Joseph Roth, Part 3

Today I will discuss Joseph Roth’s last novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker. In this work, published only months before his own untimely death, Roth again devotes his attention, and sympathy, to the loser. This time, though, the story is even more personal, because it eerily foreshadows Roth’s own death. In fact, Roth himself called it his last testament.

The holy drinker in question is a homeless man in Paris named Andreas Kartak. At the beginning of the story the only thing Roth tells the reader is that he lives under the bridges over the Seine. Later on, Roth fills in Andreas’ background. Andreas originally left his native village of Olschowice in Polish Silesia to work in the French coal mines. But he soon ran into trouble. When one day he sees his landlord savagely beating his wife, Caroline, with whom he had become friends, Andreas steps in to protect her and kills his landlord. This is the act that lands him in jail. Since his release he has wandered around Paris during the day and slept under bridges at night. The only other shelter Andreas found was in cafés.

Andreas has been doing this for some while when Roth begins his narration. In the first chapter, a genteel-looking man approaches Andreas and offers him 200 francs. The stranger’s only condition is that Andreas pay the money back to the shrine of the “little St. Therese of Lisieux” in the chapel of St. Marie des Batignolles. It turns out that this gentleman has recently become a Christian and given up his well-furnished home for the bridges over the Seine. He then walks back into the shadows.

From this point onwards, the novella portrays Andreas’ attempts to do something worthwhile with this gift and his struggle to repay “little Therese,” as he calls her. He starts out well. He buys a new suit and briefcase and persuades a wealthy man to hire him for a temporary job. But once the job is over, he spends the money he earned on liquor. Andreas then starts running into a series of old acquaintances. Some want to help him out, others are only interested in his 200 francs, while others discard him as just an old memory. Andreas just searches for wine, women, and song, while remembering episodes from his life.

Every Sunday, however, Andreas is resolved to pay back his debt to “little Therese.” He hears church bells ringing and, stuck in sin as he is, he knows where his duty lies. But getting to the church is never as easy as deciding to go there. Sunday after Sunday he somehow fails to make it to “little Therese.” On the last Sunday, Andreas makes it all the way to the church square, but again he runs into an old acquaintance, a drunkard just like him, who coaxes him, despite his protests that he needs to go to Mass, into a nearby café. There they drink their Pernod, until a little girl enters and walks past them. When Andreas finds out that her name is Therese, he immediately offers her the money, but she won’t take it. She does tell him, however, that her parents are attending Mass; this reminds Andreas of his duty, and his own desire. Unfortunately, as he is thinking of leaving, he collapses in the café. Since there is no doctor there, the waiters carry him into the nearby sacristy to see if the priests can help. There Andreas breathes his last, reaching into his pocket for the 200 francs.

Andreas had not been able to find a roof to sleep under, to stay sober, to hold down a job for a long time. He had been a loser for a long time. Yet in the end he succeeds; he brings the money to “little Therese” and dies, hopefully, at peace with with God. Andreas was right to persevere in hope.

The novel then ends with this line, which Roth obviously meant to apply to himself: “God grant all us drinkers such an easy, beautiful death!”

Joseph Roth & Sympathy for Losers

“He who has no unhappiness does not believe in miracles.”

“God grant all us drinkers such an easy, beautiful death!”

This summer I read two books by Joseph Roth, Job and The Legend of the Holy Drinker. Because I enjoyed these books so much, I wanted to bring them to your attention. Today I am only offering some information about Joseph Roth. Tomorrow and the next day I will take a look at these two books in more detail. I apologize beforehand that some parts of this essay are not quite as fully thought out as they should be; I thought it better to post it now or else risk never finishing it. (Spoiler warning: I will be giving away the endings of both stories.)

Joseph Roth is not very well known in America, though he is well-regarded in the German-speaking world. If an American has heard of him, it is probably on account of The Radetzky March, his fictionalized telling of the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nevertheless, Americans should study Roth more closely because he makes us ask ourselves a certain fundamental question we usually try to evade: In a society driven by success, what do we do with “the loser”? Roth’s writing poses this question so poignantly for at least two reasons. First, Roth himself was a loser. Geopolitics are certainly one part of the reason why Roth was a loser: He grew up in a turbulent world and into an age-old way of life that disappeared when he was barely reaching maturity. But, he was also a loser on a more personal level: He lied about himself compulsively, and died a homeless alcoholic. Secondly, Roth had the rare gift to be able to narrate a novel about a person’s entire fate with great sympathy in a deceptively simple style.
Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, East Galicia. Until the end of World War I, East Galicia belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but was then annexed by Russia; it is now located in western Ukraine. More importantly for Roth’s outlook on life, Brody was a sizeable Jewish shtetl. Roth was not raised speaking one of the local Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian), but rather German and Yiddish; he later attended the only German-language high school in the nearby city of Lemberg, as he would have called it, or Lviv, as it is now known in Ukrainian. As a result, he was something of an outsider in his own native region, and always felt attracted by the wider German-speaking world outside the shtetl. This attraction drew him to Vienna for university studies. Shortly after this move World War I broke out and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the principle of unity in Roth’s life, was dismembered, with Brody and Lviv falling to the Bolsheviks.

With no home to return to after the war, Roth started work as a journalist, first in Vienna and later in Berlin. At the beginning of his career Roth was most concerned with social and political questions, displaying a generally socialist attitude. Nevertheless, his roots in the Jewish shtetl always shone through. Perhaps his most famous collection of articles from that period is entitled “The Wandering Jews” (Juden auf Wanderschaft).

The second stage of Roth’s career is marked not by an abandonment of social and political themes—they continued to play a role in his novels and short stories—but by a new emphasis on the fates of individuals. It is this stage that saw Roth produce the works for which he is still remembered, most especially The Radetzky March. It is also this same period—probably not coincidentally—that saw Roth’s personal life fall apart. His wife went insane, and he sought love from various paramours, with predictably poor results. He often lied to others about his childhood to cover up unpleasant details, such as his father’s insanity. But, he also told conflicting stories about his own religious views; some days he told people he was a proud Jew, other days he was a Catholic or an agnostic. He wanted to make a grand tale out of his own life. If personal problems were not enough for him, Roth had to flee Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. In the end, though, it was his drinking that caught up with him, and in 1939 he died, homeless and penniless, in a Parisian café.

This would be the life of just another unhappy artist—not at all worthy of the appellation “tragic”—if it were not for the fact that Roth was a man who had engaged with the world. Roth was a journalist who was deeply involved in the world around him. Yes, Roth was weak—he was an alcoholic, and he turned to other women when his wife became insane. He also had a narcissistic streak—thus, the many lies about his own life. But I cannot help but sense something greater than a plain old deluded alcoholic. He knew that life was a grand story, but as far as I can tell, he also knew that he could not deny his sins. And most importantly, he always kept his hope alive.

Joseph Roth loved a certain type of loser. It was not the loser who tried to blame all his own personal faults on other people. Even if Roth himself could legitimately blame circumstances beyond his control (World War I, the October Revolution, the Nazi rise to power) for his misfortunes, he always admitted that his drinking was a problem that he had to control. Roth loved the loser who could not understand the world and whom the world could not understand. He had nothing but sympathy for the man who truly struggled to discern his purpose in the world, but simply could not find it.

But for Roth, even a loser’s life was worth telling. Even a loser had to keep hoping.