Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

His eye caught Moe, limping, big-nosed, down at the very lowest aisle. It was more than a mere aisle; it was the passageway between the box seats at the edge of the ball field and the first row of seats of the grandstand. His scorecard stint finished (“Scah-cod!”). At each gate, the shleppers , Benny Lass and Moe among them, had bawled in monotone at the incoming flood of fans, “Getcha scah-cod. Can’t tell the players without a scah-cod.” Moe had elected ice cream for his second item to vend. He seemed to cry his wares within a narrow range of seats, as if he were on a tether, limping a given distance to the right, then after a space, a pause, returning and limping to the left, his gaze lifted under his white visored hat. His mouth forming the words “ice cream,” inaudible through the mingled noise of intervening voices jeering, cheering, rooting, he stood transfixed at the center of his tether — for a single moment — and tore himself away, and traveled a long distance.

In direct sunlight too, he oscillated, the sun’s rays glaring on his tray of vanilla ice cream. What was wrong with the guy? What was the jibe they had made about him around the peanut hamper? Ira had forgotten to ask Izzy afterward. Moe was his name; that much Ira remembered. Curious, and guilty at having loitered so long, Ira walked down the steps, dutifully hawking his wares; and reaching the bottom, turned toward the section of grandstand Moe had been frequenting. Why? He hadn’t sold anything. Still wondering why, Ira reached the end of Moe’s seeming tour, and retraced his steps. Moe had kept looking up. So did Ira — and suddenly felt: a vertigo: a stunning inner gasp without a sound. The woman, not young, in her forties, not pretty, buxom — was she sitting deliberately with her thighs spread? Cunt, the word came unbidden to Ira’s lips. Big red cunt in a black muff that at the moment of spying engulfed him with desire, plummeted him in a sudden, swooning spasm. Like Moe, he couldn’t tear himself away, but did, had to. Secret that was stolen, evil, stealthy, yes, that — he went on, his head bowed, shaken by a kind of wildness, grimness: realization there at the foot of the packed grandstand. Look what he was. Look, where it was leading him, where it was dragging him, like the way he got started, that same feeling all mixed in it, not stealing silver pens, but right in his inside, like his will, like the thing he wanted. That way: lurk, waylay, oh, Jesus. Why did he have to hear about Moe, see him do that? Why always that goddamn accident he was always in the way of, like he was set for it to happen? Jesus, that was exciting, that was exciting.

Moe approached, limping on crippled foot, his big Jewish nose prominent — and his eyes, as though he were suffering, suffering, his eyes seemed like red-rimmed, great, sick circles of crimson around terrible sadness. The vanilla gobs of unsold ice cream cones in his tray were all part melted, had begun to sink below the rim of the cone. That’s all he sold ice cream for; that’s all he lived for. Jew, Jesus, homely crippled Yid. But you’re worse than him—

“Hey, fella! You got a cold grape soda?” Reality, hearty American reality, boomed out from three rows up.

“Grape? Yeah. Huh? Grape soda?”

VII

He welcomed the electronic routine of the computer, recording date and time and the code for the eighty-column print on the monitor. Ecclesias, his friend, both his friend and life-support system, helped bring him back from the past — that would be the simplest way to say it — bring him back from that complex confusion, loss, anxiety, frustration of those years before M, and even after, those years, long years of grievous depression and literary desuetude in Maine. These were the interminable years of immobilization. He hadn’t felt that way in a long time, not for months, but once again, as so often in the past, a conjunction of circumstances had brought it on. And he had dreamed too, dreamed most of the night, it seemed, apprehensive of what he would do next morning, how to start the next day’s work, sorting plans, proposals, introductions. No, he had weighed returning to beginnings: prefacing the beginning of his work in progress with a foreword. But no, that would never do; that was like a reformed drug addict — or even cigarette smoker — saying to himself, “Now that I’ve given up the drug, the weed, just to show how free I am of it indeed, I’ll tantalize it, toy with it, flout it by trial.” Anybody, even a fool, would know that wouldn’t work.

