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

XIII

How protean “Prufrock” seemed at first reading — and at second reading, and at third. How utterly ungraspable. It was like learning to swim; nothing to hold on to, no firm medium to depend on. What the hell was the man talking about? It was not each separate part that baffled Ira. It was all of it. It was the meaning of the whole that tantalized, that he couldn’t comprehend. He felt as if he would have to memorize it, commit it to his mind, or his mind to it, have it with him at all times, without need of the book, contemplate the poem until the meaning became part of him, and then he could understand it — the way he understood himself.

Finally that was what happened, or something akin to it: the sum of the meaning came into view: almost like moonrise, like a harvest moon, to wonder at, yet know it to be true. So that was what Eliot was talking about? It was how living in the modern world affected his spirit; how living in the modern world formed his mood, a mood made up of futility and timidity, frustration and emptiness, loneliness, misunderstanding, self-distrust. That was what all the parts added up to. Now Ira could sustain himself within the poem. Ira had made it part of himself. It was himself. The only thing missing that Ira thought he could add was his self-revilings, his cankerous, special depravity. Yeah. Kept him from feeling all that intolerable ennui Eliot felt, but otherwise Ira knew he was close. He was telling you life was a worthless, pointless, tiresome void, papered over by what d’ye call it? Formalities. Why had it taken him so long to figure that out? The poet didn’t say it right out loud, the way an old gink like Longfellow might have said it: life is real, life is earnest. He didn’t say life is vain, it’s a lot of worn-out etiquette. He didn’t have to say it. You were the one who said it. So. . he was only saying what Ira felt. And now what Ira felt was a poem. He could quote it. Though he was speaking for the leisure class, for the gentry and for gentiles, and he was from the koptsn and the shleppers , and a Jew, still, Ira felt the same; funny, Larry didn’t. All in all, if he had come out of the long moiling and groping through Joyce’s Ulysses with the realization that the materials for literature lay in the plethora of the squalid and the banal all about him, Ira emerged from the “Prufrock”—much more than from The Waste Land —inoculated with disenchantment, immune to ideology, to allegiance, more prone than he had ever been before to alienation, courting it. Everything became mere counters for manipulation — inventory for a writer, if that’s what he was ever going to be: pegs to hang irony on: religion, Yiddishkeit , immigrant ordeals and adversities, sweatshops and trade unions and “sotzialism,” sordidness and Jew-baiting, penury and persecution, one’s own enormities, one’s own callousness and cowardice, everything was convertible to universal literary currency.

How strange, how strange in so many ways! So many fateful forces at work: the petering out of Larry’s literary impulse, his interest too, and with it, as though his charm were draining away, his personal charm, his social charm, as if he had lost an inner grace, and in its place, in place of that freshness, originality of observation, that lyric bloom, as in genetics, a separation had occurred. The pristine feature became recessive, and the commonplace one dominant. The poetic imagist became the spinner of set jokes, the histrionic raconteur, luxuriating in tedious embellishment. At first, and more and more, as time went on, Ira would catch Edith’s eye seeking his own, as if he were trying to transmit her patient indulgence, or her evaluation on the beam of her sympathy — at the same time as she smiled tightly at one of Larry’s long-winded anecdotes. Just a week before Ira got the job at Loft’s, she had intimated — and how he treasured that minute of privacy! — that she would always welcome a visit by Ira alone. How he gloated over that! Some time was to elapse before he could — and before he dared — take advantage of her invitation. But when he finally did, the bashfulness he felt at first wore off by the time the visit was over. Ira went away, urged warmly, earnestly, to return; he went away, gleeful in his treachery, feeling as if he were someone between a neophyte and a confidant. Ira was pledged to discretion.

