Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  I’ve put the girl with the nuns for 300 francs a month. The boy in a school (where his Negro uncle works) also for 300 francs. But, as per contract, I am only getting money from de Lange till 1 November. I refuse to enter into a new contract with him. So I don’t know what to do.

  I want to and I have to go to Amsterdam after finishing the second book. After that I should like to be alone somewhere for a week, and rest. I don’t know what to do. If I were a hysteric, I would take refuge in illness.

  What shall I do? I have nothing to eat—not even anything to drink.

  Please give me an answer.

  I beg you sincerely, VERY earnestly, please reply immediately to

  your old Joseph Roth

  355. To Stefan Zweig

  Paris

  18 October 1935

  Please, the stories referred to in this letter will follow immediately.

  Dear friend,

  do I need to tell you that your telegram and dear letter made me blissfully happy? I have no sense of the novel at all, I couldn’t even bring myself to read the proofs, I’ve hardly opened it since, every word and comma reeks to me of ghastly torments, bills presented by porters and waiters, and sundry other ritual humiliations. I have no idea, perhaps you overestimate it, or I underestimate it, everything’s possible. On top of which, I’m busy with the next book,1 completely engrossed in it. As for sales, etc., I’m not optimistic. The only place I have readers is Holland. In Switzerland I’ve been so far ignored by the leading newspapers. In Austria, I’m between two stools, the reactionaries taking me for a left-wing Jew, and the Lefties for a “renegade.” For German refugees, Heinrich Mann, Feuchtwanger, and Arnold Zweig are all important writers. It would take a miracle, I think, for the book to be a success. In film terms, Mussolini snuck in ahead of me. You don’t film the same stuff twice in two years. So much for my “prospects.”

  For the umpteenth time I want to take advantage of your friendship, and ask you to write to your French publishers about the book. I broke with Gabriel Marcel, the editor at Plon, for not publishing Antichrist after he had contracted to do so. It would also help if you could draw the attention of various Swiss and Austrians to the Hundred Days; and write Huebsch about your impressions.

  I know I’m taking advantage of you. But I need you too, and I can’t go on living without your help. Literally: can’t go on living. I’ll explain my life to you, shall I? You will believe me that I write with a clear conscience—not even disturbed by alcohol—now that you’ve seen that I have a literary conscience. My dear friend, you surely won’t suppose I’m any more unclear in my personal speech than I am in what I write. I beg you therefore to give this letter the same credence as you would any book of mine. I give you my word of honor that I write letters no less conscientiously than books. And letters to you at that!

  That’s why I beg you, my dear friend, to attend to this letter with good will and utter confidence; at least as much as you brought to my book: (I will write numbered headings, for the sake of clarity, and invite you to answer me point by point.)

  1. I am not purposing my destruction. Only it so happens that in my case, self-destruction is the same as (my admittedly feeble efforts at) self-preservation. (More of which later.)

  2. My material situation is as follows:

  a. On 1 November I will be getting my last and final installment from Allert de Lange;

  b. I have already borrowed 2,000 francs against this installment; [. . .]

  1. the next book: i.e., Confession of a Murderer.

  356. To Stefan Zweig

  [end of October 1935]

  My dear friend,

  I thank you from the bottom of my heart. There is no other way of saying this in my vocabulary. Admittedly, 2,000 francs are not enough to save me, but even so, it’s like a convict getting his chains not taken off him, but at least loosened. If they are loosened for two weeks, to me that feels like a scent of freedom, and I can at least look out my cell window. Would you be able to write to Mr. Hella sometime before the 1st?—Tomorrow I’m seeing Mr. Sabatier.1 Thank you for that too, with all my heart.—We’ll see. I have yet to hear anything! I am very much afraid you will be one of just 3 stray individuals who admire my book.2 You will have made a mistake, I fear.

