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

“Hey, I’ll tell the teacher on you!” The boy looked around. “I’m reading this!” he said angrily. “And I don’t want no other one! Read ’em yourself!”

Sammy waited a moment and then tried again. “You know you shouldn’t read fairy books in the library.”

The boy clutched the book to himself protectively and rose. “You want to fight?”

“Don’t get excited,” Sammy waved him back into the chair and retreated a step. “I was just sayin’ fairy tales is better to read in the house, ain’t it — like when you’re sittin’ in the front room and your mother’s cookin’ in the kitchen? Ain’t that nicer?”

“Well, what about it?”

“So in the liberry you can read from other things. From King Arthur or from other mitts.”

The boy saw through that ruse also. He waved Sammy away. “I’m gonna read it here and I’m gonna read it home too, wise guy.”

“All right, that’s all I wanted to ask you,” said Sammy. “You’re gonna take it, aintcha?”

“Sure I’m gonna take it.”

“I thought you was gonna take it.”

Sammy retreated to one of the central pillars of the reading room and stood there, watching. The same play of wonder and beguilement that animated the boy’s thin features while he read also animated Sammy’s pudgy ones, as though the enjoyment were being relayed. After a time the boy got up and went to the desk with the book still in his hand. The librarian took the card out of the book and stamped the boy’s own card. Then she handed him the book. Sammy’s round face dimmed. He waited, however, until the boy had had the time to get out of the reading room and down the stairs before he put his worn library card in his pocket and made for the exit.

“Somebody Always Grabs the Purple”

The New Yorker , March 23, 1940

Well. . it was touching, but not too touching. It was The New Yorker after all, of that period, with its aim, as it was perhaps today, though he scarcely read the magazine, with its aim of diverting the reader, presumably the fairly discriminating, well-to-do reader. It had been written according to the directives his literary agent at the time impressed on him: that he was never to get the reader to identify with the central character of a story, but to feel slightly superior to him. And so the kid in the sketch was himself and not himself. Ira thought ironically of the Hamlet alternative of being or not being. It was both always, it could only be a unity when both were together. It was strange though, and more than a little retarding — was that the right word? — arresting, inhibiting, to view this evidence of the writer he was, he once was, the preserved specimen of the writer he had been: the arrogant, egotistic, self-assured author of his first novel. Rereading his product of forty-five years ago drained him of what he was today. . something better than he had been, he thought, he hoped. Ah, how could you have let that life, all that life and configuration and trenchancy and conflict escape you? when it was still accessible, still at hand, retrievable, still close.

God, fourteen years spent in that slum of Harlem, with its changing composition and context, its squalid designs — let it get away from you, a mountain of copy, as the journalist would say, local color, novelty, from the moment you stepped into the street, stepped in or out the hallway. You blew it, that was the current expression; he would think of it a million times more, after M had lifted him up in bed, because his rheumatoid arthritis all but immobilized him after a night’s immobility. He took his hot shower, to limber him up a little, and came out of it, mourning rather than reflecting: Ah, the lost riches — what was it? The Joycean, sordid riches?

Perhaps because his view of it had changed: He couldn’t accept only a surface perception of it anymore. Was that the effect of Marxism? Of the Party’s influence? He had to consider, to recognize, somehow to indicate implicitly in his writing the cruel social relations beneath, the cruel class relations, the havoc inflicted by deprivation concealed under the overtly ludicrous. No more the Olympian mix of Anatole France’s irony and pity. And that was why he rebelled against Joyce with such animosity today. Anyway, something had barred the way, at the same time, as it undermined the way. That something they would call today loss of identity. And with loss of identity came loss of affirmation. And without either identity or affirmation, the great panorama of fourteen years of life in and out of 119th Street in Harlem was denied him — in fact, if one wanted to amplify it, ramify it, even adulthood was interdicted, adequate adulthood.

So he felt gloomy, pensive. . You know why I can’t delineate it now, Ecclesias.

— I know you know why.

What summer day was it he went striding in the freshness of morning, in the happiness of a newborn school vacation, to the Metropolitan Museum, solitary? (Set it down, set it down: No one else on 119th Street wanted to go.) Hiking between the dark, weathered, low stone wall that girded up the embankment of the park inside, separated it from the avenue and the row after row of mansions, the immeasurably opulent mansions across the avenue. Under the trees, in leaf, on Fifth Avenue, sturdily striding Ira, admiring, reveling in the lordly bay windows of imposing edifices pouting in pride, with each shade drawn down to the same distance. And the marble lintels, the organ-clusters of chimney pots rising from slate roofs with verdigris copper trim. While on the avenue, the double-decker buses ran, the ten-cent-fare buses that only the rich could afford.

“Where are you off to, young man?” asked the stout gentleman with the straw-colored mustache who was standing beside the lady with eyeglasses who was also waiting for the bus at the curb.

“Me? I’m goin’ to the museum.”

“Really? So early in the morning?”

“Yeh. It’s far away.” Had he by now learned to be wary of gentle strangers? Or did the presence of a woman give him a sense of security? “And after I go there and see, I have to come back all the way too.”

“Of course.”

The two waiting for the bus turned toward each other, a faint smile on each face, and he was on his way again. The moment would abide in memory like a fine stanza of a poem, or a few bars of fine melody that consoled in later years. In these hollow, later years, Ecclesias, when the silver cord is loosed, and the bearings burned, the threads stripped off the screw, or the contact lens blown away by the breeze.

XIV

The Great War had come much closer — he would have to make his way as best he could among roughly typed sheets in disorder, and his memory a farrago. Much closer. Already Ira had seen and heard elderly Jews in Mt. Morris Park rise angrily from benches and brandish canes at each other, while they exchanged insults in Yiddish: “Pompous German! Coarse Litvack!”. .

Waylaid en route to the floating East River swimming pool by a scowling little gang of Italian kids, he was menaced with: “Which side you on? What’re you? A German? You from Austria?”

Ira surmised what might be in store. “Nah. Not me.”

“What’re you then?”

“I’m a Hungarian. Hungarians don’t like Austrians.”

His accosters were nonplussed. “Talk Hungarian,” their leader challenged.

“Sure. Choig iggid bolligid . That means I like you.”

“How do we know?” a henchman demanded.

“I can say it again,” Ira offered.

“Say that you’re on the ‘Tollian side in Hungarian,” the leader probed.

“ Choig iligid bolligid Tollyanis .”

“Let him go,” the leader decreed.

And go Ira did. .