Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  Sincerely,

  your St. Z.

  Please take it easy. Stay in bed if you must, but don’t drink.

  285. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  [postmarked: London, 18 July 1934]

  Dear Roth,

  I hope you’ve calmed down again. You take a wrong view of everything—there is a thousand times more punctilio among publishers here than in Germany, it’s viewed as a gross breach of decorum to snatch an author away from someone else, and Gollancz’s interest in the book was first and foremost a way of getting you all to himself. You really need to suppress all those telegrams and express letters (that stem from your inner unrest)—the more calmly you negotiate, the better it is. Huebsch will be here soon, and I want to talk everything through with him. But please stay calm, you must save yourself for your work, nothing is more important than that, in every sense.

  Sincerely,

  your St. Z.

  I am leaving here as soon as I have seen Huebsch. Regards to Kesten, and thank him for his letter.

  286. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  11 Portland Place

  London W 1

  [July 1934]

  Dear friend,

  got your express letter (but why express, Huebsch won’t be here for another 6 days!) plus contents. Dear dear Roth: clarity, common sense! Please! Won’t you see that no one wants to offend you or cheat you, not Landauer, not Gollancz, not Heinemann—the two last-named are enormous enterprises where some clerk passes a memo to an undermanager: as a realist or man of imagination, you need to see it in the correct proportions. But the idea that Gollancz or Heinemann (basically not actual persons, but concerns) wanted to “offend” you, is completely bizarre!!!

  I know you are extraordinarily clever. But cleverness has never been enough to save someone from stupidities that stem from some inflammable part of his emotions. My dear friend, can’t you feel me suffering because of the compulsive way—even at times you earned a lot—you were always thinking about money, WITHOUT really EVEN BEING GREEDY. If you were a miser, a Harpagon, I would see it as lust, for you it’s a torment, only partly created by circumstances, partly by you yourself, and from which I fear it won’t be possible to free you in this life. Believe me, I rack my brains over how to help you, and when I say you can’t be helped by money alone, you have to give up these self-destructive self-lacerating urges! Allow me, your true friend, to tell you one symptom. I have letters from you over many years. They were often full of bitterness. But never full of hatred. Now all of a sudden, I see in your letters hate and vengefulness against individuals, threats to denounce them even in your last will—Roth, I implore you, you’re a kindly, helpful, understanding soul: don’t you feel the evil in them, an evil that isn’t in you, but that comes from outside? THAT’s what alarms me for you now, the fact that you see evil, and feel evil intentions everywhere around you, and that evil is already inside you. Yes, initially as a fantasy and resistance, but to be forever thinking of the evil coming from others means to hoist it into you, to let it nest in you and grow like a cancer, like a tumor. No, Roth, I don’t want that, it’s not you, it’s—though you may deny it till you’re blue in the face—alcohol, which has made you more irritable and choleric than you are by nature, which has falsified your true being. I don’t want the author of Job to go writing books and letters fueled by resentment: the Antichrist was a yell, magnificent, but now you must defend yourself against yourself! As before, I remain convinced you should take a cure, just to be taking steps against yourself, and especially because the moment is not yet at hand when you need to withdraw, but merely should and ought and not have to, and that would be the best moment.

  I will only discuss the publishing questions with Huebsch. Perhaps he’ll still be able to turn everything round. Don’t despair. You know that I will help you financially if need be, but I am loath to do it in such a way that it melts in your hands (or in your mouth). I would rather have helped you once and for all, with the month’s cure that would mend your health.

  Sincerely, in haste

  your S.

  A copy of my Erasmus has gone from Vienna to Paris. An idiotic misprint drove me wild: on page 224 it should of course say Machiavelli’s amoral politics, not moral.

