My writers

By Ramona Koval

 

A cursory glance through the review pages of literary magazines for the last hundred years will tell you hardly a week has gone by without another serious book about one or other of the Bloomsbury set (Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster) or their friends or relatives or hangers-on. I would call that an inordinate interest. I understand that readers can be attracted to particular times and places, but Bloomsbury is not for me.

My writers meet me in Post-World-War-1 former Habsburg Empire-Mittel Europe and in Paris  – and my biography would partly explain this. My parents came to Australia as holocaust survivors from Poland via Paris and but for the vicissitudes of history, I could easily have been born in Warsaw on the Vistula or on the left bank of the Seine. 

I’m haunted by knowing what was coming to my writers as the twenties tuned into the thirties and the forties loomed. It’s like watching a pantomime and when the villain creeps up to the hero the wide-eyed audience screams Look Behind You, but here I scream Look Ahead of you! But they can’t of course, and isn’t that the case for all of us?

A life of reading has been an education in language and the human condition, and has also invested me in surprising imaginary friendships with these long-dead authors. And in our time when writers from past eras have been subject to revisionist scrutiny, let me explain how these friendships have enriched my understanding, and given me an object lesson in not passing judgement too quickly.

When my contemporaries were reading the French writer Marguerite Duras in the 1980s I did too.

She was all the rage. Her subject was the suffering and abjectness that can come with erotic passion. You only had two choices – to live a banal life or to die of love. It was very French, or at least French in the way that life seemed from far away Australia at the bottom of the world in Melbourne, where I was reading and definitely not dying of love.

Even in the ‘anything goes’ 1980s when women’s writing was hailed (at last) and we read about sex, relationships and the tiny domesticities of life which were newly discovered profundities, she seemed that bit more self-absorbed and narcissistic than most  of the others.

And she was a mistress of the genre – her edgy book The Lover described an affair between an older Chinese millionaire and a fifteen year old French school girl in 1930s Indochina. In her film Hiroshima Mon Amour a French woman filmmaker and a Japanese architect end an affair with a long conversation on memory and forgetting. The lost romance is compared to Hiroshima, a pretentious if not preposterous turn.

I always had my suspicions about her, and they were more than confirmed when I read The War, (La Douleur) published in 1985 and purporting to be notes from a forgotten diary she had kept in war-time Paris which she later discovered. In only seventy pages she details her experiences waiting to hear if her husband, who has been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, has survived.

And when she learns he is indeed alive, she describes her mixed feelings of joy and fear at his return. He turns up as a mere ghost of the man who had left. Now emaciated and sick, she details his convalescence: his appetite, his bowel movements, his state of near-death. I began to almost like Duras now, for her devotion and for nursing him back to health. 

But, when he had regained his strength, she delivers her blow -  she no longer loves him and has decided to go off with her lover, the writer and activist Dionys Mascolo, the man who was a good friend of her husband’s and who was to become her second husband and the father of her son.

I still remember the effect that reading this account had on me – I shuddered and thought Duras was vile and I could not accept her heartlessness. Unlike loyal Penelope waiting at home for Ulysses and weaving and unravelling her work each night,  to deceive her suitors, Duras ejected the man who had spent time in hell, sustained by his dream of coming home to her. How could she?

When the book was published she was a heroine to some critics for her self-assertiveness. Their interpretation was that she had liberated herself by not allowing her own feelings to be subjugated to those of her husband, but in the context of his suffering, I thought she was a monster.

It took thirty years for me to read the other side to the story, when writing my book Bloodhound I came across the memoire written by that skeleton that had returned to their Paris apartment, Robert Antelme’s The Human Race. Published first in 1947 and largely unnoticed, it was republished by Gallimard in 1957, and not translated into English until 1992. 

Even now it is not very well known to readers of English but so much deserves to be.  

Reading The Human Race introduced me to the voice of the man whose body Duras described in such detail, as if he were a patient in a hospital, and a faulty machine for her discomfort.

