Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  What use is it to me if I run away with a guilty conscience? With my work? I’m always working, everywhere I go, so long as my conscience is clear. I can’t work if I’m on the run.

  How am I to live without an advance? Should I go to the baker, and ask him for an advance, instead of the publisher? Is it better, or more moral, if the cheese seller sends me threatening letters, instead of de Lange? Where exactly do you think I should economize? Most people who don’t drink spend their money on food. What’s the difference. Or on women; or gambling. That’s right: “this is what I have, and I’ll cut my cloth to fit.” But I don’t have anything. What cloth am I going to cut?

  If I had ever had anything, it would never have occurred to me to cut my cloth according to what I need. But as it is I don’t have anything, I never had anything.

  I am not resisting, I see everything perfectly clearly. Everyone has his mistakes. I want to live in such a way that I can still bear my mistakes. They are a part of me. With all my mistakes, I still need 5,000 francs per month, and security for 2 years. Without my mistakes, I can’t call my life my own. As little as I could without my virtues. I need security still more than money. I can’t live in a continual state of panic. But I do live in a state of panic. Have done for years. As long as I’ve lived in my state of panic, I can’t even see the correctness of a bit of advice. And I can’t help it either if my reaction to it is wrong.—I SIMPLY DON’T KNOW. You can’t tell a man sitting in a burning house to be a good fellow and fetch his coat before he jumps. It’s pointless; even if he wanted to obey, he couldn’t hear you.

  I sense how many worries you have. Don’t go worrying about me as well, to the extent that I become a burden for you. That would be a sin I couldn’t bear.

  My novel will not sell. I am sure of that.

  I embrace you sincerely, never think that I don’t hear your voice, and your splendid heart,

  your old J.R.

  360. To Stefan Zweig

  17 November 1935

  Dear friend,

  I am chasing my last letter with another, because I fear I haven’t been clear enough. If you think a “harsh” tone on your part might hurt me in some way, then I counter by being afraid you will still misunderstand me when I’m pretty clear with you.

  Of course there can be no possibility—I’m not that cheap—of my ever supposing you had things easy, giving me cheap advice—or dear—from a position of security. The one who thinks like that is a scrounger. I never see you “in the box seat” but always in the tragic fog that shrouds us as writers, and I never see your bourgeois existence. (If I did, I would tell you.)

  The way in which you seek to connect God to my writing is inadmissible. Writing is a terrestrial thing, and, from a “metaphysical” vantage point, is in no way different from shoemaking. Say.

  If I want to do nothing but serve God, then I must become a monk. (I hope to end my days like that.) As long as I do terrestrial things like write novels, then I don’t see why I should live any worse than a bad shoemaker who makes useless boots. Only when you write something like the Imitation of Christ do you refuse an advance.

  It’s unpractical to accept advances. But you can’t avoid the unpractical on the grounds that it’s also impious. All those shit writers I see around about me live more practical lives than I do, and get bigger advances, and, perfectly literally, are less shat upon than I am.

  If twenty bad shoemakers live splendidly, then a twenty-first will surely scrape a living too. The shoes he makes aren’t any worse because he happens to be a fool in his personal life as well.

  I have far too low an opinion of writing for your appeal to my faith to have any weight with me. Writing isn’t a question of election or selection. That would be hubris. There are no “artists” and no “genius” in the whole Bible; none in the New Testament; none in the long line of the saints. What we do, my dear friend, is worth little or nothing, in God’s eyes.

  One ought not to confuse—this seems to me a very grave sin—the practical advance with the heavenly “advance” that God also gives the shoemaker. In His eyes, shoemakers and writers are of equal worth.

  Tell me this: if a poor shoemaker accepts a sum of money from a customer to go and buy leather to make the customer a pair of boots, is that not perfectly natural? And “unpractical”?

  I do exactly the same thing. (Quite apart from the fact that I was one of those rare unworldly shoemakers, who is cheated by his customers all his life.)

