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

“I haven’t seen you before,” the young undergraduate made overture.

“No.”

“I’m Nathan. That’s Tamara. That’s Leonard. That’s Wilma.”

“I’m Ira.” He nodded his head gauchely. “Ira Stigman.”

“English major?”

“No. Bio.”

“Do you write?”

“No, I happen to be a friend of somebody here. I go to CCNY.”

“Oh. City College?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you like CCNY? Any good courses?”

“You mean in English?”

“Yes. Or philosophy. The humanities.”

He wasn’t sure what they meant by the humanities, but he felt his benightedness too keenly to want to talk, to disclose his want of articulateness, his want of comprehension of more than elementary opinions. “I take English Composition 1. I’m just sittin’ here,” he said gruffly.

His reply had the effect he hoped for. After sharp surprise, they looked lingeringly askance, then divested themselves of interest in him. It was just as well. With nothing to communicate, he felt his isolation, and perversely preferred it intact: he was the obtuse and listless listener. Words crossed the table, and were crossed by others from nearby tables. Only a single time was his attention brought to a focus by what they were saying: when a spirited disagreement arose about a poet named Jeffers.

“He’s crazy!” someone asserted.

“No, he’s not.”

“That Tamar . And now, Roan Stallion . You’ve read it?”

“Of course.”

“What’s next? Pasiphae giving birth to the Minotaur?”

“Pacify? Why pacify?”

“Oh, come on. You know what I mean. Animal sex and incest mean something else to him. Man is sick.”

“ The man is sick. Jeffers is sick.”

“Oh, no, he’s not. He’s talking about man, introverted man.”

“Well, aren’t we all?”

“No. In general. And in general, I agree with him. Man is alienated from nature. Man is doomed.”

“I don’t think so. The further he gets away from nature, the better off he is. He became man only by getting away from nature. That’s why I say Jeffers is crazy.”

“That may sound clever—”

“It’s been so all along. What else does it mean to be civilized?”

“At least he doesn’t keep harping on the Jews, like Eliot,” said one of the young women, Tamara. “Jeffers does use my name, which happens to be Hebrew.”

“Oh, yes? Why? Any reason?”

“It means ‘date,’ the fruit, but it means something else — to Jeffers. It’s clear.”

“What?”

“Tamar in the Bible is raped by her brother.”

“I didn’t get that connection at all. You Zionists have all the Biblical answers.”

“You don’t have to be a Zionist to know that. She was King David’s daughter, and the whole thing fits into Jeffers’s incest symbol.”

Incest symbol . The way they used it, it didn’t mean anything. . a symbol? Putting a newspaper, Der Tag , under Minnie when she was bluggy, and then pitching it out the window down the airshaft, and scaring the rats scurrying. Now that was the real thing. Didn’t Mom look all over hell for it afterward, though, for the roman she hadn’t read yet to Mrs. Shapiro? Symbol, so all right, symbol. Symbol referred to something else. Referred to alienation — that fellow there said it — alienation? — getting away from everybody else. . sick introspection. . Maybe. So what’re you gonna do? You’re alienated. Yeah. “Where’s Der Tag ?” Mom kept hollering, accusing: “Did you see Friday’s Tag ?”

“Me? No. Not me. What do I want with Der Tag ?”

Ira tried not to steal glances at Edith, but couldn’t help it, and from time to time she caught his gaze before he could shift away, and she smiled at him, sympathetically, reassuringly.

Smiling winningly to gain attention, Edith, who, together with her guest, had seated herself on the dais a few minutes before, stood up. The poet they were privileged to hear this evening, she informed her audience, was undoubtedly familiar to the majority of them. She ranked as one of the most distinguished writers of lyric poetry in the country, rich and distinguished in her imagery, in her superb use of the poetic medium, her poetic meanings wonderfully compressed, and yet losing none of their singing quality thereby. Léonie Adams. And without more ado, she would turn the platform over to her. Edith expressed certainty all would find the evening a memorable one.

Followed scattered applause. The recital began. Léonie Adams arose from her chair, and with two slender volumes in hand, stepped up to the lectern; she opened the first of the volumes, a thin blue one, turned pages, pressed down the page selected, and yet without consulting it at all, she began reciting. Larry had praised her lyrics highly when he and Ira were engaged in writing the announcements of the recital—“Her poems really sing. You rarely come across such beautiful, really original imagery! She’s tops. I wish I had one of her books of poems here to show you. She’s way ahead of Edna Millay.”

And now she stood there, in front of everyone, a real poet, a poet in the flesh, reading her poems. Ira listened intently, lost and recovered meanings, lost them again, never truly grasping the intent of the whole. Nevertheless, however sporadic, he was moved. Even the fragments had a richness that made him wonder whether, given the book in front of him, poring over it and returning, he would grasp the meaning of a separate poem in something like its entirety, something like the way he grasped James Stephens’s “What Tomas Said in a Pub” in the Untermeyer anthology. Or trying to discover the essence of Walter de la Mare’s “Here lies a most beautiful lady,” or John Masefield’s “Cargoes,” nearly any poem there, like Sandburg’s “Fog”—oh, wasn’t that beautiful fancy Adams read just now: “The dream of flying would lift a marble bird.”

In the intervals while auditory attention lapsed, the visual replaced it. He studied the reader. She was pretty, short in stature, mature yet young, a short figure with a small head, small features contained in dark, bobbed hair. She was curiously built, though, almost as if her figure were at odds with itself. From the waist down, as her lower body appeared when she first stood up and from time to time when she stepped away from the lectern, her hips were chunky. Her face and torso were delicate, seraphic and delicate, but rested on a stocky base, strong, chunky hips, piano legs, as they were called. With her blue eyes set wide apart, and seemingly focused on an ethereal yonder, and with her soft, clinging, husky voice, she looked and sounded like a true poet, otherworldly and inspired — above the waist — and down below like any housekeeper. Could it be, Ira ruminated, the poet sort of borrowed from the centaur?

Murmurs of approval greeted the end of each poem. Though Ira failed to understand anything but lovely fragments, out of courtesy to his host, Larry, and in case Edith looked his way, he manifested appreciation, conveyed an immobilized rapture. He was slow, he was inveterately slow of mind — Ira palliated disappointment with himself at his failure to comprehend. He had to mull things over and over, he told himself — consoled himself once again — and then perhaps he might be able to fathom the meaning, or fuse the separate wonderful metaphors into a unity. Listen to her: “Since the salt terror swept us from our course”—that applied to him. Striking and unique juxtapositions of words, musical, labyrinthian in their evocation, if only he could encompass the significance of the whole. No, not the message. Whatever it was. The allusion. Yeah, yeah. When he read the Robert Frost poem about stopping by the woods in winter, he caught the central allusion of death and duty, he felt it within the context of the words themselves. Not this. Well, dummy that he was, what the hell could he do?