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

There you have it. And Eliot before you. Ira slid dry fingertips over dry fingertips. Editing his prose of five years ago gave him an oddly unreal feeling, imposed a kind of surrealist duality upon himself, almost dangerous, in that he was at a loss as to who the writer was, who judged, who determined, whose emotion and sense of fitness was the more authentic, corresponded best with reality. Dangerous, in that he verged on loss of control. Or was it that writing under stress made the transcribing and rewriting seem surrealist? He had been depressed again this morning (new pains, new symptoms: osteoporosis, perhaps, from taking cortisone over so long a period). He had been hostile to existence, surly to M, and she had begun to weep: “Do you want me to give up writing music?” she had asked.

Perhaps it had been the visit of M’s brother, Clive, and his wife, Mary, these last two days, that had had something to do with his grimness — unconscious maybe, who knew. Clive was well-to-do, with a winter home in Florida and a summer home in Michigan. A retired insurance consultant, he was tall, naturally imposing, and thoroughly American. Soon to be eighty, a bit florid of countenance, he had to watch his blood pressure, hoped to die on a tennis court, and addressed his placid wife — mother of their eight children, social register, though exceedingly versatile domestically — as Mrs. P. Clive was very cordial with Ira, communicative, as toward a member of the family. He was warmly affectionate with his sister, recalling old times when they tried to motorize a bicycle, and failed, and when they went out to the sand dunes with the outmoded box camera that took pictures on glass plates. “And who carried the covering cloth?” M reminded pointedly, just as a sister would. And therein lay the rancor, of that were the filaments spun.

From the time of her marriage to Ira, until. . when? 1975, over thirty-five years, Clive had never communicated with M. And in what dire straits she had been once, back in 1950, when she had lain paralyzed with undiagnosable Guillain-Barré, she who had driven her brother, Clive himself, for radiation treatment when he developed a cancer of the colon — miraculously remitted. Well, what the hell. . Ira had behaved boorishly, in the family’s Cape Cod home, Jew Ira, after Father, executive secretary of Kiwanis International — and an ordained Baptist minister besides — in his monumental insensitivity had remarked that Kiwanis International, that famous, public-spirited, public service organization, didn’t want kikes joining in. Ira had been asked to leave. And when Father himself was about to die of a stroke a year later, he enjoined his wife to have nothing more to do with M, cut her off from all inheritance (to their credit, M’s siblings had ignored the paternal injunction). Well, the hell with it. What did Pop do, the old sonofabitch? Left Ira and his two sons a dollar apiece, out of about forty grand. To hell with it. What did Blake say? Something about running your team and plow over the bones of the dead. There were other things more important to consider.

Yes. Whose voice did the talking, whose was in the right? The one in a previous draft arguing so persuasively, so convincingly, that he felt unmoored from his own ego? Or his own later voice, almost diametrically opposed in view: that it was not separation from source, or truncation of “roots,” that was the cause of the deterioration of the talents, the cause of the fading of the brilliant gifts of those whose advent as writers had been so auspicious? He had argued that the cause of their failure lay in their inability — and his own too — to align themselves with the future. Marcia Meede had said something akin to the same notion in one of her poems, a kind of old-fashioned exhortation in verse, which Edith (in days of friendship still) had included in her first anthology: “We have no past for fuel,” the young men said, as the first stanza began. And the second: “Cut then your future down!” the old men said. It was an ingenious conceit, more than a little forced, and like some of Longfellow’s tropes, silly if pressed too far. Who knew what to cut, or where? Who knew where that future lay? It was a matter of luck, of conditioning, of alignment with the grain of that future forming in the present. Moreover, he didn’t like her metaphor of “cutting your future down.” It struck him as distasteful, lacking in nuance. And further, it begged the question. Then so did he with his own idea that he and others as talented as he was, or more, had failed because they had been unable to align themselves with the future. Oh, hell, all he proved to himself was that he was no intellectual, even remotely, was incapable of dealing with abstractions. No philosopher. How many times had he looked up the meaning of “ontology,” only to forget it the next day. He learned by rote; he learned through his muscles, he was wont to say. Plebeian: Christ, anybody could see that Larry had clung to his folk, had not severed from them, his sources, so called. But were they, were they? And if they were, was that where the “shallowness” was to be found? Who were they, first-and possibly second-generation Americans? Then Edith was only partly right, partly right and partly wrong. Larry had the capacity — for feeling; he had the receptivity, the discrimination, the imaginative bent — but no profound source to draw from. Then he, Ira, was back to his original thesis: the same thing applied to him: his sources were the measure of his depth. Though deeper than Larry’s they too had given out.

That was not all he could say about the subject. That was all he should say. Literary figures appeared at the threshold of mind, Joyce and Shaw, Synge and Sean O’Casey and Yeats — curiously, all Irishmen. Well, Faulkner then. But he barred them all. This was not the place to dwell on the topic any longer, even in his ramshackle fashion. It was strange, though, how contradictions within the self made you feel, as if you had lost all your substance, were hollow. It had taken him a long time to oppose himself to himself, nor was he sure any longer he was right now and wrong then, but at least he had acknowledged the two opposing theses. He had tried not to ignore anything, blot out anything, fake anything. He had tried to be honest. And the answer he sought still eluded him. Still, acknowledging his own contrarieties reunited him within himself.

He sighed. Time to save: his electronic timer beeped a warning that the hour was up. And then the dreadful thought occurred to him. If his second thesis was true, could it be there was no future, and that was why so many bright spirits so suddenly dimmed? Nonsense.

I am Merlin and I am dying , involuntarily, the Tennysonian quote came to mind: I am Merlin and I am dying . .

XIV

They would be lying on the studio couch, Edith and Larry, after Larry had put away his sculpture, or possibly finished it, done all he was capable of in reproducing a likeness of Edith in clay. They would be lying on the studio couch necking, as it was commonly called: clinging, caressing, billing and cooing, giggling. That was how they made love, with a third party, himself, present, though why he should be present puzzled him — at first. Was it because Larry wanted to show off his skill in modeling clay? (Afterward, his being there seemed natural, and later still, in later years, the tripolar, if not more, seemed to characterize all of Edith’s relations.) He knew only that he was welcomed by both, welcomed by Edith, invited by Larry. They didn’t mind his being present, he explained to himself, because their lovemaking was so harmless, so innocent, so unsullied. Little wonder — he would reflect afterward — that he got all kinds of bizarre notions of how decent people made love, people not wrenched beyond recovery, not saturnine and self-despising, as he was by the despicable things he did — with a kid cousin. Unfortunately, there was an element of truth in his bizarre notions too: decent people weren’t maimed by their early sex experiences as he was; quite the contrary, their early sex experiences may have been, as they were with Larry, one of memory’s loveliest blooms. All this Ira discovered later.