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

The 1924 Olympics were to be the culmination of Farley’s career as a sprinter. Against all expectation that in college and with greater physical maturity, his running ability would reach new heights, the contrary took place: he sank into mediocrity — and obscurity — never placing better than third, and in the end, not even that. He had peaked at the age of nineteen, and by his twenties had “burned out,” as the expression went.

Burned out. Ira shifted eyes away from the monitor. Whatever the expression actually signified, psychologically, physiologically, he knew what it meant, just as everyone else did. He knew what it meant as far as his own forte was concerned. As novelist he too had plummeted into oblivion.

— Was that the intent of this lengthy digression? An excursion into homily?

To be sure. That I and an appreciable number of my talented literary contemporaries would experience the anguish of “burning out” seems to me singular enough. But that the same thing would happen to a youthful runner before he reached his majority is astonishing, is it not? Burned out. He had one chance, Ecclesias, and only one chance; it was all he would ever have.

— Unlike you, his growing old in wisdom would do his legs no good.

Any more than it did mine. I’m curious to know whether he’s still alive. I’m more than curious. I think when I next get to New York, if I do, I shall look up the telephone number of the Hewin Funeral Parlor, assuming it’s still extant.

— Do that. As a matter of fact, all you need do is pick up the phone, and ask Directory Assistance for the telephone number of the Hewin Funeral Parlor in New York.

Yes. Though I doubt I shall.

Ira gave a copy of his only novel to Farley’s mother, soon after it was printed, sometime in 1935. Farley was in Boston then (he had attended Boston University, a Catholic school, Ira believed). His brisk, brown-mustached father had died, and the funeral parlor, still in the same location, which was rapidly becoming black demographically, had passed into the hands of Farley’s older brother, Billy. His mother sat in the empty funeral parlor upstairs, sat in a rocking chair, on the sandy rug, still the same quiet-spoken nunlike woman, wearing the same gold-framed eyeglasses, the heavy down quite gray on her upper lip. Resigned. She accepted the book in the absent Farley’s name. And Ira dreaded to think of the shock that her perusal of the book would give her.

— Why don’t you call him?

Well. . By brooks too broad for leaping the rose-lipped girls are laid. . Shall I delete?

— You ought to.

Ira sat many weeks later in the front room of the flat in Harlem, on a summer’s day, a Sunday in early August, and spread in front of him a sheet of lined paper on the glass-topped table. It was one of the elegant and newly acquired pieces of living-room furniture, bought at an unheard-of price from Mom’s affluent cousin Brancheh, because that kind of furniture had already gone out of style. He could only make token resistance against a foregone conclusion: the letter he was about to write to Cornell declining the scholarship. He read once again the request for an early reply, once again the reminder that part-time work was available at the university toward earning dormitory fees and meals. Pop — Ira tried to shift responsibility — had reneged, with typical hemming and hawing, on his first, impulsive, generous offer, an offer made in the flush of pride at his son’s outstanding achievement, one that took Pop completely by surprise, even as his ensuing magnanimity took Ira completely by surprise. Pop had initially volunteered to provide his son with a new wardrobe, offered to pay the railroad fare to Ithaca, to defray expenses for Ira’s first six months at Cornell. . But now he wasn’t sure he could afford the added expense that would accrue from Ira’s living away from home. There was an expression in Yiddish that summed up that kind of hemming and hawing, that combined the two verbs into a single one: into a kind of evasive snuffle connoting far more than did the English words, singly or both together: Er funfet shoyn . Pop funfeted .

Ira read the rough draft of his letter over again, meditated, picked up his fountain pen. His heart heavy with renunciation, he gripped the pen with fingers deeply ingrained with plumbing grime, and made corrections in the rough draft. He refined his craven reply. For craven it was, formulated by a mind that knew itself craven, craven and puerile, devoid of self-reliance and initiative. He regretted very much, he wrote, but he had to decline Cornell’s generous offer of a four-year scholarship. Parasitic, fresh from this very Sunday morning’s skulking, nasty lechery gratified on Minnie, he would rather stay home, stay tied to Mom’s apron strings, apron strings that afforded far more latitude than she ever dreamed of, far more leeway for sordid gratifications. He would rather stay home. Why part with all that? And give up his snug and complacent dependence on Larry, on affluent Larry, on charming Larry? Give up his friendship? Nah. Nevertheless, for all the cowardice and pusillanimity inherent in his abnegation of the scholarship, still, stirring within him he seemed to sense (was it an illusion?) an intimation of some kind of undefined foreknowledge, an inkling of a direction in which he had to go, and the direction in which he had to go was the direction of his present choice. Within the murky slough of his self-indulgence, he seemed to discern that if he had any hope of escaping from his abject slavery to his contemptible personality into some kind of freedom or self-respect, then he had to cling to Larry, which meant that he stay home and attend CCNY.

He declined the scholarship, couched his fateful renunciation in words written on another sheet of blue-lined paper, words shaped by a thick-nibbed fountain pen. He left the house with the two-cent stamp affixed to the sealed letter, and mailed it in the wide-mouthed slot of the cast-iron letter box on the corner lamppost opposite Biolov’s drugstore. The counterweighted lip uttered a cast-iron snicker as the letter box engulfed the white envelope.

I

How beautiful, how glorious, the first hour or two spent in the environs of CCNY was! An academic cornucopia it seemed, so bountiful and promising from the outside he was convinced that he had made the right choice after all. The early-autumn afternoon on campus that day in 1924 was nothing short of entrancing. While he waited his turn to register for courses, he tramped over the dry, fallen leaves on Convent Avenue in upper Manhattan, trampling on the multitudes of crackling leaves to the east of the college in the shadow of the white and gray Gothic buildings, benign Gothic buildings sedately housing promise of wisdom and higher learning that would yet raise him above himself into a confraternity of serene and meditative peers. Trampling on the leaves on Convent Avenue, he felt an onset of euphoria, a veritable beatitude at the thought of the great transformations that would be wrought within him inside those white and gray Gothic walls. Change, change, the shedding of his abominable self, that was what he wanted most. Surely that would begin as soon as he registered: perhaps a new, an elevating, a desirable future would commence right here. At last.

He looked about to preserve within him, he hoped, this treasured moment: behind him spread the bare ground of the college playing field, behind him the pale tan parapets of the great Lewisohn Stadium. Before him were the black steel pikes of the barrier separating the heights on which the college and he stood from the declivity of the small park just below, with its green benches and gray outcrops of rock, its boulders and trees and brown leaves drifting down on the slope and the walks beneath. And the city opened up before him, as if at his feet, all below and beyond him, three boroughs in view at once, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, in their different directions, their rooftops at all levels, chimneys, smokestacks, and spires. Overhead, tenuous smoke streaked the dome of heaven. Everything seemed propitious, seemed an omen of great future consummations. He was still going to major in biology. He might still become a scientist of renown, yes, in time separate himself from the object of his shamefulness, find a normal course for his libido, redeem himself. In an hour or two he would take the first steps toward realizing the felicitous opportunities circulating within those cloistered sanctuaries of study housed in gray and white stone rearing up into the pure azure above them.