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

XII

While Larry sculpted, continually imbuing the clay with greater detail, and Edith posed meditatively in the light of the floor lamp, Ira began to depart from his practice of just sitting there quietly, more or less patiently, under the light of the other floor lamp, augmenting the weak, wintry light of the basement room. Chatting with Edith too much tended to disturb her repose as model, so Ira began to delve into Edith’s ever-growing collection of modern poetry, the proverbial slim volumes of modern poets: Aiken, Pound, Frost, Adams, Sandburg, Millay, Stevens, Wylie, Winters, Teasdale, MacLeish, Cummings, Taggard, Sitwell, Williams, Tate, Ransom, Robinson.

Edith never hesitated an instant to buy a book of poetry she deemed to have literary merit — and most of them Ira failed to understand. Oh, there were exceptions: Jeffers he could follow quite well, his long narrative poems. Ira could follow a story, and the “plots” of some of Jeffers’s stories dealt with subject matter he had become too thoroughly and too shamefully acquainted with, and Jeffers’s incestuous narratives aroused his interest all the more. And Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay and a few others, like Housman, were easy. Edith remarked when she saw him assaying their collected poems that they no longer addressed the modern mood. “Passé,” Larry chimed in, and added, “That’s me. Passé.”

Edith tried to soothe him: “Oh, no. You haven’t really come into your own yet, how can you be passé?”

“It’s a feeling I have.”

“Oh, lad, these things have their own pace. Poets find their own voices. And sometimes quite suddenly.”

And then in Ira’s haphazard way, he came upon T. S. Eliot. He had by now achieved major status as a poet, in vanguard critical opinion — and among the CCNY literary elite, of course. Once again, Ira felt as he had about Joyce, even though Larry, just as with Joyce, found no affinity with Eliot. Ira felt this was another case in which it was his duty, if he really wanted to get some notion of the age in which he lived, its attitudes and presentiments, it was his duty to read Eliot. No, not merely to read — Ira didn’t grasp what he read, so reading wasn’t enough. Ira had to strive to understand, to study, study as if he were applying greater and greater mental pressure to a problem before him, to try to make up by sheer, undeviating pressure of concentrated pondering, make up for his lack of the kind of sensitivity to the significance pulsing within a poem that Edith had, and Larry too, when he cared, though he no longer seemed to. Ira thought he ought to try at least in this one case, to comprehend the widely acclaimed poet, T. S. Eliot, this one case, to make up for his failure to resonate, for his limitation of response to delicacy, to subtlety of allusion. Perhaps his defense against an inner foe, his continual sense of shame, had become a barrier to the messages of other minds, modern minds, the messages of most of the poets on Edith’s bookshelves. That was how it seemed. But Ira was determined to wring intelligibility out of this one enigma, T. S. Eliot.

And alas, Ira began to think he had performed the task too well. In the nihilism of spirit that his self-opprobrium had brought him to, in which Ira found himself now, odious and unspeakable to himself, Ira was all too susceptible to the meaning, T. S. Eliot’s meaning steeped in crushing fatuity, in alienation, tortured anomie, despair, that he absorbed so single-mindedly, as Ira had never absorbed the content of the Ulysses —it was too large, recondite, and finned with irony. Ira absorbed the emotion of Eliot’s poems, especially his two major poems, before he understood the meaning. Ira absorbed the emotion, until much of it became part of him .

Ira was all too conscious of the recurring Jew-mockery in a number of the poems: of Rachel née Rabinovitch tearing at the grapes, of the Jews in “Gerontion” sitting in the window, “spawned in some estaminent,” of Bleistein, of Sir Ferdinand Klein, Sir Alfred Mond, and the Jew underneath the lot, and the echt deutsch Litvak in The Waste Land . He was all too conscious of the poet’s anti-Jew bias, but he accepted it, shared it, even approved of these thoughts — since leaving the East Side and becoming conscious of himself, not as a member of a homogeneous folk, but as an individual Jew, distinct from his milieu, nullified, demeaned, experiencing the entire spectrum from sufferance through malevolence to violence. And with relatives all sordidly straining for success, and home life what it was — and the even uglier thing he had made of it — and of the wider family relations — eventually, Ira became averse to Jews and repelled by Jews. Eliot’s clever aspersions and disdainful caricatures seemed no more than just. Deft and diverting and oh so apt, their contemptuous attributions didn’t apply to him, for the simple reason that Ira appreciated them. Ira shared his repugnance, appreciated his wit, applauded his finesse. That excluded him from Eliot’s gibes, as it did all other Jews who possessed taste fine enough to relish the supreme adroitness of his calumnies. Or to whom his ridicule no longer pertained, people like Larry, sophisticated Jews, the assimilated, the deracinated: Jews like himself. Those Jews were exempt, because they were the elite, more or less.

Sixty years later he no longer felt so elite, or so impervious to more common acts of anti-Semitism. In fact, he could easily become depressed. He recalled a sense of dread when M told him, as she lifted him to a sitting position in bed one morning, that according to the radio newscast earlier, an avowed Jew-hater by the name of LaRouche had won election to office — over the major-party candidates. The news haunted him all through breakfast: a Hitlerite sonofabitch had won office in the United States, a self-proclaimed Nazi — under his leadership, his political party had established itself in four or five states. Haunted him: with a flurry of memories and fears: storm troopers, the camps, the ovens. . the cinema scenes of women lined up naked before the “bathhouses,” and the kids lugging suitcases to the freight cars, and — mostly what came back was the days before World War II, when Jew-baiting was becoming the vogue, in higher circles, not just the slum street, no, no, had become a tactic — what had Dalton Miltz told him, co-lover of Edith, Dalton, when he treated Ira to lunch in a Chinese restaurant: that the class of ’38 at Cornell — the very university Ira had won a scholarship to — had marched in jubilant file across campus, singing, parodying the song of the seven dwarfs in Walt Disney’s Snow White :

Yo ho, yo ho, we’ve joined the CIO

We’ve paid our dues to the goddamn Jews

Yo ho, yo ho, yo ho, yo ho, yo ho. .

In the city parks too, provocateurs had taken up positions, lying so plausibly, debating so coolly, and with henchmen about them, Nazi shills to attract a crowd. And the fear and the helplessness and the hopelessness that possessed him. And Father Coughlin whipping up a pogrom over the radio, with his boyhood pal Farley as an acolyte. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was that, that triggered his depression. He couldn’t tell. And where would the Jews run now? Apparitions of Jews thronging in flight, cramming into planes, cars. Where now? And he himself, and M, and Hershel, his Orthodox son, and Hershel’s rabbi’s-daughter wife, and their three offspring. Run. And what about Jess, half-Jewish son, and his son, Oliver, quarter-Jewish grandson — where would they run? Would they have to run? “We decide who is a Jew,” said Hitler. By the time Ira had finished breakfast, gone into his study and switched on the computer, the very thought of resuming his narrative had become intolerable.