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

The first chapter of the Ulysses seemed delightfully narrative, pungent, wry, precisely focused. Above all, the writing flowed freely, as a sparkling stream of disenchanted realism. The light and air in the round tower was clear and crystalline; the seascape was glorious; stately Buck Mulligan bearing in his shaving articles was delectably sacrilegious. Ira wondered how Larry could have found impediment obstructing his enjoyment of the book: certainly not by Buck Milligan and his spoofing, his blasphemous intonings over his shaving mug, certainly not the arrival of the old milk-woman, and the badinage of the three youths in the tower. To him, the atmosphere of the narrative at first felt transparent, the movement and posture sharp, the tone engaging and natural. The chapters were brilliant — and completely accessible. Ira was delighted, delighted and triumphant: Ira understood it: the great, the redoubtable Ulysses of James Joyce, all its nuances seemed open to him.

As the clandestine love affair circulated about him in the ivy-covered stone cottage at Woodstock, the pages, even for Ira, began to grow opaque, the story to grow labyrinthian, loopholes within a massive masonry. He could see what Larry had objected to, why he had put the book down: it became a labor to read, an arduous, unrewarding groping, a groping often beset with perplexity, often in the dark. All too often, he felt as if he were besieging a citadel of narrative bristling with devices to protect, to fend off comprehension. He stumbled through long, esoteric passages that humiliated him by his inability to understand. Never once did it occur to him to make any association between the episodes in the narrative and the title; never once did he descry parallels between characters and situations in the novel and their Homeric prototypes, satiric parallels, ironic parallels, parallels of any kind. Sheer drudgery to endure, most trying of all to contend with, was that the story went nowhere, with interludes, Bloom and the Citizen, Bloom’s grief for his dead son, Bloom’s stagy shmertz at the hour of his cuckolding, Bloom consuming his “feety” cheese sandwich (Go know his fellow diners, gobbling, gnawing, chomping, were Lestrygonians. Poor guys. How else do working commoners eat?). As long as the pub was full of Lestrygonians, that’s what counted: Lestrygonians (as later parsed by the Gilbertian synoptic chart), the Lunch, 1PM, Esophagus, Architecture, Constables, Peristaltic . . Now, there was something to engross the consummate artist, the construction of a learned three-dimensional crossword puzzle.

Oh, despite that, there were many peepholes, there were a multitude of apertures through which one beheld facets of Irish urban life, matchlessly depicted, his throbbing catalogs of locale and landmark. And yes, yes, not to forget, of especial poignance to Ira, that rift in the dense texture of prose when the disapproving priest spied the two young lovers emerging guiltily from the bosky seclusion of their fornication. How like the two young Irish lovers who had saved Ira from that rusty pederast in Fort Tryon Park, the one lover trailing the other down the path, the flushed, glowing domestic, the deprecating, muscular swain, husky caretaker or freight-handler. How Irish that seemed to Ira, having spent so many years among the Irish, on an Irish-dominated street.

Yes, it was more than these now mundane observations that had enthralled him as a young man. Despite the carping of the dour, refractory old codger who, because he had himself reunited with Judaism in the form of Israel (and thereby had sharpened his once dull consciousness of being a Jew), had become the adversary of his renowned preceptor, and kept injecting his present bias, his revisions and reservations, into the impressions of the youthful reader that was once himself, the Ulysses was more than that. It was an immensely liberating experience for the as yet pre-embryonic literary man, the amorphous, larval novelist. Oh, it was not merely because of the trail it blazed, the conventions broken, the daring situational and verbal precedents it set, Bloom sitting on the crapper, Molly’s monologue while menstruating.

They were of immeasurable importance in breaking down conventional barriers in literary representation. But more important than anything else, of supreme importance to Ira: the Ulysses demonstrated to him not only that it was possible to commute the dross of the mundane and the sordid into literary treasure, but how it was done. It showed him how to address whole slag heaps of squalor, and make them available for exploitation in art. Equally important was Joyce’s tutelage in the sorcery of language, how it could be made to fluoresce, to electrify the mood and rarify the printed word. No more awesome master of every phase of syntax, no more authoritative mentor — nay, taskmaster! — of subtlest effects, subtlest distinctions of word or phrase, had Ira in his desultory way ever encountered than Joyce. Wryly, Ira remembered the old saying about the Chicago packing houses: that they used every part of the pig except the squeal. Joyce elucidated ways to use even the squeal: lingo as well as language, the double entendre, the pun, the homely squib, the spoonerism, the palindrome, pig Latin and pig Sanscrit.

So Ira read on, toiling doggedly through hundreds of close-knit pages, wrenching his brow in perplexed concentration, seeking denouement — going unrewarded, save for Bloom’s escape from near-altercation with an Irish jingo, save for Stephen’s smashing the gaslight in a whorehouse, and being punched in the jaw by a vociferous British soldier. Ira sought a meaning that was absent, without ever realizing that was the meaning. But as the days passed, and he read and wrestled, read and floundered, the strange conviction took firmer and firmer hold of him, that within himself was graven a crude analogue of the Joycean model, just as he felt within himself a humble affinity for the Joycean temperament, a diffident aptitude for the Joycean method. Opaque though many and many a passage might be, Ira sensed that he was a mehvin of that same kind of world of which Joyce was an incomparable connoisseur: of that same kind of pocked and pitted reality. There were keys that evoked that world, signatures by which they were recognized, and he was ever receptive to them — why, he couldn’t say. He could summon up words that connoted those signatures, signatures that were keys to their quotidian.

What was there in that stodgy variety of Dublin city through which Bloom and Dedalus went to and fro that was so very different from the stodgy variety of Harlem’s environs, the environs Ira knew so well — and the East Side environments that memory retained like a reserve of impressions? If a one-eyed Irish jingo heaved a box after the ignominiously fleeing Bloom, Ira had just as cravenly allowed a couple of micks to spit on his blue record card while he waited in line to enroll in P.S. 24. If Bloom knew the hour when his wife cuckolded him, what did that compare to Ira’s knowing the equatorial hour on Sunday morning when Mom and Pop were gone? And worse, worse than anything Bloom ever suffered: that agonizing afternoon when murder flapped bat wings over his plane geometry text, because Minnie hadn’t menstruated. And talk about the nastiness of the diurnal — talk about the absolute vertigo of furore of a chance weekday break, what was looking up a statue’s buttocks compared to that. . or the colossal jape of compassionate Mamie’s sentimentally “forcing” a greenback on him, a buck, right after he had hoisted her drippy kid daughter, Stella, on his petard. Hell, of nastiness, of sordidness, perversity, and squalor — compared to anyone in the Ulysses , he had loads, he had droves, he had troves. But it was language, language, that could magically transmogrify the baseness of his days and ways into precious literature — into the highly touted Ulysses itself. It could free him from this depraved exile, from this immutable bondage. Sensibility and need, given language, could beat silence, exile, cunning anytime, especially if sensibility and need, given language, was a past master at silence, exile, cunning.