  Whether it is a good book or not, I now have enough strength in me to finish the Regular and to go on to “Strawberries.” I could have “Strawberries” finished within a year. What matters to me isn’t so much being able to rest, as being allowed to work in complete peace and quiet. Work under such circumstances is better for me than sanatorium and vacation. Above all I need to be free of the exploitative contracts and humiliating bossiness of Landauer. It was so stupid of me to sign all those émigré contracts, and so sensible of you to steer clear of them. Everybody now resents me for my big advances,3 and they hate me and will ruin my book with their hatred. Hate is even more magically powerful than love.

  Why do you think I don’t want to make any promises to you? As your friend and as I believe in God and in your friendship, I promise to stop killing myself if I can have the certainty of being left alive for another 3 months following 15 November. That’s what I drink to forget! Only for that reason, and because instead of 6 or 8 I have to write 15 or 20 pages a day. I have found places for the children costing, all told, 650 francs per month. Perhaps that could be reduced eventually to 300 or so, by special dispensation. My room costs 700 francs per month. I beg you, I beg you, please rescue me. I am doomed, I can’t go on selling myself tout compris, with all subsidiary rights, I can’t wake up night after night from dread of what the morning will bring, the hotel manager, the mail, don’t think when you see me that I live the way I appear, my life is atrocious, atrocious. I slink around like a wanted man, my hands shake and my feet shake, I only calm down a little once I have had a drink. Free me from my trembling and apprehension, if you can, and I will need only beer and wine to write with, not schnapps.—I have another fortnight clear in front of me, and then nothing, nothing thereafter, and I don’t believe my book will be a success, but I still would like to go on living.

  I am so sick, forgive me for begging you to confirm that you’ve received this letter. I no longer believe that letters arrive. I am inconsolable if I don’t get word from you, my true, my one true friend! Are you upset with me for some reason? Have you had enough of me?

  I embrace you sincerely,

  your old J.R.

  1. Mr. Sabatier: an editor at Grasset.

  2. my book: The Hundred Days.

  357. To Stefan Zweig

  Paris, 7 November 1935

  Hotel Foyot

  My dear best friend,

  thank you for your dear letter, and for Mr. Hella’s visit. You have no idea how oppressive I find small and tiny improvements; especially as I am only able to secure them from such a good and noble friend as you are, and nowhere else. I know, for instance, as a member of the German Hilfskommittee, who among the writers gets money, and how much. You would be surprised at the names, and the sums, too. These men of thought and imagination don’t have the imagination to picture the hundreds of simple but very valuable people queuing every day for a work card, a piece of paper, a free meal, a paltry sum to appease the hotelkeeper—only for a short time. Perhaps I wouldn’t have the imagination either if I didn’t go over there from time to time myself, even though I can do so little to help. I admit I always go on days when I feel particularly wretched, and then I sinfully gorge myself on the sight of someone skipping out because I’ve slipped him a carnet of bus tickets. They are so hard there with those poor wretches that I need to pull myself together if I am not to burst out crying—and they have to be hard, otherwise there wouldn’t be something for everyone. The office is run by one Mr. Fritz Wolff,1 he’s a hard and kindly man, everybody hates him, I happen to know that he needs pills to help him sleep at night,
because otherwise his conscience would keep him up. Thus far, I am almost the only one of the impecunious “artists” who hasn’t accepted support from him. And how could I, even if I wanted to? How could I sit there like that, and receive beggars? One author, who lives in the south of France, got a sizable sum—not knowing I’m on the committee. Then he told me his wife had come into some money, and she went back to Germany, and the net result was the purchase of an automobile on the installment plan. That was a heavy blow to me. I can’t get my head around that.

  Well, enough cursing! You won’t strengthen but perhaps lengthen our friendship if you try to order my life for the next 1–1½ years so that I don’t have to fear the next decade. Another 6 months like the last, and I’m certain to be in hospital. I can’t manage it any more, not physically. I can finish my next book by mid-December, and it would be nice if we could be together for once, without one or the other of us working on a book. Well, please be sure to come then, my dear friend.

