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

Edith would just sit with her tiny hands in her lap and gaze at him with her large, brown eyes fixed on him unwaveringly, the expression on her face sober, yet, to Ira, inscrutable. What was she trying to plumb? Larry seemed to welcome the disquisitions; he encouraged them. Still, he really didn’t seem to listen — that was the peculiar part of it. He sat receptively with big hands locked, but it was clear his mind was elsewhere — about what? a poem? And yet Ira got the feeling it wasn’t that, something else was disquieting Larry, and Ira’s lectures about biology filled a kind of troubled interlude in his friend’s mind. Where the hell Larry got his ideas for poems anyway, Ira didn’t have the slightest notion, but he seemed more and more receptive of late to Ira’s impromptu lectures. A little puzzling, wasn’t it? But if that was what Larry wanted—

“They’re called Orthoptera, because they have straight wings,” Ira discoursed. “You know, insects are cousins to crustaceans, like the lobster. But just the same, Jews can’t eat lobster. Isn’t that funny? My father once when he waited at a fancy banquet ate so much lobster that was left over on the plates he got sick and threw up.”

Edith laughed. Larry smiled — absently.

“My Uncle Moe loves lobster too. But not clams. He can’t eat a clam.”

“Why not? They’re seafood,” Edith said. “Is that the kosher thing again?”

“Oh, no, they’re neither of them kosher.” Ira hesitated, grinned apologetically. “Boy, have I got myself into it. It isn’t very nice. It’s because of what people commonly call them. Common people call them.”

“What do they call them?”

“It isn’t nice. I said I’d get myself in trouble.”

“Heavens, Ira. I’m not that squeamish. Do I seem to be?”

“No.”

“Then why not tell me?”

“Another time. I know, I’ll tell Larry. I’ll leave it up to him.”

Edith smiled, unenlightened, but indulgent.

There came a day, the third or fourth day after Edith had joined them, on which one of those not entirely casual episodes occurred, not entirely casual because it seemed fraught with remote rumor, or stirred by a hint of challenge. It would only be later, when all that remained of the environs of the incident was the spacious, quiet living room in which the incident had taken place, later condensed into a workaday patch of daylight, with a woman standing in it. The woman was Edith, and with simple generosity, she proffered a book, a fairly thick volume, proffered it to Larry. It would only be some time later that Ira came to realize the import of what took place in that elegant living room in that small fraction of time. And yet, the very fact that the event left behind, however small, an irreducible knot within memory would forever mark in Ira’s mind the momentous instant of transition when the past departed from its old aim, its previously envisaged future, to a new one, the instant when sensibility redirected its commitment from an old to a new function.

The book that Edith held out to Larry was one she had brought with her from France. She had smuggled it through customs, a blue paper-bound book, an untitled copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses . And that was something else to mark, to note about her — the errant insight fluttered through Ira’s mind — that behind her steady, gentle gaze, deception could lurk, duplicity within the friendly dimple of her smile. Yes, she had broken the law deliberately, she explained, and she took pride in doing so, and was jubilant that she had succeeded. “It tickles me no end that I slipped the book through the barrier they’ve built around it,” she said. “Of all the silly prudishness. As if a book that demanded so much from the reader could possibly impair anyone’s morals. Only Mr. Sumner or other prigs like him in the Watch and Ward Society who hunted for the four-letter words might think a reader would take all that trouble for so little titillation. But anyone with ordinary common sense would know better.”

She not only saw no reason to abide by the puritanical standards of the Watch and Ward Society, which she characterized as nothing more than a lot of inhibited prudes, but she was also genuinely curious about the book, which had won so much critical acclaim, on which so many encomiums were bestowed — by Eliot, by Pound, by other leading critics of English literature, critics who appeared in The Hound and Horn and The Dial . She wanted at least to become acquainted with it. Above all, she was eager to have Larry read it. She hoped that its daring literary innovations might provide impetus to his own writing, might steer his imagination into uncharted regions. “It may give you some new ideas, darling,” she said, when she tendered him the blue-covered volume. “I’d love to hear your reactions. It’s made such a clean break with convention. And of course it’s so daring in its treatment of sex.”

“You’re so sweet to do it.” Larry kissed her. He took the book from her, leafed through it, glowed with pleasure. “I don’t know how else I’d have gotten to see it. And speaking of taking a chance.” He shook his head in admiration. “I’ve gone through customs coming through Bermuda. Even with nothing really valuable to declare, I shook in my shoes. I don’t know if I’d have had the nerve to look those customs officials in the eye with this in my suitcase.”

“Oh, poof. The worst that could have happened was confiscation of the book. They would have relieved me of it — if they had recognized that it was banned from the country, and that’s dubious. And of course, I would have played innocent. I didn’t know it was banned. I just hope it does something for you, dear, encourages you to experiment.”

“And so do I.” Larry opened to the first page, read: “‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. . Introibo ad altare Dei . .’ My Latin can certainly handle that. Well, there’s no time like the present. Thank you, darling. This is just the right required reading for Woodstock.” He kissed her again.

Edith fondly watched him depart for the library, and when he settled into an upholstered leather library chair, she went to her portable typewriter among the scattered papers, folders, and carbon sheets in her master bedroom study, leaving Ira to wander out to a seat in a white filigreed chair in the enclosed lawn and absently mull over the incident, while he studied the grass to catch sight of some unusual insect.

He had heard about the book. He had heard it spoken of with bated breath by the literary elite among his classmates, the vanguard aesthetes in the ’28 alcove in the basement of the college. One of them, goateed Seymour K, though older than the average freshman, was already on the editorial staff of the CCNY Lavender . And it was Seymour who sought out Ira, in order to make his acquaintance: “Oh, you’re the one who wrote that piece about the plumber?” he asked Ira. Seymour had a twitchy tic that affected one of his cheeks above his goatee, and when he heard Ira’s diffident admission of authorship, his tic registered with great positiveness. Neither he, he told Ira bluntly, nor any of the upperclassmen editors had thought the thing ought to be published in a college magazine. It wasn’t only an amateurish piece of writing, “it could really have been written by a plumber’s helper.” He laughed at his jest. It was only at the insistence of Mr. Dickson, the faculty adviser for the magazine, that the piece was considered at all, and eventually published.

Anyway, the CCNY literati were all conversant with Ulysses , the imposing literati like Leon S and Yarmolinsky and Lester H, upperclassmen and for the most part only names to Ira, but all reputedly bursting with modern trends in writing, who knew all about something called the New Humanism, who read The Hound and Horn and The Dial , could descant on Gerard Manley Hopkins and sprung verse, and poets named Pound and Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and — they made Ira feel like a maundering dub without an opinion to his name. James Joyce’s Ulysses —it was like a fetish to them, to the highbrows in the alcoves. The rare one who had read the book seemed invested with a veritable luster; he was like one inducted into an esoteric sodality, an ultramodern one. Even to demonstrate familiarity with the book warranted pretensions to the intellectual vanguard.