Thiên Tài
Lưu Vong: Joseph Roth
Nederlands Letterkundig
Museum en Documentatiecentrum, Amsterdam
Joseph Roth; portrait by Mies Blomsma, November 1938. Roth wrote at the
bottom, ‘That’s really me: nasty, soused, but clever.’
Đúng Gấu Cà Chớn đấy, cực
kỳ cà chớn, cực kỳ thông minh, và cực kỳ mê gái!
[tởm, say, nhưng ma lanh]
On The Wrong Side of
History: Ở phía Ngụy
Darkness before dawn
Joseph Roth 1
Joseph Roth (2)
Joseph Roth [1894-1939]: Vị Hoàng Đế Của
Hoài Nhớ
Nghề của tui không phải là
để làm hài lòng ông Giời.
Bố ai biết tại sao Thằng Chả lại chọn cái nghề đó cho tui.
My profession was not to pleasing God,
but His inscrutable will had selected it for me.
Joseph Roth
Lời thú tội của một tên
sát nhân
[The Confession of a murderer]
"Tôi viết nó thẳng một
lèo," Roth viết thư cho bạn mình, là Stefan Zweig, sau khi hoàn tất
cuốn sách vào năm 1936. Trường hợp Joseph Roth là cái ngược đời vốn chỉ
dành cho những bậc đại trí, đại nhân, thí dụ như Kafka. Vốn được coi là
một trong những nhà văn quan trọng nhất của thế kỷ, nhưng lại được rất
ít người đọc. Có vẻ như gần đây, nhân loại bắt đầu sửa sai, về những
lỗi lầm trọng đại như trên. Nadine Gordimer, nhà văn Nam Phi, Nobel văn
chương trên tờ Điểm Sách Nữu Ước, coi toàn bộ tác phẩm của ông, một
“tragédie humaine”, Bi Kịch của Con Người, được
viết bằng kỹ thuật giả tưởng hiện đại. Ngoài ông ra, không nhà văn hiện
đại nào, ngay cả Thomas Mann, tới gần được cái toàn thể, một mục tiêu
bất khả của chúng ta – our impossible aim - theo nhà phê bình Mác xít
G. Lukacs.
Roth, cho tới khi ông mất vào năm 1939, là một trong số những nhà văn
Đức lỗi lạc nhất, lưu vong. Thành thạo môn võ công Song Thủ Hổ Bác, tác
phẩm của ông vừa là giả tưởng vừa là báo chí với những nối kết thật khó
mò, giữa lưu vong và thân phận của riêng từng con người [điều mà chúng
ta gọi là "căn cước", identity], giữa đời tư và đời công, Lời Thú Tội
Của Một Sát Nhân, nằm trong dòng Conrad [với cuốn Tên Mật Vụ, The
Secret Agent], Dos [với Tội Ác và Hình Phạt]... là một dẫn nhập tuyệt
hảo vào cái thế giới của những Ông Cố Vấn, Ván Bài Lật Ngửa,Thời Gian
Của Người, Người Mỹ Trầm Lặng...
Joseph Roth, tên khai sinh là Moses Joseph Roth, sinh ngày 2 tháng
Chín, 1894, trong một gia đình Do Thái, tại Brody, Galicia, vùng cực
đông của đế quốc Habsburg lúc đó. Mất ngày 27 tháng Năm 1939 tại Paris.
Ông chẳng bao giờ nhìn thấy bố, biến mất trước khi ông ra đời, và sau
đó mất vì bịnh điên. Được mẹ và gia đình bên ngoại nuôi nấng. Học
Brody, đại học Lemberg, Lvov hay Lviv sau chuyển qua Vienna vào năm
1914. Phục vụ một, hoặc hai năm trong quân đội Áo Hung tại mặt trận
miền đông, như là phóng viên hay censor [kiểm duyệt viên]. Sau đó, ông
viết, “Kinh nghiệm mạnh nhất của tôi là về Chiến Tranh và sự huỷ diệt
quê cha [fatherland], thứ độc nhất mà tôi có được, đó là đế chế Áo
Hung.”
