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

Jacket: Bay Windows . Drypoint and sand ground, 1929.

Volume I: Arch Midnight . Drypoint, 1930.

Volume II: Relics [Speakeasy Corner] . Drypoint, 1928

Volume III: Glow of the City . Drypoint, 1929.

Volume IV: Late Traveler. Drypoint, 1949.

HENRY ROTH, who died in 1995, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of eighty-nine, had one of the most extraordinary careers of any American novelist who lived in the twentieth century.

He was born in the village of Tysmenitz, in the then Austro-Hungarian province of Galitzia, in 1906. Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he landed at Ellis Island and began his life in New York in 1909. He briefly lived in Brooklyn, and then on the Lower East Side, in the slums where his classic novel Call It Sleep is set. In 1914, the family moved to Harlem, first to the Jewish section on 114th Street east of Park Avenue; but because the three rooms there were “in the back” and the isolation reminded his mother of the sleepy hamlet of Veljish where she grew up, she became depressed, and the family moved to non-Jewish 119th Street. Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. With Walton’s support, he began Call It Sleep in about 1930. He completed the novel in the spring of 1934, and it was published in December 1934 to mixed reviews. He contracted for a second novel with the editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s, and the first section of it appeared as a work in progress in Signatures , a small literary magazine. But Roth’s growing ideological frustration and personal confusion created a profound writer’s block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream.

In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artist’s colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer. They fell in love; Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family. With the onset of World War Two, Roth became a tool and gauge maker. The couple moved first to Boston with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then in 1946 to Maine. There Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor, while Muriel also taught and eventually became principal of a grammar school.

It was the paperback reprint in 1964 of Call It Sleep, republished by Peter Mayer, then a young editor at Avon Books, and reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Irving Howe, which catapulted Roth from literary oblivion and brought him widespread international recognition. In 1968, after Muriel’s retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They had become acquainted with the environs during Roth’s stay at the D. H. Lawrence ranch outside of Taos, where Roth was writer-in-residence. Muriel began composing music again, mostly for individual instruments, for which she received ample recognition, while Henry Roth, mentored by the publisher, William Targ, and Roth’s literary agent, Rosyln Targ, collaborated with his friend and Italian translator, Mario Materassi, to put out a collection of essays called Shifting Landscape, published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1987. After Muriel’s death in 1990, Roth occupied himself with revising the final volumes of the monumental Mercy of a Rude Stream , which he had begun eleven years earlier. The first volume was published in 1994 by St. Martin’s Press under the title A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park , and the second volume, called A Diving Rock on the Hudson , appeared from St. Martin’s in 1995.

The third volume, From Bondage, published in hardcover in 1996, was the first volume of the four Mercy books to appear posthumously. Requiem for Harlem , the fourth and final volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream , which came out in 1998, concluded the cycle, which began in 1914 with the Stigman family’s arrival in Jewish-Irish Harlem and ended with Ira’s decision to leave the ancestral family tenement and move in with Edith Welles on the night before Thanksgiving in 1927. Roth was able to revise both the third and fourth volumes in 1994 and 1995 shortly before his death.

An American Type , a posthumous novel published by W. W. Norton in 2010, was originally labeled by Roth as “Batch Two” of Mercy of a Rude Stream . It emerged from 1,900 pages that Roth was also revising in the years before his death with his assistant at the time, Felicia Jean Steele. Delivered to The New Yorker as a raw manuscript in 2005, it was crafted by Willing Davidson, then an assistant in the fiction department, into one final work of fiction after two excerpts were excerpted in 2006 by the magazine under the titles “God the Novelist” and “Freight.”

While still alive, Roth received two honorary doctorates, one from the University of New Mexico and one from the Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion. Posthumously, he was honored in 1995 with the Hadassah Harold U. Ribalow Lifetime Achievement Award and by the Museum of the City of New York with Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger having named February 29, 1996, as “Henry Roth Day” in New York City. From Bondage was cited by the National Book Critics Circle as being a finalist for its Fiction Prize in 1997, and it was in that same year that Henry Roth won the first Isaac Bashevis Singer Prize in Literature for From Bondage , an award bestowed by The Forward Foundation. In 2005, ten years after Roth’s death, the first full biography of his life, the prize-winning Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth , by the literary scholar Steven G. Kellman, was published, followed in 2006 by Henry Roth’s centenary, which was marked by a literary tribute at the New York Public Library, sponsored by CCNY and organized by Lawrence I. Fox, Roth’s literary executor.

FICTION

An American Type

Call It Sleep

NONFICTION

Shifting Landscapes

Mercy of a Rude Stream , Volume I: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park

Copyright © 1994 by Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream , Volume II: A Diving Rock on the Hudson

Copyright © 1995 by Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream , Volume III: From Bondage

Copyright © 1996 by The Estate of Henry Roth

Mercy of a Rude Stream , Volume IV: Requiem for Harlem

Copyright © 1998 by The Literary Estate of Henry Roth

Editor’s Afterword copyright © 1998 by Robert Weil

All rights reserved

First Edition

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