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

The damned things that happen to innocence, or ignorance, in the slums, that happen in alien slums, in heterogeneous ones, that probably might not have happened in homogeneous ones, at least, so I fancy, in ones dominated by orthodoxy, like the East Side, or by folkways, like Little Italy. And of course, they wreak havoc with the personality. That does not exclude similar traumatic episodes that may affect scions of the middle-class or the wealthy; given the terrible vulnerability, impressionableness of pubescence that exempts no one from irreparable damage at that period in life. I wonder how such things are dealt with in China, the Soviet Union, in other socialist states?

I am grateful for this electronic device. My gratitude should be extended or generalized into gratitude for modern science or technology (I write this the following day), despite the detractors of modern science and technology, such as one whose pronouncements I read recently, whose name I have forgotten for the moment but it is well known, who seems able to solve the Joycean three-dimensional crossword puzzle with relative ease, but referred to the personal computer as so much expensive junk cluttering up the house — or words to that effect. The gentleman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The short period of discipline necessary to gain sufficient control over the device has repaid itself immeasurably (nor do I believe I speak for myself only); it has made possible a new — or renewed — bond between the one who would express his feelings and thoughts and the vehicle for that expression.

Even the preliminary fussing, sometimes less, sometimes more, required to set the “machinery” in motion: the slightly disconcerting message of “BOOT FAILURE,” or even when all goes well, the routine requests for time and date and the need to answer them, the ascertaining of the number of “bytes” still available on the disk, provide a warming-up process for the mind as well, for the incomparably more subtle organic computer in front of the electronic one. What is man’s future? One cannot help asking oneself, coming away from radio dispatches of battles between two Moslem sects in Lebanon, leaving some fifty dead and three times that number wounded — at the same time as men in space dramatically attempt, though they fail, to reactivate a nonfunctioning satellite. Will man’s cortex prevail over his hypothalamus?

And so many other notions, considerations, come up between the writer and his narrative, beginning in the morning, notions drifting through the mind, as M helps her rheumatically wracked husband sit up in bed, plants a morning kiss of affirmation on a brow, grotesque, I’m sure, in its graphic signals of pain: What to do about all those people, all those “characters” I have introduced here, dealt with, whose ends I know, and others to come, whom I have survived in the flesh and won’t in the narrative; and of the years I shall never live to deal with, nor care to, for that matter, years following my marriage to M, years in machine shops and tool rooms during the Second World War, years, vicissitudes in Maine, and the four-year tenure of employment in a psychiatric hospital in Augusta, the years spent raising waterfowl, the years of M’s and my ludicrous, bitter summer seasons with our pathetic, feckless, impossible tenant: Pop, my father. . years that I shall not have time for, that I shall not have time to attempt to render into literary form. M (who is at her desk this moment writing music — to meet a deadline: that of submitting it to her coach this coming Saturday) — M is all about me, M is part and parcel of my consciousness. She is part and parcel of the trials and tribulations of my attaining to my present consciousness. She, more than anyone, confers the kind of purpose that holds me to my task as a writer; she imbues me with a sense of worth, and above all, unity, a mighty fortress that defends the present from the past.

XXXI

Two streams of urine flowed in an intertwining chain down obscure door and jamb, dripped to gritty threshold. “You got a piss hard-on, ain’t ye?” Weasel observed.

“Yeah, ye can see? I couldn’t help it.”

“You pull off a lot?”

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” with slight affront. “What d’ye mean?” Ira was sure he knew what Weasel meant: the same thing last year, on the roof, that Bernie Hausman had tried to show him, the only kid he had ever beaten in a fistfight in Harlem. The same thing Mr. Lennard had tried to make him do. He knew, of course, he knew: that lanky, rusty bum in Fort Tyron Park — against a tree. Oh, he knew.

He knew, Ecclesias, of course he knew.

— But never connected the two, associated the two?

I can vouch that he never did.

— Is it possible?

In his case, yes. We’re dealing with someone almost completely autodidactic.

— He wasn’t ready for this next phase.

He was and wasn’t. It was he who had to provide the inferences that bridged boyhood to puberty, inferences sufficient to support his precocious sensibility. His timbers of mentality and judgment, inference, in a word, were much too slight to sustain so heavy a load of grossly misinformed and disinformed fancy.

“Pull off. Like this.” Weasel’s demonstration conformed to pattern. “You wanna pull off now?”

“No.”

“Me an’ Tierny pulls off.”

“Yeah?”

“You oughta see him. What a handmade prick he’s got. All right?”

“No.”

“No. Why? You Jews don’t have to go to Confession— Oh, I know: You’re fuckin’ somebody, aintcha?” Weasel persisted through Ira’s silence. “Hanh? Who you fuckin’?”

“You left that fire burning in the tin can up by the sidewalk.”

“Dat’s nutt’n,” Weasel hesitated, became confused by Ira’s irrelevance; and when Ira backed away to button his fly, Weasel did the same. “You want one o’ my spuds? I got two bakin’ in der.”

“No. I’m goin’ upstairs right away.”

“Oh, the navies old and oaken, oh, the Temerairie no more.” Random quote, Ira ruminated: epigraph taken from Melville of a poem by Hart Crane. Why did he think of it? The appeal of the rhythm, the mood, the nostalgic purity of ocean and wind? Oh, the ambiguities, ambivalences the writer contended with and had to find his way through to some semblance of coherence. The contradictions, the subterfuges, the concealments — that had to be resorted to: He had refined the sensitivity he had been born with into an instrument capable of noting the weakest ephemerid within his mind, the permissible, the impermissible: Had he been a nineteenth-century novelist, or in fact, a true novelist mirroring the society about him, then so much that pertained to himself he could have projected onto a fictive character, into a fable about others. But alas, trapped in this mode of his own devising, albeit the divorce between present personality and a prior one was unforeseen, he had no alternative but to acknowledge the actuality: his own surge of curiosity to assay the experiment — and its failure.

You see, the whole “evolution” was reversed in my case, Ecclesias. It should have been the other way round, was, if I’m not mistaken, for most adolescents—

— Very likely.

I can envisage its development, even given the same set of characters, the same scenario — eliminating improbable fantasy, such as running away from home, an act which this, by now, totally Mama-dependent kid was incapable of. Given his thirteen, fourteen years of age, again all other things being equal, given the same heterogeneous Harlem slum setting, in a word, given the rule, not the devastating exception, then some similitude or “normal” development might still have been possible. You follow me, Ecclesias?