  287. To Stefan Zweig

  [Marseille] 19 July 1934

  Dear friend,

  read the enclosed, the copy of a letter I wrote to a friend,1 an old Russian aristocrat, a consul in tsarist times (has money—between ourselves: he wanted to give it to me once, but I thought L. could use it—then through my agency lent it to Landauer—strictly between ourselves.) You’ll see from it the sort of things that befall me. I fear you’re overestimating Gollancz, just as you overestimate my dipsomania.

  You can give or show it to Huebsch too. I want him to be in the picture.

  I can see the time coming when you won’t want any more letters from me.

  I am doomed, that much is clear.

  You think I’m mad, when I’m rational. I’m not imperiled either.

  I’m just furious when my honor is impugned. Mr. Gollancz did that. He owes me an apology.

  Since you’re not sitting facing me, eye to eye, you of course jump to the conclusion that I’m self-destructive. The enclosed is a little supplemental proof of what it is that’s actually destroying my life.

  It’s too late, I’m sick of this world.

  I embrace you warmly, your old

  J. Roth

  I can’t show dear Kesten everything, for instance not the enclosed letter. He is close to Landshoff, and I mustn’t destroy their thing. I see everything, Kesten only sees some things, albeit more clearly than I do at times.

  1. friend: Konstantin Leites.

  288. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  [July 1934]

  Dear friend,

  you’re getting too excited. Gollancz already knows you weren’t ill-intentioned, but that you were the victim of a misunderstanding. But English publishers insist on fair dealing among themselves, and G. hopes that Heinemann will publish the book, and then all the others as well. His principal interest in the Antichrist was that it would have given him on option on your subsequent work, and precisely that is ruled out by your contract with H.

  My dear fellow, I implore you: (I have been imploring you for years) don’t always try and market yourself to six people at once. It’s Huebsch, it’s Landauer, it’s Alexander, it’s yourself, it’s Albatross, it’s de Lange, and Tal—confusions are bound to result. What you’re doing is crazy, negotiating with firms on three unwritten books at once, and making deals that resemble the IOUs of officers (madness giving away 60% of your foreign rights). You need to draw up a schedule with a friend like Kesten. Put everything on it exactly as it is, a list of all your obligations to various publishers, and tabulate it, so that it can be taken in at a glance, and then Huebsch and I can look it over1—what the position is with de Lange, with Querido, to whom have you offered, sold, part-sold future books of yours. My dear fellow, you must make clarity, get Kesten to help you, and sign off on the paper. Then I’ll go through it all with Huebsch.

  And as regards the future. Don’t scare away publishers by putting money front and center. You will harm yourself if you are too urgent and insistent about money (remember your psychology). It scared me in your letter to Gollancz that, even before the contract was signed, you were asking him to wire you the money. Of course something like that is bound to set a publisher’s alarm bells ringing, he won’t have much faith in an author who’s so desperate.

  So don’t worry! No one thinks badly of you. I’ll straighten out the Antichrist business with Huebsch. But please—a clear statement of your obligations, in graph or table form, and Huebsch and I will look at it.

  Ginzburg must be somewhere in your vicinity, in the south of France, only I don’
t know where

  Sincerely, S.

  In haste

  1. look it over: absolutely well-meant, utterly demeaning, and completely impossible.

  289. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  [July 1934]

  Dear friend,

  don’t let’s argue about morality! That’s not immoral, what’s immoral is you proposing to write a novel by October, when you sat over your Radetzky March for two years! You, Joseph Roth, will face your ultimate judge alone, not the 8 persons you always mention. Let them wreck your life if they must, but not your art.

  Second, I can sense your rising fury. You are beginning to see people like Landshoff, Landauer, and Kesten as your enemies. One day you will see me as your enemy. It won’t break my friendship for you. Only add to my regret that the Antichrist has you in his claws. It’s a dangerous thing, to sup with the devil.

  Huebsch has been chasing around like a mad thing. I’m meeting him tomorrow, Saturday. There’s no question of income for a year, but I hope to be able to secure something. The book trade over there is in terrible shape. The numbers of 1931 are a distant dream, just as they are in Germany.

