by Anca Cristofovici<\/p>\n
There is an apartment for sale at 119 Promenade des Anglais, in Nice. Writer Joseph Roth stayed there with his friend Hermann Kesten on several occasions in the \u2014 more nomadic than ever \u2014 last years of his life.<\/p>\n
I consider visiting the apartment. Then I change my mind. What could I find lodged within those walls but the agony of a man whose life was getting more and more muddled, while his writing remained crystal clear?<\/p>\n
Instead, I cross the street and contemplate the vast expanse of water. Would the sea have brought back to Joseph\u2019s mind his homeland \u2014 the Habsburg Empire \u2014 broken, at the end of the Great War, into pieces that are still a puzzle, and to which he was attached by bonds of love and hate, as some are to their homelands?<\/p>\n
The receding waves have a distinctive resonance here, like the ring of pistachio shells dropped into a copper bowl. They pass over the pebbles, polish and transform them. The echo of that smooth-paced coming and going may have slipped into the rhythms of The Radetzky March<\/em> when Joseph Roth was contemplating the sea from this apartment here, one of his many locations in several countries while he wrote \u2014 over two years \u2014 this lucid, flamboyant, tender novel.<\/p>\n Yes, the beach in Nice is covered with layers of pebbles! Large or small, whole or chipped, all painful to walk on. Or better said: it is made<\/em> of pebbles, or otherwise there would be no beach at all in this so-called \u2018Bay of Angels,\u2019 a name derived from the word used in the local dialect for a kind of fish familiar to these waters.<\/p>\n As I approach the shore, beguiled by rocks coated with algae that shine like some Golden Fleece, stranded among the pebbles an impeccable orange takes me by surprise. A disposition toward magical thinking bids me believe that it was Joseph who dropped it there for me as a sign of recognition, perhaps. We are somehow related, after all. Once citizens of a wider world, my grandparents had birth certificates from the same vast homeland that had issued his.<\/p>\n Along the narrow beach lie a few huge tree trunks that weren\u2019t there before this winter. Copper-red under their bark, which is peeling like sunburnt skin, they are of a species that doesn\u2019t grow in the immediate vicinity of the Bay (the Promenade is lined with palm trees, most of them bald these days due to a bug that has spread in the area). They look like abstract sculptures, these trunks, like relics of pagan gods, and must have been carried to this beach by the storm last autumn, which destroyed many riverbanks and bridges and set entire habitations and broken trees on a long journey to unknown destinations. Now people rest on them and take in the scenery complete with aeroplanes heading for the airport and a small flying population attached to gaudy parachutes. Carried by boats which generously distribute petrol vapours into air and water, their yells and howls advertise the dream of Icarus, what else!<\/p>\n Joseph would no doubt commiserate with me on the current state of decadence and uglification around the Bay of Angels. In spite of which, with all the weight of his experience, he would remind me that all things are bound to vanish<\/em>, gn\u00e4dige Frau<\/em>. Or, he might recommend what he wrote to Stefan Zweig in 1936:<\/p>\n Dear friend, we must love and keep loving these days. We\u2019re in such a muddle.<\/em><\/p>\n I sit on one of these trunks, juggling the orange, and with it my thoughts on Roth and other drifters from that ethnic jumble of an empire which, for more than eight centuries, tried to make one world out of a multitude of peoples. Even though it ultimately failed, a gift of versatility survived in its former inhabitants and was carried into the wider world as they crossed border after border, some never settling down.<\/p>\n In the 1930s, these drifters would gather in the temporary homes of Heinrich Mann or Hermann Kesten here, in Nice, or hang out in the caf\u00e9s around Place Massena: who coming from Vienna or Temeswar, who from Berlin or Brody, all free of permanent dwellings or possessions, waiting for temporary residency or travel papers, all sharing (or imagining they did) what Rainer Maria Rilke (who only passed through Nice on his way to Duino) called Weltinnenraum<\/em>: that inner world <\/em>he had so strived to expand throughout his life “in inner circles that reach across the world.”<\/p>\n \n When he wasn\u2019t staying with friends, Joseph Roth would lodge at a hotel on Gambetta, a boulevard perpendicular to the Promenade, halfway between that apartment for sale on the west side and Place Massena, on the east side, in the vicinity of Old Nice. An apartment building at present, like many hotels of the Belle \u00c9poque, it was (and still is) called Il Imperator<\/em>, what better name for the romantic monarchist that Joseph Roth had surprisingly become in his later years!<\/p>\n Yet, the exacerbated fantasy of restoring his lost homeland was not without a touch of the teasing humour common in Mitteleuropa. For what he really defended was a supranational Europe, rather than a system for which, early on, he\u2019d had ambiguous feelings. After all, in old age he became what he had always been: a committed European from the far reaches of the continent.<\/p>\n To this lucid nostalgic for whom \u2018everywhere was home,\u2019 the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Nice seafront appeared as both familiar and outlandish. In his heyday \u2014 when, as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung<\/em>, he was known as one of the best German-language journalists \u2014 Roth wrote a report on Nice for the 25 October 1925 issue. He described the population promenading or, as the phrase went \u2018taking their constitutional\u2019 along the seafront, as \u2018exquisite and extraordinary\u2019 as characters coming right out of a novel. They all looked impeccable, moved in set choreographies and gave the impression of being the outcome of an uncanny process by which \u2018people who were originally a literary creation, were then copied out in flesh and blood.