  I can’t live like that. You can’t be a saint, and at the same time make profane things. You may say to me that it’s my duty to serve literature. I don’t serve literature. Literature is a terrestrial matter; it’s my job. A marriage: worth such and such, or such and such, like a wife. A terrestrial matter. You need God’s grace even for a tuppenny fuck. (Excuse pencil, my pen’s run out.)

  I don’t want to live a profane life any more. I’ve had enough of it. Profane and miserable: It’s too much. The profane, which is miserable, is killing me. That’s suicide. I am NOT being modest and devout here. An author is a worldly figure. He has, if he has my qualities, to live at least as well as the least of his colleagues. It isn’t absolutely necessary, but in an earthly sense it would be justified.

  I embrace you,

  your Joseph Roth

  361. To Stefan Zweig

  Paris, 26 November 1935

  Dear friend,

  Mr. Sabatier has just written to tell me Grasset will take my novel, so long as de Lange’s conditions aren’t too steep.—Now I hear that Sabatier is leaving Grasset, and going to Albin Michel.

  Thank you very much for interceding in the thing just now coming about. Probably you’re thinking of a type of publisher that could help me. Please God I’ll be saved.

  Dear friend, if you don’t come till January, I fear you’ll only find me half alive. The Christmas holidays in particular I will NOT be able to survive. You can have no idea how much I dread them. My whole tribe of Negroes is descending on me, perversely and needlessly decked out with German Christmas trees and Aryan sentiments. There is nothing I hate so much as the smell of pine sap on an empty wallet, when I don’t even have small change with which to take myself to a restaurant. It’s physically impossible for me to survive that without being autonomous. Even surviving until then, without money, is impossible. I have 200 francs a week for myself till 23 December. I suffer the plagues of Egypt if my wife cannot go to the cinema. I must be free in the evening, I must be alone, and alone with a clear conscience. In that woman—as in all of them—there is the deadly and perfectly natural urge to constrain me, to make me into a sort of family pet, and the only way I can protect myself from that with a clear conscience is if I provide for her in some sort. Without a clear conscience, I cannot go and be free. My sufferings would be redoubled.

  There’s no point, my dear friend, all my strength is frittered away in this pettiness. I spend three-quarters of my day on foolish things, ridiculous worries, there is no one, far and wide, who could free me of so much as a telephone conversation. Nor do I even want my wife to do it. Everything would then be presented to me one day as “work,” “deserving,” and so forth. I do not want someone to cook, or type or phone for me; save me from services. They will all come home to roost one day. I must be as autonomous as a pasha in his harem. I don’t pay with sex, or by the acceptance of so-called services. I don’t care.

  I wish a higher force would free me, so that . . .

  362. To Stefan Zweig

  Paris 6e

  Hotel Foyot

  33 rue de Tournon

  6 December 1935

  Dear friend,

  I’ve had piles these past three days, and am unable to sit at a table and write. Forgive the dictation, therefore. Grasset bought the book. According to my contract, Mr. Brun had to deal with de Lange directly, and not with me. I would
like to look him up, but can’t find a plausible pretext for a visit.

  I understand that you can be here on or about 14 December, and that you have no more than 3 or 4 hours to spare for me. I don’t think that it is possible to gain a true picture in so short a time. At any rate, I should like to ask you to set aside at least one of these hours for my friend, who will give you exact information, better and more clearly than I can.

  Thank you very much as well for your comforting postcard. My state is much too bad for me to get anything out of Döblin, thanks all the same. He was always a shouter, and belongs for me with those deeply detested “activist writers” that Germany was crawling with in those years. He knows this, too.

  I embrace you warmly,

  Your faithful old Joseph Roth

  I beg you to please come and help me.

  I want to live, but I can’t go on. I am getting sicker, and I have no one. My loneliness is such that I will cling to anyone at all, so as not to sleep, or rather not to lie in bed, not sleeping. Poverty would be happy [. . . illegible] and no guilt. And no material obligations. I am humiliated every day, and my self-contempt takes the form of physical illnesses of all sorts. Who am I to call to, if not you? You know that God answers very late, generally after death. I don’t want to die, although I have no fear of death.

