Endless Flight is the first biography in English of the novelist Joseph Roth. This is very surprising, since Roth’s short, violent life traverses some of the most compelling episodes in 20th-century European history. He was a supremely elegant, intelligent and clear-sighted writer, despite living out of suitcases, in hotel rooms, always on the run. If most of his novels are flawed in one way or another, they are all interesting in others.

He also wrote what must be one of the dozen greatest European novels, The Radetzky March, translated at least three times into English since 1933. (We are now lucky to have Michael Hofmann’s superb, comprehensive translations, which perfectly convey Roth’s native skill in language.) He dropped out of sight, even in Germany, after his death in 1939, but the first collected German edition of the novels appeared in 1956, which brought him back into currency, and interest in him has grown steadily ever since. Keiron Pim has done a good, solid job – but why hasn’t there been a biography before?

I suspect the reason is that the story is staggeringly depressing. Marvellous as his novels are, Roth proves a bracingly horrible presence as, in the last years, he descended into a sea of alcohol. (I commend the scholar who recently discovered that his bar bill at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna remained unequalled and unpaid.) He wrote a fair amount about good deaths, such as that of the old servant Jacques in The Radetzky March, who died upright and painlessly. Roth’s own end, in Paris at the age of 44, was not like that. He collapsed in a bar, his liver so distended that the malformation could be seen through his fur coat. He was taken off to the pauper’s hospital, where the doctors ill-advisedly withdrew all alcohol. He had to be tied to the bed, yelling for more brandy in solitary agony.

There was no money for a burial in Paris, so that took place on the cheap, in a suburban cemetery where he still lies. Nobody could decide whether he was Jewish or Catholic, a monarchist or communist – the representatives of Otto von Habsburg and the Communist party had an angry confrontation at the funeral. It’s somewhat surprising that anyone turned up, given how difficult and unreliable Roth had been to all those who tried to help him. Nowadays people seem to want their novels to be written by nice, or at any rate personally admirable, authors. They should read this biography, and then The Radetzky March, to see just how great a book a frighteningly unpleasant person could produce.

Roth’s life was only partly dictated by circumstances he had no control over; quite a lot of it was driven by his own terrible decisions. It looks rather like a phantasmagoric shadow of Hitler’s career, distinguished by being Jewish, as well as by his immense, disillusioned talent. He was born in remote Brody, in Galicia, now in Ukraine. He made his way to Vienna, like Hitler, with dreams of taking the world by storm through the creative arts, and then to Berlin. He was, it appears, the first novelist to mention Hitler by name, as early as 1923, in his novel The Spider’s Web. The Radetzky March was published four months before Hitler came to power, just in time to be burnt in the Opernplatz by Goebbels and his mob.

Initially, Roth was a superb journalist. His form was the feuilleton – an observational piece about a moment of life. One of the volumes of selected journalism translated by Hofmann is entitled What I Saw – and that’s exactly right. Roth, in life, talking about himself, was an appalling liar (he would threaten a longstanding friend who showed growing incredulity about his recounting of episodes from early life to a new acquaintance). In his work, however, there is a compelling truthfulness. Giving advice to an aspiring journalist, he said that his writing aimed to be both ‘eyecatching and load-bearing’, and that’s what it succeeds in being: angry, vivid and all but impossible to refute.

Some authors who lived through this time did their best to account for it with limited means, and are still of interest – Hans Fallada, Roth’s girlfriend Irmgard Keun, and his patron Stefan Zweig. Others, such as Thomas Mann or Hermann Broch, largely turned their gaze elsewhere. Roth is rare in being a writer of the highest technical command who wrote incontrovertibly about the history he lived through.

Much of Pim’s biography is made up of incidents of bad behaviour and unpleasantness. You had to put up with a lot from Roth. Maudlin self-pity was about the best you could expect (‘Of my last 17 novels, 15 have been forgotten’). When Zweig, a well-meaning, successful dilettante, tried to help, Roth took the money and went on insulting him. On one occasion, Zweig, observing the wreck of Roth’s clothes, paid a tailor to make him a new pair of trousers. Roth walked out afterwards straight to a bar and poured enough alcohol over himself to stain the trousers before meeting Zweig again. The aim was to show his benefactor just what he thought of his kindness.

Being a friend was bad enough, but having to work with Roth was still worse. His devoted editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung received letters from him explaining that everything in the newspaper, apart from Roth’s own column, was rubbish, and then discovered that Roth had signed up to write exactly the same sort of pieces for a Nazi-supporting rival paper. Poor old Zweig found out too late that he’d been dispatched to London to negotiate the rights to one of Roth’s books which had already been sold. It was just that Roth wanted to be paid twice. A publisher pointed out with pained politeness that last chapter of The Emperor’s Tomb –the unsuccessful attempt at a sequel to The Radetzky March – was identical to the last chapter of a previous novel, Flight Without End. Considering that Marlene Dietrich declared on its publication that her favourite novel was Job, Roth was remarkably successful in destroying his career simply by being horrible to everyone he met or worked with.

We are not going to meet or work with him, and the books are sublime, either in patches or, in the case of The Radetzky March, continuously. Even his last novel, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, is a deliriously funny and elegant fable of a street drunk to whom everyone keeps giving money for no very good reason. The Radetzky March remains a miracle – the story of the decline and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire seen through three generations of a military family. It is largely set on the empire’s remote edges, and has a quality of stillness and dreamy strangeness. But its details of the physical world are extraordinarily concrete, making even the wildest events utterly convincing – the mad officer at the farthest reaches practising alchemy, or the famous chapter that enters into the life and thoughts of the aged Franz Joseph, and ends with the drip on the end of the emperor’s nose. There is nothing in the world like it.

Pim’s achievement is all the more impressive when you realise that this life of the supreme novelist of place was largely written remotely, in lockdown. He somehow stays sympathetic through the worst of Roth, arguing that it was circumstances that destroyed the writer – though I continue to think that Roth would have been just as disagreeable if he’d lived in Totleigh Barton in the 1980s. There are some dutiful tutting noises about Roth describing the children of his black girlfriend as ‘piccaninnies’, and more about some doubtlessly awful misogyny. I have a factual correction: it’s very misleading to refer to ‘Otto Wagner’s’ Steinhof psychiatric hospital. Wagner only designed the hospital’s church, the most beautiful in the world. Another gripe is the long plot summaries of each of the novels, which seem unnecessary since they’ve all been recently published in English. But that’s a minor complaint.

This is, however, one of those biographies of writers where one wonders with real concern what the subject would have said about it. Perhaps it would have been greeted with the same words Roth gleefully wrote to his patron Zweig: ‘I am afraid I fear for your immortal soul.’ This may be the reason why prospective biographers have been deterred in the past – the sense that however good a service they might have rendered, it would always be in the face of that glowering, furious but accurately observing presence.