Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters
Page 52
I know that your mind, used to stability and to thinking in terms of continual improvements, will view this catastrophe of mine—and rightly—as a consequence of my overall situation, and that you will first think how to improve the overall situation. Please bear in mind, though, that this acute difficulty may make a subsequent overall situation impossible. Even a sort of reconciliation with Huebsch, which nothing suggests he wants or is ready for, wouldn’t help. He is certainly not the object of my bitterness, you don’t need to take him under your wing. He has only followed the rules of my fate, he is a cat’s-paw in the hand of the destiny that has prepared all this for me.—But all this is not now. At this moment I can see the policemen escorting the man back toward the station. I feel a sudden desire to relieve him, to take his place and say there has been an error, a mistaken identity—and so bring about the final catastrophe. I can’t go on. I see right away that there’s such a thing as literary honor. The reality is that I’ll get another letter from the hotel tomorrow, that the laundry bill hasn’t been paid, and that I won’t be able to write anything any more, not even a letter. Today is Sunday. On Tuesday you will have this disgusting letter, does that feel like a long time! It’s three years! Can you, will you send me a telegram?—And then I’m afraid of the post. What if this doesn’t find you? I’ll send it express, and then a postcard as well. It’s cheaper than registered. But believe me that, in this whole calamity, your saying that you forgive me remains the most important element. Please send me a wire. (I am not responsible for the nonsense that may appear here.) All I know is that these are the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and that it’s 24 days till I next get money from Holland.
I am so full of loathing for me, it’s so awful, soon I won’t care any more—and that frightens me.
I embrace you, send me a wire on Tuesday, I will go home late for fear of not finding one,
your J.R.
1. the publisher, the new one: the Catholic press De Gemeenschap, in Bilthoven, Holland.
2. should I not turn to you: Hermann Kesten remarks that, in addition to being one of the best-selling and most-translated authors in the world at that time, Stefan Zweig had substantial private means.
3. another novel by the beginning of September: this is The Emperor’s Tomb, which ended up overtaking The Tale of the 1002nd Night in JR’s choked production schedule.
4. Mr. Lion: Ferdinand Lion (1883–1965), essayist, critic, playwright. There is something in what he says. Thomas Mann, for instance, saw Roth primarily as a drunk, which Roth repaid by seeing Thomas Man(n) as primarily neuter (see no. 210).
424. To Blanche Gidon (written in French)
Ostend
Hotel de la Couronne
13 August 1937
Dear friend,
thank you, thank you for all the good you do me, I don’t deserve it.
My life is constant trouble. I would like to see you in Paris again. But it’s out of my hands.
The little I write to you—it comes from a good heart, and a silent heart. It’s the first time I’ve experienced a deepening attachment. To this point all I’ve known of other people were either the stable ones or the others who slowly weaken and lose their way.
Excuse my French! Give the doctor my best wishes. Your devoted old
Joseph Roth
I am just completing a book you will like very much. I know it—in the midst of my misfortunes I know it.
425. To Stefan Zweig
18 August 1937
Kind thanks from an oppressed heart,1 my friend! Don’t reproach me for railing at myself. It’s the only thing I can do, I involve you in my catastrophes, which I probably deserve, though I do nothing to provoke them. Instead of the most exalted, I make merely the most putrid demands of you. I want to be near to you, and probably only succeed in being intrusive. Next follows a break-in to your restricted bank account, and the shameless imposition of further economies, all caused by me. I know you take far greater pleasure in sensual things than I do, a good express train, a decent meal, a spoonful of caviar, and I take the spoon away from you and I know what it feels like, to have one’s wine glass taken away. No brother would do that to you. The counterweight is this: you have to imagine suddenly, with the help of one banknote, waking up from a coma, the women are once more walking down the avenues, the trees are green again, laughter and tears are back, the beloved pain returns that had been anesthetized by banal squalid worries. Your life returns to you, the hotel was a prison in which one was not allowed to be locked up, worse thereby than the others. Suddenly it becomes your airy bower again. These are actual sensations, my dear friend, if only I weren’t so desperate to have them. It’s too much, too often, I rack my brains for ways of breaking free of my publisher, but racking one’s brains doesn’t produce miracles. It’ll be the death of me, this mixture of brain, hand, begging, advance, eager promises of works that my head isn’t certain of being able to write—and all in vain, without readers, without the trust that comes from outside, an echo to the one within. I can feel myself having to violently regenerate morally and physically, in two months I have to be well, then abysmal feeling, panic and derangement, anguish, heart pain, darkness. Two or three proper catastrophes, the death of someone near to me, and I’ve had it.2 Such loose talk as Lion’s is very detrimental to me—in monetary terms too—believe me, it damages me with publishers, with Oprecht,3 with Huebsch, with Querido, in Vienna, it builds up like an avalanche, and it crushes me. My productivity is taken amiss, my blocked colleagues take it for proof of lack of talent.
