pomp and circumstance
by Douglas Messerli
Joseph
Roth Radetzkymarsch (Berlin: Gustave
Kiepenheuer Velag, 1932), translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel as The Radetzky March (New York: The
Overlook Press, 1995)
One
might be tempted to say similar things about the novel’s characters: the three
generations of the Trottas, beginning with the infantry lieutenant, Joseph, who
saved Franz Joseph, the Supreme Commander in Chief’s life by pushing him down
at the very moment, at the battle of Solferino, when the emperor had put
binoculars to his eyes. Joseph suffered a shattered clavicle and bullet lodged
in his left shoulder blade, but both he and the emperor survived. In
appreciation for his brave deed, Trotta is decorated with the Order of Maria
Theresa and knighthood, now called Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje, in honor
of his native town. Neither a great military man nor, for that matter,
particularly gifted in any specific profession, Joseph Trotta, however, is a
thoroughly honest man, outraged when he reads in a children’s history of his
alleged salvation of Franz Joseph:
An enemy lance bored through the young hero’s chest, but most of the
foes were already slain. Gripping his naked sword in his hand, our un-
daunted monarch could easily fend off the ever-weakening attacks. The
entire enemy cavalry was taken prisoner. And the young lieutenant—Sir
Joseph von Trotta was his name—was awarded the highest distinction
that our Fatherland has to bestow on its heroic sons, the Order of Maria
Theresa.
Against the advice of all his friends and
authorities, Captain Joseph Trotta petitions the government for changes in the
text, but is unsuccessful. Youth needs heroes, the authorities and the emperor
proclaim. In response, Joseph retires to a country house, puttering around the
place for the rest of his life, his only bequeaths to his son amounting to the family
title and a painting by his son’s friend, Moser, during one of his visits home.
The
son, a central character of Roth’s novel, grows to be the District Captain,
Franz, Baron von Trotta und Sipolje, a man of no great imagination, but of
superior character and obedience to the demands of the society. Sending his son
to military school, he dutifully relays the laws of the Habsburg Empire to his
local populace. But his greatest achievements are the absolute regularity of
the Sunday concerts by the famed conductor Nechwal—concerts beginning always
with the renowned “Radetzsky March”—his morning constitutionals, and his
afternoon visits to a local bar where he plays chess with the garrison medic,
Dr. Showronnek. Franz’s life, in short, is a regularized life of a dying
generation, a world of moderated pomp and circumstance, played out upon the
backdrop of the small town of W in Moravia.
His
son, Carl Joseph, in turn, is raised as a military man, serving first as a
member of the cavalry, later as in infantryman. He too is unimaginative, a
nonreader, who basically obeys authority. But Carl Joseph, the hero of Roth’s
epic tale, has none of the backbone of his father and grandfather, but rather
is a weak man, who as the tale moves forward, finds love with two motherly,
older women, Frau Slama and, later, a wealthy married Frau von Taussig, becomes
an alcoholic, and assumes others' gambling debts—all of which result in
scandals and in the deaths of some of his only friends. In the end, like nearly
all the figures of this fiction, he dies in battle in the prelude of World War
I, a death that is so banal that it reminds one of the children's nursery
rhyme, "Jack and Jill" ("Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch
a pail of water"), an act Carl Joseph undertakes from the embankment in
which he and his men are holed up in order to slake the thirst of his soldiers.
In
short, the Trottas are representative of just those figures in the great
Austria-Hungary empire who outlived their era, contributing to the fall of the
empire, a world of Romantic ideals without any substance. As my friend Marjorie
Perloff, mused, “How does Roth, then, make us care so much about these people,
people whom you might detest in real life? Yet we do care intensely about the
Trottas, and we are moved by the events in their lives.”
One
might simply attribute this ability to feel for Roth’s insignificant characters
by pointing to the author’s narrative capabilities. Yet, on the surface at
least, Roth’s fiction is simply a realist work, with no great flourishes of
narrative technique to explain why as late as 1932, long after the great
narrative experiments of Proust, Woolf, Kafka, and numerous others—to say
nothing of Stein, and in the very same period as Faulkner’s greatest works, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Roth’s more
traditional-seeming fiction still holds its own, seeming even to be part of
that modernist sensibility.
In
part, it is Roth’s ability to present his numerous figures within a
cinematic-like structure, interconnecting them with all the art of a great
cinematographer moving through time and space. The entire fiction is brilliantly
played out between two crucial events in Habsburg history: the salvation of
Franz Joseph in Solferino—which permits him to reign longer almost than any
European monarch—and the assassination of the heir apparent, Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, an event which would soon end the Austrian empire. These two points
in time—1859 and 1914—eleven years after Franz Joseph’s coronation and two
years before his death, link the Trottas to the emperor through fifty-five
years of his reign, more than a half-century.
Within this matrix, Roth moves freely back and forth in space, from
Solferino to the small town of W, from Vienna to the small borderlands town
where Carl Joseph is stationed. There are many examples of Roth’s abilities to
cut and intercut with great exactitude, but none so startling as the series of
events that begin with Carl Joseph’s involvement with the killing of local
factory workers on strike. Presenting Trotta in bed with encephalitis and other
injuries, Roth cuts to the Kaiser in his
castle at Schönbrunn vaguely recalling the Trotta name and associating it with
the name Solferino, before writing on Carl Joseph’s dossier the words settle favorably. A brilliant chapter
about the aging Franz Joseph follows, presenting his isolated life in which the
wise monarch is forced to play the simpleton and fool. Despite having a cold,
Franz Joseph is determined to attend war-games and maneuvers in the distant
borderlands, at which point the author moves him forward in space so that by
the end of that chapter, he meets up with Carl Joseph himself, associating the
young lieutenant with his grandfather, and mistaking him his father, the
District Captain. It is as if history itself has intervened in the Trotta
family’s life, all accomplished with a few splices of narrative ingenuity.
