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

“As I recall, I sit with my little schoolmates in the darkened primary-school assembly room, the one I attended when we lived on 9th Street and Avenue D. I was about seven years old, the year 1913 (year between the disaster that befell the Titanic and the outbreak of the World War). In the lighted frame of a miniature stage on the assembly-hall platform, a Punch and Judy show is in progress. And while the darkened hall reverberates with the shrill laughter of the assembled kids at the spectacle of Punch belaboring clamorous Judy — who should give vent to heart-rending sobbing but me. I bawled so loudly, I had to be removed from the assembly room. I still recall one of the schoolteachers bending toward me at the end of the row of seats, and with kindly forebearance signaling to me to get up, and come to her. ‘He’s hitting her!’ I blubbered as the teacher escorted me out of the assembly hall. ‘He’s hitting her!’

“I alone saw it in that light. I wonder why? I don’t think it was pure compassion on my part that led to the anomalous outcry — I was an aggressive enough little tyke. Rather, it was that the belaboring of one puppet by another provided altogether too faithful a reproduction of Pop’s often insane beatings of me. Provocations I must have afforded in plenty, without any doubt. But the little man, pathetic, deeply troubled little man, frustrated by his inadequacy, haunted by fear of ridicule, undoubtedly a rejected child himself, lost all self-control in administering chastisement. He went almost berserk, seized the first scourge within reach, stove poker, butt of horsewhip, wooden clothes hanger. Mom, in fact, always maintained that the peculiar inward crook of the pinky of my left hand resulted from my trying to ward off some flailing blow. If nothing was at hand to flog me with, he yanked me up from the floor where I lay groveling under his blows, yanked me up by both ears, threw me down again, and trampled me. He himself — scared, resentful, unstable, little man! I have made mention before, in my novel, how I would stand in front of the long, black-framed pier glass, the same one we brought from the Lower East Side to Harlem, admiring the indigo-blue welts on my back. I am certain Mom must have saved me from being permanently maimed, or saved my life perhaps, on more than one occasion, by sheer physical intervention, grappling with Pop, for which she would have received blows herself. So I howled with terror when Punch battered Judy.”

Thus he had written, the Ira of only five years ago. And he could have added that the assault by one puppet on another on the little stage might also have called to mind the sometimes violent quarrels between Mom and Pop, when they came to blows, when they threw the contents of coffee cups at each other — and when Ira and his little sister Minnie cowered under the table, and wept in fear. Punch walloping the vituperative Judy; Pop walloping Mom; Pop thrashing Ira. And so Ira sobbed at the fearsome verisimilitude. That was what he wrote, that was what he thought represented a valid reflection of childhood reality before, long before he ever dreamed he would or could bring himself to an honest admission of the true nature of his own adolescence, one which was undoubtedly shaped by much of the violence of his childhood.

It was that interpretation which underwent a change. It changed because of a reorganization of ethos that changed the former personality and viewpoint. The reason he blubbered at the sight of Punch beating Judy — Ira was now convinced — was not primarily that the act recalled his own savage chastisement at the hands of Pop, or those ugly, violent quarrels Pop sometimes had with Mom, especially in the cheerless penury of those earliest days on Essex Street and Henry Street. But rather that he was already deficient in the average child’s ability to discriminate, to distinguish the virtual from the real. Surely other children were present in the assembly hall that day who must have been chastised as severely as he, or witnessed as harrowing scenes at home as those Ira had beheld; and yet they laughed noisily and unrestrainedly at the antics of the puppets. Was it because of lack of sensitivity that they didn’t identify with the ludicrous little figures on the stage? Or because they were better able to distinguish the actual from the imaginary? Ira was certain of the truth now: it was because in the minds of the rest of the kids present, a fair balance between emotion and intellect had already been struck. Ira lacked just that: an equilibrium between his feeling about a perception and a rational appraisal of it, in a word, objectivity.

It was difficult for him, on account of that very lack, to undo, as it were, adequately gainsay, what he had written five years ago. But to have done otherwise, to have accepted what he had written, without making the effort to convey his altered view of self, would have meant that he still envisaged that self as unchanged from the child he had depicted in his novel, passive victim of malign forces about him, susceptible, innocent sufferer of the wounds and spiritual havoc inflicted on him by a neurotic father and by a callous and hostile environment. He was not innocent, and the environment was not callous and hostile; these were facts he no longer could conceal from himself. The difference between the Ira of five years ago and the Ira of today, who revised the view of his predecessor into a view he deemed more just, stemmed from that negation; and that negation in turn was accomplished by the slow, agonizing denial of a previously consummated holistic metaphor. The very travail that went into forging the plausibility and holism of the metaphor also forged the shackles on the spirit of the artisan himself. They had to be broken. By that and that alone: the breaking or repudiation of the approved and the applauded. The Marxist-Hegelian negation of negation. At all costs, because only thus could he win renewal of self. In his case — Ira thought grimly — revision and renewal were accomplished not by an accession of greater powers of analysis, an enhanced gift of abstraction, though with the passage of years something like that must have occurred to a moderate degree. Rather, he had learned to sublimate feeling into fine sensibility, until it became a more reliable, a keener, judge of reality than his dubious sagacity.

“And Pop [Ira reverted to the 1979 typescript] — memory harbors a few, tender recollections of Pop too, rare but precious. We climbed up to the roof of our house on 9th Street, he and I. We stepped through the roof door into the limpid vault of October sky. We located the chimney of our kitchen stove, spewing smoke from the woodfire Pop had kindled there. He had already bought a pair of calves’ feet in the kosher butcher store, the small hooves still on them, and with a scrap of wire tied about them, he suspended the calves’ feet within the chimney. They were to be smoked. For how long a time they were thus processed I no longer recall (until the small hooves came off, I think); nor how Mom prepared them afterward for the table. The entrée was called pechah in Yiddish: calves’ feet in aspic, I daresay would be the equivalent in English, a quivering, amber mass savory with smoke and spice, and served on slices of toasted, stale challah impregnated with whole cloves of garlic rubbed into it. Much relished by all of us: pechah , savory Galitzianer token of rare paternal companionship.

“Again, though the recollection is almost too faint to descry, Pop and I are sitting on the barrier timber at the end of the dock jutting into the East River. In one sense, where we are sitting is a continuation of 9th Street into the East River. In another sense, it is where East 9th Street ends, and a cobblestone-paved, lopped-off block east of Avenue D begins. The day, a summer’s day, has been scorching hot, and now at last, supper over, the first shadows of twilight fallen, a cooling breeze blows toward us from the river. Other residents, immigrants or less recent arrivals to the New World, residents of the immediate neighborhood, are sprawled there too, certainly. But I am aware only of being with Pop, of the unusual pleasure of sharing a pleasant interlude with Pop, a brief interlude of relaxed amiability: to sit side by side with him on the massive, splintery, weathered timbers and look out across the river at low-lying, smoky Brooklyn, to watch a hempen-mustached tugboat chug by, butting into green water, and driving undulating rollers toward us; with what sinister sound they lap among the piles beneath the dock. Sitting there, one could get a view of the gas company plant a few blocks uptown, its buff-colored storage tanks like huge bass drums at the foot of a smokestack against the darkening sky. Infrequently, but worth waiting for, as if it were a pyrotechnic display for our diversion, a lurid shaft of flame springs from the top of the smokestack into the twilight’s dusty lapis lazuli, and flares, flares upward—‘Look, Pop. Look!’. .”