LETTERS: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters,Translated and edited by Michael Hofmann, Granta, 552pp. £25
IN A LETTER from February 1933, the Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth wrote from Paris to his friend and fellow writer Stefan Zweig, announcing, "It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe. Quite apart from our personal situations – our literary and material existence has been wrecked – we are headed for a new war. I wouldn't give a hellerfor our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns."
It is characteristically astute. Roth was a shrewd commentator, an observer who saw deep into the heart of a gesture, a nuance, never mind a glaring disaster. He was the definitive witness. Newspaper editors recognised this, and he ensured that they paid in exasperation for the privilege of using his wonderful copy – and wonderful it was.
A Roth dispatch went beyond hard fact: it conveyed the mood as well as the political implications and how it all affected Everyman. No writer chronicled the death throes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as perceptively. He was the first to note the emergence of Hitler and even referred to the future dictator in an early novel, Zipper and His Father(1928).
Roth understood, and lamented, a central Europe in which cultural and racial tensions grappled with history while the new forces pulverised the old. Best known for his elegiac masterpiece The Radetzky March (1932), he was a tormented genius who lived his short life on the run from his many demons, including poverty and hopeless alcoholism. That he was remarkable is beyond dispute; that he was troubled is obvious to all who have read him.
This heartbreaking, often blunt, at times cringe-making and always relevant volume of letters will both move and dismay Roth readers while testifying to the towering humanity, warts and all, of one of the finest writers of the 20th century.
True, there are mere glimpses of Roth’s singular gifts. Most of the letters are concerned with money – specifically, his lack of it – and many contain his funny and invariably disparaging comments about editors, publishers and inept translators. Humanity in general doesn’t fare much better, while most of his regular correspondents, particularly Zweig, would appear to have earned the epithet “long suffering”. There is relatively little about Roth’s writing life, and far more about his daily struggles and failing health.
He was born into hardship. His father died, insane, before Roth’s birth in 1894. His glamorous wife also lost her mind and was killed by the Nazis after Roth’s death in a Paris hospital.
The task of compiling and translating these wry, angry, frequently theatrical letters has been undertaken by the poet Michael Hofmann, the illustrious translator of Roth’s fiction as well as two volumes of collected journalism that includes some of the best material any of us is ever likely to read. However fragmented and repetitive the letters may seem, they offer an oblique contemporary account of a Europe stumbling into chaos.
Hofmann’s commentaries are vital to the book. In addition to an introduction, there are four short essays linking the sections. These are divided into Roth’s early years; his emergence as a writer; the moment on January 30th, 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor (a disgusted Roth boarded a train in Berlin bound for Paris and never returned to Germany); and the fourth and final section, by far the longest and accounting for more than half the book, which is dominated by Roth’s correspondence with Zweig.
Thirteen years his senior, privileged and well connected, in contrast to the maverick, self-destructive Roth, Zweig – who largely financed the final decade of Roth’s life – accepted the role of secondary writer to his aggressive, suspicious and challenging friend.
Roth’s dilemma as a rootless outsider who lived in hotels should be acknowledged. Hofmann explains, “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 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.”
War destroyed the world. For Roth, there was the additional trauma of seeing his homeland disappear. More than anything, he wanted the old empire to rise as a phoenix. This Austro-Hungarian, born in Galicia, on the fringes of that empire, would in time, thanks to the redrawing of maps, become a Russian and, ultimately, a Ukrainian.
One might wonder how (and why) Zweig accepted all the moaning and recrimination. But Roth was a force of nature with a compelling intelligence; amid the ranting were sparks of fire. It is tragic to see him described, at 43, as looking more like a 60-year-old. In a long letter to Zweig dated July 24th, 1935, Roth remarks, “The world never had a conscience, if you ask me.” By October he is begging to be rescued: “I am doomed, I can’t go on selling myself tout compris . . . I can’t wake up night after night from dread of what the morning will bring, the hotel manager, the mail . . . I slink around like a wanted man, my hands shake . . . I only calm down a little once I have had a drink.”
If only one word were used to describe this book – and Roth – it would be "human". His struggle to get his novels published, even after the success of Job: The Story of a Simple Man(1930) and The Radetzky March, makes for grim reading. The life is often squalid, but the work is gold dust. Roth's admirers will want to read this book, and should.
It concludes with a cruel irony. The final letter was found among his effects after he died. American Pen had written to him, inviting him to participate as a special guest at the World Congress of Writers at the New York World’s Fair. The event was due to take place in May 1939. Roth never got there. He died, aged 44, in the same month.
For those who have not yet explored the writings, now is the time – and this volume, graced by Hofmann’s candid exploration of Roth’s troubled life and mercurial art, will shed more light on a unique central European voice.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Timesand author of Ordinary Dogs, published by Faber
