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

— You think so?

Yes, and I can think only, if you call it that, I can think only figuratively, or subjectively: how the event, the episode, feels. Probably all of this is interconnected: my subjectivity, my weakness in objective analysis, my paucity of ideology—

— And of ideas.

And of ideas. Granted. It’s all one zone, one ever-changing, ever-recurring zodiac: personality, proclivity, vicissitude, act, character, rearing, perpetual zodiac.

— Do you know what you’re talking about?

Quite frankly, no.

— I think I have an inkling, though, one that breaks through the wall of your verbiage.

What?

— Unpremeditated too in this case. I do think that you wrote as explicitly as you did because you still are what you were. That the hold on you of what you were is, so to speak, still in force. Though your hard-won wisdom, or perhaps foresight, restraint, together with your depleted appetite, might make you, if not immune to those same temptations, at least resistant, more resistant than you were. Perhaps even to the point of distancing yourself from them, taking to your heels, the way that Saint Anthony did, who left his cloak in the harlot’s clutch. Who knows, you cannot, never will, recover, have not shaken, cannot shake, the brand you seared into yourself.

That’s why the explicitness?

— I think so. I’m almost sure of it.

Well. And what do you advise, Ecclesias?

— You might as well accommodate it.

It?

— What you were. Be it again you never can be.

You mean the danger of my being it again?

— Yes. And you already see that resisting it was to no avail. You set out in a first draft without a sibling. Ineluctably your sister forced her way into your narrative, strange, even bizarre though it may be for one to commit sibling incest without mentioning a sister, at least in the beginning. You see what a fix you’re in now that the truth has made its way to the fore. You’ve lopped off the beginning of your yarn; you’ll have to make amends some way. So powerful a shaping force in your life simply would not drown.

I had hoped when I was through, when all this sordidness was over, to introduce her, portray her as another character. .

— As it was, you were left with a lopsided tale. Anyway, to conclude, it would be folly to repeat the error again. So make a clean breast of what you are. It’s perfectly evident you can’t do otherwise, because you’re no other than you were, though you’re other than you were—

All right. All right. All right.

— Or dangle in some surrealist limbo.

All right. All right. So now I maneuver in double jeopardy, double-furtive, double-scurvy, through incest-and-a-half. Soror. Sobrina .

— Yes. Doubly fecund and doubly fertile. Also doubly liable to indictment for statutory rape.

I do thank you, Ecclesias.

— Never mind. Incest cum suror —can you supply the ablative?

And so it came to pass that he had really screwed her. And no one had noticed, no one had guessed. She had gone back inside the kitchen to rejoin the others. Oh, she knew, she had wanted it, she feigned dummy-blandness. She’d never tell. Nearly hadn’t told him about the painter, except — as if he’d back off, constrained in deflowering her. But that sonofabitch of a house painter. . Nobody home, and the plump pullet waggling her tail around. Down with his overalls, let the walls wait. Balls for the walls, and pop goes the cherry-o over his overalls. . All right. Ira tried to put his thoughts in order. Jesus, only fourteen years old, but down went your kasha-colored secondhand knickers. So what? Minnie was younger, just tickled sandwich-style — till that time once suddenly, oooh! So when could he go there again to visit Mamie? After Zaida went there to live; that would be praiseworthy. Laudable pretext, boy, keep the old codger company, hearken to his Talmudic disquisitions, commiserate with him in his widowerhood, in his hypochondriac ills.

But until then: let’s see.

IV

With the resumption of classes in the new year, the year 1925, Larry read a short story he had just written, with considerable help in plot from Ira, at the next scheduled session of the Arts Club, but he came away bitterly resentful at the contemptuous treatment his work had received at the hands of his fellow undergraduate members of the club. “The dumb bastards!” he stormed. “They never even saw the underlying significance of the story. The dumb futzes! Always preening themselves on being in the vanguard. It’s sheer empty bragging. They’re blind. Everything has to be so esoteric nobody knows what it’s about, and I’ll bet they don’t either. Just plain show-offs. Make a big impression by running down an honest piece of work.”

“Boy, I can’t believe it.” Ira listened sympathetically. “The parts you read to me sounded great.” He had never seen Larry so wrought up.

“Oh, no, they’re much too highfalutin for a straightforward piece of writing, a genuine short story.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“And do you want to know something? There’s an undergraduate in the club, Schneider — swell-headed. Upperclassman. Senior, you know the kind. A self-styled penetrating literary critic.” Larry’s wrath took the form of an unblinking stare. “You know what he did? He actually plagiarized an essay on Ezra Pound, and read it at the Arts Club as if it were his own.”

“Who?”

“Schneider! Snider! However he spells it,” Larry snapped.

“Oh. Snider. He must be a good poet.”

“No, Schneider’s the plagiarist. Ezra Pound, he’s the poet.”

“I think I remember the name now.”

“Schneider copied the whole thing word for word out of a small out-of-the-way magazine that he thought nobody else would read. Well, somebody did. Boris G. I told you about him. He’s in love with Edith. And the bloke was caught. Edith said he cried all over the place about it.”

“Wow. Sorry he was caught.”

“Yes. And he had the nerve to get up and say that my story was just an old wives’ tale. He plagiarizes an article, and he sneers at an honest short story.”

Ira felt he had to wait a few seconds to let Larry subside. “What’d the others say?”

“Snide. Like Schneider. Snotty. Anything to show off. Oh, they said the story shed no light on the modern condition, modern quandaries. Quandaries!” Larry repeated, deliberately theatrical. “It didn’t reflect contemporary attitudes. It could have been written in the nineteenth century. As if it wasn’t expressing anything universal. Hadn’t any value. What bull!” He slapped a phonograph cover. “ And it had a plot! Sin of sins. Can you imagine? Even though I explained at the beginning I was trying to do a tightly knit short story.”

“Yeah?”

“I read the whole thing to the family. They thought it was great. All right, say they’re not the foremost literary critics in the world. Edith read it. She thought it was good. She saw I was working with a symbol about past and present. But to these superintellectuals — as they think they are — the story was trivial. They couldn’t write one as good. That’s the truth of the matter.”

Again, as that day when he hustled soda at the Polo Grounds, Larry seemed prone to, seemed prepared to, dismiss adverse criticism. Was it because the critics belittled his ego, or wounded his vanity? Didn’t recognize his distinction, maybe. Ira couldn’t say. Unlike Larry, Ira realized, he had come to absorb humiliation almost as if it were his due.

“It was just a raw, a rotten exhibition of plain jealousy, that’s all it was. It was mean,” Larry inveighed.

“Yeah?”

“Especially that Percy-on-the-half-Shelley Markowitz, with his experimental poems about the sea-green sea and the hoar-gray hoar-frost. All kinds of Gertrude Steinish stuff. He—”