Nothing You Can Do (Will Change Him)
The ending is wrong.
It is as simple as that. A
character, someone called Eduard P., a mutual friend of the main protagonists,
of whom we have never previously heard, not even one shout from a side street,
informs the narrator of Arnold Zipper’s fate: he has become a clown. Joseph Roth then writes him a letter to
clarify what this novel means:
But then P.’s monologue changes:
Your profession has a clumsier, but for that reason more
evident, symbolism. It is symbolic
of our generation of returned soldiers, whom everyone hinders in our attempts
to play a part, make a decision, play a violin… in the spiritual content of the atmosphere, which is more
powerful than its content of electricity, there will float the distant echo of
your single notes… the frustrated
longing of our whole generation will remain as immortal as it was unfulfilled.
Roth is referring to the failure of the Great War
generation; defeated by their fathers who started it, and which is here
symbolised by Arnold’s current job.
His life punched out of him, he has been turned into a figure of fun:
He was wearing baggy
trousers, a tight-fitting jacket, and a light-coloured top hat with a wide
ribbon.
‘A genuine clown!’ I cried.
‘Just look!’ continued
P. ‘Take a look at this face! This face has had twenty thousand thick
ears! It has a dog-like face
melancholy. It looks so sad
because it cannot say how sad it is.
Think of his entrance. He
comes on stage, unsuspecting, had no idea that the public is sitting in the
stalls. He is a fathead, and he
looks like one, like someone who only needs a meal and a drink to put him in a
good humour. He wants to play a
piece on his violin. But as soon
as he is ready to play another clown comes on, a self-confident one, also a
fathead, but a fathead with ambitions, who knows very well that there is a
public, a director, wages. This
clever one gives our Arnold a thick ear.
Arnold has played precisely two notes. But these two notes, which he plays before the other one
notices, are so clear, so heavenly, that all the audience is sorry that Arnold
doesn’t play on.
This seems pretty clear, and sums up the book very nicely:
the pompous, ever confident, so talkative and dream soaked, Zipper Senior never giving his son the chance to perform properly. We have been reading about the pathos of a youth’s failure;
its atmosphere like a house abandoned before it has been fully built. And there are moments of extraordinary pathos in the book,
particularly around Frau Zipper, who is herself defeated by her contemporaries;
crushed between the poverty of their daily life and the fantasies of her
husband, who subdues her with the tyranny of his optimism – he is the eternal
child, and all his words are broken promises. Yes, this passage seems very clear. Father and son are symbols of two different
generations; the younger never getting a look in, except to cry mournfully,
because they have been ruined by the war for which their fathers are
responsible.
But then P.’s monologue changes:
Do you know this one?
Of course. You’ve already
spotted it, and now you know that Arnold’s musical gift is just sufficient to
play those two notes divinely.
There’s your novel!’
Roth is poking fun at a particular intelligence, the kind
that rules Hollywood today, which believes a screenplay must have one immediately
identifiable idea that can sell a film on an advertising poster. Although this sudden shift, from a
coherent story, suffused with symbolism and the rich details of a well-observed
life, to a sales pitch, is exactly what happens to this novel; and destroys its
aesthetic unity. Before this
intrusion the creator’s vitality had been able to soften the edges of his
symbols, the well fed stomachs of his characters flowing over the waist bands
of their bespoke trousers and skirts, making them ambiguous and vague. But now he brings the hard form of his
original idea too clearly into focus; so that Roth is like a friend at the
cinema, poking us in the ribs to point out the villain in the grey mackintosh. Was the novel too close to the author,
its point too important for him, to leave it to the understanding of the
reader; now confused, he realised, by his artistry…
It is possible that the novel hadn’t followed his original
allegorical plan. Arnold’s father
not quite the fantastical monster he saw in his mind’s eye, when he first
conceived the character... over a
drink in a café, with some grandfather shouting over his left ear about peace
and declining civility. Discipline
I say! Discipline! The
only way is to squeeze them into a good trench. Do you hear me?
Young man! Do you
hear what I say? We must squeeze them up into a good old trench. Scare them into obedience. They’re
rascals otherwise. Wild animals! Only a good war can cure them.
Zipper Senior is not such a man. He has charisma.
And he is funny. He is not
unintelligent. Often we like him;
indeed we like him a lot. It’s
just… he’s not quite human.
His optimism is a like a bullet-proof car, speeding around
town knocking down its inhabitants.
You daren’t cross the road or…
marry him. His wife made
that fatal mistake. Now all his
family are his victims. We see
this from early on, where, after his childlike quality is described, we watch
Zipper Senior at the dinner table, cruelly dominating his wife with his jokes
and his sarcasm. And also his
unreachable presence: he lives within his own self-created universe that others
cannot penetrate. For completely
oblivious to the outside world, which he creates in his own image, paints it,
almost, on his own eyelids, he cannot be reasoned with or influenced – he is
always right. Imagine that! Imagine living with such a personality
every day… We feel sorry for his
wife, whose existence he effectively nullifies. We expect our partners to respond and adapt to ourselves,
for there must be some “give” in their characters, because we need to change
them as they invariably change us; it is the only way we can confirm our own
being. If this is not possible, if
they remain always themselves, that is always the same, they become tyrants, no
matter how benevolent their personalities; for the other person always has to
submit to them, as Frau Zipper does in this novel. He doesn’t see her!
And so she ceases to exist – made invisible by her own husband.
