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

And here Ira paused, paused and shook his head. These half-truths, half-truths he was forced to labor under, forced himself to labor under.

— Well, then, who are you? Editor or contributor?

Both and neither, Ecclesias. I know this is the time of my deepest un-doing; I grow drowsy with the numbing dolor of it. This is the time. This is the time. All things apart from this are like so many streamers, mere fringes, fronds—

— Not quite, not quite. Among them are also life-determining episodes.

Yes. But the main thing is that it was during those years that I tore apart the ligatures, my psychic ligatures, sundered them irreversibly. The spring was pulled beyond its intrinsic elasticity, its constant, never to resume its original form. God, how one can ruin oneself, be ruined; it’s inconceivable.

— Alors, mon ami.

VI

So back to P.S. 24 Ira returned. One of his aims, he was quite sure, was to obtain a transcript of his record in grammar school, and especially of his year in junior high school, since he would have to present this as credit toward continuation of high school. Ira Stigman had been expelled from Stuyvesant for fighting (that became his standard explanation, and strangely, no one questioned it), and his records had been destroyed. He needed them to enroll in another high school. Secondly, he appealed to crippled, mock-bellicose Mr. Sullivan, because he had once had such a high opinion of him in his English class (and such a low one in bookkeeping), for help in finding a job. He met Ira’s appeal, or better said, his prevarication, with charity, and even with some indignation at what he regarded as summary punishment for so commonplace an offense. He wrote a letter of recommendation to the head of a small law firm whose books he kept. And on the strength of it, Ira applied for the position of office boy, either that day or the next — and he was hired.

Mr. Phillips, his new employer, gave the impression of being a reasonable man, even-tempered and deliberate, with a trait of smoothing the sides of his long straight nose between thumb and forefinger. He invited Ira to sit down at a desk and write a letter of application for the position. He found the letter satisfactory, except for one flaw: Ira had spelled his name with only one “1” instead of two. He would have to be much more careful in the future to note such details as this if he expected to satisfy the exacting requirements of a law firm, Mr. Phillips stressed.

But he was a washout as a law-firm office boy. Without more ado: a lamentable washout. A ludicrous failure. He could not even get a message straight over the telephone; in his anxiety and apprehension he couldn’t even hear straight; he couldn’t distinguish spoken words. Also, it was a rare occasion when he found his way to the right courtroom, the right session, the right hearing at the right time. Rare as rare could be. Shlimazl! Pop was right. And if by some stroke of luck he did follow instructions correctly, did get to the right courtroom at the right time, then he mooned past the announcement of the case for which he had been sent there for the express purpose of asking for postponement or deferral. Mr. Phillips smoothed the sides of his long nose a fortnight or two; his junior partner fumed, tutted, growled something about a chump. And Mr. Phillips’s secretary was wracked by puzzling hysterias. .

The firm moved its location to new, more commodious quarters. The entire office decor underwent a change: the stout old friendly oak filing cabinets and the grainy yellow oak desks were replaced by sleek, coffee-colored metal. Along with that change came a change of office boys. Another youth took Ira’s place, a youth of about Ira’s age, but slender, large-eyed, knowing, a little amused, a little condescending. He reminded Ira of the fellow student from whom he had stolen the silver-filigreed fountain pen. Mr. Phillips explained that the newcomer was to take Ira’s place beginning the next week. Ira was a good boy, Mr. Phillips affirmed, but not suitable for work in a law firm. He was sorry, but he would have to let him go.

To tell the truth, Ira wasn’t too unhappy. He found the work boring, devoid of color and encounter, of the tangible tartan of the city’s aspects he loved to contemplate. Except that he would have to go home and tell Mom that the source of his nine dollars per week had dried up, he felt more relieved than regretful at being fired. He knew he was just too much of a mope to cope with the job, with the abstractions he already perceived composed most of it.

So ended his brief untenable and tenuous association with the law, lawyers, and the legal process. He resolved never again to work in an office of any kind. It was enough to be a boob without having to cringe in humiliation of having others discover the fact.

If only there weren’t so many interruptions, Ira mused, so many distractions in the life of the narrator. He could go on from episode to episode in a tale told autonomously from end to end. (His old complaint; was it pretext or legitimate?) Distractions were too many for him, or too beguiling, or he — his will — was too weak to resist. Once it had been strong enough, once it had, when he wrote his one and only novel.

He had managed to exclude distractions and involvements for as long as four years, until the opus was done. Ah, youth — and he had had a plethora of distractions and involvements. Sexual often, though not always: a love affair that went to hell; and that pas de deux, de trois, de quatre . And illness too had interrupted, but again, not for long. He had then clung tenaciously to his narrative, which was something he could no longer always do. And, dear reader, as Jane Eyre would say, and a whole swarm of other literary narrators of fiction, in the good old days when ye scrivener snuggled up to the reader, dear reader, if you don’t like it you can lump it, whatever “lumping it” meant. Dear reader. There might not ever be any readers, dear or otherwise, though he made every effort to preserve means of communication with them, future means of communication: those floppy disks wherein he addressed Ecclesias. Dear reader.

But then, those were not the days, and these were, when he spent, or rather wrecked, an entire day, with a gut gone haywire — or perhaps he should say, spent altogether too many of them that way, recuperating from various surgeries or miasmas of mood and malaise, all or most of them, very likely, payments or penalties, retributions from excesses of the way, way back. But then too, and that perhaps was the worst of it, in that long past when he wrote his youthful “classic of Lower East Side childhood,” he hadn’t tried to pry off and peddle segments of the novel, as he did now, still hoping to make an impression on modernity (and garner a few bucks while he was at it), and in consequence, hadn’t received the rebuffs he did now, and likely deserved, from various and sundry well-thought-of periodicals.

His stuff was now old hat, and for all he knew, stereotyped as well. But the rejections brought him face to face with the fact that he was an old man of seventy-nine, and his literary wares those of a seventy-nine-year-old man, waning and wanting, and perhaps pathetic. Be better, more dignified, if he shut up, maintained an air of remote reserve, because that way his deficiencies would remain unexposed. Good idea.

Well. . As he wrote his literary agent: he would refrain from submitting further fragments of his writing. It was all or nothing now, and if it was to be all, then it would have to be posthumous. Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni . .

Roving again in the vicinity of 14th Street, on the east side of Union Square Park, passing by the ornate facades and arched windows of the lofts and office buildings of the time, he glanced at a BOY WANTED sign posted on a doorway: Inquire at the Acme Toy Company Upstairs. Again he found what he so lackadaisically sought, and was all but afraid to find: a job interview. The blowsy, stertorously breathing, cigar-puffing Jewish proprietor behind his mussed desk in his small, cluttered office was Mr. Stein, he informed the young applicant. Mr. Stein appeared to be in his late fifties. Beside him stood his son, Mortimer, a tall, dark young man in his twenties, who scrutinized Ira through the slits of intolerant brown eyes.