"My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary." Joseph Roth's masterpiece, The Radetzky March, describes this world before the shock of the first world war, and the collapse of the multifarious society, with its rigid rules and habitual pleasures. The Trotta family is shown in three generations; each scene is economical and unforgettable. The Emperor's Tomb, Roth's last novel, tells the story of another young Trotta, first seen as a man about town, frequenting cafés and prostitutes, who is called up, and returns to the chaos and disintegration of Vienna between the wars and the coming of the Nazis.
Michael Hofmann, the translator, points out that "whereas The Radetzky March is strictly patrilineal, The Emperor's Tomb is a novel of mothers and marriages". Franz Ferdinand Trotta is in love with Elizabeth, but needs to conceal this from his friends and drinking companions. Stefan Zweig, Roth's compatriot and uneasy friend, describes in his autobiography the unpleasant and stifling state of relations between men and women in Austria-Hungary at that time. Nice women were meant to know nothing and to beautify themselves and prepare for marriage. Men were initiated, often by their fathers, into the complex world of prostitution, from the cheap to the glamorous and into the perpetual fear of the pox that went with it.
There was an extraordinary young sage called Otto Weininger, read by serious thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Freud, who wrote about "The Organic Untruthfulness of Women", whereby males were intellectually powerful, moral, strong-willed and religious, capable of true love and genius, and Aryan. Whereas females were credulous and forgetful, amoral, impulsive and irreligious, sexually hungry and hysterical, and Judaic.
The woman as mother in this novel is devoted to her son, dignified, selflessly hiding her deafness, and hostile to Elizabeth as daughter-in-law. Trotta marries Elizabeth before going to war she disappoints him by reading a silly book of jokes on their honeymoon journey. On their wedding night he is prevented from joining her by the death of his "retainer", Joszef. Elizabeth goes home, the marriage unconsummated, and is found after the war in a lesbian relationship with Jolanth Szatmary, short-haired and hostile, who makes hideous arts and crafts objects in yellow and orange. This enterprise contributes to the loss of the family savings, in the midst of the economic debacle before the second world war.
Roth is a master of sharp scene-shaping and storytelling. In The Radetzky March scene follows scene, all unforgettable, with a driven inevitability. As a writer I felt something in the construction of The Emperor's Tomb that was the sad opposite. The writer knew he had to set something down, to bring things to life, to make one scene inevitably follow another, and he was uneasily aware that he was unequal to the task. This was Roth's last novel, published in 1938, and we know from Hofmann's introduction that it arrived in a muddled state. The publishers had been promised 350 pages, and received 173. Moreover the last chapter was "almost word for word the same as the last chapter of your Flight Without End. Is that an error?"
During the writing, Roth changed from the third person to the first person, which feels like a mistake. The third-person narrator in The Radetzky March has a cool, precise voice which adds to the tension and mystery. I found I could neither sympathise with nor dislike this Trotta who is indeed a superfluous man, and not quite convincing as the narrator of his own disintegration. The writing, minimal though it is, is full of heavy repetitions. The word "death" resounds portentously throughout, but there isn't enough around it for this to work. We are told more than once that "Death was already crossing his bony hands over the glass bumpers from which we drank", but I at least am not convinced that this rhetoric fits with the rest of the first-person narrator.
Hofmann's translation is tough and readable though I began collecting colloquialisms that felt out of place and brought me up against the fact that this book was not written in English or American. JM Coetzee once complained that another Hofmann translation used English colloquialisms for an American market, and this is always a problem. "A ways", "gussied up", "sprog", "sharp cookie", "gobsmacked", "pinkie" these words were just not at home in the discourse they were in.
But there are wonderful moments. The death of Joszef and the narrator's need to attend to a dying retainer, not to a new wife, is an image of the whole tale. Most of all, perhaps, the wonderful scene towards the end in the Café Lindhammer, where the narrator is camped for the night. A jackbooted German arrives Franz thinks he has come out of the toilet and announces that "a new German people's government has been established". Everyone leaves, and the Jewish café owner shuts up the café for good and turns out the lights. Franz does not know what to do, but in the end heads for the Kapuzinergruft, the emperor's tomb, accompanied by a dog he doesn't like. The last line is "Where can I go now, I, a Trotta "
Google is a wonderful thing. I know Vienna only slightly and the emperor's tomb not at all. But Google produced an infinity, or so it seemed, of images of ornate tombs in shadowy alcoves, armour and memorials, bare-boned death's-heads pompously crowned.
AS Byatt's Ragnarok: The End of the Gods is published by Canongate.