  Your J.R.

  As a curiosity, I enclose a cutting from the Vienna Journal where it says that the gangster Schulze had tried to read Shakespeare and you. Gangsters evidently have a better taste in books than American millionaires. You should send the cutting to Huebsch.

  363. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Foyot

  Paris

  [December 1935?]

  Dear friend,

  thank you so much for your help and your letter. Why do you call me not very good? You left me for 3 weeks without a line or an address, and I might have gained the impression you were as anxious to avoid me as success itself. You don’t know how much a letter means to me, and how little I deserve only to be found good, once I have been measured against others. You don’t know—and will never learn—how darkness, strife, ugliness, and hatefulness are destroying my life, or how impenetrable the [. . . illegible] of futility is. All work, and no success at all. I yearn for it with something like homesickness. You are the only one with the strength to tear me away from where I am—if you even want to, that is. I can’t write as I would speak. If your mind isn’t set on my rescue, I am certainly doomed.

  I don’t know what misfortune befell Jacob,1 but I don’t care for him, and I don’t understand, frankly, why you do. There’s a sort of ambivalent halo around his personal and literary life. The death of Alban Berg2 is certainly more tragic than the bad luck of Jacob. I hear that he got involved in changing money. There’s bound to be resentment in those accounts, but what does a writer have to do with exchange rates or percentages and those things? Why does he get involved in things like that? But I’m only talking off the top of my head, and you’re sure to know some justification for it. So I’ll expect you, yes? I’ll be finished with the new novel on the 20th. I am working regularly, but badly. I’ll await you. Others are as well, I know, and I’m confused and depressed that you want to lump me with them in your cauldron of worries and embarrassments.

  Your old Joseph Roth

  Please will you give the accompanying letter to Mrs. Zweig.

  1. Jacob: Heinrich Eduard Jacob.

  2. Alban Berg (1885–1935), the composer of Wozzeck and Lulu, died impoverished and unable to afford treatment for an insect bite.

  364. To Thea Sternheim1

  4 January 1936

  Dear, esteemed Madam,

  I’m sending you the Tolstoy with the same post, and I beg your pardon for my dilatoriness.

  It wasn’t so much distraction, as sadness, which led to casualness.

  Belatedly, but sincerely, I wish you a happy new year, and kiss your hand as your devoted

  Joseph Roth

  1. Thea Sternheim: ex-wife of the author Carl Sternheim.

  365. To Stefan Zweig

  20 January 1936

  Dear friend,

  please forgive me, another registered letter. Thank you for your most recent letter, and for the regards that your dear wife conveyed to me. She hinted to me why you won’t be able to stay in Paris beyond the end of January. If your mind weren’t already made up, I would ask you myself to stay away from any disgusting manifestation. But I am unable to absolve you of the friendly duty of rescuing me. You will learn from the accompanying letter that the end is nigh, if not already at hand. Please take me absolutely at my word. The letter will fill you in. It is impossible that I go on living and writing, after 5 books in 3 years. This letter here makes it impossible for me to go on working on my current book. I was 5 days from finishing it. It’s possible that here and there a person may still like me, but you are the only one who is yoked to me. You are the only one who can actually help me. Only with you can I change and save my life. Please come to me. I beg you earnestly, de profundis. I don’t want a shabby death. I implore you, answer me right away. Don’t go interpreting my words, don’t analyze me please, and don’t make me still unhappier than I already am. Don’t write to me, talk to me. I have experienced myself how with the writer’s pen, the primary feelings of the human being and friend tend to “overformulation.”

