Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

The moment you begin to question my friendship is the moment you’d better end it. I will think the better of you for that, and not “take it amiss.”

  You don’t know, you have no idea, how wretched I am; how I lose more and more of myself from day to day; you have NO CLUE. I remain, until you decide to terminate our friendship,

  your old J.R.

  414. To Blanche Gidon

  Vienna, 18 May 1937

  Dear dear friend,

  by chance, I’m just reading the second installment of my novel in Candide.

  Thank you ever so much for the wonderful translation. It shows your ability as much as your friendship with me.

  I still haven’t received any money from All. de Lange Verlag. He told me that an unbelievably small sum had been agreed upon. I don’t believe him! I would be extremely grateful to you if you could find out what Grasset was paid for it. In my current destitution it would be of major importance. Stefan Zweig has confirmed that the sum reported by the publisher is far too small for Candide.

  I kiss your hand, and thank you again, and send the professor my warm regards.

  In old true friendship, your

  [Joseph Roth]

  415. To Mr. and Mrs. Gidon (written in German and French)

  Hotel Cosmopolite

  Brussels

  20 June 1937

  Dear friends,

  you don’t know what a pleasure you gave me. It was wonderfully generous of you to send me the photos, and at a moment when I was very ill, toxified, with swollen legs and bloodshot eyes, and my heart full of anguish. I’m a little better now. There is some hope from Holland.

  You didn’t understand me: I know that Candide paid 8,000 francs, and that of these, 4,000 are going to de Lange. But he WON’T pay me 2,000. He only wrote loosely to say he would give me “something” once the money has arrived. All I want to know is whether the 4,000 has already been paid to him. Even if he only gives me 500 francs, I’d be satisfied—though it’s all flagrant breach of contract.

  I got through the winter by giving talks, and in Austria by writing articles for Legitimists, on whose instructions and at whose expense I have come here. The books no longer bring in anything. A new one has just been set: The Story of the 1002nd Night, but not yet corrected and revised. I’ll have to start a third, if I’m to stay alive. There’s nothing else I can do. In Vienna my wife’s sanatorium set the bailiffs on me. I do believe it is absolutely impossible to know or understand the folly in which I live my life.—But don’t let me talk about those things! We’ll speak in Paris. Are you going away this summer? Where to?

  I’m looking at you both at the moment, your picture is on my desk. I have the feeling you can see me too.

  Thank you for your friendship and LOYALTY.

  Thanks to Mr. Matveev as well. He hasn’t forgotten me. That’s a further consolation.

  Very warmly in old troth, to you and the dear doctor. His spectacles are glinting in the picture. His beard gleams, and his kindly skepticism shines forth

  To your old

  Joseph Roth

  416. To Hermann Hesse

  Brussels

  5 July 1937

  Esteemed Mr. Hermann Hesse,

  today I got your sweet book of poetry. It had taken its time getting to me. It shames me as much as it honors and delights me. Because it seems that I am left owing the now sexagenarian poet of my youth respectful and comradely congratulations. Please accept the word “comradely” as the expression of my happy feeling to have consecrated myself to the service of the language whose sweetness and strength I learned to love in your writings twenty years ago. Back then I was a soldier in the trenches, [. . . illegible] and resolved to remain in the army, and end my life as a major in Teplice or Brunn, if I should be spared. It was therefore as a layman twice over that I read your works then: not only was I not a writer, but I was a soldier. I will admit to you today in your festive year, that I reread your early works ten years later, then already an aspiring writer myself. They were as fresh as on the day they were printed, and they offered the “expert” the noble satisfaction of enjoying your “craft” and mastery with insightful admiration.—I beg you, to whom I owe so much, to forgive me for not having sent you a birthday telegram. For weeks I’ve been lying in bed with swollen feet, not so much unhappy as almost in despair and sometimes furious at my disobedient body. It’s only in the past few days that I’ve recovered a little alertness. Alert enough to feel the doom doubly that threatens our world, our little islet of world where we will die, the last 10 of the Fourth Regiment.1

  In continuing gratitude and admiration,

  your Joseph Roth

  1. the last 10 of the Fourth Regiment: from an Austrian soldiers’ song. One imagines that the pacifist Hesse (then celebrating his sixtieth birthday) will have been bemused and alienated by the martial reference in particular and the letter altogether.

