feuilleton – Impolitic

His high forehead and sunken black marbles for eyes give the rest of him, which isn’t much, the illusion of gravitas.

He slinks and contorts like water as if to ceaselessly dazzle a mirror unseen but to him. Passing women lift their chins, droop their eyelids and spy him through a squint. There is something about him, both magnetic and repulsive, that pierces them. Something taboo. Perhaps something false.

The grifter slouches into a kind of practiced repose and periodically scavenges his lady’s plate for stray beans and clumps of sticky rice that tumble from her burrito. She puts three fat fingers to her lips, an attempt at modesty, and chews and chews. The rouge on her cheeks, clownishly thick, cracks and a wet flap of tortilla falls into her lap. He looks at it, at her, then at me, and sinks even lower, thumbing the cleft on his chin that lends him an unearned perspicacity.

His pomaded mop, Vantablack in the dim light of the joint, is coiffed with the utmost care, over and back in a flamboyant sweep; he pats it like you would a hot electric range. But his shirt is too big—there’s a gap between neck and collar, which is yellowed with sweat and tired. It is second-hand, one of two on loan from a former employer, who, on an nth-generation facsimile, in the box labeled “Reason for termination,” recorded without emotion, “repeated indiscretions and tardiness.” His gal licks her plate, blows him a kiss and splits.

He turns, motherless again, and stands transfixed before a high-definition aerial shot of some sprawling Asian megalopolis, the camera slowly descending into a blinking cacophony of black glass and steel plunging out of fog. It cuts, retreats, and the loop repeats. He watches it again and returns, smirking with adolescent mirth. An eyebrow asks, You gonna drink this? He wants to be surrounded by beauty. Forbidden beauty. At home, on his nightstand, is a single book: “How to Achieve Multiple Orgasms.”

At closing time, desperate for a piece of ass, he’ll charm you into playing “banker,” and craftily withdraw funds for one last round. And you’ll oblige, desperate for a piece yourself. The lights go up. His shoes are untied and he reeks of a cheap chemical spray. In the foyer he strikes a kind of decadent pose, simultaneously priggish and artless (elbow out, thumb through a belt loop, foot turned out like a gangly ballerina), and leans into a window. Not to see, but be seen—his reflection, primped to taste, complies.

For his face is the ticket, to bed or bar and all the people in between. People going places.

Image: Leiter, Saul. The Kiss. 1952.

“Albania is beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring.” How many journalists have the gall to begin a story like this? One, long deceased, I’d wager.

His name was Joseph Roth. Born on the bleeding edge of the Habsburg’s Austro-Hungarian empire, in what is now Ukraine, he spent much of his working life in Germany observing and remarking upon the milieu of decadence and decay and, ultimately, madness between world wars. Roth composed a formidable body of fiction, but he also introduced to the English-speaking world the feuilleton, the slight piece of entertainment, gossip or criticism that he wrote by the boatload for Der Neue Tag, Prager Tagblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung, Neue Berliner Zeitung and other papers of the day. The term now has the unfortunate connotation of “soap opera,” in France particularly, but for Roth the feuilleton, dozens of which are collected and translated by Michael Hofmann in The Hotel Years, was the sine qua non of journalistic soothsaying.

Relying on senses alone—“interviews,” said Roth, “are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas”—his little stories, two or three pages long at most, are a joy to read, each the equivalent of a well portioned dessert. This is literature, if not sheer poetry, in comparison to the antiseptic, matter-of-fact filler that pads the modern newspaper. He tells of churchgoers “smelling of jasmine, sex and starch”; of the fraternity man, a “slogan on two legs,” whose humdrum existence “resembles the underworld stirrings of incompletely deceased ghosts”; of a hapless stage clown whose show betrays his “fight against life, the brutal unremitting struggle against the resistance of everything in the world, the wickedness and unfittedness of things, the grotesque illogic of ordinary circumstance.” The stranger, the commoner, the invisible—Roth, with an uncommon sympathy, noticed the people swept aside by impersonal forces, by time and history, by the swastika. He noticed the profane absurdity of life, vanishing ways of being (“Will you ever be greeted like that again?”), cities “made of stacks of city, of bundles of towns” with “each street a gaping mouth.”

It’s dizzying. The scope and depth of his observations. And refreshing, to know that, in our age of insouciant narcissism, there once lived men—a man, at least—more interested in the lives of their neighbors. Roth, a Jew who owned virtually nothing and lived in hotels, was, in a sense—and despite a fatal alcoholism, an exemplary witness of Christ’s admonition to “become passers-by.” And a paragon of the responsible journalist. “What can I do,” he asked in the pages of Kölnische Zeitung, “apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit?”

Image: Meidner, Ludwig. Die Brennende Stadt. 1913.

Tag: feuilleton

The Grifter

Seeing This and That