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

“People aren’t interested in his long-winded anecdotes. People are interested in ideas.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s amusing sometimes. If only he didn’t demand to be the center of attraction always.”

“No. That’s true.”

“Lewlyn has observed the same thing. He told me he liked your brief descriptions of people in your workshop much better than Larry’s stories. He took so long coming to the point.”

“Yeh?”

It was funny that first time, funny and strange — and embarrassing. After two big drinks of bathtub gin and grapefruit juice, he didn’t know what he was talking about, especially when everybody got on the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti; still, Edith accompanied him into the hall when he left, squeezed his hand, and said he was wonderful. What did he say that was so wonderful?

Said the statuesque dame, statuesque, Edith called her, not dame, just statuesque, in a peach frock — poet too — Louise? Louise Who? Boy, you’d have to be six feet tall or nearly, have a cock three inches longer, like Guido up in the stifling lifted train, putting eight quarters on his lazy hard-on. “Animahl!” said Russo. In Italian. Not animal. “Animahl!” So what did she say in the peach frock after Edith introduced them? “What do you do, if I may ask?”

“Me? I work in a car barn.” He just barely got the words out, nearly inaudible with self-consciousness.

“A cow barn!”

“No, a car barn!”

“Oh, how delightful!” And then she suddenly laughed — not at him, but at the thought. Laughing made her beautiful too. Boy, what a goddess. “You herd trains into a barn. What rare human touch in our mechanized existence. It becomes almost livable.”

And then five or six clustered around him, unwilling center of attention. What do you do? You do, really! Oh, tell us! Tell us what you do. They sat down on the couch, women, men, and Edith, her olive skin even more luminous with pleasure, made room, and left him. And that was when it all started about Sacco and Vanzetti. “We’re sure the men are bitter about it,” one woman said.

“They hardly even talk about it. Maybe the Italians.”

“They don’t? What do the others talk about?”

He had finished his first drink, and giggled, “Who’s gonna win in the Aqueduct races. The odds. Babe Ruth. God, what else do they talk about.”

“The very worst thing in the world to romanticize,” said the poet in the peach frock. “A cause. The very last thing a poet ought to write about. It’s sheer sentimentality. There you have it. What did the Irish nationalists do about Yeats and about Synge’s plays? They excoriated them, they blistered them. Please!”

“You’re absolutely wrong!” declared the short, stocky man. “In fact, I’m glad you mentioned the Irish nationalists. Who wrote, ‘A terrible beauty is born’? And on what occasion was the poem written? On the occasion of the Easter Rising. Was that a cause?”

By now Ira had glugged down his second drink. He began to feel a little at ease with the short, ladylike poet, Léonie, whom he had met several times, although he still venerated her. She had read before the Arts Club when Marcia and her enigmatic friend had attended, and what lovely poems she wrote, lyrics, said Edith; Ira had read them when she and Larry snuggled together on the couch. And Larry was the first to agree they were lovely. What figures of speech they were — although she didn’t have much of a figure herself: torso and face above like a Dresden doll, and a poly-solid build below. She was the one who just kept opening her lips to say something, and never said it, her mouth forming words without voice. What a wonderful way to talk; you never got into an argument. “What do you think of all this, Ira?” she said softly, so that almost nobody heard. And that was when he got started.

“You can’t break the writer apart,” he said almost sullenly — didn’t care who listened. He didn’t care if he made sense, as if he had a ventriloquist talking inside him. Hell with them, they didn’t know what he knew; their beings hadn’t been wrung the way his had. “You can’t break him into this and that. He can’t write like a doctor writes a prescription. It comes out of one piece — all his sickness too. That’s the way I keep thinking about it when I’m under a train slopping grease in a brake cylinder. If I was to write, how’m I gonna separate it? I can’t.” Neither could he check his gesticulations. “He’s supposed to use everything if he’s a writer, a poet, I don’t care what he is. We had some of Milton’s sonnets in Survey of English Literature: he could write so beautifully reaching in a dream for his dead wife”—the words began to choke him—“and he could write, ‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints.’ He didn’t divide himself up. That’s what I mean.”

“I agree with you entirely,” said smooth-featured, attentive John Vernon. “But how many writers can be so completely holistic?”

“Huh?” He was being taken seriously. What the hell was holistic?

“Not even Milton was entirely whole,” said John. “The only two that come to mind are Shakespeare and Rabelais.”

“Plautus might be included,” said Berry Berg.

Ira knew he was over his head. And worse, other guests had stopped to listen. He was flighty with liquor, he ought to shut up. “You can be just as involved as you wanna be!” he burst out.

“You can?” asked blurry Juno in peach. “Can you illuminate further?”

“You can!” He couldn’t stop himself. The words seemed visionary within him. “If you had something inside you that kept you together, anything you write you can keep together.” The guy he was, all twisted to hell, and only something to hold on to: holistic? He’d have to look it up. Mystical, mystical, and he didn’t believe a goddamn thing. Jesus Christ, he must be disgracing himself. “You have to believe and not believe. You have to use everything like counters, you know what I mean? Did Melville believe that sky pilot’s sermon? I don’t think so. You use everything, I think, the way a kid uses blocks. Any kind of blocks. Any which way suits you.”

“Go on,” urged the poet in peach.

Instead, suddenly bashful at his temerity, he grinned in silent appeasement.

Edith offered him coffee, but he declined. He said he had to leave. And then she followed him into the hall, and squeezed his hand, almost looked as if she wanted to give him a kiss.

But you’d think that was enough. He got into the subway train uptown, and what did he start doing? He began to doze — and the next thing he knew was the trainman shaking him: he had already removed his necktie and jacket and was unbuttoning the top button of his shirt.

“Hey, bud, wake up.” The blue-uniformed trainman shook him again, while everyone else in the train focused eyes on him.

“Oh, Jesus, I thought I was home.”

“Well, you ain’t. You’re in a subway train.” Still watchful, the trainman removed his hand from Ira’s shoulder. “You all woke up?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Mortified, Ira stood up, hung on the straps till he got to the cubicle next to the train door. Braced in a corner, he pocketed his necktie, put on his jacket. He skulked there, out of sight, until the train reached the 96th Street interchange for the Harlem local, and then he got off. He’d better stand up in the station, he told himself, stand up in the train for Harlem too, all the way to 116th Street. And then sober up walking from Lenox to Park Avenue. He paced groggily back and forth on the platform, waiting for the local. He was like somebody coming from one world into another. Was that the world promised him in that aureate moment of beatitude when he stood on the street corner in West Harlem? Oh, Jesus, maybe he ought to try puking after he climbed up to the street.