We will [see] each other whenever it suits you, God knows how I need to have you there, at hand, and how much I need you to need me. Even though the unhappy propensity to see each meeting as a farewell is becoming a real disease. I am half done in, and at the same time eerily taut. It doesn’t go.
Please confirm receipt of this letter, and the date of your departure.
Your warm and trusty
Joseph Roth
1. an oppressed heart: JR’s old friend on the FZ Friedrich Traugott Gubler used to say, half jokingly, that Roth should always be sad; the sadder he was, the better he wrote.
2. and I’ve had it: indeed, it was the news that Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York that brought on JR’s fatal collapse in May 1939.
3. Oprecht: Emil Oprecht, publisher and bookseller in Zurich.
426. To Stefan Zweig
Ostend
Hotel de la Couronne
26 August 1937
Dear friend,
I am VERY disquieted, because I have no reply.
Cordially,
your old J.R.
427. To Stefan Zweig
Ostend
Hotel de la Couronne
29 August [1937]
Dear friend,
where will you be going?
Perhaps we could meet anyway?
Loyally, to you both
Joseph Roth
428. To Blanche Gidon
Ostend
Hotel de la Couronne
[postmarked: Ostend, 3 September 1937]
My dear friend,
no good news. Au contraire! I force myself to write, purely so that you know I am loyal, and that I’m resting. My worries are unending. I’d like to talk. I can’t write any more.
Wretched, and very sad
your old Joseph Roth
429. To Stefan Zweig
Ostend
Hotel de la Couronne
4 September 1937
Dear friend,
if you want to see me, it will be possible only in Brussels. I have to go to Amsterdam on the 18th, at the latest. On the 15th I have to have the bulk of my novel finished. (My publisher still isn’t back yet.) I should have had it ready on 20 August (at last I got some ink)—I’m unable to finish it, and then I won’t h
ave any money, not even through November, wretchedly. My Belgian visa (extended) runs out on the 20th inst. I have to write 10 pages a day, for the next 10 days here. I can only get to Brussels, and for one or two days. You can easily get a transit visa for 3 days. If you should need to extend it, it’s inexpensive. All we need is a 4-hour block of time, intensive, undistracted, for our most important things. Dear friend, wouldn’t it feel absurd to be flying over my head, or rattling past me in a train.—You write, “above all, tell me what your plans are”—and you don’t feel how that pains me. What plans could I possibly have? The man won’t pay me anything, he’s on vacation. What am I supposed to do? My freedom just about stretches as far as Brussels; and then only until my visa gives up the ghost. I’m expecting your answer to the effect that you’ll expect me in Brussels BEFORE the 20th. Place? Hotel? Time and place?—If you can’t, then please drop me a line to say so. I’m on tenterhooks.
Warmly and sincerely,
your J.R.
430. To Stefan Zweig
Hotel de la Couronne
Ostend
7 September 1937
Dear friend,
thank you for your card. You should have heard from me by now. I can’t get to Paris, but you can very well go to Brussels. I need to go there on the 20th to renew my visa again. Which is absurd, seeing as I have to go to Amsterdam from here. I can only sketch things in, it’s a waste of ink to go into detail. I hope very much that we do see each other. At least for a single day. But it mustn’t be wasted either. So let me now talk about my essay in the Christliche Ständestaat that you were critical of, I don’t quite know why. I didn’t “adopt” the distinction between Christian and Jewish publishers; it was the Jewish publishers in Austria who were the first to adopt Hitler’s distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan authors. It was the publishers who undertook that discrimination, not me. It’s my duty to call to order those Jews who do Goebbels’s bidding for him. Zsolnay, Horovitz, the silly idiot Tal, your jumped-up Reichner, who had the chutzpah to advertise you in Germany: they’ll wreck the last few “Aryan” writers and publishers. Because these rightly make appeal to the fact that even the Jews follow the demands of the Reichsschrifttumskammer.1 Quite the contrary: it’s my duty to put a spoke in the wheel of those Jews who are making the calamity worse. And that’s what I’ll do.
