The Leviathan

Translator’s Afterword

The Radetzky March was published in September, 1932. The Jewish-Austrian novelist Joseph Roth (1894–1939) had completed his masterpiece sometime in May or June; serialization in the Frankfurter Zeitung had been underway since April. By Roth’s standards, such a pace was sedate. The Radetzky March promised to transform Roth’s standing, from a successful and admired newspaper writer with a sideline in (mostly bracingly short) novels, to an important contemporary novelist who once upon a time used to write for the papers. Such pleasant things as sales and advances earned-out and foreign translations for the first time loomed into prospect. It seems that Roth meant to follow his success with another major novel (which he called meinen Erdbeeren-Roman, “my Strawberries novel”) set in his Eastern Jewish homeland (he was born and grew up in Galicia, an Austrian ‘Crown land’, now divided between Poland, Ukraine, and Slovakia).

On January 30, 1933, all that changed. Hitler became Chancellor; that same day, Roth left Berlin, and never set foot in Germany again; soon to be instituted Nazi laws saw to it that he never earned anything from The Radetzky March; and a word was found for what had been and remained his wandering and short-run modus vivendi of hotels and trains and bars: exile. Thenceforth, his energies were divided between furious anti-Fascist articles — mainly read by other furious anti-Fascists — and a string of short, would-be potboilerish novels (Tarabas [1934], The Hundred Days [1935], Confession of a Murderer [1936]) read by nobody very much, which he wrote at an insane pace, and distributed among three, more or less unwilling, Dutch publishers, who always lost money on them, and were not always reconciled to the fact. It meant basically the end of anything resembling a literary career. Roth outdid Kafka: he was simultaneously strapped to two writing machines: one present and public and political, and one past and private and narrative-fantastical; one that depressed the writer, and offered challenge and confrontation, and one that — if everything went well — distracted the writer, and offered refuge and alleviation; one that was duty, and one that felt like dereliction; one that was urgent, and one that he merely needed for his survival; and each was antidote and poison to the other. Not surprisingly, in view of his drinking, his uncertain circumstances, financial troubles, a short temper, the hours he kept, and more “further complications” than one can shake a stick at, his health failed rather quickly. He died on May 27, 1939, not quite forty-five years old.

What is remarkable is that among the disjecta of those years, there are pages and passages and pieces (“Rest While Watching the Demolition” of 1938 is one sublime instance) and even whole books in which Roth forgot or transcended his atrocious circumstances, remembered what it was to keep faith with the reader, and managed to write at the top of his bent. The novels The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) and Weights and Measures (1937) belong here, as do the novellas The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) and The Leviathan of 1934 or 1935, first published in excerpts in French translation, and not finally scheduled for German publication until 1940 by one of his Dutch publishers, by which time Roth was dead and the Germans had invaded Holland; the bound sheets were kept hidden, and the short book was published, “with a small delay,” as the publisher coolly noted, in 1945. The Leviathan (der Korallenhändler was the original title, “The Coral-seller”) is one of the pieces — along with the eponymous fragment Strawberries — salvaged from Roth’s great projected Galician novel.

So much for the background to this particular little jewel. I offer as much detail as I do, because none of it — “of course” — makes itself felt in the novella itself. Roth, poor man, may have had the ghastly sense that the wheedle and distress of the begging letters he wrote during the days made themselves heard in the fiction he composed at night, but he was really far too professional a writer for that to be the case. Read the first six words — the classic “Russian” opening of a story of Gogol’s, or Dostoyevsky’s, or Chekhov’s — “In the small town of Progrody,” and you know you are in the hands of a very great master. At the same time, though, The Leviathan is not a fable pure, hermetically sealed from reality. It plays, for instance, sometime between “the war with Japan” of 1905, and the beginning of World War One. It is set at the edge of an empire, and on the cusp of an age, even though most of its personnel are innocent of both. It accommodates an outbreak of diphtheria, a coma, a run on a bank, emigration, the imputation of homosexuality (with “young Komrower” — or is that a shameful thought?), the modern sales techniques of Jenö Lakatos, the end of a marriage in sexual indifference and alcoholism and overwork, a false product, and a true death. All these things it has over and above its picturesque ethnological base, which one might dub “Chagall.”

People don’t often talk about tempo, and yet it strikes me as being a primary — perhaps the primary — quality in fiction, as much as psychological acuity, or style, or voice, or construction. What most strikes us about Roth may be his passages of full-throated, sumptuous description — of corals, of ships at port, of a summer evening — but there is also the brute and wonderful speed of change, with which a character arrives or takes his leave, or changes his mind: as Roth says, in this very story: “lightning is slow by comparison.” This is what makes him, for all his avowed hatred of modernity and modernism (he had no use at all for tricksters like Joyce), modern and contemporary. Without that speed, he would be an inferior, hokey, and metronomic product. The pleasure Roth gives us, is, I would argue, entirely based on his absolute, minute, and uncanny control of the speed of his story. From control of speed come fluency and freedom, and comes this astounding and moving story that is so unlike any other, and that no one else could have written: not parable, not poem, not fairy-tale, not prayer, not farewell, but partaking of the nature of all five.

— MICHAEL HOFMANN