The Hotel Years

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Klaus Westermann’s 1990 Kiepenheuer & Witsch edition of the complete works of Joseph Roth fills six blue-linen thin-paper volumes, each upward of a thousand pages. Three of these volumes are of fiction — from “Barbara”, The Spider’s Web, Hotel Savoy, and so on, to Job and The Radetzky March, through to the posthumously published Legend of the Holy Drinker and The Leviathan: just over a dozen novels and fragments, slightly more stories and novellas — and three are of non-fiction. In the course of his short life, Roth wrote many hundreds of newspaper articles. If Chekhov’s wife was medicine, his was journalism — journalism in an unusually sweet and liberated and luxurious sense of the word, the wife in a hammock, with an umbrella drink, painting her toenails. “Rainbow-coloured soap bubbles” he called his pieces — when he wasn’t getting on his high horse to his bosses, and telling them he was “sketching the portrait of an age”. Over long periods, there are three, or four, or five articles a week, for the Frankfurter Zeitung and others. Roth was equal parts novelist and journalist. He wrote himself a perfect dumbbell. He can’t have intended it, wouldn’t even have known it (readers of his letters will recall that he lived out of two or three suitcases, and had no books, least of all his own), but the balance and parity in his work are exquisite and speaking. In a career spanning technically twenty-four, more realistically twenty years (from his return from the War in 1919 to his early death from alcoholism on 27 May 1939 at the age of forty-four) he therefore wrote between 250 and 300 published pages a year, not far short of one a day.

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