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

Yes — for once, Ira had successfully located a document in his files: it was from Richard, who had married lola within a year of returning from Oxford, cordially acquiescing in Ira’s request to visit him and lola in Annapolis, where they lived in retirement after Richard’s distinguished teaching career at St. John’s College. “What a horse’s ass I was!” Ira said aloud — and shook his head. He had a chance to visit them, and hadn’t. “Goddamn lazy bastard.”

“Dear Ira,” he read Richard’s fountain-pen black but clear handwriting: “I hope it isn’t too late for this to reach you. Iola and I would very much like to see you. We can’t put you up. For different though similar reasons, we are invisible until about three o’clock in the afternoon, but we’d love to take you to dinner and travel backward with you to New York and forty-odd years ago.”

That was in May of 1970, and Ira, lazy, cheap bastard, after first writing them he would go, canceled at the last minute. Ira still heard Richard’s voice on the phone expressing his regret at hearing Ira’s change of mind, the pause in conversation, and the regretful silence prelude to acceptance. Rue would consume him every time he thought of the lost opportunity. Shlemiel, shlimazl . They both had cancers. Both were dead in a couple of years. .

With unfailing altruism, Edith dictated that she would leave the St. Mark’s Place apartment to Iola and Richard, while she herself sought, and found, another place. The new apartment was far less attractive — probably less expensive too — totally without any charm, even to Ira’s slowly developing taste in such matters, a single low-ceilinged room, dingy, two steps down from the sidewalk and in the basement of a typically remodeled former townhouse — in the very midst of the turmoil of 8th Street’s motley thoroughfare, its stores, traffic, eating places, window shoppers, trolley-car din and clang. It was there, in that dingy, low-ceilinged basement apartment, that Larry’s inability to find lyric outlet, or to tap new sources of literary inspiration, became associated in Ira’s mind as the place where his friend’s frustration became chronic. Avowedly so. It was there he grieved over the loss, lamented his condition more than once; the last time, when Ira was there, Larry’s voice faltered, became throaty, almost broke. Edith tried to soothe, to cheer. All writers ran into these “fallow periods,” she said, endeavoring to keep incentive alive. Fallow periods were succeeded by recrudescence, she assured him: inspiration revived all the more vigorously after such periods of quiescence.

The weeks went by, but Larry’s poetic impulse showed no sign of revival. It was as though a phase had passed. Something — a lyric, a literary surge, had risen on the tide of his early youth — and ebbed away with it. Why? What was this thing called imagination? This urge called creativity? What drove it; what was its motive force? What was this strange need that demanded outlet in a certain form, that could only be satisfied a certain way? Strange. And was it the need that left one, or only the ability to satisfy it? Or both? Ira pondered, and could find no answer. It happened, and as Mom would have added: und shoyn .

The Arts Club, in which Larry had been so active, too was disbanded. Larry was no longer an undergraduate at NYU, and whether he could have continued as secretary of the club or not had become moot. He no longer cared to be secretary, nor even cared to belong. And with Larry gone, and no one to replace him as student secretary, no one to accept the executive burden of arranging meetings, Edith and John Vernon found themselves too busy with other matters to afford the time necessary to keep the club functioning. They felt the club had served its purpose. The initial enthusiasm, the ferment of innovation, had also waned, or been permitted to subside. Ira also gathered the impression that the two faculty sponsors both felt more secure in their positions, and hence could safely slacken in their activities to win favor with Professor Watt by further devotion of time and energy to the enterprise they had initiated. Edith, especially, was sure she would be advanced to an assistant professorship the following year. The Arts Club was allowed a quiet demise.

The weeks went by, bringing the fall term of 1925 to an end. Having given up further attempts at writing, Larry turned to another art form entirely: sculpture. What a strange metamorphosis Ira felt he was witness to, on those Monday evenings when he accompanied his friend to Edith’s basement apartment. Larry had enrolled in a private school of design, and was taking evening lessons in drawing and the plastic arts. Not only had his art form changed, but the whole setting of his love affair underwent a change as well, became different, in so many ways, and in so short a time. Truly, the pristine bloom that once had seemed to encompass the lovers had passed. That bright, airy, quiet apartment, to which Larry had taken Ira the first time, with white walls more radiant than reality, with trees outside the windows in a yard of verdant and flourishing vegetation, had now given way to a dingy, cramped, low-ceilinged room, one into which street noises intruded, past whose single, smudged window the legs and feet of pedestrians continually traveled. Changed, vanished, hard to define: the novelty was gone, the afflatus and promise of that first sense of new freedom, its bewitching latency and illusory horizons, all had dissolved like a mirage. “Romantic” was the word that described what it once was — ah, yes, now he understood, understood the meaning of the word — in his terms: the sense of a marvelous unfolding of the new, mysterious and boundless. He understood because he realized he had been under a spell, and the spell was broken. Drab clay now displaced all those airy sentiments, glamorous overtones, those allusions to books and belles lettres . Masses of drab clay dispossessed discussion of ideas, the New Criticism, the advent of Humanism, often, more often than not, insubstantial and fragmentary to Ira’s intellectual grasp, yet all the more precious whatever he succeeded in grasping — grasping and retaining. Ah, precious to dwell on, to try to extend, extend the implications, mentally test their application. The only thing that had the power of transfixing him, like the power of plane geometry, seemingly long ago, the only thing that sometimes could actually evict thoughts of sex from his mind.

But changed now, changed. Terminated. Yielding to talk of sculpture, sculptors, and techniques. Oh, hell, who cared? The change in Larry’s artistic medium seemed to have a kind of subliminal symbolism about it, graphic, maybe too, well, say visible. Drab clay in a small, gray apartment had taken over the aspiring word, the novel notion, the expansive oral prompting. Did the kind of transformation he saw occurring in Edith’s dingy apartment take place in his mind only? Did it mean a change in Larry’s personality? Anh, what kind of a dumb question was that? And yet he now actually beheld how the quotidian, the mundane, precipitated out of the romantic the way silver chloride precipitated out of solution. Facts swept away illusions — one had read about that and reread about that, but one had to experience the process, mull it over, and even then still be puzzled about how the change took place, and what effect it had, or what it indicated. Something mysterious about it, sad too, the final settling into a mold, the hardening forever of the once protean and iridescent, eternally cast in dingy pall. Jesus, he’d never get free of his confusions; he couldn’t think. Feel, yeah. How the hell do you get ready for the change that will lock you into the settled and prosaic? Jesus, and you thought that out of the change something else was going to emerge, something else come to fruition?