Vào năm 1918, ông trở lại Vienna, bắt đầu viết cho những tờ báo khuynh
tả với cái tên là Roth Đỏ, ‘der rote Roth’, Roth, một tay xã hội chủ
nghĩa với trái tim chảy máu, ‘the bleeding heart Socialist”. 1920 ông
dời tới Berlin, và vào năm 1923 ông cộng tác với báo Frankfurter
Zeitung. Những năm tiếp theo, ông đi du lịch suốt Âu Châu, và từ những
nơi đó, viết bài về cho báo trên: miền nam nước Pháp, Liên Xô, Albania,
Đức, Ba Lan, và Ý. Ông là một trong những phóng viên số một, và được
trả tiền hậu hĩ nhất - một thứ tiền nhuận bút như
trong mơ, the dream rate - vào thời đó: một Đức
mác/một dòng!
Một số bài sau được in trong The Panopticum on Sunday (1928), và trong
Wandering Jews [Do Thái Lang Thang, 1927]: một cái nhìn khô khan về vị
trí của những cộng đồng Do Thái tại Đông và Trung Âu.
Roth, trong thời gian là phóng viên tại Vienna, là một trong những nhà
văn đầu tiên ngửi ra những thảm hoạ sắp tới, sẽ do Hitler gây ra. Ông
cũng là người đầu tiên chống lại những người Cộng Sản, nhận ra bản chất
ma quỉ của sự cai trị của Stalin [recognizing the evil nature of
Stalin’s rule].
Khi Nazi lên nắm quyền vào năm 1933, Roth sống tại Paris, nhưng còn ở
Amsterdam, Ostende, miền nam nước Pháp, viết cho những tờ báo lưu vong.
Như Walter Benjamin - người đồng thời, đã từng viết cho tờ Frankfurt,
đã từng đi Liên Xô và vỡ mộng - nhận xét về Roth, rằng Roth đã tới Liên
Bang Xô Viết như là một tay Cộng Sản tin tưởng ở chủ nghĩa này, nhưng
khi rời nơi đây, như một tay Royalist: Quan điểm chính trị royalist,
bảo hoàng, thực ta chỉ là cái mặt nạ che giấu niềm bi quan chán chường
của Roth. Bài viết cuối cùng của ông có nhan đề là “Goethe’s Oak [Cây
Sồi của Goethe tại] at Buchenwald”. Buchenwald sau đó là một trong
những trại tù và lò thiêu người của Nazi.
Những năm cuối đời của ông thật là vất vả. Rời khách sạn này tới khách
sạn khác, uống như hũ chìm, khốn khổ vì tiền bạc và tương lai thì thật
là mù mịt. Ông hoàn toàn suy sụp khi nghe tin nhà soạn kịch Erns Toller
treo cổ tự tử tại Nữu Ước. Trong những giấy tờ để lại của ông, có một
thiệp mời của Pen Club [cơ quan này đã đưa Thomas Mann và nhiều người
viết khác tới Mỹ].
Thật khó mà tưởng tượng nổi, một nhà văn Roth, trên một chiếc thuyền
trực chỉ Thế Giới Mới, và sau đó, tiếp tục sống, và viết ở đó, và tuyên
bố: không đi đâu nữa!
Thế giới của ông là một thế giới cũ, và ông sống, đến nát bấy, không
chỉ một, mà cả hai, cái thế giới đó, và chính ông.
The Genius
in Exile
Anka
Muhlstein
Hitler was
named Reich chancellor on January 30, 1933. The very same day, Joseph
Roth
boarded a train from Berlin to Paris, never again to set foot in
Germany. This
writer—a renowned columnist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, an acerbic
observer of
German cultural and political life, the newspaper’s star reporter from
Paris, a
roving correspondent sent variously to the south of France in 1925, the
Soviet
Union in 1926, Albania and the Balkans in 1927, and Italy and Poland in
1928,
and finally the respected author of novellas and novels—thus began his
life as
an exile.
Roth was
born to Jewish parents in 1894, in Brody, a small town in East Galicia,
near
the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia. An only
child (his
father went mad and was committed before Roth was born), he was raised
by his
mother in her father’s home, in a family sufficiently assimilated that
it spoke
German instead of Yiddish in its daily life. Joseph was a star student
in the
gymnasium, where the makeup of his class was reflective of the town’s
population (twelve Polish Catholics, fourteen Orthodox Ukrainians, and
seventeen Jews), then spent a semester at the university of Lemberg
(Lviv), and
finally studied German literature in Vienna. In 1916, he enlisted. His
military
career was neither heroic nor even particularly active. He was assigned
first
to work as a censor, then as an editor of a military newspaper.
