Your Joseph Roth
1. Lampel: Peter Martin Lampel (1894–1965), the leftist homosexual playwright and screenwriter, was described as “one of those curious characters who came very close to the Nazis before being arrested by them.” JR accuses him of involvement in Vehmic murder, a Nazi reinstatement of an old Westphalian custom from the Middle Ages, involving the collective “lawful” killing of an outlaw.
368. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth
[Nice, no date]
Dear friend,
well, things are a little clearer now—I will be in Paris next week, around the 7th, stay for a couple of days, and am looking forward very much to seeing you. I hope your advisers have worked out a plan, then I will do my best to see that you get at least a little quiet. Rely on me!
Aside from you, the only German I want to see is Ernst Weiss. What an awful schism there is right now—the campaign against Thomas Mann, Hesse, Kolb, mostly conducted by people who, if they’d been able to borrow a foreskin from somewhere, would still be sitting in Germany, quietly or otherwise. Why the internecine venom of the other Germany—like Kerr and Kraus just the other day. Imagine Goebbels chuckling over it. It’s such a pity, and so unpolitical!
Here I’m spending time (a privilege) with Jules Romains and Roger Martin du Gard.1 Clever minds, especially when unembittered, are always a tonic.
Till soon, my dear fellow!
your St. Z.
I am VERY proud that I, the most fanatical chain-smoker, a veritable Joseph Roth of nicotine, have been completely off smoking the last 14 days. It can be done, if you want! And you’ve got to want, and you’ve even got to got to want, my dear friend, this time (since my struggle with the angel of nicotine) I’m demanding action from you.
1. Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958), French historical novelist, who won the Nobel Prize in 1937, was at André Gide’s bedside when he died. Today, he languishes in obscurity in the English-speaking world.
369. To Stefan Zweig
Sunday [2 or 9 February 1936]
Dear friend,
at last your good letter arrived, I really thought you had had enough of my bitterness. I am a great burden on you, but who else can I go to, who am I to confide in, all around me are traitors and worms. What did I ever do to anyone? I always helped people. Now I see a letter from Schickele to de Lange, where he writes that other authors get nothing, because Roth gets such enormous advances.1 How can he do such a thing? I am vehement at times, but never behind backs, I am capable of hate, but never hateful. Marcu wrote to Kesten in the same way. What’s going on? All the work I did in the committee for my poor colleagues. I even collected money for them, and they’re all sore at me, from Heinrich Mann to Soma Morgenstern.
The quarrel about Bermann2 is a bad business. Now we have one publisher less, and have provoked the anti-Semitic instincts of Korrodi.3 But Bermann bears a lot of responsibility. Firstly, the journalistic émigrés have their spies too, someone from the Sureté générale is even a member of the journalists’ union, and Bernhard4 is organized in France, and is a power in the land. [. . .] Secondly, it’s not right that Bermann, instead of replying in person,5 always sends his élite authors out to do battle for him. It’s undignified and vulgar. [. . .] He wheels out Thomas Mann with all his dignity for a rag where Heinrich Mann is pissed at in 4 offensive columns. He makes Thomas Mann into an ally of Korrodi’s. Oh, it’s all such a tangle of filth and craziness. Sense has moved out of our heads, without giving notice. We are mad and in hell, we are crazy shades, dead but still stupid. This world is in limbo. At the Rolland celebration,6 they yelled out the “Internationale,” 2,000 people, loathsome Comintern figures among them, today the papers are full of the execution of 5 disloyal Soviet officials in Petersburg, and what does the great man do: he protests against one lot of murders and uses his dignity to suppress the other. And is happy to be celebrated by people you could describe as principled murderers. Does it get any worse? I was happy you weren’t there, I think it was the spirit of Erasmus that did it, it was his way of thanking you.
I’m drinking almost only wine, promise. I just want peace—3 months of it—and not these debts and worries! I won’t be able to write anything after this novel. I’m physically drained from writing. If I’m to carry on, I need to stimulate myself—and that depletes me further. Do you think I don’t know?