  417. To Stefan Zweig

  Grand Hotel Cosmopolite

  Brussels

  10 July 1937

  Dear friend,

  I received your grumpy letter. Why are you so afraid of words that won’t come? They have less meaning than pebbles dropped into the sea. Haven’t I written you worse things before? I’m a little concerned about you, and your letter added to my concern. Silly your suspicion I might have crossed your name off the list. I don’t keep lists. With the number of friends I have, I don’t need a list. But for a year now, since our melancholy goodbyes in Ostend, and more particularly since your return from South America, you’ve been in a state where either you don’t respond at all to my communications, or you respond badly. You react a little egocentrically. You blame God for your aging, instead of thanking Him for it. You don’t understand that people have gotten worse, because you were never willing to see them as good and bad and as human until Judgment Day, which you are so slow to believe in. How can I talk to you? Because you notice it getting darker, you stand there bewildered by the approach of night; and you think, furthermore, that it’s something personal to do with you. Even currency devaluations you take as a personal affront, because you had thought you could save yourself by living in the isles of the blessed. Now, for the sake of money, you want to return to the Continent, and to its darkest part. (Mind you don’t stay there too long!) You are independent of publishers and advances. You can afford to write nothing at all for two years. You truly are a “freelance.” Who else can say that of himself? Rolland has disappointed you. My Lord! He always was a false prophet and in thrall to noble errors and idealistic self-deceptions. Just before the World War he idolized the Germans and put to sleep whatever alertness the Continent had. After the war he proclaimed the absolute goodness of humankind, and today he’s a lackey of the Russian executioners. In the truest sense of the word, he has never known where God dwells, and he never will till his dying day. You already have a clear notion—being of the tribe of Asra, who have God, even if they never get him—of the inadequacy of all human idealisms that you bathed in from the time of your youth, and in which you have steeped yourself. You’re bound to be disappointed. The nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi is just as unhelpful to me, as Hitler’s violence is detestable. Of course you shouldn’t sign up for any party or group. I don’t see why that should even occur to you. You are an unregistered member of a motley group as it is, with tumblers, men of the world, rascals and dilettantes and liars, all coexisting with a small handful of decent individuals. You think you have already withdrawn from it. Oh no, you haven’t! Why for instance did you send a statement to be read out at the PEN Club? An organization where Communists and Fascists shoulder the yoke of politics and the state, and you come along and intone your: Down with politics! You’re not serious. Don’t you understand? That might be the way to speak in front of a republic of ghosts, but not to a lurid organization where assholes have seats and votes alongside brains. Do
you think you’ll tug at Feuchtwanger’s conscience? Will you hell! Why do you do these things! You can’t get over the loss of Germany! It’s only if Germany exists that you can be a cosmopolitan.1

  Show equanimity to the world and give what you have in the way of goodness to three or four individuals, not to “humankind,”

  your old

  Joseph Roth

  I am going to Ostend again. It will remind me of you.

  1. a cosmopolitan: these are all wounding and pertinent strictures to Stefan Zweig.

  418. To Blanche Gidon

  Hotel Cosmopolite

  Brussels

  13 July 1935

  [postmarked: 13 July 1937]

  Dear friend,

  please excuse me for writing in German. I’m interrupting my work. It’s difficult for me to make a sudden switch into French. Well, I thanked you from Salzburg for the sweet and lovely photos. I won’t repeat my “witty” remarks. But I also asked you for 2 practical things: 1. de Lange promised me of his charity to pay me “something” (my guess is 300–500 francs) of the Candide money, as soon as Grasset has remitted it. I ask you again please tell me if you can find out from Grasset when the money was dispatched to de Lange. The 2. question was: I’ve been asked for a couple of short stories by an American publication. I had a list of subjects written down somewhere, but I can’t find the piece of paper. I now think Mrs. Manga Bell has it, and I think you see her from time to time. I’ve also forgotten the name of the lawyer in Nice to whom I gave all my papers. I’m sure Mrs. Manga Bell will remember it. In case she wants to keep hold of the original piece of paper (I know she likes her little memorials), she could copy it out for me. It would help me a lot.—If it’s difficult for you to see Mrs. M.B., then just leave it. Querido does nothing for me in France. You could perhaps hawk the book1 around, it might be more suitable for serialization than the Confession.—In any case, I’ll write to Querido, even though we’re brouillés. As the mail is so unreliable, as you see, I beg you for a speedy reply.—My best regards to Mr. Gidon. With all my heart, your old and grateful

  Joseph Roth

  1. the book: Weights and Measures.

  419. To Blanche Gidon (written in French)

  Hotel Cosmopolite

  Brussels

  [postmarked:

  Ostend, 21 July 1937]

  Thousand thanks, my dear friend, for your letter and your great kindness. Please excuse the pencil. I would like this postcard to reach you before your departure. I’ve sold just 1,100 copies of Weights and Measures. I don’t think I will ever have a year in which I can take a rest from writing. I’m writing again now. I am battered and half demented at the same time.—Thank you for speaking to Mrs. Manga Bell, and thank her too—if you see her. The lawyer’s name was Feblowicz, that’s right. But Mr. Dohrn1 must be away from Paris, just now. He doesn’t reply to me. I don’t think you’ll have a moment to speak to him. But thank you in any case, from the bottom of my heart!

