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

And much of it, nay, most of the motive force driving the transformation was economic. Economics, the drive to get out of the precincts of impoverishment, the drive to escape the restrictions imposed by the parochial milieu, restrictions closely associated with poverty, restrictions that were part and parcel of penury.

The mind, informed now with awareness of the greater opportunities of the cosmopolitan world, chafed in revolt against prohibitions, prohibitions that only yesterday were nurturing traditions , but now newly perceived as constraints. Thus, when the revolt against the parochial world succeeded, and the individual, say a writer, cast off the restrictions that were part and parcel of his formative milieu, he simultaneously abandoned his richest, most plangent creative source: his folk, their folkways , his earliest, most vivid impressions, the very elements of his formation . Hence the price of success in his best work was to condemn him to discontinuity, if he was to continue. What a paradox! Condemned him to draw on shallower, lately acquired sources different in kind, in nature, from those that imbued his best work. Hence he was condemned to repetition, to academia, to Hollywood, to booze, to immobilization, singly or in combination. Q.E.D.

Ira shut off the shower, and bent over the faucets to turn the small handle between them that deflected water from shower to tub, and also allowed the residual water in the shower pipe to trickle into the tub. Then, holding on to a variety of handgrips he had attached long ago, to prevent M from slipping on the tub bottom — and now, what irony: it was he who needed them, not M — he trod carefully on the antiskid toadstool shapes M had stuck to the bathtub bottom. At the other end of the tub, he reached around past the shower curtain to the yellow bath towel hanging on the clothes hook affixed to the narrow door of the small utility closet close by.

Yes. Therein lay the contradiction. He might have returned to his source, he might have continued to write about a dwindling, a crumbling away of life, once lusty and flourishing, and — how unbelievably soon! — disintegrating. But who could do so with any validity and conviction — after he had rejected that life, after he had been infected by association with the cosmopolitan, the larger world in which he now functioned and moved freely? Others had managed to do it, return to a stagnant or depleted source. He too might have done so, and continually extruded a different model of it, the same sausage in a different casing, a different version of a world no longer extant, or no longer viable. . He could have echoed and reechoed himself, rung variations indefinitely. . sold hundreds of thousands of copies of each new edition. . lived in luxury off the royalties. .

Head and neck, neck eased by hot water, he could towel off without too much trouble; it was armpits he couldn’t reach, couldn’t stretch stiff, unyielding sinews that far. With his back he had difficulty too, in drying it; still, if results weren’t wholly satisfactory, the effort was tonic. No use striving to dry his legs below the knees. No use and dangerous too. He might topple over — so. Sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

But that was a minor, minor point, though how nice to have all kinds of dough, but that was a minor point. He began folding the bath towel. Dropped to the floor just below: to raise the makeshift elevator he had devised for getting out of the tub: oddity of oddities, oh, everything about him was oddity. It was a pretty piece of wood, supported underneath by the wooden drawer knobs, which added height, knobs of drawers; but a pretty platform the pretty piece of wood made. It had been the cover of the outhouse toilet of Ira’s home in Augusta, Maine, when he and M had first bought the place. He stepped out of the tub safely onto the platform — no, the important question was: why were those first novels so often the best ones? No, that was obvious. He had already answered that. The earliest were the freshest. But still, other first writing, fresh though it might be, might also suffer from ineptitude, the crudity of the novice. No, no. The question was: why did those first (and sometimes only) novels frequently have such wide appeal? They were often best-sellers, if not at the outset, then, like his own, and others as well, eventually. Why? The answer was that it was not only the writer, the literary artist, who suffered from disabling discontinuity; it was the multitude, the populace, the reading public who were troubled by the selfsame thing as well. He was certain of it—

His moccasins on, he padded back to his study, where his shorts lay on the open pages of the unabridged Webster on its improvised stand, a flimsy TV serving table on wheels — certain of it as hell. That was what his fable had been all about without his knowing it; unwittingly he had struck the universal chord of what had affected millions of people. In the U.S., in foreign countries via more than a half-dozen translations. Why the hell should a dope like him, who could write nothing of any consequence thereafter, have established an international reputation of sorts? Imagine: on that teeming East Side, who would have dreamed, who would have wagered a dollar to a kopeck, among all those millions of immigrants, that the Stigman brat, who lived in the corner house on 9th Street and Avenue D, would distinguish himself in any way except maybe becoming a rabbi. . well, maybe one guy might have surmised: the boarder in their fifth-story aerie, before Uncle Morris came to America, Feldman by name, who prophesied to Mom, with extraordinary clairvoyance, even if a bit wide of the mark, “There grows another Maxim Gorky.” Who else would have dreamed that the little gamin whom the poor harassed rabbi, or malamut , was preparing to translate lushin koydish into mama lushin would one day see his English step- mama lushin translated into modern lushin koydish .

But really — Ira chided himself — the thought was a bagatelle, a bauble, a one-liner. The genuinely significant idea, which one Israeli reviewer writing in Haaretz delivered, was: “Childhood is not a step of the way, but the whole way.” The man was uncanny! Without knowing more about the author than the book itself, he had unerringly probed to the truth. The source of the novel’s strength lay in the novelist’s weakness; the adult may have accreted literary techniques and virtuosity; the creator was still the child, precocious perhaps with respect to letters, but still a child.

Well — after trunks, pants, after shorts, trousers, take your choice. Standing up, following even a brief period of sitting down, was a consideration these days, with knees what they were, capable of a single poor and painful thrust. He tried to “rationalize” the business, spare himself superfluous movements: put shorts on partway, then draw his pants up to his knees, before getting up, so that he had to stand up only once, not twice: pull his shorts up to the waist, then his trousers while still standing; keep his trousers from falling down by tightening the belt so that the garment stayed above his knees. Oh, there were tricks in every trade, more than one way to skin a cat, or outwit rheumatoid arthritis — chief point was that in his novel, he had stumbled on a fable that addressed a universal experience, a universal disquiet, more prevalent in this age, undoubtedly, than ever before in human history: the sense of discontinuity.

He didn’t have to be a supreme literary genius — Ira walked barefoot through the hall toward the kitchen. M had already transferred there, as she always did, his socks, his wristwatch, his sneakers and upper garments — it was John Synge, Ira reflected, who had already discovered the foregoing. John Synge, whom Ira admired as man and writer, who had taught Ira so much, from whom he had never grown estranged, whom he had never grown to detest, as he did Joyce, but admired to this day. It was Synge who had observed, to paraphrase him, that talent wasn’t enough. The writer had to strike a chord reverberating in harmony with something deep within his time. That was why a dub like himself could write a classic of its genre, as it was called. A real fluke.