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

Boy, the guy was rich. His clothes, tweed jacket. That sheen on his skin, brought up delicate. He was the baby of the family, he said: that was why. .

Sky, open space of Columbus Circle hove into view. . Bermuda, Larry said he had spent so much time in Bermuda. Was that why he talked that way? About calabash pipes and Dunhill pipes, cost a fortune. And what was that Ethical Culture School where he said he went for a while? He had drama and ballet there. Not just dancing, two-step, fox-trot, shimmy. Ballet, gee. Where the hell was that jitney for the subway?

Life is real, life is earnest, Ecclecias. No? You never can be diverted, can you?

— Occasionally. You certainly managed to evade that snare. If I knew anything about the game, I’d say gambit, but that’s only another cliché.

You’re right. Any will do.

— Fairly adroit. You were virtually on the gaff, to vary the metaphor once again, but managed to escape. Having told you something about his immediate relatives, he asked you about yours. Which was only natural—

Oh, I expected to regale him with tales about my immigrant Zaida and Baba and uncles and aunts. And tales of the East Side.

— He asked you whether you had any brothers and sisters. That’s more to the point.

So he did. You see the fix I’m in?

— Then what will you do later?

What I did then. Yes, I have a younger sister. Let it fade.

— When will you admit her to the realm of a legitimate character, acting, active, asserting herself, an individual?

I don’t know, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write about her in all the emotional dimensions she deserves. But I have to do something. I’ll have to: sometime opportune, in passing mention. . a flake of this terrible, unspeakable inter. . inter. . interlude. Ssss. Interplay, flay, slay, clay, lay. Curiously enough, though she was omitted altogether in my first draft, I arbitrarily, mind you, introduced her (and I shall come to it) with very little apology, as I remember, or ceremony, simply because to continue without her became unfeasible. So, you have your answer, Ecclesias, at least in part.

XVI

Came Friday, Ira simply absented himself from the gun room. Why waste time in lame excuses? He joined the millrace of schoolmates, out of the open front-door sluices, down the stairs. Larry was already waiting on the sidewalk corner.

Once more together out of school jurisdiction, where they were allowed to smoke a block away from the building. And now with a solid kernel of intimacy formed — formed and inviting augmentation — they crossed Tenth Avenue amid droves of schoolmates, and sauntered the more slowly to enjoy each other’s company through motley, clamorous 59th Street. Did Ira ever read modern verse? Larry asked.

“Wha’?”

“Modern poetry?”

Ira felt at a loss, puzzled. When did poetry become modern? Where was the dividing line? What the hell did he mean by that, anyway? When Ira had read The Idylls of the King, which was a pain in the ass, that wasn’t modern. He really thought — no, actually, he didn’t think about it, but if he were pressed for an answer, he would, well, come close to saying: how could anyone write a poem that was studied in high school, if he wasn’t already dead? Tennyson was dead. So was Leigh Hunt with his “Abou Ben Adhem.” Coleridge was dead, Coleridge of the wonderful Ancient Mariner . Shelley was as dead as the Ozymandius he wrote about. Keats with his “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” had died of T.B. Byron — everybody knew he kicked the bucket at Missolonghi. And The Lay of the Last Minstrel —ha, ha, ha — the Last Minstrel’s lay — Walter Scott was pushing up the daisies. They were all dead. Longfellow with his spreading chestnut tree, FitzGerald with Omar’s book of verses underneath the bough — poets you liked, or didn’t like, if you studied them in school, they were dead as doornails. Q.E.D. What the hell was modern verse?

“Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Larry prompted unasked. “Vachel Lindsey, Sandburg, Teasdale, Aiken, Robert Frost.”

Jesus, he didn’t want to appear too dumb; still, Ira had to admit he didn’t know any of the names. He didn’t know whether to adopt a contrite or bumptious stance. “I never heard of ’em,” he confessed.

“No?” Larry wasn’t in the least condescending. “I’ve got a copy of Untermeyer’s Anthology of Modern Verse . It’s a good introduction to modern poetry. Very good.”

“Yeah? Where’d you get it?”

“My sister Sophie gave it to me for a birthday present.”

That wasn’t exactly what Ira had intended to find out by his question, but—

“I could lend it to you,” said Larry. “I’d love to lend it to you, if you’re interested.”

“I guess so.” People bought, gave, owned books; was he so stupid not to know it? Or betray not knowing it? “I’m used to going to the library,” he explained. “That’s why I asked.”

“I don’t know whether public libraries have the Untermeyer collection or not. But one thing I’m sure of, you’d enjoy it.”

“Yeah?”

“‘Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,’” Larry recited. “That’s Vachel Lindsay: ‘Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, pounded on the table, beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom’—I’m not sure of just the way it goes—‘Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom! ’”

“Chee!” Ira was spellbound. It was like an incantation. “That’s modern? That’s how modern poetry goes?”

“Isn’t it wonderful? The rhythm: ‘Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black, cutting through the jungle with a golden track—’”

“Wow!”

“I thought you’d like it.”

He felt the familiar, the commonplace, become puzzling. The street opened up toward him, throbbing, as if he were at the flaring end of a great horn, overwhelmed by an unexpected confusing crescendo. Buildings seemed to skew about. Wearisome perspectives shed their gadding and humdrum crusts. What did it mean? It was something like the way Larry transformed from gentile to Jew; only this went the other way. What did this mean, Larry reciting modern poetry? How could he be so coequal, so at home in all this; as if it were an everyday going-on, as if he were part of it, used to it? Modern poetry. Here and now. All around.

“‘I saw God! Do you doubt it?’ You’ll like this one by James Stephens,” Larry overflowed. “He calls it ‘What Tomas Said in a Pub.’ You know what a pub is. It’s English: a bar, a saloon.”

“Yeah?”

“‘Do you dare to doubt it? I saw the Almighty Man! His hand was resting on a mountain! And He looked upon the World, and all about it—’”

Black youngsters in tattered garb, like stamens surrounding a gangly adolescent girl on the stoop of a tenement along the route to the subway on 59th Street, giggled at the spectacle of Larry’s large white hand in wide, unrestrained sweep in keeping with his recitation.

And Ira, dazed by a new kind of, new kind of what? A new kind of meaning, of being, of feeling, almost like coming out of a labyrinthian basement into daylight. That was it: it was today! “It’s like that?”

“Yes.” Larry smiled with pleasure. “Did it take you by surprise?”

“I’ll say. You mean all these writers — these poets — they’re alive? I know it sounds foolish. But that isn’t just what I mean. I mean—” He was silent, a long perplexed interval. And then in nearly painful revelation, “It’s going on. That’s what I mean. Right now.”

“That’s right. I know what you mean,” said Larry. “People are still writing poetry. It didn’t end with Longfellow. Or with William Cullen Bryant. ‘Thanatopsis.’ Or Idylls of the King . That’s the trouble with the way English is taught in our high school. Any public high school, nowadays.”