  Drop me a LINE, please.

  Happy holidays! to you and Mr. Gidon. I remain your very loyal and grateful, also very old

  Joseph Roth

  (Landauer is honest, but evil.) Will you be staying in the mountains for long?

  I await your reply! Thank you for the translation! Weights and Measures is set in Bukovina, and not in the old Polish part of Austria.

  1. Mr. Dohrn: Klaus Dohrn, who edited the Austrian monarchist publication (to which Roth contributed), Der Christliche Ständestaat.

  420. To Stefan Zweig

  [Ostend] 28 July 1937

  Dear friend,

  thank you for thinking of me with the obituary. Tschuppik1 was much closer to me than you thought, and for many reasons, and the news of his death—conveyed to me by a telegram at 7 in the morning from the editorial office of a newspaper: “Please hurry obituary Tschuppik,” robbed me of all strength. I am completely crazed. Angina pectoris in my heart. Everyone’s dying, so far: Hermann Wendel, Walter Rode, von Gerlach, Stefan Grossmann, Wassermann, Werner Hegemann, and others besides.2 Broken hearts: Hitler will have to pay for those at a dearer rate than for the simple murders. You’ve no need to call out to me: We must stick together. I don’t think fucking Prussia is going to kill me off. I’ve always despised it. Ebert3 or Hitler, I don’t give a shit. For me that shitty country was what California is to the gold digger. If I survive my penury, then I’ll outlive Germany.—But it won’t be any help from Querido, de Lange, Huebsch—who, let me say, is my personal backstabber—that will see me through.—Ostend without you, the same bars, completely different. Very familiar, very remote, terrifyingly both at once. I stagger from one week to the next. Please write and tell me where you’ll be on 1 September.—And confirm receipt of this card, please, sincerely

  Your old

  J.R.

  Grasset didn’t remit any money for the serialization in Candide. Do you know whom I can turn to?

  1. Tschuppik: Karl Tschuppik (1877–1937), Austrian journalist and author of biographies of Maria Theresia and Ludendorff. A friend of Roth’s, and another author in the Allert de Lange stable.

  2. Wendel, Rode, von Gerlach, Grossmann, Wassermann, Hegemann: all German writers in exile.

  3. Ebert: Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925), the first president of the Weimar Republic: an impressive if not altogether believable diatribe against Germany.

  421. To Stefan Zweig

  2 August 1937

  Dear friend,

  thank you so much! Your letter is a wonderfully comforting witness to your recovery: style and atmosphere bespeak your health and clarity of mind.—If you will, please read my second obituary to my dearly beloved Tschuppik in the Christl. Ständestaat. But don’t imagine for a moment that I’ll write you one, should I happen to outlive you. You are not just intellectually close to me, but physically. It’s the umbilical cord of friendship, there is such a thing. With you I don’t have the distance that is the prerequisite for an obituary.—You can’t excuse Huebsch. He has destroyed me materially, and wrecked my credit (all senses) with the Dutch boss. He could have arranged a meeting between the three of us, but he doesn’t want to see me, and the fact that you wanted the meeting doesn’t excuse him. A man who embraces me and kisses me on the cheek has to take my side, even if he doesn’t have the financial clout. But he wrote to tell me that my Weights and Measures was a literary disappointment! And, having once had the authority to offer me 100 dollars a month—for a year—he didn’t have the right, purely legally, to suddenly withdraw it. That’s what you should have held against him. In your place, that’s what I would have done. It would be absurd to say: this isn’t a reproach. It is—and it won’t detract from our friendship.

  I’ll meet you wherever and whenever you want. I can’t make plans. I am now writing my fifth book in 3 years. It was a long time ago that I wrote you to say I’m all washed up. The ending is a little protracted. I take more time dying than I ever had living.

  I embrace you,

  your J. R.

  Greetings from Almondo,1 Ostend

  And Floréal2 asks after you every day. I just ran into Almondo in the Café Flynt in the corner where I’m writing this. He gave me a bottle of Verveine!

  1. Almondo: owner of the Café Almondo in Ostend.

  2. Floréal: owner of the Café Floréal in Ostend.

  422. To Stefan Zweig

  4 August 1937

  Dear friend,

  an illustrated Yiddish paper in Riga asks me for 5 short stories of mine, at 1 pound apiece, and says they have discussed it with you. Is that—true? Please let me know. I can’t imagine you gave the matter much attention—and why would you. But bear in mind that this Latvian Jew—surely no idealist—quoting your low price, also “depresses” the prices of the others. Imagine such an offer made to Ernst Weiss, or other noble souls who are befrien
ded by you. You are by no means entitled to make yourself so available—on behalf of other people. You can give away their works for nothing, if you want to be generous. But remember that you know only extremes of liberality and expensiveness. You don’t help the Riga Jews by being cheap. And to your friends (forgive me for using this rather loathsome but unambiguous business parlance in haste!) you “spoil the market,” some obscure jobsworth who wants to make money out of photographs, and who lives better than you do, gets a staggering advance—from you. You don’t need that one pound, thanks be to God, not yet. You are obliged to be either dear or free.