Anthelme, Duras and their circle were members of the Communist Party and he was arrested and interned in 1944 for his work with the French underground. His clarity, human understanding and courage come to the forefront in the account of his life and times in captivity. An anthropologist by training he was able to analyse the circumstances of his life and the actions and reactions of both his captors and his fellow sufferers.

He daydreamed of M.(as he called Duras) in his most difficult hours and I was devastated for him, partly because reading his account of his terrible suffering I knew that while he was going to survive, he was also going to be rejected. “Look what’s ahead of you!’ I cry out again.

His book is a testament to human decency and friendship, strained as it had been in the most extreme of conditions. He was so impressive. How could a man like this be involved with such a person as Marguerite Duras?

She said of him:

He didn't give advice, and nothing could be done without his advice. He was intelligence itself, and he detested intelligent talk.  I don't know what to call it: grace, maybe.

Eventually Robert met his second wife Monique, with whom he had a son and a long marriage which lasted till his death. She was perfect for him, good company, filled with curiosity and a loving carer during his last seven years when he was paralysed.

I was pleased that he had made a life with a woman who deserved him.

But human relationships are never that simple. In a 2009 documentary Monique told a few home truths about the circle in which she and Robert moved.

Two years before his 1944 arrest, Robert had already left Marguerite the year that their child had died at birth. He had had an affair with a woman at work.

Yes, I know. How the mighty have fallen.

Marguerite then began the affair with Dionys Mascolo, and all of them shared an apartment  in the Rue Saint-Benoit in the years of scarcity before Robert was arrested.  After the war Dionys and  Marguerite broke up after fifteen years together. He was having affairs with many more women.

But, and this is the kicker, all of them remained friends and worked together in various political and cultural ways after the war. In another interview Mascolo said : “When Marguerite and Robert lived together, she had lovers, he had mistresses…We were against marriage, against normal education, against the church, against the very concept of `family'… This is to say that I have not deceived Robert Antelme . . " and that  " Robert was a brother to me , I loved him more than my brothers ... It was me who went looking [for him] in the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, with papers provided by Mitterrand."

They had described the kind of bohemian arrangements that I always associated with Paris.  Why had I been so straight-laced in my previous reading of them? Why was I so unforgiving when they had forgiven each other long ago?

But I had read something correctly. 

In that interview Monique says that Robert was very upset when The War was published, feeling betrayed by the way he was depicted and that she didn’t believe Marguerite had made these notes during the war and rediscovered them. Describing her as both terrible and wonderful, Monique doesn’t sound in the least bit rivalrous.

And on the question of whether Duras could have “forgotten” about diary notes on Antelme, American writer Edmund White says:  “Since Duras drank in order to write she seldom recognized her own writings when she reread them”.

In her seventies Duras  lived with her companion, the almost four decades younger gay man, Yann Andrea. She was in love with him and wrote about their closeness and her frustrations that it could not be physical. He has been described by Duras scholar Victoria Best as “her muse, her pet and her slave”.

White described Duras in the early 1980s:

“holed up in her château dictating one much-worked-on line a day to Andréa, who would type it up. Then they would start uncorking cheap Bordeaux and she’d drink two glasses, vomit, then continue on till she’d drunk as many as nine liters and would pass out. She could no longer walk, or scarcely. She said she drank because she knew God did not exist…She was an egomaniac and talked about herself constantly… She loved herself, she quoted herself, she took a childlike delight in reading her own work and seeing her old films, all of which she declared magnificent.”

I’m judgemental about Duras, I know, but I’m not a fan of alcoholism as an excuse for writers behaving badly, although I now have a more nuanced approach to her life and times.

And  you know I’m not the only one who takes sides in these imaginary friendships with those long dead writers and their circles.

Let me now introduce you to the poet and translator Michael Hofmann, who is not dead yet, but who plays a pivotal role in another of my obsessions as the only way I have access to all these books is through the work of translators, as my language skills don’t run to easily reading them in the original German and French.

