Drunk, Drunker, Drunkest

In 1939, Joseph Roth died in exile in Paris. Exile was long in the cards, since his homeland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, no longer existed. He was the age I am now. As a friend of mine would say, “And there the comparison ends.” But Roth died of delirium tremens and pneumonia. He was a chronic alcoholic. So there’s that as well.

Roth’s great subject was nostalgia (for the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and there was no shortage of oxygen for it (world war, fascism). But it doesn’t take an expedition to find discernment of the alcoholic condition as well.

He writes of The Berlin Pleasure Industry that every class is supplied “with the appropriate entertainment and the appropriate – and affordable – drink, from champagne and cocktails to cognac to kirsch to sweet liqueurs down to Patzenhofer beer.” He was not reluctant to do his own research, of course, and in a single night “my mournfulness was such that it compelled me to experience the pain of every class of big-city dweller athirst for joy …”

In an earlier essay, he says of proposals for the Berlin skyline: “[A]lready we hear that the first skyscraper in Berlin is to contain a great entertainment palace, with cinemas, dance hall, bar, Negro bands, vaudeville, jazz./ Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them./ And if it were possible for us to build a “planet scraper” and to construct settlements on Mars, the expeditions of scientists and engineers would be accompanied by a delegation of bartenders.”

In the novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, finished a month before Roth’s death, Kartak promises to make good on a series of “miracles” which have allowed him to drink on and on by leaving his benefactor’s two hundred francs to Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux. He dies drunk, believing he has completed the task, though he has simply (and gratefully) given the money to a young woman who happens to be called Thérèse. The last line of this last work says: “May God grant us all, all of us drinkers, such a good and easy death!”

The chronology is not Roth’s (the first piece above was written eight years after the second), but it is an interesting descent nevertheless: alcohol as pleasure, as weakness, and then as destiny. I know, to the fingertips, the pleasure; the weakness, maybe; and certainly the indifference to a good and easy (and pleasurable and medicated) event at the end. Who would want to die of anything else? But I also know that Roth hits a precise note, not for all but for many, when from the beginning he reports on the “pain” of those “athirst for joy.”