Edith and Ira discussed Larry a great deal — that first time, and afterward. From the very beginning, she dwelled on her disappointment in the way he was developing. He was merely facile, she now realized: his talents were superficial — not as Ira’s were, deep and serious; they would develop, she was sure, into those of a genuine literary artist. Larry would never grow as an artist, she was sure of that too, because he shied away from discipline, or lacked the stamina to cope with it, with the taxing and the unpleasant — as Ira was capable of doing, as she had seen him do, first in Woodstock with the Ulysses , and then by his poring over T. S. Eliot and his shy comments about “Prufrock” and The Waste Land ; she found them very stimulating. Larry’s taking on sculpture was really just another proof of failure. It was an escape. Instead of tackling the arduous, the demanding, and patiently, quietly, requiring all he could of himself, he had shifted to the immediately rewarding. That was his trouble: he craved immediate rewards, accolades. It was his family that was at the root of all this: they had made so much of his cleverness that he expected the same kind of instant applause and admiration for everything he did, and when he didn’t get it, he turned to something else. She had hoped he could overcome their middle-class influence, their ideas of success, and for a while she had thought he could, but she was mistaken. Though he had shifted from NYU to CCNY, and had given up his dental career, he hadn’t been able to break away from his middle-class ties and his middle-class standards. He was just too dependent on family, too attached, too given to basking in their admiration. He would become just like the rest of his family in time: conventional. He would surrender to their middle-class values: “I’m sure you’ve noticed how shallow he’s becoming.” Edith shook her head solemnly.

Shallow. What did it mean, he now pondered, having become — long ago — a lapsed writer himself. His springs of creativity had run dry, seemingly petered out, just as Larry’s had done, the chief difference being that his depletion took place a few years later than Larry’s. Did the same stricture that Edith had once applied to Larry apply to Ira as well? Was he too shallow? Once again, what did it mean? In that case there were dozens of shallow writers of that period, that time, each showing great promise at the outset, each producing creditable work, a novel, a trilogy, and then, silence or redundancy, Hollywood or academia — or premature demise, as though they willed it. Salmon who fought their way upstream to breed — Ira turned eyes inward, as if to examine the metaphor. Perhaps it went deeper than he knew. Salmon fought their way up to their own origins, their own native freshwater streams, to breed and perish. But that was only an analogy; it told you nothing of the concrete forces at work, psychological, social. One could say they were like certain minerals, Ira told himself: lead sulfide that fluoresced in ultraviolet light. They were on the beam then, irradiated and radiant, and when it passed, they went dark. But again, that was only analogy. What beam? How many writers and poets who belied their early promise did Edith dismiss in the same way that she dismissed Larry: they were shallow? What was it that gave out? It seemed as if an entire literary generation, Ira’s own contemporaries, had petered out. Why had replenishment been curtailed for them, and what kind of replenishment was required, but absent? One after another of the writers whose acquaintance Ira had made through Edith came to mind. Each offered a different explanation, or for each one a different explanation was offered, to account for each individual’s default in the face of early promise. Here, one imbibed too freely, here, another suffered a psychological block, here marital and here financial difficulties. . until Ira began to suspect that all these explanations, or excuses, were so many symptoms of a general malady that affected them all. It was a most peculiar malady, more nearly like a plague, and today, Ira regarded Larry’s case as one of the earliest examples of how that plague affected them, the more susceptible talents like his first, the less susceptible ones later, but all eventually. Initial success virtually guaranteed that one would succumb to the plague sooner or later. And why? Because the dynamic of the scourge lay coiled within itself: success tended to drive the artist from his source. To the degree that he exploited that source, to the same degree was he divorced from it. Nor was there any other source remotely as viable that could be annexed in place of the abandoned one. Why? Did the transfer from a parochial world to a cosmopolitan one negate the parochial one? Negate, yes, in an organic sense. But here was annulment, and therein might be the answer. The two worlds were not organically connected, for otherwise the one might have subsumed the other. Greenwich Village literati, growing excited about literature over a cocktail, were sterile as literary material — at least to Ira. He didn’t know these people, their origins, memories, motivations, patterns of thought. They were alien to the world Ira had fled from, but was informed by, as he was alien to the world they had fled from, and were informed by — and neither they nor Ira could any longer return.