I see Ernst Weiss from time to time. He is both bitterer than I am and more contented. I am a little nonplussed by him. Often he is very, very sad. He likes you, one of the few honest likers. He has a lot of the virtue of justice, which is why I admire him. But it’s not real affection.
Today it says in the paper that Laetitia7 has been dead for 100 years. Her picture, which I’ve never seen before, is oddly close to my description of her. Nor did I know that she’d died blind, I made her weak-sighted in my book. Come along, come along.
Sincerely your
Joseph Roth
1. such enormous advances: one editor is quoted in Bronsen as saying, “I had a vision of whole generations of beggars when I saw Roth cadging an advance.” In a letter dated 10 May 1935, René Schickele wrote, “Roth has left us. Gone to Amsterdam to sit beside the till. He was cross with [Valeriu] Marcu for giving him only half the travel money, instead of all of it. For us de Lange authors, Roth is a sort of vacuum cleaner. No speck of dust, no crumb from the master’s table that doesn’t get sucked into that bottomless hole. What’s left for the rest of us?” It wasn’t a good idea to turn up with a manuscript after Roth had been by.
2. the quarrel about Bermann: Samuel Fischer’s son-in-law and publishing heir, Bermann Fischer, had just gone into exile, first to Vienna and then Stockholm, where he set up his own publishing company and continued to publish Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig.
3. Korrodi: Eduard Korrodi, feuilleton editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
4. Bernhard: Georg Bernhard (1875 Berlin–1944 New York) was the editor and founder of the German exile newspaper Pariser Tageblatt.
5. instead of replying in person: but Bermann couldn’t have replied from within Germany (where he was still based) to items in exile publications without making things hot for himself and the firm whose custodian he was, following the death of Samuel Fischer in 1934.
6. Rolland celebration: Romain Rolland’s seventieth birthday was on 29 January 1936.
7. Laetitia: Marie-Laetitia Bonaparte, Napoleon’s mother, a character in Roth’s novel The Hundred Days.
370. To Stefan Zweig
Hotel Foyot
Paris
Wednesday [February 1936?]
Dear friend,
I am not at all offended, your wife must take my extreme despair for antagonism. It’s most peculiar. You’re tired out, I know, and I am inconsolable about the fact that I only tire you out more. I’m too shaky to be able to put it better and more delicately than that. I’m too confused at the moment, I’m not sure I shouldn’t just go to bed, and wait for the end. But I do know this, that it’s not possible for me to do anything else, as you suggested. For whom do I write articles? Or films? How do I make the time? Where’s the money to tide me over? I’m running around with my tongue hanging out, a scrounger with drooling tongue and wagging tail. How do I avoid signing new contracts for new books? I don’t even get offered those. What do I do, now, today, next week? All your perfectly correct thoughts have nothing to base themselves on. You just need to put yourself in my shoes, you can do that, in my typical day, I’ve told you what that’s like. I have no more nights. I [sit?] around till 3 a.m., I lie down fully dressed at 4, I wake up at 5, and I wander around the room. I haven’t been out of my clothes for two weeks. You know what time feels like, an hour is a lake, a day is a sea, the night is an eternity, waking up is a thunderclap of dread, getting up a struggle for clarity against fevered nightmares. That’s what it’s all about, time, time, time, and I
don’t have any. In two weeks I’ll have a contract, in three weeks, I’m told, there’ll be a reply from America—and how much of my life do I lose in those 2 weeks! For nothing! For nothing! Humiliated, disgraced, indebted, smiling, smiling through gritted teeth—an acrobatic stunt—so that the hotel proprietor doesn’t notice, my pen clamped, cramped in my hand, desperately clinging to the idea I’ve just had, because it’s galloping away from me, sometimes starving, falling asleep in my chair after 3 sentences, but what do you want, what do you want from a man who’s half madman, half corpse? What else am I to do, if I don’t write books? I’m old and sick, I can’t go back to the army, which is the only job I ever had. Debts, ghosts, privation, and writing, talking, smiling, no suit, no shirt, no boots, hungry open mouths, and scroungers to stuff them, and ghosts, ghosts, wall-to-wall ghosts. And what a life behind me! What do you want, my friend? How well you are able to describe it, and how alien it sounds to me, your clever counsel. You know everything, don’t you! You know everything! You can sniff out the deepest secrets, and the things that lie around on the surface, you see those too! Or do you miss them? I can’t sell film ideas, I can’t compete on the English market with Lania, etc., with [. . .] Frischauer—I’m not up to it. Please, my dear friend, take me at my word. Either I’ll be sick to death, or go crazy, or perhaps I am already. Don’t be angry, and remember I love you
Your J.R.
