Below, Joseph Roth addresses a close friend while in a state of romantic agitation. The fling with the twenty year old would not last, and Roth soon took up with another mistress closer to his age. Through these entanglements he maintained a deep-seated love for his wife, Friederike Reickler, who suffered from a progressive case of schizophrenia; soon after this letter’s writing she ceased to recognize her husband. “Now in my case,” Roth wrote while processing the divorce papers, “love goes through the conscience the way with others it goes through their stomachs.”
To Friedrich Trangott Gubler
Hotel du Cap d’Antiba
Very Personal
Antibes
Please Deliver Immediately!
Sunday [March 1931]
Dear, dear friend
thank you! I would surely write more, letters and articles and both, which come to the same thing, if it wasn’t that I’m caught in a terrible fix I can’t settle. I’ve fallen in love with a twenty-year-old girl. It’s impossible, it’s a crime, I know it, to attach this girl to me, and to the dreadful tangle of my life. But I can’t desist. Even if I were free to marry her, her family—very rich, very Catholic, German-hating Flemish barons who suffered under the occupation—would never allow it. The girl (still underage) wants to leave her family after she comes of age in July. It will be a huge scandal there (in Bruges). I am perpetrating a cretinous stupidity at my age but for the first time since my wife’s illness, I feel alive again. It’s not something I can turn away. I think you’ll understand. My novel is going nowhere, I don’t have an income, I’m quite evidently insane. I can’t work, and yet I know I’ll become completely sterile if I can’t have this girl. And then there’s my still warm feeling for my wife. I would never have thought I could be so foolish as this. And the knowledge of my own folly gives me happiness to cancel out my unhappiness, and I am more confused than ever. Dear friend, it is possible I’ll need your calm, and your kind and helpful heart. Will you promise them to me? Don’t mention this to anyone, except your good wife!—What shall I do? I have three chapters. I must be finished in July. I’m not enough of a novelist to go around thinking only of my book. With all my skepticism, for all my self-analysis, I’m in love. I need it as a thirsty man needs water. And I know it’s poison.
…in cordial friendship
your old
Joseph Roth
Will you please help me if I need it?
From Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters. Translated by Michael Hoffman. London: Granta Publications, 2012.
FURTHER READING
J.M. Coetzee reviews Roth’s short stories, also translated by Hoffman.
Nadine Gordimer looks at Roth’s reports from Berlin.
Noting the absence of love letters.