The unpleasant truth about Joseph Roth

Endless Flight is the first biography in English of the novelist Joseph Roth. This is very surprising, since Roth’s short, violent life traverses some of the most compelling episodes in 20th-century European history. He was a supremely elegant, intelligent and clear-sighted writer, despite living out of suitcases, in hotel rooms, always on the run. If most of his novels are flawed in one way or another, they are all interesting in others.

He also wrote what must be one of the dozen greatest European novels, The Radetzky March, translated at least three times into English since 1933. (We are now lucky to have Michael Hofmann’s superb, comprehensive translations, which perfectly convey Roth’s native skill in language.) He dropped out of sight, even in Germany, after his death in 1939, but the first collected German edition of the novels appeared in 1956, which brought him back into currency, and interest in him has grown steadily ever since. Keiron Pim has done a good, solid job – but why hasn’t there been a biography before?

I suspect the reason is that the story is staggeringly depressing. Marvellous as his novels are, Roth proves a bracingly horrible presence as, in the last years, he descended into a sea of alcohol. (I commend the scholar who recently discovered that his bar bill at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna remained unequalled and unpaid.) He wrote a fair amount about good deaths, such as that of the old servant Jacques in The Radetzky March, who died upright and painlessly. Roth’s own end, in Paris at the age of 44, was not like that. He collapsed in a bar, his liver so distended that the malformation could be seen through his fur coat. He was taken off to the pauper’s hospital, where the doctors ill-advisedly withdrew all alcohol.