Reportage: Ever seeking the lost world he regarded as his true fatherland, that of the vanquished Austro-Hungarian empire, chronicler and perennial outsider Joseph Roth embarked on a doomed odyssey which led him across Europe.
As the creator of fictions such as Rebellion (1924) and The Radetzky March (1932), he ranks among the finest; as reporter, as seer, he has no equal, save perhaps George Orwell. Yet even that most gifted of English writers ultimately lacked Roth's languid melancholy, despairing humanity, cynical romanticism and flair for the heartbreaking phrase encapsulating fatalism and empathy.
Within two years of the 2002 publication of What I Saw: Reports From Berlin, 1920-33, a remarkable selection, gathering pieces written by Roth in which he explored the evolving horror of Berlin and Germany, pre-dating and during the rise of Hitler, which was translated by Michael Hofmann and published by Granta, comes this contrasting companion volume of travel pieces and features about Paris and France, juxtaposed in the final section with more sombre political commentaries. As Hofmann remarks in a characteristically astute and informed introduction, "If Berlin was Joseph Roth's frigid inferno, Paris was his paradise".
This is a wonderful book in its own right - as well as a valuable addition to the Roth canon. In keeping with the best writing, he inspires his reader into wanting to leap from the armchair and visit the places he describes with such vividness. A powerful sense of Roth's engagement with the history, landscape and people undercuts many of the pieces. Finally, it seems, Roth the transient dreamer found a home of sorts. There is also the opportunity to see the already world-weary Roth, at 30, delight in Paris and, later, elsewhere throughout France, particularly Avignon, with all the joy of a boy experiencing first love.
Hofmann, who has consistently proven to be both an inspired translator of, and commentator on, Roth's works, quotes in his introduction a letter Roth wrote on May 1925 to his friend and Frankfurter Zeitung editor, Benno Reifenberg. In it, Roth assures his editor he is still in possession of his "sceptical intelligence." He goes on to pronounce Paris the capital of the world: "It is free, open, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in its magnificent pathos."
The sheer light-heartedness of his remarks, particularly when read against the background of Roth's superlative fiction and often darkly ironic reportage, reveals yet another dimension to one of the most singular European voices of the 20th century.
For once, the detached loner seems at ease and eager to belong. Ever the stylist, he concludes his despatch to Reifenberg: "I could weep when I walk over the Seine bridges; for the first time in my life I am shaken by the aspect of buildings and streets." This upbeat tone is beautifully sustained in 'How to Celebrate a Revolution', an article dated 1925, that was not published in his lifetime: "They are dancing in the streets of Paris. People are dancing in celebration of a revolution, a revolution that took place such a long time ago that only a historian can have any faith in the notion that it actually took place."
In 'America over Paris', an essay-length piece published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in the same year, Roth satirises the impact of New World commercialism on the city he clearly adores: "Over the rooftops of Paris there is a smiling baby colossus of rude health. It is there to promote, to advertise, a soap whose appalling effects it represents in exaggerated form. This huge disembodied baby, whose mouth is 50 feet across, and whose round vacant eyes perhaps 10, is attached to walls and fences. It's a robust monster - a smile today but a grin tomorrow - a sporty infant with a football for a face . . . It's an idealisation of the American male . . ."
Beyond the streets of Paris, in the 'In the French Midi' section, he visits an arena in Nimes that stages bullfights by day, and in the evenings becomes a cinema. It is to the movies that the local mothers arrive, bringing all the children, including the babies, who "lie on their backs under the night sky, with open mouths as though to swallow the stars". He later returns to observe a bullfight in which the bull is teased not killed: "The bull is black, strong; the skin bunches round his neck; his good, broad brow has a blueish (sic) shimmer in the sun; his eyes are large, perplexed, dark green, and, for all their fury, still tame.The people who torment him are young, dark-skinned, stupid".
Of Nice, he writes that the town "looks as if it had been dreamed up by society novelists and populated by their heroes . . . God can't have created such people . . . Writers spent so long writing about them that they came to life". In the title piece, 'The White Cities', Roth begins: "I became a journalist one day out of despair over the complete inability of all other professions to satisfy me. I was not part of the generation that marked the beginning and end of its adolescence by scribbling poems."
No, Joseph Roth the writer was shaped by his experiences in the Great War and by a life spent wandering and thinking, watching and feeling. Yet again, with this as with any book by Roth, one of Europe's elite artists, all any reviewer or reader can add is read it - as well as everything by him - and wonder at a very special sensibility.
White Cities: Reports From France 1925-39 by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta, 301pp. £14.99
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