This story started for me in 1972 when I had a summer job in a bookshop and each day I passed by a second hand goods stall under the Glenferrie railway station. One day I noticed and then bought two abandoned framed etchings, one for $7 and the other, with the cracked glass ,for $5. Each was of a Jewish elder of some sort, and I thought my mother would recognise the ancestral faces typical of her lost family.

I bought them to cheer her up, although unfortunately that was a lost cause. They were signed in pencil, E.M. Lilien and they have hung of the walls of every home I have had since then.

So Ephraim Moses Lilien was an Ashkenazi Jewish artist born in 1874 in Drohobych, now in the Ukraine but then part of my Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a founder of the Zionist project in the 1920s and his art had been reviewed by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.

Some years ago a friend, the painter Allan Mitelman, introduced me to Stefan Zweig’s excellent novel Beware of Pity and one of Alan’s dark etchings hangs in my apartment across from the Lilien etchings and so I like to imagine that between them is the connecting ghost of Stefan Zweig. So it seemed right that I felt a bond with Zweig although I couldn’t find an English translation of his work on Lilien.

I know that etchings and imaginary ghosts are an odd way to choose reading material but when I am inclined  this way, in the mood for following my nose,  I try to read as much as I can and so I read Zweig’s The Post Office Girl, some of his short stories and Zweig’s memoire The World Of Yesterday, an account of Zweig’s life in Vienna at the height of the Austro-Hungarian empire, amongst poets and musicians and psychoanalysts. Considering what I knew of what was coming to that fated part of the world in the subsequent decades, I found his work compelling.

Zweig was a hit author of his time. Born into a wealthy Jewish Viennese family he was able to travel the world as a young man, sampling life and art wherever he could. He was the most translated writer of his age, famous the world over.

So I was looking for reviews of Zweig’s memoire when I found one by the aforementioned Michael Hofmann from 2010 in the London Review of Books. I had loved Hofmann’s translation of Joseph Roth’s book What I saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 , with its many touching brilliant examples of Roth’s short pieces of journalism, and I even interviewed Hofmann about the book when it was published in 2003. His view of Roth and his work was: “wilful and versatile, beautiful and drawn to ugliness, everywhere and nowhere. Philanthropical and misanthropical endlessly spooked and endlessly observant.”

Joseph Roth was a close friend of Stefan Zweig’s, and Zweig was a great admirer of Roth’s work. Zweig was the famous novelist and non-fiction writer and Roth was the famous reporter whose work for the Frankfurter Zeitung was poetry in motion. He wrote for the Feuilleton section of the newspaper devoted to literary pursuits, fiction, criticism or light observations, as he put it: “Truth in half a page”.

Roth was born in Brody, (only 187 km from Lilien’s place of birth – see how I love these connections?) in the eastern corner of the Habsburg Empire to an orthodox Jewish family, and raised by his mother after his father went mad and disappeared.

His was a very different life from Zweig’s establishment upbringing, Roth constantly on the road, not mixing with those living the high life in major capitals, but lived reporting from the ground up, writing amazing journalism, which he thought of as “sketching a portrait of an age” and writing fiction too.

He moved to Paris as correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he wrote in hotels and bars, always desperate for cash (which his friend Zweig provided for him so many times) and reading Roth’s letters over many years (also translated by Hofmann, of course) one can track his growing fear of what Nazi Germany will become for Jewish writers like him, and his years of begging Zweig to use his fame and declare his hand against the fascist monsters who were taking over.

By the time Roth had published his brilliant novel The Radetzky March his books were being banned and burned and Roth’s world was growing more desperate as his source of support from newspapers dried up, and he railed against his publishers and his friends repeatedly as he sunk into the alcoholic stupor that finally killed him in Paris in March 1939. He was 44.

So translator Michael Hoffman introduced me to Joseph Roth. Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth were already friends. This literary party of my imagination was all going swimmingly until I read that review by Hofmann of Stefan Zweig’s memoire. Hofmann for some reason had a set against Zweig while completely in love with his friend Roth.