When peace
returned, Austria-Hungary was no more. The emperor, Karl I, renounced
the
throne on November 11, 1918. The empire had been broken up and Vienna,
just
four years earlier the capital of an empire with 50 million
inhabitants, was
now nothing more than the seat of government of the Austrian republic,
a
much-shrunken country with only 6.5 million people. Freud, for whom
emigration
was “out of the question,” declared, “I shall live on with the torso
and
imagine that it is the whole,” but the torso was a ghost town, sunk in
an
atmosphere of fear and instability. Roth, still an Austrian citizen,
managed to
find a job writing for a progressive newspaper but it folded just a few
months
later. He then left Austria to try his luck in Berlin.
This move
marked the beginning of a period that was productive and rewarding both
in
personal terms—in 1922 he married a young Jewish woman, pretty and
sophisticated, named Friederike Reichler—and professionally. In 1923,
the
Frankfurter Zeitung, a liberal paper, hired him and Roth soon became a
master
of the feuilleton, a very particular literary form, a short article
that
provides political commentary in light of an incident or something the
author
has seen. And Roth took great pride in his mastery of the genre:
The
feuilleton is as important as politics are to the newspaper, and to the
reader
it’s vastly more important…. I paint the portrait of the age. That’s
what great
newspapers are there for. I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist; I’m not
an
editorial writer, I’m a poet.
His work as
a journalist led him to explore Berlin, and soon he was as much at his
ease in
a louche cabaret as in a museum, sliding from the European world of
Alexanderplatz to the Jewish quarter: “A strange and mournful ghetto
world,
where carts trundle past and an automobile is a rarity.” In 1925, his
employer
sent him to Paris.
In spite of
Roth’s success in Germany, he always felt a certain menace hovering (in
some
towns, the atmosphere was like that “five minutes before a pogrom,” he
writes).
An Ostjude like him could hardly help but be upset at the sight of
thousands of
Jewish refugees, “welded…together like a landslip of unhappiness and
grime…all
huddled together…on the floor like luggage on a railway platform,”
pouring into
Berlin, where the rise of the fascist militias, as described in his
first
novel, The Spider’s Web, never ceased to alarm him. Thus settling in
Paris
brought him a moment of unalloyed happiness.
In a letter
to his editor, Benno Reifenberg, he trumpets his joy:
I hope this
letter does not give you the impression that I’ve quite lost my mind
with
delirium over Paris and France…. I feel compelled to inform you “in
person”
that Paris is the capital of the world…. It is free, open, intellectual
in the
best sense, and ironic in its magnificent pathos.
For the
first time in his life, he felt free. He was making a good living and,
in a
burst of slightly misplaced optimism, he praised the difference he saw
between
French and German attitudes toward the Jews. “In Paris there is a great
tradition of practical humanity. Paris is where the Eastern Jew begins
to
become a Western European. He becomes French. He may even come to be a
French
patriot.” He was fascinated to see the freedom with which French
children play:
“[In the parks] walking on the grass is permitted to a degree that
strikes the
German visitor as practically sinful…. The French pedagogical system is
not
Spartan strictness but Roman freedom.”
This period
marked the high point of his life as a writer. Between 1925 and 1933
his
articles were so glittering that Michael Hofmann, an admirable
translator and
an indispensable commentator in the absence of an English-language
biography,
noted: “It is…a perfectly respectable opinion (held to by some readers
and
critics at the time) that Roth’s masterpieces were not his novels but
his
feuilletons.” In parallel, the publication of a remarkable series of
novels
leading up to his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, published in 1932,
bolstered
his reputation as a fiction writer. But this respite was short-lived.
His wife,
suffering from schizophrenia, had to be hospitalized and the political
storm
crashed down on him. When he returned to Paris in 1933, a one-time
paradise had
been transformed into a place of exile.