371. To Stefan Zweig
17 February 1936
Dear friend,
it was kind of you to reply to me at once. I’ll write you in more detail as soon as the novel’s finished.—I only want to tell you this, quickly, that I am not bitter or embittered, not for a moment. You’re mistaken there. My respect for human beings is immense—and so every disappointment, the least instance of harshness or obstinacy—not to me, but to others—shakes me, enough to make me curse. I just don’t understand the world, I suppose. I demand too much—too much literature of myself, too much humanity of others. I don’t understand why so much evil happens on a daily basis, and the fact that such a thing is possible makes me question each individual. I sense squalor and betrayal. I think I can only understand the world when I’m writing, and the moment I put down my pen, I’m lost. Alcohol isn’t the cause, perhaps a consequence, though it makes things worse. That’s the truth. You give people too much credence, I too little. Both are bad. What pains me with you is that you believe strangers sooner than you’d believe me. I have never broken my word. I’m too loyal. It worries me. You worry me every bit as much as I you, no more, no less. Your magnanimity worries me as much as my own pettiness. My night porter1 is a decent man, more honest than ten authors, and I certainly prefer him to Kesten, say. That’s just, that’s not bitter. In the 60 years of his life, my night porter has committed fewer skulduggeries than Marcu has in 10. Which in my eyes makes the porter Auguste noble, and Marcu not. Quite apart from the fact that Auguste understands his job better than ten mediocre writers. I cannot give up my respect for Auguste, or his affection for me. Vous êtes un bateau surchargé, vous coulez à pic, he said to me yesterday. Mon pauvre vieux, venez chez moi. Those are my Nobel prizes.—In the whole of German literature, I don’t know of anyone, besides yourself, who understood that, precisely that. There is only moral hierarchy, not intellectual, much less pseudo-intellectual. In all literature, I love only you, only you are my friend, everyone else isn’t worth shit, in spite of my respect, which some of them deserve.—I’ll write you soon, after the novel’s done. (And how badly will that turn out, in such a time!)
Your Joseph Roth
1. my night porter: the night porter at the Hotel Foyot, invariably hailed by Roth as “mon cher Auguste.” He advised Roth on money and personal matters, publishing questions, etc. A true friend of Roth’s.
372. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth
11 Portland Place
London W 1
3 March 1936
Dear friend,
in haste, my congratulations! At last you’ll be able to stop and draw breath, a completed book is a happy boon—I hope to be where you are now in another week, but for now I’m still in a state that makes a half-decent letter a near-impossibility. You feel so vulnerable when you’re supposed to be concentrated on your work, people pressing and oppressing you on all sides. Sometimes I get quite desperate, and I see where you’re coming from. If only one could put one’s entire strength in one’s work, and not fritter it away in a hundred trivialities—imagine what that would be like! I am increasingly convinced that only purely selfish people are able to use the full measure of their talent.
Tell me what your plans are. I take it you probably will be going to Holland. I think it would do you a world of good to get out of Paris, if only for a few days. You need to be able to lose yourself and those around you every so often. I have very high hopes of your novel, and from what you tell me of the contents, it will be of interest—and in terms of the financial reward this is critical, nowadays—to the film industry. Your final liberation can only come from that quarter, I believe. Zuckmayer1 and Bruno Frank2 have been here for a week or two, and both came away with gigantic sums. That’s where I notice how clumsy you and I are by comparison, and how you in particular struggle for tiny sums, whereas canny authors earn as much at a stroke as for five or ten novels.