“Stefan Zweig just tastes fake,” wrote Hofmann, dismissing him as the “Pepsi of Austrian writing”. It doesn’t help my case that of course I find that a clever and arch dismissal which I might admire had it not been directed to a writer who I was lining up to defend.

Hofmann is scathing about Zweig’s decision to keep upping stakes after he left Europe in 1934 first for London, then for New York then Los Angeles and finally to Petropolis, Brazil, as if it was ridiculous for this Jewish writer to feel the threat of Hitler’s world domination. How very dare he.

In his suicide letter written in 1942 in Petropolis, Zweig wrote:

Every day I learned to love this country more, and I would not have asked to rebuild my life in any other place, after the world of my own language sank and was lost to me and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.

But to start everything anew after a man’s 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom – the most precious of possessions on this earth. I send greetings to all of my friends: May they live to see the dawn after this long night. I, who am most impatient, go before them.

And this is Hofmann’s take: “like most of what he wrote, is so smooth and mannerly and somehow machined – actually more like an Oscar acceptance speech than a suicide note – that one feels the irritable rise of boredom halfway through it, and the sense that he doesn’t mean it, his heart isn’t in it (not even in his suicide)”.

This was shocking. Don’t you agree? What makes Hofmann so angry with Zweig that he even finds something to sneer at in his suicide note?

I am of course disturbed that it was a double suicide – Zweig’s much younger second wife Lotte died beside him, he was 60, she was only 33 – I know  - and who am I to apportion blame, although it is possible that the woman who was first his secretary might well have been manipulated by him to die together, against her best interests. And I can see that this is a problem.

Was there something wrong with me or was there something wrong with Hofmann? I suppose there could be something wrong with both of us.

But why did I have a dog in this fight?

Would I really want to be friends with either Roth or Zweig?

Actually, I think not. Zweig would have been too reserved and proper for me, and I would have been put off by his continued insistence on keeping his head down politically, as it were, which would have reminded me of the Jewish joke about not making trouble even though you were in front of an actual firing squad. Roth was too much of a sentimental drunk, and they were both men of their time with all the chauvinism towards women that you might expect of that. Especially towards an old woman like me.

But why does Hoffman have it in for Zweig?

This led me on a trip through Hofmann’s writing and life, looking for clues to his animus.

Anyone who reads Hofmann’s reviews and his lively translations can see what a gifted writer he is. And a gifted poet too.

How very annoying. Why can’t he be bad?

It would hurt me more than it would hurt him if ever I decided, on principle, not to read his work again.

I thought Hofmann must have what my mother called “A Father Complex” with Zweig, and with a little digging it was easy to uncover. He has written about his relationship with his father, the German writer Gert Hofmann, a man who seems to have been difficult, who left Michael and his mother and sisters to take up with a new family and who shipped Michael off to boarding school and university in England where he says he felt like a refugee.

So he grew up as the exiled son of an adulterous, self-absorbed father who didn’t pay enough attention to him.

Hmm. Interesting.

But the deep hatred of his father, especially in Hofmann’s early poetry is tempered because later Hofmann had spent much time in translating his father’s novels into English, a filial act of grace that seems to speak of deep love. So now I find myself in the psychoanalysis business without a license.

Hoffman’s translations of Roth’s works have made me love them. So I owe him. But why does his love of Roth mean that he can’t abide Zweig?

Did his father hate Roth and love Zweig?

I love Roth’s work but I disapprove of his shambolic life and drinking. 

I wondered if Hofmann was an alcoholic like Roth and therefore resentful of Zweig’s exhorting Roth not to drink so much. Hofmann has also written of his admiration for the work of Malcolm Lowry the English writer of Under the Volcano, another writer ruined by drink.

Roth was most generous with the money he borrowed from other people - he tended to give most of it away, requiring yet more hysterical begging letters on his part.

