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

So here was Larry, not only a poet and writer, but one privileged to read the fabulous book of the decade, perhaps it would prove to be of the whole century. And after college opened, to meet, to mingle with the initiates on equal footing, mingle with the cognoscenti, the avant-garde of the class of ’29, condescending even about the faculty of the English department, none of whose professors, they were sure, was privy to this supernova that illumined the literary firmament, in all likelihood had never heard of the Ulysses . But—

Two days after he received the volume from Edith’s hands, Larry returned it. He had spent most of the last forty-eight hours perusing the book; then, frustrated, skimming here and there seeking a window of interest; in the end, irked, yawning with boredom, he gave up further investigation, and called it quits. “Thanks, my love,” he said to Edith.

“Have you read it?” Edith asked.

“No, and I doubt if I ever will. I’m afraid I can’t.”

“I’m sorry. Is it too packed?” Edith sympathized. “As I said before, it’s not light reading by any means.”

“No. I didn’t expect it would be. But oh—” Larry rolled his eyes up in comic bewilderment. “Oh, no. It just takes altogether too much work to find out how little happens in pages and pages of print. I’d much rather spend our next week together here doing something else — if you don’t mind. I feel time’s too precious to waste on something I’m not getting anything out of. Time with you, especially, darling.”

“You do what you like,” Edith urged tenderly. “That’s more important than the book. Please, lad, don’t feel you have to read it.”

“I don’t.”

“You shouldn’t, if it doesn’t contribute anything to your literary development. I’m sure the book isn’t for everyone, and might even be harmful to the lyric, romantic state you’re going through. I should have thought of that, before I burdened you with it. I’m so sorry.” Fondness and contrition mingled on her face as she held the volume in her hands. “I didn’t mean to impose it on you.”

“Oh, well, it hasn’t done me any harm.” Larry put his arm around Edith’s waist. “It’s satisfied my curiosity. I just wish you’d gone to all that trouble, taken those risks for — a little better — return.” He smiled down at her.

“My beautiful lad.” She looked up at him, her slightly protuberant eyes shining with adoration. “You do what you please. Just be the sweet, sensitive lad you are. You’ll get there your own way, I’m sure.”

Boyoboy — Ira tried to feign inattention, play the stock figure, the stock presence, which he thought was his role. But just look at the way they loved — the way fine, tender, sound people loved. Look at them: so unsullied their affection, their love, they didn’t have to hide it, except for gossip that might endanger her college position, things like that, concessions to prudence — but otherwise, so pure, elevated, yeah. Boyoboy. As if your — Jesus, he hated to say it even to himself — your cock were a mile away, had nothing to do with your balls in this kind of seraphic love. Boyoboy. So what the hell did they do at night?

VI

The opportunity to read the novel devolved upon Ira. He was aware of a ripple of craftiness coming over him when Edith turned to him, saying, “Would you like to look at it, Ira?” and offered him the blue paper-bound book. He felt as if he were about to steal a march on Larry, good, kind, generous Larry. And yet there was no help for it. If Larry couldn’t or wouldn’t subject himself to this shibboleth of modern novels, he had to accept the consequences of his refusal. Yet Ira felt ruthless, nonetheless. He couldn’t help it: he needed to enter any gateway of esteem far more than Larry did, any gateway of esteem, of prestige. Ha! Why had he clung so to Farley? And been deflected into the shameful disaster of Stuyvesant High? What an insight that was, yeah. Gone to Stuyvesant instead of Clinton for the same reason: because with Farley he entered a gateway of esteem. Why did he need to? On account of what he himself had become, had done to himself, damage inflicted on himself, that had never scathed Larry. Maybe Larry was right, for all Ira knew. The book wasn’t worth all that tedious, unrewarding conning of all kinds of literary stunts, as Larry called them, just for the sake of the fancy panaches the vanguard of supercilious CCNY aesthetes who had read the Ulysses prided themselves as deserving to wear. The outcome was something Ira couldn’t tell; he could glimpse things, all kinds of things, notions that had come to him unbidden when he saw his Composition 1 sketch printed in The Lavender —and also when Edith complimented him on his letters to her in Europe. Notions, farfetched fancies for one who wanted to be a zoologist — or a biology teacher. But you never could tell. One thing was sure: he would butt his way through the book, cost what it might, the Ulysses that Larry had just rejected. Still, maybe it was more than that, maybe it was the way one had to go. Fainthearted and shirker though he knew himself to be, he had a dullard’s plodding tenacity within himself, an unsparing resignation to drudgery. The grind, they sometimes called it: the scholastic grind. And yet, he wasn’t a grind. Discipline wasn’t the right word either. He wasn’t disciplined: he was a slouch, a folentser , as Mom so often railed at him, a sloven. Anybody could tell that. But he had — it wasn’t a sense of destiny — goddamn it, that was too fancy a way of stating it anyway. A hunch? No, not even that. It came back to the same thing, some kind of spasmodic, dumb determination he was going to find a way out of himself , out of what he had gotten himself into, cost what it might. Larry didn’t have to pay that kind of price. He didn’t need to. Neither did most everybody else, classmates Ira had begun to hobnob with: Aaron, Ivan, Iz, Sol. They didn’t need to either. Ira did. He needed to, and he was willing to pay the price. That was the only way he could put it into words for himself. What other way was there? What other gateway?

How does one treat all this — Ira thought — while the computer growled, and requisite amber primed the monitor into legibility — how does one treat of a literary antimony, attraction, repulsion, still eddying ecumenically in the same breast? Say you’re treating the tender inception of a love affair, and at the same time completely cognizant of its rancorous termination? Oh, well, a minute’s reflection would reveal that most of life was that way: the furious flouting of the once warmly espoused, the eviction of enchantment from the bosom, and its preemption by disenchantment — or worse: hatred. Any grown-up was familiar with the dyad, and any writer worthy of the name had dealt with it at some time in his life. He needn’t have raised the question at all, Ira told himself, except that he was intellectually slower than most.

His disaffection with Joyce had been slow indeed, for at first he had regarded this book brought by Edith rapturously, his irritation growing at first imperceptibly, yet over sixty years later to reach this crescendo of loathing. Such was his disavowal of the greatest seminal work of English literature of the twentieth century. Ulysses had become to him an evasion of history; its author resolved to perceive nothing of the continuing evolution of Ireland, refusing to discover anything latent within the seeming inane of a day in 1904. History may have been a nightmare, but the ones who could have awakened him were the very ones he eschewed: his folk.

The man loathed, the man quailed before change — that was the crux of Ira’s present aversion to his quondam idol. The book was the work of a man who sought to fossilize his country, its land, its people, to rob them of their future, arrest their ebullient, coursing life, their traditions and aspirations. Within the compass of a single day, he would embalm their élan in intricate irrelevancies, and mummify them in the cerecloth of correspondences. (What horrible analogies came to Ira: of the corpse and the ghoul, the corpse and the necrophile!) In short, even as evolution developed the predator from among its own kind, here was one in whom the wretchedness and degradation of his people had instilled such appetite, it amounted to a vested interest, to societal cannibalism. He opposed alteration of the wretchedness and famine of their lives. The sordidness these inevitably spawned became his stock in trade, his literary storehouse. For him to have transformed his contempt for “the sow that ate her young” into sympathy for the desperate strivings of his people to free themselves from abysmal want, from their proverbial tha shane ukrosh under British economic and social domination, would have required a complete overhaul of the haughty psyche that derided the very source of its identity, the Irish folk; would have demanded a complete humbling of that psyche, indeed its abnegation, its reversal, which alone could have effected the regeneration of that psyche. There was no other way.