From one day
to the next, Roth lost his job, his German publisher, and his German
royalties
at a time when his expenses increased. The clinic where his wife was
being
cared for was expensive. He had to support his mistress, Andrea Manga
Bell, and
her two children from her brief marriage to a Duala king in southern
Cameroon.
Dealings with the Dutch companies who published exiled authors in
German were
troublesome. Advances had shrunk. As we can see from Roth’s
correspondence with
Stefan Zweig—who offered him an abundance of advice and crucial
financial
assistance, all the while urging him to be a little more patient—he
struggled
and wound up making a hash of all his business interests. Although he
managed
to hold onto his foreign rights, the valuable film rights to his novel
Job went
to his German publisher and were therefore lost to him. He traveled
constantly,
both for meetings with his publishers in Holland, Switzerland, and
Austria and
in search of places to live that might be less costly than Paris.
All the
while, in spite of the terrible chaos of his life, he went on writing.
Finding
a haven in a café, he worked for hours on end, stimulated by glass
after glass
of cognac, which unfortunately began to pile up.
I have
written since Hitler’s accession, 8 hours a day on average, day after
day: a
novel (botched, but still a finished book); 3 novellas highly
successful [The
Leviathan, The Bust of the Emperor, The Triumph of Beauty], the
Antichrist; ½ a
novel (new); 34 articles.
The two last
novellas were published in magazines in France. He needed to establish
himself
as an author in France and that may explain why he moved away from his
customary topics—Jewish life in Mitteleuropa and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire—and chose instead to write The Hundred Days, an account of
Napoleon’s
return after his escape from Elba. This is how he explained it to Carl
Seelig,
a Swiss critic:
It’s my
first attempt at a historical novel—certainly not because I want a
“success”—do
I still need to say that? But because I’ve found in the material a way
of
expressing myself directly. And I’m in the worst pickle: I despise the
low
modes of the historical novelist, and become lyrical, in the way of the
novelist.
But he was
more specific in a letter to Blanche Gidon, his French translator:
He interests
me, your poor Napoleon—I want to transform him: he’s a god who went
back to
being a man—the only time in his life when he was a “man” and unhappy.
The only
time in history that you see an “unbeliever” visibly SHRINK. That’s
what draws
me to him. I wanted to make a “humble” man out of a “great” one. It’s
all too
clearly DIVINE PUNISHMENT, for the first time in modern history.
Napoleon
humbled: a thoroughly terrestrial soul lowering and raising itself at
the same
time.
After the
book came out in German, Roth appealed to Zweig for help in finding a
Swiss or
Austrian publisher. He also asked him to see what he could do in France
and the
United States. Zweig did as requested. But the critics weren’t
particularly
kind in the US and the book soon disappeared from circulation. It would
not be
reprinted for another seventy years. Only now are all of Roth’s novels
available in English.
The Hundred
Days stands out as an exception in Roth’s oeuvre not only because of
its
setting and time in history, but because it is weak. Paradoxically the
Hundred
Days, the three months that passed between Napoleon’s escape from the
isle of
Elba and his final defeat at Waterloo, constitute one of the most
intense
moments in modern French history. The political tension arose from the
fact
that the marshals and ministers who had rallied to Louis XVIII’s
support after
Napoleon’s first abdication on April 6, 1814, now faced with his
triumphant
march across France, were forced to take sides very quickly and bet on
either
the emperor or the king.
In the
novel, Roth turns away from the inherent interest of those dramas of
ambition
and loyalty, instead choosing a more personal and inward approach. He
narrates
the story in part from Napoleon’s point of view and in part from the
vantage
point of a young Corsican laundress working at the court: Angelina
Pietri,
madly in love with Napoleon but willing to give herself with utter
indifference
to other men. But while in other novels Roth is capable of fully
depicting a
woman in a brief phrase—be it a furious female Jewish villager who
“stood there
hissing as though she were filled with boiling water, and suddenly
spat,” or a
Prussian governess who, “in her grey Sunday silk, head erect, her hair
in a
heavy bun at her nape, a mighty, crooked brooch like a Tartar scimitar
on her
bosom…looked armed and armoured”—he fails to create a vivid character
with
Angelina.
