It was at this hour that my friend Tunda, thirty-two years of age, healthy and vigorous, a strong young man of diverse talents, stood on the Place de la Madeleine, in the centre of the capital of the world, without any idea what to do. He had no occupation, no desire, no hope, no ambition, and not even any self-love. No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he.
It could almost double as a beginning (indeed, doesn’t Musil’s Man Without Qualities begin similarly, with a city and a gifted man in some perplexity?), only the world is used up and the hero has nothing to offer it. They recoil from each other in mutual disappointment. “Where can I go now, I, a Trotta?” is a little lower, and a little less clamorous — there is no brass about it, no thèse, no O Welt outcry — but it’s basically the same ending: Tunda the tragedy of potential, Trotta the tragedy of none; Tunda in the capital of the world, Trotta in Germany’s newest fiefdom; Tunda on the threshold of a life, Trotta in the house of death. Still, no one who knows both books could fail to be reminded of the other. Indeed, it seems Roth himself was, because at one stage he mailed his publishers the ending for the earlier book. With adorable innocence, they wrote back (September 16, 1938):
It has come to our attention that the last chapter of The Emperor’s Tomb which you sent us is almost word for word the same as the last chapter of your Flight Without End. Is that an error? Surely one can’t use exactly the same chapter in two different books.
It’s hard to know if Roth purposed anything by it, whether it was a clerical error or an early instance of recycling, or a cynical try-on (all seem possible). There followed some of the usual Hickhack — Roth about money, the publishers about the manuscript; then Roth about the manuscript, and the publishers about money — the pages by now had been set! — before, fully two months later, Roth explained that there had indeed been a misunderstanding, and at the eleventh hour the ending of Flight Without End was successfully kept out of The Emperor’s Tomb.
All his life, Roth had an ambivalent attitude to psychology. He was happy to adopt the Freudian picture of the house, with its basement, ground floor, upstairs and attic, but he had no use for Freud’s theories or practice. When Stefan Zweig (who wrote a monograph on Freud, spoke at his funeral and counted himself one of his most loyal friends) suggested to Roth that he might be “subconsciously angry” with him, Roth exploded back (April 2, 1936): “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘subconscious? It’s pure Antichrist!” In Right and Left (1929), sounding unusually pompous, Roth proclaims: “Passions and beliefs are tangled in the minds and hearts of men, and there is no such thing as psychological consistency.” The plurality, the mutability, the essential unknowability of people is one of his great themes. In The Radetzky March a woman in the space of a single hour is “capable of piling the characteristics of all four seasons on a single shoulder.” In The Leviathan, Nissen Piczenik has a sudden idea: “A notion like that arrives suddenly, lightning is slow by comparison, and it hits the very place from where it sprang, which is to say the human heart.” In Right and Left again (but of a different character), Roth writes: “He remembered the lunatic in his village at home, who never tired of asking everyone he met: ‘How many are you? Are you one?’ No, one wasn’t just one. One was ten people, twenty, a hundred. The more opportunities life gave us, the more beings it revealed in us. A man might die because he hadn’t experienced anything, and had been just one person all his life.” At the same time, it is obvious that Roth is a wonderful observer, an intricate understander and a droll relater of human behaviour. Take, in the present novel, the series of interactions in the third chapter where Trotta acquires his cousin’s waistcoat, watch and chain; or, near the end of the book when he realizes how long his mother has been struggling with her deafness; or the time when Jolanth and Elisabeth go to the ladies’ loo together, taking care on their way back, to see that they, in their female supremacism, are presented with the bill, and not Trotta. All this is nothing if not psychology, but psychology of an unusual sort, namely something momentary and dramatic, on occasion even catastrophic. It is a thunderbolt or lightning-flash, not a climate to be measured, calculated and predicted — something you might take an umbrella for, or a sweater-vest. Consistency doesn’t interest Roth, perhaps even at a certain level, plausibility; and if plausibility, then as a servant not as a master.* What interests him is change.
In an odd way, The Emperor’s Tomb is a sort of Bildungsroman, beginning with a privileged, rather shallow character (technically an adult though he continues to see himself primarily as a child), and ending with a Lear-like figure, with nothing but the first stirrings of wisdom and dignity. To do this, Roth has had to deepen the character as he went along: begin with one of his trustful blockheads (I don’t think I’m exaggerating), and end not just with experience and pain, but grafting on a nervous system and an intelligence with which to absorb them. Austria, the culture of Sachertorten and Sacher-Masoch and whipped cream and Klimt and Strauss and braided uniforms and archaic usages and Schnitzler and sweet little girls in the sticks (of the name of a girl in a Trafik scrawled on a box of cigarettes — a name, incidentally, almost identical to that of Roth’s poor schizophrenic wife, Friedl Reichler) needed to be made into a subject for tragedy, because that was how Roth understood what had happened to it, and he was no longer interested in writing anything else. Hence — I imagine — the switch during the writing of the novel from third person to first. Roth wanted access to his own intelligence and anguish and dignity. He therefore had to merge or morph his hero with himself, and he could only do it with the discretion afforded by the first person. (The book moves, you might say, from Trotta in the morning to Roth at night. The one who is woken up in the morning is not the same as the other who can’t go to bed at night. It’s only when you put it down at the end that you realize that something has happened to our hero or anti-hero.) Trotta has gone along rather purposelessly, except for, in his rather baffled and passive way, accruing losses — except for (as we say) de-accessioning. In the space of not many pages, he has lost basically everything: his mother, their servant, his wife, his child, his house, his cousin and his Jewish friend, his noble friends and his Polish Siberian friend, the remains of his fortune, even the quality of the night in Vienna at the turn of the century. The ending is naked self-portraiture. It is not the property of a character in a fictional situation, but the feeling Roth gives voice to in propria persona in his non-fiction of the time, the atmosphere of terminal dereliction and hopelessness experienced and expressed in pieces like “In the Bistro After Midnight”(November 1938) or “Rest While Watching the Demolition” (June 1938):
When the first silvery streetlights glimmer on, a refugee, an exile, sometimes comes along, without a wanderer’s staff, quite as if he were at home here, and — as if he wanted to prove to me in one breath that he felt at home, that he knew his way around, but also that where he felt at home wasn’t home — he says: “I know somewhere you can get a good, cheap meal here.” And I’m glad for him that he does. I’m glad that he walks off under the trail of silvery streetlights, and doesn’t stop, now that night is falling, to take in the ever-ghostlier-looking dust on the empty lot opposite. Not everyone has to get used to rubble and to shattered walls.