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

— You know what that entails, do you?

Oh, I have some notion, Ecclesias. I too used my folk as mere counters in nugatory design. Far worse than the humiliation of nonentity, or the morose disorientation of lost identity, is the despairing contest between aging and a new beginning—

Oh, there was much more he could say — Ira felt himself flag — much more that had occurred to him in the heat of his antagonism to Joyce. What had changed Ira’s view of Joyce so radically these last few years — Ira drew pent breath at the intensity of his introspection — what was it that had changed his view so radically? Ira’s views of Joyce had changed, not suddenly, but irresistibly, the result of small dissents, cumulative contentions, that at length reached a critical point: the point of outright repudiation. Again the process was dialectical in character; his increasing discontent with his great master culminated by changing quantity into quality. The illustrious author, greatest prose writer of the twentieth century, from whom, wittingly or unwittingly, Ira had drawn method and guidance, to whom he turned as to a touchstone of tacit approval, to whom he paid boundless homage, the supreme author had renounced his people, renounced their trials, their yearning and their suffering. Even as Ira had renounced his, without slogan or fanfare, but to the same degree, as if Joyce were the very paradigm of the kind of severance it was incumbent on every genuine artist to do whose goal was greatness. But severance from folk had provided no exchange, certainly not the exchange Ira had expected, from a specific people to a universal one, from the parochial to the cosmopolitan. There was no universal transfer inherent in the severance, no pending renovation. Severance from a people meant just that: to be cut off from them. To be liberated from them, yes, but at the same time to renounce belonging to them, to remove himself from the opportunity to tap their inexhaustible diversity, their vitality and invention. The reaction, to borrow from the language of chemistry, went to an end: to an irreversible precipitation: a novel, yes, out of one’s folk, out of solution, out of ionic interchange, precipitated into estranged immobilized sediment. And as had happened to Joyce, so, on a humble scale, to Ira. Oh, the analogy proceeded ineluctably (a word Joyce favored), proceeded clumsily, but ineluctably. Sequestered by his own monstrous ego, isolated from access to the dynamic vitality of his folk, Joyce crystallized the sterile precipitant of his art into pyrites of portmanteaux, the ultimate in antic medium, the ultimate in imposing stasis in human interaction. Unlike his great mentor, Ira couldn’t go that far, neither did he care to try. He came to terms with his dearth, became resigned to sterility.

But now — and for some time — Ira’s direction had changed, and changed to diametrically opposite to his original one, the one that had supplied the initial guide to his only novel. His new direction was diametrically opposite to that of Joyce. It was a direction toward a reunion with his people, growing with the passage of years ever stronger, more purposeful, more partisan, more informed, more steadfast. Even though at times it seemed to him that his reunion might be a reunion with a lost cause, that history and social change might overwhelm the small nation to which his spirit had fused in hope and pride, nevertheless, he clung all the more loyally to the midwife of his rebirth: Israel .

His people were Israel. Not the Diaspora, the mercantile, the professional, the urban, the business Diaspora, a people of the past, as far as he was concerned, who might well disappear in another century, and might do well to disappear — and from whom his estrangement had been very little reduced — but Israel! A people of the future, a people redeemed, redeeming their land, his people were Israel. Not some idealized country, but all of it, ranging from the slattern in the chain store to the snide male bus driver waggling insulting hand under his chin passing his female counterpart, who was driving her bus in the opposite direction; from the proverbially rude clerks and civil servants, from the exacting little despots presiding over desks in the post office, to the myriad of harassed, intelligent, and cordial folk, bearded or clean-shaven, observant or indifferent, the researchers at the universities, the keepers of fish ponds, drivers of tractors, cultivators of cotton fields under Mount Gilboa, harvesters of the avocado groves near the Jordan River. Kibbutz and moshav and posh hotel and run-down Tel Aviv seafront: Israel. It was Israel that had rescued him from Joyce, had rescued him from alienation, modified him even to tolerating the Diaspora. It was late in happening, true, but it had happened, and it succeeded in altering the orientation of the once withdrawn individual. Ah, for the gift to express the changes that had taken place within him, since the end of that withdrawal — the accession of judiciousness along with partisanship, of steadfastness along with deep concern. To Israel he owed a new staunchness of affirmation, a sympathy with people, a unity within and without, a regeneration, that by contrast made Joyce recede into the distance like a black hole, pathologic and pathetic, a black hole of English letters, beyond whose event horizon change became stultified, illumination became trapped, trapped and retarded as in Finnegans Wake . .

That was how he felt about Joyce now . Not when Edith tendered him the Ulysses to read. Not how he felt then . It was those two things, two strophes, toward and away from the altar, he had to bear in the same breast. Nothing uncommon, he told himself. It happened all the time. And yet, he knew very well, it didn’t happen all the time. Would that the time spent in reverie on why it happened, why and when and where it did and didn’t happen, would repay for itself with an answer, one that his limited analytical powers could set forth.

Still, two things had come out of his rendering of his cogitations, the one trivial, the other too late, though of immense importance in contributing to his understanding of himself. The trivial one he named an aphorism for an aphid, a wisecrack of dubious quality: Sure, Bloom is some sort of hybrid; he’s a Hybrew . And the other was that in “analyzing” Joyce, in attempting to probe Joyce’s character, Ira had stumbled on his own fatal, or near-fatal, weakness. It was one that he shared with Joyce, and probably was the reason for the intense initial affinity with the other: both sought escape from milieu, from environ of folk, and eventually succeeded — but in doing so, both arrested maturity. Oh, it would take time, it would take time to ponder that one anywhere close to its depth.

It was like a letter that one left unfinished, and returned to the next day. Ira had “saved” his day’s writing, and switched off the device. And then he had ruminated further on his last statement, whether it truly reflected the actual state of things, that both Joyce and he had sought escape from milieu, from environ, and in so doing had arrested personal maturity. The realization came to him that the statement was not a true reflection of actuality. Rather, it was a surface observation. The truth was that during those first few years, when both identified with their folk, when both belonged to their people, perception was a window on the world around them, perception and its accepted setting of opinion and inference and practice. But more and more, as time passed, each driven by his own compulsions, each employed the activity of mind, of mentation, as a baffle against perception, against its accepted setting of opinion and inference and practice. Ira had sat well-nigh stunned by the realization, stunned and appalled: so this was what he had spent a lifetime doing? Not transforming his perception of reality into art, but transforming mind into art as a way of buffering, of screening out, reality. And now near ninety, he finally understood: he had continually, increasingly — until the act had become inveterate and automatic — responded to the buffer, to the screen, not to life-derived actuality, but from the resonance of the very thing that occluded actuality. . Too awful to think about, too awful to think that the revelation had come at the end of life. Crushing was the only way to put it. All those years of not perceiving, but responding only to the resonance transmitted by the protective sheath against perception. It was not something Kantian that he was discovering about himself (and Joyce), a ding an sich . It was the common response to ordinary perception shared by all mankind, but which he had learned to alter, to create by muffling the data of existence.