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

“So it’s an idée fixe . Next time I’ll hide it behind a jogafree book.”

“Hide it behind Sandburg, hide it behind Amy Lowell. Cummings, Aiken — now there’s a lovely poet!”

“I think I ought to buy you a copy.” Edith tugged prettily at the tassels of her brown dress, straightened up to regard herself in the large wall mirror. “Would you like a copy?”

“Oh, no, I’ve practically memorized it. Be a waste of money. Waste o’ land. Ho, ho.”

“Then why do you keep reading it?” Larry demanded.

“I don’t always read it. Sometimes I read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’”

“But why?”

“Something I need to know.”

“Something you need to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, great.”

“I think I understand,” said Edith.

“You do?”

“I think Ira keeps reading Eliot to find out what he feels about life—”

“Who’s he?” Larry interrupted. “Eliot?”

“Oh, no. Ira. Isn’t that so?”

“It comes close,” Ira agreed.

“Do you mean to say,” Larry addressed Edith, while he pointed at Ira, “he doesn’t know what he feels about life?”

“It’s quite possible.”

“That’s news to me. You don’t know what you feel about life?” Larry demanded.

“I don’t. That’s right.”

“I didn’t either at his age.” Edith interceded. “But I didn’t have time to think about it. I was too busy being an A student, getting on the dean’s list, honors, a Phi Beta Kappa key, and other things I don’t think are anywhere near as important as I did once. And of course, earning my own way, playing the piano in moving-picture houses, at shivarees. I think what Ira’s doing is far more important.”

“Why? What’s he doing? He reads The Waste Land . He reads ‘Prufrock.’ All right, then what do you get out of them? I’ll ask you.” Larry turned to Ira.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Ira began slowly, paused.

And when he failed to go on: “It’s not to be in the swim with the literati in the ’28 alcove?” Larry suggested.

“Well, maybe. I don’t know.” Ira found a cove in his ear to scratch. “You’re asking a multiple-choice question. I could either make a gag out of it, or tell you a tale that would make the hair on your head — what is it Shakespeare says, snaky locks in horror standing on end ?”

“Well, we’re all grown up. Go ahead.”

“Make your hair stand on its head.” Ira grinned in evasion.

“You’ve indicated something like that before,” Larry persisted. “In fact, a number of times.”

“It’s like something I’m trying to find out. I won’t know till the end.”

Larry shook his head.

“Eliot is a bitterly disappointed romantic,” Edith came to the rescue. “Completely disenchanted about everything in the modern world. He scoffs at progress. He doesn’t believe in it, doesn’t believe in our modern conveniences. Or says he doesn’t. For him all our old values are meaningless or exhausted. Not necessarily middle class. Western values. They’re arid. He compares them to the richness of the Renaissance, the grace of the Elizabethans. He juxtaposes them to show how mean and tawdry ours are.”

“All right. But how many times do you have to read him to get a particular meaning? Once or twice would be enough. Ira reads him like a — what’s the name of that book clergymen read?”

“Breviary.” Ira shifted position, self-deprecating.

“Yes, breviary. Thanks. Why? Because he’s become the fashion, he’s become the vogue.”

“No. Because there’s more to it than that.”

“To tell you the truth, Edith,” Larry digressed, “I pity anybody with talent today. I mean any poet, especially if he falls under Eliot’s influence. It’s the undoing of their own, you might say, pristine sort of perceptions. That’s what I think, anyway. I feel that even though I don’t go along with Eliot, he has subtly undermined me.”

“You do?” Edith regarded her lover with large, solemn eyes. “Darling, I don’t think any writer can afford to neglect that part of his existence that a poet like Eliot is addressing, ignore it and hope to develop as a writer. I often tell my class: beauty is truth today in a way Keats never would have imagined. In fact, he might have been revolted by the way poets interpret beauty today.”

“I wouldn’t blame him,” Larry said.

Edith tilted her head and smiled, as much to console Larry as to indicate that she was prepared for what he said: she was resigned. There was a lull.

“I do. Yes. I feel quite resentful about him. It’s enough to feel his effect, the undermining of one’s own romanticism. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with romanticism, with being a romantic. I mean, Eliot’s destructive enough of youthful outgoing feeling, say like Millay’s, without having to pay tribute, get aboard his bandwagon. And I—” He looked at Ira with a certain restrained desperation. Then his gaze fixed on a passerby seen through the window, at the same time as the window light illuminated Larry’s regular features. “We seem to be very much opposed in this matter.” The palms of his big hands opposed each other. “That’s the chief reason I can’t stand rereading him. I’m just repeating what I said. He does something peculiar to my psyche, my id, identity, whatever you want to call it.” Larry grimaced at a vague unpleasantness, looked chidingly at Ira. “That’s why I wonder why Ira keeps rereading him. It’s not a question of bad faith, it’s a — well, antagonism.” He laughed at himself.

“I really think it’s too bad.” Edith shook her head commiserating. “Something like Eliot coming between you. It’s just too bad. It’s odd too. And almost funny.”

“That’s what I say.”

“I’m not arguing that. I’m not a poet,” Ira tried to rebut.

“Then what in all that futile, yes, cheap, moribund world of today he makes such a point of appeals to you so much?”

“That’s it. I see myself mirrored.”

Edith sat at the edge of the couch, her tiny hands clasped in her lap. Meditatively her large brown eyes traveled from Larry to Ira.

“Well, beauty has gone out of style is what it amounts to. I still think it exists despite Mr. Eliot. I can put it in a word: he’s undercut beauty.” Larry pressed his lips inward against his vehemence.

“And I have no feeling for it. Somehow, it’s not my world, that’s all. You’ve been raised on Beauty as something to worship; I haven’t. And when you turn Eliot down,” Ira leaned forward in his chair, “it means you haven’t been weaned.”

Edith suddenly laughed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Larry demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just a wisecrack maybe. Weaned into the lousy modern world.”

“I don’t think Ira is denying Beauty,” Edith intervened. “I think what he’s trying to say, and I think what he’s looking for in Eliot, and Joyce too, is to find some way to make use of his city upbringing, with its many ugly aspects, to make it into something beautiful.”

“Are you?” Larry addressed Ira.

“ Vehr veist? ”

“Galitz!” Larry’s epithet was not altogether humorous. “ Vehr veist? He means ‘who knows.’”

“Although it may not necessarily be in Joyce’s or Eliot’s manner,” Edith continued soberly. “I suspect he’s trying to find some way of keeping the ugliness of modern urban life from overwhelming him. And us too for that matter.”

“By doing what?”

“Almost by making a shield of it.”

“And I can’t because I spent so much time in Bermuda, where life was so peaceful and beautiful. Is that it?”