As for
Napoleon, Roth turns him into a Job figure, submitting uncomplainingly
to the
divine will. He imagines Napoleon after his defeat at Waterloo
overhearing one
peasant saying to another:
“That’s not
the Emperor Napoleon! He’s Job. He isn’t the Emperor!…”
[Napoleon]
entered his carriage. “He’s Job! He’s Job!” rang in his ears.
“He’s the
Emperor Job!” the wheels repeated.
The Emperor
Job continued toward Paris.
In Paris he
takes a measure of his downfall: “‘I have no soldiers,’ said the
Emperor, ‘I
have no guns. I offered myself to Death. It rejected me.’” But the
disaster
itself restores to him a certain pride.
I am more
than an Emperor. I am an Emperor who abdicates. I hold a sword in my
hand and I
let it drop. I sit on a throne and I hear the woodworms gnawing away. I
sit on
a throne but already see myself lying in a coffin. I hold a scepter but
I wish
for a cross. Yes, I wish for a cross!
And there,
in spite of his skills as a storyteller, his brilliant descriptions of
the Old
Guard’s sacrifice at Waterloo or mob scenes in Paris, Roth loses his
reader. We
don’t expect the characters in a historical novel to be entirely
truthful but
we do expect them to be believable, and so a novelist cannot wander too
far
away from the legend of the character. It is simply impossible for
anyone who
knows anything about him to imagine a mystical Napoleon who turns to
God. The novel
also suffers from the inevitable comparison between Roth’s portrait of
the
French emperor and the one he so brilliantly drew of his own emperor,
Franz
Joseph, head of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, symbol of the union of so
many
different peoples, in The Radetzsky March.
Michael
Hofmann writes of this novel that it “seems to have been done in oils,”
and it
is certainly true that not only does Franz Joseph seem to have been
portrayed
in oil paint but one almost feels he is about to step out of the frame.
Here he
is on the eve of battle, giving audience to the Jews who have come to
pay him
homage:
[The
Emperor] rode to meet the Jews. At the edge of the village,…they surged
towards
him, a swarthy cloud…. The elder stopped three paces before the
Emperor…. And
his overgrown, toothless mouth began to mumble in an incomprehensible
language
the blessing that Jews have to speak when they see an Emperor. Franz
Joseph
inclined his head…. From the rout of Jews an indistinct muttering
arose. Their
backs still bent further…. “Blessed art thou!” said the Jew to the
Emperor.
“Thou shalt not witness the end of the world!” I know, thought Franz
Joseph. He
shook hands with the old man. He turned. He mounted his white horse.
He turned
left and trotted across the hard crusts of the autumn fields, followed
by his
retinue. The words that Captain of Horse Kaunitz addressed to his
companion
next to him were carried to the Emperor on the wind: “I didn’t
understand a
syllable of what that Jew was saying!” The Emperor turned in his saddle
and
said. “Never you mind, Kaunitz, he was talking to me!” and he rode on.
Roth might
not have been especially surprised at the tepid reception given to his
book on
Napoleon. After all, he had written to Blanche Gidon: “My book seems
atrocious to
me. It can’t be helped! I have no time.” He had no time even to
complain, so
overwhelming had his woes become. Anguished at his wife’s fate in
Austria,
crushed by worries about money, exasperated at the constant quarreling
that
accompanied the breakup with his mistress, he went into an alcoholic
nosedive
and yet, all the while, continued to write. An article that appeared in
a
publication for émigrés, though written with a light and humorous touch
and a
great modesty, still gives us a sense of his despair.
During his
time in Paris, Roth had always stayed at the Hotel Foyot, at the corner
of the
Rue de Tournon, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. He frequented a
neighboring
café and entire days went by without his leaving what he called his
Tournon
Republic. But one day the hotel closed down. It was scheduled for
demolition,
and a few days later Roth watched from his customary perch as his
Parisian home
crumbled into dust:
Now I’m
sitting facing the vacant lot, and hearing the hours go by. You lose
one home
after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s
staff. My
feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry. Misery crouches
beside me,
ever larger and ever gentler; pain takes an interest, becomes huge and
kind;
terror flutters up, and it doesn’t even frighten me anymore. And that’s
the
most desolate thing of all.