A
similar event occurs when the ever-troublesome Carl Joseph is forced to pay up
on loans and gambling debts (debts he has taken on for others), writing to his
father for help. The father, we are surprised to discover, has no money—like
his son, he is incapable of balancing accounts. Here also, Roth suddenly moves
his small-town figure—often described as a near look-alike of the Emperor—into
the royal court as the dashing elderly man, dressed in his white military
attire, seeks out and is finally permitted an audience with the Emperor in
order to plead his son’s case. When the two finally do meet it is not only that
they look like brothers but appear to be looking into a mirror, forcing the
reader to recognize that they are not only similar in appearance but that the
District Captain, son to the man who has saved Franz Joseph, and the Emperor
are mirror images of one another in their beliefs, their demeanors, and their
lives—reiterating the fact that the son of the “hero of Solferino” has remade
his life in the image of Franz Joseph. By bringing the two face-to-face, Roth
has cinematically demonstrated that time and space have become one, over time the
elder man has seemingly spawned his double in the surrounding societal space,
which is, of course, the desire of any despot, beloved or not.
Another device Roth uses to develop his characters is to imbue them with
special eccentricities or endow them with sudden perceptions which link them to
us. Once he has established the Trottas as types—as blustery remnants of a
romantic past—the author suddenly recasts them against type as they are faced
with special perceptions and exceptional circumstances. Most of these scenes
are also laden with irony, not only with our realization that they are not
usually like this, but through the exceptionalness of their emotions and
situation they are not so very different from ordinary folk, confused and very
human beings. One of the most notable of numerous such occasions is when Carl
Joseph returns home to be told that the woman, Frau Slama, with whom he has had
a long affair, beginning in his youth, has died in childbirth. Carl Joseph is
stunned by the news, and even more troubled by his father’s insistence that he
visit and present his condolences to Slama himself. Carl Joseph puts off the
event as long as possible, but ultimately encounters Sergeant Slama in his
now-empty house. The two uncomfortably share bits of conversation, the young
Lieutenant having to pretend a near ignorance to the objects in a room in which
he has spent long hours. Offered a raspberry drink, Carl Joseph must almost unendurably
sit through Slama’s attempts to find where the liqueur is kept, looking in all
the wrong places, Carl Joseph knowing of its exact location in the kitchen. The
pain and frustration of this scene is almost unbearable, as we feel the deep
tension between the two men. But Slama turns the tables, so to speak, as Carl
Joseph attempts to make a hasty retreat, calling him back to hand his
wife’s love letters over to the young lieutenant. Although Carl Joseph has
saved Frau Slama’s letters he clearly has never imagined that she might save
his, and that not only has Sergeant Slama known of their affair but so too has
his own father. Such situations, in short, intrigue the reader and involve him,
as we first feel for the figures involved and then delight in the ironic humor
of the situation.
At
numerous times throughout his work, Roth creates similar situations: each time
father and son come together in what begins as a formal and rather distant
relationship, the two increasingly reveal and even display their love for one
another, Carl Joseph, on his final visit, for the first time not only taking
his aging father’s arm, but holding it, walking home arm in arm. At other times
Roth attributes to these two figures with sudden flashes of perception, Carl
Joseph, for example, coming to realize his great love and compassion for his
friend Max Demant; the District Captain, upon his trip to visit his son in the
borderlands, discovering through the pessimistic observations of Chojnicki, that
the empire is indeed about to collapse. Similarly, the emotional complexity of
both mens' deep relationships with the most worldly and least-traditional
thinking figures in the book—Moser, Demant, Chojinicki, and Skowronnek—gives
dimension to the obedient and unquestioning Trottas.
Finally, in a book with all the hoopla of military parades, rattling
sabers, and heel-clicking (one of the most painfully revealing scenes in the
book is when the District Captain’s loyal servant Jacques is ill in bed, he
attempting to click his heels under the covers when visited by his employer),
and, yes, the blaring trumpets of “The Radetzky March,” the dominant images and
sounds are strangely those of the natural world: from the canary’s beautiful
songs that accompany both Jacques’ and the District Captain’s deaths, to the
croaking frogs of the borderland swamps, the strange honking early migrations
of the geese, the constant murmur of crickets, and the eerie silence of the
ravens signifying to the locals the end of their world, it is nature that has
the final say in Roth’s noisy dissonance of Austrian society. And, in the end,
it is not the marches, the clashing swords, the explosion of rifles, or plod of
feet that defines this dying world, but silence, the mouthing of words that
cannot be heard as the Kaiser lies dying, the empty silence that settles over a
son’s death.
Roth’s great fiction may seem almost artless, a simple—if epic—tale of the
death of the Austria-Hungry empire, but it is, finally, a domestic drama most
carefully crafted in his vast cinematic movements, its delicate shadings of
characters, and its skillful juxtaposition of human and natural voices. And by
fiction’s end, the blare and bluff of “The Radetzky March” is drowned out by
the rich and various cadences of living and dying men.
Los
Angeles, May 1, 2012
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