Musil’s evocation of that time is a marvellous discourse; Roth’s is a marvellous evanescing of the author in his creation of a vivid population of conflicting individuals expressing that time. His method is a kind of picaresque struggling on the inescapable chain of the state. He rarely materializes authorially. There is his odd epilogue to Zipper and His Father, apparently some sort of acknowledgement that this, his most tender book (for while their situation makes both Musil and Roth ironic, Roth is tender where Musil is detachedly playful), is a form of the obeisance to the past that is autobiography. And there is his prologue to The Silent Prophet, his most politically realistic and least imaginatively realized book. In this prologue he comes as near as he ever will to an authorial credo in respect of his pervasive theme, the relation of the individual to the state. He says his characters are not ‘intended to exemplify a political point of view — at most it (a life story) demonstrates the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end.’ The state/empire is the leg-iron by which his characters are grappled. The political movement against the state, with the aim of freeing the people, in Roth forges a leg-iron of its own by which the revolutionary individual is going to find himself hobbled.
Roth manages to convey complicated political concepts without their vocabulary of didacticism, rhetoric, and jargon. In the bitter experiences of Franz in Flight Without End, disillusion with the revolutionary Left conveys what must have been the one-time revolutionary Roth’s own experience more tellingly than any research into his life could, and points to the paradox that runs through his novels with such stirring dialectical effect on the reader. The old royalist, capitalist, hierarchic world of church-and-state, with kings become divine authority on earth, their armies a warrior sect elected to serve as the panoply of these gods, is what he shows ruthlessly as both obsolete and blood-thirsty. But the necessary counter-brutality of the revolution, and the subsequent degeneration of its ideals into stultifying bureaucracy — surely a characterising tragedy of the twentieth century — leads him to turn about and show in his old targets, fathers, mothers, the loyalist, royalist land-owners and city fathers, enduring values in the very mores he has attacked.
This is hardly a synthesis for his dazzling fictional dialectic. One who came after him, Czeslaw Milosz, expresses the dilemma: ‘111 at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic, in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.’ After another world war and during some terrible regional ones, the collapse of ideologies and the emergence of new fanaticisms, have we now, too, nothing better to turn to than the conservatisms of the past? It troubles me that the writers whom I tend to admire most — Roth, Kundera, Milosz, Levi, Kis — are those who reject, out of their own experience, the Left to which I remain committed in hope of its evolution. Perhaps it is because writers are better writers when they take the (selfish?) freedom of ignoring any constraints of loyalty? Or does their quality come from the unbearable freedom of exile — no plagiarism intended. . This, which the others with the exception of Primo Levi share with Roth, provides the distancing, the slow rupture of membranes that is the ultimate strength of disillusion. Irrational, despised, and indispensable ties of home and habit which persist torturingly in inappropriate circumstances, in their characters, and make these powerless, become creative power in the writers themselves. Roth is a supreme exponent.
The ten years 1928—38 seem to mark the peak of Roth’s mastery, although the dating of his novels, in terms of when they were written rather than when they were published, is often uncertain, since in the upheavals of exile some were not published chronologically. The Radetzky March (1932), Weights and Measures (1937), and The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) are both the culmination of the other novels and the core round which they are gathered to form a manifold and magnificent work. Zipper and His Father (1928) and Fallmerayer the Stationmaster (1933) are a kind of intriguing coda, a foray into yet another emotional range, suggesting the kind of writer Roth might have become in another age, living another kind of life. Not that one would wish him any different.
Roth was a Jew in a time of growing persecution that drove him into exile, but as a writer he retained, as in relation to politics, his right to present whatever he perceived. Jewish tavern-keepers on the frontier fleece deserters. There is a wry look at Jewish anti-Semitism. In Flight Without End a university club has a numerus clausus for Jews carried out by Jews who have gained entry, and in Right and Left—a novel Roth seems to have written with bared teeth, sparing no-one — there is a wickedly funny portrait of the subtleties of Jewish snobbism/anti-Semitism in Frau Bernstein, who, while concealing that she is Jewish, as soon as someone at dinner seems about to tell a joke, would ‘fall into a gloomy and confused silence — afraid lest Jews should be mentioned’. But old man Zipper, like Manes Reisiger, the cabby in The Emperor’s Tomb, is a man with qualities — kindness, dignity in adversity, humour, love of knowledge for its own sake — and, yes, endearing Jewish eccentricities and fantasies, portrayed with the fond ironic humour that was inherited, whether he was aware of it or not, by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Fallmerayer, the country stationmaster’s passion for a Polish countess who enters his humble life literally by accident (a collision on the railway line), is an exquisite love story. Its erotic tenderness would have had no place — simply would have withered — plunged in the atmosphere of Roth’s prison camps or rapacious post-war Vienna and Berlin. It takes place in that era, but seems to belong to some intimate seclusion of the creative imagination from the cynicism and cold-hearted betrayals that characterize love between men and women in most of Roth’s work. Helping to get the injured out of the wreckage, Fallmerayer comes upon a woman on a stretcher, in a silver-gray fur coat, in the rain. ‘It seemed to the stationmaster that this woman. . was lying in a great island of white peace in the midst of a deafening sea of sound and fury, that she even emanated silence.’
The central works, The Radetzky March and The Emperor’s Tomb, are really one, each novel beautifully complete and yet outdoing this beauty as a superb whole. Jacket copy dubs them a saga, since they encompass four generations of one branch of the Trotta family in Radetzky and two collaterals in The Emperor. But this is no mini-series plodding through the generations. It is as if, in the years after writing Radetzky, Roth were discovering what he had opened up in that novel, and turned away from with many dark entries, leading to still other entries, not ventured into. There were relationships whose transformations he had not come to the end of: he had still to turn them around to have them reveal themselves to him in other planes of their complexity. So it is that the situation between fathers and sons, realized for the reader with the ultimate understanding of genius in Radetzky, is revealed to have an unexplored aspect, the situation between son and mother in Emperor. And this is no simple mirror-image; it is the writer going further and further into what is perhaps the most mysterious and fateful of all human relationships, whose influence runs beneath and often outlasts those between sexual partners. We are children and we are parents: there is no dissolution of these states except death.