Whatever your personal hermeneutics, it is impossible to read Mahfouz’s work without gaining, with immense pleasure and in all gratitude, illumination through a quality that has come to be regarded as a quaint anachronism in modern existence, where information is believed to have taken its place. I pronounce with hesitation: Wisdom. Mahfouz has it. It dangles before us a hold on the mystery. Mahfouz is himself a Zaabalawi.
— 1996
JOSEPH ROTH: LABYRINTH OF EMPIRE AND EXILE
I approach writing about Joseph Roth’s work somewhat defensively. Pundits will say I have no right because I admit I have no German and cannot read it in the original. How could I deny this lack, a deafness to what must be the bass and treble of his use of language? But I believe I have understood him according to my time and background. A writer whose work lives must be always subject to such a process — that is what keeps the work alive.
Strangely, while I have been writing this, the wheel of Karma — or historical consequence? — has brought Roth’s territory back to a re-enactment of the situation central to his work.
In Roth we see a society — an empire — in which disparate nationalities are forced into political unity by an over-riding authority and its symboclass="underline" the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the personality of Emperor Franz Josef. There, the various grouped nationalities’ restless rebellion, the rise of socialism and fascism against royalism, led to Sarajevo and the First World War. After the Second World War the groups that had won autonomy were forced together again, if in a slightly different conglomerate, by another all-powerful authority and its symboclass="underline" the Communist bloc and the personality of Joseph Stalin. Now restlessness and rebellion, this time against the socialism that has not proved to be liberation, bring once again the breakup of a hegemony. Passages in Roth’s work, about the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, could with scarcely a change describe what has happened in Yugoslavia in 1991.
Roth: he looks out from a book-jacket photograph. Just the face in a small frame; it is as if someone held up a death mask. The ovals of the eyes are black holes. The chin pressed up against the black shadow of a moustache hides stoically the secrets of the lips. A whole life bronzed there. And there’s another image in that face: the sight of the huge sightless eyes with their thick upper and lower lids dominating the width of the face has the mysteriously ancient gaze of a foetus, condemned to suffer the world.
‘Je travaille, mon roman sera bon, je crois, plus parfait que ma vie’, Roth wrote. Prefaces to some translations of his books give the same few penny-life facts: born in 1894 in Galicia, served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, worked as a journalist in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, left for France in 1933, wrote fifteen novels and novellas mainly while a figure in émigré opposition to the Nazis, died in Paris an alcoholic in 1939. I failed to find a full biography in English. After having re-read all Roth’s fiction available to me, I am glad that, instead, I know him the only way writers themselves know to be valid for an understanding of their work: the work itself. Let the schools of literary criticism, rapacious fingerlings, resort to the facts of the author’s life before they can interpret the text. .
Robert Musil, Roth’s contemporary in Austro-Hungary, although the two great writers evidently never met, put into the mouth of his Ulrich: ‘One can’t be angry with one’s own time without damage to oneself; to know that Roth’s anger destroyed him, one has only to read the great works it produced. The text gives us the man, not t’other way about. The totality of Joseph Roth’s work is no less than a tragédie humaine achieved in the techniques of modern fiction. No other contemporary writer, not excepting Thomas Mann, has come so close to achieving the wholeness — lying atop a slippery pole we never stop trying to climb — Lukacs cites as our impossible aim. From the crude beginnings in his first novels, The Spider’s Web (1923) and Hotel Savoy (1924), the only work in which Roth was satisfied to use the verbal equivalent of the expressionist caricaturing of a Georg Grosz or Otto Dix, through Flight Without End (1927), The Silent Prophet (1928?), and all his other works with, perhaps, the exception of the novellas Zipper and His Father (1928) and Fallmerayer the Stationmaster (1933), his anti-heroes are almost without exception soldiers, ex-prisoners of war, deserters: former aristocrats, bourgeois, peasants, and criminals all declassed in the immorality of survival of the 1914—18 war. This applies not only to the brutal or underhand necessity survival demands, but also to the sense that, in the terrible formulation of a last member of the Trotta dynasty, they had been ‘Found unfit for death’.
All the young are material for the solutions of Communism or Fascism as the alternatives to despair or dissipation. Their fathers are unable to make even these choices, only to decay over the abyss of memory. All, young and old, are superfluous men to an extent Lermontov could not have conceived. Women are attendant upon them in this circumstance. Roth, although he often shows a Joycean transference in being able to write about women from under their skin, sees them in terms of their influence on men. ‘We love the world they represent and the destiny they mark out for us.’ While his women are rarely shown as overtly rejecting this male-determined solution to their existence, they are always unspokenly convinced of their entitlement to life, whether necessity determines it should be lived behind a bar, in a brothel bed, or as an old grande dame in poverty. No better than the men, they connive and plot; but even when he shows them at their slyest and most haughtily destructive, he grants them this spiritedness. Reading the life (his) from the work, it is evident that Roth suffered in love and resented it; in most of his work, desired women represent sexual frustration, out of reach.
The splendid wholeness of Roth’s oeuvre is achieved in three ways. There’s the standard one of cross-casting characters from one novel to the next. There’s the far bolder risk-taking, in which he triumphs, of testing his creativity by placing different temperaments from different or (even more skilled) similar background in the same circumstances in different novels. There’s the overall paradoxical unity of traditional opposition itself, monarchic/revolutionary, pitched together in the dissolution of all values, for which he finds the perfect physical metaphor: the frontier between Franz Josef’s empire and the Tsar’s empire, exemplified in Jadlowsky’s tavern where Kapturak hides the Russian deserters he’s going to sell to America and Australia. The only contacts between men are contraband; this commerce is the kind that is all that will be left of the two monarchic empires fighting each other to a mutual death, and the only structures that will still exist in the chaos to follow, and the early twentieth-century class struggle to arise from that.
Roth’s petite phrase in the single great work into which all this transforms is not a Strauss waltz but the Radetzky March. Its tempo beats from the tavern through Vienna and all the villages and cities of Franz Josef’s empire, to those novels set in Berlin, where the other imperial eagle has only one head. For Roth’s is the frontier of history. And it is not re-created from accounts of the past, as War and Peace was, but recounted contemporaneously by one who lived there, in every sense, himself. This is not an impudent literary value judgment; it is, again, the work providing a reading of the author’s life. Here was a writer obsessed with and possessed by his own time. From within it he could hear the drum-rolls of the past resounding to the future.