I intend to wait here until I get word from you.
Till that time, I remain your — and your wife’s — old
Joseph Roth
1. The office wired JR back, “No pink elephants, all articles arrived safely, write just exactly what you want, pay no regard to anything.”
2. “The White Cities”: which sadly never came out in that form, though the revised sequence of pieces, some of Roth’s finest, happiest, and most boisterous writing, is included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.
20. To Bernard von Brentano
Marseille, 22 August 1925
My dear friend,
I’ve received one typed letter here, and another rather hasty one. A third therefore seems to have gotten lost.
If I can begin by setting your mind at ease regarding our relationship: your income doesn’t stand between us, rather it connects us. A relationship between two people isn’t based on bread, but it remains important that both should have enough to eat. Hunger trumps sentiment. It’s important that neither of us should starve. That’s why I raised the matter, and that’s why I mentioned you to Reifenberg and Simon.1 I think you’re over the worst. I think I’m headed straight for it.
I have sent the FZ 7 articles. So far as I know, not one of them has appeared. I think I can no longer hit the democratic tone. In every line of mine the republic gets slapped around — whatever I’m writing about. The paper is cowardly. It won’t print my articles, and it won’t tell me why. I think its behavior is immoral. I wrote to Reifenberg to say so. If the publisher has the courage of his convictions, he will give me the boot. Then I will be free, as I was for twenty years of my life. I’ll go to Mexico. If he wants to be a coward, then I’ll demand that he pay me properly for his cowardice. If he doesn’t publish me, I want to see money. And even so I’m going to go to Mexico one day, in the not too distant future. I’ve been established for too long. You see: I really don’t care about an income. I don’t care about a bourgeois base. It gets in the way. It makes me ill. I am ill already.
Name and reputation in Germany — what’s the good of that? I can see past the nationality. But not the language. German is a dead language, as dead as late Latin. It’s only spoken by scholars and poets. By Jews. In the Middle Ages a man had power if he wrote in that language. In our democracy today he’s nothing. I can cope with the fact that the Germans are barbarians. But not with my inability to convert them. We’re like missionaries addressing heathens in Latin, to convert them. Futile endeavor.
To move from proletarian to human is easily said. But what if I’m only having my first experience of human beings now, at the ripe old age of 31? What if I met my first humans here in France? Germany is populated by geniuses and murderers (half animals). Humans begin at Aix. I would have to live and study for another twenty years before I could write about humans. And even then I wouldn’t be sure it was possible to do it in German.
Tomorrow the Socialist Congress begins here. I have spoken to acquaintances from Berlin and Vienna. It’s a terrible thing to see those people in this setting. The sun shows how much dust there is on them. They have landed here, like the Lombards a thousand years ago. With Schiller collars! With briefcases! With umbrellas! With fat flat-footed wives! And hatless! They sweat. They smell. They drink beer. They are noisier than the many Orientals who make a deafening noise here in the port city. Social Democrats always look German. Even when they’re technically Lithuanians. Because the type is native to Germany: honest, hardworking, beer-bibbing, world-improving. A socialist and a democrat. “Justice!” Hope for evolution. German through and through. The aspiration of the German woman to march through a busy life on flat heels is already halfway to socialism. They all carry on as though they had to determine world history in the next decade. They have come together to fight for Ibsenite ideals. Not knowing how antiquated those are. I saw Friedrich Adler,2 my great compatriot. A tyrannicide on his uppers. No pistol in his briefcase any more. Features shaped from the mealy dough of humanity. The monarchies are dead — here are people with nothing left to slay. They haven’t a chance against industry.
I have visited so many towns in Provence, I could write a book about them: “The White Cities.” But do I know if I still need to write it? It’ll be settled one way or another in the first half of September. Write to me in Paris.
Regards to your wife. Mine is in bed with a fever. Brought on by the climate, obviously. I’m just off to spend the night in the old port. That’s the world I feel really at home in. My maternal forefathers live there. We’re all kin there. Every onion seller is my uncle.
Your friend
Joseph Roth
1. Simon: Heinrich Simon (born in Berlin in 1880, robbed and murdered in 1941 in Washington, D.C.), son-in-law of Leopold Sonnemann, the founder of the FZ, on the board from 1906, co-owner from 1919. Went into exile in 1934, first to Palestine, where he co-founded an orchestra with Toscanini, then the United States.
2. Friedrich Adler (1879–1960), son of the Austrian Socialist leader Viktor Adler. In 1916 he made an attempt on the life of the Austrian prime minister Count Friedrich Stürgkh, was condemned to death, and pardoned in 1918; secretary of the Second International.
21. To Benno Reifenberg
Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
26 August [1925]
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
you are much too zealous in your self-accusations. It’s wrong to think you should have known how nervous I am. No one can know about the level of my agitation — constant and powerful — about everything under the sun. I am never at ease. Of course I exaggerate. When I write in that vein, you shouldn’t take it seriously.
For all that, I’m grateful for your letter. I sent off three feuilletons today. Not everything in them is the way it ought to be. But they are entirely honest, I think that will come across. I have seen a bullfight for the first time in my life. If you’ve never seen anything like that, then you can have no conception of the gruesomeness of it. I know of no French writer who has written about — much less against — these Provençal bullfights. Not Daudet, not Mistral either, to the best of my knowledge. I think they’d be ashamed, and they’re scared. They’re happy to write about the wind, the sky, the people, the riders, the women. Tell me why a great writer isn’t duty bound to accuse his country instead of praising it. They all write as though they wanted their personal monument. And I’m not just talking about their relation to the patrie, but to humanity, to society, to every manifestation of life. These writers are all so appallingly affirmative. They reinforce their readers in their bourgeois — i.e., antiquated — attitudes, instead of destroying as many of them as possible. They themselves are nothing but superbourgeois. It’s perfectly OK for a little burgomaster to put up a statue to a great writer from time to time. Next to the statue of the little burgomaster. Perfectly OK for the older daughter to play Schubert on the piano. Schubert composed for her.
I was depressed to hear of Willo Uhl’s1 death. He was the first person I met in Frankfurt 3 years ago, and I’m fond of his children. I got a couple of recent editions of the paper. There were only two decent feuilletons: Rudolf Schneider on “heroes” and Willo’s obituary. He was such a good and cheerful goy, he stood between the sentimental Jews and the awkward ones on the board, and he was the very opposite of German democracy. It’s too bad he’s dead. He could never have made 60, but 45 is maybe ten years too early. What did he die of?