  Your dear wife spoke to the Humanitas Verlag in Zurich2 for me. It so happened my good friend Leites went there too, and he came back with the following terms:

  a. 18% royalty

  b. 2,000 Swiss francs (in installments)

  for a book of stories. I am to answer the Humanitas person3—he seems to be genuinely humane (and well-off) this week still. The only contracts I have outstanding are for the Regular with de Lange, and for 3 stories (with conditional acceptance) with Reece. I have a choice, I can either give him 3 stories or 6,000 francs. I have about 8, and when I’m done with the Regular, another two already sketched out. So, I’m not short of material.—For the reply to Humanitas I only need to know whether there’s any prospect of your getting me publication in England—and what I then do about Huebsch, to whom I feel at least a moral obligation?

  He hasn’t written to me yet. Nothing on my book, except a long article in the Basler Nationalzeitung, and a very laudatory advance notice, with excerpt, in the Prager Presse. Not a squeak from the publisher, who hasn’t even started selling. After chivvying me with about 100 letters to finish, it turns out it’s the others who aren’t ready, and he wants to put the whole print run on the market at once. But that of course allows the good publicity to wear off.

  Please reply soon, I need to hear that you haven’t forgotten me. How horribly lost I’d be without you.

  Thank you, my friend, embraces,

  your old J.R.

  1. Fritz Wolff: an exiled lawyer, a friend of Roth’s.

  2. The Humanitas Verlag was founded in 1934.

  3. the Humanitas person: Simon Menzel, who founded the publishing house.

  358. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Foyot

  Paris

  12 November 1935

  Dear friend,

  Mr. Paul Frischauer was passing through town yesterday. He promised me to talk to you very soon. He will have told you my idea about Moses Montefiore.1 He is full of optimism, but I have to say I don’t believe in it, at least not in the possibility of my getting hold of money to survive the next couple of weeks.

  Also I’d like to ask you to tell me whether you think Heinemann would raise any objections, though of course he doesn’t have an option as such.

  You’re quite right about the stories. I’ll try and negotiate accordingly with the gentleman from Humanitas. But whether he agrees is debatable. I would have to pay out Mr. Reece immediately.

  Nothing from Huebsch still. Even if he’s contractually bound to de Lange, couldn’t he pay me a little money toward the next novel, he must know by now that I’m industrious and diligent, if not always punctual?

  It seems I don’t have much alternative to Humanitas. I can’t stay in the same horrible association with Landauer and Landshoff as hitherto. Please say hello to Joachim Maass,2 if he’s still in London.

  I don’t think I can do business with Bermann Fischer. I dislike him personally, because he tried pointlessly and for far too long to compromise with the Third Reich. It’s the same reason I broke off relations with the Frankfurter Zeitung. I don’t see why I should judge Bermann Fischer’s behavior any differently than, say, Heinrich Simon’s.

  Dear friend, today’s date is 12 November. If you tell me that we should have a detailed and practicable plan by December or January, please don’t forget that there are 6 or 8 weeks till then. It’s a long time to be writing, in such a pickle. I don’t know how I can get through such an interval without taking the Humanitas offer. I’d rather sell a couple of stories and live, than sign a contract that may be more beneficial to my reputation—but only once I’m dead.

  Don’t worry about my drinking, please. It’s much more likely to preserve me than destroy me. I mean to say, yes, alcohol has the effect of shortening one’s life, but it staves off immediate death. And it’s the staving off of immediate death that concerns me, not the lengthening of my life. I can’t reckon on many more years ahead of me. I am as it were cashing in the last 20 years of my life with alcohol, in order to gain a week or two. Admittedly, to keep the metaphor going, there will come a time when the bailiffs turn up unexpectedly, and too early. That, more or less, is the situation.