You shouldn’t attack me for doing it either. It wasn’t Hitler or me who undertook this discrimination, but our old Jehovah. The Jews may not become anti-Semitic or anti-Christian, less than others. A Jewish publisher who won’t publish a book because he can’t sell it in Goebbels’s Reich; who only publishes books that will do well with the anti-Semites: that publisher is the lowest worm, and I will inevitably always try to crush him. And for the rest: tua et mea res agitur.2 We can’t permit ass-kissers, true Jewboys, chutzpah-chappies, and weeping willows of Jewish origins not to publish me, because Goebbels doesn’t like me. We have enough “Aryan” anti-Semites. We don’t need Jewish ones. As long as it’s possible for me to hurt them, I will do so: with delight. In order to hurt them, I wouldn’t shrink from allying myself with “Aryan” anti-Semites. A non-Jew who does what Goebbels says is a poor son of a bitch. But a Jew, a publisher in Vienna, who turns me down, is vile scum. Mr. [. . .] a recent immigrant, anti-Semite from a safe distance, a Jewish spear-carrier for the Reichsschrifttumskammer; the widow Tal, who says: we must all start over again, under pseudonyms; that Horovitz, who delights in the name of “Phaidon”; the toilet manufacturer Zsolnay, whose Werfels have gone up; your chutzpah Reichner, whom you—bafflingly, for me—treat as if he were the Insel Verlag: those serfs of Pharaoh, those betrayers of Moses, that filthy shit is what you defend, you Jewish poet, against me? You, my friend, who have God in your heart. Whom you have long forgotten, and are now learning to love again? I would have thought my article should have given you pleasure.
But no: you’re still on the side of “common sense.” You’ve experienced repulsive things with me: but the terror is still ahead (believe me!).
In the Ständestaat there is only room for One. I am with Him. God asked for ten just men. I am a man: I am satisfied with one. This Ständestaat has at least kept going until today. Sufficient of a miracle. But if Jewish publishers upset the miracle, if Werfel-Mahler3 embraces the Reichspost,4 I won’t hesitate to hurt those desecraters. May lightning strike them, and I will try to get there before the lightning.
I hope that’s all that needs to be said on that head, which might disturb our meeting.—
If I had a brother, I wouldn’t wait for him any differently than I am waiting for you now. You know that—but that doesn’t mean you have to come.
Sincerely your
Joseph Roth
1. Reichsschrifttumskammer: the organization, established by the Nazis in 1933, to which all writers had to belong in order to be able to publish in Germany.
2. tua et mea res agitur: (“it concerns us both”) adapted from Horace’s line “Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet,” “You yourself are in danger when the wall of your neighbor is on fire.”
3. Werfel-Mahler: a scornful dubbing (and unmanning) of Franz Werfel, who was married to Alma Mahler.
4. the Reichspost: Viennese newspaper financed by Hitler’s ambassador at the time, Franz von Papen.
431. To Stefan Zweig
[Ostend] 8 September 1937
Dear friend,
our letters will cross in the mail: I don’t want you to be uncertain or—which is worse—ambivalent about me for a single day.
Do you know me so little as that? Don’t you know that hatred is foreign to me, yes, since my devoutness, something sinful; and are you really so remote from me that you fail to see that the purest intentions animate my indignation, my rage, don’t stoke my hatred?—Something in me rebels at the idea that a man who trades in books is just as capable of villainy as one who sells celluloid. And where does your forgiveness get you? Don’t you see that you’re doing exactly the same thing as all the politicians who left Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin to wreak their destruction? They say: “Get used to it, it’s the way dictators are.” And you say: “Get used to it, that’s the way publishers are.”—I say, one may be called to become a writer, but not a publisher. And someone who only wants to calculate, and to calculate with betrayal, who deals with Hitler, such a person should stick to celluloid. Apart from the fact that some publishers are swindlers—[. . .]—I don’t even insist that they keep honest accounts; but that they don’t shop us to the Reichsschrifttumskammer is the least I can ask for. If I had hatred in me, then I’d be sterile, and I’d know it. What it is is rage. I don’t hate any man. I hate evil and its tools and weakness. Who’s left to stand up for goodness, if even you want to make your peace with the wretchedness that permits a man who deals in our heart’s blood to have the morals of a sock seller?—Have you so little respect for your own work, and in front of them?—My dear friend, it’s too simple, the way you’ve made your peace with these terrible facts. I can’t do it. I really feel no hatred, or, if you prefer, no more than Voltaire—no friend of mine—for the instigators of witchcraft trials. No more and no less. If you like: as much hate and as little as St. Boniface. You surely won’t think I’m moved by personal spite? Me, just now undergoing my novitiate?