He cheerfully sends his sons off to war…
But it is hard to dislike Arnold’s father. He is a good talker. He likes to meet people, and is always
making connections to improve his social standing; allowed on the station
platform when the Kaiser comes to town, or given permission to walk across the
grass because he is friendly with the park attendant… All are pointless social gewgaws, but because they are so
cheap and useless, and he attaches so much importance to them, we can’t help
but laugh, and so like him. He is
a lovable fool, led astray by his own fictions. He is too unthinking and dreamy, too pathetic, to be bad;
and so we continue laughing and feel sorry for him.
Roth writes pathos better than he does hate.
Then, as with so many of this author’s books, the novel
suddenly changes focus. Initially
a character study of Zipper Senior it changes to become one of his youngest
son, Arnold. There is a short
middle section when the war happens; and where the oldest son Caesar goes mad,
the experience turning the father’s hair white. For a moment the narrator believes his character has
changed… Later he realises he is
just the same. Living now on
dreams of Arnold, who has married a successful movie star.
Arnold represents the aimlessness of the post war
generation. Destined to fill the state bureaucracies he finds that he cannot
keep to the routine; preferring the company of bohemians in the Viennese coffee
houses. Not that he has any
intellectual or artistic talent – he just likes to listen and be around writers
and musicians. And they get used
to him, and like him; the silent spectator to their games and endless
talk. With his life becoming
increasingly aimless, and potentially destructive, the narrator, Joseph Roth,
suggests that Arnold marry: it will give you some shape and a purpose – if only
going out to buy clothes on a Saturday afternoon, he says in his clinching
argument. He gets a wife! His first love who, after not seeing
for years, he finds amongst the city’s drama schools. This is typical Arnold, who is too lazy to discover someone
new. Erna is beautiful. But she is also completely detached and
self-centred; using her good looks and intelligence, and her drama skills, to
manipulate those around her. Yes,
you have noticed, Erna is like Arnold’s father, but with one major difference:
she does not have his innocence - she sees the world all too clearly for
that. It is made, she believes,
for her benefit only.
For reasons that are not obvious, an insurance policy during
the bad times?, she marries him.
It is the unhappiest period of Arnold’s life, as Erna uses her personality
to become a successful film star; which means essentially performing off screen
rather than on it; making the right connections and creating the sellable
stories to ensure her fame – is she a lesbian out of inclination or column
inches? She is the mirror image of
Zipper Senior, who fails in life because his connections and stories are poor
and dysfunctional. Unlike Erna he
is too stupid to understand how the world really works.
There are a few years of dizzying success, then she has a
fall; and her career ends. They
downsize, and while living together for the first time properly as a couple
Arnold stops loving her. The post
war dream reduced to just one more petty bourgeois life; that is falling apart… They have no money. They are getting poorer… So Arnold, like his father before him,
goes to Monte Carlo and wins at the casino.
Erna goes to America and resumes her film career.
And Arnold becomes a clown.
And Zipper Senior?
We believe he died a happy man…
It seemed to me that only now, for the first time, had I
established the similarity between father and son, now that they were
quarrelling over a subject about which they were really in agreement. I noticed in Arnold’s expression the same
mark of a lost and childlike happiness which had so fatally branded the old
man’s face. Except that in
Arnold’s case it was veiled in melancholy. It was as though the son were already aware of being a
figure of fun, and had thus attained tragic stature, while his father exhibited
the same characteristic with the victorious pride of a man who believes that,
precisely because of it, he will ultimately triumph.
If father and son are so alike it is hard to draw a moral
about the generations; except the pathetic one suggested here. They are the same limited persons,
destined always for the life of the second rate. Only their mood is different; with traces of suffering in
the soldier son replacing the naïve optimism that dominated before the
war. In his book White
Cities, which are sketches of his time
in France, Roth describes a film he saw set in the period around the fin
de siècle…[i]
We see the Parisian crowds of 1910, turned out to see the
French president, men carrying rolled-up sausages of black silk (which are
umbrellas in a state of repose), with pince-nez on broad ribbons that sway in
the breeze like hammocks for flies, with cravats spilling out across chests
like floppy mattresses on bedframes.
We see women with long trains that look like carpets that have
accidentally gotten caught under their feet, in wraps that suddenly and
dramatically bell out at the hips, in the little bonnets of all kinds teetering
on top of vast, unsteady towers of hair, and therefore held in place with
kitchen skewers. The women all
look like round towers, wide at the bottom, narrower further up; when they
stand up, their dresses hide their feet, actually the dresses are fixed to the
sidewalk by means of a wire grid. At the very top the tower are three gibbering
glass cherries….
We sit in front of the whole
deceitful misery of our fathers, who appear to have invented the cinema purely
to show us themselves in their full absurdity, and we laugh, we laugh…
Zipper senior is the human embodiment of that
generation. And yet, and yet… the new post war world is little
different; only the styles have changed.
Realising what he had done did Roth react against himself, and so force
the ending? Did he decide to
ignore the performance he had created?
Did he get up from his theatre seat… and stand… and turn around… to
shout into our faces: Look! Look
at that. There. Just there.
Look! This is what I mean!
See! See!
If we are wise we will peek over his shoulder and peer
around his thickening waistline…
(Review of Zipper
and his Father)
[i] Another sketch in that book suggests the model for
Arnold:
“That
evening it dawned on me that there was nothing else open to me except joining a
circus, though not to be a bareback rider or an acrobat! That’s not for us Jews. I’m a clown. And my very first appearance in the circus, I’ve been
utterly convinced that I haven’t broken with the tradition of my forefathers at
all, but that what I am is what they should have been. Admittedly seeing me would have come as
a shock to them. I play the
concertina and the harmonica and the saxophone, and I’m hugely relieved that
people don’t know I can play Beethoven.”
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