Don’t worry about Manga Bell, it would be surprising, the way you live, if her nerves didn’t get frazzled. When you’re better, she’ll feel better too.
My exhaustion greets yours, my book greets yours, and once again, with all my heart, my joy firstly at the fact that your book is finished, and secondly that you’ve managed to keep your promise to yourself,
your faithful Stefan Zweig
1. Zuckmayer: Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977), popular German playwright and novelist, friend of Brecht’s. Went into exile in Switzerland, then the United States.
2. Bruno Frank (1887 Stuttgart—1945 Beverly Hills), playwright, novelist, screenwriter.
373. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth
49 Hallam Street
London W 1
16 March 1936
Dear friend,
your letter arrived just now. I’m hoping you just overreacted to a strain within your generally overstrained condition. Remember, you have a great book newly completed, and an indescribably difficult struggle with yourself every day. That will lead you to see things unduly pessimistically. You know I often urged you to take a month off. Two people living on top of each other, always sharing the same space, you can’t work like that in the long run, and you will need an occasional break. I’m sure you will have completely recovered in two or three days alone in Amsterdam, and I’m sure you have friends in Paris who will keep you posted. Our work unfortunately keeps our imaginations exercised, and like all Jews, we have pessimistic imaginations. Just try and avoid delusions. Things will sort themselves out, and probably by the time you get this, you will have heard better news from your friends. But overall, you know my belief that you need to be away from Paris for a while, never mind where, and live by yourself with reduced commitments. Ideally, we should have been able to talk all this through face to face, only I can’t break off now, or else I should have come over to see you. I have just moved apartments, and am settling into my new place. Note the new address and phone number,
sincerely your Stefan Zweig
I must beseech you, my dear friend, not to fall prey to gloomy delusions. You’ve finished a book, and it’s bound to be a beautiful book, that has to be the important thing—what would a marriage be without crises, they’re an essential part of things. Don’t go running back to Paris now, you need to recuperate, nothing matters more than that you keep yourself going, seeing as you keep all those other people going!! More soon from your
St. Z.
374. To Stefan Zweig
Thursday, 19 March 1936
Amsterdam
Ed
en Hotel
Dear friend,
there is news, but wretched news. Mrs. Manga Bell [. . .] was unable to stay in the hotel. She had a temperature [. . .] I’m afraid I wasn’t wrong. I’m a burned child.
On top of everything else, the new publisher, Mr. van Alfen,1 has a flu. I won’t know my fate till the middle of next week. So I’m wasting two weeks in Amsterdam. I couldn’t stay with Landauer, he has his girlfriend2 with him. I don’t even have the strength, with all this uncertainty and panic, to dictate. Because I must patch my novel. It’s all full of holes.
I made the lowest tender offer I could. Who knows whether it will be accepted. If it isn’t—Mr. van Alfen is a completely unliterary type, he comes from the advertising world—then I don’t know what will happen. If only I weren’t so enfeebled. Even if he does give me money, that would mean I have to give him a novel by September. How will I do that? With whose head and what hand?
I’m leaving my wife at Gottfarstein’s3 for a time. It’s a poor part of town, St. Martin, she’ll see how Gottfarstein lives, and the almighty struggle he has every day to earn 10 francs. He is a good man. His girlfriend is Polish, and a good girl. My café life has spoiled the woman. [. . .]
I can only hope to make a plan once I know the fate of my novel and contract. But how am I supposed to write the next one so quickly? Nothing from Huebsch. I’ll write to him again today. I implore you, write to him please yourself, please, now! He must know that I’m dependent on his sticking by me. He’s silent as the grave. What can I do?
Please write me, at this address.
I enclose a letter to your wife. Show her this one as well, please.
I long to hear what she has to say, and I want her to be informed. Especially because Mrs. M.B. likes her.
Where shall I go? I won’t go to London. I’m afraid of the language, and the people, and I have no connection to the cinema either.
Sincerely your old
Joseph Roth
Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters Page 46