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

“It’s not just that, lad. You were too gently reared.”

“And yet you thought it wasn’t advisable for me to break away from it. Or try to. Expose myself to some rough spots.”

“And I still think my advice was right, darling. It would be the height of folly if you didn’t go on and get your degree.”

“Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. You got a good quotation for me, Ira? You generally manage to come up with a good one.”

“Not this time.”

“All right, then tell me: you pore over Eliot whenever you’re here. You waded through Joyce, right? When we were in Woodstock? You admitted you didn’t understand half of what you were reading about. The same thing is certainly true of The Waste Land . You need a lot of scholarship, literary background, not just English literature, foreign literature, Latin, Greek, all kinds of esoteric allusions. Frazer, for example. You haven’t got all that any more than I have. So in what way are they going to help you? That’s what I want to know. If you don’t understand it?”

“What you say is true. I don’t.” Ira thumped his back against his chair. “It’s a state of mind I get out of them. I don’t know what that state of mind is. I couldn’t give you a definition. But as I’ve said before, I can discern a compatibility. And I need it if I’m to do any writing. Maybe I can’t. But you know, Larry, there’s a lot of difference between us. I don’t have to tell you. I’m a shlemiel , yeah, I am,” he overrode Larry’s gesture of objection. “Gee, the things you can do. You can turn your hand to almost anything: writing popular lyrics, skits, acting, selling, that modeling in clay over there you’re doing. I haven’t got a damn thing, excuse me, Edith, I mean anything except where my ‘Impressions of a Plumber’ in The Lavender points to. If I’m wrong about that, I’m, gee, I don’t know. I could end up—” He wagged his hand in comic transition. “Dun’t esk.”

“And you think Joyce and Eliot will guide you toward realizing future literary ambitions?”

Ira shrugged. “I imagine I need more than just those two. But so far, I notice one thing: they both contrast a heroic or — or noble, maybe, past, chivalric pieces, passages, with an ugly present. Is that right, Edith?”

“I think you’re making a better point of it than I did.”

“Yeah? I don’t think the past was what they make of it either. Not for the common guy. The nobility maybe.”

“Is that what you expect to do also? Contrast the two?”

“I don’t think so. Not explicitly, you know. It happens that I come from a past a helluva, I mean a heck of a lot longer than any of their goyish ones. I mean gentile, Edith. But in both of those guys, life today is a negation. And I demand an affirmation. Another point is that Larry makes unfair comparisons. You know what he does. We’ve spoken of it. He contrasts the inconsequence and sordidness of modern life with the great literary art of the past. He links passages of his own observations of the tawdry modern actualities with quotations from the classics. Well, if you’re going to compare all the common ratty things of today with Elizabethan art and courtliness, it’s a cinch to tell who comes out ahead. What about comparing like with like? Joe Blow who comes in off the street to buy the Loft’s ninety-nine-cent special with Tom the shepherd who blows his nail, or the actual illiterate guy, probably, who lugs the logs into the hall.”

“All the more reason for me to ask, why are you so smitten with them?” Larry queried.

“I told you. If I don’t know who I am, how I can handle who I am, they come closest to telling me.”

Despondently, he skimmed through the small stack of her Xeroxed letters in his possession. Years and years ago, in the depths of the Depression, he had bought for Edith a secondhand five-drawered metal filing cabinet — twenty-five dollars — had paid two bucks extra for delivery from the Jewish office furniture dealer’s on Third Avenue to their place at 64 Morton Street.

And in this ample filing cabinet he had sorted out all his letters to her, and separately, all her letters to him. Of the ten-year exchange of letters, he had recovered none of his, only this little batch of Edith’s letters to him.

Just the sight of these letters made him recall Edith, poor Edith, near the end, an alcoholic, a confirmed sot, and she had undoubtedly blabbed everything. Pitying insight posed the question: what had happened to her self-esteem? Edith’s? So fine, so good, so generous, so tender. Oh, Christ, he had been just the right protégé for her. And had Edith also had incestuous relations with her father? A friend of Edith’s, Daniel, had asked him. Shux. If that wasn’t the morbidity of inversion.

Daniel had intended to write a biography of Edith sometime in the near future. But apparently the project fell apart when he learned about Larry. Edith hadn’t told Daniel a word about her freshman lover, or about other young men she had initiated, and was inclined to be skeptical about Ira’s assertion that Daniel’s primary source of information was untrustworthy, until Ira’s disclosure about Larry: “Well, how the hell did I meet Edith? I went to CCNY. Larry, my high school chum, went to NYU.” Perhaps, after that, Daniel saw that Edith was making sure she would be seen the way Ira felt she always wanted to be seen: as the heroine of her own tragic drama.

Anyway, there they were, the Xeroxes of her letters, relics of Edith, of the living woman that was, the mundane, the matter-of-fact, the worried, the hurt, unhappy, intelligent, forthright, moderately promiscuous woman he had scarcely understood, and couldn’t portray. Her voice in the typewritten letter was unmistakable.

I’ve been to Silver City twice in two weeks. The days are as I described before: just a setting and setting and a lifting Papa up and down, and getting his cigarettes or his glasses, and making and making conversation; and when he’s to bed, then there is Inez, his housekeeper, who can’t read, and making conversation with her till bedtime. I’m calming down now, was frightfully nervous at first, and have had little appetite, but sleep has helped, and I’m taking advantage of that at any rate.

So, to repeat, apparently things are awful out here. They are damned bad in Gallup too, I gather. I’ve decided I’m weird in one respect. All these people here around my age do is reminisce about the past. And how well they remember it! I’ve always pushed the past out of my mind; I don’t linger on it, rather resent it, I suppose, and consequently completely forget it. I always think either I’m crazy, or these people are, when I’m out here with them at all, as I’ve been once or twice, and only out here. Moreover I’ve an inclination to want to shock them, which is purely childish on my part, and this shows I still resent them more than I should. I’ve outgrown everything I met, one thing at a time, but you’re the one thing I’ll never outgrow, that outgrows me all the time, and that therefore I adore, and sometimes could kick violently in the seat of the pants, because you’re able to hurt me, and no one else is, and because most of the time you’re right, though your youth makes you immature in knowing how people live and are, often. You’d better have more personal life soon, or you’re going to need it badly, and whatever amuses you and feeds your imagination is all right with me always. Those letters of mine you’re filing away will give you a good deal of dope, I think, with which your imagination can work. I’ve forgotten how many people have deared and darlinged me, and it doesn’t matter, but what does matter is that most of them still like me, and take me for what I am without glamour. There is a terrific streak of emotional sentimentality in my family which I’ve always fought free of, but undoubtedly am possessed by at moments.