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

V

That was to be the original ending of Volume I of Mercy of a Rude Stream , so he had signified on the disk on which he kept a skeleton outline of the contents of the sections into which his work was divided: of necessity, according to the capacity of his computer. It was now four days since he had returned home from surgery, as it was termed these days (instead of an operation), to repair the hernia. He was almost back to normal, in body and mood, thanks in great part to M.

How he had marveled about this mystery, her, yes, impregnable devotion to him, while he was still in the hospital, chafing, fretting unduly at the colloidal personality of his average American roommate, his-cheap, plastic tastes, his inane mental content, his preference for the sintered sham, for the gilded and gelded, with a wife like him, and friends as well, the TV programs he was addicted to.

He hated them instead of pitying them —that was the difference, that was where he was wanting, and M was not. He hated them because he wasn’t one of them, he supposed (he had mulled about the matter for hours on end). He wasn’t one of them. He was an everlasting Falasha, as he had written in his journal. Well — the miracle was that M loved him so, this daughter of the same dominant society that he detested for its banality, and that detested him, he was sure, with equal intensity for his alien views, elitism, his alien response to their mass-produced, disposable values. M loved him, cared for him, tended to him, looked after him with such solicitude — and such wisdom. She wasn’t the only one in this goyish world of the Western Diaspora whom he respected, even formed deep attachments with — by no means — there were dozens, and not only intellectuals either — but her he worshiped, “this side of idolatry,” worshiped her as devoutly as a flawed, fluctuating soul could worship another fallible, human being, could worship his mate of many years. She had awakened in him affirmations and compassions that dispelled the lethargy of his habitual cynicism, his alienation, restored him to a wider humanity, and who could tell? Her constancy and devotion might have been the spiritual catalyst in effecting that qualitative transformation in himself, a regeneration of personal commitment that was instrumental in the birth and growth of a wider personal commitment: his partisanship for his own people in Israel. Ironic too. . she was not Jewish. .

Volume I. Finished. Done with. He had thought about it this morning, as he showered, breakfasted, and the rest, and he wished he could set down, or rather formulate, the thought as it first occurred to him: with the same pristine lilt of wording. But he was rarely able to do that, to remember the exact form of the advent of the thought, unless he had the means at hand, and the impulse, to jot the thing down at the moment of occurrence. He had not had either. So — the insight had gone unrecorded (no new experience for writers); he would now have to grope, cumberously, toward an approximation of the original formulation. It was to the effect, or bore within itself the incipient realization, that his “creative” days were done — no, that wasn’t quite it; that he had recognized for a long time. The central point was that it was not his attempted innovations of narrative that were of interest to people; his endeavors in that respect had undoubtedly long since been dealt with by others — and surpassed. He simply hadn’t been around when all this was happening. People, the reading public, were interested in him, to the degree they were, not because they expected exceptional literary output from him any longer, but because they were curious about the vicissitudes he had undergone, vicissitudes marked by an element of freakishness.

He should have known that from the first, but as usual was slow to apprehend; it had taken him all of Volume I to perceive it. What had happened to the author of that anomalous classic of Lower East Side childhood, as certain critics referred to it? That was the meaning surely of the frequent requests he received from journalists and others, freelance writers, for interviews. They reflected a degree of public curiosity regarding the extraordinary hiatus of production that was the dominant feature of his literary career. They sought information from him and about him on which to base hypotheses as to the cause. He wasn’t prepared to advance any, since he was the last person in the world equipped with the necessary intellectual, philosophic, social apparatus to do so.

And not to forget, though he would be better off if he did, the letter he had received yesterday from David S of the Washington Post , a very sincere letter, requesting an interview; and his own decision not to grant it. Interviews preyed on his mind in anticipation, for fear that he would reveal the extent of his unfamiliarity with modern literature, his absence of profundity, the skimpiness of his critical faculties. Interviews took more out of him than they should, or were worth. Besides, he had already been done, well done, and as he would like to say, though he would probably veto the inclination, overdone. Most likely, though, his most compelling motive in denying the request for the interview was his desire to preserve the integrity of the unexpected turn his writing had taken, or was about to take, unexpected acknowledgment of the individual he had been, and still had to abide with.

“No, I’ll conduct my own interview, Ecclesias,” Ira muttered as he proceeded to SAVE the working copy he had already typed on the screen. Some faint but promising notion had crossed his mind as he did so; faint and remote, but at his age (and before), the faint, rare notions had to be retrieved at once, hermetically enclosed, or they volatilized. . Had the elusive, the evanescent thought been simply that he would soon be dust? He didn’t know; it wasn’t able to get him back on track anyway. But how he plodded, how he shuffled as he walked the length of the mobile-home hall to the kitchen. There M, her piano practice over, stood with bent head in faded pink variegated apron over blue shirt, paring vegetables to go into the Belgian cast-iron orange enamel stew pot — how beautiful her lofty brow under gray hair. He plodded, shuffled, he who had once been just like — how repelled he was by quoting that snobbish, evasive Jew-tweaker — TSE-TSE. No, Ira thought: old Bert Whitehouse in Norridgewock, Maine, a scad of years ago while he was writing his novel in 1933, had said it just as graphically in his way as Eliot had in his: “Once I could scale a four-rail fence one-handed; now I stumble over an inch-thick board on the ground.”

And why should the public at large be interested in the inventions he might have to offer now? They represented anything but contemporary configurations; they were those of a half-century ago. This was a different age, and demanded — and needed — new interpretations and new judgments made from the vantage of a fifty-year gradient. It would take another century or more to disclose the proximity, the near-contemporaneity, of the seeming gap.

From his fifteenth year to his nineteenth, from his expulsion from Stuyvesant to — and perhaps beyond — his freshman year at CCNY. The facts here were very good. He knew he could recall with fair accuracy many facets of that period, some charged with dreadful meaning, some no more than diverting reminiscence. He was Mr. Editor. He was boss. He’d get on the linear choo-choo, and bowl along to the provisional terminal, no, the provisional hub, a junction point, in railroad parlance. How could he — that was it — delete, shorten, condense? What did he have here?

“It is as difficult to set down,” he had written, “as difficult to set down as it is to recall the proper sequence of the farrago of events in the months succeeding my expulsion from high school. I returned to P.S. 24—”