  Erasmus set off on his way from Vienna to Paris long ago. I have no idea where he’s gotten stuck.

  I enclose a little something. Just to make sure you have no anxieties, if Huebsch’s money gets delayed.

  In haste, your S.

  No, I won’t enclose it, I’m going to send it to Kesten instead, with the request that he buy you the needful.1

  1. the needful: at this point, the demeaning takes over.

  290. To Stefan Zweig

  Nice, 20 July 1934

  Dear dear friend,

  every day you are kind enough to write me a few words, and every day I repay you with some bêtise or wickedness. Please try to understand how much this Gollancz business has thrown me off-kilter, after your telegram and your letter with the hundred pounds made me dance with joy.—You must understand that I’m getting horrible demands by mail every day. I have borrowed money in a really foolish way, from a waiter, from my translator—and worst of all, on behalf of a poor crippled painter at the Austrian consulate, where they wouldn’t have given him any themselves. So I borrowed 1,000 francs against my good name (with tricksterish self-confidence), and again at table, again sinfully, another 1,000 from a little man by the name of Grünberg who called on you in London, with my recommendation. Dear friend, you’re the only one I can tell all this to, and may God forgive me for doing so, because you are so unmoving in your incomprehension of me (no doubt therapeutic, because at heart you must know what’s going on with me). If anyone finds himself in urgent need, I go into a panic, God forgive me for saying so—and even writing it down—maybe 50% of my debts are incurred for others, just as half of my life belongs to others.1 You reproach me with being a professional expert on the human soul and committing mistakes—and you are an expert, and an expert in particular on my soul—and the mistakes that you make are also considerable.—You see, I can’t go somewhere and say: help so-and-so! Instead I say: help me! His pregnant wife is my pregnant wife, and at that moment I’m not really lying. But the outcome is that I get into spectacular difficulties, because I don’t calculate for myself either. And since I’m not a true saint, but a human being with ideas of being decent, I become furious and unreasonable. And it seems unfair to me that Gollancz can plead solidarity, and I think it’s unfair too that you, my friend, make common cause with the clever people. Be clever, be as clever as you like, but leave me out of it—I’m past repairing. I work like an ox, I live badly, I feed 8 people dear to me, and sometimes as many as a dozen strangers, I am honest, neither Mr. Gollancz nor anyone else has any right to say otherwise. I shit on his solidarity with Heinemann, he knew I was Heinemann’s author before he wanted to buy Antichrist, he has no moral or legal right to retract his offer subsequently. I don’t like it—not for my sake—but out of principle. It can’t be right that I write an Antichrist for the public, and suffer from anti-Christian wheezes in private. So I’m going to fight it, using all the means of worldliness, the duel, the court case, the insult, I don’t know what else. This “solidarity” among messrs publishers in London is a work of the Antichrist, just like the lack of solidarity among publishers in Germany. And—unless my ear trained from Russian descent and Austrian birth deceives me—then a gentleman by the name of Gollancz is going to be a Jew from Budapest, or Keeskemet, or Pressburg.2 Just by the by. When old Fischer once asked me where I was from, and I replied: Radziwillow, he confided: “Between you and me—I wasn’t born in Germany either!”3—I have the feeling that this Mr. Gollancz is Hungarian. It’s not the cz in his name. It’s the tone of his letters. But I know: this too is hubris. Without the grace of God, one may not be a prophet. Anyway what does it matter, perhaps Gollancz is English, and Chamberlain4 is a Magyar. What’s important is not doing the Antichrist’s bidding, not in England and not in Hungary. To return to the case in question: I can see the devil’s grimace in the way that Gollancz, in spite of knowing that I was Heinemann’s author, begins by taking the book; then—later—thinks to himself he is being uncollegiate against Heinemann; thereupon asks him, and without so much as checking the veracity of his information, suddenly allows “solidarity” to obtain. It’s more honorable to give 100 pounds to the author of Antichrist than to believe a colleague who was manifestly telling an untruth. I don’t have the least respect for the good morals of these Magyar Englishmen—who could be bona fide Englishmen for all I care (my business is not geography, but moral geography)—who are capable of insulting a man of honor, but incapable of apologizing to him. No! I must say I can’t see any distinction between the sell-you-down-the-river Germans and the my-word-is-my-bond English. It’s not a nice thing to call an author a cheat, because you prefer to believe your lying brother publisher. And [you my] friend and comrade, fourth estate like me, we have no cause to acknowledge these worldly values, which do not even obey the world’s laws. Maybe I am not behaving “sensibly.” But I behave the way I write. And what sort of inconsequence do you expect from a man who has written the Antichrist? I will not allow a lie to stand—and then not because it happens to be directed against me, but because it’s a lie, and because tomorrow it may be directed against others. And it’s an even worse lie if it makes appeal to solidarity or morality or British royal family la-di-dah. And money—I know—is the Antichrist (just like the cinema, which you take under your wing)—but I have never spent more on myself than a bookkeeper. And I work more than ten bookkeepers, and need money for others. That’s the law of my life, and it’s the only way I know.