  What you say about the attempt to replace the planned manifesto makes me sad. Even at the time I thought the manifesto was pointless. Even more pointless is replacing it with something else. Basically, the Jews are small and petty. Only the great reflection of Jehovah sometimes lets them appear generous and magnanimous. At the decisive moment, their courage fails, and they run away. I don’t blame them for it, you understand, my dear friend, weaklings are always bound to run away at the decisive moment. I am just trying to save you from an undertaking that could end up as a bitter disappointment to you. I have completely stopped believing that any undertaking involving more than two like-minded individuals could be the least use anyway. The collectivism of the few isn’t going to cut much ice against the collectivism of the many. A couple of individuals have as much chance as anyone against the madness that results from the collectivism of the world today. One would have to organize a sort of guerrilla war of decent people. You wrote perhaps truer than you knew when you said: “If only it would come off, more or less.” That’s a form of words. It’s very apparent that you have nothing beyond a vague hope. Things don’t come off, “more or less,” they come unstuck.

  It’s too late is all it is. Back then when the great shit started, a great and united front of decency might have achieved an extraordinary turnaround in no time. But intellectual forces fail, for instance the Vatican. It would have made a decisive impression on Europe, and on the League of Nations, if the Holy Father had said openly and courageously, as befits a pope, that he forbade all support for an Italian war of conquest. But today’s pope is to Christians what Thomas Mann is to Nobel laureates, and Bermann Fischer is to publishers, and Gottfried Benn3 to doctors, and Rothschild to rich Jews.

  I would beg you, my dear friend, not to fritter away your strength in some collective; it only has a value when it is alone.

  Forgive me these rather lengthy disquisitions. But I had to tell you, and I would have written in far greater detail, had I written by hand. It costs me too much time.

  Please answer as soon as you are able.

  Sincere embraces

  [Joseph Roth]

  1. Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), English philanthropist, whose early support of Palestine is considered influential in the founding of Zionism. Roth was thinking of writing an essay or book on him.

  2. Joachim Maass (1901–72), German writer, went into exile in the United States in 1939, became professor at Mount Holyoke College, biographer of Kleist.

  3. Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), doctor, essayist, and poet.

  359. To Stefan Zweig

  16 November 1935

  Dear friend,

  you’re probably right with your doubts about the
Montefiore. If I get only 100 pounds as advance, there’s no point. According to Frischauer’s account, that was “salvation.”

  No, it’s not your tone that’s “harsh,” but your argumentation—generally correct and even faultless—but here not fitting the case. You can use any tone you want with me, whatever tone happens to suit you, any one; it’s almost absurd to think that I might misunderstand your tone. All I sense there is a pedagogy that won’t quite fit me, an attempt to influence me in a way that’s all too “logical” and inflexible.

  I can’t come to London. I couldn’t stand London. I detest the maritime and Protestant world. I hate the stiff collars and that deceitful “Gentlemen!” I would get sick there inside 3 days. There wouldn’t be any point. I wouldn’t be able to work there.

  Since I’ve begun to write, I haven’t been able to work without an advance. It’s a great sin, but an even greater one is the suicide of writing nothing at all. I am now 41 years old. For 15 years I ate dry bread. Then I ate bread and butter. Then there was the war. Then ten more years of bread. Then there were the advances. Journalism. Revolting work. Humiliation. 16 books. “Success” only in the last 5 years—associated with personal unhappiness, and therefore invalidated. Loans and being swindled. Hitler. All the time looking after other people.

  I can’t live on dry bread any longer. (I eat almost nothing as it is.) I can’t live in a village. People who order their lives by their income, at least have an income. The least of my income was always my advances. And then I fail to see why they had to be so small. Humility has nothing to do with economizing myself to death, which is a false economy. No one lives as economically as I do. A man in a cell is hardly as lonely as I am, sitting in a café to write. I don’t need seclusion. I am secluded. Go tell a snail to get itself a house in the country.