\u2019<\/p>\n Judging by a series of portraits taken by the Viennese photographer, Lisette Model, on the Promenade des Anglais between 1936 and 1938, if the promenaders looked anything like apparitions from a novel, it was not exactly because of their elegance. Was Roth\u2019s a mere projection of the poise and grace of the Vienna of his youth? Or was Model\u2019s version a rather expressionist version of the Riviera? Perhaps, at the time, the world did look as full of insouciance as he described it. At least in that small part of the city along the seafront, so different from the hinterland whose population \u2014 rural and poor \u2014 used the sea for laundry and fishing and didn\u2019t (it still doesn\u2019t) look at foreigners with a good eye. But then, over thirteen years things change: clothes, customs, physiognomy, gait. And even more so over a century.<\/p>\n Were he to land nowadays on this beach, or, say, have a glimpse of the Bay of Angels from one of those parachutes, Joseph Roth would think the people he observed there in 1925 had slipped out of the elegant \u2018novelletish world\u2019 straight into some pulp fiction or beach book read under a parasol. Although, with the sun so blinding, the noise so unnerving, with children or adults banging pebbles like Neanderthal humanoids to scare away the pigeons or their own boredom, I\u2019d defy anyone to read on this beach even a novel that doesn\u2019t require much involvement.<\/p>\n Indeed, why would anyone read anything on the beach instead of contemplating the sea (were it not for the noise, the petrol, the hot pebbles)? I do remember, however, that once, on the beach of Eze, my seascape included a young woman floating on an inflatable ring, undisturbed by sun or jellyfish. Engrossed in a book \u2014 probably not The Radetzky March<\/em> \u2014 she turned slowly with the mild waves like the second hand of a watch.<\/p>\n What writer wouldn\u2019t dream of such a devoted reader?<\/p>\n \n Joseph! One has to adjust to the times. O tempora, o mores<\/em>, right?<\/p>\n Nowadays, vacationers wear shorts, shorts, shorts!<\/p>\n They amble along the Promenade in tongs.<\/p>\n Flip-flop-flip-flop!<\/p>\n They float on larger than life swans, or other domesticated animals: winged horses (pink), unicorns (gold), whales (cyan).<\/p>\n Splash!<\/p>\n Still, by the Mediterranean, not everyone is vacationing. From the train to the border town of Ventimiglia, in Italy, one often spots skinny bodies of children playing in the water, floating on tyres that look like chocolate-coated doughnuts. They wave with excitement at the train, as kids do in so many provinces around the world. Some are the children of refugees, I\u2019ve heard, whose parents keep being pushed from one side of the border to the other, provided they have survived the crossing.<\/p>\n Based in Paris in the 1930s, Joseph Roth was helping Austrian and German refugees with legal formalities at the dreaded Police Prefecture, where \u2018after having walked so far, they would get a chance to wait: wait for instructions, restrictions, objections, rejections, evictions.\u2019 During those long hours, he enjoyed chatting with their children and he learned quite a lot from them.<\/p>\n If I jumped off the train in the fluctuating sea border zone between France and Italy, and they bowled a tyre in my direction inviting me to join them, what stories would these children tell me, or, for that matter, to any one else interested in listening to them?<\/p>\n \n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n \n As I pack up my books to leave a place which has been my writing refuge in Nice for a few years, I recall that Joseph Roth did not have his published books with him, and that, like his compatriot Rilke, he did not really have<\/em> a home for much of his adult life.<\/p>\n In her novel, Child of All Nations<\/em>, Irmgard Keun \u2014 German author and Roth\u2019s companion for a couple of years in the late 1930s \u2014 is said to have taken him as the model for the narrator\u2019s adventurous father. In one of the book\u2019s many comic episodes, the family of drifters enjoys a short-lived stay in Nice, where they rent an apartment. Thrilled to be enfin<\/em> settled, the mother buys a whole set of pots and pans, only to have to pack them up soon, when they have to embark on a night train for yet another temporary habitation.<\/p>\n In 1936, Roth visited his friend, Zweig, who was spending the summer in Ostend. At the time, the \u2018pearl of Belgian beaches\u2019 was, like Nice, the temporary home of a small cosmopolitan world of writers, artists, and journalists. Unlike Nice, it was largely destroyed by the bombs that were soon to be dropped there, as elsewhere in Europe. But back then, the place felt quiet, soothing, the North Sea a placid counterpart to the passionate Mediterranean.<\/p>\n By the Ostend seafront, the two friends sit in a caf\u00e9, talk about this and that over writing breaks, and Zweig introduces Irmgard to Joseph. In between conversations, they ask for yet another Verveine<\/em>. The word evokes to me the scent of verbena tea, and I wonder why such a \u201choly drinker\u201d would ingest quantities of that herbal remedy. To clear his mind? His intoxicated liver? Or to bring back childhood memories from the far reaches of his vanished homeland?<\/p>\n Verveine<\/em> happens to be, in point of fact, the name of an exquisite (and quite strong) liqueur. It has a radiant green colour and is served \u2014 as I like to imagine \u2014 in a hand-cut Bohemia crystal glass.<\/p>\n On a sunny day, it glows like a cat\u2019s eye in the dark.<\/p>\n \n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Nice, Saturday, August 14-17, 2021<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Anca Cristofovici There is an apartment for sale at 119 Promenade des Anglais, in Nice. Writer Joseph Roth stayed there with his friend Hermann Kesten on several occasions in the \u2014 more nomadic than ever \u2014 last years of his life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1872,77],"tags":[1905,1873,1123],"class_list":["post-16370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-89-90","category-english","tag-anca-cristofovici","tag-egophobia-89-90","tag-english"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-4g2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16370"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16371,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16370\/revisions\/16371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}