On Joseph Roth

As every critic who writes about him is compelled to observe, the work of the Austrian writer Joseph Roth does not have the reputation it merits. It took some time for him to be recognized even in German-speaking countries; it has taken still longer for his major works to be translated and acknowledged abroad. Compare him to two figures who are better known - Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann - and one can perhaps work out what his image lacked. Roth was neither an established cultural authority like Mann (who even went so far as to claim, during his American exile, that he was German culture), nor a radical literary experimentalist like Kafka. He was too conservative to be an out-and-out modernist, and too disorganized, too bitter, sceptical and oblique to become a defender of tradition. And yet I'm convinced that the best of his work not only can but ought to be mentioned in the same breath as the giants of twentieth-century European literature. I can't assess his work in the round - for that, look at Jon Hughes' website, with its links to numerous reviews and articles charting Roth's reception in the last few decades. Here I'm just concerned to put down a few observations.

The first thing that struck me about Roth's prose was its perceptiveness, its receptivity to the smallest detail. The photographer Brassai once described Proust's masterwork In Search of Lost Time as a "single gigantic photograph", as if its writing were the development of latent images recorded in the film of a lifetime's experience. Roth's achievement is less slow and complete - but photographic it surely is. His instinct and keenness of eye was that of a Cartier-Bresson, lightning-sharp. He was, after all, a journalist before being a novelist, writing in a vein between reportage and personal column that would be hard to place in a modern paper. Aptly, the translator Michael Hofmann entitled his selection of Roth's journalism "What I Saw", and placed at its head the 1921 piece "Going for a Walk". Beginning with a stroke-by-stroke picture of a street scene - a cab-horse, a boy playing with marbles on the pavement, a girl in a window - he prepares a statement of his ultimate priorities as a writer: for Roth, "it is only the minutiae of life that are important". Big "stories", whether journalistic or fictional, have lost their pull: "Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history as expressed in newspaper editorials? Or even the fate of some individual, a potential tragic hero...? Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, competely meaningless. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes...I'm going for a walk." (pp. 24-5) Assuming Roth did not simply abandon this opinion when he came to write fiction, how can it possibly be reconciled with the novelist's task? Can one write about great personal and historical events and not take them seriously?

Roth in fact does just that. Even in his familial saga The Radetzky March the feeling that "all loftiness is hopeless" remains. Everything grand is played down, undercut, or made absurd. The heroic deed at the beginning of The Radetzky March is immediately ridiculed by parodying it as a set text for primary-school children; the announcement of the outbreak of the First World War arrives at the height of a grotesquely chaotic country-house party which carries on regardless. Death is ignominious or anti-dramatic: Lieutenant Trotta is shot not storming the enemy position but while carrying pails of water from a nearby well; Anselm Eibenschutz in Weights and Measures is murdered "and as they say, no one cared two hoots about it". I imagine that Roth secretly felt the artistic problem with such events to be that nothing can be "done with" them, because they are in a sense indescribable. The reality of death or war cannot be adequately perceived. The only "proper" response is to piously switch one's camera off, and this Roth was never prepared to do. Even in such scenes he ends up describing - not the event but something else, the birdsong, the rising dust, how the dying man's "white teeth shone against the blue autumn sky". Like W. H. Auden, Roth understood very well how suffering "takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along". Above all it is nature which in Roth's universe dwarfs the individual event. The objective pathos of natural beauty reduces man to an unreal substance, his history a mere "airy exchange" of vaporous illusions, vanishing like the steam from a bowl of food, in Rilke's metaphor. Roth's own image is more eloquent and antique: "a farmer walks across the soil in spring - and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed".

We can sow riches, then. Roth clearly believes that human traditions and cultures - for him above all that of the Austro-Hungarian empire - can take on some of the stable dignity and simple, unknowing wealth of nature. But this belief has two distinguishing marks: it is impersonal, supra-individual first of all - contrast Goethe's ideal of the natural growth of the individual personality; and it is involuntary. (Roth was nostalgic for the pre-war world not because it had ordered itself in some kind of perfect natural balance, but because it left space, because it was tolerant toward the older, smaller worlds of the farm and the shtetl. The end of empire meant the end of tolerance.) And these sympathies with community perhaps explain what has been criticised as a fault in Roth's style - the weakness or flatness of his characters. If they are flat it is once more only in the sense that a photograph is - a characteristic of the medium, merely. But they are weak because they have to be in an artistic sense: it is an integral part of Roth's anti-heroic world that individuals qua individuals should be flawed and unreliable, their wills subordinate to desire, habit and social custom. (There is the obvious similarity to Roth himself, too: weak, drunk, and indisciplined in everything except his art.)

A great part of Roth's brilliance is in his analysis of personal weakness. His treatment of Paul Bernheim in Right and Left is understanding, sympathetic to a degree, but communicating throughout a sense of Paul's feebleness, his complete inability to act with decision and instinct. Lieutenant Trotta and Anselm Eibenschutz are characters of the same cast. Their counterfoils - Roth's answer to the question, what does strength look like? - are more forces of nature than human beings: the inscrutable, shape-shifting Nikolai Brandeis and the opportunistically violent Leibusch Jadlowker. (Jadlowker and his smuggler's tavern appear in several of the novels - he is part of the landscape, like the swamps, the trees and the wolves.) The few genuinely good men - rabbis, servants, farmers - are distant, and as far as possible uninvolved in events. They too have an almost geological permanence to them. But the traditional centre of the story - the "hero", imperfect but an active and potent force for good - cannot hold. He cannot even achieve enough stature to make tragedy possible.

To conclude that because Roth observes so much and so pessimistically he must be a "realist" would be misguided. His world is cruel but also magical, almost dreamlike, owing in the later novellas an obvious debt to the fairy story. The key is not in introducing unreal apparitions or impossible events but in the way the real is presented. Certain symbolic details, such as the tinkling of Euphemia's earrings in Weights and Measures, are shaped almost like magic charms. The eponymous alcoholic in The Legend of the Holy Drinker encounters his improbable - but not impossible - beneficiaries exactly in the manner of the traditional quest narrative (as famously analysed by Vladimir Propp). From all this emerges a peculiar atmosphere that is a key achievement of Roth's later work, and I'm tempted to speculate that, as well as relating back to the German Romantics (Hoffmann, Brentano, Eichendorff), it looks forward to the "magic realism" and imaginative fantasy of post-WWII literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude paradoxically reads more like late Roth than like anything else in early twentieth-century fiction I've come across (excepting Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita). But there is less playfulness in Roth's work than in Marquez or Borges - and more sheer, concentrated poetic beauty, crafted from the pure truth of observation. The "minutiae of life" seemed to him to demand no less.