And so he
went on writing and the books from the last years of his life were up
to the
level of his finest work. It is a challenge to date their composition
because
Roth was writing a number of books at the same time, often in such
panic,
struggling as he was to meet his deadlines, that his Dutch publisher
pointed
out that the last chapter of The Emperor’s Tomb resembled word for word
the
last chapter of Flight Without End. Surely there must have been some
mix-up.
Roth agreed and without any very clear explanation sent back a
different text.
After The
Hundred Days, he had gone back to the subjects that had obsessed him
all his
life: the Habsburg Empire and Jewish life, the underlying themes of The
Emperor’s Tomb, published in 1938, and The Leviathan (whose original
title had
been The Coral Seller), which only appeared after Roth’s death, both
recently
republished in Michael Hofmann’s translations by New Directions. The
world he
had known and loved was about to perish in a conflagration. Filled with
despair, in these last books, he brought to a tragic and bitter end the
saga of
the Trotta family, started in The Radetzky March, and destroyed the
hope for
the decent Jewish future he had envisioned in Job.
If Job, the
most Jewish of all his novels, ends with a miracle—after a terrible
stay in New
York where he emigrated to protect his family, Mendel Singer, the
humble Jew,
finds happiness once again living with his only surviving son—The
Leviathan
finishes with a shipwreck. The Leviathan is written with the simplicity
of a
fairy tale. One of the most striking aspects of Roth’s talent is the
stunning
diversity of his style. During those very last years of exile, he
ranged in tone
from a book that’s half detective thriller, half spy novel, reminiscent
of
Dostoevsky in Confession of a Murderer, to the bright and lyrical style
of The
Leviathan.
Reading the
first thirty pages of this novella, you would hardly imagine that the
author
was struggling in grinding poverty. They conjure up the pleasant life
of a
pious Jew, a coral merchant known for miles around named Nissen
Piczenik, in
the small Russian town of Pogrodny. Nissen loves his corals
passionately and he
has only one wish: to finally glimpse the sea where these wonders live
beneath
the gaze of the Leviathan, a legendary fish. His wish will be granted
but it
will lead him straight to disaster. He sets off for the Black Sea. A
treacherous rival plots his ruin while he is away; Nissen decides to
take ship
for Canada. But the boat sinks and Nissen chooses death before his
time,
plunging from the lifeboat into the water in order to join his beloved
corals
at the bottom of the sea. Roth had decided to delay the publication of
this novella,
because he felt that the topic lacked relevance. Ironically, by 1940,
the
specter of suicide had become grim reality for many of Roth’s closest
friends.
The Radetzky
March concludes with the death of the grandson of the founder of the
Trotta
dynasty during World War I, while The Emperor’s Tomb begins in 1913 and
ends
with the Anschluss in 1938. In it, Roth tells the story of the fall of
Baron
Trotta, whose gilded youth is interrupted by the war. Sent to a
prisoner of war
camp in Siberia, he escapes and returns to his mother’s house in
Vienna. But
the Trottas have all lost “name and rank and station, house and money
and net
worth, past, present and to come.” In the final scene, a man bursts
into the
café where Trotta and his friends are finishing up their evening, a man
dressed
in
leather
gaiters, a white shirt, and a sort of forage cap that looked to me like
a cross
between a bedpan and our good old army caps…. This person…looked as if
he might
have come up from the toilets…. [He] said: “Fellow countrymen! The
government
has fallen! A new German people’s government has been established.”
The
Anschluss has put an end to Austrian independence. The café empties
out; the
waiter shutters the windows and exits, leaving Trotta alone, as if in
his
grave. With a final start, he gets to his feet and heads off toward the
Capuchin Crypt where the Habsburg emperors are interred, and the novel
ends
with this question: “Where can I go now, I, a Trotta?”
Roth must
have asked himself the same question as he was finishing what was to be
his
last book. The answer was crueler than even he could ever have
imagined. News
of the suicide of his friend the playwright Ernst Toller in New York
caused a
collapse from which he never recovered. He was taken to the hospital
where he
died four days later, on May 27, 1939, of pneumonia and delirium
tremens. His
wife was euthanized by the Nazis in July 1940.
—Translated
from the French by Antony Shugaar