The volume of Roth’s letters which Hofmann translated have many written to and some written from Zweig – Roth begs Zweig for money, describes his current state, talks about his work and his arguments with his publishers, and Zweig sends money as well as heartfelt advice about the need for Roth to stop drinking and get his life in order. Zweig’s concerns seem pretty normal to me. And Hofmann himself admits that with Roth:

“Every relationship with every correspondent is tested to its destruction ; it’s hard to think of one who comes through …not the loyal and persistent Mme Gidon , whom he begins by trying to fire as his translator , or the ever devoted , ever inadequate Stefan Zweig ; …He mocks his publishers — it doesn’t matter which ones …In these letters — these IOUs and SOSes — we have something like the protocol of a man going over the edge of the world in a barrel . How can we not be amazed, harrowed, quickened, awed ?...Roth was , moreover , a great and passionate hater ( it’s yet another one of the many , many , unbridgeable differences between him and Zweig, who wasn’t , and who wasn’t easy in the presence of hatred either ).

So Hofmann loves the hater and hates the man of peace.

Hofmann in an interview about his rather good poems presents as reticent and he seems incapable of the bustling tone of some of his reviews.

Asked in that conversation about the review that started me off on my quest for justice for Zweig he says: ‘It was when I was dealing with (Roth’s) letters and in my own dealing with publishers at that time, for a while I became more combative.”

So all this animus stems from when Hofmann was in a bad mood with his publishers and he took on the persona of the man whose letters he was in the midst of translating? Really?

In a book called Summer Before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936, Volker Weidermann  writes about a holiday that Zweig funded for Roth to meet him in Ostend, Belgium - they were part of a group of refugees on the last holiday that either of them would have…and Roth not only took Zweig’s money, he made fun of him in front of others and sunk further into alcoholic stupor. This story really got to me – I’m quoting Weidermann here -

“Their favourite occupation is to make fun of Stefan Zweig and his good nature, his naïve , unshakable belief in the good in people, his love of humanity. “ It can’t be genuine , ” Roth keeps saying , although he of all people knows better . Zweig takes him to a good tailor to have a new pair of trousers made for his suit. The tailor refuses to follow the narrow officer’s cut demanded by Roth, but Roth is delighted with the result nonetheless. But when he is sitting next day on the market square with [friends] at a bistro table that looks like a beer mug , he orders three glasses of liqueur and empties them over his jacket one after the other, to the wild applause of his girlfriend, “ What are you doing ? ” asks [his friend]. “ I’m punishing Stefan Zweig , ” Roth replies . “ That’s how millionaires are ! They take us to the tailor , but they forget to buy us a jacket to go with the trousers ! ” Three days later Stefan Zweig indeed orders a jacket to be made for him too . “ He’s a genius , ” Zweig says…And Roth is proud of his new jacket, and proud of the fact that he hasn’t behaved humbly with Zweig .”

So, to end, I would happily share a coffee or a schnapps with Stefan Zweig, although I can see his work is very much of his time, but that’s why it’s interesting to me. 

I think that Roth’s novel, The Radetzky March is brilliant, its language and style wonderful and I love his moving sensibilities and watchful eye in his other stories and his journalism. But I would both delightedly read his work to you for you to marvel at, and at the same time, cross the street to avoid him and his genius.

I was pleased that Robert and Monique Antelme  lived out their lives together, surrounded by friends and family, Monique coming out of all this the best, of course, the one I’d most want to be friends with.  

Michael Hofmann’s work of translation is the only way in which I have had easy access to Roth’s work, and so, despite his nonsense over Zweig he has become my imaginary friend, even though he doesn’t know it and isn’t even dead yet. Which means he still has plenty of time in which to further disappoint me!

I can also say that starting with my idea of Duras the monster, I was led to a deeper understanding of her world and to the work of Robert Antelme, and to all their faults, which has left me wiser and grateful, which surely  is the true gift of reading.

So is it is better to read a book and judge it for what it seems to be, or to get behind the desk with the writer and see what kind of  person is telling you the story. But why make it a choice? Why not do both and more?

Here’s a radical thought – read to enrich yourself, to open your mind to a range of possibilities and so prepare to immerse yourself in understanding everything that makes us human.