Marching with the Trottas

Some novels creep up quietly on you from behind, while others grasp you firmly by the collar and sweep you briskly into their firmament, barely giving you time to catch your breath. The Radetzky March is certainly among the latter, and I duly succumbed within pages, when I discovered it gently simmering with potential on a holiday bookshelf (other people’s bookshelves always simmer with more potential than one’s own). Holidays are, by definition, an attempt to embrace the unfamiliar, and this novel’s very title, so redolent of Mitteleuropa, promises immersion in a different world, the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire on the fringes of which its author, Joseph Roth, led his own doomed and self-destructive life.

It is impossible not to be seduced by the vital, ironic voice of this writer, translated with such élan by Michael Hofmann, who has made it part of his life’s work to render all Roth’s works into English. And as the novel unwinds, its elegiac yet laconic tone engenders a fascination with the man who wrote it, a marvellously subtle observer of the conflicts and contradictions of a vanishing world. Joseph Roth pictured empire as a melancholy farce, and chronicled it from the margins with a mixture of affection and exasperation as he moved restlessly from his birthplace in Galicia through a gradually fragmenting Europe to his final resting place in Paris. It was there that in 1939 he died of drink and despair at the age of 44. The Radetzky March, universally agreed to be his masterpiece, opens on the chaos of the Battle of Solferino in 1859, where a humble Slovenian infantry lieutenant called Trotta inadvertently transforms his family’s fortunes at a stroke. Spotting the young Emperor Franz Joseph raising a field glass to his eye, and thus making himself a target for the enemy, Trotta wrests the monarch from his horse and takes the sniper’s bullet squarely through the shoulder. This spontaneous act of heroism confers eternal favour on subsequent generations of Trottas. Promoted and decorated with the Order of Maria Theresa – the highest honour in the land – the newly ennobled Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje is elevated from his humble origins and required to square up to the demands of his new position, but in truth he is not temperamentally suited to it. ‘Fate had singled him out for a particular deed. He subsequently did everything he could to return himself to obscurity.’ So when, years later, he reads in his young son’s revisionist history book a vastly embellished account of his fateful intervention on the field of battle he can hardly contain his indignation. He demands a correction of the record not just from the powers-that-be but from the Emperor himself. Rebuffed by the great Commander-in-Chief, Trotta resigns from the army in a huff, his integrity saved but resentment simmering, and lives out the remainder of his life in curmudgeonly obscurity. To his only son he bequeaths a mantle of faded glory and a portrait of the unwilling, unlikely and ungrateful Hero of Solferino that is to haunt, indeed taunt, his descendants. For his son Franz and grandson Carl Joseph are typical of a family that has had glory thrust upon it and remains faintly bemused as to how to deal with the matter. They are men of only moderate capabilities, and they have the misfortune to inhabit a world whose time is running out – the certainties of the past are fragmenting as centrifugal forces tear the Habsburg empire apart, forces that the Trottas are powerless to resist. To read this novel is to be swept up in seismic changes in European history, yet the charm of it is that your feet never leave the ground, so compelling and often humorous are the events it describes. This is a story of fathers and sons, and in particular fathers and sons who can’t communicate with one another. The disillusioned Hero of Solferino forbids his son Franz to go into the army, making a District Commissioner of him instead – in those days a father’s wish was binding. The District Commissioner’s own son Carl Joseph, who enters the story aged 15 to the strains of Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’ played by the local military band, makes good his father’s loss of a military career by going into the cavalry. But not before he has been deliciously seduced by the irresistible Frau Slama, a local sergeant’s wife, and learned the heartbreak of true loss when he hears of her death in childbirth from his impassive father. His secret distress is compounded by deep humiliation when the sergeant nervously returns to him a packet of love letters found in his wife’s possession, and Carl Joseph realizes that his youthful indiscretions have been known all along, not just by the unfortunate husband but by the District Commissioner too. His father is, after all, heir in more than name to the man whose portrait glowers over the Trotta dynasty, just as the Emperor’s ubiquitous likeness in every bar and brothel of the land acts as a touchstone for his scattered subjects. Both hark back to the exacting standards of a fast disappearing age. Whatever qualities made such an unlikely hero of his grandfather have not trickled down the generations. Inept and undistinguished, Carl Joseph finds himself kicking his heels in the small garrison town of W. It’s in Moravia, we are told, but it could be any district of those far-flung Prussian lands. There’s no war, no enemy, no focus for the troops, just regular drill, and dominoes in the officers’ mess and, when their blood is up, a visit to the local brothel at Auntie Resi’s. And Carl Joseph makes a hash of things again, becoming the unwitting cause of a duel in which his one true friend is killed. He elects to remove himself with a regiment of riflemen to a yet remoter spot in the swampy eastern marches of the Monarchy, on its border with Russia – the same area of Galicia, now western Ukraine, where Roth himself was born. Roth was a true poet of the provincial; he was drawn to the edges of empire in both life and fiction. Despite its remoteness, the border town of B is not all howling Siberian winds, bears, wolves, ice and bedbugs. There are shafts of civilization, notably in the person of the local count, the colourful Chojnicki, who holds sumptuous banquets and whose forays into politics have left him with few illusions.