  In practical terms, this Gollancz business has wrecked a year of my life. Mr. Reece was all set to pay me for a year. Maybe the solidarity craze will take hold of him now as well. And for the rest of my life I’ll be tied to a certain publisher whom I don’t like any more—purely because his colleagues showed solidarity. I don’t know what you find to admire in it. It’s legally and morally reprehensible.

  You’re going away, and who knows if we’ll ever see each other.

  Please try and see that Huebsch pays me for the Antichrist right away—preferably before the first. I’m dying. And—what’s worse—others are dying too. And I’m not at all too proud to ask a second time for the money to be wired. At least with Huebsch that wouldn’t be a psychological error. He should be with you soon. Please, don’t waste a moment, you will really be helping me. (And that’s the only way you have of helping me.) I embrace you, and beg your pardon!

  Your Joseph Roth (very sober and very desperate)

  1. to others: Hermann Kesten writes, “I was witness on dozens of occasions when Roth gave—for him—considerable sums of money to some needy individual.”

  2. from Pressburg: Victor Gollancz was born in London. Ceteris paribus, Roth tends to have it in for Czechs and Hungarians most of all—see his later outburst against B
udapest in no. 378—because he blames them for the breakup of the Dual Monarchy. Villains in his books are very often Hungarians.

  3. Fischer—S. Fischer the publisher—was born in Lipto Szent Miklos, in present-day Slovakia. Joseph Roth was not born in Radziwillow.

  4. Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940)—or Czamberlain?!—was the prime minister of Great Britain from 1937 to 1940.

  291. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  11 Portland Place

  London W 1

  21 July 1934

  Dear friend,

  of course the setting up of the company1 was a specious business. [. . .] It’s not possible to judge these things from outside. In general, I see only two alternatives: either you don’t go into business with friends, or you only do business with friends you can trust implicitly, like Huebsch.

  You chose something like the middle way, which will always be the worst. [. . .] You’re magnanimous and suspicious at one and the same time, which is a bad mixture.

  You’re going to have to steer one course or the other, either purely commercial or purely on trust, and the best thing would be if you didn’t take personal charge, but had someone like Kesten work on your behalf. I know how clever you are, but your cleverness is forever being crossed by emotional complexes and points of honor. That’s why you ought to keep everything to do with money separate from yourself, and leave it in the reliable hands of someone you trust. Of course it was idiotic to wire Viking when you knew Huebsch was going to be here in 6 days. [. . .]

  I’ll be in touch again when Huebsch is here. I have a lot to get through in my last days in London. From the beginning of August my address will be Salzburg again for a while, even though I won’t be there in person.

  Sincerely,

  your St. Z.

  1. the company: Orcovente.

  292. To Stefan Zweig