Poignant hope in a Paris refuge

The “paradise” that Paris offered to the Austrian writer Joseph Roth, as he grew alienated from a Europe darkened by racist ideologies and political violence, has blessed the exiles of dozens of intellectual and artistic figures. Heinrich Heine escaped his literary enemies in Berlin to live in a small apartment in Paris with a prostitute named Mathilde, whom he hid from visitors behind a Japanese screen (while the smoke rings from her cigar wafted over the top). Alexander Herzen, the great Russian liberal, reflected on the nature of democracy in Parisian cafes, far from the reach of the czar. Walter Benjamin paced up and down Les Halles and brooded over modernity’s bitter mystery; Joyce and Beckett strolled the boulevards pondering the British parochialism that had left Oscar Wilde indigent and dying in a cheap Paris hotel; the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo wrote that he wished to die in Paris on a rainy Thursday afternoon and many years later fulfilled his desire (though on a Friday) in Paris, while it rained. And Milan Kundera stays in Paris even after the collapse of Communism, as if he wanted to prolong the paradise of exile forever.

We forget, living in such a fluid time, what it meant to have a place to escape to when the freedom to move about was as rare as a social consensus that religious, racial, ethnic and sexual differences between people should be politically irrelevant. Nowadays all we have to do to be more ourselves and escape from constraining circumstances is to go downtown. But political, intellectual and spiritual dissidents of the 19th and early 20th centuries often had to pull up their roots and move to the French capital. For them, Paris was indeed a paradise, but a paradise that one got expelled to rather than from, a paradise where they could clear a mental space deep inside themselves in which to rebuild the home they had lost. To live in a foreign place that allows you, with hope of return, to mentally reinhabit the place you came from -- that is the very definition of “exile.” The word implies intense reflection to the point of literary bursting. People who settle down in a foreign country intending to forget where they came from and wanting only to build a new future in the new place are immigrants, not exiles. They lack the exile’s navigational memory of a lost country. The exile lives in fear of becoming an immigrant.

Joseph Roth is a fascinating writer partly because of the motion-rich context into which he was born. He grew up in a collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire and a Europe that was about to metamorphose by means of the First World War. A Jew, he chose to keep moving and reinventing himself to survive the forces ranged against him. His novels’ protagonists are mostly all in motion: former prisoners of war, army deserters, soldiers in harm’s way, civilians who have arrived at or are on their way to a lower stratum. His counterposing of this social flux against his characters’ interior motion creates the gentle, biting, clement irony that is peculiarly Roth’s own.

As a journalist who had all of Europe as his beat, Roth visited Paris many times before he all but gave up the itinerant part of his journalistic career and settled there for good in 1933. He wrote the luminous pieces in this collection -- superbly translated by Michael Hofmann -- during the last anguished years of his life, in alcoholic despair over the poisonous atmosphere that was enveloping Europe. Yet these articles -- travel reports, political essays, book reviews, personal reflections -- are filled with a hope so idiosyncratically refined by Roth’s special irony that, for all their pockets of death obsession, they have the quality of music, or wine. Nearly the entire collection is tuned to the pitch of the title essay, with its characteristically Rothian first sentence: “Paradise is downstairs, in a basement.” The specialness of the irony lies in its sincerity. Nothing is being exposed, unmasked or undercut: Paradise really is in this basement, and this basement really is a paradise, odd as that may seem. The sentence is open and honest about presenting its seeming contradiction as just an ordinary fact of Roth’s existence.

Roth maintains this tone throughout the essay: There are angels in this paradise, but the angels are prostitutes -- and yet they are also truly angels, who dispense heavenly relief to the parched souls who come to rest there. Not all the souls deserve such rescue, however. Roth resents the angels’ ministration to “traveling salesmen,” “necktie sellers” and “married men from Boston, Liverpool, Amsterdam,” but he does not begrudge it to the “sailors ... their childish collars riffled by a permanent sea wind ... or to Negroes, or half-breeds, Javanese cooks, boys from Mongolia, Abyssinian princes, and heavy laborers from the markets of Paris.” The angels themselves are just as mixed: “[A]ll races on earth are represented -- white, yellow, black, brown, shaded, mixed, nuanced....” But just when you think Roth has found a homely joy in his underground paradise he makes a raw presumption: “Everyone knows they are lost. The girls become more lost than ever. Even the traveling salesmen would like to cry.”

A paradise that is a basement but still a paradise, angels who are prostitutes but nevertheless angels, a hope-filled cosmopolis that is at the same time a hopeless dead end -- the restlessness of Roth’s peregrinating life found its correlative in his agile sensibility. A brief contemplative repose rising out of ceaseless motion is Roth’s essence; perpetual motion itself becomes a fragile, redemptive calm. He does not simply like the idea of easygoing cosmopolitanism; his radically incompatible thoughts, feelings and perceptions defer to each other as if they were citizens in a kingdom of toleration.

Congruent with this endless mental movement is Roth’s obsession with hybridity -- with mixed races and mixed places. It’s why he loves noise. In Marseilles he loves “the great cloud of noise” in which disparate elements fuse in a vast dissonance. It’s why on his travels through the Midi and the “white cities” of Nimes, Arles, Lyon and Avignon he loves the clashing detail, the blending of opposites. He has a persistent sense, in these ancient towns, that life and death keep switching sides: In Marseilles he reflects: “What is now? It’s already over. What is dead? It comes bobbing up again.” In Avignon, this Jew who enthusiastically absorbed the Catholic culture in which he grew up muses on what he believes is Provencal Catholicism’s cosmopolitan nature: An “organic fusion of all sorts of traditions and styles.... This is assimilation at its best: A person may remain as different as he is and feel at home.” In Les Baux he becomes almost rapturous: “Does the Orient not survive in the Roman arch, in the medieval epic? Are there really distinct worlds? Is there not just one world? What seems to divide, to set apart -- does it in fact not unite us?”

These are beautiful sentiments, and what makes them poignant is that they amount to a dewy fantasy of utopian French tolerance that Roth devised and set against the belligerence and racism of Germany, a country he despised, all the more so as Nazism grew stronger. If Roth’s sensibility possessed the soft complexity of a fine wine, he also used it to cloak his mind in a protective haze, similar to the effect of alcohol. In his late journalism, Roth’s intellect sometimes medicated itself with its own powers, the way the body uses fever to kill a virus. It is embarrassing, though revelatory, to read Roth’s interminable paean to French Premier Georges Clemenceau, whose loathing of the Germans he understandably admired. Yet Clemenceau’s stubborn hatred sent tens of thousands of French boys to their deaths in the First World War and drove him to exact onerous penalties from the Germans at Versailles, thus planting some of the seeds of German rage and the Second World War. But Roth was not deceiving himself: He idealized his new environment to protect his sanity and to preserve his mind for the unsparing candor of his novels.

Roth knew the score with regard to certain consequential French sentiments. Reviewing a book by the French Catholic writer Paul Morand, he deplores the fact that “on every page Morand’s characters are representatives of race, nation, religion, estate and type.... [T]he people are as neatly classified and categorized as the dogs in a natural history textbook.” Roth himself longed for the mongrel nature of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy -- a longing that was also a means of reaching back toward his youth. And Roth’s nostalgia, his exile’s harking back, his habit in this collection of seeing in the present living pieces of the past and of describing history as a possible idyllic future, was also the way Roth prepared himself for death: He liked Lyon because there “[d]eath is accepted like a gift.” It came not long after the last of these strange, fascinating pieces was written. *