  I can’t bring myself to write to Mr. Brun. Unless Landauer’s lying, Brun hasn’t yet sent the 4,000 francs to Amsterdam, because the franc might fall further. Nor would it be correct on my part to chase him on behalf of my publisher. I know Mr. Brun too little, and Mr. Landauer too well. I have an offer from Niehans’s Mass und Wert.1 But the rates are absurd: 7 Swiss francs for “cultured prose.” 8 days’ work for 50 francs = 1 chapter of a novel that won’t be bought.—I know you’re inclined to see modesty as one of the primary attributes of the writer. But penury surely isn’t. Your writing doesn’t improve if you allow yourself to be suckered. Poverty is only a virtue if it’s a grace. And that doesn’t depend on us, alas. It’s just as possible to go under through paltriness as through immoderation.

  Sincerely, your old

  Joseph Roth

  1. Niehans’s Mass und Wert: Mass und Wert was a bimonthly journal for free German culture, edited by Thomas Mann and Konrad Falke, in the Niehans Verlag, in Zurich, a somewhat more settled and conservative affair than Klaus Mann’s Sammlung.

  423. To Stefan Zweig

  8 August 1937

  Dear friend,

  it will be difficult for you, perhaps even, God forbid, impossible, to pull me out of my worst situation thus far—and the one for which I am least to blame myself. It’s hard for me to say it, as you know. See from the enclosed letter what’s happening to me, only happens to me. I’m getting 125 gulden per month. Everything is adjusted to that, the hotel, all my personal needs. The publisher, the new one,1 after Querido and de Lange, hasn’t sent me this month’s money and has gone away on vacation. I have nothing, except a couple of stamps bought in advance, and as if fearing the worst. The hotel, booked for 8 weeks, room payable every other week, is getting nasty. On the 15th I need to renew my Belgian visa in Brussels. I have 40 francs in my pocket. I don’t know what to do. Should I not turn to you?2 Perhaps it would have been right. There is so much unappetizing baggage, in terms of my poverty, my constantly varied little catastrophes which to me are earthquakes, in this rope that so long disdains to kill me once and for all, and just tightens spasmodically around my neck, it’s soaked already in the sweat of my fear; nothing but the vacation of just one man who won’t know any of this—I am his only German author—a puff of wind, some woman falling ill so that the managing editor can think of nothing else—takes me to the brink of Salvation Army and jail, unfortunately only in installments to the brink of the grave. I’ve finished my long novel 1002nd Night, the other one is three-quarters done, I have to hand it in at the beginning of September. In Poland I was writing all winter—the lectures on the side—I was happy and cheerful to be getting 125 gulden till the end of ’37. And for the past 4 weeks here I’ve been calm and industrious. Then yesterday the enclosed letter came. Whom can I send it to? Not to you, I know that. For almost a whole year I didn’t bother you with my shitty little affairs. Excuse me! If you can excuse me. I hope at least you’ll reply promptly. If you can somehow arrange for me to get the money through Belgium or Paris, then I can send 125 gulden back to your address (if it’s still right?) on 1 September. What shall I do? Answer me, I beg you. Just now, two policemen are dragging a man across the street. I am so wound up that I can see myself there in their midst, with no visa, being schlepped to the German frontier, the directest way back to Austria. Almondo has asked me around, but if I take so much as one meal from someone like that I’d feel I was practically a con artist.—I have such huge fear of falling into the depth of those latrines. See how it pulls me in. Please see, it’s not my fault. I’ve wrecked my reputation by industry, too many books in short succession. I’ve got this publisher to agree to publish my next book not at Christmas, but in 1938. But in order to live till the end of ’37 I’ve promised to deliver yet another novel by the beginning of September.3—Oh, it’s all shameful, pitiful, degrading. I’d seen the end so many times already, please believe me it’s not being delayed through any doing of mine. I mustn’t shoot myself—left to myself I would have done it, to spare you the undignified spectacle of a lamenting friend. Please believe me, I haven’t done anything irresponsible, I came here for 3 months with exactly 1,800 Belgian francs, to be in the cheapest country and in the proximity of this strange publishing house, which doesn’t understand the least thing about packing, or printing or distribution, whose typesetters don’t even know German. I have to correct their exotic misprints myself, there is no one else to do it. And Mr. Lion4 turns up and says he would never have thought someone who had put out so many books could be any good. And there are many who think like that. You still believe in my literary virtue. But you can see I can’t work in a latrine.