  Please write back right away, and help me, and save me really. Your

  Joseph Roth

  366. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth

  Hotel Westminster

  Nice [no date but 1936]

  Dear friend,

  our letters crossed in the post. What Landauer wrote was what I was always afraid might happen—I’ve known for a long time that the next movement in your royalties wasn’t going to be up, but down. That’s what made me so anxious when I saw you failing to get by on relatively high sums. With the grim foresight that I have, I knew that the next trend for the émigrés was down (it will go up again when there is no fresh blood, when the overcrowding has stopped, and people like you appear at your true worth).

  But as I say—we need a plan for the next few months. You’ve got to get over the dead point. I fear you will once again have incurred obligations. Couldn’t Dr. Wolff1 or Leites send me a full list, so that we can make a plan together in Paris? I don’t know to what extent the agreement with Huebsch has panned out, how much you have sold or compromised in advance, whether you are able to count on anything at all in the months ahead, or whether everything has been paid out already. You’ll have to help too. Your daily alcohol consumption will have to be reduced. I can see it in myself—nicotine is as indispensable to me as schnapps is to you—that will power gets you partway there. Then (in your interest) we will have to force alcoholic reductions upon you. You will curse us and call us names, but for your sake we’ll have to do it. We can’t prevent your collapse by ourselves. You’re going to have to help. You’ll have to consent to a plan, you mustn’t (quite apart from your health) exceed a certain sum for alcohol—simply because it’s immoral to spend more on booze than a normal family spends on living. My dear good fellow, don’t forever be arraigning the times and the wickedness of other people, admit that you bear some responsibility for your state, and help us to help you. Don’t come up with new sophistries to the effect that schnapps makes you noble, lucid, productive—il avilit, it debases. As you want to live (thank goodness for that) you will have to put your shoulder to the wheel. I’m just looking back on an awful week from not-smoking (normally I get through a dozen big cigars a day!)—at last the pressure is finally reducing, I feel as light and relieved as after a colonic irrigation. My own chastening gives me the right to demand that you stop, or at least reduce your intake of alcohol. And above all, finish the novel, so that you can rest.

  I was here yesterday with Jules Romains:2 I think his novel
is the best of recent years. Today I’m seeing Schickele—Heinrich Mann appears not to be around.

  Sincerely, your Stefan Zweig

  1. Dr. Wolff: Fritz Wolff.

  2. Jules Romains (1885–1972), poet and novelist. Zweig’s reference is to the novel cycle Les hommes de bonne volonté (1932–56, 28 vols.).

  367. To Stefan Zweig

  [January? 1936]

  Dear friend,

  I don’t understand why you don’t reply to my last letter. If you’re angry with me, then our close old friendship demands that you tell me. If you don’t, then, for the first time, I don’t understand you.

  But that isn’t the reason why I’m writing. I’m worried something might have happened to you.

  This worries me. Why don’t you answer? You could just tell me: I’ve had enough of you, leave me alone. Why don’t you say anything?

  Another thing: the dubious Lampel1 is staying in your hotel. Please, don’t say a word to him!

  I don’t give a damn about Marcu (or Schickele either). I know exactly what you’re worth, and the way you like to cast your nobility before swine. I can explain the difficulty and the wailing of Schickele. Please don’t be led up the garden path by your sense of justice. And don’t listen to Marcu’s lies.

  But maybe it’s too late. I have no other explanation for your not-replying than your uncertainty whether to tell me now or later that our friendship is over. I’d rather you told me now. In my condition, the pain and uncertainty of waiting for word from you is worse than the knowledge itself. You don’t care for my friendship? Tell me, then! I’ve known for a long time that my friendship must become burdensome, one day. That it would become burdensome to you I still can’t bring myself to believe.—Why the silence? Why don’t you answer? Has something happened to you? What? And why not tell me about it? Please, tell me the truth, all of it right away. I am waiting for every mail delivery. You make me terribly unhappy. I can’t stand it. Your silence is unaccountable to me. I can’t go on living like that, with you, with the knowledge that you are supposed to be my friend, my silent friend. What do you want? Say! And say it right away,