All his life, Joseph Roth preferred to write in public. He was a familiar sight in cafes and hotel lobbies across most of continental Europe, including Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Marseilles. “Aside from being unable to bear loneliness, being surrounded by life stimulated him,” writes Keiron Pim in his absorbing new biography of Roth, “Endless Flight.” Whether dashing off his latest journalistic dispatch or drinking himself to within a nanometer of liver collapse, Roth, one suspects, was only ever happy when surrounded by waiters, bartenders, porters, maids and concierges. A self-declared Hotelpatriot, he was constitutionally averse to domesticity. “I hate houses,” he once wrote to a friend.
To be fair, he did not have a great deal to be happy about. Born in 1894 in a Galician border town in a remote corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his life — even after he became the acclaimed novelist who best captured the era between the world wars — was a constant process of loss and dissolution. He never met his father, Nachum Roth, who died insane in the care of a wonder rabbi, or miracle worker, when Roth was 16. In 1918, he lost his fatherland, too: Following its defeat in World War I, the vast, multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its 50 million inhabitants, fractured into a cluster of nation-states. (In Roth’s most famous novel, “The Radetzky March,” Emperor Franz Joseph I sees “the great golden sun of the Habsburgs sinking, smashing on the bottom of the universe, crumbling into various littler suns.”) Austria was reduced to a small republic of just 6.5 million people, while Roth’s hometown, Brody, was absorbed into the Second Polish Republic, suffering brutal devastation in the Polish-Soviet War.
Dispossessed of his father and fatherland, a rootless Eastern European Jew on a continent gripped by nationalist fever, Roth’s self-identity was especially tenuous. To some degree, this suited him fine, at least professionally. “He needs a little discomfort to feel alert,” Pim writes; “too much comfort is soporific.” It also provided Roth with a certain biographical freedom, the license to invent his past as he went along. (David Bronsen, who wrote an earlier life of Roth, called him a “mythomaniac.”) From the rubble of his past he molded new, fictional selves, adopting different personas, mannerisms and dialects. “He favored his imagination over reality and movement over stasis,” Pim writes. “Better to dream of home, better to wander: to travel in hope, rather than to arrive, settle and be disappointed.”
Before Roth found success as a novelist, he established himself as one of Europe’s leading writers of the feuilleton, a form that originated as a “talk of the town” newspaper supplement in 19th-century France. It arguably reached its artistic apogee in early-20th-century Vienna, where it was seen as uniquely suited to capture the flux and fluidity of life in Europe’s febrile modern cities. (Its most celebrated practitioners included Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar and Peter Altenberg.) In Roth’s hands, it became a way of orienting himself in the interwar twilight. He once told his close friend and fellow Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, “I think I can only understand the world when I’m writing, and the moment I put down my pen, I’m lost.”
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Whether in Berlin, Paris or Vienna, Roth reported from and responded to the chaos and uncertainty of the changing world around him. Always allergic to the lofty and the monumental, he proved a brilliant observer of life, especially life on the margins: He wrote with empathy of refugees, prostitutes, thieves, drunks and the homeless. When, two years after the assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, Roth was sent to visit the Rathenau museum, he eschewed the historical and the political and wrote instead of Rathenau’s books, pictures and — echt Roth — his former servant, “a fine, quiet and thoughtful man.” As he wrote in a German newspaper in 1921, “It’s only the minutiae of life that are important.”
By the middle of the 1920s Roth briefly appeared to have found his place in the world. He’d married Friedl Reichler in 1922, was a regular and respected contributor to the daily Frankfurter Zeitung, and in 1925 discovered Paris, a city that overwhelmed him with its freedom, beauty and charm. “Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European,” he wrote to a friend. He’d seen enough of Germany’s embattled Weimar Republic to guess which direction it was headed in. Paris, at least, seemed to him a bulwark against Europe’s encroaching nationalism.
But happiness, like everything in Roth’s life, proved fleeting. “I simply don’t know how to live,” he told a friend. His constant traveling and nights of drinking were a strain on his marriage, and by the end of the decade Friedl had suffered several anxiety attacks and a mental breakdown. (She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and eventually institutionalized.) Wracked with guilt, Roth looked in vain for a miracle cure for his wife while continuing to numb himself with drink. To make matters worse, his predilection for hotel living and financial mismanagement (his English translator, Michael Hofmann, called him “the most impractical man who ever lived”), meant he was in constant need of money, to the chagrin of the editors who employed him.
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Despite being confronted on all sides by calamities — professional, personal, political — Roth somehow managed to write his two undisputed masterpieces, the novels “Job,” published in 1930, and “The Radetzky March” (1932). It was his first taste of literary success. (“Job” sold 20,000 copies, and Marlene Dietrich called it her favorite novel.)
Then came 1933. Roth’s name was on the first list of writers whose books the Nazis banned and burned. On Jan. 30, the day Adolf Hitler was named chancellor, Roth got on a train from Berlin to Paris. He had no illusions. As he famously wrote to Zweig: “Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.”
The last hundred or so pages of “Endless Flight” are difficult to get through. By the end of the 1930s, Roth was a bloated, portly wreck, shuffling along on feet swollen by drink. Though he continued against all odds to write fictional gems, he left a trail of financial and fraternal ruin wherever he went. (He practically bankrupted his Dutch publisher, De Gemeenschap, and his bar tab at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna remains unpaid to this day.) In a shocking photograph from 1936, he is seated next to Zweig, who was 13 years Roth’s senior but looks 13 years younger. With Roth increasingly desperate, paranoid and impoverished, his death in 1939 comes almost as a relief to the reader. At least he was spared the horrors history still had in store, chief among them the awful fact of Friedl’s death in a gas chamber as part of the Nazis’ euthanasia program for psychiatric and disabled patients.
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Pim, though an unlikely contender for a Roth biographer (his first published book was about dinosaurs), proves a sensitive, judicious and perceptive guide. What elevates “Endless Flight,” beyond the pathos of its narrative, is Pim’s discussion of Roth’s writing. Whereas most biographies settle for the breezily abstract, Pim devotes page after page of close reading to almost all of Roth’s novels, redescribing them in a style to match its subject. (Of Roth’s early journalism, Pim writes, “His heady prose teemed with the boisterous energy and melancholic undertow, the sunlight and gloom, of the city he had made his home.”)
Pim also carefully navigates Roth’s complex politics and Habsburg nostalgia. By the time of the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, Roth had developed a Quixotic obsession with the need to reinstate the Habsburg monarchy, even going so far as to travel to Vienna in secrecy to meet with politicians who wanted nothing to do with him. Probably it was always a harebrained scheme, though bearing in mind the atrocities to come it is hard not to sympathize. (Hofmann once wrote that Roth had convinced him to become “a fully paid-up Habsburg monarchist.”)
Pim, paraphrasing the Italian writer Claudio Magris, argues that Roth’s writing sustains the myth of the Habsburg Empire as a “tolerant, multiethnic civilization that becomes a dreamlike refuge from our own times’ intolerance and division.” Maybe so. Surveying the blighted world around us, however, it seems to me there are worse places to take refuge in than a time when, as Roth put it in “The Radetzky March,” “it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died.”
Morten Hoi Jensen is the author of “A Difficult Death: The Life and Work of Jens Peter Jacobsen.” He lives in Brooklyn.
Endless Flight
The Life of Joseph Roth
By Keiron Pim
Granta. 527 pp. $35
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