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

— Do you realize what you’ve done? What you did, I should say.

Not till this very moment, Ecclesias. It has certain order to it, hasn’t it? Well, the plumber’s helper, and his perhaps unattended first cousin, next in line, having more or less slaked desire on his sibling earlier in the day. No, the whole thing, not to pun, springs from memory: of the nasty ditty about not being a plumber, nor a plumber’s son. And the all-too-obvious, smutty conclusion. Bear with me.

It was midafternoon when he finished, an execrable draft, barely legible, even to himself, particularly the last two pages, scribbled in the furious haste of completion. He sat quietly relaxing, exultant with consummation, whose fervor he could now afford to let drain away. It had to be typed — not only for the sake of legibility; it deserved typing. He felt so oddly proud of it, elated by it, complete justice could only be done to it by having it typed — typed rather than merely rewritten in ink. Minnie was the only one he could have turned to for the favor, and of course she would agree: but where was she? Beyond appeal. He could have dictated it to her. Too late even for that by the time she came home. He might as well do it in ink, in his best penmanship, which was lousy anyway, but would have to do. Or beg Dickson for another day. Lose a few credits maybe, as penalty. He was willing to accept that, God, yes, but the manuscript had to be legible. Typewritten it might mollify Dickson to some extent, which was another reason for typing it. It would make the reading easy; and that way he might get by his not adhering strictly to all the letters of the law, his small deviations from the strict confines of the cut-and-dried “how-to.” His work had taken a few skips out of bounds. Small ones. And if he missed the deadline besides — ouch! Type it, type it. Make a few amends. Time? Ten minutes to three. He stood up. Type it yourself, goddamn it. Walk over to Mamie’s and type it on that ancient gummy Underwood, weighing half a ton, that Stella employed making out dispossess notices for her mother, or new bills of fare which the partners of the restaurant in Jamaica then mimeographed. Move your ass. Hoof it over there. You can do it before it gets too late.

Should he include it, delete it? Ira studied his typescript. Written when? When committed to the familiar yellow second sheets? He raised his eyes to the umber, grainy piece of cloth M had attached to the curtain rod from which the regular white curtain hung, in order to minimize the brightness of the sunlight coming from behind the monitor and directly into his eyes. Yes, when had he written the typescript? Ira retraced the years: evidently when he could still type on a manual typewriter, however ineptly, when his now weak and arthritic hands and fingers could then still abide the impact of the keys of the large manual Olivetti portable he had used in those days.

And when did that become too much for him? At. . about. . 1980 or ’81. So he was still able to pound away at the keys — until M insisted he buy an Olivetti electronic. (And that was only a halfway measure.) Anyway, he was still typing manually in 1980; that was five years ago. And he was then seventy-four years of age. What the hell was the odds, as his fifty-year-old Irish crony, back in the thirties, Frank Green, would have said. What’s the odds? Why do it? Well, just to see what difference there was between the Ira Stigman of five years ago and the Ira Stigman of today, the tone of his literary difference. Why not? And one would have to consider the role of Ecclesias too, credit him for any maturing of ideas, improvement in prose — and Ira believed there was — again in good part thanks to Ecclesias. He was so benign usually, caustic rarely, ever disposed to condone. “Tolle lege ,” Saint Augustine in spiritual crisis heard the voices of children crying: “Tolle lege ,” take up and read. That was in the days long before floppy disks.

It was important, this five-year-old prose that Ira was about to transcribe, it was important for another reason, now that he had made mention of Saint Augustine. It was important because he had divested himself of a formidable inhibition: he had admitted a sister into his narrative, something he hadn’t done in the draft on the desk beside him. He had been compelled, reluctantly, painfully, to make the inclusion; he had done so belatedly, in spite of himself, but eventually he had done so. And surely, prior to that, how different must have been the rationale of the narrative—“rationale” was a polite understatement, as Ira knew only too well. Once Minnie was admitted into the story, everything was different, drastically different, nay, it would be nearer the truth to say flagrantly different, self-revealing in approach, in treatment, in the contour of the narrative. How long it had taken him to square with the truth; how long he had clung to subterfuge!

“Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton [the original typescript began], and at least several score of other lesser bards invoked the Muse at the outset of their grand epics, that she might vouchsafe the poet the power of imagination, the poetic stamina to sustain his lofty envisaging all the way to its successful conclusion. Invoking the muse has gone out of fashion these days: Dante’s ’O Musa, O alto ingegno,’ or m’aiutate .’ Milton’s ’Sing, Heavenly Muse,’ Homer’s ’aeide, thea,’ are no longer heard. We don’t believe in the Muse any longer. Still I feel the need to advert to some source of spiritual replenishment that will enable me to carry forward the account of this nasty, muddled, contradictory, and confused life of mine. In one of the cantos of the Inferno , Dante describes with the horrible vividness of his genius the gruesome transformation that takes place between man and serpent, both of them two aspects of damned souls (for committing what sin I’ve forgotten). As the one stings the other, the two exchange roles, the two exchange form and function, the erstwhile viper now assumes human guise, pursued by the erstwhile human, now viper: a paradigm of the interaction between depravity of environment and the susceptible individual: De me fabula narratur .

“Instead of the Muse, I turn for inspiration and a sense of renewal to the Lower East Side — though God knows, I was already wayward enough there. Still, I felt at home there, shored and stayed by tenets I imagined inhered in the nature of things. I belonged . And therefore, everything I did, however wicked, was somehow endemic, indigenous, part of the general scheme, as was even Pop’s insensate corrections. (It was as a prank, and by my own volition, I dropped the milk dipper down into the third rail of the trolley — though it is true I had been previously initiated into the performance of the act by a couple of goyish gamins.) To repeat, I belonged. Therefore, nothing I did destroyed common norms, though I may have been guilty of their infraction. Escapade and punishment pertained to each other, and both comported with the Lower East Side consensus. In a way, I couldn’t do anything that vitiated my normalcy, and inclusion within normalcy equated to a kind of absolution. As robust an absolution as the ever renewing innocence that coursed like an ichor through my veins, and made me ready to accept any challenge.

“What scraps are these I evoke, gather, to give me fresh impetus for the long rueful journey ahead? Well. Trimmings, findings, in a word, remnants: vignettes and tableaux that for one reason or another I either overlooked or found no place for in my first novel about an immigrant childhood on the Lower East Side. Or perhaps, as so often happens, they ran contrary to my conception of the spirit of the whole: they didn’t fit, proved fractious (and perhaps, also, had they been accorded their due weight, a more viable model of a Lower East Side childhood might have emerged: viable, in the sense that it might have assured the author a longer writing career, a professional future). But — the ancient adage about the ill will has its application here — the previous exclusions of scrap and remnant now rescue me from redundancy.