He had considered prefacing the day’s work by saying as much. Or, discarding preface, eschewing names and exordium, and beginning in media res , proclaiming: no, James Joyce, the bastard is like a literary black hole. You aren’t meant to go on writing after that, after you’ve come in contact with him. You can’t escape him, once you’ve entered his stupendous gravitational field; you’re lost, caught in the vortex of the event horizon where time piles soon to stop. And that’s what he tried to do, that Pied Piper of Dublin, make time stop, erect so colossal a roadblock against change, there could be nowhere left to go, nothing left to do, except stand before his works, his image, to worship him as icon — such was the monstrous immensity of the man’s ego. And he had just that kind of submissive votary in his avid exegete Stuart Gilbert: every fault of his fetish became a hallowed attribute, every weakness, every dodge, every cop-out, a stroke of genius. .

Ira had in the previous month set himself the task of reading Stuart Gilbert’s explication of Joyce’s Ulysses ; and that had been its effect — to throw him under the sway of the sorcerer again, him whom he had so explosively, so violently repudiated, repudiated to the pitch of irrationality. Repudiation had begun seething in him ever since Moira P, professor of Irish studies at UNM, had nominated Ira as the guest of honor at the Joyce festival to be held in Albuquerque. It was in celebration of Bloomsday that the festival was held, and it was on Bloomsday that Ira, the erstwhile Joycean disciple, had reached the point of rupture with his great master. It was exactly on Bloomsday that James Joyce’s Jewish Junior had blown his top. He would! What a time to kick over the apple cart. But he had to. Like all revolutionary, drastic rectifications, whether of soul or of society — or of tecton — his readjustment had gone to extremes, gone to excess, before he regained any sort of equilibrium. He had gone off the deep end. He felt embarrassed by it, but it couldn’t be helped, or rather, couldn’t be recalled.

And why the rupture? That was the important thing, far more important than the form it took, its immoderation. Why the rupture? Because of the clearly felt, the profoundly felt, need to bring to an end the self-imposed exile within himself, come to grips with the new reality of belonging, of identifying and reuniting with his people, Israel. The vanities, the insanities, of Joyce, for so they seemed to Ira, despite all the extraordinary artifice, the prodigious virtuosity, the verbal interlacing — or what to call it? — circuitry, intricate upon intricate, interconnected inlay, unbelievable in its cunning as the network on a ceramic chip, all served to conceal the fact that the human element, the interchange, the unavoidable confrontation between man and man, man and woman, especially with regard to the latter as intellectual equals, bringing into play respect for their minds as well as amorousness for the sexual roles, without both of which true tenderness could not be felt, nor delineated — was never addressed in Ulysses .

