The Radetzky March (2 page)

Musil’s evocation of that time is a marvelous discourse; Roth’s involves a marvelous evanescence of the author in his creation of a vivid population of conflicting characters expressing that time. His method is to show a kind of picaresque struggle on the inescapable chain of the state. He rarely materializes as the author: There is his odd epilogue to
Zipper and his Father
, apparently some sort of acknowledgment that this, his most tender book (for while their situation makes both Musil and Roth ironic writers, Roth is tender where Musil is detachedly playful), is a form of the obeisance to the past that is autobiography. And there is his prologue to
The Silent Prophet
, his most politically realistic and least imaginatively realized book. In this prologue he comes as near as he ever will to an authorial credo with respect to his pervasive theme, the relation of the individual to the state. He says his characters are not

intended to exemplify a political point of view—at most, it [a life story] demonstrates the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end.

The state or empire is the leg iron by which his characters are grappled. The political movement against the state, with the aim of freeing the people, in Roth forges a leg iron of its own by which the revolutionary is going to find himself hobbled.

Roth manages to convey complicated political concepts without their vocabulary of didacticism, rhetoric, and jargon. In the bitter experiences of Franz in
Flight Without End
, disillusion with the revolutionary left conveys what must have been the onetime-revolutionary Roth’s own experience more tellingly than any research into his life could, and points to the paradox that runs through his novels with such stirring dialectical effect on the reader. The old royalist, capitalist, hierarchic world of Church and State, with kings assuming divine authority on earth, their armies a warrior sect elected to serve as the panoply of these gods, is what he shows ruthlessly as both obsolete and bloodthirsty. But the counter-brutality of the revolution, and the subsequent degeneration of its ideals into stultifying bureaucracy—surely the characterizing tragedy of the twentieth century-leads him to turn about and show in his old targets, fathers, mothers, the loyalist, royalist landowners and city fathers, enduring values in the very mores he has attacked. This hardly provides a synthesis for his dazzling fictional dialectic. One who came after him, Czeslaw Milosz, expresses the dilemma:

Ill at ease in the tyranny,
     ill at ease in the republic,
in the one I longed for freedom,
     in the other for the end of corruption
.
⁴

The ten years between 1928 and 1938 seem to mark the peak of Roth’s mastery, although the dating of his novels in terms of when they were written
⁵
rather than when they were published is often uncertain, since in the upheavals of exile some were not published chronologically.
The Radetzky March
(1932),
Weights And Measures
(1937), and
The Emperor’s Tomb
(1938) are both the culmination of the other novels and the core round which they are gathered to form a manifold and magnificent work.
Zipper and his Father
(1928) and
Fallmerayer the Stationmaster
(1933) are a
kind of intriguing coda, a foray into yet another emotional range suggesting the kind of writer Roth might have become in another age, living another kind of life. Not that one would wish him any different.

Roth was a Jew in a time of growing persecution that drove him into exile, but as a writer he retained, as in relation to politics, his right to present whatever he perceived. Jewish tavern keepers on the frontier fleece deserters. There is a wry look at Jewish anti-Semitism. In
Flight Without End
a university club has a
numerus clausus
for Jews carried out by Jews who have gained entry and in
Right and Left
—a novel Roth seems to have written with bared teeth, sparing no one—there is a wickedly funny portrait of the subtleties of Jewish snobbism and anti-Semitism in Frau Bernheim; she concealed that she was a Jew but, as soon as someone at dinner seemed about to tell a joke, she would “fall into a gloomy and confused silence—afraid lest Jews should be mentioned.” On the other hand, Old Man Zipper, like Manes Reisiger, the cabby in
The Emperor’s Tomb
, is a man with qualities—kindness, dignity in adversity, humor, love of knowledge for its own sake—and, yes, endearing Jewish eccentricities and fantasies, portrayed with the fond ironic humor that was inherited, whether he was aware of it or not, by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Fallmerayer, the country station-master, conceives a passion for a Polish countess who enters his humble life literally by accident (a collision on the railway line). It is an exquisite love story whose erotic tenderness would have had no place—simply would have withered—plunged in the atmosphere of Roth’s prison camps or rapacious postwar Vienna and Berlin. It takes place in that era, but seems to belong to some intimate seclusion of the creative imagination from the cynicism and cold-hearted betrayals that characterize love between men and women in most of Roth’s work. Helping to get the injured out of a train wreck, Fallmerayer comes upon a woman on a stretcher, in a silver-gray fur coat, in the rain. “It seemed to the stationmaster that this woman… was lying in a great white island of peace in the midst of a deafening sea of sound and fury, that she even emanated silence.”

The central works,
The Radetzky March
and
The Emperor’s Tomb
, are really one, each novel beautifully complete and yet
outdoing this beauty as a superb whole. The jacket copy calls them a saga, since they encompass four generations of one branch of the Trotta family in
Radetzky
and two collateral branches in
The Emperor
. But this is no miniseries plodding through the generations. It is as if, in the years after writing
Radetzky
, Roth were discovering what he had opened up in that novel, and turned away from, with many dark entries leading to still other entries not ventured into. There were relationships whose transformations he had not come to the end of: he had still to turn them around to have them reveal themselves to him on other planes of their complexity. So it is that the situation between fathers and sons, realized for the reader with the ultimate understanding of genius in
Radetzky
, is revealed to have an unexplored aspect, the situation between son and mother in
Emperor
. And this is no simple mirror image; it is the writer going further and further into what is perhaps the most mysterious and fateful of all human relationships, whose influence runs beneath and often outlasts those between sexual partners. We are children and we are parents: there is no dissolution of these states except death.