Chojnicki would tell all and sundry that the Emperor was a senile idiot, the government a bunch of morons, the Upper House an assembly of credulous and pathetic nitwits, the state authorities corrupt, villainous and lazy . . . ‘This empire’s had it. As soon as the Emperor says goodnight we’ll break up into a hundred pieces . . . I tell you, gentlemen, unless we start shooting it’s all up. In our lifetime, I tell you.’

As the narrative criss-crosses Austro-Hungary, dealt out evenhandedly among Trotta father and son and their various retainers, and as riot, espionage and blackmail pile on their respective pressures, we see the cracks in the fabric widening. It is in Count Chojnicki’s forest that the tipping-point is reached during the regimental centenary festivities – a glorious scene snatched from the mounting threat of a thunderstorm during which the rumour of assassination in Sarajevo is received. Why read about the misadventures of unexceptional men, you may wonder. The answer is simple: Roth has conjured up with almost hallucinatory intensity the sights and sounds, the colours and music of a lost world with its rigid rules and varied pleasures. Open any page, and you will be struck by the subtlety of detail, the sheer brio of the language, the deftness and wit of his descriptions. There are scenes that will long linger in the mind, such as the death of Jacques, old retainer to the District Commissioner and servant of his father before him, who one day unaccountably fails to deliver the post to his master’s breakfast table:

Today, as ever, there was his ‘three-minute’ egg in its silver eggcup. The honey was liquid gold, the fresh rolls smelled of fire and yeast as they did on every other day; the butter, nestled on a dark green leaf, was a gleamy yellow and the coffee steamed in its gold-rimmed china. It was all there. Or at least it was Herr von Trotta’s initial impression that it was all there . . .

But there are no letters, and no Jacques, who is ‘discommoded’, which is quite out of order and the cause of deep indignation. ‘The District Commissioner himself was never ill . . . Illness was nothing but an attempt on the part of nature to get people used to the idea of dying.’ And so it proves, although Jacques manages to spin out his demise for an impressive length of time. His is a shadowy role (in fact, his death is his finest scene) but, like all of Roth’s characters, he touches the heart, and we cannot fail to mourn him. I tracked down and read with real enjoyment other works by Roth, and what a discovery they are: Michael Hofmann has translated ten of them over the past quarter-century, both fiction and journalism, bringing this author back into the public eye. But it is The Radetzky March that most brilliantly, and entertainingly, articulates his preoccupation with history, his mix of affection and despair at the paradox of the world that nurtured him. It turns out that Roth was a fabulist, someone who left a trail of misinformation behind him, cloaking all his movements in mystery and proving so difficult to pin down that there has still been no English biography of him. Yet from what we do know, his own fragmented, almost itinerant life could be said to reflect the fault lines that he so hauntingly exposed in this novel.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 41 © Ariane Bankes 2014