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

“Yes, sir.”

“An impression of the subject, an impressionistic article, was precisely not what I asked you to write, but a straightforward work of exposition. You’re a science major, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you’ll have to be satisfied with the low mark you’ll receive for your term paper. And, I’m afraid, in the course as well.”

But no reproach, no matter what the magnitude, or potential penalty, could diminish the swell of exultation Ira felt. He was going to be in The Lavender ! He! A nobody! Wow! What an exoneration of his nonentity! The years, the hours, the days enduring the sullen shlemiel who was himself. And worse than than: a shlemiel perpetrator. Reprieve. A rift of reprieve. Ah, wait till he told Mom, told the family — Mom’s bosom would heave with joy. And what would Pop say? He’d have to admit that there was something more to his son than the kalyikeh he appeared to be. And Larry? And Edith and Iola? The magazine was due to appear during exam week, but he couldn’t wait to tell them! Wow! Minnie would beam: my marvelous brother! Exploit that adulation for what it was worth, of course. Oh, boy! And Stella — she was too dumb, malleable, to require extra incitement. Admire, go ahead and admire. And with vast, cynical gratitude, accept Mamie’s proffered reward of a dollar afterward: “Here. Indigent collitch bhoy. Take.” Jesus, wasn’t the world wonderful!

He looked hopefully at the typescript at his elbow. Where was there an opening, an ingress in the block of prose? Or an unobtrusive place to justify end to beginning? There wasn’t any really. So. . grab the first convenient starting point:

Originally when Ira would tell the story “The Impressions of a Plumber,” he always treated the sequel as the climax. And what was the sequel? He received a D in the course. What a delicious contrast, he felt, between having won inclusion of his term paper in the college Lavender , received inclusion in the college literary quarterly because of its literary merits, or, at least, because of its narrative merit, and the ignominious D grade he received for the course in English Composition 1. That sequel no longer seemed now the climax, risible and paradoxical though the whole incident might be.

No. That, and all he envisaged — and which was realized too, for the most part — seemed, at this remove, anticlimax. The true climax was of a twofold nature. One, and perhaps the less important one, was Larry’s barely concealed hurt, not resentment, hurt, expressed in the perceived attitude toward him. He was almost aloof, he was perfunctory in his compliments, in his congratulations. Larry was too kind and generous a person to be envious or discomfited; instead, he was hurt, he was reserved. His manner reminded Ira of that time in their senior year when they shared Elocution 8 together at DeWitt Clinton, and Ira had been excused from class for the balance of the period by Mr. Staip, as a reward for the excellence of his address on William E. Henley’s “Invictus.” Larry had seemed disconcerted, as much by Ira’s unexpected infringement on purlieus he assumed were his, but more since he was doing so without credentials.

Oh, it was easy, Ecclesias — easy and unjust — for someone like me, fraught with guilt and self-hatred, to impute to Larry thoughts he may never have entertained: that I was some sort of apparition from the slums functioning ably in a cultural realm.

He should merely have said, the true result was of a twofold nature, one being Larry’s reaction. The other — ah! Not Edith’s flattering eagerness in reaching for the copy of The Lavender , when the sketch appeared in the last days of the college year. Nor the realization about Iola, awaiting her turn to read it, with a show of even greater eagerness — radiating pleasure and almost emphatic pride in this vindication of her judgment, as though the sketch were a disclosure of greater latency, developing under her implied aegis, in competition with Edith’s sponsorship of Larry. No, nor Mom’s flushed happiness, nor Pop’s noncommittal raising of eyebrows — ah, no. The other result, to which everything else became peripheral external, became subsidiary, was the impetus to an internal change, an internal change wrought in him as a consequence of the publication of something he had written.

Difficult to formulate, other than badly, and perhaps there was no need to formulate it at all, but he now realized that if there was anything he could do in his life, there was only one thing he had a chance of doing well. If Ira was to have a career, a future, if he had a definite bent, he now had only one: it was in the art of letters, in the craft of writing. The publication of his sketch disclosed, at least to him, that in spite of the booby negligence of its author to follow clear instructions, which had yielded instead to an inner urge, he had nonetheless written something that compelled recognition. The piece had evidenced a nascent literary ability. The accolade, the seal of approval, was bestowed on a piece of prose written not in accordance with Mr. Dickson’s directives, but on his own impulses. What was it those Spanish mariners shouted from the crow’s nest high on the mast — or soldiers too, from some height, the conquistadores — when they spied the first trace of land? “Albricias! Albricias!” Bounty! So with Ira. Albricias for the inner discovery.

Moribund from then on became the subject of biology, the career of zoologist. So this was what he had been groping toward all these years? Ever since leaving the Lower East Side, surly and bewildered by what the years were making of him — or unmaking. Unmaking and making of him this, and he never knew it. This was all they could have formed or fashioned out of what was undone. So it seemed. When the core of decency, his self-esteem, was wrecked, what else could have arisen to win positive, approved fulfillment? Writing was all that could in some way gain rehabilitation — without his seeking pardon or absolution, but by employing what he was. Jesus. Because he had destroyed, or undermined irreversibly, the central strength of who he was, writing was all there was left to him as justification for being what he now was. God, it was a strange thing to have to discover for oneself. Because — shift the blame to chance, or to obscure, early influence — other strengths, other virtues, or fortes, he did not feel that he possessed. Ira had forfeited them, if he ever had them. It was a choice that was not a choice; it was a choice without alternative, without option. It was his sole recourse. And fortunately, there was even that, for without it, only crime and perversion would have been the consequence. He would have been another inmate in an institution.

So writing became a hope toward a career, not a true commitment, but an inchoate, befuddled aspiration. Nevertheless, however flimsy the aspiration, it afforded a kind of temporary haven for the maimed psyche, a holding pen (what a bilious pun!), until such time as opportunity for marshaling his inner turbulence into some order presented itself.

The literary path became thus his “choice,” and as murky and confused a one as it was possible to be, not for any goal of material success, which certainly was a legitimate incentive, and a mark of professionalism, but out of that same blind intuition upon which he had come to depend as a better guide to survival than his intellect. And fortunate he was too that there already existed a road, a well-traveled highway in his psyche, one that he should have abandoned at a far earlier age than he did, but not having done so proved a boon: it was a road paved with ten thousand myths and legends, and the fairy tales he loved so well.