reach the point at which they cause an explosion. Not visibly, of course. Heavens, no! But one that is contained in itself, more an implosion…

In any case, it may be seen that the reports are toying with his delicate soul, even while he imagines he is toying with the news. If he weren’t so utterly bespectacled, it might almost be that the news is reading him. Perhaps he imagines his mind is toying with these half-reported things, filling them out. But these special reports take it out of him. A leader’s shallow scoop would do him in. Everything there is so agleam with shiny common sense that the reader can’t but be dazzled.

Now he stands up, the reader, fully in the picture, older, wiser and possibly sadder. With his left hand he smoothes away any unevennesses that may have occurred in his beard and changes his glasses. (For an instant he has shy little mousy eyes.) Then he snaps open a coffin containing a different pair, and heads outside, equipped for the street.

The feuilleton remained covered. He leaves it to less manly natures than his own.

But if it should happen that one day, quietly, out of boredom, he should read it, then he would not like it one little bit. Because what I write is not to his taste…

Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 January 1926

To the many scenes of war misery in Vienna a new one was added, a few days ago.