Three Novellas

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The Legend of the Holy Drinker is Joseph Roth’s last work of fiction, quite deliberately so. Like Andreas’s repayment of the two hundred francs, it was his last detail. Again like Andreas, he took his time over it, didn’t rush — as most of his books were rushed — but worked at it slowly, with pleasure and pride, for the first four months of 1939. At the end of the fifth, he died. He was not quite forty-five years old.

It is an invidious thing to knock away the props of a dead man, but it is clear that Roth for some time had been running out of reasons to remain alive. Being an exiled writer was attritional, and beyond that, it was perspectiveless. Politically, economically, emotionally and physically he was under threat. Alcoholism had destroyed his health; in 1938 he suffered a heart attack, and he could walk no more than a few steps. He advanced a sophisticated argument that while drink shortened his life in the medium term, in the short term it kept him alive — and he worked hard at testing its logic. After his beloved Hôtel Foyot was pulled down in 1937 (for twelve years it had been “home” to this inveterate and committed hotel-dweller), he moved to the Hôtel de la Poste, above the Café Tournon. His attic room was so tiny that he would fall out of bed straight into the corridor, and thence plunge downstairs into the bar. There he would spend the rest of the day and all night holding court, working, and, increasingly, drinking and brooding beside a small Babel of saucers. His friends and colleagues were dying, often in grotesque circumstances. In 1938, he went to Horváth’s funeral, and told friends that the next obituary they would write would be his own. It was the news of another friend’s death, the suicide of the playwright Ernst Toller, that precipitated his own collapse, hospitalization and death after four days of bungled treatment.

In the circumstances, it is miraculous that Roth should still have been able to write anything at all, doubly miraculous that it should have come out as light and elegant and sparkling as The Legend of the Holy Drinker. The word “legend” is rather soggy in English, but the first dictionary definition of it is “the life of a saint,” and Andreas is indeed the unlikeliest of saints. But there are many unlikely saints, and Andreas is as much imbued with hope, faith and charity as the best of them. A merciful irony plays over Andreas — the irony of a loving god who drinks, and who can understand his “hunger,” his courtliness, his choice of hostelry, his behavior in the ritzy hotel room. Drink in the book is a philosophy, almost a formal device (as in farce); it is certainly not content, still less milieu. A drinker’s blackouts, confusions and carelessness — or liberality — are a way of experiencing the world. The suggestion throughout is, to say it with Robert Frost, “One could do worse.”

It is customary — and usually correct — to praise Roth’s style for its simplicity. But Roth is not monosyllabic and not Hemingway. He is a thoughtful, quirky and refined writer. Simplicity in English is apt to be taken for rawness, simple-mindedness or blandness, and Roth is very far from being any of these. Nor would he have allowed simplicity to obstruct him in what he was saying. Therefore, after little hesitation, I have decided to plump for a style that gives expression to Roth’s ironic capacity, flexibility and qualities of thought. In English, this means using French and Latin words, and this I have very occasionally done, conscious all the time that Roth would have deplored such a practice (and even more the condition of the language that necessitates it), but thinking that in the end he too would have had to adopt it.

MICHAEL HOFMANN

November 1988, London