Roth marches on
Writing here (18 November), Anita Brookner described Joseph Roth’s reports from France 1925-39, The White Cities, as ‘her best read of the year’. I’ve had a copy for several months now, and I keep dipping into it and always finding something new, surprising and delightful. The rediscovery of Roth has been one of the happiest things in recent years; it owes much to the devotion and excellence of his translator, Michael Hofmann, and of course to the support given by his publisher, Granta.
Roth is probably best known for The Radetzky March, one of the masterpieces of 20th-century fiction. None of his other books may match that; why should they? — it’s enough to have written one such novel; but nothing he wrote is less than fresh, illuminating and original, and everything, fiction and journalism alike, is completely individual, the voice unmistakable.
The White Cities offers not only delightful pictures of France between the wars; it is also the record of the impact of the country and society on one born a subject of the Habsburg empire (to the memory of which he remained loyal), then, after 1933, a refugee from Nazi Germany. As a journalist Roth has an enviably light touch, comes at things from unexpected angles. Some pieces are harrowing, the Thirties being what they were. One article, Children of Exile, recounts a conversation with an eight-year-old boy, son of an Austrian Jewish shoemaker, met in the waiting-room of a police prefecture in Paris. The boy has learned more of the world than he should have at his age, understands it better perhaps than his father. The article was written in October 1938, a month after Munich, and this is how Roth ends it:
I’ve just seen a photograph, printed in several newspapers, of a little English girl who apparently had been waiting since ten in the morning for Neville Chamberlain and his wife, and finally got to meet them in the afternoon, and, on behalf of all British children, to express her thanks to the British prime minister for going to Germany on his peace missions. A sweet little English girl ... God grant that she never comes into the sort of knowledge that the eight-yearold son of my Austrian shoemaker has come into.
The juxtapositioning, sharp yet strangely delicate, of these two stories, is characteristic.
I don’t suppose Roth will ever be a popular writer; he wasn’t in his own lifetime. In September 1937 he noted the arrival of his 18th book: ‘of the previous 17, 15 have been forgotten’. Three days later he gets the royalty statement for his 17th one: 3,450 copies sold. ‘I am a long way from having “earned back” my advance.’ His publisher writes sadly, ‘It’s terrible to see these accounts’. Roth reflects:
And I’m not their only author. My colleagues’ advances are not covered either. Book publishing is a weird and wonderful business. Publishers deal in red figures. It must be very hard, especially when you bear in mind that I can’t live off my advances either.
One knows just what he means and how he feels.
I have developed a special reverence for Roth. Few writers have better displayed that quality Hemingway admired: grace under pressure. And the pressure to which Roth was subjected was greater and more intense than most of us, in our prosperous and generally tolerant Europe, can imagine. So also was the temptation to despair, which nevertheless he resisted. Humour keeps breaking through, wry, ironical humour, astringent certainly, but also often tender.
So, whenever I am in Paris I go to the Bar de Tournon, just below the Luxembourg Gardens about which he wrote so well and lovingly, and drink a cup of coffee to his memory at the table where he drank stronger liquors. I don’t know if it is the café which he described in The Bistro after Midnight, but I like to think it is the place where he listened to the old taxi-driver who was once a coachman and who told him what was wrong with the world: ‘It’s conscience — conscience has been eradicated. It’s been replaced by authorisation’ — an observation worth pondering today also.
Allan Massie
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