No theme in Roth, however strong, runs as a single current. There are always others, running counter, washing over, swelling its power and their own. The father-son, mother-son relationship combines with the relationship of the collection of peoples in the empire to a political system laid as a grid across their lives; and this combination itself is connected to the phenomenon by which the need for worship (an external, divine order of things) makes an old man with a perpetual drip at the end of his nose, Franz Joseph, the emperor-god; and finally all these currents come together in an analysis—shown through the life of capital city and village—of an era carrying the reasons for its own end, and taking half the world down with it.

Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.

How unfailingly Roth knew how to begin! That is the fourth sentence in
The Radetzky March
. His sense of the ridiculous lies always in the dark mesh of serious matters. Puny opposition (alone person) to the grandiose (an empire): What could have led to the perversity of the statement? And while following the novel the reader will unravel from this thread not simply how this memory was obscured, but how it yet grew through successive generations and was transformed into a myth within the mythical powers of empire.

The outstanding deed is not recounted in retrospect. We are in the battle of Solferino and with Trotta, a Slovenian infantry lieutenant, when he steps out of his lowly rank to lay hands upon the Emperor Franz Joseph and push him to the ground, taking in his own body the bullet that would have struck the Emperor. Trotta is promoted and honored. A conventional story of heroism, suitable for an uplifting chapter in a schoolbook, which it becomes. But Captain Joseph Trotta, ennobled by the appended “von Sipolje,” the name of his native village, has some unwavering needle of truth pointing from within him. And it agitates wildly when in his son’s first reader he comes upon a grossly exaggerated account of his deed as the Hero of Solferino. In an action that prefigures what will be fully realized by another Trotta, in time to come, he takes his outrage to the Emperor himself, the one who surely must share with him the validity of the truth.

“Listen, my dear Trotta!” said the Kaiser. “… But neither of us comes off all that badly. Let it be!”

“Your Majesty,” replied the captain, “it’s a lie!”

These are some of the most brilliant passages in the novel. Is honesty reduced to the ridiculous where “the stability of the world, the power of laws, and the glory of majesties were all based on deviousness”? Trotta turns his back on his beloved army, and estranged by rank and tide from his peasant father, vegetates and sourly makes of his son Franz a district commissioner instead of allowing him a military career.

The fourth generation of Trottas is the District Commissioner’s son, Carl Joseph, who, with Roth’s faultless instinct for
timing, enters the narrative aged fifteen to the sound of the
Radetzky March
being played by the local military band under his father’s balcony. The DC has suffered a father withdrawn by disillusion: he himself knows only to treat his own son, in turn, in the same formula of stunted exchanges, but for the reader, though not the boy. Roth conveys the sense of something withheld, longing for release within the DC.

Brooded over by the portrait of his grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, lonely Carl Joseph is home from the cadet cavalry school where he has been sent to compensate the DC for his own deprivation of military prestige. The boy is seduced by the voluptuous wife of the sergeant-major at the DC’s gendarmerie post. When she dies in childbirth, Carl Joseph, concealing his immense distress from his father, has to pay a visit of condolence to the sergeant-major, and is given by him the packet of love letters he wrote to the man’s wife. “This is for you Herr Baron,… Please excuse me. I have orders from the district captain. I took it to him right away.” There follows a wonderful scene written with the dramatic narrative restraint that Roth mastered for these later books. Devastated, Carl Joseph goes into the village café for a brandy: his father is there and looks up from a newspaper. “‘She’s given you a cheap brandy… Tell the girl’ he remarks to the waiter, ‘that we only drink Hennessy.’”

One has hardly breathed again after this scene when there is another tightening of poignantly ironic resolution. Father and son walk home together.

From the entrance to the district headquarters, Sergeant Slama emerges in a helmet, with a rifle and a fixed bayonet plus a rule book under his arm.

“Good day, my dear Slama!” says old Herr von Trotta. “No news, eh?”

“No news,” the sergeant echoes.

Carl Joseph is haunted by the portrait of the Hero of Solferino, and though inept and undistinguished in his military career, dreams of saving the Emperor’s life as his grandfather did. A failure, haunted as well by the death of Slama’s wife (Roth
leaves us to draw our own conclusion that the child she died giving birth to may have been Carl Joseph’s) and his inadvertent responsibility for the death of his only friend in a duel. Carl Joseph fulfills this dream only when, incensed by the desecration, he tears from a brothel wall a cheap reproduction of the official portrait of the Emperor—that other image which haunts his life.

Roth reconceives this small scene at full scale when, at a bacchanalian ball that might have been staged by Fellini on a plan by Musil’s Diotima for her “Collateral Campaign” to celebrate Emperor Franz Joseph’s seventy-year reign, the news comes of the assassination of the Emperor’s heir at Sarajevo. Some Hungarians raucously celebrate: “We are in agreement, my countrymen and I: we can be glad the bastard is gone!” Trotta, drunk, takes “heroic” exception—

“… my grandfather saved the Kaiser’s life. And I, his grandson, will not allow anyone to insult the House of our Supreme Commander in Chief.”

He is forced to leave ignominiously.

As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvelous subtlety what was withheld, and longing for release, in the father. The old District Commissioner’s unrealized bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is, first, merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.

The second set piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequences that have richly overlaid it. The leveling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The DC not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he
too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is to ask that Carl Joseph not be discharged in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph, “ ‘That’s the young man I saw at the most recent maneuvers.’… And because his thoughts were slightly scrambled, he added, ‘He nearly saved my life. Or was that you?’ ”