One and all, men and women, to him whose false superiority consisted of his supreme virtuosity of the word, as if that alone ordained him high priest of beauty and truth — and that alone was enough to relieve him of any responsibility to his fellow humans and to his folk — to their aspirations, their centuries of suffering and their struggle. His virtuosity obviated all kinship. Oh, there were a hundred indictments he could hurl at Joyce; and reading Stuart Gilbert’s salaaming adulation, ground-kissing obeisances, incited a hundred more. On every page: commencing with the scarce nominal Jew that the great Guru foisted on the reader, a Jew without memory, without wry anxiety, exilic insecurity, not merely oblivious of his heritage, but virtually devoid! Of the Kishinev pogrom the year before, nothing, of Dreyfus, nothing, nothing to say to Dlugacz, or whatever his name was, the Hungarian butcher, no sally about the pork kidney: was it kosher? No inference, no connection between a newspaper offering plots in Palestine and the possibility of a Jewish community in Dublin. No recall of Friday candles, no recall of matzahs . Jeez, what a Jew, even one converted while still a juvenile — no cheder , no davening , no Yom Kippur, no Purim or hamantashen , no barucha , no Hebrew, no Yiddish, or naught but a negligible trace. And despite the lack, daring to depict the Jew’s “stream of consciousness,” the inner flow of a Jew’s psyche, an Irish quasi-Marrano of the year 1904. What unspeakable gall that took, gall and insufferable egotism! Gall and ignorance! And Madame Tweedy, out of a “Spanish”-Jewish mother. Had Joyce even looked at Sephardism, Ladino, the Inquisition — let alone, for all his highly touted erudition, Yiddish, Hebrew, or Chaldee, as the truly erudite Milton termed Aramaic? Didn’t Mama remember anything either to tell her half-Sephardic daughter about? Not a brass candlestick, not a dreidel , a challah on Friday night, the agony of 1492, the expulsion? No. As long as Mama’s name was Lunita, satellite of her Gaia-Tellus daughter, shoyn genug, wunderbar! Torquemada, the quemadero , the auto da fé , what was that? Consider, Master Jew-Joyce, the effect of the altercation with the Citizen (when Bloom was actually at his Jewiest — and note: when presented from the outside , the outside!), wouldn’t that have devastated you the rest of the day, hung over you like the ancient pall of exilic woe? And here was the difference, aye, the crucial difference, between your Irish Catholic self, qua-Jew, and the genuine article. Bloom would have gone home to his wife, even if she was cuckolding him, if he loved her, or she him, even a little, for the comfort she might give him (she was “part” Jewish, you know), for all that he suffered, outcast among the gentiles, a Falasha, alien, even though she had descended from a converso? Granted that Molly were totally a shiksa , she would have consoled him; she would have understood something by now of the Jewish condition — not to the extent that Ira’s beloved gentile M understood, but after these many years, something, something, of the Jewish plight. Instead of turning to her, Bloom did what Joyce himself would have done, treated a wife like an appurtenance, slack-Irish, never thought about the thing again — by the master artificer of allusion, of interspersal, of intertexture, juggling color and orgon, art and rhetoric and logo. Instead, the Yid is farcicalized (as Pound observed, calling Joyce anti-Semitic, the very cream of the jest, coming from Pound). Instead, the earth shakes as Bloom flees via hansom cab, the seismic shocks registered at grade 5, at the observatory. All of a sudden, gratuitous goyish flapdoodle of Elija Bloom ascending to heaven at an angle of forty-five degrees, like a shot off a shovel. Who said that? Joyce himself. Why? Yes, why this intrusion, this irrelevant commentary on his own story, and by the most self-conscious, superb literary craftsman of his time? And the most notably “tolerant” of Jews in an age rife with intolerance? Yes, why? First and foremost: failure of courage, the courage of sensibility, without which, as Eliot said in different words, there could be no great art; cowardice in the contemplation of violence, even if the man himself might be physically afraid, no matter. And all this rationalized by his championing of so-called Aristotelian stasis, when what he actually meant was fear of contemplating violence, violence at every stage the usher of change, of development, of maturation, of casting off the old, of growth into the new — resisting all this, until finally, he wove himself a chrysalis, a verbal shroud called Finnegans Wake . Cowardice, that disguised its shrinking under Olympian buffoonery: at the very moment of truth, twisting the knife in the Jew in his quandary, in his millennial Diaspora, with gratuitous burlesque temblor, burlesque Ascension in chariot of fire, all this in the name in fidelity to gigantism, to Cyclops, Polyphemus. Bahl Pound saw through it, cagey, crusty Pound, in spite of all his batty political economy and his loony anti-Semitic “usura,” a man. A man worthy of respect — and sympathy too — so Ira felt — for the stupefying torment and remorse the realization his own monumental misguidance inflicted on him. One glimpse — had Joyce permitted himself that, had he summoned up the courage to take one glimpse into the harried Jewish soul, pariah and scapegoat of Europe — and the author’s whole Homeric house of cards would have tumbled to the ground. Nay, more than that: he would have begun to grow up, develop, change, he would have begun to win the state of mind of a modern man. He would have liberated himself from the self-imposed constriction of myth, freed himself from his Procrustean spoof, and sued for reunion with his folk. It wasn’t the nightmare of history from which he was trying to awake; it was the daylight of the present he fought not to awake to.