A Conversation About Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth
The following is a panel discussion that took place at McNally Jackson last October on the occasion of New Directions’s reissue of Joseph Roth’s The Hundred Days. The panel included Richard Panchyk, author, editor, and translator of twenty-three books; George Prochnik, author of The Impossible Exile, a biography of Stefan Zweig; Tess Lewis, a translator from the German and French and an advisory editor of The Hudson Review; and Sophie Pinkham, doctoral student at Columbia University’s Slavic department. The event was hosted by Joshua Cohen, new books columnist for Harper’s and author of six books including Witz, Four New Messages, and the forthcoming novel, Book of Numbers.
Special thank you to McNally Jackson Bookstore, New York Review of Books, and Michael Barron at New Directions.
JOSHUA COHEN: Hello. Thank you all for coming out. I see a handful of people in the audience who know much more about both of these writers than I do. So I should just leave right now. … Excuse my voice. I just got off a two-and-a-half month book tour in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So this might be the last subject I want to speak about. If this were a panel run by Joseph Roth we’d be drinking already. If this were a panel run by Stefan Zweig, your moderator would be much better prepared—fussily prepared, neurotically prepared.
With the translator’s permission, I’ll read a bit from this book, The Hundred Days, which is a telling of Napoleon’s return to, and fall from, power. The bit that I’m going to read comes just before Napoleon dictates his abdication to his brother. So the him—the he—here is Napoleon:
That night found him sleepless. It was somber and sultry. All the millions of stars were up in the silvery blue heavens, but when the Emperor gazed at them, they seemed not to be real stars, just the pale, distant images of genuine stars. That night he once again felt he could see right through the seemingly sublime intuitions of the Ruler of the Universe. He had yet to really know God but he now believed he could see right through Him. The Emperor believed that God too was an Emperor but a wiser, more cautious and therefore more lasting one. He, however, the Emperor Napoleon, had been foolish through arrogance; he had lost power through arrogance. Without that arrogance, he too could have been God, created the blue dome of the heavens, regulated the brilliance and position of the stars, and orchestrated the direction of the wind, the drifting of the clouds, the passage of the birds, and the destiny of man. But he, the Emperor, was more modest than God, carelessly generous and thoughtlessly magnanimous.
He opened the wide windows. He could hear the cheerful monotonous song of the crickets in the park. He detected the rich peaceful fragrance of the summer night, the overpowering lilac and the cloying acacias. All of it made him furious.
No longer did he want a throne or a crown, a palace or a scepter. He wanted to be as simple as one of the thousands of soldiers who had died for him and for the country of France. He hated the people who tomorrow or the following day would force him to abdicate; but he was also thankful to them for forcing him to resign. He despised his power but also his lack of power. No longer did he want to be Emperor, yet he wanted to remain Emperor. Now at this very hour they were debating in the House of Deputies whether he should remain Emperor or not.
Restless and lost, he paced, stopped a moment at the open window, turned around again, sat at the table, opened its hidden drawer, and attempted to organize his papers into three piles. Some were harmless and could stay; others were sensitive and had to be destroyed; still others he wished to keep and even take with him. He held a few of the letters to the golden flame of the wax candles. He mindlessly allowed the ash to scatter on the table and the rug. Suddenly he stopped, gently replaced the condemned papers, and began anew his pacing. It had occurred to him that it was perhaps too soon to destroy these letters and he was gripped by a fear, his old superstitious fear that he might have carelessly given Fate a hint, a sign. This thought wearied him, and he tried to stretch out on the sofa. But as soon as he lay down, he felt more helpless than ever. Black worries seemed to be swooping down upon him like sinister crows on a corpse. He needed to get up. He looked again at the sky and then checked the time. This night was endless. Confused visions ran across his mind; meaningless images with no temporal reference rose up as if from totally different and newly unlocked compartments of his memory. Meekly he gave in to them, sat down, supported his head with his hands, and fell asleep in his chair.
JC: So I wanted to read that not just because it’s one of my favorite scenes in the book, but because it seems to me that while writing a portrait of Napoleon, Roth was also writing a portrait of a writer: someone who sits around a lot, and calls it “working” or “thinking,” someone who makes things and then burns them, paces endlessly, rues, entertains contradictory thoughts, entertains contradictory thoughts simultaneously, and finds his only peace with the craft, and with the craft of living, by falling asleep. In short, I felt some Roth-ian biography informing that scene, and I want to begin by asking Richard, the translator of this book, if there’s any truth to what I’m saying, or am I just being “a critic”?
RICHARD PANCHYK: I think there’s a lot of truth to what you say. By this time in Roth’s life he was very focused on his writing and his misery, complaining to people about how much he wrote and how many hours a day he spent writing and that it was endless. His process, I mean. He didn’t really have a house; he lived out of hotels at that point so he would write in cafes on paper, longhand. He didn’t use a typewriter. So you know his process was drinking smoking, writing, sitting there, and like you said probably eventually just falling asleep out of sheer exhaustion.
JC: But also the idea that, though this was his daily routine, he was the Emperor and maybe even the rival of God.
